Tophattingson
No bio...
User ID: 1078
Covid vaccination has such a minor effect compared to other patient choices that you would never bother surveying for it unless you are doing so for political partisan reasons. Covid just isn't dangerous enough for that to matter.
To provide an example, heavy smoking (which is a lower threshold than you'd expect) costs the average heavy smoker about 10 QALY, so any amount you charge for being unvaccinated, you'd have to charge heavy smokers ~500 times more. Already this stretches the bounds of feasibility. Any cost high enough to cover the cost of repeatedly vaccinating yourself for covid (Yep, that's a thing still, are you up to date according to local recommendations?) will be greater than the additional insurance cost, unless the premium increases by so much that you bankrupt all smokers. Not to mention the "gay tax" you'll have to charge for HIV risk, which for sexually active gay men is also a much higher risk than covid.
Edit: For the sake of providing real-world numbers, with the caveat that the UK doesn't operate on an insurance model, official recommendations are 1 booster shot every 6 months for £100 each when offered privately. Therefore if you increase insurance premiums on the unvaccinated, they will need to be at least £200/y more to be more expensive than simply being unvaccinated. Therefore you'd want to look at charging heavy smokers an extra £100,000 a year, which is multiple times the average annual income in the UK.
I'm afraid no matter what you try to do to construct a rational basis for punishing covid vaccine dissidents, it will succumb to the simple fact that covid isn't dangerous enough to justify it, unless you are also willing to simultaneously hit other groups with orders of magnitude more severe punishments.
Tophattingson
3d ago
I find it fair to prioritize people who were not complicit in causing the health care emergency.
Sure, but there is no existing policy for this, no past policy, and to bring it in for 2021 would obviously be perceived as an ad-hoc move to punish political enemies.
Further, if done in a dispassionate way, the main people who are complicit in causing a COVID emergency will be the elderly for the crime of being old.
It would be also compatible with free market solutions like some anti-vaxxers voluntarily paying a private ICU facility a premium to keep a fraction of a bed to compensate for their higher risk of overwhelming the medical system.
What is the risk of "overwhelming" a free market private medical system? This is like saying gluttonous people should have to pay restaurants a premium in case they show up when the restaurant is already full - a misunderstanding of what a free market would actually mean in terms of having the choice to turn away customers.
This is very different to my approach to other vaccines where the immunized do not spread the disease, and being unvaccinated means, in the more extreme cases, that you are actively playing for team Nurgle.
Again this would end up being ad-hoc because we don't actually treat behaviours that spread disease like this in proportion to their risk of spreading disease. Outside of obvious culture war examples like anal sex, consider that alive while immunosuppressed will do a lot of damage all by itself.
Tophattingson
3d ago
Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
Should Conservatives be a fan of law and order in Stalin's USSR?
This is just bad understanding of what conservatives believe. There are authorities worth following, and authorities that are not, differing slightly depending on form of conservatism.
Tophattingson
3d ago
The problem with suddenly slapping a QALY triage system on covid vaccination is that covid just doesn't have that big an effect on QALY. About 1-2 weeks loss per infection on average. This pales in comparison to other risks, like smoking (loss measured in years) and even to politically polarised risks like being a sexually active gay man. If you were assembling a checklist or survey you use for the calculation you wouldn't bother putting covid vaccination on it over hundreds of other risk factors.
This policy would rightly be seen by its victims as a blatant and obvious political attack on them specifically rather than part of a calculated dispassionate healthcare strategy. So no different than the mandates themselves.
People travel less to places when they perceive a danger, even if the danger wasn't presented to them by any policy or authorities.
The danger was presented to them by policy and authorities because the prevalence of covid is effectively invisible to the average person in the absence of being told about it by authorities. What exactly would someone notice, absent being told, that would inform them that covid was around and uniquely dangerous? Approximately nothing. They'd notice people getting colds, as people always do, and old people dying at a fairly similar rate to what old people died at a decade or two ago, and short of carrying out their own far-reaching statistical survey on death rates they'd have no idea anything was amiss. This is roughly what happened in the Flu pandemics of the 50s and 60s - nobody really cared because there's no particular reason you'd notice an elevated risk.
This is hardly some tourists notice everyone who visits X mysteriously comes back in a body bag and therefore stop visiting X. There really is no danger that a layman would be able to detect were it not for authorities insisting there was a danger.
