In my experience a lot of YIMBYs are actually NIMBY but YIYBYs - Not in my back yard, but yes in YOUR back yard. A classic example is so-called progressive Robert Reich who has many times opined about the lack of affordable housing, eg,
To me the best option would be to massively expand the blue tick / verified accounts to include anyone who can prove their real world identity (and tie their actual name to their accounts), but continue to allow anonymous accounts, and allow users to only view verified accounts and anonymous accounts they follow if they wish. This would cut off trolls, disinfo bots, and spam at the knees while still allowing people who want or need anonymity to have it.
Years ago I did credit investigations related to mortgages as a job. My info is perhaps a bit out of date but I'm not aware of any significant changes related to this. If you simply ignore an account that has a balance due accumulating on it, they'll likely charge it off to a debt collector as part of a routine batch process. The threshold where this happens varies but 90 to 120 days overdue is the common range. You could argue with the collection agency that the service provider voided the contract by their behavior, but honestly, arguing with a collection agency isn't gonna be easier than jumping through the hoops to cancel with these scummy service providers.
No. You cant do anything to someones credit unless you have their SSN. Damn good thing thats the case also, if you happen to be named Jane Doe or Bob Smith.
Yup, the local city library dinged my credit report for late library fines ($18) and I had to clear it up to get a new mortgage. The library did not have my SSN.
Even more tragic is that after the bird flew away the scientist played back the recording and the endling returned, thinking it another from its own species.
The US tax code is absolutely riddled with tax loopholes. Many of these loopholes were designed to act as an incentive, such as tax breaks for hiring former felons, building factories in certain locations, investing in R&D etc etc. Major corporations often pay far lower than the US corporate tax rate precisely because they respond to these tax incentives (and sometimes abuse them, but that's a different story). Does this deal mean that the US will close these loopholes? If so, then 'rich nations' have lost a major tool for creating desired outcomes. If not, then how can this deal prevent other countries just offering whatever loopholes they want that reduce the effective tax rate below the minimum?
> Many of these loopholes were designed to act as an incentive, such as tax breaks for hiring former felons
I wouldn't call all of those incentives loopholes. There's an incentive to hire felons because it's better to have them working secure jobs than having to spend more tax money getting them through the legal system and months/years of jail again. It's an incentive because it's a cheaper solution overall. It's not the same class of an issue as double-Irish.
I'm not sure what the solution for mixing this with the minimum tax is, but if there's a good reason for the incentive, it may even be beneficial to the country to essentially match the missing tax itself. That's assuming the incentives have the real impact they should.
This is a minimum with the corporate tax rate in the US being above that. Therefore, the difference between them minimum and the official value is the incentives margin that the government can use to nudge corporations in the desired direction.
Yes I understand that, but I believe that many corporations today pay even lower than a 15% effective tax rate. I suppose you're saying that these loopholes will be closed up to that minimum?
I think your choice of words here is confusing the issue a little, and would propose “incentive” for a tax break the government would like you to take (employing felons), and “loophole” for tax avoidance the government doesn’t want you to take (eg: sending all your profits to the Cayman Islands).
Given that, if min tax rate is 15% and standard corp tax is 20%, the government is happy for you to get to 15% and would like you to get to there with incentives, but not happy for you to get any lower however you do it. The incentives are generally not powerful enough to get you there anyway
Amazon has enjoyed an effective tax rate of 4.7% over the last 10 years by using tax breaks, tax credits, and depreciation, that have nothing to do with offshoring cash.
Depends what you mean by loop holes. In the US, you can deduct R&D or capital costs like building a factory. That can make your tax bill nearly zero. I wouldn’t call that a loop hope. It’s something out there to incentivize capital spending and job creation. Other countries have the same
Right, so the question is will those 'deductions' still be allowed or not? If so, then get ready for endless deductions from countries that want lower tax rates than 15%.
I would hope they're still allowed, wouldn't you? Incentivizing new factories incentivizes new job creation. The income from these jobs are taxed perpetually. Otherwise, companies will sit on the cash or distribute it to shareholders in the form of dividends, which increases the wealthy shareholder's wealth, with only a one-time 15% going to taxes.
This isn't to say that I don't want businesses taxed, but if a business had 10B in profits, but deducts 5B for capital improvements, then the 5B in remainder can be taxed at 15%
We can't know for sure until the text of the deal is published, but it is the likely scenario. plus, all the accountants and tax lawyers on the world will be unleashed upon this agreement to find ways to avoid paying up. So, this is my hope, but it is not certain.
Can you post your original message to the forum here too? That way we can know for sure what was said precisely, otherwise it's just he-said / he-said.
Because people are interested and want to find out the truth? At the moment it's a he-said-she-said situation, with each side posting their own (probably biased) version of events.
The person you're replying to is suggesting that everyone who's "interested and want to find out the truth" here should stop and re-evaluate what utility that gets them, vs what disutility that information-seeking gets the people involved.
To put this another way: the paparazzi that chased Princess Diana to her death, did so because there was demand for tabloid journalism.
The people that invested in this affair that doesn't concern them? They need a new hobby. Maybe volunteering at their local vax site for a few weeks could do some actual good instead of trying to play detective just to feel good about themselves pretending they are contributing.
The technical work that a lot of us are involved in is deeply intertwined with the venture capital business. This is a glimpse of how things operate inside of that business.
Posting the exact text would be sort of the opposite of gossiping. And it is somewhat important because of the possibility of ycombinator unjustly punishing someone(the other possibility being that ycombinator did nothing wrong and this tweeter just burned his reputation). The beauty of the internet and message boards is that if you don't want to take part in the conversation, you can just leave the page.
This is the major humanitarian issue of our time. It's time to put aside profits and apply economic pressure to end this (and other crimes against tibetans, mongols etc). Does the enlightenment project in the West have any energy left?
> This is the major humanitarian issue of our time.
