Seems easy to rule out vitamin D if sunlight exposure isn't relevant at time of infection then.
6,395 karma · joined July 8, 2010
I'm not a professional and this is just me spouting ideas, but I wonder if this is one reason why America is so hard hit compared to Asia. Americans generally commute by car, stay in a massive building complex all day for work, and go home and stay inside. In Asia, a huge proportion of people commute by foot, train (which involves walking to the station), or scooter. Then they walk to a grocery store or restaurant to get some food. I wonder if those minutes of continuous sun exposure add up and lighten the severity of it.
It's human nature to have an in-group and out-group. Sometimes it's as simple as language. Generally, anyone who claims they have absolutely no bias against X people for Y characteristic aren't aware of their own biases.
It's truly fascinating because I've never seen a city in Japan that costs anywhere near as much as some podunk local economic hub in the US, yet I hear these "it's too expensive" stories all the time.
My combined monthly expenses in a city--rent, food, and everything--comes to maybe $1200. My mind is blown whenever I hear people say they're struggling to pay for things or life is too expensive. The main thing I've noticed is most of these people are going to bars/izakaya several times a week, and it's easy to spend $50+ for a small meal and some beers there. I know people in Tokyo making far less than Western wages but still living very comfortably.
But in-city rent in Japan doesn't even approach a typical 500k population city in the US , unless you're insisting on living in the middle of the most in demand parts of Shibuya or something.
Being taught something != actually feeling something. You can say "that's bad" and people will repeat after you in agreement. Doesn't mean the voice in the back of their mind actually agrees or can just flip like a switch. Decades of thinking that are slowly ironed in don't just go away in an instant.
When I immigrated, I left behind tangible proof of my achievements, but I could've also completely bullshitted my history and instantly jumped into a higher level than was possible in my old country. It's also virtually risk-free should I fail. So long as I have enough money for a plane ticket home, I can just leave and there's zero long term consequence. This is incredibly common for westerners in Asia to do. It's also not uncommon for non-Americans to move to the US to instantly get a leg up in work with some companies really giving preferential treatment to things like H1Bs, then going back home with a larger savings and better opportunities to actually get started as an entrepreneur.
Americans who only have America don't have those massive privileges.
This is really the key point.
When immigrating to a country, you’re already taking a huge risk. You’re leaving behind extended family. You’re generally a little more well off than a typical person in your home country. You’re not really bound down by debt histories (who’s going to collect when you’re 5000 miles away and your bank accounts are out of reach?). Your debt future isn’t as much of a concern (who’s going to collect if you just pack up and go home without telling anyone?) Your past work experience and education experience isn’t as much of a concern because nobody is going to call up a former employer in a foreign country or look up transcripts or know anything about the reputation of foreign schools. You’re generally willing to take bigger risks because you’ve already taken a huge one by up and leaving your old lifestyle, and you also abandon a bunch of your burdens.
A bunch of people will say their home country doesn’t have great opportunities, but America does. 100% of the time, without exception, there’s an American living in that country making shitloads of money because being an immigrant there presents unique opportunities and they’re laughing at people saying America would be better.
Saying this as someone who immigrated to a country outside of America.
There are really only two ways I can sit in them. One is that just one small point of my head makes contact, and my back is perfectly straight and doesn't make contact with the seat. The other is that I do rest my head against it, but I'm bending my head down at a 45 degree angle and it feels like my neck is about to snap.
I wish they just didn't exist.
Sometimes literally. They'll show me series of fire hydrants that don't end after several minutes, and I just give up.
If I’m outside and doing something all day, or I’m really involved in reading a book or painting something, over half a day will pass before I realize I forgot to eat breakfast.
But if I’m relaxing, wasting time on the internet, or not really doing much, I get an urge to grab a snack or have a glass of milk that’ll hit me once an hour.
That hasn't stopped any company from total collapse before and it won't now. Other social media sites have people somewhat locked in since it's all about staying in contact with friends and following certain people. You need to push the entire crowd at once to have a good replacement, but those sites still die when they screw up enough. Reddit's a place where people mostly read comments, see some funny pictures or news, and then go about their day. There's a lot less keeping people from dropping it and moving on.
