adamiscool8

Conscription is a good example of a social burden unfairly dispersed and widely objected to — at least in the West. My point is the underpinning of this “one more mandatory intervention is no big deal” view is not based on reality. The State stopped forcing irreversible interventions on adults when eugenics went out of (polite) fashion. The belief compulsory acts are normal and good policy is based on something like a public health bureaucracy fantasy version of economics’ perfectly rational actor models.

Inference based on overall adverse events post-vaccination being lowest in elderly recipients, plus the early SAE warnings (myocarditis, etc.) being exclusively towards young adults.

Also more conspiratorially, because I think they would have provided the age-stratified data if it supported their objectives of improving lagging uptake among younger cohorts.

Would be nice, but all they volunteer is that the adverse event rate is highest in the 30-50 year olds. Given that, I don’t think it makes a material difference

In Canada, all reports to our Public Health Infobase must be made by a health care professional. I do suspect underreporting, given social and collegial pressure on practitioners to not undermine vaccination efforts, but I accept the given stats linked above at face value for the purposes of my model.

We generally don't allow parents to force risky irreversible things onto their children. But also, the view of all citizens as simple children of the State seems...problematic.

The true hospitalization risk from COVID could be 1/4th to 1/10th that given that cases are widely estimated to be 4-10X what was reported.

The serious adverse event definition and rates are defined here: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/ut...

1 in 9000 doses reportedly results in a SAE, so if you are mandated to take 4 doses, your risk becomes ~0.04% or ~1/2500.

This also does not factor in the risk of "adverse events of special interest", which can be serious or non-serious (though neither seems great for the end user).

And looking at how this page has been updated since the last time I saw it, another red flag is how they separate those out - with a dead link to boot. In my opinion a continuation of efforts that seem intent on obfuscating the ability to make individual risk calculations through this pandemic.

>We all have to take risks and some of them are mandated for the good of society.

What are some other risky and irreversible interventions mandated upon the individual for the good of society?

According to my governments stats, the COVID-19 hospitalization rate for my age + health cohort, when modestly adjusted for their known undercount of cases, is less than 1 in 3000.

Also by their stats, more than 1 in 2000 4-dose mRNA vaccine series have resulted in a serious adverse event reported by a health professional.

Then, factoring in the additional risk of acquiescing bodily autonomy to an opaque bureaucracy — considering what herding behaviors have been blatantly manufactured over the last few years, and the conflicting interests involved.

I think declining is a very reasonable choice.

Not in all age+health cohorts.

The rate of adverse events seen with the flu shots is a full order of magnitude lower than the COVID-19 vaccines. People are partially up in arms because there is a continued conflation of two very different safety profiles.

The rate of serious adverse effects is literally a full order of magnitude higher for the COVID-19 vaccines than for the flu shot or the longstanding childhood inoculations like MMR. The difference you see in trust is because of an establishment that appears to have become so biased it undermines itself by not openly acknowledging fact.

I don’t think this is a complex trade-off at all, precisely for the reasons in your second paragraph. The whole issue boils down to whether we should allow the powers that be a framework to criminalize being an unadulterated human. That path may be less salient in the short-term (particularly in the face of manufactured panic), but it’s far, far more terrifying in the long run.

Can you explain exactly how it’s moral to prevent an otherwise healthy person from mixing with the elderly (who are free to be vaccinated and wear PPE if they feel at risk) in public settings, unless they will accept a medical intervention with a 1/3000 risk of a serious adverse event to themselves?

Well, despite those handicaps, I trust your risk calculus is still as valid for your situation as mine is for me. Why would you not extend the same courtesy to others? I’m reminded of a Carl Sagan quote:

> One of the great commandments of science is, “Mistrust arguments from authority.” (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment). Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.

In my age+health cohort, the known and documented risks of the vaccines outweigh the known risks of COVID-19, but you assume “bad reasons” because it’s not a religious objection or medical contraindication. What makes your risk calculus any more valid than mine?

I would go so far as to say it’s anti-science to lump 99% of the vaccine rejectors as “uninformed”. I’d venture the average mechanistic knowledge of these products is higher than in the rejectors than in the vaccinated set.

