__blockcipher__

It's such a no-brainer since the national security apparatus (the FBI, NSA, etc) were used against Trump and his campaign very transparently. So you'd think he would want to strike a blow against them by pardoning Snowden.

In reality, he doesn't seem to have a deep, principled understanding of the issues of the "national security" apparatus (commonly known as the "deep state"). So I'm not optimistic, although maybe he's just waiting until after the election.

What Trump's administration is doing to Julian Assange is also quite evil (see Cassandra Fairbanks' reporting here - she's a very clear Trump supporter and yet is highly critical of his admin with respect to their treatment of Assange). It's not any more evil than what Biden or others would do, to be clear, so this isn't something unique to Trump, but we can certainly say that Trump has not shown any desire to try to do the right thing here.

This is information that is trivially verifiable and has been verified by numerous sources.

There's already been leaks such as a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack while receiving a footjob (edit: if this seems crude, I'm mentioning it as something that makes it very clear that the info is real) so unless you think it's a deepfake - or that they hacked it from his iCloud account and made up the story about the laptop repair shop - then you cannot deny the veracity of the story.

It's also been corroborated by people like the aforementioned Bobulinski. If this were truly a false story it would be trivial for the Biden campaign to deny the allegations.

The reason this story is not being reported is not because it's not "verifiable"; even ignoring that it is verifiable, the media had no trouble publishing the unverified story of Trump's tax returns, the unverified and now completely debunked Russia collusion hoax (if you're not read up on it, please don't reflexively downvote - with what we know today it is now certain that it was actually a manufactured hoax and not just an innocent misunderstanding), etc. So there is absolutely a double standard at play and it's very plain to see if you go look for it, but if you just stick to CNN and other mainstream media you will literally never see the full story (or even a fraction of it).

Sorry for the delay.

https://pastebin.com/GeCpFhih

very haphazard but at least will give you pointers to most of the studies

To quote CU as the worst decision out there is laughable. Personally I fully agree with the ruling, but even if I didn’t, isn’t Dredd Scott far more disastrous? Or Korematsu (allowed detention camps based on race)? Or the one that allows forced sterilization of the mentally retarded?

Supreme court cases build upon precedent. It sounds like your real issue is with corporate personhood. That was decided in a case that Citizens United built on, so I would recommend barking up that tree instead.

In any case, I personally feel corporate personhood actually does make sense. It’s absurd that I as an individual can engage in speech but if I communicate through a company that I solely own now I can’t.

Trying to “get money out of politics” is a fools’ errand; as Citizens v United demonstrates, speech often requires money. What we really need is the opposite: get politics out of my damn money!

(By the way, most who have been spoonfed the “get money out of politics” line are entirely ignorant on the facts of the CU case. As I recall Hillary Clinton was trying to suppress a documentary critical of her because it was too close to an election. Does that sound like something you’re a fan of?)

You fundamentally misunderstand SARS-2 if you think it “risks becoming endemic”. It already is endemic and it would be regardless of whatever measures we took. It’s a zoonotic virus that is great at spreading. It is functionally impossible to eradicate.

I have a dump of research papers I can send to you. Currently traveling so might take till tomorrow morning

> Which btw, these current death rates are with active measures in place. If we didn't have these measures then the trends set early on would be off the charts by now.

Sweden contradicts this.

> So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet...

The way we count COVID deaths is fundamentally different from how we count Flu deaths.

It's much better to look at total deaths and compare to previous years. You'll see we've experienced an uptick this year but not one that is nearly as massive as you would predict based off the hysteria

Thanks joshua.

By infectious I meant the basic reproduction number, but I believe SARS-2 is also more infectious (in the sense if likelihood of infection per exposure event) given its incredibly high binding affinities. It seems to be unusually good at infecting humans in a way SARS-1 wasn’t. Not sure if that’s due to furin cleavage or what. I’m a bit rusty on the mechanics there so open to dissenting opinions.

Also I don’t believe SARS-2 exhibits asymptomatic spread; that seems to be largely a myth. It does undeniably exhibit PRE-SYMPTOMATIC spread however. My hunch is that the early course interferon mediated immunosuppression explains that phenomenon.

IMO the true asymptomatics (never showing symptoms) are asymptomatic largely because of T-cell cross reactivity which theoretically will reduce or entirely prevent spread. Thus why we really don’t have good evidence of asymptomatic spread but we have a wealth of evidence on pre-symptomatic.

> Also worth remembering that NYC would have run out of hospital beds entirely if they didn't implement strict lockdown measures. The NYC (or really NY) stay at home order went into effect on March 20, and daily cases peaked plateaued 1.5 weeks later.

