Discuss anything Huey Lewis related in this thread.
The News
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Even with realpolitik, there is a limit to what you can just stand by and watch, like Lorcan says. One of our almost neighbouring countries being invaded and destroyed and committing war crimes en masse there should be the limit. And it’s not just about sanctions – let’s remember that Russia turned off the gas faucet by themselves before there were sanctions against gas specifically. In the same way, Russia would have used gas as leverage to blackmail Europe into just accepting its takeover, and the slaughter and rape of the Ukranian people. Any form of possibly effective protest against it would’ve been met with “Well, do you want your gas or not?”
So yes, at some point the question does become, do you have any principles at all even if it costs you or don’t you? Might as well just give up on the human race if the answer is let’s get that gas.
Also, people actually having to freeze and even dying is not a neccessary consequence of the price of gas going up, it’s a neccessary consequence of our current fuck you I got mine capitalism approach.
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It was the sanctions against the Russian energy sector that especially made natural gas through the roof.
Not really. If you recall direct purchase of natural gas wasn’t sanctioned within the EU. Nordstream 1 was still operational and pumping gas to its major customers in Germany and the Netherlands. Russia then slowly choked the supply, in response to sanctions and military support to Ukraine.
So I’m not sure of your options there, it looks like the pipe gets switched on if you don’t oppose the invasion of a sovereign nation.
How reliable are these claims of hundreds of thousands dead due to high energy prices? I thought most countries affected have subsidised energy costs for low income families to mitigate.
Not for the first time this has shown the fragility of not owning your own energy supplies or being over reliant on a single source, we saw the same issue in the 1970s oil crisis. France are facing very little increased because of that and similarly in Malaysia I have faced no increase in petrol or electricity prices this year (albeit we don’t get cold). If this accelerates moves to renewable usage then we’d also see a reduction in deaths from air pollution.
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So, alongside sneaking out a new policy barring links to other social media platforms, Musk just declared that Twitter is a publisher!
This mess is going to get spectacularly messier.
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It’s as if companies have a need for a legal team.
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But surely, the Magic Invisible Hand of the Market will take care of that?
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Apparently the banning of links goes against an EU law with maximum fines of 20% of company revenue. Whoooooops
Good thing Musk has all but eliminated Twitter’s revenue!
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Speaking of NFTs, guess who’s getting in on the action?
Have you seen that people who bought these have found watermarks on the images, because he stole stock photos to make them with?
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it becomes like a trolley problem: do we sanction Russia, and accept that people here die from the cold, or do we refrain from sanctions, thereby continuing to
allow Russia to kill more people directly.
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This mess is going to get spectacularly messier.
You mean like this: Elon Musk Asks the Audience, and They Tell Him to Step Down as Head of Twitter
Elon Musk on Sunday publicly polled Twitter users about whether he should step down as head of the social network, and the people have spoken: 57.5% of the 17.5 million accounts that cast votes in his poll said yes, Musk should no longer be in charge of Twitter.
In posting the query, Musk said he would “abide by the results of this poll.” He has yet to weigh in on the results this morning. Last night, as the vote leaned toward the “yes” votes, he posted: “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.”
Some speculated the poll is just a ruse and Musk has already selected a new CEO, as he said he would(Opens in a new window). The fickle billionaire, however, went on to tweet that “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”
The company, which no longer has a communications department after mass layoffs and terminations over the last two months, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since Musk took over in late October as “Chief Twit,” not a day has gone by without Twitter making headlines—whether the CEO is laying off and rehiring staff, rolling out then immediately killing features, or banning and reinstating accounts.
The poll about his future at Twitter came after a tumultuous day that started with the company rolling out a puzzling ban on linking to rival social networks. The policy was announced during the World Cup final (at which Musk was in attendance), but amid pushback from all sides, Twitter backtracked, deleting tweets and a web page about the ban by day’s end.
