Totally not Gorgon

I quoted the wrong thing. ehh. Nevermind,

Minsk 2 mentions Donbas autonomous regions that would somehow also have representation in Ukrainian central government and have veto power over, say, NATO membership for Ukraine. Yeah, that was never going to fly.

I don't see the need to invade Ukraine to get most of those fulfilled. Russian armies present in the breakaway republics would more than likely have been sufficient to prevent attacks, and to finally negotiate and end to the fighting. What's more, Russia could have done this years past. Russia didn't, because it needed to build antipathy against Ukraine in preparation for an invasion, and because the war was serving them so well in destabilizing Ukraine and slowing down membership of both NATO and the EU, neither of which would have allowed Ukraine to join while it was fighting a civil war. The West rather foolishly let Russia know by its actions that the opportunity to invade Ukraine was running out, and so Putin took our advice to do it while he could. It's pretty clear that Russia meant to overwhelm the whole of Ukraine, and claim the big prize, rather than the consolation prize of the Donbas, but couldn't do it because of the sad state of its armed forces.

I don't understand what the victory condition is for Russia, I mean they could take Kyev and remove the government. And then what ?. Another Ukrainian revolution in either months or years. Millions of willing resistance fighters. Millions of displaced refugees with nothing but hatred for Russia. The Ukrainians are simply done being told what to do. That's the main miscalculation. So far the Russian invasion has achieved nothing much that will be of value on the negotiation table. Best case scenario, Russia started this slaughter for the win of some small amount of territory and probably permanently terrible relations with Ukraine and the west. There is just no way it was worth it.

Putin is doing a deep cleansing. You don't want to be any of those *toxins* leaving the body He'll feel better once he has wrapped it up with a coffee enema.

I'm jumping in at steam deck 2

MYTH: The natural immunity I get from being sick with COVID-19 is better than the immunity I get from COVID-19 vaccination. FACT: Getting a COVID-19 vaccination is a safer and more dependable way to build immunity to COVID-19 than getting sick with COVID-19. Ok, but isn't this a non sequitur. We are talking Vaccine + natural immunity. Not vaccine OR natural immunity

You aren't making a lot of sense. Your reference to "Excessive lockdown language" is simply the variable I use to store the equation "lets not bother with lockdowns that don't work" And indeed you don't seem to be advocating Omicron lockdowns anyway. You aggressively assign disproportionate meaning to adverbs. That said, a lot of people have felt lockdowns to be excessive, now, I don't particularly care about "feelings", but we do need to take stock and consider when and how we are allowed to interfere in people's lives for the greater good. The answer is not "never," and it's not "always" either. So when does it become "excessive". Well arguably somewhere within the confines of having another choice to accept higher transmission and having emergency capacity bend, but not break, under the strain. This is the difference between the early days of people dying for lack of ventilators, and now.

Another thing to consider here, is that saving lives with extreme measures, which after two years I think you could call lockdowns, can be done more efficiently. If we force people to exercise or quit smoking we are pretty much guaranteed to save more lives. You seem to have zeroed in on 'voluntary infection', and what it is, is simply not choosing lockdown. The rest will take care of itself owing to the increased transmission of Omicron. We are putting immunity in the bank from a standpoint of not knowing when or if there is going to be a better time to do so. It's not free, this is increased risk for people with existing conditions, but that is the nature of these calculations, that was always the case.

It seems likely that we will run into the same supply problems from last time though, doesn't it.

Well ideally they jab you in the arm with the vaccine and you come back a week later for a shot of virus in the other arm, and then you isolate. But, this is the strategy pursued by many European countries. They pushed the third vaccine shot in the middle of winter, the usual high point for infection, and then didn't lockdown, like they had all the other years. hospitalizations and infections were very high. And, at least where I'm at the wave is bottoming out. So we are coming out of winter with high immunity.

And of course, all other things being equal. the exposure leads to increased immunity, and therefore also increased protection for your surroundings.

the math looks like this : you know you are going to be exposed, you can't expect to avoid Omicron by isolating. If you are exposed while your vaccine protection is the strongest. 1-3 months after your 3rd shot, you have mitigated the chance of severe covid by as much as you are able.

Doesn't it stand to reason that what you get if you are exposed to Omicron ,is Omicron antibodies and Omicron immunity. Given that we don't know when or even if there is going to be another vaccine, Omicron antibodies might be a good thing to have come next winter, as opposed to three vaccinations worth of not particularly good protection.

Lockdowns don't matter that much if mortality is very low. The only point of lockdowns is to spread out hospitalizations, they can't succeed in avoiding transmission long term. Not with Omicron anyway. So. If you have low mortality and even with very high hospitalization,. you should be swapping temporary vaccine induced immunity for much longer lasting natural immunity. You get new antibodies even without getting sick, although not as many, from just being exposed to the virus. This only goes if you have very high vaccine rates and preferably a third shot as well for the majority of the population. It's super important to have *some* antibodies as opposed to none. Which is why the largely ineffective vaccine is still an enormous life saver.

Also an argument for not doing excessive lockdowns. The Chinese clearly miscalculated with Omicron. the vaccine wasn't good enough to solve the covid problem on its own, but, it can/could have been used to bolster natural immunity. Vaccine protection from serious hospitalization, the factor that governs death rates the most, goes down by a whopping 10% in a couple of months, so really, in that timeframe, you should be deliberately exposing yourself to the virus.

The main difference would be that Covid infected billions, not millions. Which should do something drastic to the time axis. That is, Covid should, hopefully move to a less dangerous much but more transmissive form much sooner. That's usually the winning strategy for the virus.

Were riiiight on the cusp of financial recovery and then there's another 'thing'. Fuking russia, or another strain, or some bloody thing.

I memorized the entire script when I was 17.

I haven't heard anything like that, but then I don't get news from twitter.

I haven't head anything like that, but then I don't get news from twitter.

Messing around in Cyberpunk. I thought, now that I have an RTX card i would switch it on and be amazed. It looks the same, slightly better lighting, maybe. That's about it.

Neil Breen eating tuna out of a can while driving.

I mean after the supply situation has been alleviated and the market has finally stabilized, and we will sit at probably old MSRP + 30 %, something like that. As opposed to 200%. not going down after that.

I thought it was going to be torture watching my RTX 3070 ti depreciate in value every day until it bottomed out around summer. Actually the price hasn't moved at all. Probably inflation ? 30 series will lose 50-75 % of its value come q3 of course, with RTX 4000. But, that's a loss I would have taken anyway buying a stop gap card. I'm willing to bet I can still recover a decent chunk selling it used. GPUs are not going down in price, the market is still going to be thirsty, even with everything intel and AMD are doing.