Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla But why is Department of Energy preparing a report on it?
TFA said:
The Energy Department, which oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories
I see. Ok, then why is the Energy Department overseeing laboratories?
History. The national lab system started as mostly nuclear power and weapons research, then branched out.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla But why is Department of Energy preparing a report on it?
TFA said:
The Energy Department, which oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories
I see. Ok, then why is the Energy Department overseeing laboratories?
History. The national lab system started as mostly nuclear power and weapons research, then branched out.
It gives me warm fuzzies when the power of government agencies expands beyond the purpose given in their name.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
History. The national lab system started as mostly nuclear power and weapons research, then branched out.
Damn backwards compatibility!
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla But why is Department of Energy preparing a report on it?
TFA said:
The Energy Department, which oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories
I see. Ok, then why is the Energy Department overseeing laboratories?
History. The national lab system started as mostly nuclear power and weapons research, then branched out.
It is also an awful lot of what they still do.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-likely-originated-lab-153104757.html
Sudden onset amnesia is already pervasive around here. Noone was ridiculed for claiming lab leak, there was no censorship, we had a civilised discussion of different theories from the beginning. All it took was a single article in enlightened newspaper.
"Noone was forced to take the jab" is also emerging. Just like Malone predicted.
It's quite fascinating to watch in such condensed form how moldable people's brains are.
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@MrL said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
It's quite fascinating to watch in such condensed form how moldable people's brains are.
On a related note, recently I observed in real time how a programmed brain performs autocorrection and realigns itself with the narrative.
I stumbled upon a mention about a new law that's going into effect soon. It's some property tax thing, doesn't matter - what matters is that it applies to a property of my friend. So I mentioned this to him when we met. He was upset and outraged, like you would expect.
: This is ridiculous, it's bullshit. They want to take all my money. Taxes are already crazy.
He starts googling about it and notices that the law comes from EU guidelines and is somehow an environment protection / eco thing. This made him visibly uncomfortable.
He found some online discussion about the subject, read some of it and started complaining about quality of discussion.: That's all just fearmongering, they don't cite anything from the bill, just repeat after each other and get upset over nothing. It's certainly won't be as bad as they describe. It will be fine. I'll find a way to avoid paying this easily anyway.
Almost immediately after that he found an official source describing the bill, confirming that it will be that bad and that it's designed in a way so you can't avoid it. What he also found is that the folks from online discussion got one (inconsequential) detail wrong.
: What a bunch of retards, they can't even read. How can you be so fucking stupid. 'Boohoo, the leftist global cabal is trying to destroy us. They made up covid and global warming, and now they want to finish us with this. Look at my tinfoil hat!'.
He was pretty satisfied with his 'rhetoric feat'. I pointed out that the bill actually does almost exactly what they say and my friend will have to pay.
: Yeah, my property is not impacted much by this. Others will pay a lot more.
So it's all fine, because others will get fucked more than him.
A short time after that, not prompted by anyone, he had this final opinion to share:: I think this new bill is really great. Protecting the environment is always a good idea. It will make people have smaller negative impact on wildlife, and in cosequence make every day of our lives healthier. I'm glad they thought of that.
And there you have it. In less than 30 minutes from 'they take my money for no reason' to 'this is great and everyone who disagrees is Hitler'. Did he read the actual bill? No. Did he check if environmental claims are true? No. Did he check how much he actually will pay? Also no.
On a personal note - this was the last straw for me. I'm done. I've lost all confidence that I can have a meaningful discussion with any of my friends about anything even remotely serious. They were insightful, curious people. Talking/discussing/disagreeing with them was a pleasure in the past. But their brains are gone - dead and substituted with simple shallow automatons. I mourn their loss, but there's really nothing I can do.
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@MrL we tried kicking ze Germans out - that didn't help?
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@MrL also that this is a less-strong conclusion than issued by the FBI months ago - lost in the mists of time. But this low-confidence finding by the energy department certainly puts the nail in this Illuminati plot.
