2,422 karma · joined October 26, 2011
The existing mRNA vaccines were pretty close to having a sterilizing effect (unexpected and very good surprise) on the previous variants.
There is still hope that the Delta-specific updates (Moderna is already testing theirs) will restore that level of efficacy, and there's also ongoing research on intranasal vaccines which should work even better for that.
You're refusing the "beta" (installed by billions of users) version of something that can save your life because you (mistakenly) believe the choice is between that, and staying as you were before.
It's not. That's no longer true with the Delta variant. Now it's really a choice between "carefully designed, just officially declared stable" vaccine with billions of users vs getting the "totally unstable, totally doesn't care about your health, completely unknown long term effects" SARS-CoV-2 virus forcefully installed on you.
You will get antibodies one way or another, and there is orders of magnitude more risk and uncertainty associated with getting them through infection rather than controlled vaccination.
Furthermore, there has never been in history any vaccine side effect that occurred later than a few weeks after administration at most.
There is just no theoretical basis for why anything wrong would happen here.
Are you demanding 100% certainty ? Sure, you won't get it here but you also didn't get it with anything else you ever did in medicine and you can live with that.
With Delta, ICUs (and even more so long covid clinics) are full of unvaccinated "healthy non obese non smoking relatively young" guys like you.
If you're not afraid of Covid, rationally you should be even less afraid of getting a vaccine.
To put things in perspective, here are the odds in young males for the most talked about vaccine side effect (myocarditis, which usually resolves in a few days), vs the odds of getting severe Covid at your age :
This is categorically false, sorry : https://twitter.com/apsmunro/status/1429449468261322759
Wow, color me surprised. That doesn't sound like a desktop Linux app at all :)
>I once almost bricked my LG monitor, because I accidentally locked the hardware buttons on my monitor, via an undocumented manufacturer specific option.
Reminds of the good old days of late 90s / early 2000s desktop Linux, when the wrong video timing settings in your XFree86 config could make your CRT monitor (almost literally) explode.
But I'm sure 2022 will be "the year of Linux on the desktop", finally :)
A Raspberry Pi 4 with PiMiga is a great way to get your feet wet (and might be all you need eventually)
There's also not a globally accepted definition of the syndrome yet, so it won't show up in stats.
If you go by "still experiencing at least one symptom after 3 months", it's closer to 10-20% than 1% : https://twitter.com/Dr2NisreenAlwan/status/13775492575703162...
Another study found that around a third of these 10-20% consider it debilitating (significantly affects their daily lives)
Vaccine-induced immunity has been shown to offer much broader protection than natural post-infection immunity, and reinfections are not rare with Delta.
Here's a recent study : https://twitter.com/OYCar/status/1412656966481039367?s=20
That's a weird comment to make on the day Hyperion ships a second significant update to AmigaOS in 3 years, while Cloanto has been sitting on its IP to sell a glorified, Windows-only UAE bundle with no improvements whatsoever.
I don't have an opinion on the legal fight, but as user I can see who's actually moving things forward, and that's where I'm putting my money.
https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708?s... (It's 100 tweets long, here's a more readable version : https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1391111720526024708.html)
The tl;dr is that 20th century health authorities went too far in their rejection of the 19th century "miasma" theory of disease transmission, and now the pendulum is swinging back again.
https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708?s...
It's 100 tweets long, may be more readable here : https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1391111720526024708.html
But take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the tracks and artists you mentioned, and see how high they went in the US vs European charts (to be fair, I was surprised that the Prodigy did so well in the US)
My claim is that the degree to which a genre becomes mainstream in a location is a good reflection of this place being "ground zero" for it.
I suppose that's one way of saying you have a different perspective from mine.
>Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it. >The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
I've addressed most of your points in another comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26981256
A lot of the genres that Ishkur despises are every bit as European homegrown as Motown is African-American to the bones.
> Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
Sure, but that's a bit like saying Silicon Valley doesn't own the Internet. It's technically true but SV is still (or was until very recently) a mecca, ground zero for all things Internet.
There is such a thing for music genres as well, and a good indicator of that is the extent to which that genre has bubbled up into mainstream pop music charts.
That's actually a sign that a genre has taken hold and reached maturity in a location, with subgenres catering for every layer of society.
