nopie
11mo ago
It's unusual but doesn't seem weird to me. Blind (the community notes say blind and poor vision) are not always blind from birth. They might have internal representation of colour and specifying blue suit can be useful for them to have her image in their minds.
At first her mentioning her pronouns seemed weird but then again – for blind people it could be helpful in certain cases.
nopie
11mo ago
Wikipedia reports that 5.9% flights were cancelled worldwide. It's definitely a lot of flights but also not that much on global perspective.
Twitter had flightradar24 animations showing flights disappearing with Community Notes saying that this animation is fake and not from CrowdStrike fault event. You wouldn't really notice 6% decrease visually or would notice only a slight reduction.
People love to lie on twitter for dramatic effect.
If we assume 6% reduction of global economic activity for one day, it certainly is loss of billions of dollars. And yet it is less than one extra holiday per year.
Why do you care about those people on internet?
Any reasonable person understands that it is morally wrong for one country to attack another that has never threatened you.
Then one can say – forget about morals, the power decides the outcome. Turns out Russia is not as powerful as we thought and they got stuck in Ukraine and are losing positions every day, thanks for western support.
A lot of people just suffer from denialism. The fog of war doesn't allow us to see clearly what is going on in every detail but in a nutshell the reality is clear. Russians might or might not manage to keep Donbas and/or the Crimea but the rest of Ukraine has remained an independent country and that is not going to change.
People in the western countries have free access to all the information and most of us see it clearly.
For a lot of Russians it is harder to see in this way because they suffer from collective delusions that Ukraine is a bad country (nazis or not) that does not deserve to remain independent and Russia is going to take over Ukraine and make it a glorious part of Russia.
nopie
2yr ago
Lockdowns were like imprisonment for me. Like a prolonged home arrest for no reason. Somehow it was very clear that they will be useless and the policies didn't even make sense.
Yes, they were the worst human rights violations in the western world since the war ended or something like that.
Only when you widen your comparison to places where wars and genocide still happens (Ukraine, other wars, Uigurs etc.), we can find examples with even worse violations.
nopie
2yr ago
The old method didn't work for me. When I was learning a second language (Russian) at school I memorized perfectly all declension tables and all grammar rules and still wasn't able to form a single sentence. I only learned it later with immersion when I had to live among Russians and learn to communicate in Russian. Now I have forgotten all the grammar rules but I can speak almost fluently.
Then I wanted to live in Spain, so I started learning Spanish by Pimsleur method which starts by using real sentences in conversion. It was great and motived me a lot. I am not fully proficient in Spanish yet but it enabled me to be able to deal with all practical matters in Spanish.
My observation is that memorizing rules do not translate well into internalizing them and being able to use in practice. Those kids who were good in Russian actually had exposure to Russia on the street or by watching cartoons in Russian.
It is possible that with this method you eventually reach a limit. Probably you then need to learn more things and appropriate training should be prepared. Sometimes knowing the detailed rules are necessary. But let's remember that people create these rules in their native language without being literate. Even a small child can sometimes correct my grammar.
nopie
2yr ago
If it was found in RCT trials that the drug does not treat the illness in the treatment group (whatever the reason), it would not get approved.
When we talk about the elderly, the number of lives saved becomes meaningless. We should use QALY or at least months of life extended on average.
Imagine a very old and sick person gets vaccinated for covid and this extends his life expectancy by 2 years. It won't be fully enjoyable life, probably still on wheelchair and full with health crisis but it is better than nothing.
Now we can compare how many QALYs were gained by antihypertensive medicines, by statins etc. and see the actual cost-effectiveness. Covid vaccines probably were quite effective among elderly but as now statins are generic and very cheap (£2 per month on average in the UK) and covid vaccines quite expensive (£50 per dose) I doubt that the gains are greater than for statins. I vaguely remember that statins provide additional life expectancy about 7 months on average. It doesn't sound much but on society's level that's quite impressive.
Of course. In those days you could die from anything else before you would die from covid. In fact, it could even be coronavirus-1970 that was worse than Sars-CoV-2. We just didn't notice it because we expected people to die at this level every year.
There are always different ways to look at the same data. With Covid certain level of deaths were inevitable. Everything that was above that we brought upon us ourselves.
Comparison of extra mortality during pandemic period between periods and/or countries can be even more fun.
Pandemic reduced life expectancy by about a half year, maybe up to one year in very unlucky countries. At the same time life expectancy in Sweden currently is roughly 4 or 5 years higher than in the US. Obviously there are some public health and/or cultural issues that make it impossible for the US to catch up with Sweden in short term. Some could even argue that it is more important to preserve freedom and dynamics, maybe even more quality of life instead of longer life.
Even if you accept those arguments, it still means that there are certain policies that impact life expectancy metric worse than covid. If preventing covid was an easy fruit to pick, the US should have prevented it. But it wasn't. Most likely the US robbed people of their agency, their freedoms and caused more harm than it would have done by implementing different policies to catch up Sweden in life expectancy.