Not even close. There's reportedly 120,000 - 1m Uyghurs imprisoned, but even this is less than the deaths due to Coronavirus. Climate change will displace and kill more. We will also have to see what happens with the conflict in the Caucuses, but the civil war in Syria has displaced 6m people.
I had a mild case of covid and the loss of smell and taste was unlike anything similar I've ever experienced. It's not like having a stuffed nose or just being less sensitive to smell. For me I could breathe just fine but could not smell or taste anything, literally zero. Even very strong smelling things did nothing for me, and food had zero taste. It's a very unusual experience and I think a dead giveaway that you had the virus (it appears near the end of an infection typically).
My girlfriend had that symptoms for few days, so I've told her to make the test, she got back and told me that the test was positive and we've got 2 weeks quarantine, it was august 26th.
The very next day I got really painful arthralgia (august 27th). The next day was fever that lasted till the thursday (august 29th). On the next day (30th august) I was feeling good, though that that was the end. Oh boy how I was wrong. Later on the same day I've had issues with breathing, friday night was nightmare with short shallow breathing and fever, that scared me a lot, never feel that way. I've gad few times pneumonia when I was a kid, but this was next level. The next day was better, so I didn't call an ambulance as they were already overwhelmed, but got to the hospital by myself and did the test with positive result. On the monday (september 2nd) I started coughing a lot, but the next day was much worse. With tuesday I started having headaches, dizziness and ear ache.. Coughing, headaches and dizziness lasted more than a week, with better and worse days.
It was the worst experience of the last few years, and it started with loss of smell an taste.
lucky I don't experience respiratory problems but I got a false recovery like you, this last Tuesday. Before I had some fever and headaches for four days.
I had some fever this two last days. and I'm experiencing weird tastes with a few good ingredients. Today, I don't had fever but nearly all day I feel a lot of sluggishnes.
False recovery is the worst thing, when you think that this is the end, then sluggishnes and headaches comes to remind you that you are still sick. Headaches and sluggishnes with dizziness still keep coming back, like last monday it was bad to the point I though that I'll lie down on the floor and won't get up. From what I've found, every time when I feel sick, my blood pressure is above 140/90. Check yours It may be the case.
I'm doing much better now, thanks! Yeah I was a bit skeptical about covid, thought it was exaggerated, but when you go trough all of this by yourself, then you realize that it wasn't.
30ish, one condition that I can think of is sinusitis, which I always have when I have the flu, with swelling of the eyes and stuffed nose. But this time there was no swelling nor stuffed nose.
also my brother when he was a kid, had pneumonia few times as I did, and when he's sick (mostly flu) he has the same issues that I've got.
My wife was ill earlier during the first wave. She literally gargled TCP (the chemical, not the protocol. Handshakes are illegal.) and couldn't taste it. If you've ever been around this chemical you know how strong it smells, people can smell it across the house. That's when we suspected Covid. Couldn't get a test until months later, and it was negative. But still suspect it.
Why would you gargle TCP?
[edit: this was a confusion between an antiseptic whose name is TCP, and a chemical which is acronymmed as TCP. The former is mostly phenol (which I wouldn't recommend drinking, but apparently has been approved for that), the latter is a dangerous industrial solvent which you should not drink.
Based on the context, I now think the person was gargling the antiseptic called TCP, which is really phenol (a totally different chemical from TCP). So I think I understand the confusion now.
When using TLAs for chemicals, it's often better to write out the full chemical name instead. When I say "IPA" I mean isopropyl alcohol but everything thinks I mean beer.
It's just one of those things where the different context between countries doesn't translate well.
In the UK, if you say "TCP" everybody knows that you're talking about the antiseptic phenolic liquid that can be used for gargling but never swallowed. It's present in most househould medicine cabinets.
It's important to note here, given that the subject is loss of the sense of taste and smell, that this stuff absolutely reeks.
> When I say "IPA" I mean isopropyl alcohol but everything thinks I mean beer.
Somewhere around April/May, everyone in my circles and all their dogs were suddenly talking about "IPA". I was very, very confused until I eventually figured out they didn't mean the beer.
TCP (the antiseptic) is more of a brand name. It was named after a chemical but doesn't contain that chemical at all anymore; "TCP" in this context is just referring to the brand name. If you gargle TCP you're gargling whatever whatever mixture of phenols they put in it now, not trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl.
"TCP is recognized in California as a human carcinogen, and extensive animal studies have shown that it causes cancer. Short term exposure to TCP can cause throat and eye irritation and can affect muscle coordination and concentration. Long term exposure can affect body weight and kidney function."
Doesn't sound like something one should gargle tho.
You don't want to drink this,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,2,3-Trichloropropane
and the data supporting it is far better than coffee. (the california law is stupid, but some of the things it lists actually are dangerous).
It's a traditional antiseptic introduced in the UK in the 1920s. It has a strong, somewhat medicinal, smell. I gargled it once, and regretted it because it tastes foul.
It is effective against gingivitis and mouth ulcers and will also ward off vampires and werewolves. Actually smells better than garlic and is cheaper than silver, so win win.
It really isn't that bad to gargle but not particularly pleasant either. It is effective though and that's the real point.
There are carcinogens and there are CARCINOGENS. Hot water is technically a carcinogen. Drinking water that is too hot can increase the risk of throat cancer. This doesn't mean we can't use them. We just have to be aware of the risks.
No, not if the "risks" is comically small. The warning label becomes meaningless when applied to anything with an astronomically low chance of causing cancer.
The list of things California says doesn't cause cancer is much smaller than its list of recognized human carcinogens. And animals studies are not 1:1 to humans.
It's literally a medical antiseptic designed to be gargled after dilution.
I would not put too much stock in Prop 65 warnings. Any restaurant with grilled or fried food is required to have them. Eyeglasses are known to cause cancer in CA. Until recently, so was coffee (buy after a long legal battle, coffee is no longer known to cause cancer here)
Same thing here. Very mild case. I had a .5 degree fever for a day (normally I'm 97.5 in the morning and 98.4 in the evening). I coughed like three times. But the sense of smell was completely removed for 4ish days. I have some eucalyptus/tea tree/menthol shampoo that smells _very very_ strongly. When I couldn't smell that anymore it was the craziest sensation. No other symptoms to really speak of. This also appeared later.
