glofish

What is your interpretation of the following quote then?

> The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.

> There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.

Who is the "believer" in your opinion? The one that after reading the above says "mask don't work" or the person that says "but, masks might still work"

Love the speech like any other nerd, but I must say Agent Smith is wrong about it all.

Mammals do not "reach equilibrium" on their own. Check out some rat infestation videos on farms.

If anything viruses show more moderation. At any given moment we have of various flu, cold etc viruses around us, in our nose, gut, tongue, yet most of the time we do just fine. It is not the "amount" of virus around you that matters.

Not to mention in most parts of the world populations are declining, and rapidly at that. We have probably already passed the peak-child.

you are conflating storytelling with the plot ... see how easy is to criticise analogies ...

there is/was plenty of fresh storytelling in every age

I think the whole food analogy is missing the main point we are not reusing someone else's food to create a new frozen food.

Frozen-ness is about mass production - but not about the origin of that food. It just conflates unrelated issues.

But it is not like that ... at all. Analogies run the risk of being completely wrong.

A frozen food is made of real food, the process all starts from scratch with "natural" ingredients (well ingredients).

The frozen food vs fresh cooked food is more like a film vs live acting. Or listening on tape vs a live concert. Even this analogy is lacking, a frozen food is made fresh at some point, it is about mass production not origin and ownership.

The frozen food is not food from your kitchen (or trashcan) remixed and added onto other people's plate.

you seem to be implying these would be the same people and that those quitting normally would not be replaced

10k here, 20k there, next thing we're talking real numbers.

Recruited 17 (most likely non-random) people each of whom skipped a SINGLE breakfast, then had 3 regular days, then skipped a SINGLE dinner ...

Basic common sense indicates that it would be highly unlikely that anything of value could possibly be learned. The variability between people, meals, state of their lives, backgrounds, habits, behaviors, schedules, etc must be staggering.

Scientists will never admit to this but about 95% of published research, just like the one above, are more like practice runs where they are honing the skills of doing the research. Right down to writing papers.

There should be nothing wrong with practicing, alas since you can't get funded for practicing and training - everyone has to always be bullshitting each other how they are producing new insights.

Aren't most of those water bubbles from the fresh water that is coming in?

Last time I checked these high powered toilets first suck things down, then fill it up with water.

The scary plume seems like a recurring pattern of scientists using scaremongering to validate the rationale for doing science.

I recall a similar photo of a scary plume of supposedly infectious COVID particles trailing a runner outside ... all that turned out to be nonsense.

> Nonconformity to the cultural zeitgeist is more acceptable now than it has ever been.

Until covid it looked to be true yet they reached to the same tools without a second thought

But it is true in that it turns around more quickly - it only took two years to understand the absurdity of COVID measures from mandatory masking to indoor lockdowns and vaccine passports - in the past that would have taken 50 years

so yes we are in a much better place

but maybe what you see is what you are made to see

the constant harping and relentless barrage of information that every major storm, landslide or flood "could have been" caused by humanity itself

yes we should be more careful and we are - and nature is much better shape than years ago - think about the massive deforestation in Pennsylvania at the turn of century, it was a barren wasteland, today it is 70% forested with millions of acres of unbroken forests

yet none of that good news is ever presented, it is always about things at the brink

you are conflating the size of the codebase with the number of dependencies

Django has fewer dependencies than Flask.

(though in all fairness the dependencies Flask has were developed by the same author, thus in that sense, it is more like Django)

and you will learn almost nothing from sequencing and studying your own genome

at best you waste your time, at worst you will find all kinds of things that are not there

it is the Silicon Valley hacker mentality that thinks the life is some sort of computer where you can fiddle with parameters

learn some biology first, then you can marvel at it and realize just how absurdly simplistic is to think you can read anything out of some random letter

Those looking for a proper and comprehensive introduction into genomics from a programmer's perspective should try the Biostar Handbook:

https://www.biostarhandbook.com/

I have learned so much from it.

It is an introduction into what is like to do genomics in a scientific environment. The content at the link the OP posted appears to be an oversimplified, high level and naive overview

Crypto will never be worthless!

