ifyoubuildit

Is there anything that can't be solved by bigger government?

I think gnome just had this as an option somewhere. Asking chatgpt says that this was removed in GTK4, so maybe it's no longer a thing?

So if I don't do a thing that has no appreciable benefit for me or the people around me, I'm being selfish, because if everyone who was in a different context did the same thing, this would somehow produce a gigantic difference?

You dumping your trash in the local drinking reservoir would probably have a couple orders of magnitude more of an impact on others than me not vaccinating after recovery (depending on what's in your trash).

OK, so I think I understand your position now: I made a single decision early on in the pandemic that I wasn't going to get vaccinated, and somehow your links from late 2021 (ie weak evidence that didn't even exist when I was deciding) were sufficient evidence that my one decision was obviously and completely wrong.

In reality, it was a continuous decision: does the totality of evidence coming out suggest I should go get the shots today? And it never definitvely got to that point, and over time the decision became better supported, not less.

You seem to understand the evidence differently. I'll grant you that maybe at some point early on I could have bought a couple months where I would have had a marginally lower chance of infection. This would have had no appreciable effect on the people around me in the grocery store. We'll have to agree to disagree otherwise.

That's not quite my claim, but its close enough.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9047157/

"Conclusions: Naturally acquired immunity confers stronger protection against infection and symptomatic disease caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 2-dose vaccine-indued immunity."

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm

"What is added by this report?

During May–November 2021, case and hospitalization rates were highest among persons who were unvaccinated without a previous diagnosis. Before Delta became the predominant variant in June, case rates were higher among persons who survived a previous infection than persons who were vaccinated alone. By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone."

"That was, and remains, completely false."

Would you like to amend your claim? You might have an argument if you stick to "could have been false for short periods of time after people were freshly vaccinated", but otherwise that's pretty indefensible.

A reasonable prior (which my doctor ascribed to) was that immunity after recovery from an infection with a coronavirus would be pretty durable and effective, and you can find plenty of reporting to support the effectiveness early on.

To believe otherwise would take some solid evidence, and maybe the Kentucky study is enough to convince you, but it was not enough to convince me (or apparently my doctor, though we didn't talk about that).

It even said this: Finally, this is a retrospective study design using data from a single state during a 2-month period; therefore, these findings cannot be used to infer causation.

So maybe "any indication" was too strong. How about any convincing indication?

Meanwhile you had things like this demonstrating that prior infection was pretty damn protective as early as late 2020: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034545

There were others as well, I was following this very closely because it seemed pretty important to not be wrong, and all of the messaging was very insistent.

You might consider reading the actual Kentucky study (as I did at the time) and looking at the limitations. This and the one in October are exactly the kind of shit that would get published and then reports like your link would way overstate what they were actually capable of showing.

Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.

You're misunderstanding btw, I didn't go around telling anyone but my closest friends and family. I wasnt about to out myself as a heretic when the likely biggest propaganda campaign in history was going on (pandemic of the unvaccinated, etc). It was mostly in hn threads on studies like the ones you posted where I would say anything about it.

I misspoke, right at rollout when supplies were short, they did say you could wait. Once they had enough to sell, everyone who didn't jump in line was a grandma killer.

> Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. ... People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.

This is asinine. There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else, and by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.

Also, I made the choice with my doctor's agreement.

I did read a lot of evidence available at the time. It's why I opted to skip the vaccine for myself given that I had already recovered shortly before the shots were available. That decision was very at odds with authoritative guidance at the time. You'd think I was a damn leper, yet that decision seems to have held up pretty well.

I also frequently tested before any gatherings, and avoided contact when I had any kinds of symptoms, test or not. I saw plenty of people figure they had gotten the shots so why not go out with the sniffles?

"Best information" and what was blasted out of the TV or considered "common sense" at the time I think have quite a bit of daylight between them.

This is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument. It works in a world where you have trustworthy institutions and its safe to just outsource your decision-making to the authorities.

Your interpretation of events might be that a collective of all well meaning people just got it wrong, and that's your right. A lot of people ended up with different conclusions, like the machine did what it does and made a lot of money, the truth be damned.

> Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.

Isn't this kinda like saying medicating your children in general is very much the right thing to do?

Like it's obviously one of those things that everyone expects you to just agree with directionally, but the actually correct answer is no, there is no in general. All drugs have a context where they make sense. E.g. you're probably not vaccinating your kids for rabies, unless you live in an animal sanctuary or something. MMR, sure.

It actually seems pretty questionable to me that it was ever a net benefit to your average young kid to get the covid shots.

All I'm saying is if you sum up the time (between vaccine release and today) that a person was strongly protected from covid infection and transmission, it's a relatively small portion of that time.