There is absolutely no way for you to prove this nor for me to disprove it, which tells you about its explanatory value. I personally find it much more likely that the dropoff in cases is purely explainable by timing; NY was already rounding the bend when it enforced its (IMO pseudoscientific and deleterious) measures.

Basically everywhere in the globe, including Sweden, showed a large uptick for some time followed by a peak and wind-down. That’s just the pattern infectious diseases show. To immediately attribute it to human intervention when SARS-2 landed on our shores months earlier than originally thought just seems like hubris to me. In any case the statement is not falsifiable so I won’t focus on it any further.

> There was a period of time when NYC was globally short on ventilators and ICU beds.

New York as a whole was a huge proponent of early invasive ventilation which probably ended up killing people unnecessarily. NY’s implied IFR was something like .7%, a number so bad it is unmatched by anywhere else in the US. My guess is not good pre-existing Vitamin D3 levels exacerbated by being directed to stay inside, combined with stress, fear, lack of exercise and lost sleep attributable to lockdown + general hysteria, and finally the aforementioned iatrogenic harm caused by excessive ventilation.

In retrospect it seemed the ventilator panic was only marginally more rational than the toilet paper panic.

I should note that, if we assume every use of a ventilator prevented a certain death, ventilators still had only a marginal effect since something like 90% of those ventilated died, and it’s only those with incredibly severe COVID-19 who end up ventilated (well, ironically except NY which seemed to ventilate “early and often”, so the cases were still severe but not incredibly severe)

> At this point we have more known Covid-19 long haulers in the US than there are Sars-1 infections globally. Comparisons to SARS-1 don't much matter.

I have a lot of trouble believing in a bunch of anecsotsl cases of people on Twittwr with very obvious political leanings, given that most long haulers I have seen are in popupations with next to no risk or SARS-2. It’s much more likely to be that the 20-something year olds are either inducing psychosomatic symptoms, or exaggerating their actual symptoms, or coincidentally got Epstein-Barr virus or similar at the same time.

I would expect bad COVID cases to have lingering effects for a few months, sure. But not “long-term” - although maybe we have different definitions there. Fatigue 1 month after successful resolution of infection doesn’t really say anything to me. But to give you something more tangible, I don’t believe anyone who’s in their 20s and otherwise healthy is really experiencing this mysterious syndrome, with a few very rare exceptions of course. You have to keep in mind the incredible psychoemotional environment we are living in currently.

The study linked in the OP estimates a median .27% IFR across all populations.

The following numbers are from several month old seroprevalence studies so take them with a grain of salt but:

https://www.ryankemper.io/post/2020-04-29-the_case_for_endin...

Pegs the 50-59 age range around the median IFR. Whereas the >70 mortality is where things really start falling off of a cliff.

BTW my point was never “your chance of dying in a car crash is >= COVID”...although that statement would be very true for <40 age populations. My point was more broadly that people have a risk aversion to COVID that is unmatched by their attitudes towards risk in all other areas of life.

I agree those who are symptomatic should stay home. But for COVID we go further and tell asymptomatic people to perform (flawed) transmission control measures. Where do we do that with Flu?

The point is if I don’t know I have COVID and spread it to Grandma at the grocery store, in your eyes I’ve killed Grandma. I wonder why we don’t apply that logic everywhere.

I glanced at the study and the fatality rates they use are absurdly high. They estimate .7% IFR for that age range which is way too high.

Anyway, my point was simply that if we took the same attitude towards risk that you all do with COVID and applied that elsewhere, we’d all be rolling around in hermetically sealed hamster balls until we died of boredom.

Your logic is actually backwards. Flu is extrapolated but it’s extrapolated fairly. Whereas for COVID-19 we perform mass testing and label every PCR-positive death a COVID death. I hope it’s self evident why that approach will massively inflate COVID deaths but if you would like I can break it down in detail for you.

Symptoms over a month and “long term issues” are not the same thing. Severe COVID-19 can cause radiological abnormalities persisting for 3 months, but these heal.

Long COVID is unproven and anecdotal and seems to be more likely to be psychosomatic in most but not all cases.

We actually don’t have this evidence. If anything we have strong evidence of the opposite.

SARS-2 radiological abnormalities resolve in months and this is for hospitalized cases which are by definition more severe than your usual cases.

There is really no evidence of what you claim.

We’re now 7 months into the major part of this pandemic and people are still stuck citing the fears we all had in April.

