I have to travel a lot for work and have noticed a trend: when a company nouns an adjective in their name, it's usually because that's the only way that anyone would ever associate that adjective with that company. I think that most likely applies here.

I've found the modern Windows file management to be very user friendly; I can get way more done on my computer in far less time due to its powerful tools, and it doesn't even need a mouse! I honestly don't think that there's much more to improve for PowerShell. I don't know what kind of Highlander 2 interface you guys are all talking about!

Be careful about convincing yourself that you are able to easily detect misinformation, as that'll build a blind-spot that someone's gonna eventually exploit.

Propaganda or not, that quote from the expert in the Reuters article that you linked sounds 100% legit to me:

"The power cut could lead to water in the storage facility evaporating and exposure of spent fuel rods. They could eventually melt and that could lead to significant radiation releases."

I'm sure that most of the people around here recognize engineer speak when they see it; there are no unqualified predictions about the future. We all talk in terms of how an outage could occur or a patch should install without issues or how there are no known risks to performing a given operation. And if your bosses have been anything like mine, they hate it!

My gut response is the agree with you, but because so much of the faux-news alt-right misinformation machine functions by telling people things that feel right without ever supporting the claims, I've got to ask: do you have any data to support that conclusion?

I mean, if you want to know who the perps are, you could always RTFA... but here, let me help: "In October 2020, the Department of Justice charged four suspected racially-motivated domestic violent extremists who "believed in the superiority of the white race and discussed accelerationist objectives" with conspiracy to damage transformers in Idaho and surrounding states."

That doesn't mean that all such DVEs are white supremacists, but it certainly sounds like at least one group has probably complained about "those people" in the past.

Sure, the vaccinated people are fine right now and even look like they're doing better than the unvaccinated, but what you don't realize is that 99.9% of those vaccinated people are going to be dead in less than 100 years. Can you think of anything else that has such a high mortality rate, yet the government is forcing it on us!?

/sarcasm

For some definitions of "open".

Would you bear no responsibility for the chaos that ensues after you shout "fire!" in a crowded theater?

I don't know what you have said, but I do know that the people who spread misinformation share in the responsibility when other people make poor decisions because of that misinformation.

What are the odds of children suffering from a covid infection vs. the odds of them suffering from a vaccine? When my son got the chickenpox vaccine, it wasn't because we were worried about him dying from the disease, it was because we didn't want him to go through that unpleasant experience and had an easy way to prevent it. So, that goes back to my initial question: what are the odds of a negative outcome from the vaccine vs. those of the disease?

I think that you'll find that you're effectively in the Trolley Problem. Inaction leaves an unvaccinated child more likely to experience more severe health issues. Taking the action of vaccinating them means that they are less likely to experience health issues, but those health issues are the direct result of your action. It's emotionally easier to accept the risk of inaction, as that gives you some (flimsy) insulation from a poor outcome.

This situation also presents a twisted bit of game theory. If you know that everyone around your child is vaccinated/immune, then the risk of them contracting covid drops, eventually to the point where the vaccine's risks are greater than covid's risks (because the child is so unlikely to contract covid if herd immunity is achieved). In that situation, it would certainly make sense to avoid the vaccine. We haven't achieved herd immunity (and maybe never will) and our schools' safety protocols are insufficient to convince me that my kids won't be exposed to covid while they're at school, so I need to operate on the assumption that my kids will be exposed to covid at some point. Given that, I think that the relative risks that the vaccine presents are more manageable than the relative risks that the disease presents, and so my older son is already vaccinated and my younger son will be after approval is granted for his age group.

When comparing relative risks, make sure that you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to look at the risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis (which is a condition that people almost always recover from in a few days, especially if there's medical intervention), ensure that you don't compare it to the risk of death from covid (which, last time I checked, has a very poor recovery rate). Also worth noting, according to NYT, myocarditis is even more common amongst covid patients than it is amongst vaccine recipients. One last thing: those silly legislations only go into effect after the vaccines have been fully approved for a given age group.

This whole situation just makes me think, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

Your post is full of excellent points and is well articulated. I just want to add a bit more content to one detail that you touched upon in the natural immunity vs. vaccine-induced immunity discussion. If people decide to believe the most alarming studies and feel that vaccine-induced immunity is inferior to natural immunity, what would that actually mean? It would mean that vaccinated people will still get sick and will only have a minor "head start" on their immune response from the vaccine... which means that they'd develop the supposedly superior natural immunity but with a reduced risk of severe sickness during that process. Even the "natural immunity supremacist" position is still an argument in favor of getting the vaccine, if they would take the time to consider the actual implications of the studies that they claim to believe.

They may not have reinvented anything, but this technology sure is revolutionary!

...I'll just see myself out...

We absolutely do need to remember what ivermectin is good for! It's a neurotoxin that's good for killing parasites when taken in extremely precisely controlled doses (so as to not significantly harm the person who is taking it). Do you know what it's not good for? Antiviral uses.