A test months later would be negative (if it was a swab) they are only accurate in the first week or so.
The antibody tests are fraught with issues, and if you fight the virus with your T cells rather than B cells, the antibody test won't pick that up and you'll show as negative.
i saw this and, echoing many of the other commenters, thought it was a _different_ TCP chemical, in this case, a relatively obscure drug similar to PCP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenocyclidine
I’m glad that was picked out. So subtle yet actually maybe exclaim out loud in this hotel lobby. I have a mask on and there are very few here so hopefully I haven’t endangered anyone, but something so sublime deserves an applause.
Same taste outcome here. Coffee and Coke Zero became very disappointing. I was swabbed and confirmed diagnosed with it.
It really did me in and I’m not sure I completely recovered form it yet. Took me 3 months after it was over to be able to run more than 30 seconds again. I could do a 5km run easily before. It’s a struggle now. But I’m in my 40’s so I expected a longer recovery cycle.
Did it change at some point? Back when I drank soft drinks I had become a diet soft drink consumer and Coke Zero was a godsend as being at least somewhat like actual Coke.
All I know is that when it came out 15 years ago it was awesome, and at some point probably 5 years ago I realised it tasted like crap and switched to pepsi max.
Nowadays when I do happen to drink some it tastes extremely terrible to me.
Edit: Apparently Coke Zero is no longer sold anywhere except where I live (New Zealand), so I guess nobody else in this forum will be able to check for themselves.
The rest of the world switched to "Coke Zero Sugar" and no longer has Coke Zero. In NZ the new product is called Coke No Sugar and Coke Zero continues to be sold because it was really popular I guess.
I've noticed that Coke Zero bottles that were left out in the sun lose most of their sweetness and taste awful. Maybe there's some photosensitive compound in the sweetener.
I found the same about Diet Coke (Coke Light in some countries). Something changed about 10-12 years ago and it started tasting "chemically" and harsh and I no longer liked it. I switched to Diet Dr. Pepper which I find has a smoother taste. But with the aluminum can shortage, it's become hard to buy in stores.
I had that exact experience for 12 days after a fever and a light cough in March. I couldn't even smell Thai fish sauce.
They wouldn't test me because it wasn't on their list of symptoms in Germany, even though South Korea, UK and China were already reporting it as a strong indicator for Corona.
I had some symptoms in mid-March as well, and actually on my birthday noticed I couldn't smell or taste nearly as well as normal. It was very apparent because I work as a barista, so naturally I rely on my sense of smell quite a lot, and I had really enjoyed the same green tea the day before and the day of my smell loss; it just tasted incredibly flat. My birthday meal and birthday wine were just a waste on me. My wife and I were tested for antibodies about 6 weeks later, when our son was born, and neither of us was found to have antibodies. It wasn't until around the first week of April that I first heard loss of your sense of smell was a symptom of COVID19. In spite of the antibody test, I suspect I had the virus. About how quickly does the antibody count drop if you develop specific antibodies to COVID19? I read somewhere that some people recovered from their infections without developing antibodies tailored to COVID19 and it was thought that these individuals overcame the virus due to their body's already existing store of antibodies for other types of Corona virus. I can't remember where I read that article now.
There is a huge variance in antibody response and duration between patients. It seems to correlate with symptom severity but there are other factors still not understood (possibly genetic). In some cases the innate immune system fights off the infection before antibodies are generated. In other cases the antibodies fade away quickly, but a high level of immunity is retained through memory T cells. Unfortunately there's no quick or easy way to do a specific T cell assay.
There is a hypothesis that prior exposure to other similar viruses provides a limited degree of immunity from SARS-CoV-2. It's plausible and fits some of the case patterns but we don't know yet if it's a significant effect.
Same thing happened to me -- and I also tested negative for antibodies about five weeks later. My partner (who had more of a flu-like illness) did test positive for antibodies though, so I'm very certain I had it. My hypotheses are: test was not specific enough, i fought it off quickly with t-cell immunity, or my antibodies fell off very quickly since I really was not sick (I had fever of 100 for about three hours and some burning pain in my nasal cavity and that's it)
I really wish they would get in gear and start rolling out widespread serologic testing. Many people have similar stories to you. For a lot of people symptoms were before there was any testing available.
With widespread serologic testing, we can at least get some waypoint data, and for people like you some peace of mind.
I'm not a doctor or biologist, but afaik your body has multiple possible responses to a viral infection, and not all of them end with an immunity. The second thing that a virus may mutate more or less quickly, evading your previous immunity.
There was concern initially, and still somewhat, that it might not confer long-term immunity. Not everything does, even if your body fights something off in the short term.
This novel coronavirus is different enough from others, and the human body's response to it is very unusual, so it's reasonable to ask whether infection confers immunity.
People were quick to assume immunity at first, because that's what people want to be true. But it was recognised as a dangerous assumption, which has a realistic prospect of being wrong.
Some people end up with antibody levels too low to measure after infection, which adds more weight to the idea that they might not be immune afterwards. You could think of that as a level of evidence; certainly it comes under "we should take this seriously". (Fortunately the human body has other mechanisms for long-term immunity (T-cell memory), but that still needs to be studied.)
The difference between assumption and evidence on this is important because it strongly informs our models of its propagation, how many people will get it how fast, how best to contain and limit it, and whether people who have had can safely (for themselves and others) behave differently afterwards.
If you've had Covid-19 and you're still struggling with Long Covid 3-6 months later, you're going to want to know if there's a realistic chance you could catch it a second time, especially because by then you know you are one of those susceptible to awful symptoms. It's not enough to assume it's just like other coronaviruses - you will have personal experience that it isn't.
I believe _jstreet is referring to the case of getting sick again if exposed to the coronavirus a second time. There are limited data, but so far it looks like the re-infection is less severe.