People mistakenly believe that the two option you have are valuable or zero. Instead it is a scale from positive to negative value.

For example a legislation to have bitcoin "pay for" the environment damage could lead to it having a negative value.

Working with and spending effort on a coin that goes to zero is a loss of productivity and opportunity of not doing something useful. Again the real cost is non-zero.

This is a great point - crypto will have utility.

But for whom? What how much is that utility really worth? And what kind of utility? That is what keeps shifting and what all the pro-contra propaganda is about.

In fact the bitcoin could even have negative utility, where getting someone stuck holding bitcoin is good for someone else.

Imagine that ... not just that bitcoin goes to zero, but could go into negative even!

denial is a powerful drug,

you are surrounded by people celebrating your genius, everything you touch turns to billions and billions

it is easy to see how someone gets disconnected from reality and ends up living in the metaverse of their own genius

It feels like it was just yesterday when the CEO declared on Twitter that all the problems are localized at international FTX.com and that funds at FTX.us are 100% safe!

Oh wait, it was yesterday.

That is a valid point - no one knows what the future holds

But we have to take into account that the active traders have been repeatedly making the same claim. How many times is one allowed to make the a similar claim before losing credibility...

Recall Warren Buffett' bet vs Hedge Funds

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...

Notably the period included an interval of a stock-market collapse and massive volatility - where smart decisions ought to have mattered more.

So the credibility of the above statement that this time will might be different feels severely weakened.

I find it really weird that they had to decompile the smart contract.

That surprised, me I thought the whole point of these smart contracts were that everyone could see them like the transactions that take place.

The whole point of index funds is that individual decisions - no matter how well reasoned they appear - don't seem to work out long term. The decision protocol that looks good today and may have worked once, twice of five times in the past will eventually lead to a ruinous decision later on that wipes out all the prior gains.

If the logic you describe works for one company why wouldn't it work for two, or five or ten out of SP500?

Heck if you can indeed pick any winner even by just a 2-3% gain than the passive index, why wouldn't you better off by building a fully custom curated SP500 that contains companies that are more likely to succeed? That 3% adds up to massively more money long term.

The whole point of active trading is exactly that, a thinking logical human being, adding all their intellect ought to be more successful than passively doing nothing.

Yet history says otherwise. Even when faced with decades long evidences active traders still believe they can do better than passives.

the problem is that that you only know too late which ones were the dumb companies

tens of thousands of active traders try to beat SP500 all the time - how many succeed ...

Why would random user be smarter than the active traders?

now consider that historically, the overwhelming majority of active managers perform worse than SP500 ...

so there, it is always easy to be smart retroactively, if you cashed out last year you would have wanted TSLA in your portfolio

then it wasn't overpriced no? Overpriced means that you can get it for cheaper.

I feel like this same topic is being revisited on a regular basis.

Most likely ever since index funds existed active traders hated them.

Here is an article from 2010: "Index Funds are distorting the markets"

https://www.wealthmanagement.com/news/are-index-funds-distor...

> With money pouring into index funds and ETFs, passive portfolios are distorting markets, harming many investors.

> Index funds are creating disturbing conditions in a variety of asset classes, including emerging markets, small stocks, and commodities.

prices are rising because we want to use the same amount of fuel as before

use less and the prices will be falling

that is the exact purpose of the action,

reduce demand

it does suck being on the receiving end - I do sympathise - and I am simply making an observation

or it could mean people waste a lot less - we all know in the western world waste is gigantic

By sucking the money out of the system.

It reduces demand - in the modern world the prices are disconnected from cost of production - instead reflect the demand for that product - how much can it be sold for

Notably the status quo for decades of research pre-covid was that masks don't work ...

Then in 2020 hysteria broke out, most scientists got scared shtless and you could only publish papers that indicate that masks work even though all the empirical evidence around us show that they don't.

If anything shows how short term scientific consensus is trivially falsifiable as it depends on few influential people.

Good luck trying to get a NIH grant with the hypothesis that masks might no be effective ... It is a no-go hypothesis from the start.

Same with zoonotic vs lab origin.