Zoraptor

I dunno about that, sounds like something that could be tackled by a very small gun shooting very small bullets to me.

The terraforming goes a lot faster if you do some of the special terraforming planetary missions.

We're up to.. "Ah yes, most certainly. When I mentioned we could put them on the priority list for PPE, they were so willing it was almost pathetic." or maybe "Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them." ..in the Deus Ex opening cinematic, I think. Which is probably closer to documentary than satire at this point, about the only thing he seems to be doing at the moment is stealing everyone else's PPE orders for some sort of massive federal stockpile.

The droid planet was scrapped early, and it really shows. There simply wasn't much to restore, and the gaps and jumps are just too big. It's an interesting attempt which doesn't really work out.

At one point everyone was selling 'fraudulent' tests, even now the best kits aren't all that accurate (bit more than 90%, iirc). Theoretically both antibody and PCR kits should be accurate, practically they aren't. Having said that, there's a shed load of stock manipulation going on with claims of miracle cures. Maybe Donald can suggest Tulip Bulbs as a treatment next, for some fun historicity. Both of Trump's suggested treatments actually do have some sort of precedent or sense behind them ("lavage" has been a treatment for damaged lungs for ages, albeit the 'disinfectant' used is plain old saline), the problem is the way he suggested them and he's made clear by calling it sarcasm that he didn't mean a sensible treatment when he suggested them.

Yeah, it seems unlikely at least from the outside that the US federal government could undersell the death toll, unless they had collusion with the individual States. OTOH I'd strongly suspect some States would only be including deaths which can definitively be attributed to covid19 in their figures, especially if they don't want to have or want to leave a lockdown type situation; or aren't in a situation where they're able to include them yet. Places like New York or the UK/ France got very large jumps in their tolls once they started including deaths outside hospitals; at home or in aged care facilities. Also, deaths tend to lag infection rates significantly. Many of those dying today caught the disease 2-3 weeks ago so death rates tend to lag infection rates by 2-3 weeks. The US as a whole also has several advantages- generally younger population, and lower overall population density- than the heavily suffering European countries. At this point I don't think the US death rate is suspiciously low.

The problem with voting for a bad option instead of a worse one is that the only thing the people putting up the bad option care about is that enough people think the other guy is worse. You end up perpetuating the cycle which sees the two bad options in the first place. It's quite something to say that the options for US voters will be a decrepit dementia addled probable sex offender with multiple political skeletons in his closet- and the other option is Donald Trump. This discussion is probably better suited for the Politics thread rather than here though. In covid19 news; WHO says there's no evidence that surviving infection confers immunity. It's pretty likely that that's a statement like their 'no evidence of human to human transmission [yet]' one where they do find some sort of immunity after further study. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's pretty short term immunity though given how the common cold coronavirus behaves. If it doesn't though then it's bad news for vaccines as well, since they rely on priming the human immune system. There's also the possibility of it going 'dormant'/ hiding in DNA, like chickenpox or HIV.

So I'm playing XCOM (recent one, not UFO Defence) and I'm enjoying the game itself well enough. I'm not keen on some gameplay things like aliens getting a 'free' move when spotted at all- only reason I can think of for it since aliens are pretty good at using cover otherwise is console memory limits- otoh it's recognisably xcom and I've always loved the strategy/ tactical layer mix in them and Jagged Alliance. But that UI- sometimes you use the mouse to select/ confirm, sometimes you have to use the keyboard to do the same thing; sometimes both in the same UI element. Click through of interface elements in the tactical screen means you do stuff you don't intend to, typically opening doors. And it has a very annoying unresolved issue with ultrawide where you can choose having the UI elements misaligned or having the movement of your squad members not correspond to where the mouse cursor is placed. OK, the last probably isn't solely console related but the rest must be, surely. How could the people who made the seemingly infinitely scalable and perennially working CivIV come up with that abject mess?

It's nice to see such optimism! George Martin said that if he hadn't finished writing the next book by the time he came to New Zealand this year we could lock him up at the old sulphur mine on White Island until he finished. Of course, White Island happens to be a volcano and erupted killing a bunch of people, so no one's going there any time soon. And now there's coronavirus so he couldn't even get to the country to be imprisoned on White Island anyway. We are never getting another book, the whole thing is cursed. There's probably passages in Nostradamus and Revelations talking about the Winds of Winter.

Bit of a better/ more relevant illustration: the vaccine undergoing trials in the UK at the moment is sarscov2 antigens (proteins) engineered onto a benign virus in order to promote an immune response. Indeed, the antigen chosen is the spike protein the video found so suspicious. Oh dear, he's endorsed flushing your lungs with plain old detergent instead I'm afraid.

