__blockcipher__

I have the opposite interpretation. Only this class of people was actually able to "not participate in society" for 18 months:

> I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions.

By "this class of people" I don't literally mean people on HN but people in the typical yuppie lines of work.

Someone who's actually working class has not had the luxury of doing so. Even if you got every stimulus check that covered maybe 10% of the expenses over the last 1.25 years. So the people who could stay inside indefinitely either never lost their job (transitioned to remote or already worked remote pre-pandemic), or they lost their job but had such a massive nest egg that they were able to weather it.

Actual working-class people have not been sheltering inside for 18 months. In my opinion it's unhealthy to do so, so I'm not alleging that it would be a good thing if the working class hid inside too, but rather that the "I'm not ready to return to normal" crowd is driven by neuroticism and a crippling fear of life itself rather than it being some actual necessary result of this respiratory virus pandemic.

My most charitable interpretation is that the ability to have avoided leaving one's house in 18 months implies a certain level of wealth (both literally in terms of money but also in terms of life situation etc)

I guess it could also be viewed as implicitly bragging about getting the vaccine (if that's the reason they're "reentering society"), but that follows less directly imo

> Did you hesitate and worry about giving your own mother a hug afterwards?

But this behavior was never rational risk-reduction; it was always a result of the incredible fear-programming. Granted if you're making a point that trauma isn't always rational and can be induced unnecessarily by external sources I'm with you there.

I would really like to see less navelgazing about the emotional trauma of the Zoom class (not talking about you but the whole "elite" socioeconomic class in general - software engineers, management consultants, etc etc), and more recognition of the harms of suspension of elective surgeries (here in CA all elective surgeries were suspended statewide for a month despite a surplus of ICU beds and despite the fact that even if ICU beds were at capacity not every elective surgery warranted being cancelled), of having a parent or grandparent dying alone because the hospital wouldn't let you in the same room as them, of even the "little" things like cancelled dental checkups, missed allergy shots, missed pediatric appointments etc

They must not think or read very deeply into their own field then, because there exists the phenomenom of immunological memory, ie the effect where memory B/T cells lay dormant in the body for decades, and upon exposure to the characteristic antigen of SARS-2 (in this case) they ramp up antibody production exponentially. This results in - theoretically, but this is definitely what happens - lower peak viral load, lower symptomacity, and thus lower transmission and a shorter disease course.

Thus even when full immunity to reinfection is gone - which btw the estimates I’ve seen are that IgG lasts a few years before the individual is seronegative again - there will still be immunological memory which persists indefinitely and vastly reduces mortality and morbidity.

Yes exactly this. Naturalistic immunity learns a more diverse set of epitopes. Whereas the artificial-spike-protein immunity is learning just the S protein. The spike is super important but it’s not the only source of epitopes. And I’ve seen some papers on immunology of SARS-2 that do show a lot of activity that’s not based around the spike protein.

This notion that natural immunity is “worse” or won’t be able to handle the “variants” is completely contrary to the evidence as well as just basic napkin immunology. It’s, IMO, purely an idea spread implicitly through media headlines with the obvious intent of convincing people who don’t benefit from the vaccine (those who have already recovered successfully from COVID-19) to get it. I’ve talked to multiple friends in real life who had PCR-confirmed COVID/19, recovered, and got the vaccine anyway (which of course had even worse side effects than the usual second shot syndrome since the immune system had already been sensitized to SARS-2), and upon my prodding they basically all seemed to think they needed the vaccine to be protected against “the variants”.

Car accidents (including a car hitting a pedestrian) is certainly a problem but I just don’t see how someone could genuinely dislike pickup drivers for a reason like that. Seems like a conclusion in search of a reason.

Except there is no convincing evidence that they actually do help others, and the whole theoretical mechanism is centered around catching large respiratory droplets which is at odd with the totality of evidence pointing towards aerosol being the dominant mode. I would add if droplet transmission is the dominant mode, which I very much doubt, then masks would still fail in a real-world setting when you look at the fact they make conversational partners stand closer or speak louder, and the massive cross contamination that happens to almost everybody wearing these pieces of cloth over their faces (hands touch mask, mask touches hands, etc)

> Staff seem to get infected less frequently than other diners, even though they are in the space for longer. There are a few possible explanations, but the fact that staff don't take their masks off is a pretty compelling one.

