Re: COVID-19 - appropriate government response?
Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2020 6:52 pm
Philosophical Vegan Forum
https://www.philosophicalvegan.com/
That probably is not appropriate. Many people do not know how to prepare their own food.
The probability of dying from driving is lower if you wear your damn seatbelt, but "in your life" would be at least the mid-point for the rest of your life expectancy. If you expect to live another 60 years, then set it at 30 years later.
...are you joking?
You are usually not infected by one particle. When you inhale a cough or a sneeze you're inhaling thousands of viral particles (the original cough/sneeze can have some hundreds of millions in it). The concentrations on surfaces you touch are likewise enormous.
The most efficient of them replicate and dominate the sample as per natural selection. Some mutations are ultimately advantageous, and it's easy to see how when you're dealing with billions of individuals per infection.
Some of the particles, yes. And again, some advantageous for the virus. Small changes to their surfaces can mean they evade immunity.
Not how it works.
Longer telomeres do not confer much if any immunity to viruses. Children get colds all the time. The reason children are less affected is likely more that the mechanisms that keep mucus out of the lungs function better in younger people, and because of their immune systems.
That's not really true, but the interrelationship of policy and economic success is complicated.
Do you listen to yourself?
Yes, but the entries were legal. The Republican narrative (a false one) is about criminals jumping the border. They don't mention air travel and don't want to mention air travel. No mainstream voice in politics is trying to shut down air transportation right now.
It's a stupid and transparent one. Conspiracies absolutely happen, the point is that they don't stay secret. Trump managed to do what he did for a few weeks until political pressure grew enough to force him to comply. If he had it his way people in the U.S. still wouldn't be aware of the issue. The point is that conspiracies fall apart, not that stupid and unethical people don't attempt them.
LOL!!!
My perception is that people in Croatia don't eat at restaurants nearly as often as people in other countries do. I am not sure, though.brimstoneSalad wrote:Many people do not know how to prepare their own food.
Why would I have to be joking? Chances are, none of us have any formal education in virology, so I am about as likely to be wrong as you are.brimstoneSalad wrote:...are you joking?
I must say what you are saying is really confusing. If it's possible for a specie of virus to have countless generations of descendants, how it is that nothing of the RNA world survived? Viruses we have today are not descendants of some being in the RNA world, they come about when an RNA inside of the cell mutates so that it starts self-replicating in that cell and is able to self-replicate in other cells of that type, right? And viruses that last for longest are ones that evolved to be harmless (as most viruses are), right? Why did using DNA evolve if it weren't necessary? Why did all those complicated mechanisms for repairing the DNA evolve if they weren't necessary for a specie to survive? Why did sex in animals and conjugation in bacteria evolve if they weren't at least very beneficial to the specie by making mutations have less effect?brimstoneSalad wrote:Not how it works.
I thought the left generally supports the Green New Deal, and that so does much of the right.brimstoneSalad wrote:And no, AOC is not mainstream, she's considered quite radical and her Green New Deal has been widely criticized by both political parties for being impractical (even though the general idea has some support).
https://www.city-journal.org/stossel/green-new-deal wrote:That 64% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats.
How did you find that web-page? How do you know it's telling the truth?brimstoneSalad wrote:Maybe fact check your claims before you make them?
But if there are indeed hundreds of people in Osijek having a coronavirus, rather than less than 10 of them (as mainstream media claims), what would stop some journalist from already informing people about that? If the police were really secretly preventing hundreds of people from leaving their houses, as the rumors I've heard claim, some journalist would report that very soon, right?brimstoneSalad wrote:The point is that conspiracies fall apart, not that stupid and unethical people don't attempt them.
My track record is significantly better than yours, so chances are that on any topic you're more likely to be wrong. Induction isn't a guarantee, but it does say something about probability.
You are confused, that's fine. Just don't assume that you are also right.
What?
