native_samples

There's a second issue because it's Glasgow. For Scotland to become viably independent it needs to wean itself off English subsidies. This sort of thing is the opposite and reinforces the general impression that the Scots aren't serious about independence. They can't afford even their current levels of spending on their own. Really is not affordable even with the rest of the UK involved, but especially not alone.

The right to bodily autonomy is not believable because there weren't a whole lot of people campaigning against vaccine mandates because they were pro-bodily-autonomy.

As for your examples, surely even pro-life people don't care about "abortions" of babies that are already dead? If laws are interpretable in that way it seems like an easy wording fix. Not many people would care about that even if religious.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-vaers-covid-...

"Since CDC officials stated publicly that “COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring is the most robust in U.S. history,” I had assumed that at the very least, CDC officials were monitoring VAERS using the methods they described in a briefing document posted on the CDC website in January 2021 (and updated in February 2022, with minor changes) [PRRs]. I was wrong."

This had to be forced out of them with a FOIA request but their response to the request (for documents related to VAERS analysis of COVID vaccines) says:

"no PRRs were conducted by the CDC. Furthermore data mining is outside the the agencies purview, staff suggest you enquire with the FDA"

The CDC run VAERS but have never actually done any data mining on it, despite telling the public that the monitoring of COVID vaccines was the most robust in history. Which means that statement they gave is either a lie, or it's true and VAERS has actually never been used to detect safety signals.

Still, there's a secondary question here: how do we know polio vaccines are genuinely so different? COVID vaccines are one of the first mandatory vaccines to be developed and forced on people in the internet era. Thanks to that and the lawsuit that's forcing documents out of the FDA, the world has far more insight into the development and marketing of these vaccines than any previous public health campaign in history. What we see from this evidence is disturbing, and it seems to be a pattern, which raises the question of whether this is really the first time public health people have been misleading people about vaccine effectiveness and safety.

If it's not, then it becomes hard to say much with any certainty on the topic, as those sources control all the data.

What are "anti vax statistics"? Do you think people who refused to take the COVID vaccines were making up their own data from whole cloth? I never saw that. What we do see is that the stats presented by health authorities are often mangled by inappropriate methodologies that appear to be picked in order to arrive at pre-chosen outcomes. When the raw data is obtained and re-analyzed correctly, we get papers like this one:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239

"The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively)."

In case you're the sort of person who evaluates arguments based on credentials not merit, the authors of this paper are all from universities or health services. One is an editor of the BMJ. One is a professional statistician and epidemiologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sander_Greenland)

You assert that the modern COVID anti-vax movement is "conspiracy driven". But there are two problems with this argument:

1. It's not really true. Refusal arises because public health officials have repeatedly lied about the vaccines, saying things like they are 95% effective against infection, or that they'll turn people into "dead ends" for the virus. That second one was the rationale for mandates and it was known to be false from the start - the trials never showed any such thing and they had no reason to believe this given that non-sterilizing vaccines are common. As for the first, the governments that publish actual case rates by vaccine status show that they have effectiveness in the minus 300-400% range i.e. vaccinated people get COVID at a much higher rate than unvaccinated people. So that wasn't true either.

2. Even if it was the case that it was all driven by conspiracy thinking, so what? It's already been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that public health leaders engaged in multiple conspiracies throughout COVID, e.g. virologists writing in private emails that they thought the virus looked like it'd been modified in a lab, and then days later signing an open letter saying the opposite. Or public health flipping from "masks are useless" to "masks are essential" overnight without any new science to drive it.

Given this history the argument that anyone proposing the existence of a conspiracy is illegitimate is, well, extremely naive.

"The risk of course is when the vaccines are defective such as with The Cutter Incident in the 1955. This was probably the root of the modern anti-vax movement"

The anti-vax movement existed from the very start. Research the history of the smallpox vaccine. Parents were choosing to go to prison for violating mandate laws rather than let their children be vaccinated because they'd seen that vaccinated children came down with actual smallpox at much higher rates than expected. Just like today, public health refused to countenance the possibility that there were any possible problems in the vaccination process. They never change. It's a psychological issue.

With Truffle you start with a Java based tree walking interpreter (could use Kotlin too for less boilerplate), so the very easiest stuff. Then you annotate it in some places, add a dependency on Truffle and ... that's it. Now you have a JIT compiler for your interpreted language. The next step is to start refining the use of the annotations and to write specializations in order to accelerate your JIT by incorporating standard techniques like polymorphic inline caches.

Finally you can compile your new interpreter+JIT engine down to a Graal native image (single standalone native binary), thus ensuring it can start as fast as an interpreter written in C and can warm up as fast as V8. The binary can also be used as a shared library.

Given that this tech exists now, people who choose to write their interpreter in Java will have a massive edge in performance over people walking the traditional path. It's still relatively new technology but it's hard to see how it doesn't change interpreter design forever.

