Bluntly: If having and recovering from COVID-19 does not confer immunity, we would be hearing New York City and New York State screaming bloody murder about reinfection, as they have some of the highest infection rates in the country, and one of the highest deaths per confirmed cases rates in the WORLD.

We are not hearing them scream.

Furthermore, bluntly: If having and recovering from COVID-19 does not confer immunity, then the COVID-19 vaccines are worthless.

The vaccines work exactly the same way as having the disease and recovering works: they stimulate an immune response, which tells the body that "This stuff is BAD!!!! Kill it if you see it again!!!". For the vaccine to grant any level of immunity, it must also be the case that actually having HAD the disease ALSO confers some level of immunity.

The People's Republic of China published a serious study recently that showed that transmission of COVID-19 by asymptomatic patients just did not happen. Period. (Whether you choose to believe the PRC on anything is up to you, but, taken at face value, the study appears to have been very well-constructed and well-executed.)

This study means that someone has to get sick enough to be symptomatic in order to be a significant transmission risk. The vaccines are specifically intended to keep someone from getting that sick.

If this were true, New York City and New York State, homes of the WORST COVID-19 statistics in the country (death rate close to 4% of confirmed cases, TWICE what every other place has) would have been screaming their heads off for at least four months now, about how reinfection was killing them.

They haven't been.

They've been SILENT on reinfection.

Conclusion: Reinfection may be happening, but it is EXTREMELY rare.

Assuming, hypothetically, that the Republicans were to manage the hat trick, take the House, Senate, and Oval Office, and enact term limits into law, what stops the Democrats from repealing them the moment they get back into power?

Various States have tried to impose term limits on their Congresscritters. Those efforts were overturned by the US Supreme Court as unconstitutional, because the Constitution is interpreted as not allowing States to impose additional requirements on candidates for Congress, beyond those in the Constitution.

Summary: To be effective, imposition of Congressional term limits would require a Constitutional Amendment. That's pretty hard to do, for very good reason.

It doesn't do much good to post as "Anonymous Coward" if your name and affiliation is in your .sig for everyone to read, Google, and confirm.

It is a pretty standard procedure these days.

You hospitalize the patient. You give him a very small dose of the allergen, in this case penicillin. You let him survive that. You do it again, increasing the dose. Wash, rinse, repeat, each time increasing the dose. The idea is that each small dose is, by itself, not enough to trigger an allergic reaction, but it does reduce the patient's sensitivity to the allergen, allowing the next dose to be larger.

Done CAREFULLY, the patient is worked up to the point where the full therapeutic dose can be given without significant risk of an adverse reaction.

It is risky, which is why it is done in a hospital (inpatient): if the patient does have an adverse reaction, the hospital can crank up QUICKLY to treat it.

Because it is an inpatient procedure, it is EXPENSIVE, which is why it is not done for all allergies.

Interestingly enough, the bacterium that causes syphilis is one of the relatively few beasties that does NOT develop antibiotic resistance. Penicillin is still effective against it, and it is so much better than anything else that the official recommendation for patients who are allergic to penicillin is inpatient ultra-rapid allergic desensitization followed by the standard therapeutic penicillin dose.

Actually not quite correct.

The cannons used in the early days of the American Revolution were privately-owned.

The armed ships that sailed under letters of marque and reprisal, before the new nation could build its own warships, were privately owned.

And, if you're going to try to make that argument, you might want to think about what it does to freedom of speech or of the press on the Internet, the Internet did not exist in the late 18th Century, either.

If you can collect sufficient energy on your spacecraft to reform the CO2 and water to CH4 and O2, you can just as easily use that energy to heat the CO2 and use it directly as reaction mass for your engines, and you'll probably get better net efficiency.

Jerry Pournelle once described a proposed jet airplane, that didn't use fuel in flight. Instead, it was painted by an orbital laser. Air was sucked in by the compressor, heated by the laser, and exhausted through the turbine. This wasn't his idea, it was something proposed by a company looking at exotic laser applications in the 1960s or early 1970s.

Reversing the CO2 production process, to recover the oxygen, is by definition not easy. C + O2 -> CO2 + energy is exothermic, highly so, meaning that the reverse reaction will be endothermic, expensively so.

Scrubbing exhaled carbon dioxide is easy, and has been done for a long time.

