The summary leaves out the most critical info from the actual article: the annualized failure rates of most of their drives are below 1%. A failure risk of 1% and lower per drive can easily mean operating a smaller batch for years without encountering a single failure.
You forget. Republicans feel persecuted 24/7, its part of the mentality.
Whoever is still wearing a mask has a personal anxiety problem.
It has been several years now and the apocalypse hasn't happened. Anyone who wants and believes in the vaccines can have as many covid vaccines as they want, for free, at the nearest CVS or Walgreens. Anyone who doesn't has no fear of covid anyway and probably had it already, twice.
Also, there is ample scientific evidence available now about the ineffectiveness of the masks in real-world scenarios, even compared in clinical settings with medical professionals wearing and changing them often makes very little to no difference, so a real-world usage where it is almost never changed daily, the expected results are non-existent.
Additionally, with very few people still wearing them, any minuscule tiny effect, the 0.000001% they might still have is nullified because nobody else is doing it.
Wearing the mask at this point has no actual effect. Not a little, not "just-in-case" and not "if it saves one life" - it doesn't. It will not save even one (1) person from even a mild illness.
It is a political statement and the desire to remain validated about their choices over the pandemic despite MOUNTAINS of evidence to the contrary.
What would you say about banning the private sale of nuclear weapons? Or fully automatic small arms and grenades?
Does banning them "push them underground and it becomes even less controllable"?
Nah. You're just cherry-picking your arguments. I highly doubt you're in favor of selling hand grenades in anonymous markets.
A far more likely reason would be that safety protocols for dealing with dangerous pathogens were insufficient or disregarded in the Wuhan lab. Negligence and human error are always the most likely explanations for disasters.
And it is very worth the effort to find out what could have prevented the lab leak, assuming it was unintentional.
Safety of anything gets a lot better if lessons are learned from failures, that's why jet travel today is as safe as it is.
And if the lab leak was INTENTIONAL, someone needs to be meet to a firing squad.
- Scenario: It escaped a lab.
- ONE Result: The conspiracy nuts will have a field day, other than that nothing happens because no country would ever allow international examinations of their bio research labs.
- SECOND Result: if safety protocols for labs were insufficient, they can be improved, if safety protocols were correct, but not adhered to, the nations and institutions responsible get punished and asked for reparations, future bio-safety inspections can and will know what and where to look for in audits.
COVID is a tragedy that caused at least a million deaths and billions in damages. Anything that can prevent future outbreaks or reduce their likelihoods is worth investigating.
Not doing an investigation into a disaster of planetary proportions because a "conspiracy nut" could be proven right is the absolute worst. And it in itself proves the conspiracy nuts right. Think about it.
Assuming it came from a lab, that lab would be in Wuhan, meaning a main sponsor of the WHO could be found culpable or negligent. But nobody can know why the WHO doesn't really want to find out anymore, can we?
Ironic enough that the country that is running amok with their own currency is trying to "regulate" other currencies. Printing trillions of dollars with no assets to back them up, giving away pallets of cash to foreign powers, increasing taxes and increasing the tax office to collect ever more, to then waste it into departments and institutions with no oversight that never get audited.
And they want to regulate other currencies.
They could start with the USD first and "regulate" that so it doesn't inflate to the moon, finally gainst state-of-the-art security against counterfeiting and then maybe, just maybe give it an asset base to back it up other than "government says so" and "cannon boats will come if you don't like our currency".
If that's in place and working, then they can start regulating other currencies to prevent poor innocent speculative lunatics from gambling away their money. Right now, it seems the US is more bent on preventing any other currency from becoming a viable alternative to the inflated funny money dollar.
It's all that and MUCH worse.
A digital dollar means the government and all it's ministries get full access and knowledge of every purchase made and the ability to put all of these under their political whims. So in fact, the government can then track all spending and cancel every purchase, if it deems them to be wrong - and what is "wrong" can depend on every single piece of political ideology there is.
It means the government can prevent you to buy merchandise for the opposition candidate. It means the then-current administration can track every dollar and cent that are donated to the opposition. It can switch off and confiscate all money owned by a dissident AND track every single business transaction they did. The government can levy every fine whenever and wherever they want, with immediate effect. You cannot ever store any amount of wealth that cannot be taken away with the click of a button.
And most likely, they will use it to track CO2 emissions "caused" by purchases and limiting them accordingly. So the government will determine how much fuel you are allowed to buy, if you can book the flight you want etc. and if you protest against that, they will remove all your wealth and prevent you from doing business with anyone ever again.
