And yet Trump still managed to demonize him as a Socialist, and therefore probably friendly to Cuba and Venezuela, in Florida, and it may well have been what cost Biden Florida due to the large Cuban American population there.

I really have no idea if the lesson we should draw is "if we pick an actual Socialist the cost would be even higher", or "we're going to be called Socialist by the GOP and lose the anti-Socialist vote regardless, so why not go full Socialist?"

I've actually looked at Factorio a couple times, but they dark brownish color scheme makes me want to claw my eyes out, so i haven't tried it yet.

I know it probably seems like a trivial concern, and i guess it doesn't fit the "theme" they're going for, but most of the time i play games to have fun. I don't need a dingy color scheme depressing me. Is there a minecraft skin or something else similarly colorful that i can install? It'd be an instant purchase if they had that.

Whelp, if you're not willing to listen to common sense, historical record, wikipedia, the CDC, and peer reviewed science, and you just respond to those things with "nuh-uh" instead of any kind of evidence, there's really nothing i can do to help you. Have fun?

"The same strain of flu we call "the spanish flu" would kill you as easily as it did 150 years ago."

You are probably wrong on one point and irrelevant on another point.

First, it's very likely that we have acquired some level of genetic resistance to the original Spanish flu. This is precisely because it killed so many people the first time around, leaving a disproportionate number of people who weren't as susceptible to it to produce the proceeding generations, i.e. us.

Second, although as previously discussed an older strain of a virus does not instantly disappear when a new strain evolves, if the old strain is not as fit it will eventually be out-competed and disappear, and that's exactly what happened with the Spanish flu

There are still many strains of H1N1 around today, but those strains have in fact evolved to be less deadly. The exact strain that caused Spanish flu went "extinct" in the wild. It wasn't until 2005 that scientists were able to reconstruct it in the lab from samples.

So the odds of you _naturally_ dying of the exact strain of the Spanish flu are zero because it's impossible to catch. The odds of you dying of one of the descendants of the Spanish flu that still go around as one of the seasonal flus are much _much_ lower. Less than 0.1% vs something between 4% and 20%. (500 million caught it, between 20 million and 100 million died.)

But if there was a lab accident and someone was infected with the original strain their odds of dying would almost certainly be higher than 0.1%, but statistically they would probably be a little lower than the original 4-20%, because many of the most susceptible people were already removed from the breeding pool 100 years ago. (Obviously we can't speak to the exact odds for any particular individual, it's possible that for any given one person all of their ancestors managed to avoid getting it the first time through sheer luck and they're still carrying a genetic susceptibility to it. But statistically the odds for everyone have improved.)

Dude, relax. You went on an eight paragraph(ish) assumption laden diatribe in response to a simple two sentence statement of fact.

For starters, read up a little on how viruses evolve.

There are "big" changes and "small" changes, and there are multiple ways those changes can occur. (Including, but not limited to, reassortment, which i believe is what you mean by "assemble randomly".) They're all "mutations", because "mutation" just means change. (There is an implication when using the word that they are "natural" changes rather than due to genetic engineering, but i'm not sure if that's a connotation or denotation.)

The H#N# nomenclature just describes the proteins on the outside. It's possible for mutations to occur in the rest of the virus without changing those. For example, there are multiple strains of H1N1. Because the outside as the same proteins it will mostly "look" the same to your body and prompt a similar immune reaction, but if you asked a trained immunologist they would probably say it's more complicated than that.

So A: no one claims the old viruses "go extinct" or "vanish", but B: even though the old strain is still around the H1N1 you catch this year may not be "the same damn virus" as the H1N1 you caught last year. (Or whichever major H#N# strain happens to be making the rounds, H1N1 is just an example.)

Also, technically, the evolution of a virus from one strain (minor or major) to another probably takes less than a second, at the moment the first virus with the new mutation is replicated. So yes, overnight. However how big a change it is and when it occurs is a matter of statistics, it could occur tomorrow, or ten years from now.

In fact given how many viruses of a given strain there are in existence at a given time and how often they replicate there probably are multiple mutations happening every day. However most of those mutations are either detrimental (the new virus either "dies" or fails to replicate) or inconsequential (the new virus fails to outbreed the parent strain and never gains significant numbers.)

Once the new strain exists how long long it takes to spread and become a dominant strain is partly a matter of statistical randomness and partly a matter of how effective it is at spreading compared to the parent strain. So the next strain of the virus that causes Covid might just have mutated while i was writing this post, but it might take weeks or months or more before it spreads enough to be identified and cataloged.