Sweden refused to implement harsh and mostly useless policies exactly because their public health leaders were worried about life expectancy. Whereas the US and most other countries just followed the narrative which was wrong.
nopie
11mo ago
It wasn't. It was on the level of flu outbreaks in 1970s.
The US had higher excess mortality than some other countries, totally due to unnecessary and wrong measures taken.
nopie
1yr ago
I am in the UK but I didn't vote.
My only concern is economy. I don't see anyone having any ideas whatsoever about it. My only hope that we don't know how but maybe some unknown figure will ascend unexpectedly to the power and will make necessary reforms. When Gorbachov became a leader of the USSR, no one suspected what will follow. Ironically, Russia has returned back to old ways of self-isolating from free trade.
nopie
1yr ago
The issue with Biden's dementia was revealed by Biden himself 4 years ago. In one response to Trump he revealed that he knows the details of the test used to assess dementia. Apparently he had been evaluated by doctors already then. We just have never been told the results and how they have changed with time.
Leaking this information would reduce uncertainty but essentially it would be the same that we can infer from videos but more precise.
nopie
1yr ago
Obviously when Ukraine joins the EU, it will be required doing business with Russia in accordance with the EU customs rules.
But that is completely different from the statement that the EU demanded Ukraine stop doing business with Russia.
We need to be precise what we mean to have a meaningful discussion.
nopie
1yr ago
I didn't read it as incitement at all. I think that a lot of people are in self-censoring mode and are constantly afraid that their writings could be perceived as racist and apply their standards to others too.
To me it sounded that he hates AI doomers and then imagines how they could become violent. He is probably wrong is his descriptions but just because they are very graphic, it does not mean that he encourages them.
It is similar to how some writers describe immigrants in Europe from Islamic countries by calling them scum and describe all their current and imagined crimes. Obviously, a lot of people consider this to be incitement against immigrants and call for censuring them. Slurs against immigrants are unjustified as it could indeed cause people to spread hate against immigrants but it is not condoning or incitement of crimes committed by those immigrants.
Here the discriminated group is AI doomers who are deeply unhappy with Fredie's article. Maybe I shouldn't call them AI doomers as it sounds offensive. I am not really familiar with the accepted terminology.
nopie
2yr ago
Probably not. Ukrainians would have started resistance and it would be very bloody and violent.
I would expect every country to fight if its existence was threatened, and asking for help is just natural too.
I don't see how Ukraine successfully fighting back Russian aggression escalates anything though.
nopie
2yr ago
Some people are waiting for Twitter to fail just like some were waiting for Russians to take Kyiv :)
Musk makes mistakes but overall I think Twitter will neither be a great success nor failure.
nopie
2yr ago
It might not be true but it is very believable. Extrajudicial killings in occupied areas happen very frequently on both sides.
Vaccines were hoped to be a tool for normalcy, not vaccine mandates. And vaccines had quite an effect, they were the best, I would even say, the only real intervention that worked and were cheap and least restricting. Before the introduction of the mandates, most elderly people were already vaccinated, mortality from covid among vaccinated elderly people were about 8 times less than for unvaccinated and that was the maximum what we could achieve. Omicron reduced the risks even further but it was unrelated to the measures we took.
The problem was that the vaccines didn't stop the spread and as the most common metric was case counts which still remained quite high, and some residual covid mortality remained many people were not satisfied and considered it to be a failure. Chasing the illusion of achieving nearly zero covid, different governments started vaccine mandates, reintroduced masking, in some cases even light lockdowns. In the UK Christmas 2021 events were really discouraged but other countries had even more restrictions. It was all in vain.
Interesting that the voices demanding surrender and neutrality of Ukraine are only becoming louder when Ukraine is starting to show some serious gains on battlefield. It is still not an ideal situation because fighting leaves many people dead and injured, the final resolution is no-where in sight and probably will happen only when Putin is gone which is hard to predict when it will happen. Instead of accepting the potential Ukrainian victory over Russia with NATO weapons and giving due lesson to the aggressor, they want perfect solution where people don't get killed anymore and where Putin is appeased. They don't want to accept that such a solution is impossible in real life.
I don't believe that the use of nuclear arms means the world is over. It can cause a lot of damage but the impact on it is overestimated. Even if one believes argameddon, we don't really know what increases the risk. People are just unnecessary panicking. We just witnessed the same happened with covid pandemic. It just led to a lot of unnecessary lockdowns, travel restrictions, useless but dehumanising vaccine mandates etc.