BTW I’m on mobile so didn’t re read that study but when I read the myocarditis study a month ago it turned out that the base rate of myocarditis was really no different than the COVID-19 rate and thus the whole scare was more or leas unfounded.

For studyi these supposed long-term effects I like to look at SARS-1 studies since we’ve had almost two decades. What we find is a few months of raidological ling abnormalities that heal, and mild cognitive deficits that linger for up to a year before disappearing completely. SARS-1 is miles worse than SARS-2 so the idea that young asymptomatic COVID-19 cases will end up with long term health problems is just completely farcical.

Unfortunately reading these studies requires a very critical lens. You showed that in your above comments but, for example, the person alleging these unproven and speculative long term impacts appears not to take that critical approach.

(1) is totally unproven speculation. We can’t even prove this happens for SARS-1 which per case is far more severe than SARS-2, its less deadly yet more infectious brother.

(2) absolutely does happen in bad flu seasons, and by the way most of those images are misleading or taken from prior years. Seriously. Even in say, New York, you’d have hospital A overflowing yet hospital B 10 miles away was at 30% capacity remaining. At least in the US a true overrun scenario never happened yet most don’t realize this.

You have to understand the role that mass collective delusion has played in our misguided response. And the media’s selective reporting doesn’t help.

> It's not as if we decided out of thin air the virus was dangerous.

But this is kind of exactly what we did. Go look at a yearly all-cause mortality chart going back the last 110 years. You’ll see this year is a noticeable but not so great uptick (of which many of the deaths will be overdoses, suicides, lack of medical treatment for preventable diseases etc btw). Whereas say the 1918 Flu pandemic was much more deadly in absolute and relative terms both.

Remember we’re talking about a disease that for many is so mild that they never realize they have it. For others like the very elderly it can be very bad, with a 5% chance of dying if infected, but it’s no surprise that surveys that ask people to estimate COVID-19 mortality show that on average people overestimate the fatality by between 10-100x.

SARS-2 is real, but the real virus really is in our minds. I hope one day you will come to see things my way too.

I also hope more commenters here will go mode out what happens when you perform universal rather than targeted mitigation measures: universal ends up with more mortality by slowing down infections in those who are not at risk, which delays hers immunity for almost no benefit.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I view doubling a chance of dying in a year, and then returning to normal mortality for the next year, as far preferable to mass business closures, suspension of civil liberties, pulling kids out of school without evidence, mandating everyone wear masks, etc.

I guess I never realized how risk averse people apparently are. I imagine these same people never drive a car since those things are deathtraps by comparisons.

Because if I go out into the world and get infected with a disease, that’s one of the risks of living life, and we have always understood that. That’s why if you catch the flu nobody blames the man next to you at the grocery store.

For COVID we throw this out the window.

When you take the approach to its logical conclusion you end up in a very scary place.

This is a debunked claim that arose from conflating IFR vs CFR. Please source your claim.

In terms of overall IFR Influenza and COVID-19 appear to be comparable. Influenza kills at least an order of magnitude more children, and for those in between roughly 35-55 they both kill about the same, and for the very elderly COVID-19 is multiple times more deadly.

The overall IFRs are very comprable except COVID-19 preferentially kills the very old. This also means when you calculate YLL (years of life lost) Influenza takes more life-years away.

I’d say at most if you take a .1% IFR of Influenza then COVID-19 is about 3x as deadly. Note however that we fundamentally classify Influenza deaths differently than with COVID-19. Almost any country considers any PCR-positive person who dies to be a COVID-19 death regardless of whether it’s a baby born with intestines outside of its body, or a young man in Orange County who died in a motorcycle accident, or George Floyd. All 3 of those examples I gave are real individuals who were PCR-positive at time of death. I know for a fact that the first two were initially labelled COVID-19 deaths, not sure about Floyd.

There’s a concept I call the pathological vs physiologixal distinction that is crucial to understand and has been totally violated with COVID—19. The short of it is that it is a mistake to confuse a virus with a disease. (This is also why the phrase “asymptomatic COVID-19” is an oxymoron; if you have no symptoms you have a virus but not a disease)

I have acne; if you culture my skin you will find the bacteria C. Acnes, which is naively believed to “cause” acne. Yet if you culture the skin of a healthy individual without acne, they also have C. Acnes. The question then is what combination of factors leads C Acnes to be pathogenic in one case (me) and not for another. The answer like most things is complicated, some combination of lipid peroxidation compromising the skin barrier, genetic skin turnover rates, etc, but most pop-sci articles will simplify it to “bacteria cause acne”.

Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that if someone dies and has a positive SARS-2 PCR test that they died of COVID. First of all due to egregiously absurd cycle thresholds, you stay PCR-positive months after infection (again, see George Floyd’s hennepin county autopsy, he “had COVID” despite having recovered from it over a month prior to his death). But more importantly even if you truly have active, replicating SARS-2 in you at time of death, you didn’t necessarily die from COVID.

I really got off on a tangent there but to wrap up, even if you take the official COVID-19 numbers - which I believe are grossly inflated - at most COVID-19 is 3x as lethal. To say it is an order of magnitude more deadly means you’re still stuck in April. It’s October now, please follow the new developments in the field. There was actually a paper released recently that traces the origins of the 10x deadly meme, debunked it and attributed its genesis to conflating CFR vs IFR. I’m on mobile travelling now without my laptop so I don’t have my megalist of research articles at my fingertips but if you search around maybe you can find it.

This is all true, but COVID hysteria has taken hold across the entire world, and HN is no exception unfortunately.

You are being reflexively down voted because people view any comparison to Influenza as illegitimate, not realizing that you are making a broader point about risk management and attribution of blame for infection as opposed to saying that SARS-2 and Influenza are literally the same viruses.

Personally I find it fascinating that I was never told it was my fault if I gave someone the flu in the course of both of us living our normal lives, but if I go to a grocery store and an elderly person does too and they get COVID-19 from me (imagine in this hypothetical there is no doubt that I gave them the virus) then somehow it’s my fault and I’m guilty of any harm that befalls then.

Incredibly dangerous precedent. I hope people see where it leads. And I hope they learn from the history of public health, such as when “public health officials” used to shut down gay bars “for the greater good”.

Yeah, that was a brain typo on my part

IME psilocybin is far better at catalyzing transformative experiences. LSD is really fun but the experience is more visual and kinesthetic than it is internal-self-reflection oriented, relatively speaking

Which is why we need reform: 230 liability protection needs to be extended only to those entities that only remove illegal content and nothing else, period.

You're right, Apple should have less control over our guns!

But just to state the obvious, there's nothing in the constitution that talks about an inherent right to control over your phone, but there is absolutely an amendment that says "a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" (and no, "well-regulated" does not mean the modern definition of "regulation")

No, the problem is really about politicization and more specifically the fact that in most US tech companies there is an enormous bias towards those on the political left, and a believe that those who lean left are more “scientifically educated” or intelligent or well-read, etc.

As one example you can see it in the way you can make hostile comments about “straight white males” and nobody says anything, but if you were to make a hostile comment for a perceived racial or sexual minority you’d be fired before even finishing your sentence

I would guess Vyvanse, it’s dextroamphetamine bound to a lysine molecule. Your liver must cleave the lysine before the d-amp is released giving a smooth release, taking ~3.5 hours till you hit max blood concentration.

Fun fact: Methamphetamine naturally takes 3-3.5 hours to hit peak so Vyvanse has a more “meth-like” concentration curve as opposed to raw d-amp (or adderal which is 75% d-amp 25% l-amp) which hits way sooner. As an aside, Meth is very misunderstood and is in many ways a more ideal ADHD drug than normal amphetamine; and indeed it can be prescribed under the brand name Desoxyn. Methamphetamine when taken in low-moderate oral doses is completey safe and less jittery than amphetamine, but if abused (say, smoking 100mg d-meth) it becomes far more neurotoxic.

Understanding enantiomers (left-handed vs right-handed molecules in this case) is really important. For amp / methamp, the d enantiomer is 3-4x more powerful by weight yet is more cerebral as opposed to causing peripheral (body) stimulation. So d is almost always superior, although with adderall it has been found that the 75/25 d/l formula synergizes and has a bit longer half life

The “able to function normally for special interest” is a symptom of ADHD itself, there is no need to bring in autism as an additional explanatory variable. (Not saying your autism didn’t mask symptoms but what you described happens in ADHD without autism very frequently)

For example I have ADHD without autism and grew up thinking I was “smart but lazy” because I was > 99% as far as raw intelligence but had little motivation for the drudgery associated with school (or indeed life itself), yet I could play video games for hours straight without seeming to be at a disadvantage compared to neurotypical peers.

This is because ADHD, among other things, is a disorder of attention regulation as opposed to being completely unable to pay attention to anything.

We're talking here about an order to prohibit all gatherings among young people. That's a huge restriction of 1a right to peaceable assembly.

I happen to think mask mandates are ridiculous too but that's besides the point.