dbsights

While they're at it, seperate out the social justice books from the science fiction, because I'm absolutely sick of it all.

Hugo awards used to be a great way to source new, high-quality books, now it's just more activist slop.

I think Fox News is just more honest about their bias than most; its certainly not true that CBC, CNN, etc. are unbiased lol. There is a distinct bias in wikipedia that is unavoidable if you happen to disagree with the NYT on a controversial social issue.

That's a good position to have on a new drug, actually.

Its also enough time for them to accept their body the way it is. Yet that doesn't appear to be what ever happens, why?

Prior estimates were 90% would desist..

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.6327...

There's some crazy stat, that 98% of kids put on puberty blockers continue to cross-sex hormones. Which clearly tell you, whatever the puberty blockers are for, its not temporary and its not 'time to think'...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...

Agreed. When I was a kid, I would look for the award winners as a shortcut to find new books to read, but lately its been disappointment after disappointment. I don't feel like the winners reflect what I consider quality (e.g. I loved A Deepness in the Sky, Cryptonomicon, in addition to the books you've listed (minus Three Body Problem)).

With the death of physical stores, I no longer have a way of discovering new science fiction. I wish there was an award or recommendation engine that could find these gems among all of the trash.

Interestingly, I did find one book that was quite enjoyable, from a John Carmack tweet of all places, The Powers of the Earth.

> wouldn't want to continue accumulating it as they know it's purely at the expense of other people

> Therefore, having a billion dollars is a clear sign that millions of people have been exploited by that billionaire.

When two people enter a trade freely, they both come out richer. How is that at the expense of other people?

You sound like a communist.

Ok, but inflation is not cost-of-living and the CPI doesn't measure either of those directly.

Its often convenient for government to conflate the two; cost-of-living is a very flexible concept and so there are lots of way to get an answer you like, but they are distinct concepts.

Surely you can understand why a changing basket of goods makes for deceptive year-to-year comparisons.

And if the prices for good B go down, and people buy more of it, then it will be weighted more in the calculation.

CPI is structurally biased to report lower inflation.

I think the portraits of the downvoters would fully explain this phenomenon

Are you Canadian? Even asking the question feels ridiculous: yes, absolutely.

He shredded the Charter to fabricate a wedge (interior vaccine passports, firing civil servants) to win a few votes in the last election. This is absolutely in character.. good governance means nothing to Trudeau compared to being re-elected.

I thought this was quite a good interview, summing the rational, skeptic position.

https://youtu.be/l90FpjPGLBE?si=v8fwGFWT-yLPpKgC

that depends on the temperature.. Burn it hot enough and the result is water + co2, perfectly clean energy

Maybe there is no conspiracy and the note is just wrong.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

"Capitalists aren't as bright as ppl think." As opposed to communists? Those paragons of intelligence?

Funny how the solution to climate change (and covid, and inflation..) is always strict top-down control. Just eliminate demand, no mention of the coercion needed to make that happen. Always the same solution, by the same people.

Makes me extremely skeptical of the whole climate change enterprise.

About that negative 18 degrees for equilibrium, does that take into account the heat radiating from within the earth as well? Radioactive decay, the core is quite hot.

Yes, they were defending in an urban area, but I think this matters less than you might expect. Russia's strategy was to saturate the Ukrainians with artillery, and they undoubtedly have superiority in this area. This kind of warfare basically negates the advantages of urban defence. Sure, it took a long time to make progress, but by design it limits the casualties of the attacker. I'd wager that most Ukrainians that died there never even saw a Russian solider.

Truthfully, no one really knows how many died (on either side), but Wagner stayed in the field vs 50-odd Ukr. brigades. How do you reconcile that with a favourable casualty ratio?

My guess: its a tactic designed to embolden the enemy and keep them committed to a failing strategy.

Bakhmut was a meat grinder, but as long as the hope of victory could be kept alive in the Ukrainian army, they would keep sending their troops to slaughter. So we got all of these videos about chaos & ammo running out on the Russian side. And the Ukrainians obligingly poured manpower into an almost-perfectly-surrounded killbox. Saw how that turned out.

I'd bet its the same deal with the current offensive, which has been similarly ruinous for Ukraine.

The killer feature imo would be a forum with moderation that only moderates and doesn't censor. Right now Reddit is unusable if you have an opinion contrary to the hivemind. Go on any r/country or r/city and you would be astonished at how far the politics of that sub deviate from the politics of the people who live there.

I'd like to have moderated comments be opt-in. The moderators can exercise their power and label something spam, hateful, or wrong or whatever, and if they do that job well most people will consent to having their perspective limited. But it should always be a choice, and people should be able to choose no censorship at all, or censorship of only the worst content.

