...or be very anxious and resent air travel. I don't feel any safe through body searches, coupled with belt/coat removal, not wearing glasses and what not.
Personally, I don't know a single person who feels more secure due to the checks.
> This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.
Even their own. Jan 6 for example. It was a guided tour given by FBI agitators apparently.
They could allow submitters to double down on submissions escalating the bug to more skilled and experienced code reviewers who get a cut of the doubled submission fee for reviews.
That's extremely annoying. I have a Bluetooth speaker that I was intending to repurpose into a device to combat inconsiderate smart phone usage. I connected it to my laptop and started playing multiple streams of Punjabi MC - Beware of the Boys. It was torturous.
My other idea was to get the line from dumb and dumber "Do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world..." And just loop the sound continuously.
I might just try this project though and see how it goes.
> Wasn't this the reason behind different versions of the game for PAL and NTSC etc.? So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?
Yes and no. Some games play at a similar speed but some (most if I recall correctly) weren't modified for the PAL market so they play slow and the image is squashed down. Street Fighter II on the SNES (PAL) is a classic example of this.
It was simultaneously such a delight and a frustration.
It was a treat to play without having to empty your pockets (where I am it cost the equivalent of 120 arcade credits) but compared to the arcade it wasnt as good as it could have been.
If you had an action replay or a game genie you could use codes to speed it up though.
Don’t be pissed. You the one sentient being in a family of NPCs (no offence).
I always microwave my ice-cream.
People freak out when I tell them I do this.
Another thing people freak out about is when I tell them I sprinkle instant coffee on supermarket bought vanilla ice cream. The (too) sweet ice cream balances with the bitter coffee and it adds a textural element.
Another great thing to sprinkle is a thin layer of cocoa powder on chocolate ice cream -- it's similarly bitter, but it's a blast of extra chocolate rather than coffee. Learned that one in Italy.
Everything is easier in hindsight isn't it? Especially with such a complex problem.
> The COVID restrictions needed to be less and end sooner
What would we have been optimizing for here? GDP? Deaths? ICU Capacity? Lifestyle? Or would we weight them? If so would we take 2nd and 3rd order effects into consideration?
> An example graph, when restrictions should have been on or off left as an exercise to the reader
I lived in a country/state that did this during the pandemic. It wasn't a case of restrictions on, restrictions off. It was more a dialing back or ramping up of restrictions. If you look at other countries that did this you will still find the wave pattern. If I had to guess that is related to immunity after exposure. What would change however is the height of the peaks. With it's political/media landscape I don't know if the approach you suggest could have been applied effectively in the USA. Ultimately what drives cases/deaths is human behavior and the virus itself. Those who thought covid was an issue were taking precautions regardless of the restrictions.
> The disease didn't go away, we just at one point decided we were done with restrictions even though conditions didn't change.
This is a gross simplification of the whole pandemic. If I was to narrativize it I would say that over time as exposure to the virus increased it became less deadly so the vast majority of the people who were already prone to dying via covid had done so already.
> The problem is it became a non-expert political issue where people who knew meme-facts based on their social bubble only really argued absolutist policies against stone wall opposition.
This is more a comment on the political/media landscape than the response to covid itself. People have to operate within the system. If they present any sort of nuanced idea then they are persecuted by roughly 50% of the population whose narrative it infringes upon.
> We needed people in a minmax mode arguing about specific levels of risk vs reward to set optimums, instead you had 0 risk folks screaming at 0 restriction folks screaming back with the middle entirely excluded. (We'll STILL get people on both sides responding here)
The WHO was very clear at the beginning of the pandemic about the risks of the virus. For wealthy countries whose hospitals were "lean and mean" a high number of cases would cause immense pressure on these hospitals resulting in otherwise avoidable deaths not just from covid but from other things that would result from a limited ICU capacity. By this I mean life saving operations getting cancelled because there was no capacity in the ICU. It's also worth mentioning the restrictions pared with the financial aid allowed people to stay at home and not engage in any risk taking activities.
To summarize I think it's easy to arm chair quarterback the response to the pandemic. It's like most of politics. We sit here watching what is effectively a shadow puppet show but are left clueless to what is really going on because if we did know we can't be trusted with the secrets, or wouldn't be able to understand the data, or would object to a course of action as an emotional response, even if what is presented is truthful and the most optimal solution to a problem. The "masks are ineffective" narrative at the beginning of the pandemic was a classic example of this.
>Everything is easier in hindsight isn't it? Especially with such a complex problem.
These sorts of statements are far too often as a justification to dodge responsibility used by those who at the time just poured more virgins into the volcano in a obviously vain attempt to change the weather (or whatever metaphor for "clearly not gonna work but ideologically convenient" you want to use).
By all means after fact have an enquiry into the response and how it could have been better but don't do that without first acknowledging the uncertainty that was present at the time.
