jkf
12d ago
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It was more like 4/10k if you happened to be in the susceptible group (young males) that we know of -- it's absolutely a possibility that low-grade heart damage was quite widespread, as only the severe cases would have been noticed/recorded.
And assuming that he's in that group (and doesn't also have cancer or something) his odds of dying from covid were essentially zero -- so the behaviour was pretty rational, really -- unlike your popping out of the woodwork to criticize his personal decisions.
jkf
16d ago
For me, the pleasure of the sex seems dependent on if I can bench press her or not.
Somebody needs to spend more time at the gym! (it isn't that hard to bench press 300)
jkf
8d ago
Any logically correct argument against "immigration" needs to be robust under switching the word "immigrant" with the word "native"
"Any logically correct argument needs to be robust under switching the variable 'A' with '¬A' or 'B' " is quite a take, logically speaking -- I understand the argument you are making, but it is not a logical one.
jkf
1mo ago
Somebody on the Scott-post did cite a paper doing exactly that -- in fact they take it a step further and look exclusively at mortality among people involved with the hospital system (where testing was manditory) but without a positive covid test. (matched cohort, 2018 vs 2020)
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-025-21782-9
Your doubt appears misplaced:
Our results indicate that during the first pandemic wave and the ensuing months, the death rate of people who were free of COVID-19 in BC (i.e., always tested negative) more than tripled that of a matched pre-pandemic cohort. In absolute terms, the group with the largest increase consisted of those with cardiovascular disorders, but in relative terms, the largest increase occurred among people who were not only COVID-negative but also had no previously diagnosed NCD, signaling that some of them may represent incident cases that escalated to death before routine detection and treatment was provided. The spike in deaths among COVID-negative people seemed to coincide with the period of almost total health system shutdown for non-COVID-related complaints.
jkf
1mo ago
The Hunter Biden stuff was true in regards to Hunter being a dirtbag but critically lacked the link connecting to Joe
An associate involved in some of their dealings testified under oath that Joe was "the big guy" referred to as getting a cut -- maybe you don't believe him or whatever, but that doesn't seem like an hallucination to me?
jkf
22d ago
It looks like a crappy scrubber to me, but if I were so inclined I could make a functionally equivalent thing from local materials in my basement (located in North America) for something like $2.00 USD BOM cost (zero to me since I'd have everything needed sitting around down there somewhere). Yes the chainmail links would take some time, but I don't think it would be a very hard 8 hour day? If I were on minimum wage this would be better than buying the thing from this guy!
So the problem is not "it's hard to make things in America", it's "it's hard to make stupid drop-ship style crap in America and sell at a profit without some kind of gimmick" -- like, IDK -- making annoying videos about how hard it is to make things in America.
jkf
1mo ago
Children can no longer enjoy the vibrant culture of cities like London, Paris and New York as they could even in the 1980s
...
When children have access to safe cities, they develop more independence, courage and can develop more maturity.
He's suggesting that NYC should be made safe again... like it was in the 1980s?
Cities are not fucking safe, yo -- navigating them despite that fact is what actually develops independence, courage and maturity.
(the country is not safe either, but in different ways)
jkf
1mo ago
All of those sound bad, but also very speculative?
We have a recent worked example of what can happen with GoF (true regardless of the true origins of covid-19); shouldn't we prioritize making sure that doesn't happen again over "stop Skynet"/"Butlerian Jihad Now" type stuff?
It's like hearing that Ford Pintos can explode due to their fuel tank design and responding with "OMG, cars can explode! Terrorists might start planting car bombs, I should work on anti-terrorism!"
jkf
1mo ago
Meanwhile the agent who did the shooting was hiding behind the barricade and probably not visible to most of the rioters.
The picture of the gun poking out from the doorway tells the tale of the discomfort with this shoot to me -- cops 'get away' with shooting people at times where there's at least a nominal case to be made for self-defence, and this is not that.
It just looks so chickenshit -- step out into the hallway, square up, present your weapon and say "stop or I'll shoot" and I don't think anyone's complaining if Babbit keeps trying to climb through the door (which she might have!) and gets the bullet.
Officer safety is a thing, but at least this much risk tolerance is expected of any beat cop confronting an aggressive individual -- however violent the riot may or may not have been, it was clearly not a warzone, and Byrd was not a soldier.
jkf
1mo ago
I’m not sure NYC has ever been safe in the last 50 years.
That's my point though -- NYC is now way safer than it's been anytime in the last 50 years -- and yet in the 1980s kids/young teens were taking the subway by themselves and roaming around pretty unsupervised. My cousin in another big city was notorious for getting lost by taking the wrong bus at around age 9 -- it happened to me once when I was with him, we were home hours late, and people were like "lol, yeah -- you shouldn't trust his sense of direction, good thing you found your way home".
Something has changed, and it's not that cities have become unsafe.
jkf
1mo ago
I'm still not 100% convinced that the antigenic imprinting thing didn't transpire with the vaccines -- I've had it exactly once, during the Omicron wave, and don't seem to get it anymore despite the odd known exposure. Which is stark contrast with my (largely rabid vaccine fan) coworkers, who seem to be down with it all winter and still complain about side effects from booster shots.
