Remember decades ago we had a hurricane and power was out for about 5 days. The streets were a mess.. trees and power lines down everywhere. Yet when you picked up the phone there was still tone and the green backlight still lit up.

Certainly NOT for Katrina.

Hell for at least a MONTH after Katrina, no matter where you were in the US you could not receive a phone call if you had a NOLA 504 phone number.

But for some reason texts would work.....so, I learned how to text then.

Phones were dead in the city for awhile for the one that came through LA 1-2 years ago....phones were out at east a few days if I recall..?

exactly. so why is it a problem if people choose to pay through their nose for techno-fetish or status symbols?

Using Apple products ceased to be any sort of "status symbol"....LONG ago....no one generally gives it a 2nd glance if someone is using something apple branded....

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.

Just curious....does Anthropic and other AI companies as a matter of policy prohibit connections from China or any of their co-horts?

Do they block all IP addresses from china?

And there we have ity. this is allso a self reinforcing system, due it it being dangerous to walk no one walks so waking walkable neighborhoods will never be a priority because everyone drives eventyrere anyway so..

Unless you are in one of the view ultra-urban cities....no we just aren't built to be "walkable"....hasn't been a need or impediment so far to be honest....it's just our way of life here.

And we're not going to be spending exhorbant amounts of money to rip and and redo our cities.

Personally I dont wanna live somewhere where I'm required to live in dense housing and share walls with neighbors. I prefer to have a front and especially a back yard where I can fence it in or my dogs, so I can set up my large log burning offsent smoker, sent up for parties with friends and neighbors for crawfish boils, etc....

I'm VERY happy being "non-walkable"....my cars and motorcycle suit me just fine for shopping, travel and just having fun out on the road....

I don't have trucks or SUVs myself....but to each their own.

Do look for that Jay Leno video...they discuss this and apparently this does not increase the weight....they apparently have plenty of strength through other means....

In saner regions of the world pedestrian safety is a requirement in vehicles

No body fucking walks in the US man....hence it doens't occur to us to be any sort of "priority".

Go stand in front of a truck and ask yourself are you going under, or over when it hits you

See?

Now this is where I assume that most people are like myself and try NOT to stand in front of a truck....

Self preservation and all that...common sense some folks call it.

Cars don't have tall hoods, trucks and SUVs do to ridiculous proportions now. Your average truck sitting at a red light can't see pedestrians at a crosswalk, especially children

Not generally a problem, as that NOone walks in the US.

These are not actually going to be much more customizable than other vehicles. The sole exception is in the infotainment department, where virtually all modern vehicles have some big overwrought thing that you probably don't want because it sucks, or it will in the future â" which will affect you if you're the kind of person who keeps a vehicle. But if you are, the auto industry hates you.

Actually I think there is more user customization available than you think.

I saw a Jay Leno YouTube video on Slate with the owner and lead engineer..was interesting.

It appears pretty much ALL the side panels on this thing are plastic....and screwed on with visible access from the outside of the vehicle.

I can foresee lots of custom shops coming up with new body pieces that can be easily swapped out at any time....

I also saw a hint on that show that in the future potential for 4-wheel drive could be an option....I hope it gets there...talk about massive custom options appearing out there for that...???

But anyway they said they were trying to basically "open source" everything they could able the Slate and give it fully to the user to do...they said they even were allowing user to do their own warranty work, etc....so, don't have to take it to the shop if you know what you're doing and it won't void the warranty.,

but have they managed to stop any pollution coming out of the tailpipe?

/me looks over his list of priorities...NOPE emissions not on my list.

It really isn't for most people you know....

You can get a cheap car that ALSO has basic modern features like power windows, as long as you buy from a capable, modern car company i.e. a Chinese company.

Fuck China.

We need to untangle ourselves from them as much as we can as quickly as we can. They are nothing but trouble for the US.

This is the same dynamic that happened in the 1980s with Japanese cars and the 90s'/00s with Korean cars.

Not even close.

Unlike China...Japan and S. Korea are NOT stated enemies of the USA....china is.

I guess I should be more obvious with the sarcasm in the future ;)

Fact check / Analyze (post is in response to an article about a new program to install better air purification systems):

Sigh, need an edit button. :P (But yes, it would be nice if more people actually cared about ensuring the accuracy of what they write and would do that before spouting off scientifically ignorant statements. I rather wish browsers had a "fact check" text box would flag in red any factually questionable statements the poster is making, with a mouseover note explaining what's wrong, with references)

"âoe" - what are you pasting from? Google Search AI? ;)

Naive vaccine approaches do struggle with long-term sterilizing immunity against fast-mutating viruses like influenza, COVID, rhinoviruses, etc (but non-sterilizing immunity from vaccines is actually quite effective at preventing the worst consequences!). Which is why new techniques are being developed to cause the body to target evolutionary-conserved regions of the pathogens rather than the "immunologically easy" (immunodominant) epitopes like COVID's RBM, influenza's hemagglutinin's globular head, and such. These regions are easy for the immune system to "see" and target, but at the same time, the virus is also evolved to be able to shuffle them easily, so you need vaccines designed to train the immune system to attack the parts that the virus can't readily change without breaking things. Some include things like having the vaccine present a large number of very different RBDs at once (making it easier to develop immunity by attacking the evolutionary-conserved regions instead), glycan masking the variable regions, and so forth.