As a rough stand in for "People's unwillingness to go do things during a pandemic"
Not a good way to define it as we have been in a pandemic since some time in the 1980s.
Furthermore cutting out 2020 because "Biden wasn't in charge yet" when 2020 had by far the lowest amount of travel and activity
I thought I had explained this clearly enough, but to try to explain this again: The reason I have cut it out is because the initial dispute is that I believe Biden's actions during covid have done more damage to tourism than Trump's actions on immigration. Therefore, including Trump's actions during covid as part of Biden's actions would be unfair to Biden.
The dropoff of 10-15% suggests that 50% of all travel from foreign visitors has been curtailed by these chilling effects - much more than even the most generous example you can find of vaccine rules.
No, unless you have evidence that the dropoff is all foreign visitors.
until we get total numbers at year's end) has had fewer visitors in 2025 than 2023, an astonishing fact when you consider the earth's population has grown hundreds of millions over that time period.
There's a reason I selected average of 2021 to 2023 as the criteria. We skip 2020 because the Biden admin was not in charge then, so we include the remaining 3 years where pandemic-excused policies were relevant to tourists, though by 2023 they were pretty weak but not entirely absent.
You're welcome to provide data for the average of 2021 to 2023 against 2025 for Vegas.
Regardless, I specified "Visitors to the US" because the initial discussion was about international tourism, and "Visitors to Vegas" is a poor proxy for this because of domestic tourism. Most numbers I could find on the percentage of visitors to Vegas that are domestic tourists puts it somewhere between 70% and 80%.
To decouple the chilling effect from the desire not to travel during a pandemic is quite simple, just compare the total decline to the specific decline in places with legal restrictions, the difference will tell you approximately how many people didn't travel because they were banned, and how many didn't travel because they were afraid of the deadly global pandemic.
"Afraid of the deadly global pandemic" is not something independent of government policy, but instead the product of government policy. If a government makes people afraid to travel by telling them covid will kill them if they do, that's still the government's fault.
This is something we could agree on, but probably won't: The chilling effect of both covid restrictions and ICE deportations is the direct result of government policy, not something that happens without. Yet for some reason you think the chilling effect of covid restrictions is merely an organic "desire not to travel".
A good example seems to be Egypt, a country that is a tourist destination, centrally located, and had very light corona virus requirements (Between August 15th 2021 and June 16th 2022 you just had to show a negative test within the 3 days before arrival).
Not a comprehensive account of tourism restrictions, you need to also consider domestic restrictions that would affect the activities that tourists can do once in the country.
But regardless, we can use your method, with the actual source Wikipedia is using for these graphs.
Egypt's numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors: 2020: 28% 2021: 62% 2022: 90%
Mexico's numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors: 2020: 55% 2021: 71% 2022: 85%
Australia will be an example of an extreme restriction country. Numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors via this dataset as OWID is incomplete: 2020: 19% 2021: 3% 2022: 39%
That some countries had returned to 90% of 2019 tourism numbers by 2022, while Australia remains down at 39%, strongly suggests that the overwhelming majority of the decline in tourism can be attributed to government policy. If the decline in tourism was instead mainly due to fear of covid, then tourists would have no reason to continue visiting Egypt while refusing to visit Australia.
Tophattingson
17d ago
Most viable theories that could plausibly be investigated via this method are not theories of everything, but rather more modest ideas. I already have a few modest novel hypotheses of my own that I lack the resources to test, and thus they will remain just that:
- Is pollen more akin to a toxin, where at certain concentrations anyone will be affected, rather than just an allergen. The experience of Japan's hayfever epidemic suggests something like this, but it would take experiments to prove it. I actually fleshed this idea out, if anyone cares to know more.
- Do viral epidemics exhibit chaotic, rather than predictable behaviour, does this explain the failure of covid modelling, and does viral interference explain why countries with wildly divergent responses to covid saw identical results (i.e Sweden and UK both had the same first wave, despite the former doing approximately nothing and the latter turning itself into a totalitarian regime in the name of stopping the spread). Yes, of course I'm going to get one of these in. I also fleshed this idea out.
- Similar to IQ measuring g factor, is there a an athletic equivalent that measures "p factor" - positive correlations among various physical tests beyond those that would be expected just from age. That someone good at one physical activity will generally be good at other seemingly unrelated physical activities.