Granted it's not putting them in the hospital or anything, but they do seem to be uniformly pretty damn sick for several days everytime -- which is worse than my initial natural exposure. Unlikely to get a good study on it, but if anything it seems like kind of the opposite of herd immunity -- I always thought that this was one of the more plausible reasons not to take the vaccine, so I get a nice glow of smugness everytime somebody calls in saying "OMG I can't even move, see you next week".
jkf
1mo ago
The issue is that you are prioritizing problems that are arguably possible (well, one of them) but have never manifested in an even directionally similar way over one that just happened a few years ago, repercussions of which were quite severe and still being felt.
I resisted "millenarian cultist" analogies so as not to be uncharitable, but you didn't want to talk about Ford Pintos, so fuck it:
It's certainly possible that Jesus will descend and start casting the goats (that's you) into a lake of fire at any moment -- this is roughly the worst thing that could happen (for you); shouldn't you prioritize Christian worship more highly than (I assume) you do?
jkf
1mo ago
A heroin habit is also a fun thing to do, that imbues the junky with a sense of purpose and fulfillment -- I don't happen to agree that this should be illegal, but glorifying it is clearly not great for society. (or, objectively, the users)
jkf
15d ago
It has the added benefit of ironically warding off accusations that I should go to the gym more.
I mean -- how much do you press anyways? I wouldn't actually get anywhere near 300 these days, but certainly well into fattie territory unless you also only like really tall girls. My current spouse I could have lifted when I was like 14, and she's pretty average height and weight.
jkf
1mo ago
You may not be old enough to pull this off, but you can always claim "I'm a Mac user, not a robot dammit" -- the ability to insert em dashes (along with other typographical flourishes) was kind of a big cleavage point between the creative different-thinkers and the sweaty geeks/corporate drones going back to the 80s.
This claim will be more credible if you format everything in Garamond Narrow.
jkf
20d ago
Why would I want to watch an extended advertisement from a couple of retarded hipsters?
I went to their website and looked at their shitty scrubber.
Buy the product, not the story.
jkf
1mo ago
reports that a vaccine "merely" health risks to the recipient by 90%
Unfortunately we don't even really have enough evidence to quantify conclusively what the 'severity' benefit really was -- the initial trials were underpowered for anything to do with severity/death, and of course were terminated once the companies got their approval. (in that the control arm got real shots)
So there's no RCT to quantify this benefit, and the population-level studies are hopelessly muddled by a mixture of hard to correct for demographic confounders and sheer politics/CW. Plus all the different strains -- it's hard to say for sure, but seems clear that Omicron was very not-severe as compared to earlier strains -- so when a person got Covid is probably even more important than his vaccination status, severity-wise.
jkf
26d ago
Now I hope the US starts addressing the scenario of "50 Chinese container ships loaded with drones" as a real thing not as Sci-Fi scenario like "what if Martians attack D.C."
Or "what if China sends unpowered high altitude floating platforms of indeterminate payload drifting over on the jetstream?" What kind of nutbar would worry about that?
jkf
17d ago
Signalling turns more or less all the time is probably good for this reason -- but you should not be changing lanes unless you capital-K Know that there is nobody in your path.
I'd much rather be in the habit of double-checking my 'blind' spots everytime I change lanes than be in the habit of signalling and then pulling right into the car next to me that I didn't check for if he doesn't take evasive action -- which seems like a pretty common freeway habit these days.
jkf
1mo ago
"Just trust me, bro" would at least have some meat to talk about in that the user might be expected to back up his opinions-- "just trust this LLM output" is intensely weak.
jkf
1mo ago
Fuckin Boomers man -- the "annual % change" on your link flips positive (slightly) in 2009, 15 years before 2024.
Fifteen years into the baby boom was 1960, by which time births were well off peak and on the decline:
jkf
2mo ago
Doesn't seem to be playing out that way in Canada -- I keep waiting for the egregoire to notice that we are locked in a cage with an 800lb gorilla and are responding to his shitflinging by poking him with a (slim) stick, but even normally levelheaded folks are so wrapped in the flag (the one they were spitting on a couple of years ago when it was being flown by truckers) that I can't see it happening no matter how bad things get.
jkf
1mo ago
Hunter (or his associate) made to make it seem like Joe was intimately involved when he actually wasn't.
How do you know this though? Sure it's possible, but I don't see any way to tell whether it (or the alternative) is the hallucination.
Certainly not:
Republicans went over Joe's financial records with a fine-toothed comb and repeatedly found nothing.
What would they find? That's the whole point of "holding it" for The Big Guy -- if he gave it to The Big Guy, combing his financials could turn up some evidence.
jkf
20d ago
Most popular youtubers are in some ways retarded hipsters -- it's not the end of the world. They also have a tendency to leverage their popularity (and their slack-jawed faux-excitement about formerly basic knowledge like carburetors and potato guns) into the marketing of crappy products -- it's nice that this guy is (trying to) make his crappy products in America, but that doesn't make his hour-long ad interesting. (and means you should take what he says with a grain of salt -- he is literally selling you something.
This lemma is not sound -- governments exist to protect the interests of their citizenry; no such obligation exists for people in other countries.
AFAICT the rest of your points rest on this assumption -- which is certainly something you can argue is a good idea a la Caplan, but is ultimately a moral/emotional argument -- so you don't get to privilege your own moral intuition over that of others by claiming to be using 'logic'.
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