NonContro

With the scale of vaccinations that we already have, COVID is firmly in the realm of influenza in terms of potential future deathtoll. In fact, for much of this year the UK had higher influenza deaths than COVID deaths:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/22/flu-pneumonia-de...

Why don't we pressure people to get influenza vaccines yearly?

Seroprevalence has been measured at 74% for Ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations in the UK.

Its not a surprise that ethnic and religious minorities are anti-vaxx - many of them already had COVID.

I'm anti-mandatory vaccinations for the same reason, as a COVID survivor. All the evidence is showing that this natural immunity is superior to vaccines, but I'm treated like a second-class citizen.

IN ADDITION, the study looked at culture viability, meaning how infectious the patients were, and found that only 13% of ivermectin patients were infectious after six days, compared with 50% of the placebo group – almost four times as many."

It calls for a bigger study.

You can live in your workplace, have a company car, company utilities, company equipment. Some customers will pay you cash. You can easily allocate business income to your spouse or children (if you live in a country without combined income taxes). You can buy products at wholesale rates.

When you're just an employee, you usually have very few of these tax optimisation opportunities.

The other factor is that the education system is dominated by people with university degrees (ie. teachers), who consciously or not direct their students to pursue the same lifestyle and career values as them.

Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.

https://www.economist.com/img/b/580/852/90/sites/default/fil...

The Christian age bracket in the 21-25 age range is 25%, 50 years ago it was 50%.

Historically, Lebanon has never been Muslim, the mountains served as isolation from the religious changes of the region, and it was a major centre of Christianity during the crusades, and remained connected with Europe.

But in the 20th century, French colonialists enlarged the territory to encompass large areas of Syria, which held Muslim populations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanon#Ottoman_Lebanon_and_Fr...

These populations proceeded to overtake the Christian populations, with the fertility rate in 1971 being 5.44 for Muslims and 3.56 for Christians.

This divide remains, in 2004 the fertility rate for Muslims in Lebanon was 1.82, for Christians 1.53:

https://www.lstatic.org/PDF/demographenglish.pdf

A 2009 study found cousin marriage rates of 30% for Muslims and 16.5% for Christians, cousin marriage is commonplace throughout the Muslim world:

https://marciainhorn.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/inhorn-arti...

In 2019 the GDP per capita of Lebanon was $7583. It will eventually (and seems like rapidly) fall to match its Muslim neighbours eg. Jordan ($4405) Egypt ($1667) Syria ($2032).

I realise that these topics are unpopular, but you cannot divorce the economic and social downfall of Lebanon from the demographic changes taking place there.

I guess businesses just need to hold out until then.

Solar and Wind can work but there are big demand management problems, and there doesn't appear to be any progress on allowing or requiring EVs to charge smartly (ie. based on the prevailing electricity price, including discharging).

Blizzard has its own launcher, which means they can sell directly to customers, at 0% commissions.

Any new Indies have to go through the monopolist Steam, which means a 30% commission and no direct access to their fanbase.

If we want better conditions in game development, it needs to be easier for disgruntled employees to leave and start their own companies. That means, explicitly, that Steam (holding the monopoly position on PC) needs to be pressured to lower its commission (the 15% level Apple and Google are moving towards seems reasonable) and offer the same terms to Indies as they do to AAA.

“You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF's money on buying condoms.”

We'll do more for the planet and for humanity by making female access to education, contraception, and abortion universal.

Either that, or Gaia will control the population, and it won't be pleasant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

Instead, we should be raising property taxes on baby-boomers (perhaps with land taxes of 1% annually, with credits for the number of children living at the address), and cutting immigration to limit real estate prices and to maintain high wages.

I think the vaccines are a good idea if you are in the risk categories, and if you havn't already had COVID.

The problem is that these vaccines are being pushed on everybody, even those with natural immunity, and its becoming increasingly confrontational. The biggest winners seem to be Big Pharma, who are already forecasting huge sales and profit increases from their vaccines businesses.

It will be vaccine shots now, and booster shots a year later, forever, until the public opposition is sufficient.

Pandemrix, designed for the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak, was found to have a 1 in 18,400 risk of Narcolepsy for children and adolescents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix

By contrast the risk of COVID hospitalisation for an otherwise healthy 19 year old male is 1 in 5,882 and 1 in 500,000 for death:

https://qcovid.org/Calculation

These vaccine injuries are only found years later.

I'm a COVID survivor and it took a few months to recover and would prefer to have been vaccinated. But its not correct to force me to get the vaccination now, and incur the risk of vaccine injury, when the risk profile is so different due to my natural immunity.

It seems like natural immunity is being overlooked because if it was acknowledged, it means fewer vaccine sales.

China needs more young people to be happy to be factory workers forever, instead of seeking out white-collar jobs.

But many young men and their parents are convinced that a University degree is essential to find a wife.

If the situation reverses to more women than men, by simple microeconomics the dating standards of women will fall and more families and men will be content in lower-status (but economically important) roles.

China could incentivize more women being born by allowing 'bride prices', paid to the bride's family instead of just being used for the wedding. Another option could be to encourage excess males to emigrate, as seems to be occurring in India.

https://www.thinkchina.sg/no-bride-price-no-marriage-china

Note, I am from Ukraine, and I am speaking from personal experience moving to the USA. My American friends eat out all the time, buy very expensive home appliances, and tip extremely generously.

I live a frugal life since this is the standard of living I am accustomed to from my homeland. I was also willing to accept the lowest salary legally possible just to get into the country, which is already a huge upgrade to my income.

I also can't then change jobs easily, since the visa is tied to my employer.

If Tech workers want to maintain this state of demand, they should really oppose immigration from poor countries, such as requiring that the H1B visa has a maximum cap of 10% from any one country, which will have the effect of limiting the number of Indians who enter. Setting an additional maximum cap of 49% males from any one country would also be good to encourage gender diversity, instead of flooding in male migrants and then forcing companies to do it.

In my country (Ukraine) its cheaper to go to a restaurant for 'business lunch' which is soup, potatoes+vegetables+meat, and juice, for $3.35.

As a single guy I can't cook that cheaply at home, which is not surprising when I am buying small portions with a huge amount of packaging around them.

Its really a shame that this concept is not more broadly applied in the West, and that restaurant food has sales tax attached to it whilst grocery food usually doesn't. We could reduce food and packaging waste if we taxed communal kitchens at 0% and shifted more people to eating inside them.

Typically the limitation for real estate ownership is lack of access to credit, or a stable job enabling you to stay in one place.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341393321/figure/fi...

What we should be doing though is building this smart charging and dispatch functionality into cars, so that we don't make our existing electricity peaks even peakier when people get home from work and immediately plug in and charge their EVs.

Ideally people would charge their cars at work, during the day. I guess we need to lean on employers with huge parking lots to provide EV charging.