JamisonM

"It needs to be determined whether such protection against severe disease at reinfection lasts for a longer period, analogous to the immunity that develops against other seasonal “common-cold” coronaviruses,4 which elicit short-term immunity against mild reinfection but longer-term immunity against more severe illness with reinfection. If this were the case with SARS-CoV-2, the virus (or at least the variants studied to date) could adopt a more benign pattern of infection when it becomes endemic."

You gotta do better than this, the source your cite doesn't support your point at all.. this study completely excludes vaccinated people and you are using it to say "infection is much more protective than vaccination". What are you doing here?

In the case of a genuine outbreak there has indeed been real lockdowns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak

"The one big difference is that an infection seems to convey pretty much lifelong protection."

From Measles? Because COVID-19 infection certainly does not confer lifelong protection! That's real east to look up!

So the first study is a population that is mostly using the Chinese vaccine that is not very good and the second study just validates that getting vaccinated before getting infected is very good (and the reinfection population was only 210 subjects!). The unvaccinated participants data is pre-delta infections:

"A total of 6169 participants in the previously infected cohort were followed in the unvaccinated follow-up period and up to 1 year after a primary infection. These participants were predominantly infected in the spring of 2020 and were followed in the period before emergence of the delta (B.1.617.2) variant."

C'mon buddy, do better!

Vaccines are clearly better than natural immunity I don't know why you think the opposite, the data is public and available for you to view. We agree that vaccines plus natural immunity are better still.

Lockdowns forever are not required, inducements to reach 100% vaccination do seem to be required, and "availability" has not been enough to achieve that in most jurisdictions, unfortunately.

I guess the short answer was no, since he didn't even get it! I suppose my original point stands!

"COVID will spread until everyone gets it at least once"

Unfortunately evidence seems to indicate that everyone getting once is also not very effective, the reinfection protection of past infection seems to be sub-20% from Omicron. You can find lots of studies with different numbers but none of them are good.

China's behaviour with respect to vaccines is very strange, they could mandate vaccination very easily, they could also relent and import mRNA vaccines but they don't. It seems like even mandating their very poor vaccines would be helping their situation a lot if it had been done months ago - availability has not been enough.

Sorry, I don't understand how this reply relates to my comment.

Are you saying that the price bump will keep him on the board? The fear of a drop will keep him on the board? I can see that, but in the long run the valuation shouldn't be affected unless he is actually a good member of the board.

I guess there is a high probability that he will drag boardroom disagreements out into the open, so in that sense they will have to "argue" with him. In general boards vote to settle things and then it is settled, they are not supposed to be arguing indefinitely - the chair calls the question and the matter gets settled.

Can Musk keep his board seat? That is my question, being an unruly character when you don't have full control usually gets you turfed from a board for violating confidences pretty quickly, but IDK.

It can be true for the purposes of harassment that enforcement can be inconsistent, and that can work to a certain degree. When a matter such as this comes before a court the spotty enforcement will be a problem for the employer.

Employers exploit these sorts of things all the time to their benefit, and I am sure Amazon has/will - but when a critical mass is reached they will find that the organizer they fired for talking unions on company time will win. This is part of the reason that it takes an extraordinary effort to unionize.

And the real issue is most likely too-short yellows!

I am wondering about how your initial response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was so ambiguous: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vogre&next=30589151

And then all of your subsequent comments seem to be extremely consistent with Russian government talking points.

You were initially kind of concerned that the invasion was not justified, but now you believe the Russian government positions whole-heartedly?

It is a very interesting transition of opinion in a short amount of time! What's up?

It sure seems like that "war on fakes" site is full on non-debunkings of things.

This article for example is just re-printing Russian government talking points:

https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-soldiers-wont-let-...

Which is fine, the authors can believe the Russian government if you want, but declaring the statements of the other side "fake" on only that basis isn't very credible.

The authors are not doing a particularly good job of framing the losses or the benefits with their wording in the article.

They link to a source that indicates that losses can be as high as .. well, exceeding the value of a seed stock used to plant the crop, so I guess that is greater than 100%?https://www.cabi.org/isc/datasheet/27034#tosummaryOfInvasive...

The actual article in question cites 60% losses: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00852-5

The five-fold statement appears to be sloppy/misleading writing with respect to comparing the improvement over the baseline, not 5x the actual production. The article is not generally dishonest but the specific claims seem to be well into the "geez.. IDK guys.." territory.

Your reply doesn't seem to address my point directly. The appeal to "time" doesn't really work given that that Moscow stock exchange has been closed since last Friday and seems unlikely to open this week.