The company is now running its own poll about whether it should implement the linking ban. With 12 hours left, 87% of the almost 250,000 accounts that have voted say no.
The confusion around that rollout, coupled with questionable bans on journalists this week, perhaps contributed to those “yes” votes on Musk’s “should I stay or should I go” poll. One has to imagine that with a full communications team in place, the weekend may have gone differently.
Musk apologized for that rollout and said(Opens in a new window): “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.”
These Twitter polls appear to be Musk’s preferred way to make decisions; he did the same when deciding whether or not to reinstate former President Trump’s account. But these polls are easily manipulated, of course. If you have more than one account, you can jump between them and vote multiple times. Bot and spam accounts can certainly get in on the action, too.
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I was going more with Musk declaring Twitter to be a publisher, with all the liabilities that that entails, but that’ll do too.
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The funny thing about his poll yesterday s that he posted it around the time he was hanging out with his Saudi “friends” at the World Cup. Lots of conspiracy theories that they forced him to post it because of the billions they’ve invested in helping Elon buy the company. But in all seriousness, no one committed to actually running a company successfully would even pretend to use an internet poll to make important decisions. Elon is such a self-obsessed clown.
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How to do a burn demonstrated by Neil Gaiman:
This has a sort of "chef will stop pissing in the soup and might hire a new chef who won't piss in the soup but anyway hopes people will now drink the soup he's already widdled in" quality to it, doesn't it? https://t.co/sncSUVbWkq
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) December 21, 2022
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Musk’s actual intention is
I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
So he will just be a humble team leader/middle manager, who will have to follow the orders of the new CEO… who will be answerable to the person who owns the company, who is… er… hold on…
To take the CEO role in a set up like that, you really would have to be foolish.
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The vote actually is just what Musk said a few weeks back that he’d vacate if he found a replacement. Nothing has actually changed in that regard really except he looks more of a dick.
In the end a lot of major shareholders are removed from the day to day running and policies of a company, my wife and I own half a kindergarten run by her sister in law and we let her carry on as we know nothing about pre school education. She needed money to start it up and we helped out and I often help review her English in communications because that I know about, setting a curriculum for kids under 5 I do not.
Musk has been a massive idiot here, thinking being a consumer of something makes you an expert on it. He’s like a wealthy sports club owner who starts telling the manager who to buy and sell, don’t – he’s in that job because he’s an expert. It’s a massive lesson in hubris, he’s lost both Twitter and Tesla billions in value and revenue by not letting a CEO who knows what he or she is doing take the reins.
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I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
Wow, he really wants to pass the buck on how shit he’s been doing. It’s not my fault, it’s the job that’s insane!
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Musk will still own Twitter and whoever sits in the CEO chair is still going to do what Musk wants. I can see there being a rotation of CEOs occupying the position because whatever they try to fix and make profitable, it will not be what he wants and/or it won’t be fast enough. The CEOs will either quit in frustration or Musk will fire them. Because of the debt Musk has saddled Twitter with and the reputation it now has, I truly don’t think the comapny will survive too much longer. CEOs will be asked to do the impossible and they won’t be able to fix it.
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I can see there being a rotation of CEOs occupying the position because whatever they try to fix and make profitable,
Like Murphy Brown and secretaries
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I can see there being a rotation of CEOs occupying the position because whatever they try to fix and make profitable, it will not be what he wants and/or it won’t be fast enough.
It’s just like Prime Ministers!
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This is legit:
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Qatar doesn’t want the Belgian police to investigate the EU corruption scandal…little do they know the legendary determination of the Belgian police to get to the bottom of something.
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So, no one gets any closure here.
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A Dutch city councilor was supposed to take a pony to the petting zoo, but he decided to first visit a pub…he left the pony behind in the pub after a few drinks.
Feels like there should be a punchline to this joke….
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A Dutch city councilor was supposed to take a pony to the petting zoo, but he decided to first visit a pub…he left the pony behind in the pub after a few drinks.
