We voted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ehh, sort of. Better than usual in the last one.

What would you have us do?

Try voting for someone that is not recommended to you by one of two corporations. I'd suggest voting for whoever says they'll strictly enforce the $3500 / year maximum individual and zero corporate election contribution limits.

In communist societies communes are the companies and there is no government. Communes are like companies except the people who work in them own them. Thus "workers own the means of production."

China isn't communist. It's not even the fake communist that you get when revolutionaries establish a "transitional government," or the economically communist that China sort of was until Mao died. It is authoritarian, which is where the government has a lot of power to tell everyone what to do.

The GP didn't ignore your original comment, they corrected it.

Sigh. Ontogeny is NOT evolution. It is not the same thing as having a low MHC diversity due to a genetic bottleneck as well as lacking tens of thousands of years of evolution to a pathogen. Not the same at all. It's silly to even suggest that. Epigenetic shifts in an individual do not create new HLA genes.

Consider COVID. Novel bat coronavirus, nobody had preexisting immunity. Did everybody die? No. Because we had high HLA/MHC diversity, making it easier to target SARS-COV-2 epitopes. Native Americans lacked this diversity. It left them ill prepared for novel pathogens.

Also, you seem to believe that any disease you've never encountered before is fundamentally dangerous to an adult. That's simply not the case. Rhinovirus is intrinsically mild. It's an upper respiratory infection; it's not adapted to lower respiratory or systemic infection. It's not ebola. It's not going to become like ebola just because you've never caught it before. If a rhinovirus strain was reintroduced after 200 years after having been eradicated, we'd all get a cold, but by and large, we'd be fine.

And what would happen if Yamagata reappeared? We'd just add it back to our flu vaccines. Furthermore, the reintroduction of Yamagata wouldn't be catastrophic without that. You do not have to catch every Influenza B lineage at all, let alone every year. If you had been infected with B/Victoria and you were exposed to B/Yamagata, you'd have little sterilizing immunity against it - you'd very likely catch it. But your past exposure to B/Victoria is still greatly protective against hospitalization and death; B and T immunity against NA and the HA stem and stalk are conserved.

And this is about whether or not to catch every lineage. Well guess what, even with air filtration, that's still going to happen. Air filtration only has a meaningful impact for people at a distance, not people close together. It's about protecting the person across the room, not the person you're standing 50 centimetres away from. What it does change is how often you catch them. And if lineages or whole viruses go extinct, that's great. Worrying about some sort of reintroduction 200 years later is just inventing your own unrealistic misery when we have actual pandemic threats to worry about.

Ah, so it only kills you if you're not driving the correct type of vehicle, or one of the "few exceptions."

I've had people tell me a lot of really dumb rules of thumb over the years, but the best are always the ones that get you killed unless they're carefully applied in only very specific circumstances.

Stop reading the opinion section of the National Post. It will rot your brain.

Do you have them installed in your house? If not, why not?

You know most of that billion years of natural selection wasn't spent packed into mostly sealed boxes with electrical ventilation systems so we can breathe right?

Of course. The point of machine learning is that the thing learning on its own is much cheaper than engineers figuring out how something works and hand programming a model. People have been talking about this since at least the 50s. It seems the mainstream needs to rediscover it every couple decades though.

Play some early access games. They usually get a lot better with updates. Optimization is a thing.

There is a very real phenomenon where software expands to fill available resources. You might have noticed it happening on your hard drive.

You can notice similar inflation here too, where computers that would have been practically magic 20 years ago are utter garbage. Even more apropos, memory today is outrageously priced, a truly civilization ending catastrophe, when it costs about half as much as it did ten years ago.

By paying for it!

Well, Anthropic isn't supposed to be. Anymore.

Unless you count asking your government to target your competitors of course.

We came back from flying to visit family for Christmas one time and someone had left a light on in the car. The guys at the park and fly lot boosted it for us but my father was concerned that the battery had frozen and cracked. So we drove for a bit and he parked at an autoparts store that sold batteries before turning off the ignition. Unfortunately he'd had the window open because it was too cold for the defroster.

The battery had indeed cracked and was toast. Since the car was loaded with Christmas presents and it was a power window, someone had to stay outside. Since I was the same someone who had left the light on, that someone was me. Which was okay, except the store didn't have any charged batteries so I had to wait in the frozen car with a window open while they charged a new one.

We're all posh divas. I paid extra to get radar cruise control in my current car, which was well worth it. It also came with power (meh) heated (very nice, no more scraping) mirrors. I recognize that my fondness for my first few cars is nostalgia and that I wouldn't like them at all if I were driving them today.

And 70s safety, pedestrian or otherwise, isn't something to aspire to.