Studies comparing populations with almost 100% mask wearing and countries with almost no masks would make for a better comparison.
Whenever I see a game with super detailed forests and houses and human models, it's almost impossible to get interested in it. It's too real and bland. Maybe it's a mental association from seeing a bunch of cheap Russian and Chinese games on Steam that use premade assets.
Using the maps on my phone in a different country where nobody spoke my language and I didn't speak theirs with 25% battery life and having it suddenly shut down wasn't the funnest moment of my life.
And that’s okay.
Mac users who hope to play anything from their steam library or dual boot Windows are going to be very disappointed.
Growing up in a small town and moving between small towns across the US every year or so, I never had exposure to "liberals" until I started using the internet as a teen. Until then, everyone I was ever around talked about them like they were bogeymen.
In the country I live in now, I was initially exposed to much more "progressive" opinions from people. Now I'm seen as less "that foreign guy" and more of a local, and I hear what people would normally discuss with their friends and family. It's quite different.
I've never seen concrete evidence that it does anything. Wikipedia also seems to say it's all ambiguous, with studies flip flopping as much as coffee and wine health studies.
The idea that bombing was working and political issues were the only reason America failed aren't supported by any facts. Saying politics were the issue is mostly used merely an unfalsifiable statement.
If the goal of the wars are redefined to some really narrow goal like just eliminating Saddam, which is revisionist at best, it seems like sending in troops when one targeted bomb on a political event would've worked better is a big oversight. The invasion just caused chaos and more trouble and we still haven't gotten ourselves out of it. Afghanistan is also total chaos, 20 years later. Military might sure isn't helping there.
In most recent conflicts, the winners are generally people with motivation to fight and unpredictable attacks. Sending in aircraft carriers and deploying 50000 young guys to a place they don't know or care about is neither unpredictable or fueled by any deep motivation. People handed a gun and taught how to make a bomb and acting to protect their family from foreign invaders are both.
I guess that really depends on what you consider a "1-1 military battle." Gentlemanly warfare used to be people marching and staying in formation and going straight at each other until they died. With that battle strategy, the victor is generally going to be the one with more people covering more ground.
But that strategy hasn't been used in a long while, because there are smarter ways to fight. Tanks and so on are the old way of fighting battle. The US has a decidedly bad post-WW2 record since nobody is really fighting by the "old ways" that much of the American military fights by, and the biggest advantage is the US can just drop bombs indiscriminately basically forever (decidedly not 1-1 combat) and hope to destroy every living thing imaginable (which still failed in basically everything from Vietnam onwards).
The claim that the US will beat any country isn't backed by any evidence. At all. There are theoretical situations where maybe the US has more people, more money, more whatever and will win if you line soldiers up and have them fight Napoleonic style, but in reality, successful wars following WW2 include... the Gulf War? Which just ended up leaving Saddam in power, ending up with the unmanageable chaotic wars we've had in the middle east these past 2 decades.
Farmed fish also generally relies on being fed cheaper seafood, and it’s hard to beat Chinese prices.
It’s best to just stop eating fish for a while. If the industry shrinks even a bit, things can start to recover.
There’s also the factor of questioning, both how things are worded and the means they use to ask them. Landline polling with 50 questions (yes, some pollers do this and you can see the questions they ask) aren’t likely to reach people with jobs or people who are young, so that results in the few people they do reach giving undue weight to “make up” for the voters they couldn’t poll. Wording of a question can also change how a person reports their result, and there’s always the lizard man constant and people who intentionally screw with pollers, some being easy to detect and discard.
In a way, they do end up as forecasters.
Maybe in 20 years these streaming services will collapse and be replaced by something better, and then those services will once again split up.
Later on, and with more digging, people who were near him at the time confirmed that the controversy was all a sham. The people who previously claimed Kerry lied all suddenly claimed they misremembered, or gently admitted that they lied. There were just enough bits and pieces of facts to build a story, and BS was used to glue it all together.
I think people are seeing a repeat of that. Some things may be true, but a lot of overly convenient information is coming out to bind it together that’s hard to absolutely verify and will likely collapse under scrutiny.
First time buyers of iPhones aren't unreasonable. Being unreasonable is saying a trillion dollar company is fine to charge more for less.