It is utterly ridiculous to try to blame either, far right or far left wing organizations for what is happening in the US right now. None of these groups have the power to cause that much damage. I’d be surprised if the number of antifa/black bloc people in these protest is more than a tiny fraction of people, like in any protest. Yet the discussion is shifted to these groups as an explanation for violence and this entire thread is full of people arguing about whether the Antifa is an organization. The antifa doesn’t even matter. What is happening to this discourse?
If there are 1000 people at a protest and 50 start brawling with the police, that changes the entire character of the day, no matter whether 50/1000 is a small number or not.
This is the point. There are many people at these protests. This is a heated, complex situation and at any large protest the people there are not homogeneous. The majority wants to peacefully protest, some loot, some want violence, the police is aggressive. Given that it is understood that every protest is a complicated social phenomenon, the narrative pushed by major news outlets in the US, and echoed in parts here, that somehow this is led and organised by Antifa, or the far right, is delusional. There are protests all over the US. In suburbs. How do you imagine this is working? The Antifa/Right has some chapters in every suburb of the US, just waiting to be unleashed upon the masses and this is the reason why protests turn violent? It's a gross oversimplification of the actual dynamics, it's a child's story that is easy to tell and easy to digest.
I read this when I was very young and had something like a pre puberty existential crisis. Like you, this book and the thoughts expressed therein resonated with me and it is a view of the world that I have held dearly ever since. I always liked it particularly, because it makes life a comedy instead of a drama. Nihilism is much darker and feels very depressive to me. Existentialism is meaninglessness too, but with a smile.
Well no, but also in the US there are research facilities working with Coronaviruses [1]. I am not advocating for this theory because there is zero credible evidence for it but there are scenarios that would make this theoretically possible.
I can't find it anymore but there was an article here published a few days ago that essentially estimated whether infections with SARS-CoV-2 come from homogeneous transmission, i.e. everyone who has it infects a few people, or from highly concentrated transmission, i.e. there are a few people who infect a large number of others. The latter seems to be the case for SARS-CoV-2. This to me makes me believe 2. is correct. We know that this disease is non-lethal for the large majority of people below 40-50. It is thus not unthinkable that it was able to spread widely in those groups before finally hitting more vulnerable parts of the population all at once in March, leading to the devastating effects we observed. Additionally, in a model where everyone is equally likely to be infected, the number of deaths would reflect the percentage of people having the disease. That is why people think there is an upper limit of a few percent of infected. This however breaks down entirely if there are clusters of cases within different subpopulations.
I am sorry but this is a ridiculous thesis. This will be over eventually, either by developing a vaccine or by mutation into a more benign strain. Nobody in their right mind will practice social distancing just because they are used to it. No system that goes against basic human drives is stable. Right now there is a risk, benefit balance but once that risk is gone, what exactly will balance this? Laws? They are already in conflict with the constitution, good luck justifying any of this if there is no deadly pathogen around.
The worms are very special. Their nervous systems are weird because they have been heavily optimized to be small. A huge push to get the full connectome of Drosophila is coming to an end right now, we are not there yet fully, but close. This research has already elucidated many things about how their brains work. People are discussing how to do the mouse now. In conjunction with functional experiments this research already explained many pathways such as olfactory associative learning, mating behavior and many others. None of these understandings came from simulations, but from multiple experiments and study of selected subcircuits. There were also successes in simulation of the visual pathway of drosophila, based on the connectomic data. For example this study [1] was able to reproduce direction sensitivity of a specific set of neurons. It isn’t necessarily true that we need to fully understand the worms before we should and can move on to more complex nervous systems and successfully understand them. It might just be that neuron abstractions don’t work well in worms, because of the mentioned evolutionary pressure to optimize for size.
A computer analogy: it's usually far more straight forward to reverse engineer a regular C program, than one of those tiny hand-optimized assembler demos.
For a concrete example, consider the "modbyte tuning"[1] in the 32byte game of life.
Life is different. There is no logic to the way it solves problems.
A programmer writing a game of life in C will probably do it from scratch, in a straightforward manner. Read the corresponding machine code and you are going to see familiar structures: loops, coordinates, etc...
Now here is how life does it: you have a program that outputs prime numbers, you then have to change it into a sorting algorithm, then in a fizzbuzz, and then in a game of life. You are not allowed to refactor or do anything from scratch. If the program become too big, you are allowed to remove random instructions.
