domain:streamable.com
Rex
2m ago
I have not had covid as far as I know. I did get antibody tests early on which were all negative. My wife had it twice and i slept in the same room with her. No issues.
I also know no one that died from COVID, other than a coworker who's very old mother allegedly died from it. This person is known for his tall tales so I cant know for certain.
I find this to be a reasonable heuristic for how much I should worry about something. I know many people who passed from cancer. Many from heart attacks. More than one from getting hit by a car when cycling. I reckon most people have a similar experience.
Its impossible for me to believe that 1.2 million people died from covid in 3-4 years and reconcile that with my experience.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3m ago
I have deep emotions seeing you go from an AI-skeptic a few years back to well, this. I'm not quite sure what those emotions are, but they're there.
zeke5123a
7m ago
Well, I would say the more you had separate groups with apparent intelligence that was buried (eg Germans), the more you look foolish for saying they did solely prophylactically.
jkf
7m 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?
sohois
14m ago
Covid was exceptionally deadly when compared to the common flu
I don't want to get into a debate about what "exceptionally deadly" means, but I don't think this is true. Spanish Flu was exceptionally deadly, COVID was largely on par with the Hong Kong and Asian Flu epidemics of the 60s, but in a much more globalised world.
I'm not really sure what prompted this article from Scott, but it does kind of follow the path the lockdown skeptical have been saying, that of the Iraq war. You start with enthusiastic support from all sides. Later you get "with the evidence at the time, support made sense" ( we are here). Then it's "I didn't support it, but I understand those who did". And finally you get to "No I never supported it and all those who did were clearly in the wrong/outright evil".
jkf
14m 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:
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
16m ago
"Genocide" has basically become a vibes-based term over the past few years, so questions involving the term have become increasingly meaningless.
What seems beyond question is that white South Africans are facing extensive race-based persecution.
I'm not sympathetic to this band but I'm curious as to why the Met are bothering to prosecute one of their members over any of the hundreds of people waving Hezbollah/Hamas flags during near daily pro-Hamas protests in London over the last year and a half.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
29m ago
· Edited 25m ago
The last one is very speculative; I have a suspicion it might be impossible. The middle one is somewhat less speculative; something akin to it is probably possible, but there are degrees of success and you're probably looking at more like "eats organic matter at a foot a day" than the "lol eats planet in minutes" sci-fi shit. The first one is proven possible by PNA, the aforementioned terribility of RuBisCO, and the wide variety of possible biomolecules only some of which are used. Anybody who knows second-to-third-year biochem knows that that design is 100% chemically and physically possible; the roadblock is the incredible difficulty of designing a full biochemistry ex nihilo (it'll be a while before anyone succeeds at this without AI aid, although I'd still rather nobody tried). I get that not everyone does know this, but seriously, this is uncontroversial in terms of "is this possible, given a blueprint?"; it is. That's why I said it's the best-case of "what the final form of bioweapons looks like"; they can be worse, but they can't be better.
shouldn't we prioritize making sure that doesn't happen again over "stop Skynet"/"Butlerian Jihad Now" type stuff?
I mean, I'd rather that 200 million people die next year from a pandemic over everyone dying 10 years from now. I'd rather that even if I'm one of the 200 million. I'm not seeing the issue.
faceh
32m ago
I would feel duty-bound to wind up some stuff at work before embarking, but depending on how this year proceeds it might seem like a good move. I'm kinda sick of paying bills and being responsible when the world seems geared to go through some serious upheavals, and all my best laid plans could collapse in a week.
Its not even ennui, I enjoy what I do, but the world doesn't seem like its going to give me the outcomes that I've wanted since childhood, no matter how much I ask and work for it.
A good friend of mine is taking a trip through southeast Asia for a month while he's between jobs, and it seems like a helluva fun time. He got to fire off an RPG.
The one romantic prospect that I was sort of excited for has mostly fizzled (I may give it one more shot, but there's not much on the horizon now). Gambling on finding a soulmate while traveling appeals to the romantic inside me. The romantic who has been beaten into a depression by the realities of modern dating.
And you're a BIT more than a 'random internet stranger."
2rafa
33m ago
I like my job, but I think it’s all about not living through it. I take solace in the things that I hope will still matter to me no matter what.