IMO that’s the least compelling reason. One big one would be the staff having way more contacts and thus higher exposure to the other circulating hCoVs as well as SARS-2 itself.

The evidence for face masks is weak at best. In my opinion they don’t even make sense theoretically unless you pretend that droplet transmission is the dominant transmission mode, which is completely unproven yet widely believed dogma (go figure)

Yeah I always find it interesting that statements like that ("scalpers hurt literally everyone") can just be made and treated as gospel by most people. Not only is the statement not self-evident, but to your point, just a small amount of thought on the issue makes it obvious what the value is.

People love to get mad at a scapegoat rather than a root cause. So you blame the scalper rather than realizing that the concert you bought the ticket for set their prices way too low - perhaps because selling at the "true" price (somewhere between the sticker value and the scalped value) - would generate negative goodwill, or it would give the perception that an event (say Coachella as the classic example) is only "for rich people". The irony is of course that selling at an artificially low price doesn't suddenly make it not for rich people, it just adds a small random chance that you'll be able to convert your own time sitting there refreshing the website across many browsers into a cheaper-than-it-should-be ticket. But functionally the vast majority of people end up buying from scalpers or at least at a slightly above sticker price.

There's a related discussion about so-called "price gouging". IMO it's the classic scalper argument but just in a different form. Price gouging laws are not just immoral but are actively ineffective at their stated purpose; they just lead to the hypothetical price-gouge transaction never occurring. If you drive across state lines to bring HAM radios or water filters or what-have-you during hurricane katrina, and try to sell at above market rate, you'll be tossed in jail and your goods will be seized by the police, rather than making it out to the people who actually need them and are willing to pay 2x or 3x the usual price.

TL;DR: We've all got these twisted beliefs about how pricing works or the law of supply and demand, an illusion supported by the fact that our respective societies are so technologically/economically advanced that we can have massive supermarkets where you buy commoditized items that you can get at reasonably similar prices anywhere. Whereas if you go back in history to a pre-industrial time, a form of pseudo-bartering was the default and there was not this idea of a commodity, but rather every transaction, every buyer:seller relationship etc was a unique and non-commoditized interaction and thus it wouldn't seem weird to have different prices for different people or different prices at different points in time, etc.

Of course it’s malicious. In context they were making a tongue-in-cheek joke intended to expose those that never heard about the MLK letter(s) to their existence.

In other news, I only learned about the assassination of Fred Hampton quite recently. That’s a fun one.

> The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet transmission seems to be the better model.

So close but so far.

At a minimum please give https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... a read. The real story is that SARS-2 does spread through aerosols whereas droplet transmission is pure unproven dogma. The paper I linked goes into some reasons why that is the case (for ex the fact that transmission is more likely close to someone doesn’t actually provide strong evidence for droplet xmission)

EDIT: I should add that even if it were primarily droplet transmission - which I very much doubt - masking would likely still fail for the stated goal (source control) in a community setting due to improper usage. And improper usage doesn't just mean "the mask is below your nose", it means "you're not changing out the mask the moment it gets damp", "you're touching your mask with unwashed hands", "you're touching your hands with unwashed mask", "you're standing closer to your conversational partner to compensate for the fact that masks muffle hearing" (<--this last one isn't "improper usage" so much as an inevitable result but I digress). And this is all without discussing any of the various negatives of mask-wearing that it's become trendy to pretend literally don't exist.

But to your point, you already correctly hinted at the fact that if aerosol transmission is the dominant transmission mode, then masks don't work even in theory, let alone in practice.

> Yikes. That's a flag.

You flagged my comment because I expressed an opinion that you disagree with about social distancing? I didn't say it doesn't work to reduce infection (although I absolutely put no stock in associative studies), I said it was a bad thing. I don't believe in constraining human relationships via coercion in order to prevent the spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus that is and was always going to be endemic. What an evil thing to do to use the flag button like that.

Doubly ironic because you linked to an article about a study rather than the actual study, and the study itself is incredibly weak because it's a crappy associative study, which is the only type of study you can really perform for social distancing (which is why it will always be a largely unfalsifiable intervention but I digress)

> Announcement of condom innovation funding: https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-condom-campaign...

