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.

My voltage doesn't vary much at all no matter how much power I'm pushing. And, unfortunately, I couldn't set my inverters to derate if I wanted. I'm fighting with the installer over access to configure/manager my inverters. They offer quite a good repair/service warranty and also a production guarantee, and won't give me control without voiding both of those so I'm debating which I care about most.

(I somehow replied to myself instead of you. What am I, some sort of /. n00b?)

And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.

Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.

Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday. I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.

Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.

And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.

Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.

Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday.

I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.

Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

Lots of companies, actually. Nearly everybody I know buys them for sheet music. Early adopters still have iPads, but the Android tablets have gotten good enough to do the job and cost less than a fifth as much as the 13-inch iPad Air. So there are two types of people — the ones who want a nice tablet, who spend the extra for an iPad Pro, and the ones who don't care, who buy something that costs $160 on Amazon, knowing that even if they break several of them, they still come out ahead.

They know nobody new is going to compete because we aren't enforcing antitrust law.

Like it or not, is you want cheap RAM vote Democrat (or whatever your local equivalent is)

Because mark my words in 10 years we'll find out they were all colluding. Just like the flat panel guys were

Bahahaha. Why don’t you ask Iran? You really are clueless aren’t you?

I'm part of the solution. I was about to buy an iPad Pro 13-inch, and bought a $160 Android tablet instead. Saved myself $1040. That was right before the price hikes.

They raised prices because they can. The shortage gave them cover.

If Chinese manufacturers can sell an iPad-size Android device with more RAM than an iPad for just $160 retail, this is not about the cost of RAM. Subtract Amazon's 35%, and the total cost of a machine with 40 GB of RAM is no more than $104, and RAM is maybe 5 to 10 percent of that cost, so the wholesale cost of 32 GB of RAM for an iPad is probably no more than $10. And they're cranking up the price by $150. RAM prices did not go up by 1500%.

It is clear to even a casual observer that Apple is just taking advantage of the massively inflated consumer price for the small amount of RAM that isn't being bought up by computer and device manufacturers, and is assuming that users won't be shocked to see their computer prices go up comparably. But those of us who have a clue recognize that the reason for retail price increases is that companies like Apple have multi-year contracts for nearly all the RAM, and the folks selling parts at retail are getting what's left over. I can pretty much guarantee Apple's prices aren't fluctuating nearly as much.

So of that $150, probably about $145 will show up as increased profits.

Guess I'll hold on to my M1 MacBook Pro and my iPhone 15 Pro for a few years longer. I was thinking about upgrading. Now I'm not. And I bought an Android tablet instead of an iPad two weeks ago because the prices were already way too high for what you get. Apple is pricing themselves out of the market, even for folks like me who have used Apple hardware exclusively since the mid-1990s and have high disposable income.

Selling fewer and fewer products at higher and higher prices is exactly why Apple nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s. This is not a winning strategy. They've tried this before.

Epigenetically, yes, actually. The extent to which this affects immunity is unclear, however.

In the context of a thread about the common cold having been eradicated for hundreds of years, that's "not being exposed at all". My assumption is that such a thing would happen through vaccination that eventually results in the case count reaching zero, and after a period of time, the vaccination being phased out, at which point the virus in question would no longer be circulating. If that's not what was meant by the original premise, then that's an entirely different question.

And if that number is zero...

Lifetime reduction in severity for the first kind of flu you are exposed to as a kid. Yes, I'm aware of how this stuff works. And yes, I know about Yamagata. And in a couple of hundred years, if Yamagata suddenly got reintroduced, it would be bad, because nobody would have been exposed to it. That was my point.

That likely depends on whether you should reasonably have noticed them in time.

Either way, though, your comment misses the point. If I understand correctly, the taller hoods were correlated with a higher rate of pedestrian injury temporally based on the number of vehicle sales in a given year, rather than directly, based on the type of vehicle causing each reported injury or death.

Assuming that is correct, then it is worth noting that something else also started happening in 2009: smartphone sales skyrocketed. The iPhone got people's attention in 2007, but smartphones didn't start becoming really popular until the price drop in late 2008, combined with the subsequent release of Android devices in late 2008. The LTE rollout in about 2010 to 2012 also pushed prices down, which accelerated the momentum. So unless that correlation was adjusted for, it seems entirely possible that the correlation is spurious, and that distracted pedestrians are the primary culprit, rather than hoods, in which case we could spend huge amounts of time and money making hoods shorter again, and it could make zero difference.

No, but I do keep my luggage in my shoe.

Language is fun.