I just want to add that there is always a latent chaos / anarchy in people ready to jump at any oportunity to convince others to follow them. Doomsayers introducing themselves as messiahs. They are any combination of pseudoscience, religion and conspiracy. All this in addition of the normal political power struggles.
>Everything is easier in hindsight isn't it? Especially with such a complex problem.
I wrote the following July 2020:
>And with all of this money being injected into the economy, we are absolutely going to get an enormous amount of inflation... eventually. You could see it as already happening with the valuation of the stock market.
And in January 2022:
>It’s time to admit defeat and plan for what that looks like and stop pretending like anything at this point is going to make this virus go away. It’s here, it’s going to kill about one person in a thousand of those left, and if you choose to not get vaccinated that’s your choice and if you’re not young you’re taking a significantly higher risk of death.
Not so much hindsight as "what I've been saying all along".
>We sit here watching what is effectively a shadow puppet show but are left clueless to what is really going on because if we did know we can't be trusted with the secrets, or wouldn't be able to understand the data, or would object to a course of action as an emotional response, even if what is presented is truthful and the most optimal solution to a problem.
This is a bunch of nonsense. What was happening was quite transparent. The science was out in the open in papers and government statistics for anyone with scientific training to read. Politicians were caving to polarized public opinions on both sides to take advantage of and encourage their chosen pole.
Those of us talking about moderation and common sense reactions were demonize by one side or usually both depending on the venue. Nobody in leadership had the balls to lead and try to make people understand a middle path based on reason.
People STILL fall into their previously chosen polar opinion and refuse to accept that moderation was the correct and untaken path.
Not so much hindsight as "what I've been saying all along".
It was a dynamic situation and it sounds like the only things that you were optimizing for in your mind was inflation and covid deaths whiles ignoring second order effects and data that likely wasn't available to the public.
You are like a person who kept telling everyone it was 12:00am but it wasn't, then when it finally became 12:00am and everyone agreed you jumped up and said "See guys it's 12:00am why didn't anyone listen to me! I was right all along!".
It's a bit rich to blame all the inflation on the financial response to the pandemic without taking into consideration the effect the pandemic had on logistics or considering what would have happened if the government didn't spend enough. Also it's probably worth mentioning that the Fed operates independently and is tasked with only financial functions.
> The science was out in the open in papers and government statistics for anyone with scientific training to read. Politicians were caving to polarized public opinions on both sides to take advantage of and encourage their chosen pole.
No argument here except to say it's one thing to know the science and it's another thing to act on the science.
> Those of us talking about moderation and common sense reactions were demonize by one side or usually both depending on the venue. Nobody in leadership had the balls to lead and try to make people understand a middle path based on reason.
If there is one thing I know it's that common sense only exists when people share the same values and assumptions. Why for example was it acceptable to you that 1 out of 1000 people died of covid? Why not more? Why not less?
>It's a bit rich to blame all the inflation on the financial response to the pandemic without taking into consideration the effect the pandemic had on logistics or considering what would have happened if the government didn't spend enough. Also it's probably worth mentioning that the Fed operates independently and is tasked with only financial functions.
The treasury spent an extra $2 trillion which the Fed facilitated the creation of and your response is "what about logistics??", hindsight isn't 20/20 for you and sky isn't blue it's a ham sandwich. It is pointless discussing this with people like you, this is why we can't have nice things.
So with your 20/20 vision and your ability to see into the future what was the exact dollar amount at the time that you thought should be enough to stop a total meltdown of the US economy? Using logic and reason how did you come to the exact dollar amount that would emotionally appease investors and business providing them with enough "investor confidence"?
The timescale you are looking at is very small. The federal reserve has a dual mandate to have maximum employment and stable prices. What would have happened on a longer timeframe to employment and prices if every other country effectively backstopped their economy but the USA didn't?
It's like you don't know why the fed even came to exist or have any knowledge about the great depression or just fail to recognize how catastrophic that the pandemic was to the USA economy or the world economy as a whole.
> And with all of this money being injected into the economy, we are absolutely going to get an enormous amount of inflation... eventually. You could see it as already happening with the valuation of the stock market.
To be fair when I read this I assumed you took issue with the actions of both the government and the fed since both were injecting money into the economy. The invocation of Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act also blurred the line between the actions of Government and the fed.
Still I find it odd that you would attribute the inflation solely to the money that was injected into the economy via senate bills but ignore the trillions the fed was injecting into the economy and supply chain disruptions or rising energy costs due to the war in Ukraine.
The biggest number for total global fiscal support I found was $14 trillion, but that was only from before mid-2020.
Most countries created a whole lot of new money and even if yours didn't, unless you're very economically isolated from the rest of the world the inflation hits you just the same.
It's about emotion not logic.
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