andrewclunn

This would be an excellent point IF these were like other vaccines (and in fact wouldn't even fall under that label without the change to the definition made last year). As it stands this is more a rhetorical argument you've made, which does nothing to address the actual unknowns and long term concerns, but merely appears as though it does if you pretend these treatments can be represented by broad aggregated tendencies regarding "vaccines."

You need to have a really hi IQ to get hacker news... That or understand that a procedurally generated listing that feeds into the egos (it's about me... I mean us!) will get up votes for the same reason that housewives read their horoscope. We're shallow animals. I mean I clicked on this to see what it was about while skipping other stories, so I'm no better.

Harboring concern over long term risks of covid because o f lack of data, but unconcerned about long term risks from vaccines for covid because of lack of data? You MAY be brainwashed.

So many commentators who say, "Your suffering is an indication that the vaccine worked!" or "That's the exception that proves, the rule! Look at this science!" when people raise concerns with the objectivity of our scientific institutions themselves. I am having a hard time distinguishing between these people and the thousands of CPP affiliated commenters that come on every YouTube video related to Chinese propaganda and policy. Here's a much better quote for this situation:

"Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" - Groucho Marx

Open source has figured this out, and have "support plans' a business or government can purchase.

If they put even a portion of the funds they would have spent into funding said free projects... I mean GnuPG is now no longer requiring or even accepting donations because of what a German city level government did to promote open source: https://lwn.net/Articles/880248/

Governments sharing and pooling their resources for open source just makes sense.

One more reason to never buy a product requiring persistent internet connectivity with automatic updates. When physical products are treated the same as software as a service, you don't own a damn thing.

Friendly hint. If you are skeptical of climate change dogma, point out the clearest / most obvious failures in the individual paper / article / claim being presented. Do not go further by offering conclusions extrapolated from that. That enables you to engage people's critical thinking without engaging their ideology.

Well, we’ll always have The Pentagon Wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLNi4bLc2h4

Looks like the data points have more to do with how many weather recording stations a region has than anything else.

Apparently this is how they judged how "into celebrities" a person was. I mean these questions seem geared toward the "creepy obsession with a celebrity" approach, which is hardly the same as thing as "public figures I follow online, respect, or who's work I enjoy" and also completely different from the "I read the tabloids and follow celebrity gossip" types. So not sure that's really what most people think of based on the title:

https://www.scribd.com/document/356931328/Celebrity-Attitude...

Here's the article from The Information (referenced in the linked piece). Important as without corroboration from two different sources, this woudl be more rumor than news:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nyt-to-buy-the-athle...

Using browsers for this sort of thing is a bad idea. These sites are the easiest (and most important) to target by copyright holders. Sophisticated users use Kodi plugins, torrents over VPN, or private share servers / services. These users are nearly impossible to stop. Keeping easily accessible websites offline and off search engines is how you stop Joe Shmoe from piracy, plus there's a centralized single point of failure to take down.

People get concerned about migrants replacing natives. What they don't realize is that after just a single generation, the birth rates of these communities plummet. It's women's education all the way down. Women have a career? Less likely to have a family, and also (if they do) to start later and thus have fewer kids. Any article that portrays population decline as a good thing (often for environmental reasons) will actively promote this link. Only two things could change this downward birthing trend:

1) ectogenesis (babies grown outside the womb)

2) reversal of women's rights and political enfranchisement

So unless you're down with transhumanist or neo-reactionary ideologies, it's time to adjust to a world with more elderly than kids for at least the next century.

Do we have data regarding reduced transmission of Omicron based on vaccination status? I ask because (given how dominant that strain is now) that could be the only rational justification for this requirement on the basis of "protecting others." I mean this in good faith. If there is data, please point me to it .

Limiting supply of fossil fuels doesn't spur green technology. Investment in R&D does. Why not stop subsidizing that fossil fuel power instead? See as it stand if you just ban new sources, while continuing to subsidize the power, you protect existing players form competition, while feeding them tax payer money, and simultaneously ensuring that they can transform their (now government mandated) monopoly in fossil fuels into a similar monopoly in the next energy source. This is just corporate welfare policy dressed up as environmentalism.

