Covid was in the West for months before "The Pandemic" was declared. Very few people noticed it because old, sick people dying of respiratory disease is normal.

Trump's original plan to tell old, sick people to stay home while the rest of us caught it was the correct one. Instead the government wrecked the economy, got a lot of old, sick people dead, destroyed the social contract and most of us caught it in the end anyway.

> They have an aging population, not enough children to take the places of their parents, and this population is increasingly unhappy with their government.

You could say exactly the same about the West. Our rulers are trying to fix demographics by importing millions of Indians, but that just makes the population even more unhappy with their government.

The elites on all sides thought they could loot the West's wealth by shipping all the jobs to China and then moving to China and taking over. Xi happily took all that wealth but then told the elites so go to hell when they wanted to move in and rule China.

This is why they're now pushing for war with China. Their plan failed and now instead of being God-Kings of China they're stuck in the collapsing West that they destroyed.

Modern politics makes a lot more sense once you understand this. They worked diligently for decades to destroy the West and enrich China and now they're suddenly faced with having to try to fix what they deliberately destroyed. Hence the rapid flip in the US from Woke Climate Change nonsense to 'Drill Baby Drill' Christian Warrior Nationalism.

Self-driving semi + low-trust society == semi sitting at the side of the road with someone standing in front of it while their friends loot the cargo.

Crooks know the truck will stop rather than hit them and the cops won't arrive for a while after it sends an alarm to warn that it's being robbed. Unless you're going to fit it with automated machineguns to shoot thieves it's going to be an easy target for them.

None of these tech-utopia ideas work in a low-trust society. They only work in Star Trek.

That's true. I've taken far less sick days while working at home because I don't have people coughing and sneezing around me all day.

You have to remember that MBAs don't care about getting work done, they only care about increasing the stock price so they make more money when their options vest. It doesn't matter if the company crashes and burns after that because they'll be counting their options somewhere else by then.

Yeah, I'm supposed to start working in the office more next week where I'll be making Teams calls to the people I work with who are all at least 200 miles away. Except we now have too many people to fit in the office so they're still trying to figure out where they'll put us.

I presume they're doing it to see if they can get people to quit since it makes no sense otherwise.

When I was a kid we were going to be in a new Ice Age by now and oil was going to run out by the year 2000.

The older you get, the more you realize there's a lot of money to be made in fear-mongering.

The real climate change we're seeing is largely due to solar changes affecting the jetstreams but we'll do absolutely nothing to adapt to that because there's a lot more money to be made and power to be gained from blaming carbon dioxide.

All the "excess death" studies I've read in the past made big claims about massive numbers of deaths in the summary but when you actually read the paper it turns out the "excess deaths" are of people who were already sick and close to death who might die a couple of weeks earlier due to air pollution but there was no way to prove it so really they were just making up a number. So I ignore anyone talking about "excess deaths" these days, it's a glaring red flag for fear-mongering.

When they release Omicron.

Note that China doesn't need to build GPUs. It just needs to build AI chips, which is much simpler since you don't need to invest vast numbers of man-years into developing the graphics side.

Build something as fast at AI processing as an x70 Nvidia GPU and put 128GB of RAM on the board and much of Nvidia's market simply disappears.

Yes. China is trying to build a Falcon-9 competitor while SpaceX is working to make Falcon-9 obsolete.

Based on the summary this seems to be comparing government-funded space programs while ignoring the commercial space programs. A single Starship, for example, apparently has a similar internal volume to the entire ISS, though obviously it would shrink once you added life support and other hardware required for people to live on board for long periods.

But still, dock four Starships to a central module providing power and other requirements for long-term habitation and you have something with far more volume than ISS for probably a fraction of the cost of a single ISS module when it was launched twenty or thirty years ago.

The wet market hypothesis claims the Covid outbreak began in the Wuhan wet market in December 2019.

We now know from analysis of stored patient samples that it was in Italy by October 2019(*) and have inconclusive tests from September 2019 so it may have been there earlier. I also have been told by people working in medicine in North America that they have found positive stored samples from patients in October 2019.

So wherever it came from, it almost certainly did not originate in the wet market in December 2019 and appears to have been worldwide by October 2019. This explains the 'super-duper scary spread' in spring 2020 because it had been going around for months and as soon as they started mass testing they started finding lots of people who tested positive.

(*) And we already had pretty good evidence of this in early 2020 as an Italian virologist had been tracking an unusual respiratory disease through the winter before it suddenly became The Pandemic.

However, this is getting a bit off-topic for railways, unless it spread by rail.

Yeah. One of the reasons the buses suck so much here is because the bus drivers won't force the scumbags to pay the fare because they don't want to get attacked by scumbags.

Most of this kind of transport planning is created by people who think we're still living in a prosperous, high-trust society where people will obey their dictats. And we're not.

The only reason most people run Windows is to run crappy old Windows software from years ago. So the faster Microsoft kill backwards compatibility the sooner they kill Windows.

Which they probably don't care about as apparently most of their profits come from "The Cloud" these days. Which probably explains why Windows tries so hard to steal all my data and shove into "The Cloud."