Thats my pushback against gp's argument that you have to give this thing to your young kids to protect me.

Vaccines that have a large impact on transmission and infection are there not just for you but for your community.

The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).

You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.

> Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization

Why?

It's not free. If you bring anything up, you will be charged. I know because I've paid hundreds of dollars for "free" physicals that way.

Are you saying my comment was terrorist sympathy?

I'm not admiring or excusing anyone. I'm saying you probably find a whole range of IQs among them. Because why wouldn't you? Whose to say if the userbase of this site grew up in the wrong conditions, a portion wouldn't be terrorists too?

> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots.

What even is a terrorist?

If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.

But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.

> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse

Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.

So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?

This is the gospel that is taught. It seems to help people tolerate the fruits of their labor being quietly separated from them over time. Just another tax, except the people have even less of a say in this one.

> So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright?

I think this isn't as unreasonable as it seems to everyone living it. It's like water to the fish.

We are conditioned that everything should be fueled by more and more debt, and your dollars should constantly be devalued so you can't stop grinding.

The little people can never be allowed to just work enough to accumulate what they need and then take it easy.

The relevant question for me would be how many people would be combat ineffective for how long with and without the flu vaccine. Your Claude conversation says things like this:

"The best recent direct measurement is the FLUTES study (JAMA Network Open, 2024), which tracked secondary infections after flu entered US households across 2017–2020. The result: the estimated effectiveness of influenza vaccines for preventing secondary infections among household contacts was 21.0% (95% CI, 1.4% to 36.7%). Note how wide that confidence interval is — the lower bound is nearly zero."

And

"This is consistent with older household work. A 2013 study found no evidence that vaccination prevented household transmission once influenza was introduced; adults were at particular risk despite vaccination — strikingly, 9 of 11 adults with household-acquired influenza were vaccinated in that sample."

So most people on base who were going to get infected and transmit are still going to do so. Some portion of them have a better time with the illness if it does come around, which won't happen all the time. Contrast that with the costs of the program (side effects, time, whatever cons you can think of), and it seems like you might not be in slam dunk territory.

Are you sure? Your link ends with this:

> Combined with the brutal arithmetic at higher R0R_0 R0 , this is a large part of why flu vaccination programs are generally justified on individual protection against illness and severe outcomes rather than on a realistic expectation of achieving herd immunity and stopping circulation.

On the one hand, in a military setting you can feasibly achieve 100% compliance. But if you don't stop transmission (which it sounds like we don't have good data saying it would), you don't get herd immunity.

So I think you're back to just the benefits of reduction in disease, which is not nothing, but it is marginal like I said originally.

> They're not. They're not particularly effective for preventing flu in an individual. But at the group level, they have a clear and useful effect.

This is my understanding. It basically would have marginally reduced the cost of the flu coming through, right? But thats not the impression that I would get from any of the discussion here. Am I wrong?

True or false: they traded a supreme leader who made a religious edict against nuclear weapons for one who did not.

> I can control government more than I can control Google or Anthropic

How true is this really? With the government, you can vote in various elections, or contact your representatives, and when it comes to important issues that will do exactly squat. You can also buy politicians or legislation, or run yourself, if you have the wealth and connections to do so.

With corporations, you can vote with your dollars, which again on important issues will probably do squat. Or you can try to get hired and change the company from within. Or if you have the wealth, you can buy the company (partially or wholly), or start a competitor and win in the marketplace.

In both situations there are options, and most of them are basically impossible for the small folk.

Are you saying this because you only recognize the name from breathless covid propaganda? Or because you know ivermectin is pretty important in livestock management.

This seems like a poor tool to keep in your logical toolbox. If some line of logic would lead to some sacred cow getting slaughtered, then that logic must be false?

I do wonder if either the interviewer or interviewee are aware how insane this must sound to people with regular jobs. They did mention something about feeling privileged, but it feels like they don't necessarily understand what that actually means.

Realistically, you hit the lottery and had (still have?) it better than most. I'm not at faang, but I do pretty well at a tech company myself, and I've never thought of any of it as permanent, and I arrange my life accordingly.

So you know who blew up nordstream?

The financial support point seems like it could have some legs. The other ones aren't terribly convincing. "They went on the bad guys show" or "they said the same things the bad guys say" isn't all that compelling to me.

I don't see how any of it rises up to "lol they've been completely debunked"

As someone who has no dog in the Russia/Ukraine fight (other than my tax dollars), I never liked how if one side said the sky was blue and you entertained the idea, suddenly you love the enemy, and you're parroting their talking points. Nevermind that neither of them are my friend.

Do you have any specifics about Mearsheimer or Sachs? Or just vague insinuations.