Feels like there should be a punchline to this joke….
The barman says to the pony, “why the long face?”
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He was just acting responsibly. He obvious realised he was too drunk to be behind the wheel of a pony.
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California has had 3 mass shootings in 3 days and the U.S. has had 39 mass shootings so far this year.
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It is something that can’t be solved without radical cultural change and that won’t happen. As long as it doesn’t the USA has to live with expecting it. That is dark but it is true.
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A Dutch city councilor was supposed to take a pony to the petting zoo, but he decided to first visit a pub…he left the pony behind in the pub after a few drinks.
Feels like there should be a punchline to this joke….
Sorry, that’s the whole story. Well, the pony was given a carrot? Not a good punchline I know.
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A Dutch city councilor was supposed to take a pony to the petting zoo, but he decided to first visit a pub…he left the pony behind in the pub after a few drinks.
Feels like there should be a punchline to this joke….
Sorry, that’s the whole story. Well, the pony was given a carrot? Not a good punchline I know.
And the pony was elected mayor!
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njerry wrote:
Arjan Dirkse wrote:
A Dutch city councilor was supposed to take a pony to the petting zoo, but he decided to first visit a pub…he left the pony behind in the pub after a few drinks.Feels like there should be a punchline to this joke….
Sorry, that’s the whole story. Well, the pony was given a carrot? Not a good punchline I know.
The story reminded me of a joke about a guy who was delivering a dozen monkeys to the zoo, but his truck broke down. His friend happened to be driving by in his van, so he flagged him down and said “I’ll give you $50 right now if you take these monkeys to the zoo.” His friend agreed. The next day the first guy saw his friend walking down the street with the 12 monkeys and said “What happened? I gave you money yesterday to take them to the zoo.” His friend replied “I did that; but there was money left over, so today I’m taking them to the movies.”
Only slightly funnier than your version.
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This disgusted me:
Video shows Memphis police violently beating Tyre Nichols in the traffic stop that led to his death
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What a fucking child:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter
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What a fucking child:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter
I’m waiting for him to go full Tom on MySpace and force all users of Twitter to follow him and make it so you can’t block him.
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5 former Memphis officers plead not guilty in death of Tyre Nichols
Seriously? These motherfuckers are on camera, savagely beating that man.
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What It Took to Bring Down R. Kelly:
https://apple.news/nowPlaying/AZ6oAY0TcTdmHhmO48cUCVQ
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How a single engineer brought down Twitter on Monday
Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future.
On Monday morning, Twitter users logged on to find a thicket of connected issues. Clicking on links would no longer open them; instead, users would see a mysterious error message reporting that “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” Images stopped loading as well. Other users reported that they could not access TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client for professional users.
Chaos took over the timeline, as users tweeted vociferously about the outage — often illustrating their points with images that no one could see, because they wouldn’t load.
In a tweet, the company offered the vaguest of explanations for what was happening.
“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the company’s support account tweeted. “We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”
The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. On February 1, the company announced it will no longer support free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited outside researchers’ ability to study the network. The company has been building a new, paid API for developers to work with.
But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.
Elon Musk was furious, we’re told.
“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
Some current employees are sympathetic to that view, which places at least part of the blame for Twitter’s problems on technical failures that predate Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale became an icon of the old Twitter for a reason.
“There’s so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks,” one current employee says.
Still, when Musk took over the company, he promised to dramatically improve the speed and stability of the site. His associates screened the existing staff for their technical prowess, ultimately cutting thousands of workers who were deemed not “technical” enough to succeed under Musk’s leadership.
But nonstop layoffs have left the company with under 550 full-time engineers, we’re told. And just as former employees have predicted from the start, the losses have made Twitter increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic outages.
Monday’s errant configuration change was at least the sixth high-profile service outage at Twitter this year:
On January 23, Android users temporarily couldn’t load new tweets or post them.