I have something like that right now (started exactly week ago), I can't smell or taste and I can easily breath through the nose, but I also feel some pressure, like it would be a little bit swollen inside. It's cold outside and breating through the nose is mildly painful when I go out. Looks more like sinus infection without typical symptoms. I wonder if you felt it like that or the loss of smell was the only indicator of illness.
-If the person gets sicker later, you don't have to wait on another test to know the diagnosis and start treatment.
-Second is from a contact tracing perspective and isolation perspective. If this person is positive, it is that much more important that they limit contact with people.
-Third is if you are positive you can donate your plasma which *may help others (good randomized controlled trials for convalescent plasma are still pending).
-If you are positive you make not need the vaccine later, it also could reduce your risk potentially for being infected later, less stress.
-Also helps population wide to know total number of infected to get an idea of rate of spread, herd immunity, other metrics.
I was sick with something like that at the end of nov 2019 - end of dec 2019. normally cold air is relaxing to my lungs, but then cold air stung. no loss of taste though, does the pain feel like stinging or something else?
And it feels like sinus infection, but on the other hand I can't imagine why I can't smell and taste stuff if I can easily breath. I'm taking already meds for sinus infection, will call my doctor after the weekend if there will be no improvement. Unfortunately in Poland we can't get covid test without having all four symptoms of it... I could do this myself, but it's very pricey and I'm doing my work from home and wearing a mask in shops anyway, so I'll just isolate even more.
This is why I think all the case count numbers are basically garbage.
For most people, going to the doctor is more bother than it's worth and half the time they'll tell you that you don't qualify for whatever test or treatment you were hoping to receive anyway.
There is a massive disconnect between how many people are testing positive and how many people are actually infected, and it's skewing everyone's perception of the virus.
This seems to have huge geographic variation. Some places you've got to go to the doc & get a referral & they're screening people out of getting the test. Other places, they're having drive-through or walk-up testing for anyone, no questions asked. Of course you'll get different results in these cases.
That would certainly help to stop the spread of Covid, but if everyone followed your advice, we would very quickly find ourselves with an entirely new set of problems.
You can't optimize only to stop viral spread. You have to strike some balance between maintaining normalcy and reducing the risk of spread.
Covid has killed a million, and will surely kill many more, but global poverty is going to increase this year for the first time in decades, and tens of millions are going go hungry.
> That would certainly help to stop the spread of Covid, but if everyone followed your advice, we would very quickly find ourselves with an entirely new set of problems.
The advice of not going to a store if you're sick with something that resembles Covid? Is that such a large number of people it will have a big cost?
The tricky part there is "resembles Covid". The symptoms are so variable from person to person (I've heard it likened to the flu, a bad cold, a mild cold, a sinus infection - all this from different people that tested positive) that nailing those down with any certainty enough to make hard decisions like that on, is basically impossible.
From what people who experienced it told me, it's not the smell & taste loss which come from colds and similar illnesses, where your nose is runny or obstructed.
One person told me she was cleaning something with vinegar, her daughter entered the kitchen and told her "mum, this vinegar smell is horrible!" and then it dawned on her she couldn't smell anything.
No runny or stuffy nose. She was normal, except she couldn't smell anything.
At this point of the pandemic, complete loss of smell and taste of this kind almost certainly indicates covid19, outliers notwithstanding.
Trust me, I know the difference between being unable to smell/taste because your nose is blocked, and actual anosmia where you can breathe normally but the sense is just gone.
I don't know if most people experience anosmia like you describe while having a common cold or the flu, though (I think they don't). From what I've read this symptom is a pretty reliable indicator of covid19, so much so that at this time it pretty much rules out any other diagnosis and it is a strong basis for medical decision making. (Of course, there will always be outliers for any symptom. Decisions still need to be made at the population scale, though).
I can manage to buy myself a three-course dinner with wine and dessert (spending a pretty $$) without going into a shop. I've managed to buy hundreds of dollars worth of books from my local bookstores without going into shops. I can lie on my floor gasping for air and get power tools delivered to my porch!
Let's be clear about what we want. It sounds like you want people to spend money, not primarily that you want them to enter shops and breathe air and touch things.
> (it appears near the end of an infection typically)
Hmm doesn't that contradict the article? Of it is at the end of the infection, then it feels like it isn't good as a warning to others that you got the virus, and more of an indicator that you had the virus
For me it was at the end of very mild flu-like symptoms (general malaise, sleeping a lot etc.). It's possible I was still contagious when I lost my smell and taste so people should probably self-isolate if they experience the same. Though my guess from personal experience is that this is a lagging indicator and possibly anyone with this has already been infectious for a while.
This was actually the UK government's justification for not including it on the list of symptoms that they asked people to self-isolate for initially - even though it was fairly specific to Covid, they reckoned it appeared too late in order to be all that useful as a criteria to get people to self-isolate. Notice also that the article doesn't say anything about when the symptom appears.
Same happened to me. No cold, runny nose, or any problems with airways. But my smell was just gone. I literally ground up basil and garlic and stuck it up my nose... nothing.
Back around 2010 I had this happen to me, It was so bizarre. Someone told me it was do to a sinus infection but I never had to go on antibiotics for one and no pain. I was sick that year with other things not related to the nose and it took a long time to get my sense of smell back. It never fully recovered to what it was. One thing I remember is it was like a filter and some things smelled awful and some things like nothing at all. Onions smelled like ammonia is what I remember most. I had lots of test done and never found out why. It wasn't a pleasant experience and freaked me out a little.
In February of 2019 I flew to SF for a business trip, and a few days after my return my wife became sick with an unknown illness -- she was complaining of shortness of breath, had a cough, lightheaded feeling and migraines.
Her breathing continued to get worse over a period of days to the point where she was waking up with blue lips and would become totally winded when walking a few feet.