- Did coastal settlements during the era of subsistence farming have better nutrition due to their reliance on a source of protein for food? Were they healthier? Stronger? Did they have longer life expectancies and fewer famines?
- Historically, how many deaths due to famine/starvation during the era of subsistence farming were actually caused by onerous taxation? There are entire groups in history who seem to have uprooted themselves for the sake of tax evasion, so surely there must have been something that pushed them to do so?
- Can ideas from linguistics and semiotics about the development of language and symbols also be applied to cuisine. Why are certain patterns, like dumplings, widespread, whereas others, like rotten fish, are not, even in societies that would have access to the relevant foods. Are there cuisine isolates where the desired properties of food in terms of taste or texture are outright different, rather than trying to achieve the same result but with different access to food?
- Relative to other periods in human history, contemporary western societies are unusually elderly and unusually obese. Is some of the modern prevalence of pornography caused by the relative scarcity of ideal-age ideal-weight partners in general society to admire/ogle (even when clothed), which porn instead provides in abundance and then takes to 11?
Tophattingson
20d ago
until roughly 2023
I personally date peak woke to October 7th 2023, and I believe that though there were trends that had started slowing the rise before then, the actual inflection point can be traced to Hamas's attack on Israel. Why something so seemingly specific and unrelated? It opened up a deep schism within woke between (to be as charitable as possible) those who support violent anti-colonial resistance by Palestinians, and those who object to Palestinian antisemitism. This rift is irreparable, as woke demands strident anti-racism as a core tenant which you cannot diverge on. Both sides now have mutually incompatible definitions of racism, and mutually accuse each other of being genocidally racist. Unlike previous splits, which tended to involve salami slicing off the least radical faction, this time they've split down the middle enough for all the energy woke once held to be consumed by infighting. It's unsustainable to be woke and a blood and soil ultranationalist at the same time.
Tophattingson
27d ago
Horror is slowly lifting the cover but for monsters, so we already do that outside the context of porn.
Tophattingson
27d ago
OF is actually a British site, though this is an easy mistake to make since the UK does not otherwise have big internet startups, and is instead known for cracking down on internet porn.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
so until a political leader comes along who shares our values, we're forced into alliances of convenience with whichever group isn't currently holding the whip [...] Tories when Labour are in power, Labour when the Tories are
Unnecessary. Both Tories and Labour back the OSA. Reform oppose the OSA.
Not a rightist, don't have a daughter. Way more concerned about the British regime fucking up their life with lockdowns 2 when the next spicy cold comes around than anyone not taking birth control or covid vaccines.
Hananiaism will always run aground on the problem that for every low human capital right-wing fad, there's something just as bad on offer from the left, with the added danger that it will also be state-mandated.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
On the other hand there are other parts of the gaming industry where the big breakthrough came from taking something relatively niche and low-budget and dumping huge amounts of money into it. To name two examples, Monster Hunter was fairly sizable as a franchise but was ticking over on PS2-era budgets by developing primarily for handhelds, then decided to go AAA for World and massively succeeded. Genshin Impact arrived in what was previously a low-budget Gacha gaming landscape and singlehandedly reshaped it, with a pricetag of $100m upfront and estimated $200m more a year since.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Even though corruption will always exist to some degree, it's much better to live in a society where it's at least not blatant and generally seen as a bad thing that should be dealt with, as opposed to a country like Russia where it broadly runs rampant.
It depends. In the UK, I would vastly prefer the blatant corruption of money under the table to get construction contracts done over the stealth corruption of planning permission restrictions in favour of incumbent property-owning rentseekers.
I see, per capita deaths.
If considering how a country might react to being attacked, scaling up the attack to match the scale of the country is useful for understanding effects. In New York after 9/11, it was often understood that everyone knew someone who knew someone who at least worked in the towers, if not was killed. In Israel, that instead applies to the entire country, something that might be the case in the US if an attack lead to the deaths of ~40,000 people.
You don’t see anything wrong with Israel killing, at minimum, 36,400,000 “Chinese civilians” worth of Gazans?
The government of Gaza already maximally wants to kill Israelis. We don't need to debate the hypothetical of how their opinions might change if they took casualties equivalent to 36,400,000 Chinese civilians. Their answer to whether they want to wage unrestricted warfare against Israel on October 6 2023 is "yes" and their answer to that question on 24 May 2025 remains "yes".
