That's bold, considering the last flu vaccine round had a NEGATIVE 26.9% efficacy.
#followthescience

Yes, you read it right, if you were vaccinated you had a 27% HIGHER chance of getting the flu.
https://www.medrxiv.org/conten...

Now, a host of slashdot leftists are ALREADY TYPING THEIR RAGE_REPLY because I must be an antivaxxer.

Actually, I'm not. I just don't participate in the "with us or against us" bullshit binary that's accreted around the COVID vaccines. (So that probably does make me an "enemy" in their book.)

I consider vaccines to be one of the greatest achievements of modern technology. I'm vaccinated. All our kids are vaccinated, and I haven't a single qualm about recommending MMR and the slate of childhood vaccines for every little kid.

THAT SAID, I also think that
- COVID panic was largely bullshit. It was a highly communicable but otherwise not-very-virulent corona virus strain that mainly affected older and vulnerable people. Thus the term..."vulnerable". At the end, the IFR for COVID19 was basically a bad flu*. Cry all you want, argue the actual data.
- the COVID vaccines were rushed, not nearly tested enough, and have resulted in some very questionable ongoing heart and other issues in younger people that had NOTHING to fear from COVID. Given the high effort in deliberately confounding the outcomes during the Biden administration, it's unlikely we'll ever know the truth.
- I'd have had much more confidence in the entire COVID event had one side not made all the decisions for everyone and insisted no debate was allowed. OPENLY discussing the causes, the treatments, and what we did/didn't know would have been preferable to the "STFU we know what's good for you" nearly-totalitarian approach. Hell, here in MN there was an almost-palpable disappointment we didn't get to use the corpse-storage-buildings the state rushed to rent.

Do you take issue with my tone? Tough shit. Anyone daring to question the Holy COVID doctrine was aggressively silenced for YEARS while the mandarins in charge RUINED lives flexing their emergency doctrines and now will evade any consequence for their awful decision making. Yeah, that bothers me.

* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...
The median IFR (COVID19)was
0.0003% at 0-19 years
0.002% at 20-29 years
0.011% at 30-39 years
0.035% at 40-49 years
0.123% at 50-59 years
0.506% at 60-69 years
https://www.medrxiv.org/conten... median IFR for flu you'll have to look as the graph isn't postable in (the ancient shit-code of) /. comments but sits at about 125/100k or 0.125%
Yes, lots more people got COVID. It was highly communicable. But nobody under 30 should have been even faintly discomfited, even people under 50 really shouldn't have given much of a shit.
Quarantining sick people in elderly homes was a catastrophically stupid idea and we knew it by March/April 2020.

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.

You are talking nonsense. A Tesla Model Y battery is 1700 pounds, whereas a full gastank of a typical sedan is less than 150 pounds

SIGH.

First off, none of the battery packs in the 3/Y are 1700 pounds. The SR pack is 350kg / 772 lbs, while the LR pack is 480kg / 1058 lbs. This includes the charge cabling.

Secondly, unless you drive around in a vehicle that is nothing more than a gas tank or a battery pack, you're kind of forgetting a few things. Let's help you out.

ICE engines typically weigh 150-300kg (~330–660 lbs), and high-performance engines can exceed this. On top of this, the transmission usually adds another 70-115kg (150-250lbs). EV powertrains are light. An entire Model 3 drive unit, including gearbox, oil pump, filter, etc is ~80kg / ~175lbs. And actually this plays it down, because except in the performance Model 3 - which matches up against quite powerful / heavy ICE powertrains - they're software locked, so they're actually well oversized relative to what they're allowed to deliver.

ICE exhaust systems add ~25-45kg / ~50-100 lbs. Obviously absent in EVs.

ICE fuel systems (pumps, lines, etc) add another ~15-20 kg or so (maybe 30-50 lbs)

ICE vehicles, due to their inefficiency, require much larger radiators, coolant reservoirs, hoses, etc (again, another ~15-20kg extra over EVs).

The battery pack in an EV makes up the floor pan. Again, that cuts mass by a couple dozen kg.

The battery pack is a stiffening element, and eliminates the need for many dozens of kg of extra stiffening mass.

The needs of an engine block impose a lot more difficult design constraints on an ICE car, including a larger front end, a higher centre of gravity, a less compressible front end in an accident, etc. The need to compensate for these things also adds significant mass.

ICE vehicles have all accessories driven by the engine, and all electrics on low voltage (heavy wiring). EVs do it either with a DC-DC converter or direct HV, saving many kg again here. New EVs are also ditching the low-voltage battery altogether.

I could go on and on. The simple fact is, while EVs add (significant mass) in the form of one part, ICEs nickle and dime the car for mass all over the place. ICEs still win out mass-wise, but on a class-and-performance comparison, like-to-like, the mass differences just aren't that much (again, unless the designer is just bad at their job or doesn't care - *grumbles again in Hummer*).

(Also, re: serviscope_minor above: You don't compare vehicles by length; it's not a very useful metric. For size, you can compare by interior space specs - trunk / frunk volume, driver/front passenger head/leg/shoulder/hip room, rear passenger head/leg/shoulder/hip room. Length isn't a good proxy because it ignores packaging; a 1960 Chevy Corvette might be "long", but has very little interior space. Interior space and overall profile are often included as part of the category of "class" (for example, the Model 3 and BMW 3-series both have very similar interior space metrics and profiles). Also part of "class" is perceived / marketed luxury, though people differ over what counts as luxury, so it's not a very clear-cut metric. Performance is another axis, as higher performance cars tend to be heavier and/or have less interior space relative to their footprint (though EVs suffer a lot less on this than ICEs).