The issue is that the regulations initially cut into the profits for meat packing companies. Then over time they serve as a barrier to entry, essentially creating artificial monopolies and anti-competitive market stagnation. It's unintended consequences all the way down, with fair competition, sustainable agriculture / food production, and food safety concerns all being different goals, which are sometimes at odds. Admitted the costs and trade offs is the first step to making real hard decisions, and we're just nowhere close to being there as a culture.

> "It is to endlessly document microaggressions but pay little attention to evictions; to spotlight company’s political platitudes but have little interest in wages or working conditions. It is to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out — with little debate. To see billionaires amass extraordinary wealth and bureaucrats amass enormous power — with little scrutiny. And to watch the most vulnerable among us die of drug overdoses — with little comment."

Your movement (progressivism) has been co-opted. The same happened to the religious right a generation ago. Grifters told you that winning was the most important thing, and that politicizing identity was how to do it. Now your views have been reduced to platitudes and slogans meant to mobilize sheep and distract from real issues while the powerful plunder (as they always have). I'd say, "learn for next time," but let's be honest, it will be some other movement (likely one that rises out of opposition to this current one) that will be the next one to be co-opted, and you won't be part of it because it will be ostensibly "right wing."

No mention of worms and their importance in healthy soil? Or the impact of pesticides on them?

While I get your point, I took the article to be more in the vein of saying that the downturn hit everyone, so your previous year's income was a horrible metric for determining who should get stimulus. There are plenty of industries where there are boom and bust years. Paying for stimulus checks with debt, and then telling people, who may have also fallen on unexpected hard times due to covid, that they made too much (and also contributed more in taxes) the previous year to get help... I mean the author does have a case.

Animal reservoirs are generally seen as a vector for reinfection, as well as places for diseases to mutate into more dangerous variants (swine flu, bird flu, etc...). The notion that animal reservoirs could give rise to less concerning variants is a welcome thought. Though, if covid can indeed infect rats and then reinfect people form them, then any hopes that this would not be an endemic disease are gone.

I do wish that "climate change" was not lumped into every environmental concern. For example, if painting one of the blades black on a windmill means the birds don't fly into it and die, then let's do it! Connecting it to a larger climate battle in order to win that war ("See wind power doesn't have that downside anymore, so more wind power to fight climate change") only gets in the way of solving the immediate problem.

> "The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319."

So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have declined, the numbers from younger "working age" people have increased more than enough to make up for it.

> "Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions."

Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.

All mechanical (no computer) motorcycles and electric assist bikes are going to get really popular when people realize that self-driving and automation in vehicles was never about freeing them from the drudgery of traffic, but instead controlling and limiting their freedom to travel.

"Odd" only if the policies are driven by public health concerns. Now ask for what motivations / goals would this approach not be "odd."

An article on the subject without a paywall:

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2021/12/a-lab-st...

There's always an underlying "those OTHER people are them dumb ones" in any and all of this sort of criticism. The thing is though, to sell it to the masses, not-so-smart characters need to be elevated to appearing intelligent, and straw men need to be employed in rapid fire. The truth is that these sorts of movies "Idiocracy" and "Don't Look Up" are there to give people of middling intelligence validation and reinforce their belief that they are the smart ones.

Psh, biology tests in production. If it works well, others will fork it.

Pick an open source project to contribute to both financially and with your work. Become that guy for a piece of software that everyone else relies on.

The emergent truth inherently obvious to those with reliably observation, pattern recognition, cognitive ability is far more reliable than the knowledge preached by academic priests from within ivory towers. The rejection of "fact checking" is a rejection of the academic model of institutional knowledge in general. Science (not empiricism mind you, but "science" as a class of researchers and Phds) has been found wanting and the masses no longer trust it.

TLDR, citations are for those who are incapable of making the arguments themselves and must outsource their very thought to other men they unquestioningly revere.