I mean, that's the whole reason for the hype, isn't it? To make sure you sell a bunch of the thing before people realize its not quite up to snuff. He's a much better salesman than other billionaire founders.
And he's also got a knack for finding ways to squeeze profits out of projects by some lateral thinking:
What to do with unused launch capacity on Falcon? Launch a network of satellites for a globe-spanning internet service. Satellites that need to be replenished regularly. Starlink is a great product in its own right and justifies Falcon launches, so it helps keep SpaceX solvent.
Then he pulled that switcheroo with Twitter by selling it to the AI company, so that even if he never turns a profit on twitter as a service, he's already got a way to profit from the information.
To say nothing of how quickly Grok has become an important part of X's infrastructure.
This is why the claim that Elon is stupid and lucky don't make sense to me. Guy may not play 4d chess, but he's playing speed chess like a grandmaster, making sure his few mistakes don't ruin him by moving faster than his opponents, if only by a split second.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
48m ago
There are a ton of confounding variables here, but IIRC we're finally seeing a significant decrease in opioid deaths (a surprisingly high count) in ways that might be significant but were rising well before COVID. The reasons are a bit unclear (dark prospect: populations particularly vulnerable to addiction have largely died already).
But surprisingly few care substantially about overdoses (or traffic accidents) because, I suppose, that's something that happens to "other people". Nobody really cares about addicts in practice, judging by the relative alarm compared with COVID. I try to care, at least abstractly, about causes of death (and non-death harm) but I'm not sure the loud "harm reduction" advocates have actually been helpful either.
jkf
51m 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.
If you burn billions of dollars trying to deliver something no one even bothers trying to make, then it can very easily prove fatal. It doesn' matter that the competition didn't try to beat him to the Cybertruck, or Semi, or Optimus, if these things are nothing but massive money sinkholes. Also, pretty sure that strictly speaking, Waymo beat him to the Cybercab / Robotaxi.
If you mess it up bad enough, it can even overturn your prior success. If Starship doesn't work out, and the competitors catch up to Falcon in the meantime, that's still pretty fatal for SpaceX.
jkf
54m 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!"
Skulldrinker
1hr ago
apps are for meeting people
No one actually turns up for dates, though. They always mysteriously get sick or suffer personal life disasters like epilepsy or dead grandmothers and have to cancel. Or just unmatch the day of the date.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
Very awesome quote. “What would CS Lewis think of Disney” now makes me wonder what all the other greats thought of Disney
cjet79
1hr ago
He also just released The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID.
I went and looked into the death rate a little more. Found this graph of the trend. Here is a fun game: spot when covid starts.
There has been a year over year increase in the death rate by about 1% starting in 2014 and hasn't started shrinking much until 2024. What the hell is going on?
I have a suspicion that old people have just been getting older. And that those old people are dying more during flu season. And that the excess death chart from 2018-2019 would line up pretty well with an excess death chart from 2020-2021. But that would probably take a lot of effort to figure out. I dont even know where to get month to month death numbers, tried asking some AI to help me find it, but sounds like its not publicly available.
Skulldrinker
1hr ago
This isn't on an app.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1hr ago
Olive beat me to it! Here's the full quote, from a letter Lewis wrote to a friend in 1939:
What did you think of Snowwhite and the VII Dwarfs? I saw it at Malvern last week. . . . Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?
EvanTh
1hr ago
But by that reasoning, wouldn't the drawing of state legislative districts also be a purely internal act? Because the states are sovereign, and if a state want one district to be ten times the size of another, that's its sovereign right?
You've got a strong argument, but it flies in the face of decades-old Supreme Court precedent which I haven't heard anyone arguing to overturn.
jkf
1hr ago
It's not a good idea to go off such n=1 anecdotes in general.
Certainly true -- I'd consider it n=2 now though! My lifestyle absolutely involves a lot less exposure to infectious diseases than yours, so I doubt that I'm like highly immune anymore -- but would expect severity to remain mild if I get it again.
How severe were your more recent infections?
People calling them "shots" or "jabs" (like for Covid) instead of vaccines probably has less to do with anything like that and more with it being shorter to say words with one syllable instead of two.
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