makomk

61 ms·

631.
by makomk 5y ago
Giving a third dose of the vaccine would probably also give people in the two-dose group additional protection against the Delta variant. The question is whether that additional protection is actually worth the additional doses of vaccine r
632.
by makomk 5y ago
Covid-19 vaccination used to reduce viral load of subsequent infections. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work with the current Delta variant - both the CDC in the US and PHE in the UK have released studies finding that the viral lo
633.
by makomk 5y ago
The thing is, it's not actually a fallacy when you're working out how much benefit getting rid of the remaining unvaccinated people would have. Think about it this way: if there are say 20 vaccinated people and 5 unvaccinated pe
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by makomk 5y ago
The most astounding thing is that the people who are so confident that their current understanding of morals is absolutely correct and there is no possible reason to debate it or challenge it were, not very long ago at all, just as confiden
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by makomk 5y ago
I'm pretty sure some of the more high-end fridge compressors used by companies like LG already work more or less like this, with marginal efficiency gains but some improvement in noise.
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by makomk 5y ago
You've seen this right? https://www.wired.com/2007/06/st-cia/ There was a more detailed presentation about it from Defcon or somewhere, and one of the details that apparently gave them away was that the
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by makomk 5y ago
Part of the problem is that the entire mainstream media narrative of the pandemic was warped by using it to get Trump out of office, which lead to downplaying how important China's actions were. In particular, I remember a lot of the p
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by makomk 5y ago
It's not that inconsistent from a UK perspective, I don't think. The government is still pushing vaccination hard because it protects the people being vaccinated from hospitalization and death and reduces the rate at which Covid s
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by makomk 5y ago
I'd argue that pointing to what gets shared, rather than what reaches people and actually gets viewed, as proof that Facebook is a hotbed of right-wing content and that the idea they discriminate against it is a lie is actually outrigh
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by makomk 5y ago
I think this is mostly only an issue for people who need rehydration due to severe diarrhoea though.
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by makomk 5y ago
In the real world, the vaccines don't provide anywhere near 99.99% protection. There are some misleading stats which claim 99.9% protection, but the trouble is that they do stuff like including a whole bunch of deaths from the winter w
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by makomk 5y ago
Yeah. In reality the main reason new audio codecs are developed post-Opus isn't technical, it's so that companies can get their patents into new standards and rake in the licensing royalties. There are better codecs for really low
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by makomk 5y ago
If I'm following all this correctly, the role of the person standing behind the committer that used the n-word in commit messages was literally to purge "toxic" elements and enforce social justice orthodoxy within the Perl Fo
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by makomk 5y ago
Also, the running costs of a heat pump are reasonably comparable to gas heating, so you don't even really save money by doing this. (Plus they're more complex and expensive to replace when they break, the installation process is r
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by makomk 5y ago
Coal isn't exactly great in terms of methane emissions either. If I remember rightly, a bunch of unexplained methane in the atmosphere was tracked down to coal mining in China in particular.
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by makomk 5y ago
Yeah, if the replies to that tweet are to be believed there have been even higher measurements from similar European weather stations under similar circumstances that simply weren't recognized as records due to the measurement issues.
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by makomk 5y ago
There are actually two questions: how much do masks prevent borderline contacts from being infected, and how broad a range of contact do they work over. As far as I can tell the two things are at odds with each other: the shallower the slop
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by makomk 5y ago
Yeah, it really doesn't seem all that plausible that cloth masks do much at this point. Not only was there never good evidence for them working, the best ones only block something like 90% of virus-bearing particles. To put this in con
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by makomk 5y ago
There's no such thing as just holding dollars when operating at this kind of billion-dollar scale. Even if you could, say, find a bank that would let you just keep that amount in an account with them, the bank would have to do the same
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by makomk 5y ago
The current vaccines + some minor measures probably wouldn't be enough. It's quite plausible that the Delta variant spreads as effectively in a fully vaccinated population as the original variant did in an entirely unvaccinated on
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by makomk 5y ago
It is not possible to reduce R below 1 through vaccination alone with the current vaccines and the current Delta variant. The press has had a tendency to downplay or even outright lie about this, especially in countries with lower vaccine u
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by makomk 5y ago
With delta, it probably isn't possible to get herd immunity by vaccinating even 100% of the population (not that they're eligible anyway) - it just isn't effective enough at preventing transmission. The maths on this is actua
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by makomk 5y ago
Only if no variant appears that has substantial vaccine escape. The thing is that if this is possible there's no level of vaccination that will stop this from happening because it's impossible to achieve herd immunity against the
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by makomk 5y ago
There are actually industries which China dominates where the cost of energy is the main driving factor, like aluminium production. The thing is that as far as anyone can tell it makes zero economic sense for that to be made in China in s
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by makomk 5y ago
You're right that people don't share the same sets of facts - for example, at least in the US Covid "non-denialists" substantially and consistently overestimate the risk, especially the risk to young people: https:&#x2F
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by makomk 5y ago
There's actually a really robust-looking study just out in the UK sampling the population to find how much less likely vaccinated people are to be positive for Covid than non-vaccinated people: https://www.ipsos.com/ips
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by makomk 5y ago
Recent reports indicate that the reason it's getting FDA approval so soon is not because of any specific scientific evidence or the standard FDA process, but instead it's being approved early as a deliberate political tactic to un
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by makomk 5y ago
The US seems to have a weird ideological opposition to the idea that recovered people have immunity from Covid, even though all the science indicates that they do. There's even weird articles in the press from time to time boggling at
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by makomk 5y ago
It wasn't just the CDC though - the entire US and to some extent global media, medical and politicial establishments got behind the idea that travel bans were ineffective and counter-productive, the New York Times included. In fact, it
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by makomk 5y ago
I'm sure the CDC could've done better, but even if they did the political benefits in terms of public trust likely wouldn't have actually materialized. I live in England, the country whose early warnings about the dangers of

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