Random Rant Thread

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This man is an "expert" on China.

"I think Xi Jinping should watch “Hamilton.”"

LOL

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Unfortunately this one is true, though.

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The so-called "football ultras" involved in every single shitty thing in Europe, it's getting really old. I mean, it is old. It's like the most stereotypical image of "Europe" from the 20th century that refuses to die, because it's true, and will continue to be true.

Sunday’s rally was organised by so-called ultra football and ice-hockey fans angry at the increasingly strict limitations introduced in response to the soaring number of Covid-19 cases in the Czech Republic, currently the worst-hit in Europe by the global pandemic by head of population.

The addition of "ice-hockey fans" is a nice Czech touch, but you can just picture in your mind what it was like pretty accurately without actually seeing a single pic or clip.

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I mean, it's probably lazy of me to call protests and riots "shitty things" in a blanket manner, because most Covid measures affect and damage the poor and working-class ridiculously disproportionately. If anything THAT is the fucking shitty thing.

But I just can't find ethical/philosophical arguments to confidently condemn lockdown and other severe restrictions. It's painful to see the wealthy getting wealthier during the pandemic while the working class people are losing out in a horrific way. It's hard for the leftist in me to abide it. Alas.

2020 has been the worst.

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I know someone from the poorest "redneck" part of Arkansas who became a Republican operative in Michigan. Let's call him Ryan. Back in 2016 he had many sleepless nights not because he was nervous about the election result (he pretty much expected his man to lose the state) but because he was overworked. His autonomic nervous system was shot. He worked every day, tirelessly, even in heavily Democratic precincts, walking for miles, knocking on one thousand doors, both figuratively and literally.

I remember him telling some days before the election day that he was feeling good about their chance. Not super-confident of actually winning it, but the internals had been getting better and better. "It's going to be close, and making it close is important regardless of the result," he said.

You can thank people like him for this gigantic mess. They flipped Michigan for Trump.

But then, you can't actually thank him now - because he's no longer with us. He passed away three years ago under very unfortunate circumstances.

That orange man has no idea. He doesn't care. He thinks it was all him, his own "talent," his own "genius." Such a typical delusional dumbass.

Ryan isn't there in Michigan to save Trump anymore, and that will hurt that fool. He has never shown any appreciation for the people who actually carried him all the way to the White House. No sense of gratitude.

I just hope he will fall hard.

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You may think this is silly, but it's actually quite revealing and interesting.

I didn't expect the Netherlands to be more pro-Trump than Italy and France, for instance. 31% is remarkable pro-Trump.

I thought Brexit/Boris Johnson wouldn't necessarily translate well into the support/favor for Trump/GOP in the UK, and this result suggests that my assumption was correct.

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The plain fact of the matter is that you can't contact-trace for shit if people don't talk to you. I'm not saying you should abandon contact tracing altogether. But when people aren't willing to cooperate, you have to revise your strategy at least.

Even here in Japan, it's hard to make people tell you who they were with, where they went, etc. It's not just the matter of privacy; They are afraid of people finding out that they tested positive. It works to some extent here simply because the number of cases have been low so far; The Japanese officials have the luxury to be patient. It's a similar story in places like Australia.

I'm afraid it's just not working in places like the UK and France, let alone the US. People in those countries seem even less cooperative than I thought they would be. And it's not just Freedom! types that wouldn't talk. People in general don't really trust the government/experts now, especially in those countries.

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So, another US government failure, ding dong!

52%+ is a hell of a victory given the current circumstances. Some of the people who normally wouldn't quite trust Morales must have voted for his man too.

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This sounds bad.

Covid: Greater Manchester running out of hospital beds, leak reveals
NHS document shows no spare beds for patients in Salford, Stockport and Bolton
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/18/revealed-some-manchester-area-hospitals-already-full

The Guardian can also disclose that hospitals in Liverpool, the centre of the second wave of the disease, had to send some patients to intensive care units in other hospitals in the north-west because theirs could not cope because staff have been off sick or in isolation because of Covid.

A well-placed NHS figure in Liverpool said: “There have been a number of ICU patient transfers over this weekend to try to cope with demand. Staff absence levels are running a bit more than double normal sickness rates. There is very little ‘spare’ ICU capacity in the region.”

We've seen this movie before, and it didn't end well.

I just don't like the general sound of it at all. I'm worried.

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I took a flu shot today. You should do it too!

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My biggest worry about the current Covid-19 situation is simple logistics. Yes, the treatment has vastly improved, even in the last several weeks. If everything was equal, we would have MUCH, MUCH fewer deaths than we did in the spring, and MUCH fewer than we did in the summer in the US South/West.

But the sheer volume of patients might overwhelm the hospitals. When the healthcare system itself is pushed to its physical limits, there isn't much you can do.

Lots and lots of people will have to tough it out in self-isolation again, which might create another huge pool of long-haulers everywhere.

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It's crying over spilt milk because it's too late now, but I must say most European countries were doing it all wrong. It's not just the UK. The UK is a convenient punching bag for me because I read British papers regularly. But almost everyone else was and still is doing what the UK was and still is doing, and it's all fundamentally misguided.

