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mxtihvb

384 karma · joined August 15, 2020

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mxtihvb··on Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills
From Walter Isaacson's biography:

Woz and Jobs got their first big break from selling physical copies of the 'Blue Box', a device which allowed you to place long-distance phone calls through intelligently breaking AT&T's phone routing network. In today's 'wire fraud' day and age, this 100% would have been illegal -- so note that these two people made today's most valuable company!

Relatively speaking, printing a photo ID or $2 bills is nothing. It is the hacker spirit (notice we are on a site called hacker news!).

mxtihvb··on Faking a Positive Covid Test with Cue Readers
Being able to fake a negative test seems much worse than being able to fake a positive test.

That said, British schoolchildren were faking positive tests with orange juice to get 2 weeks off school! https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/uk-pupils-oran...

mxtihvb··on Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food
Your claim isn't borne out by Hong Kong's case fatality rate numbers, which are broken down here by age range, vaccine type and # of doses: https://mobile.twitter.com/tripperhead/status/15124203942710....

Note that Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) has consistently been way ahead of any other public health establishment in tracking and responding to COVID; they launched on-arrival rapid testing in March 2020 (!) and realized COVID was airborne, not fomite-transmitted, months before the CDC did. They've also consistently released provably accurate numbers. Hong Kong has had a bad response to COVID recently, but all of it is due to the bureaucrats in charge ignoring the CHP's scientifically-based health advice in favour of mandates handed down from the mainland government.

In any case, the numbers show that while Sinovac isn't as great as Pfizer, it's much better than being unvaccinated. The case fatality rate among 80+ year olds who got covid is 15.68% for unvaccinated people, 3.98% for those with 2 doses of Sinovac and 1.73% for those with 2 doses of Pfizer. For 70-79 year olds it's 5.28%, 0.6% and 0.33% respectively. Note that all of Hong Kong's recent wave was from Omicron.

We forget how lucky as a civilization we were to develop mRNA vaccines in response to COVID, and how much better than expectations they were. We would have been thrilled with the efficacy of Sinovac. So while Sinovac is definitely worse than Pfizer, it's misleading and alarmist to say that it's 'basically worthless.'

mxtihvb··on NYC allows citizens to report idling vehicles in exchange for a cut of the fines
Now if only they give you a cut of the fine for reporting a car in the bike lane!