"Finally, looking at that figure you might wonder why the relative risk of smoking has increased so much. Based on my first pass through the literature, it seems like no one knows. There are at least three possibilities:
- Over this period, cigarettes have been reformulated in ways that might make them more dangerous.
- As the prevalence of smoking has decreased, it’s possible that the number of casual smokers has decreased more quickly, leaving a higher percentage of heavy smokers.
- Or maybe the denominator of the ratio — the risk for non-smokers — has decreased."
My first thought was "second hand smoke". My logic is, when smoking was more normalized, non-smokers were exposed to some of the same risk as smokers due to smoking indoors, etc, resulting in higher rates of lung cancer among non-smokers.
You’re missing the point, I think. Lying won’t help, as very few people would do it. Most people would just give their number - mostly because they don’t realize it is shit practice to collect numbers, some because they don’t want confrontation.
By politely pointing out the absurdity, we can maybe raise a tiny bit of awareness. I am sure at least a handful of people behind me in the line noticed.
"Instead, they’ll be reminiscing about watching a Twitch streaming millionaire child screaming racial slurs as he rail-guns his opponents on Fortnite."
This perspective is reductive and insulting. There are many great, wholesome creators on YT/Twitch who put a lot of work to make their content welcoming and intellectually engaging, even if they are seemingly just playing video games. Just because the author doesn't like it doesn't make this remotely accurate to the real world.
I think in this case, the hypothetical lawsuits would be between companies that make iOS apps and Apple. The companies that make iOS apps want to have their own payment system where Apple doesn't take a cut.
Right, but Apple could just say Google has different policies... they never argued that google legally had to allow them to accept outside payments. They would just say "Google could have prevented us by policy legally, but didn't want to."
I don't mind PHP (like I don't mind lots of things that I don't really have to deal with), but Hack is by far my favorite web language. It has most of what's nice about PHP (specifically, reload and your changes are there, memory is request-scoped, etc.), without most of what's awful (the HSL fixes most of the goofy inconsistencies, real (although still not as expressive as I'd like it to be) static typing, etc.).
I think this is a valid point, but one consideration that feels missing from a lot of these kind of disucussions is to what extent the economy will "come back", even if every restriction were lifted.
If people are afraid to be in public, then the restaurants, bars, and shops won't see full-scale business return. Those jobs and business will be lost anyway, perhaps with more people infected than necessary. Or, we try and find some middle-ground "new normal" that lets people feel safe in public. Or something else? I have no idea and I doubt many people in this comment section really know either.
"I think this is a valid point, but one consideration that feels missing from a lot of these kind of disucussions is to what extent the economy will "come back", even if every restriction were lifted."
Because there's no point debating such a question. Arguing that we should leave lockdowns in place because people would be too scared to go outside even if we lifted the lockdowns, is tautological.
If the argument is that people are going to stay home anyway, then we should open the economy on first principles.
I don't think its that simple, because it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I think CA has the right idea to lift restrictions at the state level so that less at-risk rural areas can try it out. It will give an idea as to what LA county would need to do: if things go okay then a reopen is reasonable, if people don't feel comfortable without some kind of "distancing" rules then those would need to be considered, or something else.
So yeah, of course there is a point in debating such a question. And there are real ways to find answers. Probably even better ones than what I said.
A bit tangential, but this reminded me of Dexter Holland [0] the lead singer and songwriter of the band The Offspring. He went on to get a PhD in molecular biology (not an honorary one) and publish various papers about HIV.
James Williamson (one of the guitarists of Iggy Pop & The Stooges) retrained as an Electrical Engineer, and ended up as Vice President of Technical Standards at Sony working on Blu-ray.
If you've read anything about what they were like as a band that's quite a career path!
Action movie star Dolph Lundgren is also super educated, with a degree in chemical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology and a master's in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney [1].
Greg Graffin of Bad Religion has a PhD in zoology, certainly after he began the band in high school. Something about SoCal punks. His dissertation is of course "Evolution and Religion: Questioning the Beliefs of the World's Eminent Evolutionists"
- Over this period, cigarettes have been reformulated in ways that might make them more dangerous.
- As the prevalence of smoking has decreased, it’s possible that the number of casual smokers has decreased more quickly, leaving a higher percentage of heavy smokers.
- Or maybe the denominator of the ratio — the risk for non-smokers — has decreased."
My first thought was "second hand smoke". My logic is, when smoking was more normalized, non-smokers were exposed to some of the same risk as smokers due to smoking indoors, etc, resulting in higher rates of lung cancer among non-smokers.