In WW2, the US was quite happy to kill 2-3 million Japanese in retaliation for Japan killing 2,400 at Pearl Harbour. Japan could have suffered a lot less casualties by choosing to surrender on December 8, but decided instead to fight a war and lose.
They are willing to surrender, but Israel refused to accept conditions.
An unconditional surrender is always an option.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Why do you think ChatGPT would be able to accurately calculate that value?
Tophattingson
4mo ago
The arrangement of politics in Australia is different and so support of political violence usually takes the form of supporting political violence by the state against dissidents. Why would the Australian blue tribe want to take matters into their own hands when the police will do it for them?
Tophattingson
4mo ago
In an alternative universe where Al Qaeda was the government of Iraq, and Iraq carried out an attack on the US that killed ~40,000 people (same proportion of population) then yes, the US would be quite willing to flatten Iraq. And if, in this alternative timeline, Iraq chose not to surrender even after an overwhelming military defeat, the US would continue the flattening until the surrendering improves.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
The threshold of herd immunity and endemicity is the same. R=1.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Sweden's population is almost 90% urban. It is just not the case that most Swedes live in rural areas.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Sweden's population density is comparable to the UK's population density if you treat the British Antarctic Territory as actually belonging to the UK. In an alternative timeline where the UK annexed the British Antarctic Territory in 2019, do you think this will have reduced the transition rate of COVID?
Sweden, Finland and Norway owning a bunch of tundra does not affect the population density that the average person experiences. That tundra cannot perform spooky action at a distance and affect what happens in Stockholm.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
We do not (except perhaps to specific extinct strains, which is mostly practically irrelevant). Herd immunity is a state in which spread has stopped because there are enough immune individuals that an infection chain cannot be sustained within the herd.
By this definition herd immunity is any time covid infections are declining, which means it cannot be sustained. In practice, like flu and other coronaviruses, covid will likely alternate between herd immunity and very slightly below the threshold for herd immunity in perpetuity.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
It's possible that many places achieved a transient herd immunity among the smaller pool of people who were susceptible to covid . Only about half of immune naive people seem to be vulnerable at any given time. which makes the herd immunity threshold low enough that it's plausible countries in Western Europe and the US hit it during the spring 2020 wave. Note, hit it regardless of whether they locked down or not. It's in my opinion the best explanation for why countries with severe lockdowns and countries without, such as UK and Sweden, achieved essentially identical outcomes. Lockdowns did nothing, they both hit herd immunity thresholds regardless, and the timing of lockdowns coinciding with that in the UK was only Regression fallacy.
Then there's Peru, which had so many deaths in 2020, despite extreme restrictions, that it implies >100% of the population should have had covid.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
I am far too used to people using the parachute idea as justification to not do RCTs in places where an RCT would clearly be best practice. Most recently, involving COVID restrictions, which are assumed to work because "physics" or whatever but never get tested. We don't apply such flimsy reasoning elsewhere. Designer drugs have to go through trials despite being physics telling you they should work because they interact with the target molecule in models. If you can do an RCT, and choose not to, you better have a good reason to do so, and parachutes isn't a good enough reason.
Early parachute designs were actually tested. Nobody took the claims of their inventors at face value, they wanted evidence that they work, so their inventors tested them either personally or with objects/animals. That's why we don't need additional RCTs for the concept of parachutes, even though you could do one using animals. If they were invented for the first time tomorrow, you'd probably want to do something like an RCT:
-
Take 20 crash test dummies.
-
Randomly assign 10 to use the parachute, and 10 to not.
-
Simulate identical falls for all 20.
-
Hand the dummies to a blinded team of engineers who assess damage
-
Compare the results statistically to see if the safety intervention reduced injuries
This wouldn't be particularly adversarial. The vaccines are kind of mediocre but fine. A bright spot in the covid pandemic is like the least stinky shit in a sewer. My disagreements are all with how states used vaccines to engage in yet more flagrant violations of human rights and violate medical ethics. I think we shouldn't invest into these tools, not as an isolated principle against mrna or viral vector treatments, but because of the risk the current institutions would use that investment just as they did in 2020-2022 for ill.
If the vaccines were released outside the context of lockdowns and other restrictions I would have nothing to say on them and there would have been no substantial opposition to them.
More options
Context Copy link