The US navy is in the SCS very regularly. They even toodle past China's self proclaimed island bases regularly, and US planes fly through China's ADIZ very regularly. Occasionally you get incidents over it like the mid air collision off Hainan (?) some years ago, but generally it's a big nothingburger. The US tends to ignore others' self proclaimed territorial waters, and always has. (The only unusual thing is that the US has two carriers in the nearby region effectively out of action due to coronavirus. 99% of the time fleet movements aren't any sort of prelude to war, they're just rotating assets.)

I'm not going to watch a 54 minute video. Turns out I might listen to (most of) it while I do other things though. TLDR; the science is not all that compelling. The video is rather like the presentation of evidence for WMD in Iraq from old asterisks Cheney; you can make it seem compelling by removing every bit of equivocation or counter evidence. It still may have come from a lab, but it isn't anywhere near proven. 1) No full tracing of origin is to be expected. In the early stages you're looking only at data only from cases serious enough to have been treated in hospital for pneumonia, which make up a small number of covid19 cases. Non severe cases would be treated as if it were flu or the cold, ie stay home for a bit or tough it out, forget about it a week later. Since only a small proportion require hospitalisation you'd have the large majority of cases being silent ones making tracing extremely hard. 2) Assuming an animal origin bats are probably the ultimate source, but may not be the proximal source. 3) 100% gene sequence similarity may mean that it's under very strong selective pressure, ie the env protein and virus simply won't function properly with significant alterations. There's a reason we still share 50% of our genes with bananas, as an illustration. 4) Natural strains don't infect humans but it has the spike protein of SARS (1) which did, therefore... what? SARS did infect humans, it just had very low transmission rates. 'Natural' animal viruses most definitively do infect humans from time to time- if they want to leave out SARS because sinophobia there's also near relative MERS (ex camellids) or the less related SIV which seems to have crossed into humans at least 11 (!) times in the creation of HIV. Or Ebola/ Marburg. All of which are ssRNA viruses. 5) No, bat coronavirus having spike proteins that can infect humans does not mean there's no intermediate host full stop, it means there doesn't have to be an intermediate host. 6) Meta: isn't it nice of the Chinese to have left all these breadcrumbs, and in articles to journals like Nature or Science to boot. 7) Yes, amazingly scientists do build viruses out of bits of other viruses to test what they do and have done for rather a long time. It's even a suggested (approved now?) mechanism for gene therapy in humans. cool) No, that does not mean that sarscov2 is artificial. Classic non sequitor, we show this and that, therefore you can draw a conclusion that does not actually follow the data gained from this or that. You've already admitted that SARS1 infected humans and working in mice != working in humans. 9) My god, they experimented on mice! And planned to on primates! In a research lab! I'm, uh, flabbergasted at this, er, revelation. What next, some poor innocent fruitflies or a big toad? 10) Retrovirus that infects humans has similarity to another retrovirus that infects humans, that's... not exactly surprising. 11) Suspicious that the lab kept quiet- but I'd bet it would also be 'suspicious' if they said anything too. 12) And we're off into direct sinophobia not related to the coronavirus which I can't be bothered listening to for 15 minutes. Sheesh, I think the Chinese government are complete garbage but anyone naive enough to think that the US government isn't doing exactly the same sort of biological experiments is naive, and didn't watch the same video 5 minutes earlier.

Less life threatening but there's also foot lesions showing up as a symptom, especially in younger and otherwise asymptomatic cases. That would more typically be seen in something like chickenpox. That would be the use case that seems most likely from its current uses, certainly, but even there the troubles with using it are multiple. Fundamentally, not many young people are badly effected, so there's little need for a preventative at this point. If things get bad with the young they seem to get bad very suddenly, but hydroxychloroquine is used to treat slow acting chronic autoimmune problems like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, not a very rapidly accumulating positive feedback loop. HCQ is an immunosuppressant so is potentially of use against the immune system freaking out, but you don't really want to give immunosuppressants to people who would otherwise very likely clear the infection quickly as you raise the chance of the infection lingering and potentially doing more direct damage itself, let alone any potential side effects of HCQ itself. And as above it does treat chronic autoimmune problems, specifically cases where the immune system attacks its own host (more or less) directly, whereas a cytokine storm is a very acute runaway positive feedback loop aimed at least in covid19 or 'Spanish' flu type cases at attacking a genuine invader- so while they are both problems with the immune system the mechanisms by which the problems occur are significantly different. I almost mentioned that as a potential use, but decided it was simply too marginal a possibility and would be functionally misleading. That probably was the thought behind it being mentioned in the first place- end of the day though treatments based either on existing antivirals or existing methods of treating more similar secondary effects are more likely to be useful. It does have to be said that Trump did not pull its name out of the blue and it was suggested and has been tested as a treatment by actual doctors. If it weren't for Trump trying to hype it as a miracle cure it would be in a 'worth a try, I guess' sort of category; unfortunately it seems to have been used mostly so Trump can claim that everything will be all right real soon now, trust him.

Yeah, you aren't going to give an experimental hail mary treatment to non severe cases. But even with that proviso the results and others like it still aren't good for it as a treatment. Trouble with the hype for hydroxychloroquine has always been that's unlike some of the other hyped possibilities (like anti HIV drugs; whose target is an RNA virus like sarscovfefe too SARS-CoV2 is as well) there's absolutely no intrinsic reason why an anti malarial should be effective as an anti viral agent, especially against a virus that uses RNA. Even though the results for it are intrinsically biased they are enough to show it isn't reliably a cure, let alone a miracle cure that will stop the virus in its tracks.

US wholesale oil prices suffer a ~300% (no typo) drop over the course of a day. In theory at least they will now pay you 30 odd dollars per barrel, to take it away.

Court documentation (pdf), specifically #40

No worries, I'm here to help, and am happy to fix any and all faulty opinions you have for you free of charge. FYI, the father says he did refer the police to the doctors' report, but they outright refused to check. Which is eminently believable since their stated and official position is the narrow 'no positive test means no covid19'. No there isn't. They may be more accurate than the PCR tests, but the only test for which stats are available shows a bit better than 90% accuracy, and even that is questionable due to being Chinese. There are multiple cases of countries rushing use of literally useless antibody tests, eg Britain. (Even if they were reliable a positive test for antibodies does not necessarily make you immune anyway. The close relative to SARS-CoV2 that causes one version of the common cold grants very short lasting immunity, one of the reasons people get multiple colds a year, year after year)

Coincidentally I saw Glass last week, and also enjoyed it a lot. Kind of wish I'd waited until I'd managed to track down a copy of Unbreakable after finishing it since I probably missed out a bit on the background stuff (I did see Split a couple of months ago, and liked it way way more than I expected to).

That was pretty much exactly my thoughts on Picard as well, though I'm not quite as effusive about the earlier episodes. From what I've seen of Kurzman that's if not a deliberate policy then it's all his projects are capable of- and it's the absolute scourge of nuTrek, Picard and Discovery having potential to be a lot better is what ultimately made them so disappointing. The writers are able to write scenes that when taken independently are reasonably well written, generally well acted and exciting enough to maintain interest. The trouble comes when they try to tie them together into a coherent whole, and find the cool scenes can't be made to fit together in a way that makes sense, and they simply don't have the dramatic fortitude to do anything with genuine emotional weight unless forced so settle for a bunch of emotionally manipulative twaddle instead.

It's definitely about whether they count clinical diagnoses as confirmed or not. That's how the police will be determining whether she's making it up, or not. They would- and did, per the article- have checked the official figures and seen no one officially had C19 in the county, they would not and could not have asked any specific doctor- and, officially, the hospital would not have had any confirmed cases if they asked there. If a doctor's diagnosis is not enough to officially determine someone has covid19 and a positive pcr is required then, officially, she would not have C19 even if she actually did, and a doctor said she did. And that is what the police base their accusation on. Police everywhere have a long history of insisting that scientific tests are infallible, because they are what a lot of their convictions are based on and any suggestion they're not leads to endless appeals. In this case the scientific test should never even make it into court as proof she didn't have it, because it demonstrably gives false negatives when people definitively are infected with SARS-CoV2. Digging in their heels even when contradicted by a doctor is perfectly in character though, because defences always have a crack at the 'scientific' evidence with their own doctors and scientists. Plus, of course, police have a distinct tendency to believe in their own infallibility, even when presented with concrete evidence.

Eh, you can have evidence that there are no cases- you just cannot have proof. There not being any confirmed cases in the area is evidence there aren't any, though per below it certainly isn't proof in the case of covid19. I still disagree with Skarpen anyway though, since... Testing is a bit of a clusterasterisk, since the PCRs seem to give up to 30% false negatives. Some places are allowing clinically diagnosed covid-19 cases into their stats while some require a positive PCR. With a clinical diagnosis but no positive PCR she'd be included in stats here, but in many other places she'd not be. It's definitely heavy handed trying to demand her silence, barring some other unknown factor like her having a history of false claims. If she did have a clinical diagnosis as claimed then there's no way she's spreading panic or anything else that might be actionable. But, I'd also give the police rather more leeway at least for their initial actions than I normally would, as the reputation for scientific tests and the PCR tests they might be familiar with (ie DNA fingerprinting) is that they are highly reliable to near completely infallible.