And whether any new strain is more or less deadly than the previous one is pretty much a crap shoot. Being less deadly _tends_ to be favored by natural selection in the long run, but in the short run being more deadly can be advantageous if that change also comes with improvement to infectiousness. In fact if viruses "knew" they should be less deadly and had any choice in the matter there wouldn't ever be pandemics in the first place.

"Why do we have new vaccines every year for 4 or 5 strand of flu? Oh: because flu did not know it should have "evolved" into "non deadly" a millenia ago"

The fact that you can get the flu multiple times over multiple years without dying in the process is pretty good proof that it has (in general) become more "non deadly" than it has been at other points in history. (Partly due to better medical treatments and humans developing antibodies, but partly also the virus adapting to us.)

I agree with that idea in theory, with a couple caveats.

In particular, procedural shows really benefit from "filler" episodes, because that's really what the show is. You want to watch them solve the crime/mystery of the week with some light banter and _maybe_ one important new character or plot element revealed. It's certainly fine if there's an overarching plot, but focusing too much on it can actually be a detriment. Castle was a much better show before they decided to try shoehorning more plot into it in later seasons.

Lucifer is an interesting case where we do care a lot about the overall plot, but it was the "filler" episodes where we learned a lot more about the characters. The first season after it moved to Netflix was just 10 episodes and felt _very_ rushed. The plot part was fine, but it felt like we never really got time to enjoy the characters because they were too busy rushing from one plot point to the next.

I first heard this song in college a couple decades ago in Algorithms class.

Mathematically the "longest path" problem is functionally equivalent to the "traveling salesman" problem. (Technically i believe that one is a special case of the other?) The phrase "longest path" was presumably just easier to use for a parody.

So your response to actual studies saying that masks work is to link to a purported study that you say claims that masks don't work but which can't be verified because it's been withdrawn? And on top of that it was specifically aimed at dental professionals and not the general public? I can think of a lot of reasons why masks might not be as effective for dental professionals but which might not apply to other people.

Scientists aren't big on withdrawing studies because it hurts people's "feelz". Otherwise there wouldn't be any studies still available about climate change because people are always getting their feelings hurt one way or the other.

So find another one of the "many studies" that's still available or shut up and take it like a man.

Masks have a function that is both easily understood intuitively and has evidence backing up their use, both in laboratory tests and in real world scenarios. And yet a large number of people refuse to follow the perfectly sensible recommendation of wearing them.

Why do you think "the population" would follow your (literally and figuratively) shitty idea, even if there was someone in the government dumb enough to recommend it?

So if a wrong answer subtracts one point but a correct answer can award a variable number of points, isn't remembering the answers that give the largest gain more important than remembering the ones that give a small gain or a negative point? The net consequence of choosing wrong between a 10 and a 1 are much larger than choosing wrong between 1 and -1.

And how is learning to play the game well a "confirmation bias"? And how are they getting confirmation bias from a negative outcome that proves they're right? I'm very confused.

Well _eventually_ he'll be right!

While we're at it, i can predict with 100% confidence that some day in the future no one will die of Covid.

I can also predict with 100% confidence that some day in the future no one will die period. And also that on some other day in the future everyone will die.

If we're very lucky the all-deaths day will come very far in the future after a large number of no-deaths day before it. But unfortunately that's not the way i'd want to bet.

Or you just join them preemptively.

Miracle Max: Move out, or I'll call the Eviction Squad!

Fezzik: I'm on the Eviction Squad.

Miracle Max, looking up: You _are_ the Eviction Squad!

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Because duh!

The (unlinked) article seems to be about how the fires can affect the appearance of the sky without affecting air quality at ground level, but that's only slightly less of a "duh!"

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As a follow-up to my previous response, we just finished watching it and we thought it was great. The overall plot was pretty similar of course (just like most adaptations a fairy tale are similar to each other) but they changed it enough to make it seem interesting and fresh. In particular the addition of wushu style fight scenes was a great addition. I'll continue to enjoy the original for the (more blatant) humor and music, but i feel like both films justify their existence and neither invalidates the other.

(Still glad the comic relief dragon isn't in it.)

I have not read any reviews yet, but the trailers made me very tentatively interested in the movie, which is the first time that's happened for me with one of the live-action Disney movies. All the previous movies were clearly just sub-par redos of the animated originals, but it seemed like with Mulan that they might actually be trying to tell a slightly different story rather than (badly) copy-pasting the original. (Though it certainly doesn't hurt that the dragon was my least favorite part of the original.)