2,749 karma · joined November 10, 2020
I assume that most chargebacks happen for purchases made with stolen credit cards. So the chargeback just returns the money to the rightful owner.
If the consumer used bitcoin, and someone stole their credentials to buy something, then they would have no way to get their money back.
It's not like this is the first time a vaccine is introduced.
I know there's a lot of misinformation about the vaccines going the rounds, but that doesn't mean that all reports of side effects are made up or statistical noise.
Most of them are from elderly people, but there are also a bunch of young people who have likely died from side effects. PEI reports 21 people under 40 who died from thrombosis after Astra Zeneca.
Biontech and Moderna had other side effects (myocarditis for young men), and also a bunch of young deaths.
Johnson is not common enough in Germany to make any reasonable judgements.
Severe side effects (not deaths) are around 0,2 per 1000 shots. (reported side effects, actual number may be higher)
Source (in German): https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/newsroom/dossiers...
I just don't think anybody should force anyone to get a shot. That should be a personal decision.
A bunch of otherwise healthy people have died from the vaccine. You can argue that it's a numbers game, and that getting vaccinated is still less risky, but the decision should not be forced on anyone.
In most rural areas in the world if you don't like what your neighbours house looks like you can go pound sand. People generally like the fact that noone can tell them what they do on their own property.
So yes, dredging up the ground destroys all context, and you get finds that are very hard to date (carbon dating and other scientific methods have limited precision if you don't have any reference points)
On the other hand, I guess you take what you can get, and archaeologists often work with finds like that. A farmer might accidentally have dug up some roman coins on their field, or people with metal detectors may find some clothing pins (not sure of the correct english word) or something. These people may also not be eager to tell you where they found it (farmers really don't want excavations on their fields)
We find these tiny fragments, and they tell us something about the past, but every artefact invites a lot more questions than it provides answers.
My late father spent some time researching tattoos and body marks in antiquity. A common pattern that appeared often were 4 dots arranged like the vertices of a rhombus. The pattern appears eg. on terracotta figurines and must have had some significance. But we have no idea what it meant, and all we can do is make wild guesses.
I think some of the vulnerabilities have been found in image file format or PDF parsing libraries. These are huge codebases that you can't just rewrite in another language.
At the same time, Apple is investing huge amounts of resources into making their (and everyone elses) code more secure. Xcode/clang includes a static analyzer that catches a lot of errors in unsafe languages, and they include a lot of "sanitizers" that try to catch problems like data races etc.
And finally, they introduced a new, much safer programming language that prevents a lot of common errors, and as far as I can tell they are taking a lot of inspiration from Rust.
So it's not like Apple isn't trying to improve things.
I think it's a good thing, since it's a pretty good guarantee that you actually get what you buy.
You can get ibuprofen and paracetamol at any pharmacy in Austria for a few euros without a prescription. And in every district there's always a pharmacy that is open 24h.
It involved a research project that they stopped funding, but didn't want to let go. The only researcher who continued to work on the project wanted to take the project to a different institution where the project could get funding, but Uni Salzburg refused and said it's their project. They would rather have the project be abandoned than let it thrive somewhere else. If their name wasn't on the project anymore, they would rather have it die.
And not to forget, Uni Salzburg was also home to our most famous case of scientific misconduct where Robert Schwarzenbacher fabricated measurements using simulation software. The handling of that case was also interesting (they terminated his employment after verifying the accusations of fraud, but one guy from the union tried to convince someone from HR to delay some paperwork so they could later challenge the termination... crazy stuff)
I think that the antibody tests are sketchy in the first place, but if they don't even stick to the protocol and don't follow up positive antibody tests with PCR tests, it's almost pointless.
People with wet/creamy ear wax smell. People with dry/crumbly earwax don't smell.
I'm not sure if it's true in general, but it's true for me and my partner.
One of our kids has creamy ear wax, and the other has crumbly ear wax. I'm curious if only one of them will need deodorant once they get to puberty...
Genetics is fun.
I'm just saying that there is a risk, and people should be aware of that fact.
Someone out there is going to be unlucky and get colon cancer from their daily glass of wine. And they probably think it's just bad luck, it can't be from alcohol because they drink just one glass a day.
(Reminds me of a relative who likes talking about how his daily glass of red wine made him live to 90. I think it's the successful chemo treatment for his throat cancer that made him live to 90, but I'm not a doctor)
Funny how they demand radical free speech, but downvote/flag anyone who disagrees, while using a forum where comments with too many downvotes are hidden automatically.
I mean, you could say the same about riding a motorcycle. Riding a motorcycle only slightly increases your risk of dying in a horrible traffic accident, but for a lot of people the risk is big enough that they stop riding once they have kids.
> What's the connection?
> There are a few biological pathways that lead from alcohol consumption to a cancer diagnosis, according to the study. Ethanol, the form of alcohol present in beer, wine and liquor, breaks down to form a known carcinogen called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA and interferes with cells' ability to repair the damage.
> Alcohol can also increase levels of hormones, including estrogen. Hormones signal cells to grow and divide. With more cell division, there are more opportunities for cancer to develop. Alcohol also reduces the body's ability to absorb certain cancer-protective nutrients, including vitamins A, C, D, E and folate.
> What's more, the combination of drinking and smoking might indirectly increase the risk of cancer, with alcohol acting as a kind of solvent for the carcinogenic chemicals in tobacco.
Alcohol is a poisson and there is no "safe" level.
Now, it's a personal decision how much risk is acceptable to you, but don't lie to yourself how "one glass a day is not going to make a difference".
You said:
> I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.
But apparently that was just a figure of speech, not an actual question.
1) Nobody is saying that ads aren't profitable or that marketers are throwing money out the window because they are stupid. The discussion is about whether invasive user tracking is effective. Ads can be profitable even though user tracking is ineffective.
2) This thread also is mostly about your very weak argument. You wrote:
> Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements.
That's just not a good argument. Who knows, maybe Facebooks tracking really is the best thing in the world, but the fact that Facebook is raking in loads of cash on its own tells us very little about how effective their user tracking is.
It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.
1) People want the services more than they value their privacy. Maybe they'll just not use the service if they can't use it without tracking
2) That invasive tracking is required to sell ads. The media industry made billions (trillions?) of revenue from ads before tracking became a thing.
3) That platform ads are the only way to make services that are free for consumers. For example, Vimeo offers an ad free video delivery service that the content creator pays for. If Youtube was no longer free, maybe content creators would just pay for content delivery instead of having consumers indirectly pay for deliver with ads. Content creators have no issue selling ads / sponsorships without any tracking whatsoever. The result would be the same as now (content free for consumers) only that now non-targeted ads would pay for everything.
4) And finally, you are assuming that targeting via tracking actually works well enough to make it worthwhile. From what I've read, ad targeting is nowhere near as good as Facebook et al would have advertisers believe. Maybe invading your users privcy just doesn't make such a big difference in the end.
I think 20h/week is a more reasonable target if you want to enjoy things beside work.
Of course it's okay to work 40h/week if you really want to, or even more, if you enjoy it, but you should really think hard about whether that's really what you want, or if it's just what your employer wants you to do.