As a genre ambassador, you know you've won when your sound (even a watered down version of it) has become the sound of pop music chart-toppers. That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.
> Don't lecture us, Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
I don't know, that's a bit like saying that Helsinki is the heart and soul of Linux, and Uppsala that of MySQL, which is technically true but ... this isn't really where it came of age and blossomed.
> Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the 90s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and exported back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
That's controversial. Techno is often described as the child of African-American soul music on one side, and white European experimental electronic music on the other.
It's trendy to stress the former and downplay the latter, and that's certainly fair enough for house music.
But when it comes to trance, eurodance, etc, I think that owes almost nothing to America or African-American music, and everything to Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre.
>It's important to first explain the horrible template that ruined Trance music. Somehow a musical artform that devoted itself to hypnotic rhythms and spacey soundscapes became, inside of a decade, a mass produced assembly line McProduct for middle class Europeans (pejoratively known as Trancecrackers because they're white. Terribly, tragically, sunblindingly, basic-bitch-ordering-a-pumpkin-spice-latte white) who should have not spent their young adulthood clubbing but rather dying horribly in another continent-engulfing conflict (I mean, come on: Europe is due).
You know, one could answer this with an equally salty comeback, like how ironic it is for an American to think he's in a position to lecture white Europeans in any way about electronic music culture or taste : we built, grew and lived this music revolution for 20 years, while white America was still all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres*, and black America all about hip-hop. To some extent, they still are.
Then around 2009**, when we had matured this into something commercial enough to be sold to the US public, we exported the cheesiest, bro-ready fringe of it as "EDM" and sure enough, it caught on like wildfire. Frat boys & sorority girls had "never heard anything like this OMG!" :)
But with remarks like the one he makes about war, it's probably sufficient to say that this guy, knowledgeable as he is, sounds like a bit of a bigot and a right d*ck.
*This was the era when Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno" (and by "techno" he meant Moby, lol), while in Europe the Berlin Love Parade had a million people in the streets each summer. I was dumbfounded in the late 90s at how many different names the id3 tag format had for country music and Christian genres. It was a complete WTF from a European perspective ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Genre_list_in_ID3v1[12]
** David Guetta-produced "I gotta feeling" for the Black Eyed Peas is widely credited to have launched EDM into the US mainstream. Soon after he & Tiesto had their Vegas residencies, EDC & UMF blew up and the rest is history.
Please accept that this does not make you immune to the good old "Mt Stupid" phase of the Dunning-Krüger curve. In fact, "smart hackers" like us are really prime examples of people who might fall for it. I contend that you are currently stuck there on Covid, and together with other smart people you're finding yourself inadvertently aligned with very dumb run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists that you would normally want nothing to do with. Please don't take that as an insult and bear with me for a moment :
Without even getting into a debate about Ivermectin, have you considered what else should be true in order for your current take on Covid severity and treatments to be correct ?
It would take a majority of people around the world who have dedicated their lives to this topic to be wrong, or careless, dumb or plain evil. Many of them are doctors and researchers who are not only acting in good faith and genuinely want nothing more than to help their patients or advance science, but perhaps more convincingly, also have personal, visceral, "can't lie about it" interests at stake, like desperately wanting to save a colleague, dear friend, or their own dad or spouse.
Please do not insult them (and delude yourself) by automatically assuming that you know better than them, that they failed to save their mom, dad or friend because they didn't want it enough. If you believe that the powers that be (institutional research / politicians / regulators / big pharma / whatever) are broken / dysfunctional / stupid and prevent the truth from surfacing, and that people like yourself are gonna disrupt the shit out of the system, stop it now. This is the definition of arrogance, and you're deluding yourself.
I could stop here really.
But let me just answer a few of the points you raised (and then I'll consider my efforts at convincing a stranger done : do whatever you like with it) :
> Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable,
This is a strawman argument, I do not think that. But I do use Occam's razor, and there is a much simpler explanation to the current absence of early stage treatments than a "suppression" conspiracy theory : that we really did try but simply have not found one that works yet.
This suppression theory was already untenable for the reasons most conspiracy theories are, but it should have been killed for good when 3 things happened :
1. A cheap generic drug, dexamethasone, is found to be our only effective treatment (albeit late stage only) with a 30% fatality reduction.
