No lockdowns are going to happen, but I expect to be masking up for at least another 6 months. Not a big deal, definitely better than it was last August, that’s for sure.
OK, that's good, but the claim I was responding to was that the new variant is not less deadly than the old one. I was asking about infection v hospital rates for the old and new variants. Also with all these different variants going around, if the newer one is less deadly it would skew that number unless the different variant cases, deaths and vaccination statuses are all accounted for.
A variant can be more dangerous even if it’s not technically more deadly simply because it’s more contagious.If a virus is 10x as transmissible, and a lot more people get infected than would otherwise, a 1% mortality rate would result in a lot more dead bodies
Because we, as a society, have decided we want/need a large government. It's not complicated. You don't have to like it, but don't pretend we didn't make a conscious choice as a society.
No one is saying the government should start producing chips, but they can offer financial incentives to encourage chip manufacturers to build fabs here instead of overseas.
We're in this mess due to our never ending quest for more "efficiency"
The government needs to recognize the fact that semiconductors are essential to national security and ensure we have the capability to produce our own.
That number is likely even higher, now, after the crap that the GOP is pulling in Arizona. One of my close friends (a conservative, who doesn't even like Trump) is now convinced that the Democrats somehow stole the election. It's insane.
I point out that there have been multiple audits, already, and no proof of fraud was found.
Doing a third audit, with zero oversight/accountability, is not a serious attempt to detect fraud. It's a means to "discover" wrongdoing that can't be proven/disproven and further confuse people about what really happened.
Unfortunately option 2 isn't what's being offered here in any legitimate way. Instead there is a stream of bizarre theories which are given as much publicity as possible, before being quietly discarded and replaced with the next one.
The point isn't to reach the truth, but to cement in people's minds the idea that a massive crime has occurred, based on the psychological bias of "there's no smoke without fire", despite all the smoke being generated by a smoke machine.
This strategy of misinformation has long been known, and was portrayed quite brilliantly in the 1962 film "The Manchurian Candidate":
> Are they saying: "Are there any Communists in the Defense Department?" No, of course not, they're saying: "How many Communists are there in the Defense Department?"
