The obvious solution is to require that airplane seats "recline" by tilting the seat and keeping the back fixed. Solves complaints between customers and make air travel just a little bit worse, so it's totally a win-win for the airlines.

Now you're sounding like those who claim covid is not that serious and is just a mild flu.

I saw a post the other day claiming exactly that, backed up with stats from... March 2020.

Idiots. Just... fucking idiots.

It's like seeing a murder victim killed with a 9mm bullet and blaming the guy nearest the crime scene who owns a 9mm.

Not even that. It's like blaming the first cop with a 9mm who shows up to investigate the murder.

It's a lab that studies coronaviruses. Odds are pretty damn high that it had a sample of the virus or a very close relative. But where did they get that? It would have already been in the wild, unless they were so mind-numbingly stupid to have been actively breeding mutations. In fact, I'd hope that they'd have spotted at least a few variants of this fucker while it was percolating through their population at a low level, because that means they were doing their job. It's not impossible that it might have leaked, but it's practically impossible that it wasn't already out in the wild.

TL;DR the entire question of lab leak versus in the wild is really a "why not both?" situation.

You should cough into your elbow instead of your hand during flu season.

Flu season is all assholes and elbows.

Sure, but you get really strange looks from people if you cough into your asshole.

As a Linux user, I got vaccinated just to get the hardware installed.

Ditto, but since then I've been having extremely vibrant dreams where install Windows on every computer I own.

Imagine living in a state so petty, so controlling, like NY or CA.

You think it's an accident that states which are home to some of the most well-known financially sleazy industries might be extra vigilant about people pulling sneaky accounting tricks?

He can't put campaign dollars in his pocket legally, I think he knows that.

There's little evidence that we're talking about someone who gives a shit whether what he wants to do is legal. The only deciding factor appears to be whether he can get someone else to do the dirty work for him.

Equating the Holocaust with a widespread refusal to be associated with utter nonsense is not proving your point.

At this point, it's just piling on.

Self-preservation. No social media platform wants to be known as "Trump friendly" right now; while carrying Trump content would bring a lot of fresh eyeballs, it would also bring the "we need to hang those treasonous Dems (and Jews... and blacks... and Pence) and take back our country from the pedofiles! Lock and load!" lunatics. Just a few screenshots of those sorts of posts next to *cola brand* or *car model* advertisements would be toxic to the bottom line.

the right wingnuts will _never_ believe he died due to an attack by them

Nobody cares what the wingnuts believe anymore.

What matters is law enforcement believes these wingnuts are willing and able to kill cops when they go on a rampage.

And while income has stopped, government taxes and loan payments have not.

It's a very rare business that doesn't have expenses even when closed. Rent, electricity, heat, maintenance, financing, spoilage, etc. I'm sure most of them have done the math and took the approach that loses money as slowly as possible.

Theater attendance was already declining before Covid

Oh, definitely. I said "operate regularly again", not "operate indefinitely again". Like many other industries (*cough* hey there, television *cough*), the normal state would still be a slow death spiral of dropping demand, increasing prices, and shittier service until something eventually gives out. But I don't think even the most curmudgeonly of industry critics was expecting things to go down quite like this.

There is no logical reason to close the theaters.

Sure there is. The theatres aren't bringing in enough money to keep operating. If you have a business, that's about as logical as it gets.

As for why people aren't going to theatres, well, because. People are scared, obviously. People may be broke, too. People are discovering that they really can live through the Internet. People don't trust experts/polticians/society and are taking their safety into their own hands. Whatever. It doesn't matter anymore. Enough people have indefinitely bowed out of aspects of the economy that businesses structured around a certain amount of asses in seats are fucked, and no amount of talking about the problem is going to change that at this point.

Bottom line, if anyone wants theatres to operate regularly again, then the numbers of active Covid infections needs to fall and stay down, and that needs to happen because less people are getting it rather than someone just fucking with the numbers. Whether that's going to happen quickly enough to save those industries is the only open question, but it's not looking promising.

Well, the guys in the red shirts don't get names...

They call it "music", so I'd say they're already quite confused.