Cuba has changed quite a bit in the last half century, I would look into it if I were you, most resorts in the country are Cuba-FDI joint ventures - it is complicated but sanctions where most of the world actually disagrees with you are a lot more difficult than this situation.

In this particular case it seems that the work-arounds are not generally available. The Russian government was not prepared to have their own reserves frozen.

"No it doesnt because is not a democratic country, why is it so hard for people like you to understand that things work very different in a democratic country than in non-democratic country?"

I sympathize with this position but I also feel conflicted because despite the enormous amount of evidence that Putin was a bad guy as recently as 2017 he had 80+% approval rating. If had not had large scale popular support for most of the last 20 years despite his anti-democratic anti-freedom behaviour would he be in a position to execute this war?

I don't have good answers for this question but just as democracy isn't just having a vote political support in a non-democracy isn't just having the legal use of violence at your disposal. It is challenging for anyone from outside Russia that wants to oppose his regime to find a way that doesn't hurt ordinary Russians if most ordinary Russians mostly have supported him.

"any sanctions strong enough to truly harm Russia would destroy the stability of the world's financial system by triggering a global liquidity crisis"

You'd need to back this up with some real evidence for it to be convincing.

As it stands right now the freezing of Russian reserves is in effect and international markets are essentially untouched, what are these additional sanctions you are referring to?

I am not an expert in this area but is seems to me that if Russia disappeared from the financial system, with an annual GDP of 1.4 trillion, nobody would really notice after the initial write-downs. It is one tenth of China, and has been chasing away FDI for over a decade - thus reducing its international impact. But I am open to explanations as to why this is a big deal, let me know!

I think that the motivation is of interest because we take motivation as a moral element of any crime - the killing of another person is judged more harshly when it is pre-meditated, less if just intentional, less still if accidental but reasonably foreseeable.

I think that in particular there is merit to the idea that someone that commits a crime motivated by an ideology is more dangerous, they are motivated by a belief about the world that is more durable than other circumstances in which a crime might be committed. Such a person needs to spend more time either away from society or restricted in ways that keeps society safer from them for longer.

Also we want to live in a society where visible minorities of any sort do not feel a particular fear of being targeted. Laws that make it clear that targeting is a particular moral failing send the message that society stands with those people, and that is a good thing. Doing more to protect vulnerable people in the first place is the ideal option, but increasing the punishment on the backend is at least something.

In the specific scenario you mentioned I would hope that someone attacking a disabled person because they were viewed as an easier target would also be grounds for a worse punishment. Violence motivated in such a way should be rightly viewed as far more dangerous and unacceptable than violence that is a product of a violent outburst - and I believe the law mostly works that way.

On the broader point I will say that I would love to live in the perfect world where every crime was some platonic ideal of an infraction that could be judged in some kind of void but the justice system as a whole does also need to operate in a manner consistent with the public's idea of what justice should roughly resemble. It is certainly the case that you can make the argument that hate crimes as a category are more "public relations" than real criminal law. I don't think any jurisdiction has, in the real practical application of the law, met the threshold to be considered cynical public relations. Democracies largely have human judges that do their best to be reasonable, "thoughtcrime" and modifiers to sentences for "thoughtcrime" haven't really been a thing. And once you are at the point where the judges themselves are really off the rails it won't much matter if you are quibbling about the sort of details that alarmists are getting worked up about here. I am aware of the concerns, I even share them, but the laws in question would need to be a lot more explicit to be of real concern.

Words have typical meanings and then they have legal meanings, you can look at the details of the first conviction under the law and draw conclusions about the threshold for "stirring up hatred": https://www.report-it.org.uk/three_men_convicted_in_first_pr...

It is very clear to me that the Scottish courts regard stirring up hatred to mean a specific threat of violence but YMMV.

Indeed, it is not just about that, but that is the principle element of the law at issue. It is certainly also true that if you were to host a race-based violence promotion party in your home you might be subject to prosecution.

It is also clear under the law that if you hosted a "race X is inferior" party at your house you would not be in violation of the law.

But if you had the "race X is inferior" party and then assaulted a member of race X you'd face a longer sentence for that assault!

The linked article is intentionally misleading. Why would anyone take seriously the idea that the courts in Scotland regard "stirring up hatred" as the same thing as the courts in China? If that is the standard for criticism for every law in the west then throw the baby our with the bathwater, it is all useless. Why waste one's time with this disingenuous claptrap?

