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Post by miscmisc on Nov 13, 2020 21:46:30 GMT 1
Look at the hottest Covid-19 states in the US right now.
North Dakota
South Dakota
Iowa
Montana
Illinois
Minnesota
Wisconsin
Kansas
They are neighbors. And I'm pretty certain that the top three states are largely responsible for the outbreaks in the rest, because they did absolutely nothing, and what's worse, even helped super-spreading events occur everywhere with their absolutely reckless policies.
You can get everything right in your state, and still the state next to you who doesn't give a shit can totally ruin everything.
It's not going to work without the federal response. I've been saying this same shit for months.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 14, 2020 4:31:11 GMT 1
306-232. The same electoral vote margin as the one four years ago, but it's a Democratic win, which is harder in the electoral college system, and by substantially bigger margins in the swing states than in 2016. Will be nearly +4.5% in the popular vote too, more than doubling Clinton's lead (+2.1%) four years ago.
Democrats ought to be worried if this is the best they could do in this election when the tide was clearly running in their favor due to the pandemic. They ought to realize that they should get out of the trap of that college graduate white sensibilities mindset. The sooner they do, the better.
But that doesn't mean that Trump wasn't roundly defeated. He most certainly was, especially since his campaign seems to have gotten almost everything right and executed its plans very well. This result is probably the best that they could ever achieve in this one, and still it turned out nowhere near enough in the end.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 14, 2020 19:13:11 GMT 1
We still don't know why viruses prefer winter. But they clearly do, and SARS-CoV-2 doesn't seem like an exception.
The things that you could get away with during the summer might get you in trouble this time.
I've criticized the sanitation theater, governments closing down parks, irrational fear for fomite transmissions, etc. But in this round, you are likely to be pretty much surrounded by infected people almost everywhere. You have to kind of assume that everyone's got the virus, every surface that you touch is infected, whether or not it's enough to give you Covid-19.
Every restaurant is an outbreak factory, and so is every bar, and so is every gym. Your boss has got it, and so has your nephew, and so has your brother. There are just so many infected people, and the viruses seem to have gotten much better at host-hopping. That's just the way it is now.
I don't mean to make you paranoid, and if you are in Europe, your country has more likely than not already locked down anyway. I'm just saying that if you think it's serious, double it. It's very serious.
The countries/communities that haven't been hit very hard yet might get in serious, serious trouble now, and the countries that are already in clear trouble with high infection rates, like pretty much all of the USA, need to act ASAP. According to one estimate, 30-40% of Americans might get infected before it's over if there are no serious federal actions to be done soon. That would mean at least 250k more deaths, and an insane number of long-haulers - when the vaccines are just around the corner!
I'm not saying anything new, but just please, take this one absolutely seriously. And if you still insist that you go ahead with Thanksgiving and Christmas like who cares, well, go fuck yourself and enjoy the fruits of your stupidity. Sure, it's a fucking "free country."
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 15, 2020 5:15:23 GMT 1
I did propose this kind of an ad idea to someone who works for the EU back in the spring, but perhaps this is a much better timing as we do see *some* light at the end of the tunnel now.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 15, 2020 20:02:49 GMT 1
A lot of people seem to misunderstand one thing about the MAGA/right-wingers' steadfast refusal to accept the election result.
Many of them *truly* believe that Trump won it. No, no, they are not trying to "fuck with the libs' mind" or even trying to "steal" it. You can't steal something that you think is yours in the first place.
They are just upset. This is impossible in their world. Impossible things must be impossible... unless!
That's all there is to it. It's truly an alternate reality, where it's inconceivable that anyone sane would vote for Joe Biden. And even more crucially, they don't know a single person who voted for Biden. When they say that, they aren't lying. They just don't. That's their social sphere, and the world outside of it isn't even an abstraction for them; It literally doesn't exist, meaning it only does in all that "fake news."
You can't quite understand what's going on unless you understand that first.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 15, 2020 20:19:31 GMT 1
You might say, "You might as well talking about urban liberals right there!"
The answer is Yes, and No.
Yes, in the sense that they all live in their echo chambers. Liberals are certainly massively guilty of that.
No, in that it takes a lot more aggressive information filtering to believe that Trump was NOT the underdog in this election. The required scale of delusion is far greater.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 4:32:07 GMT 1
Health care workers are quitting en masse. Who can blame them. It's obviously too much for them.
This is really looking disastrous.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 5:31:14 GMT 1
If you see/hear someone online/on TV who is saying things that contradict what I say in this thread, check their background to see if they are connected to the Hoover Institute/Stanford. If they are, bingo. Throw them into the trash can.
The Hoover Institute/Stanford has been the biggest source of Covid misinformation since March. Richard Epstein, John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, Eran Bendavid, Scott Atlas, etc. None of these people have any credibility whatsoever.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 5:39:59 GMT 1
The price of living in a society is that you have to fight your inner "Why should I give a fuck about these fuckers" voice and be obliged to help/save the kind of people who have grotesque contempt for the concept of a society while being willfully ignorant of their near-total dependence on it in actuality.
It's not easy, but there's no way around it. People are horrible and hopeless, but we have to live with that.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 6:22:19 GMT 1
Hiring the worst people imaginable and then firing them later and bragging about that decision is a very underrated Trump routine.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 6:58:17 GMT 1
This, this, this, this!
This is so true.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 7:21:34 GMT 1
The Swedish epidemiologists calling certain phenomena "strange" when they are objectively not strange at all is such a giveaway to indicate that they've lost their plot.
And of course, this.
Well, Sweden is a solid society and it will be fine anyway despite the misguided experts who run the policies, but the reputational damage is rather big. I saw a mini documentary on the topic even in this fellow no-lockdown country, and it wasn't so much about their approach, but about their attitude. One scientist said, "I don't understand what made them feel so confident in their approach, because there was no evidence for their theory back then, and there still isn't."
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 7:24:07 GMT 1
Er...?
"another"? "national lockdown"?
What?
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 15:13:49 GMT 1
Phase 3 trial data of Moderna vaccine - 94.5% effective.
Even better than the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine, and more importantly, this one can be stored in a regular fridge for 30 days. The Pfizer vaccine needs to be stored at -70-80C (!), which is clearly a huge logistical problem. -70-80C is far outside the range of human environment temperature.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna are mRNA vaccines and seem pretty strong, meaning they reliably produce strong antibodies and also rather significantly affect your body in one way or another. I'm curious to know how well DNA vaccines would work as they are probably "safer" and a lot less likely to cause side effects, but we'll have to wait for another several months for them.
Anyway, so, it's going to be much better next year. I'm relieved that I wasn't giving you a false sense of hope for months.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 16, 2020 15:27:45 GMT 1
The US completely botched its Covid measures, which ended up accelerating the speed of the vaccine trials to a significant degree. It's counter-intuitive that the citizens of the world's richest country volunteered to be the guinea pigs for the less wealthy in the rest of the world, but that's the timeline where we live. It would make little sense to intelligent aliens.
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