most people use their Canon to shoot, not fire, but I guess that's semantics.

First off parents don't give vaccines to their kids and then their kids die horribly. I was unvaccinated for measles until very recently. My mother was an antivax lunatic. Colloidal silver and the whole nine yards.

But even ignoring the kids all those people become breeding grounds for new variants that go right past the vaccines you've got and kill you.

You can't have a peeing section in the pool.

That's okay King Trump will protect me from the viruses. And hurricanes. Both of which using nukes.

You've pulled some interesting data and constructed your own narrative around it, but it leaves out a lot of the science behind public health.

You come to the conclusion that it's largely a virus that affects people 50 and above. Well, yes, those are the people who died from it. But the rest aren't unaffected: it's still a fucking brutal disease at any age ("discomfited" does *not* describe it); the causes and effects of long COVID are just now being unraveled; they may have been cared for by a person who was taken out by the virus; and by the way, why is it unwarranted panic in your book when it's only 50+ers who are being mowed down by this thing? In 2021, 100,000 people PER WEEK were dying from COVID at one point. That's a lot of parents, grandparents, employees... people.

Further, just being under 50 is no guarantee that you'd survive an infection; it's not even an assurance that you'll get past it without long-term effects. Let's also remember that during the bad years of the pandemic, it wasn't 2025. We didn't have five years of epidemiological data to look back on, and it was anybody's guess where this thing was going; it could have mutated into a form that was more widely deadly. We simply didn't know and the historical models weren't much use against a novel virus like this one. Of course people were panicked.

A big piece of the societal concern for COVID was the inability of the US health care system to respond to a sudden capacity-busting spike in hospitalizations - remember "Bend the Curve"? Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed by COVID cases. With no vaccine and no treatment early in the pandemic, they simply didn't have any way to keep medical service providers safe from also being infected. With the flu, of course, we have vaccines and actual treatments for the disease; none of this was a thing before the COVID vaccines, placing many more people at much more risk.

You make the assertion that the vaccines were rushed into people's arms. I'm going to assume you're referring to the mRNA vaccines here since they were the early heroes of the pandemic. Research on mRNA vaccines had been underway for a long, long time by the time COVID made its appearance. It may have seemed as though this new, untested technology was given a very short test run, but in fact they were the result of 15+ years of research into the underlying technology. It just so happens that the research came to fruition at precisely the right moment. And you'll remember that the other vaccines, based on more traditional methods (inactivated virus, for example) were considerably less effective; some of them were in fact withdrawn due to being ineffective. China's initial vaccine is a particular example of this.

In the testing stages, the mRNA vaccines showed outstanding effectiveness – somewhere between 90-95% effective at preventing serious disease. That is phenomenally successful. Lots of vaccines that we routinely administer don't approach these numbers. If a group of researchers were conducting, say, a cancer trial where they were testing new treatments and *this* kind of result came out halfway through the trial - they'd stop the trial, verify the results, and if they panned out, you had better believe the treatment would be in IV drip bags ASAP. This is breakthrough medical science territory and let's just be grateful that it happened.

I will completely agree with some of your critique and add some of my own. Chaos and intentional malfeasance at the federal level resulted in bungled messaging and outright misinformation, creating a unnecessary societal divide. Strategic mistakes were made at all levels of government, exposing the weakness of our system to deal with such a once-every-century disease event.

Where I disagree with you is what seems to be your conclusion: that COVID wasn't as much of a problem as people made it sound; that if youw ere under 50, you didn't have much to worry about; the insinuation that the vaccines were rushed and may have caused more harm than good. This ventures into the standard antivaxxer arguments, which you helpfully note is not your intent, but nonetheless there is considerable semantic overlap between you and them.

The first mRNA vaccines were something like 95% percent effective against the contemporarily dominant COVID strain (Delta). So there's a big of data for you. Also, just because a virus is fast-mutating doesn't mean a vaccine can't work against it. When a virus mutates, not every section of its genome undergoes change – and vaccines can target the parts that don't change, like the spike protein that COVID uses to enter human cells. Even when the targeted region mutates, vaccines can retain some effectiveness if the mutation isn't too dramatic.

Well, we've dramatically ramped up our mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacity due to COVID - perhaps this time they will be more competitive.

Silly plebeian, he's a member of the ruling class. You don't fire your ruling class except maybe out of a Canon.

Humanity is not ready to give up on having rulers. Hell we can't even recognize we have them in America

Well, your buying power would be crippled.

Is CEOs telling me that AI isn't going to take jobs while privately they're telling everyone and anyone that they're going to cut their workforces in half within the next 5 years.

Climate change is the same thing.

You have governments and CEOs that say everything is fine but when it comes to the actual money and the actual Financial reports you're going to find them singing a completely different tune.

I don't think there's anything that can stop the shit storm that's going to hit us all now. The time to stop it was last November and we didn't do that.

Bullshit. Rand Paul like the other three Republicans that voted against it were allowed to vote against it because they are otherwise in vulnerable districts and could face a primary Challenger or even a viable Democrat. Paul especially because Kentucky has a Democrat Governor.

The Republicans do this every time they do something really horrific to americans. The wider the margin they have in Congress the more horrific the thing we get.

They know that the bill is insanely unpopular. Every forum I go to is filled with people over 55 that are on disability talking about how they're going to die now. There's a bunch of people retired who are talking about how they're going to be homeless soon because they're social security payments are getting cut. There's a whole bunch of nastiness in that bill to take money away from vulnerable old people, many of whom voted for Trump.

So the Republicans will figure out who is the most vulnerable Congress member and tell them to vote against whatever horrible thing they're doing.

Rand Paul has been playing that fucking game for decades and you people have been falling for it. You never learn because you simply aren't capable of it. It's not really your fault it's not like you can Will yourself an extra 100 IQ points anymore than I can. If I could wake up tomorrow and be two or three times more intelligent so I could be above all this crap I would.

It's frustrating to be just smart enough to know how fucked I am and not smart enough to be able to do anything about it.

Any Republican that crossed him and he has more than enough money to do it. He could replace every single Republican in the House of Representatives if he wanted to and he wouldn't even break a sweat.

Mark my words in a few months as a rider on a bill he will get his subsidies back long enough for him to extract all the money from Tesla with that pay package of his. He needs just a little bit more time because he's finishing up the paperwork after buying a law in Delaware that will let him avoid the lawsuit that stopped the pay package last time.

If you have Tesla stock then you either need to sell it right now or you need to take an enormous risk. Because as soon as musk gets that 55 billion dollar pay package Tesla is going to be effectively broke and the stock is going to collapse. No amount of dangerously stupid self-driving cars will fix that

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

Slashdot doesn't ban people. It just lets the mod system make you invisible. You're thinking of Reddit. You are also a bot. It's so weird bots still waste time on this dying web forum. I'm assuming it's because the site is in a list somewhere because it used to be a bigger deal.

It's not his fault. Hunter biden's laptop had Hillary Clinton's emails on it and that made him do it.

The BBB was supported by the overwhelming majority of conservatives. That's why the Republicans passed it. One or two billionaires bitching about it doesn't change that.

The Republicans don't, and never have, cared about deficit spending. It was Saint Reagan who actually started the modern trend of overspending. Literally the only time they bring it up is when there's a democrat in office and they want to shoot down any spending that might alleviate poverty. Meanwhile, historically, Democrats have done better controlling the debt than Republicans.