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jpxw

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One incident caused by a natural disaster that would never happen in a European country like Germany, the other caused by mismanagement and frankly jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence which would also never happen in a country like Germany.

Edit: in response to the large number of people bringing up BER and other infrastructure failures in Germany: yes, BER and others may have been bad, but a completely different kind (and magnitude) of incompetence than that which led to the Chernobyl meltdown. They really aren’t comparable.

I suspect that using past positive tests would make things even more complicated. It’s very easy to underestimate how difficult things are at the “tens of millions of people” scale, particularly for governments.

You have a government whose vaccine policies are grounded in proper science and medical ethics, reducing the number of vaccine hesitant individuals

Circular argument, no? This point is only relevant to whether natural immunity should be correct if you accept that your own position (natural immunity should be taken into account) is correct.

Vaccinated people are way less likely to get infected.

And I don’t think there’s any evidence that vaccinated people have higher viral loads with less symptoms - that would be extremely surprising if true. I understand that vaccinated people can have high viral loads in breakout cases, but presumably in those cases they’re symptomatic - I don’t recall seeing any analysis of this.

Please feel free to prove me wrong.

Pros vs cons of taking natural immunity into account:

Pros:

- An extremely small number of people who would get side effects now wouldn’t

Cons:

- Logistics: you now need to perform a blood test on every single person in the country, process the results, send out vaccine invites based on the results, and set up some system where people can prove their blood test results. None of the aforementioned components currently exist. You also need to come up with some arbitrary threshold for “enough” antibodies.

- Cost: the blood test costs 4x as much as the vaccine, from what I see in other comments

- Incentives: you risk incentivising vaccine skeptics to deliberately contract COVID

The fact that it’s a personal choice doesn’t mean that both choices are equally correct.

IMHO, unless you’re a hermit, and excluding certain other extremely rare edge cases, the only moral choice is taking it.

I don’t know a single person who was hospitalised from the vaccine, and almost every adult I know has got it.

Conversely, several people I know were hospitalised from COVID, one of whom was killed.

Anecdotal, of course, but in the absence of better data, I’d be interested in other peoples’ experiences.

I’ll also note that in my country someone dying of the vaccine is a news-making story. Someone dying of COVID isn’t, because, sadly, it wouldn’t be “new” at all.

ADE 651 5 years ago

No it isn't. Someone who succumbs to lung cancer after smoking 1000 cigarettes a day for 20 years is still a victim of lung cancer. The definition of victim says nothing about causation.

ADE 651 5 years ago

Blaming the victim isn't necessarily always wrong.

Maybe. I think at least part of the reason is political though.

Nobody wants to be the person who scraps a security policy and then has a terrorist attack happen as a result of their policy removal. Not politicians, not TSA higher-ups, nobody. That's a career-ending mistake, no matter how unlikely it may be.

Not to mention that it's probably not a particularly popular decision amongst the public. Maybe it's security theatre, but people like it.

I hate the name personally. I would not feel comfortable asking a normal person (or, now that I think about it, even someone tech-savvy and privacy conscious) “hey come and join my Revolt server”.

At best, it sounds like I’d be inviting them to play some online game.

It was a glib little quip, as you mentioned. That was the entertaining part.

Edit: I’ve just noticed a particularly vile and undeserved comment in reply to you, and to some extent feel responsibility, as it’s part of a comment chain I created. I hope the mods will take action and ban whoever made this comment, although by the looks it’s a burner account. It’s quite jarring to see something like that on HN.

Also, people are annoyed about the fact that the scanning is done client-side, which is ironic because Apple are doing that in order to increase the security/privacy of the system. I can see why people are uncomfortable about client-side scanning, but there’s still some amusing irony in it.

Yet another reason to disable iCloud, if you’re privacy conscious.

Although you’re relying on your recipient disabling it too. So really you have to use something else. Signal, etc.

With that said, I still think an iPhone with iCloud disabled is better than other phones on the market privacy-wise. And for the average consumer, iPhones offer a good tradeoff between privacy and usability.

Health insurance for all? Agree. I’m not sold on the economics of UBI.

IMO something that I think would make a huge difference while also being realistically achievable is criminal justice reform. We cannot let prisons continue being factories for drug addicts and career criminals. There must surely be a better way than this.

I totally disagree on the format, FWIW.

When I see a link to a Twitter thread, I know immediately what to expect. I know that the formatting will be consistent. I know that the site will be accessible and at least somewhat readable. I can see the reactions of other people to the content immediately. I can interact with the author in a uniform and easy way, if I want to. I know that the content likely won’t be too long.

This without even mentioning the benefits to the writer of the post. Twitter is free. It’s widely used, so you can get way more impressions that you’d ever get on a blog. It allows you to immediately see and interact with people reading your posts - it’s incredibly painful to do that with a blog that you host. It gives you decent analytics. It’s obviously way easier than hosting a blog.

Of course, blogs have many advantages too. Blog posts and Tweet threads solve two different problems.

Zx 3.0 5 years ago

After reading about various vulnerabilities which are the direct result of backwards JS language features - most recently prototype pollution - I’d be hesitant to use JS for writing scripts.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid.