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Zoraptor

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Everything posted by Zoraptor

  1. They've scaled up fine for their existing production base though, and gone from zero to multiple tens of millions of doses per month per company. That's facilities that would have been used to make other vaccines and the like under normal circumstances. It's new production facilities that require certification etc and some raw material supply that are limiting numbers, and some one off batching issues like for AZ in Belgium and one US plant making J&J's being contaminated (plus the Brazilian and Slovak Sputnik issue, assuming it isn't just politics). Brazil is making vaccine domestically now, but they started later and are producing less than they really should have given their theoretical capabilities.
  2. Sure he did, you're just interpreting it in a narrow legal framework. I tend to wish bad things to happen to people without even the merest scintilla of integrity irrespective of whether they've actually broken the law, and someone with any integrity at all would have told Burisma to FOAD when offered a directorship under those circumstances. As it stands, Hunter Biden's 'punishment' amounts to receiving millions of dollars from that directorship and pimping his new book on the talk show circuit.
  3. Turning down Pfizer is fine*, they're extremely expensive and also of significantly reduced practicality for a lowish infrastructure tropical country due to their strict storage conditions- and they're also massively over subscribed. They may be the most effective, but you can vaccinate 20+ people for the same cost using vaccines that store long term in the fridge rather than at -70 and all the vaccines reduce severe infections to nearly zero, even the worst (but also cheapest to make...) Chinese one. Really, Brazil should be licensing then producing their own vaccines en masse (as with local Sputnik), and IIRC that is the intention. Why it's taking so long I don't know, Brazil has a pretty decent bioscience sector so far as I'm aware. *not least because they're already planning to annualise shots, so they make a non pandemic 26+USD off everyone in their system, every year. Thanks, but I'd rather have a 1$ Astra Zeneca/ Sputnik/ J&J annually and do something constructive with the extra $25 saved like buy computer games I'll never get around to playing, or something actually decent like greasies at Maraetai.
  4. Sigh. Someone trying to find evidence of someone else doing something wrong and ending up (allegedly) breaking the law in doing so is an absolutely classic case of situational irony. It also only really works, as irony, if the person being investigated initially didn't do anything illegal. (I'll always pillory Hunter Biden though, because a metaphorical rotten cabbage in the face is the very least he deserves. No way he didn't know what his directorship was intended as, no one is that dumb, and no way he didn't know the position it would put his father into either)
  5. Cohen's always going to say that though, since he flipped himself. Press will always go for him as a template over, say, Roger Stone because ultimately they want Rudy to flip. Would be ironic if Giuliani got done for Ukraine shenanigans while Hunter Biden got away with taking a job he was completely unqualified for and awarded solely because he was the VP's son without any consequences. While it may not have bought actual influence it was certainly intended as a bribe and cannot be read any other way. The only thing more ironic was Trump complaining about it given the fingers his children- and a particular child in law- have in various pies due to who their father is.
  6. Saudi's climb down is nearly complete. I still remember well all the Saudis in 2016 saying they wouldn't talk to Iran under any circumstances because they weren't arab and simply weren't worthy. Guess all it takes is Trump leaving, a couple of refineries being blown up and spending almost all the piggy bank in Yemen. Losing to shoeless Houthis whacked out on Qat and watching them blow up Abrams after Abrams with fricking 1960s era Malyutka all filmed on a 1960s era Nokia is bad enough, but losing and running out of money when you're the world's biggest oil supplier? That takes some sort of special ability. GD is being a bit too negative on the DC, our far and away most important transmission cable is indeed HVDC (and the 2nd most important one nearly was and got rejected for 'political' rather than practical reasons) and there are a lot of HVDC lines around- there are just a lot lot more AC ones. Not disputing the general observation about the practicalities of AC over DC though.
  7. It wasn't rejected for bad data per se, it was rejected because the adenovirus vector had reverted back to a self replicating form. That means you could get (very mildly) sick from the vaccine itself as its base vector causes Common Cold in the wild. There's always a small chance of that happening if you use a viral vector, and while it has very low potential danger it should be caught and fixed anyway. That's also why they'd still be happy with a locally manufactured version.
  8. Most of the complaints I've seen about GOG's refund policy were from people trying to game the system. Always amusing when someone with a public profile complains about not getting a refund for a game they've played for 50 hours. The exception would be around C2077's release, where support in general was snowed under. A low refund rate shouldn't be all that surprising for a curated store, as at least in theory that eliminates people refunding because the game simply doesn't work. A lot of people also use steam's refund system in lieu of a trial/ demo version of games which obviously cannot be the case for a drm free system.
  9. GOG has released an infographic on the past year. Very few absolute numbers are given though, only relative.
  10. I'd probably specify it as being an 'institutional' type killing too. A fight between a mexican gang and a black gang might be colour related as well, but it's between two equivalent groups. Police killing someone due to colour is a lot different since the police are a representative of Government, as would be the judicial system if they let police off lightly or failed to punish crimes against one racial group equivalently to others. In a more general sense people care a lot less about gang warfare type deaths because there's an expectation that if you have gangs they will be involved in crime, and sometimes that involvement will result in violence between competing groups. That's always been the case to greater or lesser extents. A cop deciding to kneel on someone's neck for ten minutes until they die while being filmed isn't quite as normal though.
  11. Similar here, they've been retrofitting hotels to improve ventilation over the past few months. As the article says, they haven't absolutely proven airborne transmission, but it's certainly the most plausible method. That's only one factor though, there are a lot of factors at work at close distance other than that, such as the ones I specifically mentioned. Mostly I find the no difference between 6' and 60' comparison to be kind of pointless and designed to generate headlines rather than say something important, so I'm not really disposed favourably to it from the start. I'd fully accept that the virus is airborne, but that isn't the only way to transmit it. Kind of sucks if you're in a situation where you have to spend a work day in a poorly ventilated room with lots of people and in that case social distancing may be approaching pointless, much as it is if you were living with someone. But there are plenty of situations where that isn't the case.
  12. The 6' rule (or 2m rule here) does have a basis in terms of reduction, since it minimises larger droplet dispersal, accidental contact and does reduce direct exposure to smaller droplets somewhat too. The fact is that for something genuinely airborne and highly infectious- like measles- you are fundamentally very much in trouble if you're in an enclosed area with someone and don't have immunity, at almost any practical distance. Covid is a lot less- about 1/6 as- infectious than measles though. As with most things covid related it's not about out and out prevention of spread. If you want that you do what we did here for 5 weeks and stop anyone going anywhere that isn't absolutely essential, a response in which social distancing is almost entirely irrelevant, and such virus as you have burns itself out inside individual houses. As with most measures like mask wearing or washing hands social distancing is about slowing/ minimising spread in a situation in which life in general has to go on. I'm not excluding the model for being just maths though, I'm excluding it for not asking/ answering a relevant question with its model; to whit, it's irrelevant if 6' or 60' is better, the question is whether 6' is better than a closer distance or not. If it is, then it's a sensible mitigation factor even if it's otherwise the same as 60', because 60' is obviously impractical anyway and the idea is to maximise prevention while minimising other impact. But they don't answer that question.
  13. There's lobbying from a lot more than just the oil industry against it, any industry that relies on oil lobbies against it too. And that's a lot, not just obvious ones like transport but also anyone who uses plastic. And, of course, you have issues like the massive deforestation occurring in Indonesia so that they can grow palm oil for 'green' biofuels... And of course of course if you wanted to switch to 'green' plant based plastics you need a lot more land to grow them on as well... ... Basically after anything more than a cursory glance at the reality of the situation: we're completely screwed and simply aren't capable of fixing things without there being maybe a 3/4 reduction in population which is the one thing no politician will touch with a pole of any length, since it would require a fundamental shift in economic theory and application let alone the ethical considerations. Fortunately, we have Bill Gates and his microchipped 5g population control vaccines for that. What was the figure that came out recently, fossil fuels in Australia are subsidised at the rate of 16,000 AUD per second or something?
  14. They've (finally) got a system for rolling back specific bits of a big update 'automatically'; 'Known Issue Rollback'. No idea why it's taken them seemingly decades to get to that point when it would seem to be a pretty basic requirement. Given the problems with Win10 and automatic updates I'm very glad I ended up with the corporate Windows 7 Ultimate that I did rather than a consumer edition since the win10 pro only tries to force you to update after about a year of beta testing by the consumer arm.
  15. They've rolled back that update now. Guess someone has to act as beta testers for MS though I too am glad it's other people rather than me.
  16. Might be a bit of payback for Erdogan's shenanigans during the Trump term, too, which ended up making the US look pretty weak. But, it will only shore up Erdogan's domestic support at a time when it's been increasingly shaky due to covid and funny money economics; even the opposition CHP feels it has to support him on the subject of genocide.
  17. Joe Biden finally recognised the Armenian Genocide, and good on him for it too. Despite the talk that it was going to happen I thought he'd chicken out like Obama did, when push came to shove.
  18. Yep, that's not a great study for actual practice, since it's just a mathematical model from mathematicians and they seem to... struggle with medical justifications and reasoning. The question is not whether you're safer at 6' or 60' as no one suggests social distancing of 60', it's whether 6' has the same risk as a closer distance like 3' or whatever. You also cannot say much about outdoor transmission when you cannot trace exposure well- which is the case in most of the world where you may have, say, got covid from someone in the supermarket, or someones else at the supermarket, or got it from someone in the car park. No way to tell, you'd just presume it was someone inside the supermarket instead of outside. We've definitely had outside transmission here, with the most well documented case involving a border worker and shop worker/ student whose only contact was them walking past the same place at more or less the same time in November last year. We could only tell that though because there were so few community cases (ie 1) so there was only one possible source.
  19. If you have a courgette (zucchini) plant in the garden you will make bread etc from it because it'll happily produce up to 2kg a week, for literally months*, and there are a limited amount of things you can do with them- and free is free. Absolutely should be savoury and eaten like actual bread rather than sweet though. *or alternatively, get mildew inside a few weeks and never recover as happened for some reason this year to no less than 4 plants.
  20. The 5 continents thing always cracks me up. Massive discrimination against penguins. But yeah, that's non political given that sport is 'meant' to be a pure contest between individuals that excludes anything other than their individual (team) prowess and that's what they're enshrining. Doesn't and didn't always work out that way though, of course.
  21. That's mostly host countries trying to make themselves look good though, rather than politics directly in the sporting events. So you'd have Cathy Freeman lighting the Sydney flame showing that Aborigines are all good now when they really aren't, or Beijing having a nice parade of its cultural diversity most of which was being actively suppressed even then. A Tommy Smith style political protest at an actual Olympic sporting event was so memorable because it's been so rare. Massive politics around the city selection and ancillary stuff like boycotts though, of course, as well as political leaders using an Olympic junket to meet up; and commercial interests being paramount go without saying- that is almost certainly the real reason for a ban on any 'politics'. And of course IOC Presidents and delegates have not always been of unimpeachable character; indeed it might be more accurate to say that they haven't always been of impeachable character given their level of endemic corruption.
  22. Don't need to, we're years ahead. Honestly, we'd consider a Free Trade Agreement with Narnia if we could find someone to negotiate one with.
  23. And we'll get to do the whole thing again next year in six months time when the next lot of exercises leads to another round of 'imminent invasion!!!111one!!!' headlines. Guess it's appropriate that Pavlov was Russian. Ironically the almost completely unreported meeting with Lukashenko from Belarus might well turn out to be of far more long term significance, now that he's permanently alienated from the west and has nothing to play off against Russia progress on the much delayed Union State seems a lot more likely.
  24. The Liverpool owner has apologised now it seems. Don't really know what they were even thinking and how insulated they were to think that it was going to work in the first place. Guess it's covid related, especially for the clubs that are in a really bad financial situation, but still, everything that happened was utterly predictable. The only surprising thing was just how quickly the decisions got reversed. Now they've lost most of their leverage with UEFA and the existing domestic leagues since they can't perpetually threaten to take their ball and go play elsewhere. No chance getting financial backing for another breakaway any time soon now that the backers are left hung out to dry, no chance getting teams to join even if they could get that backing, massively reduced ability to extort money out of their domestic leagues... almost enough punishment meted out already. Just needs some cut price fire sales from owners whose expectations of a US style franchise league have been dashed.
  25. All the English clubs have pulled the plug now. What an utter unmitigated embarrassment.
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