Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

This is what failure looks like.

[K1power]

Jan 10, 2022 16:16:50 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

You could've seen from miles away how Rogan would react to the NPIs, such as masks, and vaccines, though, especially given his particular temperament.

I guess. Pandemic crisis management just wasn't that big of a topic before 2020.

miscmisc said:

Yeah, we should encourage everyone to "ask questions," but of course the most important thing is *what* questions, and the "I'm just asking questions" questions are usually either utterly uninformed or not even questions at all.

Similarly, the business of "making sense" is actually the question of making sense to *whom/what*. If it's just the tiny mind of a Joe Blowhard, that "sense" has very little value. It's not about the argument, but about the person and their limitations. 

Yeah, to me the questions sounded more designed to confirm personal bias, rather than a sincere desire for knowledge.

[miscmisc]

For the n-th time: every single one of the politicians in the world who got Covid says, "Thankfully I'm feeling well," but the truth is that many (quite possibly *most*) of them lied, and that at least for people around and above middle age, "mild" is very often not very mild at all. Even if you were vaccinated, and even boosted.

[miscmisc]

The US broke its own hospitalization record yesterday. Predictably.

[miscmisc]

LOL

[miscmisc]

It's tragic that as far as I can see none of the replies point out the big elephant in the room: That those graphs are garbage.

If you bring these graphs - without the R-squared specified, even - into an engineering class, or even an astronomy class, you would get an instant "F", with this brief comment from the lecturer: "You made that stuff up."

Because they are fucking bollocks. That's just not how you draw graphs, in science at least. They are just random dots, and fuck, one of the two isn't even a valid variable! Yet there's no doubt that this professor(!) prides herself on being a "social scientist".

Like I've said one million times, I *am* in favor of woke, broadly speaking. But it's undeniable that a substantial part of it is to keep employing these clueless/fraudulent fools at the "social science" departments of academic institutions.

[miscmisc]

And those British know-it-alls casually talking about Covid being "endemic" now due to Omicron.

Huh?

Yes, that's your reaction, right?

None of them have the faintest idea about what the term means, you guess, but then you realize that some of them are actually epidemiologists.

You pause and wonder, for a few moments, if it's you that completely misunderstand what "endemic" means, and that they are the adults who know what they are talking about.

But of course, you snap out of that momentary confusion as you remember the track record of those silly Brits, and that unfortunately epidemiology isn't really a legitimate scientific field either.

[miscmisc]

At this point, the physical evidence for facial masks' efficacy against Covid - which means droplets and aerosols basically - has been so overwhelming that the mask-skeptic brigade is now roughly at the same level as anti-vaxx in terms of irrationality. The war is basically over no matter how hard they pretend that it isn't.

If anything, we, which includes early mask advocates like me, completely underestimated a facial mask's efficacy *for the wearer*. The good ones like N95, KN95, KF94 etc. in particular are by far the best defense outside the vaccines.

[miscmisc]

On the other hand, the universal mask-wearing in Japan is less effective than generally believed because there are far too many people, particularly young people, wearing polyurethane masks, which are utterly, utterly useless. They don't block shit. You might as well wear a Batman mask, seriously.

[miscmisc]

There is no publication that has lost as much credibility during this pandemic as the Wall Street Journal. That paper has been a total Covid mis(dis)information galore. Even the New York Post, which is also known as the "tabloid version of the WSJ", has been ten times as reliable.

I actually can't think of any other major newspaper anywhere in the world that has been worse than that garbage paper.

[miscmisc]

I've been saying for weeks that the US will do a hell of a lot worse with the new variant than the UK no matter what, but even I'm kind of taken aback by how much worse it seems going to be.

[miscmisc]

Very important. This should give you a good idea on the primary way this thing spreads.

And how important masks are. They can significantly delay the pace of your inhaling aerosols even in spaces with contaminated air.

[miscmisc]

Note that the study above was done by *scientists in chemistry and engineering who specialize in aerosol science*.

Not some "social scientists" and "analysts" who make a living by torturing data in arbitrary ways all day long to try/pretend to "prove" something and never actually do so.

You tell the people who actually do actual work for the society's benefit that masks don't work BECAUSE INCONCLUSIVE DATA!, and I'll enjoy seeing you get punched in the face (figuratively speaking).

[miscmisc]

According to the geniuses, this is what the "endemic" Covid looks like in our society. 2,500 deaths in a country of 330 million people is a perfectly acceptable daily event, amirite.

[miscmisc]

Matt Damon and Reese Witherspoon have been damn red hot these days, haven't they? Getting more and more unhinged every week.

LOL. Nope.