That said, I totally understand Elon Musk's arguments. His first poll was unreasonable because it included the condition of Ukraine remaining neutral naively believing that it was a real reason why Russia attacked. The second poll is more reasonable. Despite all the blood and everything ultimately if most people in those areas prefer to stay with Russia, then it is wrong to force them eternally. The question is only how this transition should happen? I cannot imagine that the referendum during the war is appropriate. But if given a reasonable time, like in five years when the cities are rebuilt and the scars of war are more or less healed, then people can make a choice. The poll doesn't say anything about these conditions but many people are reading it in the context of the first poll and in the context of current politics instead taking it at the face value.
nopie
4mo ago
I think that a lot of young people today are very sympathetic to communist ideas especially in Latin America. I don't understand why, probably due to lack of growth, high unemployment, especially among young people.
For me it is unimaginable because I grew up in the USSR and we all hated it. Yet, a lot of old people are nostalgic towards the Soviet times. They had hard time to adapt to competitive system. I can understand that. Transition had to be done in more thoughtful manner. In Russia it is probably even worse due to widespread corruption and inequality.
We had to study communist ideology, read Marx and other works already at the primary school. It was very boring. I don't understand how people can find them inspiring at all. At the same time other teachers let us know, in short passages, what was wrong about the Soviet system. Biology teacher told about Lysenkoism, others mentioned deportations and so on. I think that we all grew up more like Kolgomorovs, knowing well what to say to authorities to survive, while retaining a different perspective in private. When Gorbachev started his glastnost (openness), the gates opened and the Soviet system could not survive.
I don't believe that this is a case with all communistic countries today. Maybe Cuba is similar but in North Korea people are probably too brainwashed and not sufficiently educated to be willing to reject communism.
nopie
11mo ago
The audience actually found it very funny, they laughed and cheered.
I think it just that showbusiness is very fickle. It can give sudden fame and glory and then can throw down to the earth.
While I agree that cancel culture is bad, I have no sympathy in this case. Who is to say that the fame and income of those performers was really deserved?
nopie
1yr ago
I benefited from stock market plunge during covid.
It was very clear that the covid panic was overblown. I couldn't predict how long the lockdowns would last but it was clear that deep pessimism was not justified. If the stocks didn't rise in September 2020, they would by 2024 for sure. So, I bought them when they were low.
And then all extra cash we couldn't spend in lockdowns got invested in stock market and it caused a small bubble of its own but it was still worth to invest for most people.
The funny thing is that I based all this on a simple fact: people get cold virus infections up to 10 times per year and it trains our immunity. We cannot meaningfully stop them, not with our current tech. A new virus will cause more problems because we have no previous immunity. And yet, with covid the risk increased exponentially by age.
Thus my prediction was: eventually everyone will get it regardless what we do. Most people will be fine, elderly will experience higher mortality as in an unusually nasty flu season and that's it. It happened exactly like that.
And yet, so many still refuse to face this reality, still argue that “covid is different” or that “people should wear masks during flu/covid season”.
It is sad to live in among such pessimists but at least I can solace myself with a lifetime chance to win on the stock market. The world should have followed Tegnell's recommendations instead of calling him nazi.
It wasn't a chance that I made the correct prediction. It was rather a chance that I got necessary education in this field and see other experts that reasoned exactly in this same way and being correct in their general predictions.
It is somewhat similar to beliefs about Havana syndrome. One doesn't need to be a genius to understand that no sonic weapons of such impact exist. People just want to believe in them for various reasons. Except that it is a small localized event that never had any impact on stock market.
nopie
2yr ago
That's why we need EMH to protect people from making simple mistakes like that. :)
Eli Lily can and will make good money on tirzepatide but it is a big company with tens of different drugs on the market. Some of them will be unprofitable which makes it hard to predict the final stock price of this company.
Also, it doubtful that it will make a noticeable dent in McDonald's profits. McDonald's is not the only fast food chain. People buy food in supermarkets too and throw out about half of it for whatever reason. It is very hard to predict what impact the appetite loss in a number of fat people will have.
nopie
2yr ago
Nobody is perfect. He needs to maintain his brand with his substack and some of these discussions can damage it.
I am being charitable to him and assume that he doesn't denounce lockdown restrictions only because he cannot without damage to his reputation. It is the same Kolgomorov's complicity he wrote about.
I can put my bets that the public is volatile. Crowds that demanded that everyone stays at home, will soon demand for blood of those who issued these orders. But I have nothing to lose if my bets do not work out. For him it is much more riskier. And he can join the crowd too when it demands blood.
Obviously the support for Zelensky is high. The fact that we cannot know the percentage with high precision doesn't mean that we don't know the percentage with error margin that is less than ±10%.
Is his course good for Ukrainian people? Who knows. I personally think that Ukrainians are too obstinate to consider they could ever get Crimea and other territories back. It prevents them thinking more about how to protect the rest of Ukraine. But that's their choice. Ignoring this will not be productive. Suppose the US forces Ukraine to do elections and Zelensky is again elected. Then what? Or someone else is elected with the same aspirations as Zelensky.
And forcing to elect a certain leader that yields to the US will lead to a new Maidan. Ukrainians want free elections not some US or Russian stooge.
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