It’s frightening how easily the framing of a very individual risk assessment with collectivist “do the right thing for everyone” messaging can prompt discriminatory attitudes. The threshold to trigger this herding behavior is far lower than I would have thought pre-pandemic, as is the ease with which fear engineering can enhance credulity and dismantle higher order thinking at scale. These triggers also reward a sense of complacency towards fundamental rights, and it seems likely more of these mass cognitive warfare experiments will be seen to intentionally probe for exploits of our current system.

The figure has been disputed [0] but it originates from an analysis done by a John Hopkins University doctor published in the BMJ [1][2]:

> We define death due to medical error as death due to 1) an error in judgment, skill, or coordination of care, 2) a diagnostic error, 3) a system defect resulting in death or a failure to rescue a patient from death, or 4) a preventable adverse event. The prevalence of death due to medical error leading to patient deaths has been established in the literature. From studies that analyzed documented health records, we calculated a pooled incidence rate of 251,454 deaths per year.

> (1) If we project this quantity into the total number of deaths in the year 2013 (2,596,993 deaths), they would account for 9.7% of all deaths in the nation.

> (2) This figure far surpasses the current third leading cause of death on the CDC’s most recent rank order. Moreover, the 251,454 estimate we derived from the literature is an underestimate because the studies conducted did not include outpatient deaths or deaths at home due to a medical error.

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bm...

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2822345-Hopkins-CDC-...

[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139

There is probably need for water infrastructure upgrades, but that’s not the central reason for the consumer choice — they’re not “falling into a trap” when they buy water.

There is value captured in the health, convenience, safety and satisfaction aspect of on-demand, portable, trustworthily quality-assured water access for a premium that this piece doesn’t really deal with.

Does anywhere even do good public water infrastructure? I wouldn’t trust a public fountain or refill station in my city.

In that both are exemplary qualities, only talked down by people who — by laziness or ulterior motive — would rather see them outsourced?

>Is there an authoritarian government in the history of humanity that managed to kill 50% of its population?

That's the sort of higher-order question you'll be able to find out right after the magical Ebola wave, if you embrace authoritarianism.

It's not, it's about a coinflip (as the sibling reply noted). But you're making a very salient point about the ease at which higher order thinking can be shut down en masse in a population through fear.

The irony of seeing this reply in a thread started with hope for "renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action" is darkly comic.

What is the best? Cursory googling suggests SD cards last ~decades at normal usage [0], and in this context where it's barely accessed, maybe longer?

[0] https://www.sdcard.org/consumers/faq

Sure, but you dramatically change the character of a city or neighbourhood when you upzone with that intensity. Real estate prices and rents would also come back to reality if rates go up meaningfully and foreign investment is banned without easy loopholes. But since BC (and Canada at large) have built their flywheel for growth on a giant RE ponzi scheme, we’re stuck debating supply side solutions to a fundamental demand problem.

$100 USD/week [0] is not much of a safety net.

[0] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06...

You don't think the accumulation of lipid nanoparticles from what might be annual vaccinations could impact developmental growth in children? We have decades of research on Coronaviridae even if COVID-19 is a bit different, but we have basically nothing on LNP.

I remember doing this in PHP(4? 5?) for my undergrad capstone project because I had a looming due date and it was the dev environment I had readily available. No helpful libraries in that decade. Great way to really grok the material, and really lets me appreciate how spoiled we are today in the ML space.

Sell antiwork merch?

>Frontera led a study that found that more than 13% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients had developed a new neurological disorder soon after being infected. A follow-up study found that six months later, about half of the patients in that group who survived were still experiencing cognitive problems.

The infection hospitalization rate for the Alpha variant was about 7% [0] so 50% of 13% of 7% means... 0.46% of patients may experience a new serious neurological complication that persists past 6 months.

Where "patients" is those aged 55-77 (with lower body mass indices, more past history of dementia, stroke and seizure, worse SOFA scores during hospitalization and higher rates of acute renal failure) [1], and...

>though we identified high rates of disability among both neurological COVID-19 patients and controls, this study was not designed to determine whether the deficits measured by these metrics are static or represent ongoing injury as suggested by some “long-hauler” and post-COVID literature. Since cognitive impairment and mood abnormalities occur in over 50% of ARDS survivors, it is possible that the level of disability we are documenting is not specific to SARS-CoV-2, but rather a result of factors related to critical viral illness.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7895685/

[1] https://www.jns-journal.com/article/S0022-510X(21)00180-5/fu...

Is there any reason to believe the CIA wouldn't have covert assets surreptitiously working in all those same roles, either domestically or abroad?