The success of splice would disagree with your notion that “users hate subscriptions”. Given the horrendous price point of many of these plugins it seems to be perfect for a subscription based model. To me it always seemed there is more of a pushback from the industry producing vsts than from the consumers.
Splice's numbers aren't public so I can't comment on their success. Avid's are, and they had a terrible quarter - and they're the poster child (alongside Adobe) for subscription licensing in creative software. But I'd be interested to see what the breakdown in revenue is for plugin licenses versus preset/sample packs (bit of a blade & razor model there).
The price points really aren't horrendous if you consider how expensive the engineering is, how little demand there is, and how long you need to maintain a product. You aren't being ripped off by spending a couple hundred bucks on a plugin. I think we'll end up at a place where everything is a subscription, but I can tell you from experience that it creates friction for the users.
Agreed. The business model seems to be to give access to the rent to own deals via the sample subscription fee. Don’t think they make any money of their plugin deals. I’m also not arguing it’s too expensive or a rip off. But it’s still a large amount of money for software, in the private space at least. The rent to own thing seems like a smart tool to get rid of the barrier of entry.
Are there no people who have to receive regular blood donations? Would you not notice such an effect in these people? I guess the donors are probably not all younger than the receiver but on average this is probably true. Does anyone know of a subpopulation that might qualify?
In addition to this, the timing of these announcements in the last two weeks were suspiciously close to lockdown relaxation dates. I would not be surprised if the RKI is using these numbers as a tool to influence behaviour, even though they know that there is a rather large error bar on the R factor. A case in point is that before the lockdown restrictions were lifted the R factor was around 0.9, but the RKI said the uncertainties are so high that we cannot be certain it is even below 1 - and suggested delaying the opening. Also, internally leaked government documents a few weeks ago showed that there is an explicit strategy of the government, to generate fear in the population in order to make people comply.
> Also, internally leaked government documents a few weeks ago showed that there is an explicit strategy of the government, to generate fear in the population in order to make people comply.
A quick scan seems to indicate a document meant to summarize the situation and possible outcomes including options for actions.
They explicitly propose to be as transparent as possible and to openly discuss the worst case scenario.
Without reading it in depth, this sounds like a sensible thing to write down to prepare the relevant authorities for what's coming.
Relevant quote:
> Wir müssen wegkommen von einer Kommunikation, die auf die Fallsterblichkeitsrate zentriert ist. Bei einer prozentual unerheblich klingenden Fallsterblichkeitsrate, die vor allem die Älteren betrifft, denken sich viele dann unbewusst und uneingestanden: «Naja, so werden wir die Alten los, die unsere Wirtschaft nach unten ziehen, wir sind sowieso schon zu viele auf der Erde, und mit ein bisschen Glück erbe ich so schon ein bisschen früher»
Google Translate> We have to get away from communication centered on the case mortality rate. With a case mortality rate that sounds insignificant in percentage terms, and which affects the elderly in particular, many then think subconsciously and admittedly: «Well, this is how we get rid of the elderly who are pulling our economy down, we are already too many on earth anyway, and with a bit of luck I inherit a little earlier »
And I would say this is quite spot on, for what we actually see on Twitter and elsewhere...
Also, their numbers, cases as well as R factor, show a strong weekly periodicity. Leading to hilarious press conferences on wednesdays where the spread panic because the cases from the weekend have finally been passed through bureaucracy... Only to announce improving case numbers on fridays. Their R calculation uses a 4day sliding window, so the increase is just the usual wednesday I guess.
It is not possible. The number of active cases peaked 2 weeks ago and is dropping ever since. What do you suggest? Keep everything closed for a minimum of 18 months? What do we do if we never find a vaccine? It is absolutely the right move to open up carefully once your healthcare system has enough capacity.
Well, we could have at least waited until masks are widely available and we have a contact tracing system that is able to trace all contacts of contacts of those infected each day. At 1000 infected per day in Germany, this would be 100.000 to 400.000 contacts traced by day.
And of course, we should have kept up the social distancing.
Masks are widely available! There isn't a single person without mask in the supermarkets. Not one. Social distancing is widely observed. I don't know where you get your information from but my experience is very different.
What region are you referencing with your anecdote? Where I live, mask usage isn't even close to 50% unless the store requires it, and that's including bandit scarves, masks not covering noses, homemade masks of dubious quality, ad infinitum. Social distancing is not well observed at the grocery store when I have to shop.
