mulvya

Lifetime, in theory. In practice, you can move the relationship off Upwork after 2 years.

See https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043210654-Mo...

This one paragraph is the sum total given for the diabetes angle:

"Rice’s nutritional quality is another growing concern. The grain is high in glucose, which contributes to diabetes and obesity, and low in iron and zinc, two important micronutrients. In South Asia the prevalence of diabetes and malnutrition can be traced to over-reliance on rice."

How does that hypothesis square with this study:

No learning loss in Sweden during the pandemic: Evidence from primary school reading assessments

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088303552...

Well, Ronaldo could hit a soccer ball after lights are cut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoScYO2osb0

"deal with kidney stones down the line" isn't compatible with "not good for you even small quantities"

Some of those vegetables are staples in vegetarian cuisines like here in India. There would have to be a huge epidemic of kidney stones if the latter claim was true.

oxalic acid is just not good for you even small quantities. We’ve managed to get oxalic acid out of everything we’ve domesticated

Doesn't sound right. WP has this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxalic_acid#Content_in_food_it.... I see a lot of commonly eaten foods with at least a small amount of it.

There is also the case of less corruption because the indirectly elected heads of the executive aren't as beholden to special interests.

Unless these heads of the executive need private sector jobs after their tenure.

Long form journalism tends to frame articles around individual narratives.

However, the article does have this:

Studies that explicitly focus on overtreatment in dentistry are rare, but a recent field experiment provides some clues about its pervasiveness. A team of researchers at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, asked a volunteer patient with three tiny, shallow cavities to visit 180 randomly selected dentists in Zurich. The Swiss Dental Guidelines state that such minor cavities do not require fillings; rather, the dentist should monitor the decay and encourage the patient to brush regularly, which can reverse the damage. Despite this, 50 of the 180 dentists suggested unnecessary treatment. Their recommendations were incongruous: Collectively, the overzealous dentists singled out 13 different teeth for drilling; each advised one to six fillings. Similarly, in an investigation for Reader’s Digest, the writer William Ecenbarger visited 50 dentists in 28 states in the U.S. and received prescriptions ranging from a single crown to a full-mouth reconstruction, with the price tag starting at about $500 and going up to nearly $30,000.

US imported even more.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-b...

Of course, that isn't quite true. If the result or outcome of an actvity is publicly observable or measurable, then a secondhand sense of judgement can be developed.

The Q says, "entire core of it was developed and maintained by a single person"

which does not describe ffmpeg. FB was pretty active for first 4-5 years, but he wasn't the sole dev even then.

While today’s cumulative deaths is highly dependent on yesterday’s (it should theoretically never be less, for example), today’s new deaths isn’t as directly correlated to yesterday’s.

Sort of. Assuming a wave pattern, values will be close to neighbouring values and vary in an gradual manner.

Obese carriers shed lot more virus, so they would be expected to have higher attack rates.

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Exhaled aerosol increases with COVID-19 infection, age, and obesity

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/8/e2021830118

    In our observational cohort study of the exhaled breath particles of 194 healthy human subjects, and in our experimental infection study of eight nonhuman primates infected, by aerosol, with SARS-CoV-2, we found that exhaled aerosol particles vary between subjects by three orders of magnitude, with exhaled respiratory droplet number increasing with degree of COVID-19 infection and elevated BMI-years.

"selling excess stock" narrative in America

That wasn't the narrative in 2002, my first Black Friday.

there is a statement on record from politicians reacting to the suggestion with "this is not Asia, people would not stand for a lockdown"

Fauci said that in Feb 2020.

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    Q. How confident are you that the Chinese are doing what needs to be done?

    A. They're doing things that have completely broken the paradigm of how you respond. They have been, in a draconian way, shutting down everything. They have locked down 50 million people, including the entire 11 million-person city of Wuhan. They will not allow anyone into Beijing unless they have a 14-day quarantine. They're essentially locking people who test positive in their houses. I mean, they're doing things that are almost unheard of in the annals of public health.

    Q. Will it work?

    A. As unusual and extreme as it is, it might actually, ultimately, have an effect. There's this report that the number of new cases for the last couple of days in China has gone down. I don't put much strength in that unless I see it really start to come down and down and down. A few days of going down doesn't mean anything to me. But if it continues to go down, that might be a signal that they're having an effect of what otherwise would be extreme means.

    Q. That would never happen here, would it? Locking down 50 million people?

    A. No, not a chance. It would never happen.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/02/17/new-corona...

Look at Table 5 on pg 19 of https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

For those under 50, the single-dosed have the lowest Delta CFR of 11/83009 = 0.013%; for unvaxxed it's 132/248803 = 0.053%; for double-vaxxed it's 48/85407 = 0.056%.

The lower Delta CFR for single-vaxxed vs twice vaxxed holds for those 50+ too, 1.935% vs. 2.173%.

Oxford defines prudent as "sensible and careful when you make judgements and decisions; avoiding unnecessary risks"

How can it be sensible if one thinks it's 'highly unlikely'?