Henri Fleuss patented his oxygen lung in 1878, which included a CO2 scrubber. It was first used operationally in 1880. (One of the first users, on a commercial dive to some 80 feet, far too deep to be using pure oxygen, got the first recorded CNS oxygen toxicity hit. He not only lived, but he went back down THE NEXT DAY, in conventional hardhat dress, to finish the job.) Submarines have been doing this for decades, at the very least. (World War II was arguably the heyday of submarine warfare.)

Jacque-Yves Cousteau, who with Emile Gagnon first developed practical open-circuit SCUBA, was an oxygen rebreather diver.

Note: Cousteau and Gagnon did not get there first. Rouquayrol and Denayrouze got there first, in 1864. The limitations of metallurgy at the time meant that their system could only hold enough air for a few minutes at depth: it was not possible at that time to make a small, light tank that could hold the necessary pressures.

"Whether it's economically viable is another question."

That is probably one of the bigger understatements of the 21st century.

Their fundamental reaction is CO2 + 2 H2O + ENERGY!!! -> CH4 + 2 O2. You will later attempt to recover some of the ENERGY!!! by running CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O + energy. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics (Respectively: "You can't get something for nothing", and "You can't even break even") make it quite clear that this is a losing proposition.

Carbon dioxide is very, very stable. So is water. That means that splitting the water to make hydrogen, to reform the CO2 into methane, is going to be EXPENSIVE, and splitting the CO2 will also be EXPENSIVE.

Plant trees. Plant corn. Plant ANYTHING. Let Mother Nature run photosynthesis. She knows a lot more about how to do this than we do.

Dude.

The virus is out there.

It has been out there for months.

Anyone can get it.

The fact that Trump got it doesn't mean much either way. New York City was somewhat nonplussed a while back when they figured out that all of their new cases were people who HAD been isolating, who HAD been wearing masks, who HAD been social distancing - and they still got it.

> Why don't those states allocate their electors today based on their states popular vote?

They do. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact requires the states to bind their electors according to the NATIONAL popular vote result.

In other words, unless you lived in New York, California, or Chicago, your vote would NOT count under the Compact.

Jerry Pournelle wrote it up in "A Step Farther Out", his column in "Galaxy" at the time. It was later collected in the book by the same title. Dr. Robert Forward called Jerry and asked him if he'd like to attend a lecture by Dr. Hawking. Jerry reports not having to check his calendar before saying "yes", as nothing on his schedule was remotely as important. (In about 1995, I had exactly the same reaction when a co-worker asked me a similar question. Dr. Hawking was speaking at SMU.)

The key concepts are, first, that the region of space-time inside the black hole is 100% unobservable, and second, the exact position of the event horizon is not fixed.
  It can move, and something that was inside can suddenly be outside. With the proper velocity vector, it may not be recaptured. There is no way to know what is in there, meaning there's no way to know what might come out.

Hawking later showed that the event horizon can jump a long distance, meaning that something can pop out at quite a distance. This later work, I don't recall where I saw it. It was some years ago, very shortly before Hawking's death, and Jerry passed away a few years back.

Stephen Hawking's work on black holes essentially said that a black hole could emit ANYTHING.

The last work he did before his untimely passing was to show that it could emit anything at any distance from the center of mass of the hole.

Jerry Pournelle wrote it up. In private correspondence, I commented to Jerry that the work had the unmistakeable aroma of an indirect proof: Somewhere, we had a wrong assumption. Jerry told me he didn't disagree with me.

This seems to be more of the same. Something is fundamentally wrong, or incomplete, in our theoretical basis, and it is screaming at us "Wake up! Wake up!"

Kemeny and Kurtz designed BASIC for exactly that purpose. It worked, quite well.

Wirth designed PASCAL for almost exactly that purpose. It worked, quite well. A *LOT* of people looked HARD at it, and noticed that the students who started in PASCAL came out a lot better than the ones who started in FORTRAN. (It is significant to note that, when the US Department of Defense put out the requests for a common language for defense embedded systems, all four of the contractor proposals used PASCAL as their starting point. When DoD contacted Bell Labs, asking Bell Labs to propose a language based on C, Bell Labs demurred, saying that C was not then and would not ever become robust or reliable enough for DoD embedded systems work.)

Abelson & Sussman chose LISP for their start-from-nothing book, precisely because LISP had almost no syntax. They chose the Scheme dialect, because it designed out some of the more "interesting" kludges in earlier dialects of LISP. I will grant that "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is not the easiest book in the world to read all the way through, and it almost requires a really good instructor to go with it, but the early stuff is very simple and very understandable.

Perhaps the right answer is, before we propose Yet Another new programming language, we spend some time looking at what has already been done.