Imagine if Elon Musk stuck to rockets, electric cars and storage for renewable energy.

The elephant's foot would look great carved into the shape of a throne for Putin to rule from.

If the amount a business can save with those deductions is as much as the employee would be paying in taxes then the government wouldn't be keeping anything. That wouldn't make any sense.

So there should be some under-the-table pay rate where the business is paying less than they would over the table, the employee is keeping more than they would if they payed taxes and the government is the loser.

I'm not saying that is or is not what was going on. Only that it should be possible.

Ever since reading the Otherland series a lot of years ago I've hoped that someday a VR Internet similar to it (minus the death and torture) would exist some day.

But then came social media, the events of 2020 and all the disinformation warriors. And this 'verse is owned by Facebook. I kind of feel like plugging into that would be like sitting calm and still while my worst enemy performs brain surgery on me. No thanks!

I'd rather not entirely forget the idea though. Just wait for another implementation.

I use an environment with keyboard, mouse AND a touch screen far more than I use one with touch alone. All those interfaces that change TOO much for touch just feel handicapped to me.

It's been a long time since I tried KDE. Maybe I would like it again?

Sorry about your ex.

I really don't think it was ever a good idea to build a nuclear power plant in an area that is known to be prone to earthquakes and/or tsunami. But that's not a nuclear problem. I wouldn't put an oil refinery, a chemical plant, a landfill or anything else that contains a lot of potential harmful pollutants in such a place.

Likewise I wouldn't judge the overall safety or usefulness of nuclear power plants based on what happened at Fukushima. There's plenty of land available where such things don't happen.

Similarly, if you read about all the decisions that lead up to Chernobyl.. there's a management culture that should NOT be allowed to exist in a sensitive area such as power production. Avoid that and you should be ok. That's a much better lesson to come away with then just going full anti-nuke.

Your mistake is to equate claims with evidence. Listening to every crazy, half-baked self-serving claim and pretending it should get equal consideration with what is already known is not a good way to do science. If they do have evidence they will present it and the conversation will change.

Computer Science alumni here, that STEM enough for you?

I still remember getting to Heuristic Programming class. One of the topics was neural networks. That was exciting to me. How to write a program that can learn! I was eager to get into it and neural nets are still relevant to the cutting edge today.

Unfortunately understanding how results feed back in a neural network and thus how to make a neural network learn required things that are taught in Calc 3. This was not listed as a requirement for the course and only up through Calc 2 was required for the degree. I had other difficult classes that semester and neither the time nor energy to teach myself Calc 3.

I always meant to get back to that but 20 years later I still haven't.

And these people want to dumb it down all the way to no calc at all?!?! There will be no future tech progress with this sort in charge!

Do the terms of your loan differ from those on the paper you signed? Did you understand what you were signing? If not did you know that you didn't understand it at the time?

I only had a small loan which I payed off in a few years after graduating. It was the kind of thing that as an adult with employment history I could easily walk in to a bank and walk right out with that same amount of money in 20 minutes.

Sure, privileged, I know. But here's the point.

To get that even that small, no-big-deal loan I had to talk to a counselor who repeatedly explained that I would not get out of repaying it.

Then I was given access to books with job and earning projections for various degrees, cost of living projections and calculators to show me what it would be like living in the future with the wages I would likely earn and the loan payments I would be making. There were graphs showing how long it would take to repay it and how much interest I would be paying at various rates, starting at paying just the minimums up to paying it off in one lump sum.

I was told to take my time, look at all this stuff, take some home and bring it back if I needed to.

Then I had to watch a movie in a little room with a bunch of other applicants where they repeated all the same stuff and told us about how our parents generation could default on student loans, many did, lenders stopped giving them, loans became scarce. And the main point.. laws changed and we would NOT be getting out of them.

All that was for a tiny little loan that I could charge on a credit card if I wanted to today.

So what did you and all these other people do? Walk into Crazy Joes Used Cars and Discount Education Emporium and say "I want me an edjumacasheeyun, where do I sign"? Did you not do the math at all? Did you not think about the future? Did you look at earning projections for your chosen degrees? WTF?

How? Executive action? That's not getting through congress! Did you think the office of president was the same as dictator?

