So what is your proposal? Death panels?

Yes.

For corporations.

I want to see the poll numbers how they feel about preachers being involved in policy decisions.

I have a sneaking suspicion that you really would sleep better if you didn't see those poll numbers.

It was an old refrigerator with a worn out motor.

Where I work, every year when they turned the A/C on, the bit error rate on one of the satellite downlinks would blow up about three orders of magnitude. The fix was to change out the brushes on the compressor motors on the roof.

That 1% appears to be roughly one million fewer workers.

Given the age group there's probably overlap/double-counting of retirees and people out of work due to long Covid (AKA medical retirements), but it's still not numbers that can be ignored.

The other factor is there's been a huge wave of retirements over the last couple of years.

It does seem odd that China was the source for another virus from animals.

A billion people in dense cities alongside huge areas of sparsely populated wildlands keep finding weird viruses?

I'd find it odd and worrying if they weren't finding viruses and trying to keep tabs on them.

What should be keeping you up at night is the pandemic that'll originate in India.

I got the feeling he doesn't know what a tick looks like

Or you just don't spend as much time where the ticks live.

I'm in a tick-prone area. I don't have to worry about them in more open, maintained areas where the grass is cut regularly. But I have one overgrown part of my property where I'm practically guaranteed to pick up ticks if I spend any time there while the ground isn't frozen.

Polio isn't back because of climate change

Not directly, but one could argue that the anti-science propaganda of climate change deniers has inadvertently given the antivax nuts a signal boost. And vice-versa, judging by how much anti-EV propaganda I've seen recently from the Qanon nuts I keep tabs on.

That said, should I really object when someone does what I think is the right thing for a terrible reason?

My understanding is that it's common for the courts to consider legislative intent when interpreting laws; if the stated legislative intent behind a bill is blatantly unconstitutional then it makes for a weaker law than a law passed for the right reasons.

So yes, you really should object if you want the right thing to stand up to challenges.

How does it screw up the brain?

There's a lot of evidence that Covid isn't really a respiratory disease, but that it's a vascular disease. Covid can do damage anywhere there's blood. It tends to start in the lungs because that's where it enters the body, but it's not restricted to the lungs.

this may be some sort of low cost design

A more interesting speculation is that it was a high cost design, which Russia paid high cost milspec money for, but actually received low cost out-of-spec junk and a nice yacht.

Where I live, they forced commercial trucks to be limited to 105km/h on the main highways. That knocked down average highways speeds by at least 20km/h practically overnight. The posted limit didn't change from 100km/h, but it's really the commercial truck speeds that set the overall pace. Most people seem okay with slowing down when they don't have to constantly deal with big rigs riding their ass.

The process also takes about 10 minutes, which seems like it might be something industrial pizza manufacturers would be interested in compared to yeast rise times.

Chinese state-flagged carriers will move it for sure.

Oh, absolutely. But China has a huge appetite for oil, and getting as much Russian oil as possible at a discount seems more their style without wasting carrier capacity trying to sell it on to other places.

It still needs to be moved, and carriers aren't keen to load Russian oil right now.