Eventually she decided she needed to see a dr so we went to an urgent care -- due to the fact we had no car (we were living downtown Denver at the time) we walked and only a few blocks from the house she nearly collapsed -- I had to hold her up while we walked very slowly the rest of the way to the urgent care -- once we arrived she was immediately put on oxygen and given an IV.
later that night she was sent home, but in the morning her condition was worse, so we went to the ER but she was sent home again this time with asthma medication including an emergency inhaler.
Her breathing was labored for months and she continued to use the emergency inhaler during this time.
In August of 2019 she completely lost her sense of taste and smell.
In October 2019 she got exponentially worse so we went back to the ER and this time they checked her in.
They ran loads of tests on her, checked for cancer, HIV etc. -- eventually they gave her a bronchoscopy and found lots of very thick stringy mucus all in her lungs and found that she had a collapsed lung.
During this time they treated her with oxygen and antibiotics.
All of the tests they ran came back negative -- she remained in the hospital for a week and eventually recovered. I was in close contact with her during this time I even laid next to her in the hospital bed but did not contract her illness.
After 7 days the doctors concluded that she must have developed asthma and sent her home with an inhaler which she relied on daily until around February.
She is now able to exercise on a treadmill without ill effects. However if I cook things on the stove and it produces smoke this seems to trigger mild issues, and occasionally she has a stuffy nose that seems like allergies.
I'm not saying she had covid-19 but she had many of the symptoms. She had no fever during this time.
Did that include tongue-based tastes, too, like sweet / salty / sour / bitter / umami, or just olfactory ones? Like, if you ate an orange would it be sweet and sour at all?
I had experienced loss both of smell (completely, kitty litter smelled like nothing) and taste (not completely). You still sense if something's salty, for example, but it's very remote. As an anecdote, the aubergine paste, which is usually off-putting and bitter to my taste (but smells nice) started tasting like nothing, really, so I happily ate my wife's supply. Soy sauce also seemed far less salty than usual. Taste remains, but very far, and smell is just lost. Very bizarre experience, would not recommend.
For me yes. Couldn’t taste anything for about a week so I just ate soup and toast. After that the sweet , salt ,fatty etc came back so I swapped to lasagna and cannelloni as it was the most normal tasting food.
Couldn’t even smell the alcohol in a bottle of whiskey.
Very weird how much smell/taste means to us but how do you don’t notice it going.
In our house no one noticed their sense of smell going yet it was a massive impact to me when I was eating flavourless food for two weeks. It was incredibly depressing not being able to go outside and being stuck in eating gruel.
The only reason we got tested was because someone wanted a sick note from the doctor and she asking everyone what they’re sense of smell was like.
Just to be pedantic: You can never smell the alcohol (ethanol) in any alcoholic drink. It's a tasteless and odourless chemical. What you taste or smell are the congeners, which are other organic molecules that are the byproducts of fermentation. In the case of whisky, you also have the additional flavour and odour chemicals leached from wood barrels.
You're basically smelling "charred wood extract" when smelling Whiskey.
You're almost certainly smelling the denaturing agent in the alcohol, the vast majority of commercial sources add something to it, even for "technical" grades.
I kept a bottle of Caol Ila by my desk and sniffed it every few hours so I could detect when my smell start coming back. I accidentally did it on a few work calls...
It's too late to edit the above comment to clarify it, but could the downvoters please explain why I was downvoted? I'm genuinely curious: what does "loss of taste" mean here? I'd like to know in case I encounter it.
For instance, if I have sinus congestion so that I can't breathe through my nose, I can't experience the olfactory component of tastes. If you gave me orange juice and lemon juice, I'd be able to tell that both were sweet and sour but might not be able to distinguish between the flavors.
So when I've read about losing taste, I've wondered if this was like all the prior times when I've lost the sense of smell, or if this was something new and my taste buds would also stop working so that I couldn't experience "salty" anymore.
When people discuss taste, it's not always clear whether they mean the sensation you experience in your tongue or in your nose.
Good question, I'm also interested. In my case (more covid-like symptoms than anything else, but no confirmation) I can feel difference between lemon and banana. But the sourness doesn't bother me at all. Also onion doesn't work anymore, normally I would cry like crazy, now I can keep it under my nose and feel only a little bit of pain inside the nose.
I've suffered reduced smell and taste from colds, though I've never entirely lost either. Even with the worst colds I could still clearly identify the acrid smell of smoke from idling diesels from 50 yards away at work.
> I had a mild case of covid and the loss of smell and taste was unlike anything similar I've ever experienced.
Very much true. Usually when you bite a lemon you feel a strong sour taste followed by involuntary movement of hands tightening towards the chest and shivering briefly.
With covid's loss of taste, i felt no taste at all when biting a lemon, but the body wants to shiver which i could control easily but was very confusing experience i never felt before. Very unique experience.
Also realized the appetite falls rapidly. Without taste i had to force feed myself. During normal illness your are tired and don't want to eat, but this is very different experience.
That was how I knew. Had a vague sense of coming down with something; smelled a scented candle which I KNEW i could smell (normally), didn’t sense it at all. Test followed.
Strange that this was known early, yet never was considered an indicator easily tested.
Thank you for posting this. I've never been able to tell what "loss" meant in media reports. I've had instances where I don't have much of a sense of smell, but I can still smell certain strong odors.
This was my exact presentation of the virus. A deeply profound loss of smell and taste, with an otherwise clear nose. I did develop some significant fatigue and fogginess and a slight cough, but the complete loss of smell and taste was upsetting. The early articles about this connection back in March is what prompted us to get tested. In our cases, though, this symptom appeared almost immediately and stuck with us throughout the infection, so I don't think it's fair to generalize about when anosmia is likely within the course of the virus.
When this happened to me I recovered my senses within about two weeks, but coffee smelt like a combo of burning plastic and rotting flesh for several weeks after. To this day (six months later), certain things smell different than they did before: low tide, poop, some foods when heated. [edit: and they all smell like the same thing]
My wife lost her sense of smell and taste, likely from COVID, back in March and has not yet recovered it. She has recovered "impressions" -- things smell or taste bad or good, but can't distinguish an actual identifiable odor.