The anti-vaxers likely look at numbers like those and only apply it to themselves thinking a 146 / 100,000 chance of contracting myocarditis isn't so bad and so dropping that down to 1 isn't worth giving up their anti-vax right-wing identity.

Let's try this from a couple different perspectives.
There are roughly 380 million people in the US (those are typically the only people in the world that matter to these types).

That's about 555,000 americans contracting myocarditis if there was no vaccine. Or it's "only" 3,800 contracting it if everyone was vaccinated.

Here's a way to look at it that is even more applicable to these people. Let's say that 100% of all americans voted in the last election. And lets say that the percentages still worked out exactly the same, and also that vaccinated vs unvaccinated perfectly followed the election. Biden voters are vaccinated, Trump voters are not.

Obviously this is not accurate because many Trump voters are vaccinated either by will or because it was required of them. Also it assumes non-voters belong in the two camps by the same percentages. But this might be interesting just for comparing what exactly these two sides following their own beliefs might get us.

With 51.3% of the 380,000,000 americans voting for Biden and 46.8% for Trump that would result in:
250,000 Trump voters with myocarditis
2,000 Biden voters with mycarditis

And if one is cracked enough to believe any of that stop the steal garbage that would only make more sick Trumpers and fewer sick on the other side.

Worth noting of course is that this is only looking at one possible symptom, myocarditis. Any other Covid or vaccine side-effect symptom is not included but since that is the only one which has really ever been seen with the vaccine including them just makes the anti-vaxer position a whole lot worse.

Conclusion...

FUCK THE ANTIVAXERS (Just not literally, we don't need more)

From what I've seen in videos of his own admission you would do better with pictures of Ivanka Trump. Donald himself would follow you!

Huh. So Bitcoin really is a real currency just like fiat then.

It might be the pill causing the decreased risk of Alzheimer. Perhaps due to a blood flow thing.

My money is on it being the sex though.

That doesn't make any sense.

Even your statement was true (it's not) " For the naturally immune they're better equipped than the vaccinated according to all scientific reports." The rest of what you wrote makes no sense.

First of all, why only two camps? Do you think that once a person is vaccinated it is now impossible for them to develop "natural" immunity on top of what they received from the vaccine? Or that getting vaccinated after recovering from infection can't help on top of that "natural immunity"?

There are many "camps".
Not counting the currently sick and/or dead there are:

• Unvaccinated morons who were lucky to never be exposed.
• Unvaccinated morons who caught the virus and recovered
• Vaccinated people who did not catch the virus
• Vaccinated people who caught the virus and recovered before they were vaccinated
• Vaccinated people who caught the virus and recovered after vaccination

First, you don't get to be in any of the "naturally immune" camps without at some point catching the virus. When you do it may be mild, or it might not. It might be really bad. There are no guarantees but study after study shows that it is far more likely to be mild if you are already vaccinated.

Second, all the reputable reports show that vaccination provides better and longer lasting protection than recovering from the real thing. Yes, there are some loud voices out there shouting the opposite but if you track them to their sources they are just taking statistics showing greater numbers of vaccinated people getting sick in parts of the world where the vaccination rate is so high that statistically there almost HAS to be more vaccinated people getting sick. (like Israel). When you adjust for the vaccination rate suddenly it looks just like everywhere else with the unvaccinated getting sicker and at a much greater rate.

The two "immunities" can be additive. Studies have shown that people who caught the virus before they were vaccinated, recovered and then were vaccinated have higher levels of antibodies and greater resistance to the disease than either of the just vaccinated or had it and recovered but unvaccinated camps.

I haven't read anything about people who had both but in the opposite order yet. I would suggest this however. A vaccinated person who still catches the virus might just be unlucky. For some fraction of the group this is most likely true. But it could also indicate a below-average immune system. The vaccinated yet sick group is going to include a disproportionate number of people with poor immune systems. Thus, even if they tend to go on and catch the virus a second, third or more times this doesn't necessarily mean that the vaccine prevented their bodies from developing so called "natural immunity". It might just be their bodies are particularly susceptible to COVID compared to others. Already it has been shown that certain genes correlate with higher infection rates.