On February 8, an error message told users that they were “over the daily limit for sending Tweets,” preventing them from posting.
On February 15, tweets stopped loading.
On February 18, the timeline broke and replies disappeared.
On March 1, the timeline stopped working.
“This type of outage has become so frequent that I think we’re all numb to it,” a current employee says.
And those are only the service outages. Other issues, such as the one that led Musk’s tweets to be made more visible on the timeline than any other user’s, have also roiled the user base.
In many ways, Monday’s outage represented the culmination of Musk’s leadership at the company so far. In a single-minded effort to cut costs on his $44 billion purchase, he has been slashing the staff and reducing Twitter’s free offerings.
This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project — one that is linked to several interconnected, critical systems that both users and employees depend on.
And with few knowledgeable workers on hand to restore service, it took Twitter all morning to fix the problem. “This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company,” another current employee says.
Inside Twitter’s HQ, however, the mood was almost light. “We’re laughing all the way down,” says a different current employee.
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Elon also had a hell of an exchange with a (ex) employee on Twitter yesterday. The former employee had been trying to figure out if he was still employed for over a week and had to tweet at Elon just to get any kind of response. The guy finally got an email confirming he was, in fact, no longer an employee. Elon then proceeded to disclose publicly on Twitter that the guy was disabled and mocked him for it. To which the former employee had a very polite clap back. It was pretty insane to see. But that’s basically Elon Musk in a nutshell.
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Twitter is a complete shitshow under Musk, it gets worse every day. Recently when I am halfway through reading a tweet it refreshes with new ones, whereas before you had to ‘pull down’ and then it would refresh. It’s been invaded by spam, in the past when you followed really big accounts like say The Guardian or CNN you’d see people try and post ads for crypto scams or whatever, now I see them on normal users that have 200 followers.
It’s a pity really that unlike many apps there isn’t really a ‘like for like’ service to hop to in the way Skype users went to Zoom or Whatsapp to Telegram. If someone just recreated Twitter pre-Musk I think users would flood across. Mastodon suffers from the Linux issue that being open source and uncommercial means the setup and interface is nowhere near as intuitive.
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A tv show here disclosed the demands our PM had in order to appear on their show ahead of the elections. The audience had to be screened so no critics of certain government policies were allowed in the studio. This means excluding parents wh suffered from being falsely accused of fraud involving government subsidies, no farmers (farmers have been protesting government policies), and no people from the province of Groningen which suffers from earthquakes caused by the mining of natural gas.
I hope this has consequences for him in the elections we have next week.
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Is this a good time to mention that I’ve never had a Twitter account? Nor a TikTok account?
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Why would anyone want Twitter’s source code? It appears to be rubbish.
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Regarding the Nashville shootings and people giving it their own spin etc.
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Some psychos on twitter see a silver lining
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Yeah well, there’s people saying stupid stuff all over the place, and nowhere more so than on twitter. I don’t think that that’s what’s relevant about this particular bit of news.
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Ah yes, monetised outrage, a growth industry.
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Regarding the Nashville shootings and people giving it their own spin etc.
Dan Hodges is a bit of a prick but he’s right enough on this point. There’s little evidence to imagine this will stop, school shootings are an ongoing part of American life. The UK and Australia made radical changes to prevent them after happening and the US won’t, they have had dozens of opportunities.
If we’re honest even if they did get a national ban on assault rifles and fast loading magazines at best it might lower the death count by a small percentage.
The media obsessing with the perpetrators over the victims will also encourage others to ‘make their mark’. If a streaker runs on a sports field the cameras move away to discourage it, if you commit mass murder you get a podcast series and a Netflix doc.
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The media obsessing with the perpetrators over the victims will also encourage others to ‘make their mark’. If a streaker runs on a sports field the cameras move away to discourage it, if you commit mass murder you get a podcast series and a Netflix doc.
