makomk

52 ms·

601.
by makomk 5y ago
Yeah, I don't think cracking down on the most prominent brands is going to fix the Amazon fake reviews problem. It means that companies can't build an actual reputation based on the quality of their products, so buyers are more re
602.
by makomk 5y ago
China is already starting to leverage that trade with Australia to push demands that are fundamentally incompatible with Australia's status as a democratic, independent country, plus they've been carrying out aggressive military e
603.
by makomk 5y ago
All the blaming of the UK seems to have been really blatant scapegoating that went unchallenged because it fit with what the media wanted people to believe, though. The UK suffered the same shortfall in yield of the AstraZeneca vaccine as e
604.
by makomk 5y ago
China seems to have a tendency towards big, high-profile projects that they can use to project a narrative of technological superiority but don't fit into any kind of useful overall strategy. I wouldn't be surprised if they build
605.
by makomk 5y ago
Any attempt to suppress "harmful misinformation" will be seen as partisan because, well, it pretty much is. There was a huge amount of utter bullshit pushed on social media about the 2016 election being stolen by fraud, including
606.
by makomk 5y ago
Yes, what people need to understand about the history of British unions is that they effectively shut down the entire country repeatedly to try and force the Government to keep coal mining which wasn't viable anymore going. That's
607.
by makomk 5y ago
They're trying to spin it as reducing the environmental impact, but the actual details in the article seem iffy. Glass fibre reinforced plastic is basically non-recyclable and they only have some vague ambition to make them out of some
608.
by makomk 5y ago
From the article: "They made their recommendation after the JCVI - the scientific body advising the government on vaccines - said it did not recommend vaccinating healthy children on health grounds alone." The JCVI are the body th
609.
by makomk 5y ago
On the other hand, the UK vaccination advisory board does not recommend vaccinating under-16s because they consider there to be inadequate evidence the risks outweigh the benefits. (Despite considerable and very public political pressure to
610.
by makomk 5y ago
The UK probably has a large chunk of the benefit it could ever possibly get in terms of stopping the hospitals from being overwhelmed - vaccination levels are very high in the age groups that're most at risk here.
611.
by makomk 5y ago
You see the sibling comment to that one, about how the UK's "very high vaccination rates" means that we've been out of lockdown for a while, are returning to normal life, and have very few hospitalizations for Covid? Wel
612.
by makomk 5y ago
Jacobson v. Massachusetts was a case about smallpox vaccination. For context, smallpox kills about 30% of those who are infected and the vaccine is so effective that the disease has been completely eradicated. Covid-19 is a lot less deadly
613.
by makomk 5y ago
The headline of that CDC article is misleading: the actual study compares the protection given by being previously infected with that given by being previously infected and then also vaccinated. There's no comparison against people who
614.
by makomk 5y ago
Not only that, but there seems to be a campaign against the press actually informing people about the limited effectiveness of the vaccine at preventing infection and spread. The stat that actually matters is the relative reduction in risk
615.
by makomk 5y ago
Big corporations already been doing this to a certain extent with China - it's amazing how gay characters just vanish from works like movies they want to sell there.
616.
by makomk 5y ago
The thing is, from what I can tell the migrant workers doing these kinds of poorly-paid jobs didn't have to worry about the cost of pregnancy or sending kids to a half-decent primary school because their families weren't actually
617.
by makomk 5y ago
All the fact checking sites absolutely do treat what they consider to be misleading narratives as outright lies when the right does it though. So at least to some extent, that strong qualitative difference is just due to claims being treate
618.
by makomk 5y ago
I think you're reversing cause and effect there. The reason NSW and now Victoria in Australia are no longer aiming to eliminate Covid is because their efforts to do so simply did not work once the Delta variant hit and could not be mad
619.
by makomk 5y ago
It was, especially getting rid of the kind of immigration that turned blue-collar working-class jobs into something that no-one local could possibly live on. Perhaps more importantly, all the educated influential opponents of Brexit insiste
620.
by makomk 5y ago
Unfortunately, the British press and all the wealthy people with second homes still have Brexit as a scapegoat for why cafes and shops in tourist destinations can't find staff. Never mind the fact that AirBNB and second homes have push
621.
by makomk 5y ago
I'm pretty sure this is the exact opposite of reality though - there have been clinics for trans children in the UK for decades, and one of the main things affecting the availability of treatment is that the number of cases referred to
622.
by makomk 5y ago
Lockdown means that it is literally illegal to make that drive to the coastline right now, and it will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The only people who get to enjoy being in "one of the most beautiful places in the world
623.
by makomk 5y ago
The trouble is that traditionally, I think the permanent Bluetooth MAC was how phones knew to reconnect with devices like headphones so it couldn't easily be randomized. This was all designed in an era when people were less paranoid ab
624.
by makomk 5y ago
The question is how useful variant-specific boosters are at this point in time, though. As I understand it there are two things working against them. Firstly, one of the main ways Delta seems to beat vaccination is by replicating more effic
625.
by makomk 5y ago
The press has done a really bad job of explaining the truck driver shortage - mostly because they want to use it as an anti-Brexit weapon - but "truck driver immigration" doesn't solve the problem. Basically, a lot of UK comp
626.
by makomk 5y ago
Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a Republican conspiracy theorist when a Democrat is president, like now. It was a perfectly respectable position held by tech-literate Democrat supporters in the 2000s under Bush,
627.
by makomk 5y ago
There's very limited bandwidth available on most of the ham radio bands and other users don't want people taking up large chunks of bandwidth with wide, high-bitrate data signals and making the bands unusable for everyone else.
628.
by makomk 5y ago
The common cold is caused by a bunch of viruses, including both rhinoviruses and coronaviruses. There's four different human coronaviruses that we know about, one of which (HKU1) was only discovered surprisingly recently.
629.
by makomk 5y ago
That's from the clinical trials, which are like two variants behind what people are actually being exposed to in the wild right now. The vaccines are much less effective at preventing people from catching and spreading the currently-c
630.
by makomk 5y ago
Except that all the existing evidence suggests your argument is backwards. Whilst Covid-19 vaccination doesn't provide full protection for either the vaccinated or those around them, it seems to be much more effective at protecting the

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