If that sounds scary, imagine Trump or Biden or whoever you dislike most being in control of this mechanism. It would be hell on earth on a scale of the Khmer Rouge. For real.
The only thing the dollar has strengthened against is OTHER currencies. Measured against tangible assets, the dollar has depreciated on insane rates. We call this "inflation", but it is exactly that: the purchasing power of the dollar against tangible = actual assets. Since all assets have different developments in their scarcities, one cannot just track the dollar vs. gold, silver or oil prices and call it the value of the dollar, but our inflation levels show how much the dollar has lost in purchasing power against the average of all relevant goods. It just lost a little less than all other currencies, but that only means the US is sinking more slowly than the other economies. Only a fool would use "sinking more slowly than the next guy" as a measure of success.
Any crime prediction algorith is one of two things:
A) bound to be called racist
B) bound to deliver very inaccurate predictions
A crime prediction mechanism, whether it is people or systems must always look at what IS, and disregard the WHY. What IS is that crime is highly predicated on racial and ethnic factors (in addition to a lot of other factors, who are also confounded with racial and ethnic factors, so much that their linkage is inextricable).
This is seen as "racist" in today's society, because society regards the WHY of these differences to be rooted in racism and therefore prohibits the observation and attribution of observations and patterns.
This is a fundamental problem in law enforcement, because law enforcement cannot and should not care about the events, systems and developments years before a crime that caused the perpetrator to become criminal. When a system is leading people into different paths according to their racial background, with one becoming criminal and the other not, it is a societal problem per se, but at the time law enforcement becomes involved, it is far too late to care WHY the person became a criminal. And society somehow tiptoes around this distinction and demands law enforcement, when the crime has already happened, to somehow rectify all problem society as a whole couldn't resolve in the last two hundred years.
If there was an excess of labor I'd say a national program to encourage 32 hour work weeks with a livable wage.
Mostly, this shows how utterly terribly useless those sanctions are.
What regimes are mostly sanctioned by the West:
- Iran
- North Korea
- Cuba
- now: Russia
And it has done WHAT to their regimes?
Nothing. Jack Shit. Nada.
All these regimes are still in power, with absolutely no signs of losing power.
Sanctions are crap. They seem to make regimes stronger and belligerent countries more self-reliant and thus being more able to wage war.
Of course I want to scan a trillion items with my smartphone when I purchase groceries for the family. There's nothing else to do with my copious amounts of freetime than to slowly waddle through the dairy aisle and painstakingly scan and check each and every item, cursing twice because I locked the phone out of habit again and the in-store wifi being too slow and 4/5G being shielded by the metal siding of the building as usual.
Really, no problem whatsover with linking my identity, location, device type and purchasing habits to each and every individual carton of milk, or not do it and rolling the dice if it's still fresh tomorrow.
We should use QR codes everywhere, maybe force people to be scanned for their personal ID and digitally proving their identity and listing their entire medical history before entering a building or commencing any activity.
Your nation has a horrible public transport infrastructure. It is not a fault of the country per se, it was deliberately, methodically and exhaustively destroyed by the oil and car industry.
Take for example New York City. This city is of course comparable or superior in population density and wealth to Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, and of course also to Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Brussels. And yet, NYC public transport is so much worse in terms of price, comfort and interconnection of different lines. I have been to all the cities listed and used public transport there extensively, and it was horrible. Taking a bus to a subway station, taking a train there, switching to a different line and taking a bus from there was utterly and truly horrible, I have no other words for that
Every other city of the US I've seen is as bad or worse in terms of public infrastructure EXCEPT Washington DC and San Francisco downtown. DC and SF downtown public transport work exactly like they should, are usable and switching trains and buses is straightforward and effective.
And all other modes of transport are just as bad, even flying. The airports are run-down, the airlines re-schedule their flights willy-nilly, passenger rights are non-existent, so they can easily schedule the flight two hours earlier and shaft you if you can't make it, or schedule it half a day later, forcing you to take an expensive hotel and abadoning the hotel in the destination city you already booked etc.
And don't get me started on American cars and motorcycles. An Internet billionaire who started car manufacturing as a hobby has done a better job than all of the US car companies have in the last 100 years, and the Japanese car manufacturers have ascended from the laughable ToyoPet to being the largest car manufacturer in the world, during several decades when American car firms have invented and developed absolutely nothing new.
Walking at the end or switching buses / trains is only a problem for old people and Americans
Your program is sick! Shoot it and put it out of its memory.
