mikem170

56 ms·

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by mikem170 5y ago
I was just thinking this. The more control that governments try to exert over their populations the more of a reaction there will be to avoid these controls. One might assume the more they regulate bitcoin that more difficult to regulate al
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by mikem170 5y ago
FYI, this worked for me only after I added a trailing slash to the gitdir: path.
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by mikem170 5y ago
I don't dispute anything in the Washington post link you sent, perhaps we are just reading it differently. I didn't think that it supported your position. Here's some of the poignant WHO statements from that article, made bet
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by mikem170 5y ago
I would agree, covid fits the medical definition of pandemic. Saying it is a "so called" pandemic is not accurate. But are you any better than the person you called out with your projection that covid will cause "tens of mil
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by mikem170 5y ago
I mentioned this because the comment I was responding to was factually incorrect when they states that Sweden mortality rate was worse than Norway over the past few years. It was not. The article I linked to explains the significance, which
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by mikem170 5y ago
Yeah, the lockdowns in the UK were interesting, particularly were they would announce them ahead of time, giving everyone time to travel and/or bar hop. I also thought it was interesting that the delta wave seemed to disappear in the U
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by mikem170 5y ago
I didn't mean it as an argument. Just throwing an additional fact out there. It seems to be relevant, given the impact that covid has on people over 60/70/80/90 years old.
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by mikem170 5y ago
As far as I know at that time they had no proof of person to person transmission. There are many coronaviruses in the wild, across many animal hosts, some can hop from person to person, some cannot. Many/most medical professionals did
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by mikem170 5y ago
Did you know that the same number of people have died in Sweden and Norway over the last four years? [0] For some reason more people died in Norway than in Sweden in the couple years before the pandemic, then Sweden caught up. They are tied
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by mikem170 5y ago
Over the last four years the all cause mortality has been the same for Sweden and Norway [0]. So it would appear more people died in Norway before the pandemic, and more people in Sweden since, equalling out over the last four years. Maybe
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by mikem170 5y ago
> There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects. 1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of th
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by mikem170 5y ago
I guess I'd be worried about the rate of breakthrough infections amongst vaccinated people in Israel, the first good data we have (the reason for booster shots). That same data showed that natural immunity was much better. [0] It may b
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by mikem170 5y ago
That would make sense, except for the countries that did lock down and did worse. It would help a lot to have a satisfactory explanation for that, too. Geography by itself is not enough to eliminate the doubt sown by that contradiction.
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by mikem170 5y ago
Over the last four years the all cause mortality has been the same for Sweden and Norway [0]. So it would appear more people died in Norway before the pandemic, and more people in Sweden since, equalling out over the last four years. So may
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by mikem170 5y ago
> Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years). The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years. Here's an article which [0] references a pa
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by mikem170 5y ago
The surveillance allows the government to better target the violence. Building lists of troublemakers, lists of those with guns, collecting information that can be used for blackmail, social credit scores, etc. The Stasi, the East German se
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by mikem170 5y ago
Cool! I like numbers, too. How about this: NYC = 8.8 million people [0], U.S. death rate is currently 8.997 per 1000 [1], which works out to 216 people dying per day in NYC. The current 4 week average for covid deaths in NYC is 5 per day [2
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by mikem170 5y ago
Conversely, is there a reason we should be optimizing the regulations we, actual human beings, live under for the convenience of national/international corporations?
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by mikem170 5y ago
This is how the KGB, Stasi, and other secret police organizations work. It's a way to extra-judicially monitor and control the population. This should give you pause for thought. Law enforcement that the public can trust is a big deal.
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by mikem170 5y ago
I've heard of this, going back a year or two. The sheriff's target the households presented by the algorithms with the intention of fining, arresting, and otherwise legally harassing the targeted families in an attempt to drive th
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by mikem170 5y ago
There could be protectionist duties. These are sometimes justified due to the cost of loosing jobs. A trade-off. I'm just not sure of relevance of the cost of asian versus african shirts in the U.S. It's not just shipping containe
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by mikem170 5y ago
I don't know if that's fair. It could be said that you are advocating for putting people in Africa out of work, messing with local economies, and people's livelihoods. It seems these trade-offs are involved whenever talking a
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by mikem170 5y ago
The idea is that "Made in Africa" clothes costs less locally in Africa than clothes made in Asia and shipped to Africa. Giving out free clothes in Africa puts "Made in Africa" out of that business. What costs less for yo
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by mikem170 5y ago
Didn't they scan carry on bags before the TSA? It would be the same thing, just with the newer scanners.
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by mikem170 5y ago
The coverage in the media given to non-scientific points of view is also a problem, often turning into blatant propaganda. I'm thinking of things like the story making the rounds last week about Jennifer Aniston cutting off contact wit
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by mikem170 5y ago
Thanks for that thoughtful reply. Recently I've been throwing around the word democracy as a way of calling out decidedly undemocratic political activity, because of the positive connotations the word has, given the narrative we'r
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by mikem170 5y ago
I heard it's a lot more than the specific store app tracking people in that store. I've heard that there are tons of toolkits and sdks used to build apps that have this kind of tracking built into them, for example [0]: 79 out of
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by mikem170 5y ago
I read up on this [0]. It looks like it helps to have a newer phone, and even then this feature is inconsistent across models, with some phones spewing non-random frames even when wifi is off and/or depending on how location services i
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by mikem170 5y ago
> Apparently USA voters do think the spending is adequate I'm not sure how well the federal government reflects the will of the people, given how campaigns are funded here, using means which are illegal in most other countries. Not
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by mikem170 5y ago
Countries bully other countries when they can. Large powerful countries become large powerful bullies. Those in the service, who tend to be working class or poor, and those in other countries pay the ultimate price. The powerful grow more p

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