Covid-19 is actually a great example. The spike protein was highly conserved until it became advantageous for it mutate to evade the highly-specific immunity created by mRNA vaccines. Then we got Omicron.

Stable across mutations? On what timeframe.. Its been stable so far.

However, create a population with narrow immunity based on a single protein, and you create a selection pressure that incentivizes mutations in that protein. Once a successful mutation exists, it has a wide open field to spread unchecked. With broad immunity (multiple proteins) it is much less likely that a variant can realize the multiple simultaneous mutations that would be required to spread effectively.

That doesn't really make sense. Target specifically, and it only takes a minor mutation to escape.

A less-specific vaccine would create immunity against multiple targets, and would logically require more simultaneous mutations to create an escape variant.

Unless your goal is to sell a new vaccine every year (chase your own escape variants, immunity-as-a-service), then MRNA isn't obviously a win.

The cohort used for the study was overwhelmingly white and female (95%+ for both), so I think your first point is fair, its not possible to generalize to the population from this one study. That said, in these groups, that study did definitely find that long covid was strongly correlated with preexisting psychological conditions:

>All types of distress were significantly associated with increased risk of post–COVID-19 conditions in a dose-dependent manner after adjustment for demographic factors (probable depression, RR, 1.39 [95% CI, 1.19-1.63]; probable anxiety, RR, 1.47 [95% CI, 1.27-1.70]; very worried about COVID-19, RR, 1.43 [95% CI, 1.22-1.68]; highest quartile of perceived stress, RR, 1.50 [95% CI, 1.21-1.86]; lonely some of the time or often, RR, 1.35 [95% CI, 1.11-1.65]; all P < .01 for trend)

This is consistent with other studies, e.g.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905

>Increased risk for PASC was noted in women and those with a history of anxiety disorder.

As an aside, the inception of the "condition" is always worth considering in any discussion of long covid:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dubious-origins-of-long-cov...

I'm in favour of free speech, without censorship from government or private entities. Which is why I think censoring the laptop story was wrong.

So tell me, how is that anti free speech?

Conspiring to suppress true information to influence an election seems worse.

> Associations were stronger in men younger than 40 years for all vaccines. In men younger than 40 years old, the number of excess myocarditis events per million people was higher after a second dose of mRNA-1273 than after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test (97 [95% CI, 91–99] versus 16 [95% CI, 12–18]).

> The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.

That's from the study you linked; for the group most at risk of vaccine myocarditis, the vaccine was associated with a higher risk than the virus. In this study, this was true for Moderna, with Pfizer being about equivalent risk to the virus (albeit without considering that the risk of infection remains after vaccination). However, there have been other studies that found this to be true for all mrna vaccines.

So to answer your question, its technically true, but only if you dilute the at-risk group by including the entire population.

The nonsense is that it's 'irrevocable', not that the lack of exposure leads to a debt. It's consistent with the headline.

For the average age at death to be above life expectancy, virtually everyone who died "of" covid must have been elderly. And because humans don't live that long, the numbers of elderly who died must massively exceed the number of young people for that stat to skew so high.

I don't know if you read your link, but it makes my point perfectly. As a practical matter, the only people that died with covid were those so frail that they would have died anyway. This has always been the case for other mild but highly transmissible illnesses, such as the flu. It seems clear to me that if it wasn't for the unprecedented manner by which these deaths were attributed, the pandemic would have been indistinguishable from a bad flu season.

"Every vaccine anyone is allowed to offer to you is a lower risk than the disease." ... "That's how the various drug and medicine safety organisations worldwide work, what they are for, and the fundamental point of them."

And that's why they have objectively failed. You don't account for incompetent or corrupt authorities. Or that different products, both called "vaccine" can have different risks and benefits. The covid vaccine is nothing like the measles vaccines, by any metric.

"If one really think those risks count as negligible, why be afraid of the vaccines?"

... The risk of covid being negligible puts an upper limit on the potential benefit of the vaccine, but says nothing about it's safety. The risk of the vaccine is not zero, and for certain groups, ie. Young men, is quite significant (and no, not exceeded by covid).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z#Sec14

For covid: average age at death > average life expectancy. Really think about what that means.

If we counted flu deaths like we counted COVID deaths (i.e. anyone testing positive who died, died of covid), you would have a similar, terrifying death count for the flu. But people still wouldn't be afraid of it.

Not because they're stupid, but because your measurement ("six million dead"!) fails to capture the reality of the situation: the chance of a healthy under 70 dying of covid was negligible. And people behaved logically given this reality.

Explain heartbeats?