Charlie Brooker had a bit about that in a newswipe 14 years ago
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In an unexpected turn, UK Twitter had fun with an American advocating for armed teachers. The guy’s name? Keith R Swank.
And with that a legend was born – Keith Arsewank.
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In the US, there is the “Follow the money” analysis to see who funds the lobbyists and campaign
contributions. Then there is also this “Reading the Room” by politicians to look at their constituents
and how they respond to a populist message.You’d be very surprised to see early videos of some who made statements then compared to what they say now.
It is as if they are compromised.Then there is news footage and pictures like this:
Which leads to this point:
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By the way, Germany also never changed its gun laws. Which is why there’s just been another mass shooting, targeting a community of Jehova’s Witnesses (public outrage has been… low, probably becauseg it’s about Jehova’s Witnesses and the perp was a lapsed member of that community).
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64910415
Seven people, including an unborn baby, have been killed in a shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness meeting hall in the German city of Hamburg, police say.
They say the gunman acted alone in Thursday’s attack, and later took his own life. His motives are unknown.
The suspect, named only as Philipp F, is said to have had “ill feelings” towards the religious community, of which he had previously been a member.
Video has emerged appearing to show him firing through a window of the hall.
At a briefing on Friday, the police said four men and two women were shot dead. All the dead were German nationals.
Eight people were injured, four seriously. A Ugandan and a Ukrainian were among those hurt.
A woman who was seven months pregnant was shot – killing her unborn baby. The mother survived.
And here’s the thing:
The suspect – described as 35-year-old “sports shooter” who had a gun licence – had fled to the first floor. His “lifeless body” was found shortly afterwards.
He had managed to shoot nine magazines of ammunition, and 20 more were found in his backpack.
Sports shooting is a big traditional thing in Germany, so there are a lot of people who have got guns. It’s just that they aren’t fetishised like they are in US society, and that our sports shooters look so incredibly daft (there’s traditional uniforms with feathered hats and marching bands and shit) that they’re a laughing stock outside of rural communities where everybody and their uncle is part of that. (They’re also basically drinking clubs with a bit of shooting on the side.)
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A reputable newspaper here reported that during the cold war era newspapers customarily printed articles that were written by our national security service. Honestly I have little doubt this continued and newspapers and media often just say what government agencies want them to. With covid and now with the Ukraine war this is quite apparent.
You must’ve had different newspapers during the covid pandemic.
Honestly, in the media here it was the complete opposite to a large extent. During a time in which the scientific consensus was very clear, there were still a lot of voices in the media speaking out against non-medical intervention measures. Every talkshow had to have one guy saying it was all unnecessary, even though 99% of scientists who actually work in the relevant fields agreed on the necessary measures.
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Mm well I still think it was unnecessary. The lockdowns and the discrimination we saw were crimes. Sweden is the only country in the world that did things right.
Honestly from a propaganda perspective it makes sense to always bring in one guy to give the dissenting view, to fake impartiality and give a target for demonization. In the media here you had the narrative that all these people voicing dissent were the dreaded monsters who wanted to kill granny. Similarly to what was revealed in the lockdown files in the UK, the government used everything at their disposal to press the fear factor. (And I think it was also revealed in their that the UK gvernment had special lines to newspapers to print what they want.)
No, Sweden did it absolutely wrong and they paid a relatively heavy price for it. If there hadn’t been lockdowns, especially in heavily populated countries like the US, the death toll would have been significantly higher. In the first year or so when some restrictions were eased, we saw surges of cases. Just because you didn’t like the actions taken doesn’t mean they were wrong.
No one really liked the lockdowns, but they saved lives. Christel lost family because some asshole couldn’t stop being selfish as they “didn’t like the rules”.
The lockdowns saved lives. That’s a fact.
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Thing is, if you don’t want lockdown then you need to support the measures that will prevent it being needed. Masking, social distancing, testing and tracking the disease.
Problem was, during the pandemic, there were too many people refusing to do all of that, thus that minority ensured lockdowns.