Covid-19 is not the flu.

I bet those governments would react, "We know that!" But they don't. Because Covid-19 is different in terms of how it spreads too.

The flu has a stable pattern of transmission; Covid-19 doesn't.

That's because with Covid-19, most of infected people do not infect others, and a small number of people are responsible for most of the transmissions. That's not how the flu spreads. It's more sustained and *mathematically stable*.

Covid-19 is much more random. That's why it's a lot harder to deal with.

Do you remember me talking incessantly about "luck" back in the spring? I didn't know what it all meant back then, but now I do.

Luck plays a huge part precisely because how Covid-19 spreads. Because it's so random due to the fundamentally non-linear nature of the transmission patterns.

But the "European model" (sorry about the oversimplification... there are variations and exceptions of course) is clearly designed for the flu. They say Covid-19 isn't the flu, but draw up policies as if it were.

For the n-th time, it's not R0; It's k. R0 is for the flu. You can't deal with Covid-19 with a flu policy.

It's very important to do rigorous cluster-busting as early as possible. Don't pay attention to each individual case. In order to suppress this virus, you have to conquer clusters.

Of course, it will be a permanent whack-a-mole. Clusters pop up everywhere randomly. But you must continue to whack them, one after another.

You do huge mass testing and isolation - which is a lot costlier - when you failed to deal with clusters, and countries like the US and UK are at that stage, although they never bothered to take cluster-busting seriously at all in the first place. 

You shouldn't misunderstand the priorities.

And masks. At all times, not "when it's difficult to do social distancing." Social distancing is secondary. Masks should come first. Anyone who's still caught up in the stupid efficacy debate on masks such as "But Finns are fine without wearing them!" and crap like that is missing the forest - masks are good because it's a blanket measure which adds zero complexity to the system. It's a dream tool in that way almost regardless of the true degree of their efficacy, as opposed to the fundamentally fuzzy and difficult nature of "social distancing."

Have you ever wondered why the nerdy modeler types, who are usually contrarian, almost universally embrace masks? That's because they recognize what I said above. It's the most reliable parameter in the model.

These should be the two pillars of your policies. Cluster-busting, and universal mask-wearing. Testing and contact tracing are important insofar as they are necessary tools for cluster-busting (Japan really, really, REALLY should do more testing to make cluster-busting a lot more efficient). You do these two permanently, forever, until there's a good vaccine to save you.

Or, you end up doing lockdown as your healthcare system gets inevitably overwhelmed sooner or later. If you treat it like it's the flu, that's the logical consequence.

And that's what has happened in much of Europe, and perhaps Latin America.

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Sorry for using this thread as a personal notebook for my work, which is what I did in the long rant above, lol.

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"the conservative policies of the U.S.-backed government that took power last year after leftist President Evo Morales resigned and fled the country."

TFW you have to torture the language so hard and inflate the word-count because you can't bring yourself to use the two words that perfectly describes what it was: right-wing coup

Or three words to be more specific: US-backed right-wing coup

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Anders Tegnell interview:
www.theguardian.com/world/audio/2020/oct/07/does-sweden-have-the-answer-to-living-with-covid-19

Having listened to his argument again, I must conclude conclusively that this man is clueless. I wish he could hear the sound of the clue flying above his head especially when he talks about how the evidence for mask's efficacy is "very weak" because many of the European countries that implemented mask recommendations (which means in actuality, 50% of people wearing masks in public space, maybe, on a good day, at best) are having a hard time.

Of course he never mentions Japan, even though the most interesting comparison that you could make on Covid-19 is the one between Sweden and Japan due to their similarities and differences. That's either because he's ignorant, or doesn't care about the "non-Western" world, or he knows it's incredibly inconvenient for his arguments. I think the answer is the first one, actually. He plainly doesn't know.

All in all, the same old, tired argument that's way past its expiration date. The whole world is waaaaaay past his stupid argument. When will he argue against the airborne transmission theory?

But like I said, beyond the argument on the efficacy, this is simply yet another man who just don't get the true significance of Covid-19 being NOT the flu. Fundamentally misguided.

Sweden has been lucky that the country didn't sink into a worse catastrophe. Thank the randomness of Covid-19. I feel sorry for all the elderly people who passed away at nursing homes, though. Unnecessarily many deaths.

We should just stop paying attention to this man. He has been in charge of a country whose track record has been pretty dire so far. The country's economy got cratered anyway and did worse than Finland, a neighboring country who is also export-oriented, while losing many, many, many, MANY times as many lives per capita. And most importantly, there's nothing novel about his approach anymore. He's old news. He still lives in April 2020. His argument against lockdown sounds comical now, especially since the vaccines are coming.

I'm done with this man. I was being far too nice to him for far too long. He can die on that stupid hill for all I care. By refusing to update his thinking as the world has earned new knowledge and perspectives, he has degraded himself into a dime-a-dozen contrarian. He can celebrate his grand, fabulous achievement of Not Having the Second Wave Yet in his little corner of the world, and the rest of us will just move on.