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@Gribnit said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@MrL also that this is a less-strong conclusion than issued by the FBI months ago - lost in the mists of time. But this low-confidence finding by the energy department certainly puts the nail in this Illuminati plot.
Eh, they gotta walk it back slowly. Also, the low level is probably due to the fact that pretty much every bit of circumstantial evidence points to it but there's no actual smoking gun linking the place, time, people, etc.
This one is just taking a lot longer than is normal these days to go through the evolution that @MrL's friend did in 30 minutes, probably due to some people still not wanting to upset the Chinese about this (if I had to guess).
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The pandemic that keeps on giving:
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@MrL said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I observed in real time how a programmed brain performs autocorrection and realigns itself with the narrative.
Since your last statements here were that you'd rather believe logically impossible conclusions that happen to align with your preconceived notion, as physicians who collected data are less reputable than hookers... that seems quite remarkable.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@MrL said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I observed in real time how a programmed brain performs autocorrection and realigns itself with the narrative.
Since your last statements here were that you'd rather believe logically impossible conclusions that happen to align with your preconceived notion, as physicians who collected data are less reputable than hookers... that seems quite remarkable.
Hookers didn't kill my friends and family members. Physicians did. You could say that I'm somewhat biased.
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@MrL Remember this: 100% of people who mix up correlation and causation will die.
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@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@MrL Remember this: 100% of people who mix up correlation and causation will die.
Yeah and some of those believing physicians will die a lot sooner.
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@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@MrL Remember this: 100% of people who mix up correlation and causation will die.
Except, contrary to the saying "correlation does not mean causation", correlation does mean causation. Just not necessarily in the direction implied.
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Not necessarily. If A causes B, and A causes C, B and C will be correlated ; but that doesn't imply that B causes C, or that C causes B.
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@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@MrL Remember this: 100% of people who mix up correlation and causation will die.
OTOH, all of the people I have met who have died, are still alive.
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@jinpa said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@MrL Remember this: 100% of people who mix up correlation and causation will die.
Except, contrary to the saying "correlation does not mean causation", correlation does mean causation. Just not necessarily in the direction implied.
Correlation correlates with causation.
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@Gribnit said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@MrL Remember this: 100% of people who mix up correlation and causation will die.
OTOH, all of the people I have met who have died, are still alive.
Ah, Democrats.
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@Zerosquare said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Not necessarily. If A causes B, and A causes C, B and C will be correlated ; but that doesn't imply that B causes C, or that C causes B.
I agree with everything you said there, except the "Not necessarily". The saying "correlation does not mean causation" is necessarily wrong because the phrase literally does not exclude the possibility of A causing both B and C.
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@boomzilla "A joint China-World Health Organization (WHO) investigation in 2021 called the lab leak theory 'extremely unlikely'."
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@jinpa said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Zerosquare said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Not necessarily. If A causes B, and A causes C, B and C will be correlated ; but that doesn't imply that B causes C, or that C causes B.
I agree with everything you said there, except the "Not necessarily". The saying "correlation does not mean causation" is necessarily wrong because the phrase literally does not exclude the possibility of A causing both B and C.
But that does not mean that B causes C or vice versa.
In reality, you can also easily get correlations due to how you collect your data. In fact, that happens a lot, so much so that such things are among the very first things that statisticians look for. For example, if you recruit people for your study by asking on Facebook, you inevitably get a biased sample: you omit everyone who can't or won't use that platform, and you may attract just a few social cliques. Extrapolating to the overall population from that sample will be very likely unsound, and the correlations in the data may be just those general ones of the people who answered your questionnaire.
I prefer working with computers. Much easier.
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@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
In reality, you can also easily get correlations due to how you collect your data.