No the natural progression is that if Daddy attacks a disabled person in the street and the kids affirm that daddy was always on about how disabled people should be culled from society that daddy gets a much longer sentence for the crime.

I think that if your family members are avowed violent criminals committed to attacking people based on their being a member of a group that is clearly discernible in society their confession to you of that fact should be admissible in court.

This headline is a ridiculous caricature of the content of the bill as I understand it.

The bill as I understand it is largely about adding a modifier to a sentence for an actual crime committed that might be motivated by hate. So the folks quoting 1984 need to maybe reconsider..

The specific "hate talk in homes" talking point seems to just be related to an amendment that wanted to make a exception so you could incite violence against particular groups in your own home without concern of prosecution. I feel like inciting violence is bad, even at home?

Freezing bank accounts when you have not been convicted of a crime happens all the time and is the way things have to work. If you let money flow freely in the banking system contingent on criminal convictions any old drug cartel could pay you a million bucks after you serve your time to let 100 million flow through your accounts or whatever. If you can't freeze accounts without an arrest that is already too slow. It is the way the banking system already works.

There is no "staged media campaign" to smear people, the media was reporting on the fact that having kids in the red zone had become illegal with the emergency orders. Kids come to protests all the time, it is not a big deal, but when the cops hand out flyers telling you that you have to leave and you don't, keeping your kids there with you, you are going to get some extra attention - it is not remotely comparable to church, women's centres, or union picnics. If you brought your kids to walk the line with you on a wildcat strike that might be comparable.. if the cops had handed you a flyer saying they were going to forcibly remove your picket line soon.

I agree that early enforcement may have made a difference - but it is clear from the reporting that towing vehicles at the outset was never an option - the towing firm that moved a shack /at the request of the protestors/ received a huge amount of harassment. In other cities pre-emptive measures were successful - sometimes by the police and sometimes by citizens. In my most generous moments I sometimes can forgive the OPS for thinking that this wasn't that big a deal at the start.

Reasonable people can disagree but I do see what you mean - I thank you for your honest consideration of my opinion, a rare treat!

Subsequent statements and clarifications have made it clear that these donors were not subject to any action, this freaking government.. they just can't quite figure out how to make a clear statement about anything, despite seeming like they are constantly reading talking points - it drives me up the wall.

I think actually you will find in the normal course of life your recourse against a financial institution that freezes your funds in Canada are many and very affordable, even free.

It is a highly regulated sector, there is frequent reporting and quick reviews. In the specific case of the GoFundMe money TD Bank was immediately at the courts begging for someone to tell them what to do.

IDK, he said the scope is a donation of over $100,000 - so probably zero people should be worried?

You can get yourself all twisted up in semantics if you want.. lots of people seem to be arguing all sorts of goofy stuff - Canadians that work in the banking sector actually know the government is telling the truth. That is what is actually going on.

I don't know very much about this stuff but it seems to me that the fairly dense housing just "behind" the wall relative to the prevailing winds would suffer from A LOT of snow accumulation.

I am sure I would enjoy living in that building and the community design seems good, if not quite as dense as might be ideal given some of the green space placement. If they have concerns about the wind they really need a lot more trees, I would venture a guess that a couple of good windrows of trees would be as good or better than the building -- but then of course trees aren't houses!

I think that we can rely on the courts to assess the situation and make an assessment, you can't codify into law the exact criteria. There are always tensions between rights, some combination of the laws, the courts, and the compliance and tolerance of the public has to settle on a decision on a case-by-case basis.

I think OWS is a good example, they got a lot of publicity and staged long term protests and demonstrations that indeed inconvenienced people, in a two month occupation there certainly was some disruption but I would invite you to compare the two events closely and I think you will see that this Ottawa situation is quite different both in the level of disruption and the quantity of arrests.

Of course in Canada we have lots of great examples of roads being blocked in isolated areas because of logging and pipeline protests, they draw a lot of the comparisons because despite their impact being very limited in terms of the people effected they are cleared out much more violently than has occurred in any instance here. Fairy Creek is something you can look into, the RCMP happily arrested journalists covering the protest crackdown in a gross violation of civil liberties and the rule of law.

I think if your impression of the protests in Ottawa is that they have simply "shut down a street" you should look into it in more detail. (For example the mayor tried to negotiate a deal to get the trucks to stop overnighting and honking in residential areas but failed to get it to stick, that's not related to blocking off one street downtown.) I know a few people that have been hassled on the street in a manner that resulting in them regarding the area unsafe and not a public space for them anymore.