Taiwan should be safe so long as China and the US/ Trump are actively fighting an economic war. I'd be more worried about Trump forcing China's hand by recognising Taiwan as independent (without a very detailed plan of how to deal with the consequences) than him abandoning them. That's exactly the sort of stunt he'd pull. China, much like the USSR, gives most of its 'aid' effectively 'in kind' rather than in cash. Big infrastructure projects funded by China, and using mostly Chinese labour much as the soviet aligned bloc got soviet or Cuban engineers for their projects. In many ways that is a lot better than the old IMF/ WB model of giving countries wodges of dosh that inevitably disappeared into various Mobutu types' swiss bank accounts instead of being spent on what they were meant to, leaving the leaders as billionaires when inevitably deposed and their countries with nothing except being permanently indebted, and forced to run their economies as dictated by the IMF- debt trap neo colonialism, as absolutely deliberate policy. Of course the Chinese model isn't disinterested benevolence either and is mostly Chinese money paying Chinese workers for projects that benefit China (and secondarily the host country), but I'm always amused at 'Chinese debt trap in Africa' type articles railing against what the west has done for the past 70 years because now it's the Chinese instead; and at least the infrastructure gets built and the Chinese can't walk away with all the ports, roads and power stations they're building.

First couple of seasons of 24 are pretty good. After that it very rapidly succumbs to threat inflation and scenario repetition. It was still (mostly) entertaining though even when it was stupid.

Because I forgot to mention it previous, the WHO definitely did make one major mistake that should not have been made- opposing travel bans up to at least early February. On that, Trump definitely has a point, and also a point against most Democrats. In hindsight travel bans were the bare minimum that should have happened, and the WHO recommended against them despite acknowledging a month earlier there was human to human transmission. The troubles with that are that the US still hasn't provided any evidence, let alone proof, for their accusations against Huawei. As such, it's being treated by everyone else as being part of Trump's trade war with China- and since he's simultaneously fighting or threatening to fight trade wars with just about everyone else there's no goodwill or benefit of the doubt. Instead, you have Europe wondering if Trump will decide that Airbus or BMW should be the next target after Huawei and China and not wanting to encourage him. Huawei is the typical Chinese loss-leader-to-drive-others-out-of-business (then jack up prices and drop down quality) model of Chinese company, but that isn't the same as it spying. There would be few people (maybe just Sarex) on this forum who'd be happier than I to see NATO fold. But NATO is irrelevant as a counter to China anyway, as it is explicitly a greater North Atlantic 'defensive' pact with its members literally half a world away from China. I tend to agree that the US should pull out of it or reduce commitments to it because I think NATO has long outlived its supposed purpose- but if that happens it will massively reduce US influence, and that has to be accepted as an obvious consequence beforehand. If you want quid pro quo for being in NATO and the largest contributor you got the return in soft power. If Obama claimed Huawei was spyware he'd be taken more seriously than Trump because Obama didn't spend his term(s) deliberately setting diplomatic fires everywhere. A leadership that everyone dislikes has a lot more difficulty getting its way than one that people want to believe is acting in their interests. The anti China treaties are with the likes of Japan, ROK, Philippines, Australia; ie greater Pacific countries. Trouble being that Trump has managed to have problems with every single country on that list too, except Australia. So much so that the Philippines- hardly friendly with China- kicked the US out wholesale a few months ago. Any China containment strategy also requires at least the tacit support of both India and Russia (who can being along ex soviet 'stans) to be effective.

Trouble is, some in the US would withdraw from NATO because others aren't pulling their weight, then wonder why Europe doesn't pay any attention to them and won't support them any more and rail about how US influence has dropped without drawing any connection between the two. And the US can always unilaterally reduce military spending, if she wants to. Nobody wants China to be the sole superpower, that's a false dichotomy. It is a potential result of Trump continually taking enormous dumps on former friends and international institutions for naked domestic political purposes though. If people end up actually taking China's side against the US what does that say about the diplomatic abilities of the US? These things don't happen in a vacuum, they happen as a consequence to deliberate US policies. Trump and Pompeo have asterisked off literally everyone who isn't Bibi Netanyahu, many multiple times on multiple issues. The ongoing collapse of US soft power is an inevitable consequence of that. It may play well to elements of the US domestically, but all the extortion, amnerican exceptionalism and unilateralism doesn't play well with anyone outside the US.