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Comment Re: Umm... (Score 1) 63

That's like having your car's engine stall, and when you tried to start it again, it doesn't. So you decided to try changing a tire to see if that would fix it. You then get in your car, and the engine starts. Success! Changing the tire fixed it! See, there's evidence that changing a tire fixes engine problems!

Well no, it didn't do anything. The tire isn't even relevant.

Antivirals, which are all targeted to a specific type of virus, act by interfering with normal cell functions that the particular virus needs to reproduce. Ivermectin is toxic to nematodes while not being toxic to you. Your body mostly doesn't metabolize it, definitely not enough to do anything meaningful, rather it basically just passes right through. It works by making its way into your intestines where the butt worms live.

When you take that crap, it doesn't do anything to a virus. It's not even relevant. Instead, what happens after you take that shit was already going to happen anyways.

Comment Re:Seems like this mostly hurts rural/minority are (Score 0, Flamebait) 156

Instead, NPR (as with nearly all news coverage) acted (and largely still acts) as though it has an obligation to present some imaginary median point between the Democratic Party (who would be moderate right in many times and places) and whatever destructive madness the GOP pretends to care about this week.

NPR does not have any sort of obligation to create a false middle. If that's what it's doing, then it's not doing what the press is supposed to do. And you know what? People realize that. One of the reasons reporters without borders puts the US as low as it does on the WPF index is specifically because we don't blindly trust the media.

https://www.pewresearch.org/sh...

And whose fault is that? NPR is part of the problem.

Comment Re:Seems like this mostly hurts rural/minority are (Score 4, Informative) 156

calling npr leftist is wild

but then again thats the intention isn't it, slander anything center/moderate/liberal as far left propaganda to legitimize your own right wing propaganda, only they have the truth

Not in the slightest. I don't know about leftist (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean) but there is an undeniable and blatant selection bias, both in terms of reporting and NOT reporting, towards whatever narrative the Democratic Party wants.

This piece is written by a 25 year veteran NPR editor (who still works there, by the way.)

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-ed...

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.

There's more in there (a lot more) but you get the idea. I honestly couldn't care less if you want to deny it, downmod me, etc. Everything he's saying here is verifiable. The truth is there for you to see it, whether you want to or not.

Comment Re:Impressive (Score 1) 175

And it does it using two very easy to acquire and hard to game measurements. That's many things, but "total nonsense" isn't one of them.

Under the WHO, Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered obese while he was in his prime.

I mean if you're going to use stupid units, lean in and do it properly. I'm not really sure why you think this is an argument in favour.

It's not supposed to be. See the very last sentence of my post. And there's a reason you guys don't change it: Cost. Namely: You go through all the effort to do that so that you don't have to pull out a calculator while driving or something? Oh wait, no, that's not the reason, you want to spend money because it makes you feel better.

For the United States, Metric formally began with the Metric Act of 1866, which is actually an entire century before your country even did it. However, the US government doesn't have the constitutional authority to make it mandatory except on measurements used in interstate trade, which it already does. However, unlike Europe, it has no authority at all to ban its use. Manufacturers can and do print both units on their labels. For everything else, all it can do is make it a preferred system, which it already did with the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.

And to restate: None of this is an argument against metric, rather I'm telling you why things are the way they are. And again, arguing about it is pointless.

I've never seen anyone making a 2nm chip in imperial.

If you want to go this route: Nobody has. You're thinking of lithography, where that number is the distance between individual components on the substrate. Besides, the point of that comment is that the measurements you use aren't some kind of indicator of intelligence or capability, like many Europeans like to reassure themselves it is as they watch themselves fall further and further behind the US: "Oh yeah, well we use metric and not stoopid customary units!"...umm...ok, whatever helps you sleep at night.

That's why Boeing is doing so well right now!

Airliners aren't really advanced in anything. Unless you count Boom Supersonic, which I think that, yes, breaking the sound barrier without emitting a sonic boom is pretty impressive. Everything else on the high end is all military and rocketry.

Comment Re:Something not right (Score 3, Informative) 63

Fungal spores are generally resistant to typical cleaning solutions that have alcohol and/or chlorine. This one in particular seems to have a list of ones known to work:

https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-...

But what about the bedsheets and the chair cushions in the waiting room? Hmm....

Comment Re:Impressive (Score 1) 175

Unless you just happen to know what size of AC you need for any given size of home, the unit conversions don't really mean anything. I happen to know this because I have a home roughly this size, and I know how much my AC uses. The amount can vary, (I actually have it measured in real-time) but it's typically around 2.5kw. However, my house is also in Phoenix where we tend to use more powerful AC units, but on the other hand mine also happens to be a relatively energy efficient split SEER 16 unit. I don't know why GP assumed 1kw, unless he lives in a trailer or something, but I think it's safe to assume 2kw for most purposes.

It's still very much napkin math, just like the WHOs standard for what healthy BMI should be (25 for both male and female, which that alone is, medically speaking, total nonsense) as opposed to the American NHANES standard, which is both more precise and meaningful. Metric itself is designed around napkin math -- it no longer even uses the original measurement based on the North Pole to the equator going through Paris, which never was constant, now it's based on plank units traveled at light speed over some number of intervals of cesium (just because) transitions, which itself is kind of weird on account of relativity, using arbitrary numbers intended to keep the napkin math intact. Other measures, like lumens, metric still measures in terms of...candles. In other words, it's still based on artifacts.

Besides, in your country, weights are usually measured in stones, and speed measured in miles per hour. If you go back and watch all 6 moon landings, you'll notice that all communication was done using imperial units. I've never seen anybody do a moon landing in metric. To this day, aeronautical engineering is still done using imperial units, and the United States has the most advanced avionics in the world. Regardless of what system you use for that, if you're relying on napkin math, then you're bound for disappointment.

I don't know why people argue over this.

Comment Re: Bad news for grifters and the UN (Score 1) 126

The republicans have long time ago redefined socialism as being any law limiting profit.

Firstly, why are you even asking them to begin with?
Secondly, people who claim to hate the American Republican Party while at the same time talking about how badly they want socialism themselves usually don't even understand what socialism is. Amimoji is one of those I've had to correct on this, and he lives in the UK, where the American Republican Party isn't even relevant. He even told me about how his political party (he didn't specify which) calls itself socialist, and how his country calls itself socialist (it doesn't, it never did.) I eventually had to show him a dictionary entry of the word, where all three definitions did not mean anything close to what he thought they meant: https://www.merriam-webster.co...

Merriam-Webster, by the way, is the de-facto American English dictionary, which is the only country where the American Republican Party holds any relevance. So I think it's safe to say that, no, they did not redefine it.

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