ed_balls

I really hard to compare UK and SA.

- average age 28 SA vs 40 UK

- a lot of immunocompromised people in SA (AIDS)

- UK has most of it immunity from vaccination which was mainly targeting AC2 receptor. It's possible that natural immunity or Sinovac (attenuated virus) has better protection than mRNA vaccines - not confirmed.

- SA is doing fewer tests.

If China would discover they are developing nuclear weapon they may choose to attack.

There is a rumor that Taiwan has rockets that are targeting Three Gorges Dam. In case of an invasion they may choose to destroy them which would result in millions of deaths of deaths. Nuclear weapons not needed.

I think that might be the biggest sin with today's school system. Big penalties for mistakes and optimisation for perfection (math and spelling tests). In reality you "want" to make mistakes, because that means you took risk. They are inevitable. Once you internalize it it's quite liberating. How quickly and well you recover from mistakes is much more important.

> Will NATO come for let’s say Latvia or Lithuania? I honestly don’t think so.

Poland may, because they see Russia as a nr 1 threat. USA have to because they(NATO) will lose any credibility. If they won't Germany, Japan, Poland, Ukraine, South Korea and Taiwan will start nuclear programs right away.

Nobody wants nuclear proliferation.

This Russia-Ukraine issue is a negotiation tactic from Russia. There will be no invasion because it's too expensive to occupy a large country.

Short term: Russia would like a land connection to Crimea, cause they have a problem with water. They don't want Ukraine in NATO.

Long term: Russia negotiating position is weakening. They have army and natural resources. As world will be less dependent on carbohydrates, oil and gas in Siberia will be too expensive to extract.

Exactly, the main threat model is the Russian aggression via hybrid warfare (anything below the classic war, which would trigger article 5) or full fledge offence. In both cases F-35 sucks, Poland is too close to Russia. I'd be much better to spend the money on drones, satellites.

> it is borderline cruel keeping them in an apartment in some cases

I don't think this is true. You can have a husky in a flat, but have to go for a run every morning.

I have a German Shepard. She goes for 3 walks a day and a lot of weekend trips. The flat is just a kennel.

Also people with weak immunity e.g. HIV positive, can stay infected for months.

> The omicron variant could be a blessing in disguise

Not really. There is a very low evolutionary pressure to become less deadly.* You start infecting people in day 3, have symptoms on day 8 and die on day 20. You can walk around for a week infecting people before you die. Compare it to previous SARS epidemic, where people started infecting others much later. It just died out, because people were isolated at homes and hospitals.

*SARS-COV-2 is an upper respiratory track disease and SARS-COV-1 is a lower respiratory track disease.

I don't mind a touch screen, but let me program the buttons on the steering wheel e.g. there should be a fn button. When I press it and arrows I can change the temperature. I'd have pretty much all important functions available without taking my hands far away from the steering wheel as well as my eyes off the road.

I wish they would stop making capacitive buttons though. (VW, Audi and Mercedes - I'm looking at you)

That is not true for Covid. It's an upper respiratory virus which infects others before causing symptoms. It's possible to develop a variant that spreads, but kills everybody (highly unlikely in practice). There is no strong evolutionary pressure like in case of SARS-COV-1

> actual racist/sexist hiring practices are what led to the imbalance in diversity in the tech field

Can you name "actual racist/sexist hiring practices"? I'm not american, but my understanding is that lack of women in tech comes from that fact that more women are interested in people that things. 80%+ women go to nursing schools, 80%+ men go into engineering. If you make society more egalitarian you maximise those differences between sexes, hence 10-15% of women engineers in Norway and 30% in Bangladesh.

no idea if that is caused by biology or social framework (the way you were raised, a lot of software jobs are in contracting, so no maternity leave etc.)

Since immunocompromised people haven't "produced" super flu variant so far, is it safe to assuming we won't have it with Covid? I may spread faster, but won't be more deadly.

Japan is fascinating for me. Do they just not test people? https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

it's hard to compare cases without knowing how many tests were done and how they are administered.

It's possible that mRNA would reduce the time to the market, which would give use more time to gather data and have better predictions of dominant strains.

There is also a train congestion in Kazakhstan. A few articles mentioned end of summer 2022, but I guess this was assuming no extra disruptions.

slower sales cycles, more risk-averse.

I used to work for a startup founded by a few Brits. We had engineers in London, but no sales people, because of the culture. I was much easier to sell to Walmart than Tesco.

Meta: Anyone owns a 10 years old model S? What is the range of battery? I wanted to buy a used electric car, but 10 years Nissan Leaf has 40km of range, which is not enough.

licensing I presume

It's really hard to compare these. Netherlands has 4.7 per 1 billion vehicle-km, UK 3.9. I'd guess this is because population density (more crossings) and a way more cyclist in Netherlands. Cycling is safer in Netherlands than in UK. (I have cycled quite a bit in both places)

Is this number really true? I remember a study from Italy (on Dr. John Campbell's channel) that there were 0 death from Covid* in people under 40 that were healthy.

*Covid was the cause of death, not sepsis and btw he tested positive for Covid.

> Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack.

Maybe it's a symptom they miss human contact.

but the stigma is still there.

> denied burial in religious cemeteries

Same for Catholics and most of Christians, hence no suicide attacks.

it's a bad idea to compare cash to a number in a computer which estimate share value (taking future cash flow into account)

We are, but not Niger.

That's why it's never gonna happen, they don't have resources to support this population growth.

> Africa and - a bit less - the Islamic World which spirals towards overpopulation on the other hand.

I don't think this is true. Every single country is on the decline. They may sill grow in this century, but it's very likely that it would stop in 50 years.