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About the only upside is that China seems to have taken a big dose of their own poison.

Reminding ourselves that you asked to be "pointed to some (graphs predicting more than 6 months)":

It is not clear when the image in first result was published, but given that it includes error bars for dates from March 2020 onwards, I would assume this is the result of modelling performed earlier than March 2020. It covers until October 2020.

Result number two is a direct link to this paper:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid-19-imperial-res...

It was published in March 2020, and predicts data till March 2021

Result number three is a direct link to this news story (with an ironic headline, given result number 4 below):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54831334

It was published in November 2020, and predicts data until July 2021

Result number four is a direct link to this news story:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53392148

It was published in July 2020, and predicts data until July 2021

This is the garbage that was fed to the UK populace on a daily basis - it was like the "modellers" had taken charge.

Will you accept that graphs predicting more than 6 months of results were in common circulation?

Are you being deliberately dense?

No, I'm not from the US, so the colloquial usage of "gas" as "fuel for cars" slipped my mind.

The US is also a net exporter of crude oil, so all I've said so far still applies.

How has the Ukraine war affected gasoline prices? Are you just talking about the state you live in, or US-wide?

How did the US screw up being the world's biggest producer of natural gas, and being energy independent?

the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok

Right, and not Apple's actions.

It'll be like the wars in Iraq and Libya. Vitally important at the time, but you can't find anyone now who will say they supported them.

Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.

FB started sinking money into the Metaverse long before that.

Three huge assumptions here -

"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.

"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.

"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.

the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy.

They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.

If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.

Can you give details on where you believe this happened?

Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.

The US has given over $8B in aid

That's throwaway change, compared to the amount spent on Covid.

Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter.

The US is the world's biggest producer of natural gas, at least while fracking is still largely permitted.

Their income and operating margin has almost halved, compared to 2021. Their free cash flow is 1/50th of the previous few quarters. Those are truly horrible results.

FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.

The two will be forever conflated (and there's an excellent argument that Putin made his move on new territory while the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions). However, literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice, to me is obviously the biggest cause of what we see now (and what is to come).

Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?

Why were "they" wrong? Is it because the issues of each successive development in mass media made those of the previous iteration look quaint? It's easy to look back on (for example) TV as a harmless diversion, but it was a radical development in the dissemination of visual information.

WW3 started years ago, and we have only just started to realise. The objective of this war is to turn the citizens of your enemies' countries into useless, self-absorbed, self-hating nobodies.

For those of you who have read The Hobbit, I see the "Culture War" as something more akin to the scene in that book where the trolls were turned to stone. That is - while we may think we are involved in some great "culture war", fighting the (online) forces of anti-democracy, bigotry, racism, etc etc - actually all that is intended is that we are arguing amongst ourselves.

Why not? It's the most efficient way I could think of, to display the sheer quantity, timeline, and content of the "Covid predictions" that we were shown in the UK. They are easily clickable, to show the original context (typically a news story or press release). You'll also note that practically all of them extend for at least 6 months.

Also, you "asked for some". There they are - there's a lot of them.

For all their other sins, at least China seems aware of the dangers of unfettered access to all that "tech" has to offer. I've long been of the opinion that it's insane for a country to allow any agent (in the broadest sense of the word) anywhere in the world, direct and unlimited access to their citizens' life, thoughts, and desires through the internet.

Sounds like you're in the UK. Do you consume any mainstream media?

https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc...

I didn't take in much news, and now avoid it more than ever, but what little I did was wall-to-wall with projections complete with big scary peaks and steep rises in numbers. I dread to think of the state of mind of someone who watched more like the average number of TV hours (for me it is zero), and took in all of this with an uncritical mind.

Indeed. Bring back the good old days when men were men and worked in the fields all day, and women were women and watched the kids and fed the family.

Not one of these predictions encompassed six months, though.

I beg to differ. Here's a sample of what we got, on a daily basis, in the UK:

https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc...

Plenty of those are dated from the early months of 2020.

Sure.

https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc...

There are plenty that stretch out for a year.

a forecast that goes out 6+ months is silly.

Sure is, which is why it's odd we've been bombarded with endless graphs with months of predictions, over the past 2.5 years.

Of course not, I would accept a different job.

Tell OP that. Or, maybe you could heed his warning about the future of the software industry.

I don't understand,

If you are a software engineer (or even, a "coder", which I think is an incredibly apt analogy for OP to mention), does your work calendar currently say "code this week for 65 hours or else" ?

I think this is a limitation of faceless communication, and boils down to the respect that users of a platform have for the other users and the platform itself. Ie - there isn't enough. And that's ok, because we should spend more time talking in real life.

Mine has a solar panel over the cargo bed and never needs charging

Interesting - what's your average daily mileage? I'm relatively familiar with the power requirements of EVs, and large-scale solar installations. I have no idea what kind of average charging power a small solar panel provides!

I see what you're getting at. I do know that many people, when asked about Whatsapp (especially parents complaining about the "obligatory" school Whatsapp groups), wish they didn't have to use it. I'm not sure how serious that sentiment is, or if they really would wish that if they understood the consequences, but as an experiment I have been attempting various community organisation projects that explicitly do not use Whatsapp. They've been quite successful, so far! We have just started co-ordinating a monthly kid's play session in our street, and I have a regular biking group.

Sample bias. HN crowd != people I know in real life.

ridiculous, anti-practical conspicuous-consumption symbols of just how much power the owner has

So like a Rai Stone?

it should probably run primarily on a small LFP battery -- whether pure plug in or hybrid.

If you go down that route, you'll probably work out that people should be riding e-cargo bikes everywhere (I've been tempted myself)

Good for you, Mr. Exception-to-the-rule. (Btw, the same is true for me too).

Meta and Visa suddenly go permanently offline. What does the social and economic landscape look like now?