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It is undoubtedly some boring, stupid, arcane bug that would make every critic's eyes glaze over and convince no one. Decent chance it was on the imagery provider's end, serving up stale data which the batch ingestion pipeline saw as new and labeled it as such.
More fundamentally, I don't know what the actual execution and motivation of this scheme would look like. Some rogue individual undermining the logged and audited data controls? A conspiracy from top executives? And all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires didn't happen and and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%? (As far as conspiracies go, there are much higher impact levers Google has that could make it a loss by 20.1% instead; why Google Maps satellite view?)
To be fair, people are primed to be skeptical of this stuff because of all the incidents when definitions in online dictionaries and wikipedia would quietly change overnight to back up what had been said by some presidental candidate or politician.
If you're referring to Amy Coney Barrett and Merriam-Webster's usage note in the entry for 'sexual preference', please note that at least that particular lexicographic outfit considers their vocation to be describing how words are used, rather than prescribing how they ought to be used; thus they were not, like Willy the Word Decider, decreeing the term to be doubleplusungoodspeakful, but noting that many other people had taken offence at its use. (This is the same reason that certain four-letter words for below-the-waist bodily functions are listed as more taboo than four-letter words referring to the loss of eternal salvation: the man on the Clapham Omnibus will take more umbrage at "Fuck $NAME1" than he would at "God damn $NAME1".
Vaccine is another one. Redefined over night.
What do you mean by this?
Maybe it means vaccine went from "get it and you won't get X" to "get it and it reduces your chances of getting X somewhat"
That's never been true though?
Measles is something like 3% post vaccine, and mumps is something like 12% per a quick google.
Flu is a bit more obvious - the idea behind the flu vaccine is to make the flu uncomfortable but not require hospitalization and result in death, it's never really been entirely preventative.
Measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are really good protection, good enough that they break the chain of transmission resulting in herd immunity (which means even the people for which the vaccine failed probably won't get the disease). Diphtheria vaccine is that good too.
Flu vaccine is a joke. The vaccine gives you flu symptoms, and you often get the flu anyway.
The flu vaccine certainly doesn't work as well as some of the other vaccines, but it is very clearly a vaccine, I don't know what the other poster is on about on that front.
The flu vaccine is one of the odder and more complicated vaccines we have - we have to guess for the yearly formulation some years we guess better than others (based off of the expectation of what this years flu will look like). It also is not good at preventing you from getting an infection, what it is good at is preventing you from dying. People will often say "oh I have the flu" no, usually they have the common cold - the flu is ass.
As for if it makes sense? Young unvaccinated people die from the flu every year, not a lot of them but they do. Vaccinated people have a much better time - all cause mortality reduction in 65+ is 20%. If you are the kind of person who doesn't wear a seat belt maybe skip the vaccine, but if you wear a seat belt then this is up there with the most impactful things you can do to prevent random risk of death.
The COVID vaccine gave me flu symptoms, flu vaccine never did - which is the case for most people. If you do that's certainly a better reason to skip it, but when my non medical (male) friends ask me about it I ask them if they are a pussy.
You can go to bed a few hours earlier in order to prevent death in you and your family/friends.
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