I had an almost complete loss of smell, unlike anything I've experienced before, but could still smell some aerosols like air freshener. My sense of smell was back to normal in about 3 days.
I currently have this symptom. I ordered extremely spicy Thai food last week. I could feel the heat, but not taste anything at all.
After about 4 days, I regained some ability to differentiate between salty/sour/sweet, but it’s been in and out for the last 2-3 days. I accidentally poured too much mustard on a sandwich at lunch today and could not have told you there was any mustard on it at all in a blind test.
I mostly ate spicy food during my time with it due to the fact the physical sensation of spiciness being one of the only things that made food interesting. Same with saltiness. I actually ate a lot less during that period due to not having much drive to do so with a lack of taste.
With a mostly mild case, it took me three weeks approximately, for my full sense of smell to return.
I lost maybe 85% of my sense of smell, and 1/2 the sense of taste. I could no longer smell anything in the air, atmospheric scents. Like if you walk into a restaurant you might be able to smell food broadly in the air; I couldn't smell what was cooking on the stove six feet away. I could only smell something if it was right under my nose (within ~20-30cm). A lot of people seem to totally lose the sense of smell, I didn't reach that level (and it still took most of a month to return).
Same here. What's was funny about losing my sense of smell is that unlike vision or even hearing, it's hard to remember how strong things were supposed to smell before, so it was also hard to know when it was fully back. But at around 1 week I smelled a raw leek and got a whiff of something and then within about 2-3 weeks, it wasn't noticeable anymore.
Absolute same - a vague whiff, tastes coming back to food with varying strengths depending on what it was, then a return to normalcy. I'm still not sure if it's back to 100%, simply due to the fact I also never really had a mindful baseline of what was normal.
I probably had decreased smell, and it felt like I was tasting with the sides of my tongue and cheeks(2 weeks later the middle of my tongue peeled off almost looked like I was getting a snake tongue).
I did test multiple times and I could still smell and taste, though it felt like maaaybe my smell was decreasing, but every article I read said completely gone smell and taste.
I realises my smell was reduced when I was in the hospital and I suddenly could smell how stinky the room and I were, then it hit me "yeah, my smelling was probably bad untill now.
My wife "realised" she lost her smell and taste right after her test came back positive.
But she most likely lied for the attention(I know this sounds harsh, but I have goos reasons to think so).
Same here, although I also had a cough and fever. My wife is a doctor and got infected at work, she suffered only a mild illness with mild fever on day one and then a cough for the rest of the week. After 7 days she went back to work (according with gov guidelines) and was never unwell again. When she was self isolating at home I looked after her and must have been exposed to huge viral loads as I was obviously in very close contact and didn’t change my behaviour at all. I was just there as if she had a normal flu or cold, so warm hugging her at night, still giving her kisses and going normally about life. 5 days into her isolation I got a fever as well and I had a very high fever for the first two days. Then it disappeared like it normally would and I just had a cough left for the week and felt a bit tired obviously. After roughly 10 days I felt like I was all good again and even started to go for runs in the park again and to work out at home again. Weirdly we lost our sense of taste and smell entirely towards the end of the first 7 days and it lasted for about 5 days in total despite all other symptoms having disappeared. It was a complete loss, like nothing I had ever had before. All in all the loss of smell and taste was literally the most annoying about it, otherwise it felt like an extremely mild flu like not even worth talking about. Luckily smell and taste came fully back, just suddenly one day it was back and that was the end of story. This happened in early April in the UK. Since then we felt great, no lasting symptoms whatsoever. I’m not a super athlete or anything, but I do enjoy sports and I have maintained a great condition and actually even feel a lot stronger than before. Probably because due to the extra work outs I get from all the extra time. This virus is just a regular respiratory illness and it’s honestly so mild I cannot believe how the world is going bonkers over this. I actually hope that the more people get it hopefully they will realise like me that this whole reaction to COVID is massively over the top. There will always be some people with complications and some who die. But that is literally just like with other viruses which we don’t care about. If you’re in normal health, are not fat and not end of life, then there’s nothing to worry about.
Of course I can, I just did make a conclusion because of my own experience and the experience of dozens of other people who I know IRL. Many staff at my wife’s work got infected. 0 deaths of those and 0 “long covids”.
I’m just saying that like with the flu, everyone around me who had COVID finds it laughable because it was actually milder than the flu. Feels to me like the people who get critically ill must be some really badly unhealthy people with some bad existing health issues. I’m not hand waving it, I’m just not very surprised and not freaking out when someone tells me that extremely unhealthy people have health issues. I mean that’s kind of what unhealthy means at the end of the day, when your body is much weaker than the average person and vulnerable to benign viruses.
We had someone die in our family presumably from COVID, but that person was 94 and we were told that she probably won’t make this year already in November 2019, which was before COVID. It’s a perfect example where she ends up in the COVID statistic, but she didn’t die from COVID. She died because she was 94 and her body gave up no matter what she would’ve had.
I'm not sure this is really going to take off, it seems that most people who are abandoning TF are moving to Jax or pytorch. My own experience with Jax is that it is much easier to use then TF, just an all round more pleasant experience. It would be interesting to try this, but at this point I'm not really willing to learn 'yet another deep learning framework' and the extreme anti-user problems that TF had make me loath to give it another shot, even with a presumably better frontend. Moreover, I think that python is just a better all-round ML/data science language at this point. Has anyone tried both Jax and this and would be willing to give us their thoughts on strengths and weaknesses of each?
I'm skeptical of JAX. It feels good right now, but when the first TF beta version came out it was very much like that too - clean, simple, minimal, and just a better version of Theano. Then the "crossing the chasm" effort started and everyone at Google wanted to be part of it, making TF the big complex mess it is today. It's a great example of Conway's Law. I'm not convinced the same won't happen to JAX as it catches on.