That doesn't change the fact that they're spending money on this intervention. Moreover there are obvious ethical concerns with billing genital modification as a medical intervention. We don't take that ethical stance towards FGM, which we rightly decry here in the West as evil. (And before you say that FGM is totally different from male circumcision, you should read up in detail about both, including the multiple different forms of FGM, many of which are analogous to male circumcision; the correct answer is both types of genital mutilation are evil, not just the one we do to girls).

> It's not really healthy to harbor this amount of unfounded hatred for someone you've (presumably) never met, and I'd advise bringing fact-checked sources next time.

You clearly aren't familiar with fact checkers and how they work otherwise you wouldn't use that phrase with a straight face.

And sorry, it is absolutely healthy to harbor a strong distaste for someone that does things you think are evil. I've never met Xi Jinping but I don't like him either.

> On the compound impact of a 1% difference: https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/apr/18/hiv-africa-6-...

First of all politifact is not a neutral source, can we stop collectively pretending that these fact-checker types have any credibility?

Anyway I don't want to get into the whole AIDS-in-Africa debate but maybe you should read up on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangui_definition and the fact that we regularly diagnose AIDS for things that could very plausibly not be AIDS.

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I avoided giving sources because I don't want to have to argue the age-old "is it okay to perform a medicalized pseudo-surgery that started out intentionally with the intention of curtailing pleasure and the function of the male sexual organ" debate. But you might be interested in https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/S0968-8080%2807... that goes into some interesting history.

On the WHO-Bill-Gates-circumcision-for-HIV thing specifically, there's a great response letter to the original study that points out the glaring flaws (the most shocking that they halted the study halfway through because the results were supposedly so good it was unethical not to circumcise everyone right away...which poor data analysis aside has the obvious confound that you can't have sex for weeks after getting circumcised thus you need a long study period). However I'm having trouble finding it.

Tangentially, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/africans-speak-out-... makes some good points though. Yes it's not a research paper, I'm not trying to say it is.

> Then why are healthcare costs in the UK (socialised) and Europe (typically private, but highly regulated with a social option) dramatically lower than US (private) healthcare costs despite similar levels of care?

They don’t have similar levels of care, that’s why. Wait times are longer and the care is overall of lower quality.

It’s also hard to compare countries directly. In the USA we have a big “underclass” of very unhealthy people (that falls along both socioeconomic and racial lines), which the countries you’re pointing out largely don’t.

Being incentivized by paying for your increased risk via decentralized market dynamics is fine. Being banned from consuming a substance because your body no longer belongs to you but rather is property of the state is not fine.

Unaware what countries have fully banned tobacco. Without looking it up at all...maybe singapore? They seem like the type.

Socialized medicine by definition increases healthcare costs because it divorces the person creating the cost from bearing the results. This applies in basically every socialist system not just socialized medicine.

It’s also worth mentioning that public health awareness campaigns frequently stretch the science in the quest to moralize more effectively. Case in point: saturated fats, pretending everyone is equally vulnerable to AIDS, etc

Thanks for the citation.

I should mention I oppose these bans regardless of whether menthol really is or isn’t dangerous, but interesting to know it increases cellular permeability. And seems like a good bit of increased heart/cardiac effects.

Once you go down this road you end up with social credit scores. First it’s the obvious stuff like tobacco, then not exercising enough, then not sleeping enough, and eventually you reach the paradox that free will is a lie anyway and there’s no functional difference between insomnia and “choosing” to eat a donut

Welcome to the new world ;)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7ny.com/amp/free-food-vaccin...

You actually get a donut per day! The foundation of a healthy diet.

Honestly the secondhand smoke research is very sketchy. Actually anything that becomes a public health issue ends up getting distorted by the public health establishment. Case in point: flu vaccines. They’re so ineffective that no rational person would ever waste time taking them, yet many of us do: https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influ... (note: the “no rational person” is slight hyperbole)

The better argument is that the actual social behavior of smoking is contagious, as any social behavior is.

Ha, I hear this argument all the time and it’s actually completely wrong. All social behaviors are contagious. They do spread exponentially. Especially drug consumption / smoking.

