yoink

And there you hit on the philosophical differences between people. 'My freedoms' vs ''sacrifice' for others'. (and 'sacrifice' is in BIG fucking inverted commas).

Tell that to a colleague of mine who's 7 year old is now paralysed from complications from catching Covid. Another friend has permanent loss of taste and smell - can you imagine how much less enjoyable life is like that? I think you're dramatically underestimating the imapct of long term covid symptoms - something we're still figuring out.

You have a 100% chance of being shot when entering a room. I offer you a 40% chance not to be. Do you take it, or do you go 'nah. That's abysmal. I'm waiting for the 99.99% offer.'? And who exactly is resting on their laurels? I can guarentee you that the pharma industry continues to pour billions into further research on treatments for new covid strains, if only because it will make them even more in the future. Of course everyone is hoping that what happens next is better. You're arguing against positions that noone is taking.

OK, Sally.

You still don't get it, do you? If someone asks you to call them by a different name, gender, species or whatever, then it's simple fucking decency to do it, because doing it doesn't change your life in ANY way whatsoever. If a guy called Jake comes up to you and says 'hey dude, I'd like you to call me Sally from now on' and you say 'no, I'M going to decide what to call you', can't you see how that would make you a complete asshole? It's nothing to do with delusion, and everything to do with you not getting to decide something like this for other people that doesn't affect you and isn't your responsibility.

Nor is simple decency, apparently.

Edited to sleep on it

Or maybe you’re just shit at stating your position clearly? Your penchant for superfluous elongation of discourse in order to facilitate the association of intelligence in the poster to the reader, provides no more than illusionary and self-delusionary camoflague for the lack of substance in your own posts.

No. NO. No they're not. Not even nearly. The range of opinions will be a bell curve with outliers, sure. But the vast, vast, VAST majority of opinions will agree. @mods Can we please get a disclaimer on Winsors posts? It's clear that he is spreading misinformation on this subject.

Are you getting the same type as your first one, or a different one? I saw something a few days ago that was suggesting mixing vaccines seems like it has additional support. It particularly called out a mix of Johnson & Johnson with a Moderna booster as being super effective. Edit: Quick NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/health/covid-vaccine-mix-match.html "The results for people who initially received a Johnson & Johnson vaccine were particularly striking. Those receiving a Johnson & Johnson booster saw antibodies go up just fourfold. Switching to a Pfizer-BioNTech booster raised antibody levels by a factor of 35. A Moderna booster raised them 76-fold" I'll try and dig out the FDA article I saw if I have time today.

Yes

I’ve got to be honest. As someone who holds multiple ‘science’ degrees, married to someone with multiple degrees and a PhD in biological sciences, hearing a layperson tell me ‘they’ve done their research’ really makes me grind my teeth. I watched a YouTube episode about doctors once. Come here, let me take out that kidney of yours.

Chronic and almost incurable, too.

The ‘my uneducated skepticism is just as valid as truth presented by experts’ is yet another bullshit argument by people trying to empower their own ignorance. I’m sorry - but if 100s of thousands of trained experts around the globe say one thing, and someone calls it The ‘Truth‘’ like it’s even possible to be some sort of conspiracy theory then they’re not a thinking skeptic - They’re an arrogant asshole. Equating their own ignorance of a subject with the weight of not only numbers, but years of specific and dedicated training and experience in the subject. It would be like me stating that my take on aircraft safety procedures are just as valid as every check-captain because I’ve taken one lesson. See? That would be me being an arrogant Asshole. Dressing that arrogance up in language to make your argument appear smarter is nothing more than a con-trick. An old one. You want to explain your position and get numbers of normal people behind it then you explain in the simplest terms because not everyone is an expert… Yes. Humans suck at complex problems. That’s why we invented computers. They also suck at generational planning of projects. Both are a function of our biology. But sometimes simple solutions are the best because either ‘they’re just the best’, or even if they’re not them it’s a hell of a lot easier to roll out a simple process and have some benefit than it is to roll out a mathematically perfect one that has no chance of adoption because it’s so complicated. It’s the same argument second amendment fans use - if you can’t come up with a single solution that fixes everything in one go, even fringe cases, then it’s best to do nothing. If the covid vaccine and lockdowns had been implemented properly then there was a very good chance we could have beaten covid - at least temporarily and nationally which would have bought time for further research. It wasn’t, and over 700,000 people in the US are dead because of it. The reason heretics should be burned is BECAUSE THIS SHIT MATTERS. It’s not philosophy - people are dead because people like you weaken the arguments for safety and you might convince others which can potentially end up hurting me and mine.

Nice idea, but the fucks who would use this will sign it while guzzling Tums and still believe not only in their self righteousness, but in their victory at beating the satanic system.

But they didn’t. So the question is utterly moot. Hey if gravity didn’t exist what ELSE might not! THINK ABOUT IT!! Only we see the TRUTH!! etc etc.