If one is very rich, then prepping may be financially affordable, but that doesn't make it cognitively rational.

'Preppers', by definition, are those who have decided the world is unstable and on the brink of collapse. Their presence or opinion, by itself, is not an indicator of how unstable Germany is.

What would give an indication is how many there are. And the article references no polls or surveys or statistics on the number of preppers in Germany. The closest it comes is,

"There are around 20m preppers in the world today according to Bradley Garrett, an academic who has studied them; anywhere from 5m-15m are thought to be in America."

Let's say, 10M are in the US. That leaves 10M out of ~7.55B in the rest of the world. Assuming uniform prevalence, that's 0.13% of the population.

This is typical of much of modern journalism. Long-form emotional tone painting and little of substance.

capital's corruption of the political system

Capital is a measure of power. Capital's "corruption of the political system" is use of that power. I'm not sure it's coherent to conceive a world where Capital retains its power but not use it to shape the people and instruments that manage society.

The study they're using as reference for IFR (Levin) estimates 0.6% for the US. The IFR for the US as of end of Mar 2021 is ~0.5%.

More importantly, their rate estimate does not taken into account obesity. US is at ~36%; India is at ~4%. As per Global Diabetes Atlas, estimated (not just diagnosed) prevalence of DM for US is ~9.3% and for India, ~5.5%. The translation of IFR needs to take into account of these factors, but they don't.

Kind of hard to tell what this result means without a control or baseline

Yes. As pointed out in

Causation or confounding: why controls are critical for characterizing long COVID

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w

"To address some of these biases, we and others used established longitudinal cohorts recruited at the start of the pandemic for regular testing for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and thus provided objective confirmation of infection. We asked our healthcare-worker participants about 72 symptoms reported to be associated with long COVID, at a median of 7.5 months after the development of COVID-19, and found that mental-health, gastrointestinal and dermatological symptoms were as common among 140 patients with mild-to-moderate symptomatic seropositive COVID-19 (‘cases’) as in 1,160 control participants who remained asymptomatic and seronegative throughout the surveillance period. Of concern, 40–60% of both cases and control participants reported mental-health symptoms, which highlights the toll of pandemic on the healthcare workforce. We also identified three clusters that included 12 symptoms—affecting the sensory, neurological and cardiorespiratory systems—that were reported by 67% of cases but also 44% of control participants, which emphasizes the ongoing difficulties in characterizing long COVID."

Didn't really answer the question.

Private jets, political access, collector art, celebrities for private performance are known things. I was expecting some form of transactions or commodities that weren't thought to exist.

Elimination would mean permanent zero COVID, not 'extended periods'. They have been able to have 'extended periods' due to tight border control but that's not 100% effective hence the current lockdowns across Australia triggered by only a handful of cases. When the threshold is that low, there's no predictability hence no promise of stability. That is what makes elimination absurd.

41% of school-aged US kids are estimated to have gotten COVID. Not such a great success.

See Table 2 of https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

These Phase III vaccine trials also do weekly symptom monitoring. In order to qualify for lab evaluation for COVID-19, there's criteria for how many symptoms are required and for how long.

The Pfizer trial results were based on 170 confirmed cases but there were “3410 total cases of suspected, but unconfirmed covid-19 in the overall study population, 1594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1816 in the placebo group.”[1]

[1] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-...

Right, what is the spread of salaries among star and journeymen players in professional sports leagues?

The Indian cricket league IPL has a public auction every year. Salaries range from 2 million at the top to 20/30K at the bottom. And most players are towards the bottom.

The CDC estimates around 30 million symptomatic influenza infections in a year; in recent years, more[1].

And roughly three-quarter of infections are asymptomatic[2], so ~120 million total cases annually.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221326001...

Utterly unrealistic, on political, logistical and sociological grounds.

In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.

The US nationalized many industries during WWII.

From 'U.S. not always averse to nationalization, despite its free-market image'[1]

"In times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. Bondholders and stockholders were compensated, and railroads were returned to private ownership in 1920, after the war ended.

During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/business/worldbusiness/13...

Edit: this appears to be a definitive account of wartime nationalization.

Industrialists in Olive Drab https://www.amazon.com/Industrialists-Olive-Drab-Operations-...

"the individual most closely involved with this effort, recounts the unique story of Ohly and his compatriots who were charged with the mission of guaranteeing that private companies sustained the vital war production of weapons, munitions, and other materiel needed by America's fighting men and the Allies to achieve victory overseas"

Full PDF: https://history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-32-1/CMH_Pub_70-3...

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Rather, it was having access to 1) continent-wide natural resources and 2) no combat theatre domestically which would have disrupted manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, not to mention civilian life and morale.

On the other hand, I’m not willing to fly to India just now. Not as much out of fear of Covid but because, if I happened to have, say, a heart attack, I clearly would be unable to get a hospital bed or an oxygen mask.

It's very region-dependent. Mumbai peaked in early April. 60%+ of O2 beds in Mumbai are vacant.