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Mm well I still think it was unnecessary. The lockdowns and the discrimination we saw were crimes. Sweden is the only country in the world that did things right.
As I pointed out before, Sweden didn’t actually do it all that differently. For example, they closed down high schools earlier and for a longer period than we did during the first lockdown.
And you can think/ all you want that it was unnecessary, but you’re going against the position of the vast majority of the scientific community. People also have every right to believe in horoscopes, homeopathy and religious mircales, but don’t take the newspapers’ stance on those issues as indication that they’re part of a totalitarian state apparatus.
Well, come to think of it, where Mark fucking Rutte is concerned, I’d probably be suspicious, too. So, uh, like, carry on.
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Thank you Todd and Ben and Christian. It’s reassuring to know that some people can look past the bullshit and focus on the facts.
In spite of the US Government telling me that COVID is over, I will continue to wear a mask on public transportation in the NYC metropolitan area. I will do what I think is right for me and for the people in my household.
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Masking has pretty much ended over here, not that I was much good at it. Masks and glasses really don’t mix. I’m good at social distancing.
The most dangerous belief now is that Covid is akin to a cold, that individual experience and good fortune is universal. It isn’t. Some get hit lightly, others far more severely, with long Covid another random lottery. Which will you be? No way to know until you get hit.
The other severe irritation is the anti-remote working lot. Hybrid can work very well, when fitted to activity but this desire to wind the clock back to 2019? Stupid and dangerous.
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Well, there was a big John Hopkins study lately that said lockdowns were pretty much useless.
No, there was a study that was misreported in conspiracy media to say that lockdowns were useless, and your confirmation bias kicked in.
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Oh, my mistake, it’s the other kind of bullshit study, one that has a prior agenda.
Steve H. Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics and Founder & Co-Director of The Johns
Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. He
is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute, a
contributor at National Review, a well-known currency reformer, and a currency and commodity
trader. Prof. Hanke served on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, has been an
adviser to five foreign heads of state and five foreign cabinet ministers, and held a cabinet-level
rank in both Lithuania and Montenegro. He has been awarded seven honorary doctorate degrees
and is an Honorary Professor at four foreign institutions. He was President of Toronto Trust
Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1995, when it was the world’s best-performing mutual fund.
Currently, he serves as Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Advanced Metallurgical Group N.V.
in Amsterdam. In 1998, he was named one of the twenty-five most influential people in the world
by World Trade Magazine. In 2020, Prof. Hanke was named a Knight of the Order of the Flag.Yeah, the guy who works for the right-wing think tank who’s policy is “the economy is more important than human lives and safety”, as an advisor to a president who downplayed a lethal epidemic, and writes for a reactionary right-wing newspaper is the person who’s opinion I’m going to trust about anything
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An analysis of each of these three groups support the conclusion that lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average
Am I misunderstanding here, or is the conclusion about covid mortality looking at the wrong metric? Lockdowns were never expected to lower mortality rates for covid sufferers and were never advertised as such, they were about reducing the absolute number of infections and cases so that health systems weren’t overwhelmed by huge numbers of people all becoming infected at once.
This is a graph showing the UK lockdown periods and the dramatic fall in deaths immediately after the first and third lockdowns (the tiers and second lockdown were not really fully-fledged lockdowns in the UK but more piecemeal measures).
I’m not sure how you can look at this and conclude that lockdowns had no effect.
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Yeah, but we wanna keep doing what we’re doing. So what if by prople visiting their grandad in a care home takes out a few of his friends in the same place?
And that did happen and it has had limited reporting on it. Covid in care homes tore through them, inflicting huge death counts. The staff working in those environments were also hard hit by dealing with that kind of impact. And this happened with restrictions in place.
Covid was the first actual, major crisis on a global scale and the world was not prepared for it all. Nor were people.