No. That's not how it works. You want me to read what you think? Then the onus is on you to choose a source that I can at least respect. If I start quoting my mate Jeff the brickie from the pub as a source of covid information then you could rightly tell me to shut up and have no need to refute any of the points he made, because it's a stupid source of information at the start. We don't need to go any deeper than that as it's a waste of time. I'm not sure why you feel the need to throw some Latin in there - it's not as impressive as you might think, but hey - maybe my classical education may finally have a point if you want to go that route? I'll also just leave this here from the BBC: "The BBC can reveal that more than a third of 26 major trials of the drug for use on Covid have serious errors or signs of potential fraud. None of the rest show convincing evidence of ivermectin's effectiveness. Dr Kyle Sheldrick, one of the group investigating the studies, said they had not found "a single clinical trial" claiming to show that ivermectin prevented Covid deaths that did not contain "either obvious signs of fabrication or errors so critical they invalidate the study"." https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58170809

You really need to read sites that have less of a bias toward conspiracy theories and Covid misinformation. It might help you. The Desert Review QUESTIONABLE SOURCE A questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency, and/or is fake news. Fake News is the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for profit or influence (Learn More). Sources listed in the Questionable Category may be very untrustworthy and should be fact-checked on a per-article basis. Please note sources on this list are not considered fake news unless specifically written in the reasoning section for that source. Overall, we rate The Desert Review Right-Center Biased and Questionable based on the frequent promotion of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and misinformation regarding covid-19. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-desert-review-bias/

For me this is just more evidence of the need for super rigorous governmental oversight of large corporations. Game-changing ones. I know, I know. That's a dirty word, but the reality is that ANY company wants to grow to be as large and successful as possible, and if that happens there is probably a point in that company life cycle where they hit a 'too big to be allowed to fail' size. (I'm using 'size' as a shortened term for 'level of influence' which is what we're really talking about). To cross that boundary should change the rules of the corporate / capitalist game, utterly. You don't get to keep doing the same stuff that got you to that size and influence - if you want the government to bail you out then the rules of engagement change to a super conservative risk profile. Some sort of extremely formalzed audit and risk assessment needs to be carried out with actions required to take the next step - if you've grown on a rediculous amount of borrowed capital then unless you take measures to bring the debt ratio to whatever the accepted value is, not only do you not make the 'too big to be allowed to fail' list, but your credit simply gets suspended. Deliberately crash the company to force it to fail to ta size that is sustainable BEFORE it impacts the global economy. That would suck for the investors (but that's the risk), and the employees, but that's a 10000x better than it sucking for people in another country who don't even know the name of the company. Right now a company can use whatever shady tactics they can get away with to get as successful as possible, and if they cross that threshold (as Evergrande did) the all of the risk gets transferred somewhere else, without any process. It's fucked up.

My wife and I both caught our first proper cold that our little one brought back from school about 10 days ago. Since then this cold has hit both of us harder than one ever has before. I ususally take a week to get over a cold, but my wife is always done in about 2 or 3 days, and never gets as sick as I do - I'm super envious of her. This one absolutlely FUCKED us both for about 10 days. Today is the first day I feel functional. It was really, really bad, but strain-wise, probably no different than a normal common cold. There's a phrase going around now called 'Immunity debt' - basically because we've not been exposed to all the small pathogens over the last 18 months that we usually are, our immune systems are effectively in hibernation. This means that when you do come across a virus it's going to spread faster in a population and hit harder than it normally would. I tell you what - it's made getting the flu vaccine much more of a priority for me this year. If a flu does start going around it's really going to hurt.

If people won't believe science enough to take life-saving vaccinations based on their political stance then there is precisely zero chance that anyone on the right will give a fuck about whatever the results of a study by the CDC on gun violence is. It's a massive waste of money before it even begins. Get right wing politicians to state publically that if an independant study shows x, y and z as resultts then they'll alter their opinions BEFORE spending the money to do the study, otherwise it's utterly pointless. Even then the cowards still wouldn't stick to their promises.

Crash all the federally funded recovery programs and then point to the democrats saying 'look what they've done' when the economy tanks. Shitty politics 101.

I love that if people follow this advice they're locked into a cycle of getting infinite vaccines.

I have EXACTLY the same issue. Newtonian physics is something that we can inherently relate to because the physicality of it is something we're exposed to every day. Even if we don't have specialized knowlege to understand esoteric details the system generally FEELS right based on a reference that we're familiar with - our normal lives. But I think quantum mechanics isn't like that. It REQUIRES a specialized language (mathematics) to describe and to create a reference framework in order to penetrate even just a little into the subject. We don't accidentally pick up any gross concepts in our everyday lives that apply to it in the same way that we do to Newtonian motion. I think this is a good example of the broader issue - being sceptical about something that we don't understand despite others who have a much deeper knowlege giving us information of why we shouldn't be. Personally, I think being skeptical of something I DO understand and have a reasoned argument for that skeptisim is a more robust way to shape my opinions. For something like quantum mechanics I have to trust people who understand the detail far better than me (while still understanding that it's a second hand position). I think this is particularly a problem with the vaccinations because of the pop-science as it is explained by the media. Invariably all of these sources give just enough basic knoledge to make people feel like experts, despite not having the background to be able to accurately apply or extrapolate data. Dunning-Kruger absolutely applies here.

How much of it do you actually understand?