PyTorch has already stood the test of time and proven that its development is led by a competent team.
I know where you're coming from, but TF in my opinion was very user-hostile even on arrival. I can't tell you how much hair-pulling I did over tf.conds, tf.while_loops and the whole gather / scatter paradigm for simple indexing into arrays. I really think the people working on it wanted users to write TF code in a certain, particular way and made it really difficult to use it in other ways. Just thinking back on that time still raises my blood pressure! So far Jax is much better and I'm cautiously optimistic they have learned lessons from TF.
I had the opposite experience. The early TF versions were difficult to use in that they required a lot of boilerplate code to do simple things, but at least there was no hidden complexity. I knew exactly what my code did and what was going on under the hood. When I use today's high-level opaque TF libraries I have no idea what's going on. It's much harder to debug subtle problems. The workflow went wrong "Damn, I need to write 200 lines of code to do this simple thing" to "I need to spend 1 hour looking through library documentations, gotchas, deprecation issues and TF-internal code to figure out which function to call with what parameters and check if it actually does exactly what I need" - I much prefer the former.
Having barriers of entry is not always a bad thing - it forces people to learn and understand concepts instead of blindly following and copying and pasting code from a Medium article and praying that it works.
But I agree with you that there are many different use cases. Those people who want to do high-level work (I have some images, just give me a classifier) shouldn't need to deal with that complexity. IMO the big mistake was trying to merge all these different use cases into one framework. Let's hope JAX doesn't go down the same route.
Not quite sure why you picked those particular examples... JAX also requires usage of lax.cond, lax.while_loop, and ops.segment_sum. Only gather has been improved with slice notation support. IMO, TF has landed on a pretty nice solution to cond/while_loop via AutoGraph.
While jax has those operations you don't always need them, it depends on what transformations you want to do (JIT or grad) and they have been working on making normal control structures compatible with all transformations
You can't blame the TF people for things like while_loop. Those are inherited from Theano, and back then the dynamic graph idea wasn't obvious.
JAX is indeed a different situation as it has a more original design (although TF1 came with a huge improvement in compilation speed, so maybe there were innovations under the hood). But I don't know if I like it. The framework itself is quite neat, but last time I checked, the accompanying NN libraries had horrifying designs.
The difference is that in TF1 you had to use tf.cond, tf.while_loop etc for differentiable control flow. In JAX you can differentiate Python control flow directly, e.g.:
In [1]: from jax import grad
In [2]: def f(x):
...: if x > 0:
...: return 3. * x ** 2
...: else:
...: return 5. * x ** 3
...:
In [3]: grad(f)(1.)
Out[3]: DeviceArray(6., dtype=float32)
In [4]: grad(f)(-1.)
Out[4]: DeviceArray(15., dtype=float32)
In the above example, the control flow happens in Python, just as it would in PyTorch. (That's not surprising, since JAX grew out of the original Autograd [1]!)
Structured control flow functions like lax.cond, lax.scan, etc exist so that you can, for example, stage control flow out of Python and into an end-to-end compiled XLA computation with jax.jit. In other words, some JAX transformations place more constraints on your Python code than others, but you can just opt into the ones you want. (More generally, the lax module lets you program XLA HLO pretty directly [2].)
There are a bunch of frameworks built on top of Pytorch too (fastAI, lighting, torchbearer, ignite...), I don't see why this should be a problem (or at least a problem to JAX but not to Pytorch)
IMO, this is not a fair comparison because Pytorch spans a larger amount of abstraction than jax (I don't quite know how to explain it other than "spans a larger amount of abstraction").
You can do much of the jax stuff in pytorch, you can't do the high level nn.LSTM stuff in jax, you have to use like flax or objax or something.
Oh I just noticed that you're one of the people behind that recent GAN compression work! Really cool stuff and a big step up this year, I've been following the field for a lil bit.
In your first sentence you're mistaking JAX and XLA
XLA: Accelerated Linear Algebra, I guess it's kind of a backend/compiler that optimizes Linear Algebra/Deep Learning calculations with some very interesting techniques, among them fusing kernels
JAX: In some sense syntax sugar over XLA, but a better way of describing it is Composable transformations + Numpy + some Scipy. The composable transformations allow you to take derivatives (be them single, multi or vector valued functions and also higher order derivatives), JIT a function (which is them compiled to XLA), 2 forms of parallelism (vmap and pmap) and others, while being compatible with one another and with both TPUs, GPUs and CPUs
"TensorFlow Probability (TFP) is a library for probabilistic reasoning and statistical analysis that now works on JAX! For those not familiar, JAX is a library for accelerated numerical computing based on composable function transformations.
We have ported a lot of TFP's most useful functionality to JAX while preserving the abstractions and APIs that many TFP users are now comfortable with."
Tensorflow is migrating a bunch of stuff to JAX. Even they use the "library" word for their own porting. For a user like me, it looks like Jax is a library that tensorflow uses...but the end-user usable library is tensorflow.
Hi, tech lead for TFP here. The wording here was unclear -- sorry! We're fixing it presently.
We are not migrating away from TF; far from it!
The change here was to interoperate with TF and JAX (and numpy!), by way of some rewrite trickery under the hood. Essentially, we wrote a translation layer that implements the TF API surface (or, the parts we actually use) in terms of numpy & JAX primitives [1]. This lets us leave most TFP code intact, written in terms of the TF API, but interoperate with JAX by way of the API translation layer. (Actually we implemented numpy support first, and mostly got JAX for "free" since JAX is largely API-compatible with numpy).
Sorry for any confusion!
We're pretty stoked about this work, so happy to answer any other questions you may have (also feel free to chime in on the github tracker or email tfprobability@tensorflow.org)
I'm not sure what point you're making. Even if the tax leads to a small black market for unregulated pollution, the legitimate market would remain regulated and thus our society would reap enormous environmental benefits. Moreover, the effort to thwart the tax constitutes a cost in and of itself, albeit the cost would necessarily be lower than the tax (to the extent that it's not lower, there is no incentive for a black market at all, which is also a real possibility)--this increased cost of pollution will also deter pollution just like the tax itself. Note that we tax lots of things effectively: gasoline, cigarettes, etc, and in none of those cases have a significant portion of the legitimate market moved to a black market--those taxes are quite effective. Lastly, Europe already has its own carbon taxes without the (rather silly) hypothetical consequences raised by critics in this thread.