Or how you define your variables to begin with. Like certain neoclassical economists are fond of defining a "real interest rate" as the nominal interest rate minus inflation and then proceed to "discover" a fascinating correlation between said "real" rate and inflation 🤦♂️
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@LaoC Well, logically you expect that the nominal rates will be correlated with inflation, because in higher inflation companies expect their revenue to raise more over time, so they may be willing to borrow for higher rates. The difference is cleaned of this effect, so it might show other effects, and is therefore genuinely interesting thing to look at. Whether the conclusions drawn from it are correct is another matter—there tends to be a lot of incorrect assumptions in use in economy.
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I remember some years ago a study that used AI (yes, I know, that thread is, uh, well, we've got more than one I think...) to detect something like cancer on X rays. Or some other illness based on the result of some other exam. Whatever, it doesn't really matter for the story.
They trained their AI with data coming from two groups of patients, one from an affluent neighbourhood and the other from a poorer area. This was good for the training set as the two populations had very different levels of the disease they were looking for, so that sounded like a good idea. And the AI did get pretty good results.
But then they looked a bit more into how the AI was reaching its conclusion, and found out that the poorer-neighbourhood hospital had older equipment, which produced low-quality pictures, and that the AI was actually trained to use this information as a likely marker of the disease (since the disease was far more prevalent in this hospital)!
So a neat correlation, but absolutely no causation, not even through a hidden variable. Or maybe through a very, very hidden one if you go back all the way to "poor neighbourhood" and how that caused both poor equipment and a higher prevalence of the disease, but that's a very indirect one.
And of course the Mandatory XKCD on the topic.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@LaoC Well, logically you expect that the nominal rates will be correlated with inflation, because in higher inflation companies expect their revenue to raise more over time, so they may be willing to borrow for higher rates.
Yes, that's what they call the Fisher Effect and it's easy to observe.
The difference is cleaned of this effect, so it might show other effects, and is therefore genuinely interesting thing to look at. Whether the conclusions drawn from it are correct is another matter—there tends to be a lot of incorrect assumptions in use in economy.
The Fisher Effect says there's a correlation, not a 1:1 equivalence that you could just cancel out by subtracting the inflation rate. Both are coupled by a lot of different actors' psychology, not just the companies being willing to borrow at higher rates but also creditors trying to make a buck, so the relationship is likely not even linear.
If we definer=n-i
, and then look for correlations betweenr
andi
, no matter what each of these variables represent it would be surprising not to find any, because it's just correlatingi
with itself.
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@LaoC said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
If we define
r=n-i
, and then look for correlations betweenr
andi
, no matter what each of these variables represent it would be surprising not to find any, because it's just correlatingi
with itself.No, it isn't. If
n
is actuallyn=f̌+i
thann
andi
are correlated, butr=n-i=f̌
and may not be correlated toi
at all. So by looking at the correlation we check whether there is a simple affine dependence, which we'd clear this way.Fisher Effect is not this simple, so this does not cancel it, but we at least learned this simple fact, so it was not completely pointless.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@LaoC said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
If we define
r=n-i
, and then look for correlations betweenr
andi
, no matter what each of these variables represent it would be surprising not to find any, because it's just correlatingi
with itself.No, it isn't. If
n
is actuallyn=f̌+i
thann
andi
are correlated, butr=n-i=f̌
and may not be correlated toi
at all. So by looking at the correlation we check whether there is a simple affine dependence, which we'd clear this way.It would be surprising if there was a simple affine dependence.
Fisher Effect is not this simple, so this does not cancel it, but we at least learned this simple fact, so it was not completely pointless.
The Fisher Effect isn't even sufficiently exactly defined, at least not in a falsifiable way. It is based on the expected inflation rate which you can't measure, only conjecture, so unless you assume it's possible that people's expectations of the future would exactly coincide with measured (but unknown to most of them) parameters of the present it's clear from the start that it won't be canceled by any measured inflation rate.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
there tends to be a lot of incorrect assumptions in use in economy.
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@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
there tends to be a lot of incorrect assumptions in use in economy.