Plus, Covid has only been blunted for those nations able to acquire and roll out vaccinations. Elsewhere Covid is having a very good time ripping through populations.
Long term impact of Covid on health separate to long Covid? Unknown. Covid is still impacting the UK health system despite politicians and media deciding not to talk about it.
Looming over of all of this is: What happens when the next pandemic hit? The only certainty is the same kind of people who fucked things up this time, the kind that talk war and blitz spirit but crumble when a real crisis hits, will be there fucking it all up again.
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Lockdowns were never expected to lower mortality rates for covid sufferers and were never advertised as such, they were about reducing the absolute number of infections and cases so that health systems weren’t overwhelmed by huge numbers of people all becoming infected at once.
This.
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Honestly I know I’m out of sync with everyone on this forum and a lot of people here in my country about this issue. I don’t mind, I just have a different opinion.
Which is fine, but then I think you also have to engage with other opinions rather than dismiss them out of hand if they don’t align with your thinking.
I’m not surprised lockdowns had little effect on covid mortality rates (as why would they), but don’t you think preventing or delaying infections and deaths is a positive outcome? Whether or not you think that is mitigated by other effects?
Ultimately the question is about balancing the benefits and harms of these measures. Undeniably there were some harmful impacts of lockdowns – socially, on mental health, and economically. We are still dealing with the fallout from that today.
But we also have to acknowledge that the decisions to impose these lockdowns weren’t taken lightly; that they did ultimately serve the purpose of ‘flattening the curve’ and delaying/preventing infections and deaths; and that broadly, the people implementing them were doing what they thought was the correct thing to do given the information they had at the time.
Given all of this I think it’s hard to agree that lockdowns are completely worthless and harmful, it’s more complex than that.
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Science is bullshit? Now that’s quite a hot take, but sometimes it’s true.
The man may be an asshole, but what you’re doing is a poisoning the well fallacy. If the study is bad, you have to point out the faults in the study, not the person writing it.
The problem is that you’re mistaking a meta-analysis for research. This is people who have a clear political agenda taking a collection of studies and then interpreting the results. They’re not doing science themselves. And it’s three economists doing the analysis, not say, epidemiologists.
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Science is bullshit? Now that’s quite a hot take, but sometimes it’s true.
The man may be an asshole, but what you’re doing is a poisoning the well fallacy. If the study is bad, you have to point out the faults in the study, not the person writing it.
Okay, sure:
A paper being touted as the “Johns Hopkins study” that suggested lockdowns didn’t reduce COVID deaths has serious flaws and is being misinterpreted, experts said.
Fox News has charged that there’s been a “full-on media blackoutopens in a new tab or window” of the paper, but science and medical expertsopens in a new tab or window argue the real reason for not covering the paper is because of its limitations.
First, the paperopens in a new tab or window is a “working paper” that hasn’t been peer-reviewed. […]
For starters, experts commenting for the U.K. Science Media Centreopens in a new tab or window warned about the paper’s questionable definition of “lockdown.” Samir Bhatt, DPhil, a professor of statistics and public health at Imperial College London, said in that statement that the study’s “most inconsistent aspect is the reinterpreting of what a lockdown is.”
“The authors define lockdown as ‘the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention [NPI].’ This would make a mask-wearing policy a lockdown,” Bhatt stated.
Neil Ferguson, PhD, also of Imperial College London, said in the same statement that by that definition, “the U.K. has been in permanent lockdown since 16th of March 2021, and remains in lockdown — given it remain compulsory for people with diagnosed COVID-19 to self-isolate for at least 5 days.” Ferguson is the director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis and the Jameel Institute at the college.
Questions also have been raised about the quality of the included studies. Of the 34 papers ultimately selected, 12 were “working papers” rather than peer-reviewed science. And 14 studies were conducted by economists rather than public health or medical experts, according to Forbesopens in a new tab or window.
