collias

Can you expound on this? First I'm hearing of it, and I can't find anything about former CIA helping to organize.

Taxing the rich is not going to solve any of this. It may help some, but it's nothing like the panacea certain people pretend it is.

If we took all the assets from all the billionaires in the US, that total is something like $6-7 trillion if we pretend there's no asset price decrease in the selling of said assets.

Sounds like a lot, but we're nearly $40 trillion in debt. Taxing the rich heavily won't solve a spending problem.

The federal government specifically, and the admin class in general was a lot smaller during our parents' era.

I'm totally on board with a gaming-focused distro from Valve. I'll switch the second they get proper Nvidia GPU support. So far, no luck with that.

But water doesn't make me as happy.

Logic Pro does this. Even GarageBand (free if you have an Apple device) has pretty decent AI drummers.

I find this to be profoundly depressing.

I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs, and playing them with (actual) instruments. It's something I get immense pleasure from, and for once, I'm actually getting some earned traction. In another life, I may have been a musician, and it's something I fantasize about regularly.

With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music. It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly, and kill budding musicians in their crib.

I suppose this is the same existential crisis that other professions/skills are also going through now. The feeling of a loss of purpose, or a loss of a fantasy in learning a new skill and switching careers, is pretty devastating.

Econ 101. If an employer can pay someone less to do the same job, they will.

https://www.epi.org/press/a-majority-of-migrant-workers-empl...

Why not both?

Stunningly beautiful write up, Lars. You have an amazing gift.

God bless you and your family.

To be fair, I'm not sure choosing electric over gasoline cars at that time would have much effect on our current climate situation, assuming equal timelines for renewable tech.

All those cars would have needed electricity from somewhere, and at the time, gasoline and coal were pretty cheap ways to generate it.

The more worrying thing here is the "circulate" part. Meaning that the lipid packages containing the mRNA sequences are traveling throughout the body, instead of staying at the injection site.

To add to this, there has been evidence that the spike proteins created by the mRNA sequences stay around in the body longer than expected. CDC has now implicitly admitted this.

CDC snapshot July 22: https://web.archive.org/web/20220722141942/https://www.cdc.g...

CDC snapshot July 23: https://web.archive.org/web/20220723161304/https://www.cdc.g...

Notice the change to the "Facts About mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines" section.

How are they getting these cars? They only offer Teslas, and ordering a (new) Tesla right now puts you at least 6 months out from delivery.

Repairability is certainly something that could be improved, and extending the life of your machine is great for the environment.

However, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine with a better power-performance curve than the M1 (or now M2) machines. Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment; the new chips are doing much more for much less.

Additionally, Apple tends to support old hardware far longer than competitors. My personal machine is still a 2012 MBP and it's just now starting to not receive the latest OS updates.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and likely go hand-in-hand.

Western Europe definitely gets the better end of the deal on the Gulf Stream.

Places like Spain and France get the pleasant end of the stream that brings slightly warmer weather than they otherwise would have given the latitude.

Meanwhile, the eastern part of the US gets the chaotic middle portion that generates hurricanes.

Give every home owner 30-year locked interest rate mortgages at <3%, then immediately raise the rates again, and no one wants to sell...ever.

It makes no financial sense to sell a property locked into such a low interest rate while rates are moving up.

Combine this situation with fairly stringent housing code requirements that make new housing difficult and expensive to build, and you have a recipe for low supply. Housing prices are exploding, and will continue to do so until one of the above situations change.

At the current rate, we will have an entire generation of renters unless they inherit property.

Reminder that many European countries do not suggest the vaccine for children, and some have even banned it in the case of Moderna.

Covid-19 vaccines don't prevent infection, and it is impossible to achieve herd immunity with them. These are facts, and they are relevant to the comment I was originally replying on.

I wasn't implying that Covid is harmless, only that vaccinating children against it should be a choice given the data on risks/benefits we currently have.

It's a neutral point. Neither the vaccine or the virus have been around long enough for long-term data.

Data from other countries with a >90% vaccinated rate for Covid would suggest otherwise. Take a look at Israel or Ireland in the past few months, for example. Israel is currently debating whether or not a 5th booster will be enough as they're seeing record infections.

You're right, no vaccine is 100% effective.

But there are vaccines that are more than ~75% effective at preventing infection, which is the number that Fauci kept mentioning when this all started.

Sure, here's some research: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

As of last week, a total of 727 children 0-17 have died from Covid since the pandemic started, and that's including the children with comorbidities.

And some more: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

There is a real risk of myocarditis for children after receiving the vaccine. Many cases of this require a hospital visit.

There is a cost/benefit analysis on the vaccine for children that looks very different than the cost/benefit to adults. Where there is a risk, there should be a choice.

Regarding the effects of "long covid", it seems to be pure speculation. The data is changing on this all the time, and not enough time has passed since the beginning of the pandemic to really nail down long-term effects of infection.

Herd immunity only applies if the vaccine is sterilizing and prevents infection. The Covid vaccines do not, so herd immunity is impossible with them.

Those vaccines are actually sterilizing/neutralizing, preventing infection for diseases that are significantly harmful for children.

The Covid-19 vaccines famously are not sterilizing, and Covid-19 itself does not pose any sort of significant risk to otherwise healthy children.

The very conflict this article is about gave birth the the Red Cross.

I'd definitely consider 50% efficacy against the most prevalent variant (by far) after 10 weeks to be "waning".

That might change if we ever get a booster targeted toward Omicron specifically, but we don't have one, and by the time we do, I'm sure there will be other variants around.

I agree with you that the risk/reward matrix varies greatly per individual; there are many like you who have had similar reactions.

I was just wondering what data your "3 is important" statement was based on.

Why the first booster but not the rest, or why the first booster at all?