Random Rant Thread

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This really is a failure of epic proportions.



If you are Russian, I'm sorry, but you should be offended by this, by your own society, and you know this isn't even the whole picture. The *official* excess deaths numbers are jaw-dropping.

This chart really doesn't look like any other country's. Look at the total deaths graph and its super-steady slope; It's a fucking straight line. The chart looks even worse, a hell of a lot worse than Brazil's and USA's. I'm not even talking about the numbers and volumes; It's about the apparent lack of effort, the absence of "care". It's really beyond the issue of the government, let alone Putin.
 
This crap sort of justifies that stupid, racist stereotype of Russians as "Mongoloids" who disregard lives.

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To be perfectly honest and frank, most epidemiologists and virologists are unimpressive scholars/scientists. You can tell the stereotype - top students never go into those fields - is unfortunately largely true.

Those are fascinating fields of study, but I doubt many smart young people feel like studying them even after such a paradigm-shifting historic event = Covid-19 pandemic. It just sounds boring and unimpressive largely because most of the scholars/scientists in those fields *are* boring and unimpressive.

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These are all extremely good news:



Because it's primarily the lung infections that ends up killing you. The Syrian hamster models are particularly trustworthy because of the proximity to the human cells.

But the caveat is that it's "decreased" from the ridiculously high loads caused by Delta and Co. That's the context, and unfortunately it will still kill tons of people worldwide.

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Doesn't look good.

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For the n-th time:

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2021 was a terrible year all around, full stop. Worse than 2020 in many ways.

2022? Well, I don't want to jinx anything, so I'll just leave it at that.

Have a good one, folks.

[K1power]

Thanks man, to you as well.

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It's telling that the first RR post of the year is me quoting Nassim Nicholas Taleb approvingly. We are on/in that kind of a timeline.

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You don't say!

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I was watching the *British* BBC coverage of Maxwell's conviction - illegally online, mind you - and was deeply disturbed by its incessant psychoanalyzing and persistent attempts to "understand" her, in the "How that sweet Ghislaine we all liked ended up where she is now" kind of ways.

Are those people aware of how creepy they sound to the average person?

And if a woman doing what she did is somehow a mind-boggling super mystery to you, I guess you're not much of a man/woman of literature. I don't care what exactly and specifically motivated her to do it, but this one is in many ways such an ordinary case that she's not even worth psychoanalyzing. Those people are wasting everyone's time *while* creeping everyone out with their super-creepy decadent British upper-middle-class mindset and sense of entitlement.

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Incidentally, KF94 has been my go-to facial mask for a long time now. N95 is way too uncomfortable, and KN95 isn't flexible enough.

My favorite is a Japan-made version of KF94, slightly better than the original, but KF94 is perfectly fine.

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I agree, but this is basically our Plan B. Plan A has failed, and we should NOT be proud of that.

This is an abstract "we", but we as a society utterly failed to tackle this disease. Total failure. I totally expected us to fail, but that doesn't mean it was our "fate" or anything like that. We could've so easily been in a better place, but basically chose not to.

So, it's Plan B. Down to each individual, fending for themselves. But as Gottlieb says, "that’s appropriate if, and only if, people have tools to protect themselves." And unfortunatly, in many countries, states, areas, they absolutely don't.

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One bad thing about being a US vassal state, like Japan, is that no matter how hard you try to slow the spread of a kickass variant of a highly transmissible virus to buy some more time, US soldiers aren't arsed to even have any semblance of the goddamn courtesy, and just nonchalantly keep bringing it in like no one should care. Their lack of discipline is appalling.

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The US has broken the new case record by scoring 1M+ cases on Monday, about which cool kids are just going "So what? It's just a casedemic!", but I suspect that we're going to soon break the hospitalization record as well, despite Omicron being markedly less virulent than Delta.



It's hard to believe this will come down quickly any time soon. The previous record - approx. 130k, caused mostly by Alpha - is right there, already within close reach. 

Both the UK and US look worse than South Africa, and the US looks significantly worse than the UK. Predictably.

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Wait, what?

He said that even without Covid, the NHS is 100,000 staff short, “so we have a long-term failure in terms of workforce planning and resourcing”.

"100,000 staff short"

Seriously?