W.R.T. compositing, browsers took a long time to move to even just GPU based compositing, and full GPU based rendering took longer still. Certainly, if Flash hadn't been killed off so prematurely it seems reasonable that either they'd have done the work to keep up, or users would have organically abandoned the platform.

Indeed, you make a good point that it was really a fight over forcing devs to use Objective C and nothing else. Flash was just roadkill in that fight.

The Jobs Flash memo was crystal clear about why Flash was being booted off his platform. It was to avoid "a third party layer of software coming between the platform and the developer".

Mostly, this reinforced the general impression that these subjects were extremely easy and involved next to no work, compared to CS. It didn't help me much in later life though.

I think it really depends on what languages you use though. If you use something like Kotlin where there's really almost no boilerplate and the type system is usefully strong, the symbolic logic auto-completion is just far more reliable and helpful. If you're stuck in a language where there's no types, and there's lots of boilerplate to write, then I can see it may be more helpful.

Weird that, no? There was no drama or employee in-fighting, yet also no racism, sexism or homophobia. How ever did we manage that.

Nobody ever overtly celebrates capitalism. It isn't true that there is such a thing as "capitalism month" in the same way there is pride month, with explicitly named events, flags suddenly popping up everywhere and so on. Communism has May 1st but capitalism? No. There never has been. You know this full well, which is why you have to lie to try and distract from the point - if there was such an event you'd hate it.

LGBT people aren't oppressed anywhere that celebrates pride day/week/month but at any rate, the obsession with dividing society into oppressed and oppressors is pure hard left ideology. Always was, since the days of Marx or even the French Revolution. It has no place being forced into people's lives via every possible angle - that is and always has been the strategy of highly destructive people.

Looking back at the 80s/90s AIDS hysteria now, it was the same as COVID hysteria. Same people even, guys like Fauci. They were telling people you could get AIDS from drinking water fountains and similar crap. No wonder people were crazy about it.

Incidentally the whole concept of a virus that primarily targets gay people doesn't make much biological sense, does it? Nothing the size of a virus can detect your sexuality, nor is there any evolutionary reason to select for such a thing even if it could. That's why the 'experts' predicted it would quickly stop being primarily a gay disease. Nope. That rather makes the theory that a lot of AIDS cases were driven by drug abuse more plausible, doesn't it, especially because this preference for gay men mysteriously vanishes in Africa.

At any rate, the public health community has pretty consistently and for a long time misled heterosexual people about the risks of any disease that's known to primarily affect the gay community. They're doing it again now with monkeypox. It almost exclusively affects gay men which is why the official CDC guidance is to - no kidding - hold socially distanced gay sex parties. But to listen to the early announcements about this you'd not have suspected this reality. There is of course no question of the state enforcing any measures against the at-risk community to "crush the curve", like banning pride week sex parties: the LGBT community is special. For the rest of us, we get lockdowns. For them, nothing. It's this sort of thing that destroys the credibility of public health (not that they had any left after COVID). It's just one long string of ideological driven "science".

What Apple are actually charging for is the first item in your list - access to the users. Apple wired the hardware to make themselves a middleman in every transaction. That's it, that's all it boils down to.

Imagine if half your app icons suddenly changed to incorporate dollar signs in celebration of Capitalism Month. Every day a new CEO is celebrated for their job creation prowess and you can't avoid it because it's everywhere. Would you simply shrug and say, well, we live in a capitalist country so it's not political? Of course not. The craziness that would unleash would bea sight to behold.

Luckily for you, people elsewhere on the political spectrum don't share your need to constantly sealion every conversation and space.

But who knows? Maybe we should have done background checks to keep your type out. Certainly, Google has become a shadow of its former self now, filled with employees who seem to be phoning it in and spending all day searching for meaning in hating their own users instead of creating great new products.

US tech firms have a long history of using US place names as code names for operating system releases. Windows 95 was Chicago, if I recall correctly.

So what you get is worthless fanboy journalism in which those who are smart enough to ask tough questions get removed, and those who are left just want to copy paste university press releases.

In turn that beds general scepticism amongst the population because they can sense that nobody is challenging the "experts".

"Classically" CBs inject money into the economy via purchasing financial assets. It gets filtered through banks and financial markets, so it's expected that this is where inflation hits first and hardest. Over time as people cash out of those rising assets the inflation spreads and starts warping the prices of other things like houses, degrees etc.

The sort of inflation we're seeing now that also affects the prices of every day items is primarily due to lockdowns. CBs bought government bonds directly, which they'd been doing for a long time but they did so on a massive scale in order to fund support loans and stimulus cheques. But everything was shut down, so people just deposited those loans into their banks and had nothing to do with them except speculate on stuff like NFTs. Now the world is opening up again that money is getting withdrawn and spent on normal, every day items, some of which are also in short supply for lockdowns and war related reasons.