While I'm probably wasting my time here. I'm going to say what I think many aren't saying. We need to heavily study and reflect on the impact of vaccinations regardless of the outcome and IF "we made the right decision".
This means comparing outcomes between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
While this study might be a step in the right direction, I feel there are too many in the medical, political and scientific spheres of influence that are shutting down such medical/scientific/humane study and debate. The silence is deafening.
If I don't hear such debate, my mind goes full tinfoil hat and thinks of concepts such as the Tenth Man Rule. It's good to have a civil discussion and disagreement on ANY subject. The data is out there. Where is that disagreement? Where are those studies? What were the impacts on heart conditions, strokes, neurological, SADS and other medical conditions?
The silence is truly deafening.
And to further increase my chances of getting censored - it's those same spheres of influence that likely created COVID in the first place and continue to allow institutions to dabble with genetic modification of these viruses. No one cares about the definition of "gain of function". We (humanity) dabbled with the code of life and messed up; we messed up big. Let's learn from this mistake and move on.
If you're only hearing silence in the vaccination debate (which, mind you, has been raging since before the first SARS outbreak, let alone the current SARS 2: CoV Boogaloo), then you might want to get your ears checked ;)
There is no shortage of medical professionals with all sorts of opinions on whether or not to vaccinate for any manner of disease, COVID included. Sure, the overwhelming majority have reached a consensus in favor of vaccination doing more good than harm (for good reason), but the tiny minority with contrary opinions are not at all being censored (if anything, they're being anti-censored, e.g. by social media posts and your usual gaggle of conspiracy-theory-peddling news outlets).
> the overwhelming majority have reached a consensus in favor of vaccination doing more good than harm (for good reason)
Do you believe they have all the data needed to make that a final conclusion?
Or are most of those medical professionals simply following certain leaders and descission makers? Would that even count as (useful) consensus then?
> Do you believe they have all the data needed to make that a final conclusion?
There is no "final conclusion". There will always be more data. So far the data have rather strongly indicated greater benefit than harm, even among the reports asserting correlations between vaccines and adverse reactions, so it doesn't seem very surprising to see consensus on that among medical experts.
The consensus ain't always right, to be clear. Maybe the small minority of experts asserting more harm than good are onto something. The body of data supporting such assertions is far more lacking, so I wouldn't bet on it.
> Or are most of those medical professionals simply following certain leaders and descission makers?
It's usually the other way around: the "certain leaders and decisionmakers" in the pro-vaccination camp largely lead/decide based on how experts are informing them - and there's certainly no shortage of said experts.
It's a fair bit more varied in the anti-vaccination camp; some such leaders/decisionmakers do defer to experts (and it's simply a case of their pool of experts being in the anti-vaccination camp), but it seems like most instead assume they know better than the experts; they tend to be the sorts of folks who already reject scientific methodology for various reasons, and thus are not inclined to defer to experts informed by said methodology.
I appreciate the response. I agree with most of what you say.
I still think it's important to point out that in this situation, with
a) a lack of primary data
and especially
b) considering the political and societal implications for publicly disagreeing with the "accepted opinion"
consensus might just not be a great measure in this case.
You seem to think that COVID was definitely man made, but we still don't have enough data to make any kind of assertion on that. Some recent finds lean more to a zoonotic source.
As for censorship, I don't think anyone is censoring truly good studies on this stuff right now. And I don't think there is that much central control of the entire medical and scientific community.
Take ivermectin, for example. Low power, poorly conducted studies trying to point to the benefits of Ivermectin to treat covid are still coming out. Doesn't seem like they are being censored.
The likelihood is that the EU and US will not directly intervene in Ukraine much like we didn't for the last invasions of Crimea and Georgia. Because of the history of the country and it's importance in the world landscape, it's difficult to escalate to a point of a nuclear conflict.
Personally, I would be more worried about Taiwan. Taiwan is similar in that they also maintain their independence from the other country (in this case China), yet (I feel) the world would be willing to go to war over controlling interest in this country, or, at least keeping it independent and neutral. Much of the world's most high tech, complex and expensive chips come from Taiwan and if China or another country would invade this would send shockwaves across the world as everything now is technology that requires many many chips. A country such as the US can't magically create a "fab" without years, if not decades of time investing in on the infrastructure and processes needed to fabricate these highly complex chips.
Historically, hot wars are often about power. This could be due to energy (such as oil and natural gas supplies) but the new power-base is technology. You control the chips that everyone needs, you control the world. Same goes with many other things like the software too but that's another topic.
If prices drop, miners may get priced out of mining if they don't have free electricity. Just like what happened when BTC was mined with CPUs and later GPUs and later ASICs people just stopped mining or using that method. Bitcoin is self adjusting, the only thing that doesn't adjust is the supply which is why some people found value in mining BTC when it was basically worthless.
I don't see how a dropping price has any bearing on a 51% attack.
If a CEO is going to classify all male Uber employees as male chauvinists and not hire them I would see that as stereotyping and discrimination of a class. The world is not black and white and I would definitely not want to work for that CEO.
That being said, I see issues with Uber long term. Not just Travis issues but also in the business model. Eventually all car manufacturers will have level 5 autonomy. At that point the car manufacturers will be Uber. They will be able to produce the car at cost and watch it drive away from the car manufacturing plant to be rented out wherever it's destination state/country is.
I'm not long on Uber either, for several reasons. But there exists a possibility that Uber's legacy could be that it served an important and pioneering role in the evolution of transportation and that is something that current employees should consider before they want to jump ship due to perceived brand popularity.
I agree, Travis did indeed disrupt the taxi industry and had to fight tooth and nail to get Uber to where it is today. I respect the hell out of that but unless Uber has enough money saved up to buy a small car manufacturer they are toast in the long term.
Regarding brand popularity, there's a quote from Gladiator that I love: "The mob is fickle brother". We're living in an age of the mobile phone app and there's no such thing as brand loyalty anymore. We as consumers and contractors can UNinstall an app such as Uber or SnapChat in 5 seconds. The only thing preventing that with Uber is likely the same thing that keeps Walmart in business: $$$.
Researchers actually found something that was already known for some time. 20 years ago I remember reading an old book about learning techniques. One of the techniques in it, and one that I use for myself and my kids is to sound out the answer to questions in various tones. For instance:
8 times 6 equals FORTY EIGHT (yelled).
8 times 6 equals forty eight (whispered).
8 times 6 equals forty eight (monotone).
etc...
It does work, but it frustrates me that these researchers think this is something new.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...