> Anyway, you don’t have a market at all without government
That is not true, in fact most of the markets in history operated either without currencies (e.g. barter, farm labor etc) or with currencies that have inherent value (e.g gold, silver). A switch to fiat money implies state backing indeed, but a) it doesn't have to be one particular state (e.g. can do business with US dollars in some 3rd world countries) and innovations like bitcoin enable markets without any centralized currency.
> If we decide we want to subsidize India’s pollution or whatever, we can still do that.
That is the crux of the criticism you say you find silly. How exactly? Please show your work, because I am curious how we can subsidize China or India's emissions resulting from their domestic economy.
> Europe already has its own carbon taxes
Again please pay attention to domestic vs imported carbon. Most of the claims of approximating carbon neutrality is much smaller than in reality, because of the increasing consumption of carbon positive goods from developing countries.
Government != currency. In the most general sense it’s just the system that defines, interprets, and enforces property rights. That can be a tribal chief or the US government or the WTO.
> That is the crux of the criticism you say you find silly. How exactly? Please show your work, because I am curious how we can subsidize China or India's emissions resulting from their domestic economy
Writing them a check would be the most obvious way.
> Again please pay attention to domestic vs imported carbon. Most of the claims of approximating carbon neutrality is much smaller than in reality, because of the increasing consumption of carbon positive goods from developing countries.
I agree, there needs to be a border adjustment, and claims of carbon neutrality need to be similarly adjusted for imported carbon. I don’t see how that materially changes the calculus. Maybe the argument is that wide-scale border adjustments haven’t been proven out, and fair enough, but let’s maintain perspective: we’re speeding toward a cliff and we can’t be too concerned about bumps off to the left or the right.
> Writing them a check would be the most obvious way.
How much the check should be for exactly? This is important because even if we assume we can get perfect compliance if we paid for it, you might find the amount required surprisingly, I dare say impossibly, high.
As a thought experiment let's say we are going to subsidize the transformation of China's non-green energy production. For comparison I will use a levelized cost of energy which rolls in capital costs, operating costs, operating capacity efficiency (which is low for renewables) and depreciation. The figures are about 0.1$/kWh for new coal (though most coal already has the infrastructure so will only have non-capital costs) and roughly 0.2$/kWh for solar (similar for other renewables). If you write a check to convert 2019 China's non-green energy production (7000TWh * 70%) the figure we get is $1 trillion, which is roughly the discretionary spending of annual federal budget, %5 of US's GDP and 1.3% of the world's GPD. That is for China only.
No political apparatus in a democracy can muster the political will to justify subsidies of this scale.
I’m not arguing that we should subsidize China at all. Frankly we subsidize them too much already, but that’s a separate topic. My only point is that we taxing carbon doesn’t preclude subsidizing them to whatever extent we choose. It seems like you’re arguing that if we pass a carbon tax it will hurt China’s economy because business will move to greener countries (countries who are now competitive after adjusting for pollution, which is what a carbon tax aims to do), and that the US has a moral obligation to reimburse them (China) for that lost business. If I’m misunderstanding, I apologize and perhaps you could clarify; however, if I understand correctly, then I strongly disagree. The West in general and the US specifically has already made China’s economy world class and that at the expense of the environment and arguable to our own economic troubles (particularly inequality). We have no moral obligation to China, IMHO.
I guess I don't quite get what you suggest we should subsidize. China and India are two of the big, emerging polluters, and their exports only account for roughly 20% of their GDP. So a good 80% chunk will run on non-green energy even if we devised the perfect policy to make the remaining 20% of the entirety of their exports green. (US imports only a portion of that but let's assume entire world cooperated).
This is not accounting for the havoc it would wreak in international trade obviously, hurting China's exports is never hurting them alone, because trades not only go both ways, but also through; meaning depending on a lot of Chinese intermediary goods that we export affects US's GDP, and also worlds GDP. If I am understanding suggestion correctly, for example a carbon tax on iPhone's manufacturing would reduce how many iPhones are sold in the entire world, not just US, and ultimately would impact US's economic power in the form of a reduction, which also reduces the ability of "writing checks" for other interventions.
I don’t think we should subsidize anyone, neither China nor India, but only pointing out that a carbon tax doesn’t prevent us from doing so if we wanted to.
Ultimately I still don’t understand why you’re claiming that we depend on China and India to implement their own carbon taxes in order for us to be successful. If all wealthy countries implement a carbon tax with a border adjustment, China and India will either have to invest in greener tech and practices to compete in the wealthy first world market or be content in a less valuable market where pollution is allowed to be externalized.
> This is not accounting for the havoc it would wreak in international trade obviously, hurting China's exports is never hurting them alone, because trades not only go both ways, but also through; meaning depending on a lot of Chinese intermediary goods that we export affects US's GDP, and also worlds GDP.
Of course it’s going to hurt our economy. We’ve been living partly off of unsustainable environmental debt, and the whole point of a carbon tax is to reckon with that. Economic pain drives us toward greener solutions so we can enjoy a sustainable economy. The only “trick” to a carbon tax is deciding what the carbon tax rate should be at any moment in time to balance economic pain with necessary environmental goals. We should want to avoid an abruptly high carbon tax rate and prefer an initially low rate that rises gradually to allow our economies some time to invest in and implement green technologies, but waiting longer to implement the tax means the carbon tax rate will have to grow more steeply which translates to greater economic hardship.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/07/22/time-invest-af...
But strongly objected to a plan to build affordable housing in his own neighbourhood:
https://www.johnlocke.org/good-for-thee-not-for-me-robert-re...