Chief among them that we can really control it at any but the highest levels of granularity. We've got a button labeled "crash" and that's about it.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
there tends to be a lot of incorrect assumptions in use in economy.
Chief among them that we can really control it at any but the highest levels of granularity. We've got a button labeled "crash" and that's about it.
We've also got a button labeled "delay crash with debt and inflation".
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
there tends to be a lot of incorrect assumptions in use in economy.
Chief among them that we can really control it at any but the highest levels of granularity. We've got a button labeled "crash" and that's about it.
We've also got a button labeled "
delayinitiate crash with debt and inflation".
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@boomzilla Same difference.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We've also got a button labeled "
delaybuild for a bigger crash with debt and inflation".FTFY
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@LaoC said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@LaoC said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
If we define
r=n-i
, and then look for correlations betweenr
andi
, no matter what each of these variables represent it would be surprising not to find any, because it's just correlatingi
with itself.No, it isn't. If
n
is actuallyn=f̌+i
thann
andi
are correlated, butr=n-i=f̌
and may not be correlated toi
at all. So by looking at the correlation we check whether there is a simple affine dependence, which we'd clear this way.It would be surprising if there was a simple affine dependence.
It would. But you can't simply claim that by taking
r=n-i
you are correlatingi
with itself, because ifn
already includesi
, either of them may have the bigger influence included. After all, what if you were takingn=r+i
instead.Of course I doubt most economists doing it ever thought it through this far, so …
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Of course I doubt most economists ever thought
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@topspin Damn; !
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New radio show. Huh.
https://www.wmal.com/your-best-shot-with-leah-durnat/
Took a screenshot because the site blocks copying text.
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A worldwide Bayesian causal Impact analysis suggests that COVID-19 gene therapy (mRNA vaccine) causes more COVID-19 cases per million and more non-Covid deaths per million than are associated with COVID-19.
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@lolwhat said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
the site blocks copying text
It also appears to be blocked completely from abroad.
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"Republicans and Democrats voted unanimously – 419-0 – to require the Biden administration’s director of national intelligence to declassify all intelligence related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and possible links to the origins of the COVID-19 virus. "
As you might imagine, unanimous votes in either house of Congress are quite rare. Certainly surprised me.
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So far, several mask related symptoms may have been misinterpreted as long COVID-19 symptoms.
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@lolwhat that'd explain why people who wore masks regularly prior to COVID have ... what? And is a vector for the live virus being found in some long COVID patients? How?
Get a dose of COVID, is what you need. Spin the wheel. Are you a lymph system champion, who clears all before you? I had a coworker go from sounding like a pompous ass to sounding like a ghost. Maybe your coworkers can gain similarly.
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@Gribnit said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
that'd explain why people who wore masks regularly prior to COVID have ... what?
Uh, the same thing? I know that it was fashionable during COVID times for pro-mask people to believe that masks started working differently 3 years ago, but all evidence since points to them working exactly the same.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
it was fashionable during COVID times for pro-mask people to believe that masks started working differently 3 years ago
It was? How so? Am I gonna find Christopher Lee in here?
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@Gribnit you might already have found Mike Patton.
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https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(23)00030-7/fulltext
The rate of adverse reactions for the second booster dose was significantly higher among participants receiving the bivalent vaccine (87.5% [95% CI, 77.2%93.5%; 56/64]) compared with those receiving the monovalent vaccine (52.5% [95% CI, 37.5%67.1%; 21/40]) vaccine (p = 0.0002). Bivalent-vaccinated participants further reported higher rates of adverse reactions in all subcategories (Fig. 1(a)). Also, there were more frequent intake of as-needed medication (Fig. 1(b)), numerically higher rates of workability restrictions (Fig. 1(c)), and longer mean duration of the inability to work (2.1 3.5 vs. 1.2 0.4 days) in the bivalent-vaccinated group.
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@lolwhat 87%. I doubt there were any vaccines prior to 2020 that had anywhere near that level of adverse reactions.