Note: it’s not relevant but to be clear I oppose all drug bans (incl tobacco) and all the COVID restrictions. So don’t interpret my pointing out that social behaviors are contagious to be justifying the menthol ban.

Yes. This is a common misconception. It’s not that inhaling any kind of smoke is inherently dangerous. It’s specifically the oxidative damage that tobacco causes that makes it so uniquely deleterious. Reactive oxygen species are no joke.

By contrast cannabis is a natural anti-oxidant. Smoking cannabis might be correlated with more bronchitis but none of the cancer, heart disease, [insert every other tobacco harm]. BTW I seem to recall particle size is different between tobacco and cannabis smoke but I think the oxidative damage is the main reason

We’re about a couple months away from being told that opposing mandatory vaccination is racist because more black people die from COVID-19.

(I mean that seriously not as a joke...although there is some natural humor in it as well)

How are menthol cigarettes more harmful than regular ones? The menthol just makes it easier to smoke more. Is that the crux of your argument?

I find the “company X is targeting [arbitrary subcategory]” argument to be totally asinine btw. Is Krispy Kreme targeting fat people by offering free donuts for people that get COVID-19 vaccines?

Lastly there is nothing more patronizing than telling a black person that you’re preventing them from buying menthol cigarettes for their own good.

Man I hate the whole “safety culture” crowd. I find it such an insufferable ideology. But then again I’m explicitly not a collectivist so that’s par for the course.

That’s the problem with socialized medicine. Once you institute it now your body belongs to the state. You’re not allowed to put something deemed bad in your body because the “people” have to pay for it.

Prohibition is wrong. It’s not just unethical but impractical.

And congrats, now cops aren’t just going to claim they smell weed in my car, they’re going to claim they smell menthol too.

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Also your “waive your right to gov funded healthcare” argument doesn’t make sense. Because I still have to pay for the other guy’s healthcare too.

Thanks for linking to that. I’d never heard of that case before; that is so incredibly horrifying. They should be in jail right now for having a known psychotic patient sign an “informed consent” form.

As an aside, there is such a long history of blatant unethical behavior and pseudoscientific medical procedures throughout the entire history of medicine (and especially so-called “public health” - take AZT as one tiny example), that it shocks me that people have this attitude of “oh yeah bloodletting and lobotomies and clitorectomedies and male circumcision as punishment for masturbation were wrong but everything’s fine now and there’s no giant institutional problems with the medical orthodoxy anymore”

I’ve already outlined in another comment why they could increase transmission.

They increase net volume of air exchanged, therefore all else equal they increase the release of aerosols. There’s furthermore a strong chance that they actively nebulize respiratory droplets into fine aerosols; ie they incresse the relative aerosolization and therefore the absolute aerosols.

They make convo partners stand closer together or speak louder.

They alter risk appraisal.

It is foolish to rule out any downsides. At best you’re advocating for a condom full of holes. At worse you’re advocating for a condom that magically worsens STI transmission.

In the context of COVID we’re actually talking about unknowingly exposing someone to a virus. So I don’t think it’s directly comparable.

Anyway, I don’t believe in throwing someone in jail for such an act. Some people do.

But I don’t think that invalidates the point that such a right does not exist, because “spread disease” is a superset of “knowingly spread disease”.

Ironically here in California it is legal to knowingly spread AIDS to someone, because democrats, yet that same political faction thinks that you are responsible if you unknowingly spread COVID-19 to someoen. (As an aside the absurd “infecting Grandma in the grocery store” doesn’t happen anyway because that’s not really where COVID spreads but I digress)

> Everyone has the right not to catch a potentially deadly disease.

Nobody has this right. This positive right has never existed. And for good reason. It leads to all manner of evils taken to the extreme.

You’re comparing global IFR to a specific region. Not the same claim. US mortality is worse because of our extensive diseases of modernity and decent proportion of elderly.

Furthermore you are assuming that the excess deaths are solely attributable to COVID-19. The truth is not even close.

Suicide rates are not the same thing as discomfort.

Calling the risks minimal to acne makes no sense. It’s one of the worst contributors to acne in any person’s daily life.

Even if I agreed with your exponentiality argument the whole point is that I’m saying masks don’t reduce spread. You seem to think there’s only possible upside, but there is equally downside wrt xmission; that is, masks run the risk of worsening transmission.