Meyerowitz-Katz highlighted his concerns with the paper’s inclusion criteria, as it doesn’t include “modelled counterfactuals…the most common method used in infectious disease assessments” which excludes “most epidemiological research from the review,” he tweetedopens in a new tab or window.
He added that the “included studies certainly aren’t representative of research as a whole on lockdownsopens in a new tab or window — not even close. Many of the most robust papers on the impact of lockdowns are, by definition, excluded.”
“All of this adds up to a very weird review paper,” he tweeted. “The authors exclude many of the most rigorous studies, including those that are the entire basis for their meta-analysis in the first place. … They then take a number of papers, most of which found that restrictive NPIs had a benefit on mortality, and derive some mathematical estimate from the regression coefficients indicating less benefit than the papers suggest.”
“All of this together means that the actual numbers produced in the review are largely uninterpretable,” he tweeted.
The more extensive critique that the article refered to is here:
2/n The paper is a systematic review performed by three very highly-regarded economists who have also been extremely anti-lockdown since March 2020. You can find it here: https://t.co/oFVbfRLRZH
— Health Nerd (@GidMK) February 4, 2022
But of course you also said:
Anyway, it is futile. You can give a hundred studies saying lockdowns were justified, it doesn’t mean I have to agree closing down the nursing home so that the patients there were completely isolated without a chance to see their loved ones was justified. There is just a fault in the morality of such a decision. Science can help make decisions, but it is not an absolute law it has to be followed always in every respect. And some science is just corrupt (like you yourself ironically demonstrated)
That last part though: It’s not that “the science” is corrupt, it’s that some people have an agenda or are bonkers. Which is why there is a peer review process where actual scientists attack each other like fucking hyena to get at the truth of a matter. That’s the actual scientific progress, which the good people on Fox news and many others – including you, in the way you started this discussion – tend to ignore, suggesting that all science is equal and thus equally bad and un-trustworthy. The opposite is the case, as long as you look at the actual science and listen to actual scientists when it comes to these topics, and not the people being paid to muddle the waters.
I do agree with you on a lot of points where measures are concerned, I believe, but the reason for that is mostly: It wasn’t the scientists making the decisions, it was politicians. And those didn’t listen to the scientists a good lot of the time, or the damage could have been reduced a lot. But like you said, scientists don’t make the decisions.
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Thank you Todd and Ben and Christian. It’s reassuring to know that some people can look past the bullshit and focus on the facts.
In spite of the US Government telling me that COVID is over, I will continue to wear a mask on public transportation in the NYC metropolitan area. I will do what I think is right for me and for the people in my household.
Ta great pirate-y cousin Uncle Bulgaria!
I was on a train the other day – only one still wearing a mask. Even most of my medics are abandoning them now. I hate them, but they do work. And I do get it: it’s a combination of cognitive dissonance / exhaustion /propaganda, etc. The plague is still out there plaguing.
I sometimes feel like the train is leaving the likes of me behind. You’ve just earned yourself a train song filled with doggies and some bonus floofy chooks:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9RUnRYDVs
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on a train the other day – only one still wearing a mask. Even most of my medics are abandoning them now. I hate them, but they do work.
Keep the faith! I drive a car, but no way would I get on public transport without a mask. Im still wearing in each and every store. Better safe than sorry (it’s still killing people every day!).
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I will; no worries.
The worst thing they said was to say, ach it’s just the flu. Which I know can be debilitating, don’t get me wrong. But, at the same time, it’s so dismissive. It’s primarily the brain impact I’m concerned about, also the heart – dementia is something I’m all too familiar with. I’m encountering too many with, for want of a better term “Covid” brain: wee ones too; not just an age thing.
Ta for all you said about the abuse in Canadian industrial schools btw.
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If it was like the flu for a person then:
1. Still no fun, not the thing anyone wants to get.
2. They were lucky.
And that’s the part people don’t want to recognise. It is luck of the draw as to if a person gets hit with long covid or becomes more susceptible to other conditions due to having it.
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