This ignores that, until we had an effective treatment program and mass vaccinations, it had a mortality rate of about 20 times that of the flu. After effective treatment plans, vaccines, antivirals, etc. it was brought more in line with the flu. 0.5% mortality means that you need to know 200 people who got sick to know someone who died. This also ignores all the people we saw online who would deny their family members died of COVID. Having had friends working in hospitals, COVID deaths were happening. And let’s be honest, how many people have you personally run into who died of the flu, yet that happens every year. We just shrug and move on. They were old, it was their time. And if it was your child, it was devastating, but could you even relate if your friend’s infant had died of the flu?

People historically are really bad at statistical analysis, so tiny risks over huge occurrences are dismissed, and most people will get away with it so we feel like the bad outcomes didn’t happen at all. But they do, and they did, and now a lot more people died than had to because people couldn’t stay home when they were sick, or wear a mask in public, or not cough in other people’s faces because it’s just a flu. And I honestly can’t show any respect to people who think their life is so much more important than anyone else’s that they can’t show a little respect and just try to not risk a stranger’s health because it might be a little uncomfortable.

So I’m supposed to just buy your anti-intellectualism rhetoric? Why should I trust your dumb ass over an expert in the field?

Hey, look, it’s Typhoid Mary COVID Larry, who wants all the privileges of society yet none of the responsibilities. If you don’t want to uphold the social contract, I’m okay with it. Get out.

A reasonably safe, fairly effective pipe bomb is easy to make with the some basic theory and high school chemistry knowledge. A moderately safe, highly effective pipe bomb requires only slightly more knowledge and a deeper understanding of high school chemistry. This stuff was easy enough that people were using it over half a thousand years ago to good effect. If you can’t figure it out now with a couple weeks effort and the breadth of knowledge at our disposal, that’s on you.

Massive changes have been happening in the battery field for decades, they just aren’t fast. Our rechargeable batteries are smaller, more energy-dense, longer-lasting, and cheaper than they were 40 years ago. They aren’t magical, last forever, infinite power, instant recharge batteries, though, that’s correct.

And absolutely HUGE pockets!

16% so far!

Remember, if it wasn’t for Larry Ellison, LibreOffice wouldn’t exist. I remember reading about those shenanigans while they were happening and desperately hoping a fork would appear soon. I wasn’t disappointed.

Pretty sure that’s a horse skull, and holy fuck, why was that ever made?

Edit: probably not a horse, but some kind of ungulate.

Well, pizza is pretty important, too.

Having addresses be easily legible for emergency services isn’t inconsequential, and is legally required where I live.

Old people have been saying this since I was a kid, and I’m old now. Our perception of time appears to be weighted inversely with how much we’ve experienced, so summer feels like forever for a preteen, but two years is a blink of an eye to someone in their 50s. Couple that with no significant events or milestones for months or years, and your perception of time is further distorted. And now all those old people, like me, can talk to a million people online about it, so it appears more prevalent than it was before, when old people couldn’t or weren’t communicating with strangers half a world away on a daily basis.

If you think Pu₂₃₈ with its half-life of 90 years is scary, check out Fe₆₀ with its half-life of 2.6 million years. That must be super scary!

/s

I’m aware that everything with a higher atomic weight than iron wants to be iron.

Yeah, this reads like, “I suck at this skill, so this skill must be useless and the people who do use it are wrong.”

And you don’t perhaps think your attitude is guided by your feelings? Why should others around you have to be the toilet where you deal with your feelings by having such a negative attitude? Or perhaps none of us are sufficient to do this on our own, and sometimes we rely on those close to us to get us through the parts we find difficult.

The fact you liken emotions to a waste product, and not an equally vital part of the entire process, says it all.

Holy shit, it’s almost like men and women sometimes have different motivations! Maybe the problem isn’t the event, but how she feels about it. And maybe the solution is to let her get it off her chest instead of suppressing it. I know, us guys generally don’t like to deal with our feelings, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that it wouldn’t be healthier if we did.

small thing to get hung up on

The thong, right?

If every Starlink satellite shattered into the most dangerously-sized pieces simultaneously, it would only affect our access to space for 5 to 10 years. It would perhaps be bad enough to put manned missions on the back burner during that time period, and would certainly cause major issues for terrestrial astronomy, but it wouldn’t cause much harm to the space program overall. If they were in a higher orbit, it would definitely be a concern.

All Kyle had to do to not have any of that happen is not show up. The odds of that dramatically increased when he decided to show up with a gun where he knew a bunch of people, some of whom would would be armed, would be out in force and opposing his views.

Much like a lone women wandering late at night through a crime-ridden part of town getting raped, he may not have done anything wrong, but his bad judgement led to the expected consequences. And before we talk about defending his workplace, there’s a reason many places say to not try to stop robberies - the insurance claim is far cheaper than the cost of most outcomes of trying to stop the thefts, even the relatively positive outcomes.

Canada decided to have none of that. Downloading without keeping a copy (streaming) was basically thrown out as copyright infringement, the whole lost income idea was generally laughed at, and the final result was a maximum judgement of $500 for all non-commercial copyright infringement prior to the suit. Which basically would pay for about one hour of the plaintiff lawyer’s fees. We don’t get a lot of copyright suits like that in Canada any more.