2. Remdesivir, the "big pharma contender" in an imaginary battle against HCQ that some insisted was happening, is found to be ineffective and is dropped without discussion.
3. In the same trials, HCQ is not outright dismissed just because it originated from quack doctors circles, but given the same fair chance as others.
> The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery
This is again a strawman argument. Covid may be treatable. When it comes to prioritizing research, it is unlikely that a treatment touted by the same circles that touted HCQ, using the same flawed reasoning (something that does work in vitro should work in vivo) is going to be THE miracle cure. But it should still be allocated some resources to verify that. It has been, and the results are unsurprisingly, nothing to write home about.
> Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?
Depending on the definition of "long haul", yes : https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-get-long-covid-a...
"According to a recent survey done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35% of nonhospitalized patients who had mild COVID-19 cases did not return to baseline health 14 to 21 days after their symptoms started. And this wasn’t just in older people or people with underlying health conditions. Twenty percent of previously healthy 18-to-34-year-olds had ongoing symptoms. Overall, research shows as many as one-third of individuals who had COVID-19 and weren’t hospitalized will still be experiencing symptoms up to three months later."
> Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?
I will let you look this up, and immediately after ask yourself whether it would make more sense to reason in absolute numbers to better visualize the burden it will cause on society (hint : it would)
Depending on the country, we're talking about giving millions of previously healthy young people brain fog and premature cardiovascular aging. This testimonial is great : https://twitter.com/a_straight_line/status/13714925394511831...
We're talking about letting ICUs run at full capacity for months, causing widespread grief in families, unbearable pressure on doctors/nurses, and consequences for every age group (including the 20 year olds involved in a car accident and not getting the care they could have). Not to mention that every new case is a ticket in the evolution lottery for variants.
So yeah, you probably shouldn't be second-guessing the benefits/risk profile of vaccines for people your age, and in any case please stop with the "99.x% survive this thing"/"as a healthy 30-something I shouldn't be forced to ..." narrative. It doesn't make you look good and more importantly, it definitely hurts society and it could very well hurt you or someone you love directly.
which is not proven to have any relevance to Covid-19, unfortunately.
> I'm prepared to treat any Covid infection I do get with a protocol including ivermectin and various vitamins which has proven effective where it has been tried in India in Mexico.
Please do not spread potentially dangerous health misinformation and false hopes, even in good faith. If there was such a protocol that worked, the world would know.
Now that Hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 has been thoroughly debunked, snake oil peddlers have apparently moved on to Ivermectin. Efficacy-wise it seems to be taking the exact same path as HCQ, unfortunately. Hopefully this time around, no more precious research time and resources than strictly necessary will be wasted trying to prove again and again that the "Internet's miracle cure" does. not. work.
More here : https://forbetterscience.com/2020/12/15/ivermectin-now-again...
> The long haul risk is a little bit more substantial
Between one in six and one in three people, to be precise. A "little bit more" indeed.
> in the vast majority of cases it is not debilitating
76% of hospitalised patients still have symptoms after 6 months. https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-get-long-covid-a...
Citation needed.
The efficacy data was based on clinical trial batches though, and the challenge seemed to be with lower manufacturing quality in the large scale commercial batches : "changes were made in their processes to ensure that the integrity was improved and brought in line with what was seen for clinical trial batches."
To be honest, we do also have real world data now (Israel mainly) that confirms the benefit/risk balance to be extremely good.
If you don't have real hardware, you're better off watching them in 60fps glory on Youtube, see this channel for example : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdaWE88_VrLbXuQrq3Uudvg
is a 20 years old French audio/music gear website featuring an exhaustive product database, reviews, newsletters, forum, social network, and marketplace.
Most musicians / producers in the country will be aware of it, including probably some famous ones.
I don't know of an equivalent in the Anglosphere (gearslutz.com would be the closest thing in terms of forum/community, but lacks most of the other features).
Audiofanzine does have some English content, but I don't think that ever really caught on.
You may want to read this for a more balanced view :
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/dragging-a...
It was really AZ's screw up. The fact is that the EU had a contract with AZ that explicitly required the use of UK plants for fulfilling the EU's orders if need be. But the problem is that AZ had also promised the UK it would have priority over the goods produced on its soil...