You can't get sunburned from far-UV like you can with normal UVC. It doesn't penetrate deep enough to reach living skin cells (e.g. the (dead) stratum corneum is 10-40 microns on most skin, up to hundreds on e.g. palms and soles) - in human tissue, 222nm penetrates only a few microns, with most of the energy deposited in the first micron; the deepest any degradation was seen in one study was 4,6 microns (for 233nm, it's 16,8 microns). As mentioned earlier, the only cells it can kill are the outermost layer of cells in the eye (corneal epithelium), but they're constantly being shed regardless (the entire corneal epithelium is 5-7 cells thick and has a ~1 week turnover, so on average just over 1 day per cell on the surface).

The comments about material degradation probably are also not true with far-UV. It's certainly ionizing, but again it doesn't penetrate deeply into surfaces . Paint is generally many dozens of microns thick (a typical two coats of interior paint is ~100 microns), while epoxy is typically millimeters or more, so you're only going to be affecting the extreme outermost surface. I doubt you could even tell.

Also, contrary to popular myth (and indeed, our pre-COVID medical understanding), most common communicable diseases (influenza, COVID, most cold viruses, etc) spread by direct airborne transmission, not fomites (surface transmission). So how well surfaces are cleaned has no bearing on this primary means of transmission. That's not that surfaces don't matter - said diseases still *can* be transmitted from fomites, and some other diseases (esp. fecal-oral route ones like norovirus) are still believed to be primarily transmitted via fomites.

Again, honestly, the only thing I would have concerns about are plants. Most plant cuticles are only like 0,1-1 micron thick. Xeriphytes (desert plants) can be thicker, though, like 1-20 microns, and are in general adapted to more UV exposure, so might be able to deal with it. But I'd think a plant with only a 0,1 micron thick cuticle and a 0,1-0,3 micron thick cell wall will get its leaves pretty badly burned by far-UV. I'd expect any epidermis and stomata exposed to the light to be almost entirely killed. But if you had a cactus or plant with really waxy leaves, it might be fine.

That we should be cool with them blowing through billions of our taxpayer dollars so that they can throw shit at a wall and see what sticks.

SpaceX has saved the US government an immense amount of money. What are you even talking about? Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy is by far the cheapest launch system out there, and is also, FYI, the most reliable launch system out there. And it go that way by exactly the process above. And that process cost far less than NASA spends to develop its super-expensive launch systems.

Tesla has been at approximately mass parity with its closest class/performance competitors from BMW (with a full tank of petrol) since 2017 (the 330i vs. the SR, the 340i vs. the LR, etc). This "EVs are super-heavy thing" is a myth. I mean, sure, if you're terrible at your job you can design a really heavy EV (*grumbles in Hummer*). But usually, if the designers did their job right, the weight difference is small when matched up on class/performance competitors.

And beyond what others pointed out - that PM emissions are only a fraction of pollutants, and that they come from both brakes and tyres, and EVs have far lower brake emissions - it should also be pointed out that tyre PM tends to be mainly *coarse PM*, not fine PM. Both are harmful, but fine PM is significantly more harmful per amount produced. Brakes have a higher ratio of fine to coarse than tyres do, exhaust is higher still.

Cars also have air filters which capture PM. Generally well less than is produced, but I've seen a proof of concept where they amped up the air filtration so that the car was net negative. If you really wanted to, nothing is stopping you from mandating that. Still, economically your best bet is surely on taxing tyres (esp. studded ones) to incentivize people to choose durable ones and ones that don't wear down the roads, to limit hard accel / braking, etc.

If people are using AI to review papers, they're getting what they asked for.

Incorrect.

Warming is proportional to the logarithm of the carbon dioxide concentration. This is the Arrhenius relationship; it's been know for over a century. (For reference, this is why climate sensitivity is expressed as degrees of warming per doubling.)

You could say that "that means that as CO2 increases the slope levels out", which is true, but we are still in the linear range.

An interesting paper (although not peer reviewed), basically re-doing Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 calculations but with updated spectral lines. Did you actually read past the first paragraph? Their conclusion was that for the one-dimensional adiabatic warming due to carbon dioxide, they calculate 2.3 Kelvin per doubling of CO2. Points to note:

1. they express warming as degrees per doubling: they are agreeing with the Arrhenius relationship that warming increases as the logarithm of the concentration.
2. Their calculated value of 2.3 K/doubling is within the error bars of the IPCC estimate (which is the average of many models), although on the low side of the average estimated climate sensitivity. But, it's a simplified one-dimensional model, so it's not expected to be identical to the full 3D models.

I can only repeat that nothing you said makes this a story that couldn't have been equally well reported in 2024, or 2014, or for that matter in 1974.

This is not news.

I searched and searched the comments trying to find your criticism of Mr Obama building "camps for undesirables" (or even the cages for children). Could you link those for me to show you're consistently about human rights and not just a tendentious hypocrite?

Except... basically all the warming already is done. Further increases in CO2 basically don't contribute to warming.

#followthescience

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.030...

Jesus.
You need medication.

We seem to be talking about completely different things. Let me see if I can state what I said more clearly. My comment had been that there is nothing new about this "news" story. Your reply was "Not sure I agree. The increase is not linear."

The fact that the increase is not linear is not relevant to the fact that there is nothing new.

You continued "That makes milestones relevant, as it helps gauge the exponent of the function."

Nope. The "milestone" 430 ppm gives you no information whatsoever about "the exponent of the function".

This story is not news. The fact that the curve is exponential does not make it news.

You're really saying that deviations from linearity that happened fifty years ago are the reason that this story is news today?

There is a little curvature visible in the measured carbon dioxide rise, but it's the steadiness of the rise, not the slight curvature in the rise, that is the reason it hit 425 ppm.