Not exactly. Viruses are incredibly ancient. They have their own genetic information and don't spontaneously derive from broken human RNA in the advanced evolutionary state they exist in today. The fact that there are viral sequences in human genetics isn't because they came from us, but rather the other way around; viral genetic information gets stuck in the genes of other species when their replication mechanisms go wrong for whatever reason and the cells survive to replicate because it ended up somewhere useless.
That is mostly true, yes. Viruses need to evolve to be mostly non-lethal for those of reproductive age, and optimally only producing symptoms that help them proliferate. In modern humans, though, people live a lot longer than they used to and viruses haven't evolved to safely spread in the elderly population without causing death. Viruses really haven't been able to evolve to NOT kill people over 50, it's something very hard to do while retaining their virulence in young people.
This is very basic evolutionary biology. You fundamentally misunderstand the scale we're dealing with here, and the extreme nature of the r-strategy that viruses employ.teo123 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2020 8:10 amWhy did using DNA evolve if it weren't necessary? Why did all those complicated mechanisms for repairing the DNA evolve if they weren't necessary for a specie to survive? Why did sex in animals and conjugation in bacteria evolve if they weren't at least very beneficial to the specie by making mutations have less effect?
No, they pay a little lip service to it because it's a popular term. Most people don't know much about the Green New Deal. Democrats don't actually support the content of AOC's green new deal, which is a lot of communist stuff. Companion legislation has been introduced because nobody takes the original Green New Deal seriously for anything other than its branding.
FYI, that's a conservative right-wing think tank, not a scientific group.teo123 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2020 8:10 amhttps://www.city-journal.org/stossel/green-new-deal wrote:That 64% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats.
It's a very well known political fact checking site, similar to Snopes. I'm surprised you don't know what it is, it's like you just declared you don't know what Wikipedia is.
How do you know they have not?
If it's true it may be reported on soon, but you also have to keep in mind that this is a very busy news time. This is a small local story of corruption at best when we're dealing with a global crises. It might just be lost on page ten of some local newspaper. It wouldn't exactly make it into the international headlines. Also, your country isn't exactly known for freedom of the press, so that complicates things further when stories can just be suppressed. It takes longer for conspiracies to break in those circumstances, and this may be too small to even come to light given current circumstances.
Well, maybe that plays some role, but everybody is far more likely to get things wrong if they are talking about something which is not their area of expertise. Your area of expertise appears to be astronomy. When you talk about astronomy, you are unlikely to get things very wrong. But when you talk about something unrelated to that, such as virology, I see no reason to trust you that you aren't getting things wrong. My area of expertise is onomastics, a part of linguistics, and compiler theory, a part of computer science, since I've written research papers about those things. And I am rather unlikely to get things very wrong about those things, or things closely related to that.brimstoneSalad wrote:If person A is right 90% of the time and person B is wrong 90% of the time, on any given disagreement the probability of person A being right (without any other information) should be assumed to be around 90%.
I am not "assuming I am right", I am assuming that whether a virus can indeed infect billions of people is a very complicated problem. And it obviously is: what we are taught at high-school appears to suggest it can't, yet some people suggest it can.brimstoneSalad wrote:Just don't assume that you are also right.
Regardless of how ancient they are, they don't share a common ancestor, yet alone one that dates back to the RNA world. Though most viruses are RNA-based, there are a few species of viruses that have DNA. And those RNA-based viruses aren't based on the same type of RNA, some viruses are based on the type of RNA that is found in ribosomes (and, in cells, it isn't actually used to encode information), some RNA viruses are based on messenger RNA. Hard to explain if you suppose viruses have ancestors that date back to RNA world.brimstoneSalad wrote:Viruses are incredibly ancient.
The fact that we have the genetic code similar to that of some RNA viruses inside our DNA strongly suggests the viruses (at least ones based on messenger RNA) came from us, or some specie that also has that code. I distinctly remember we were taught in school that there is no known mechanism by which code from RNA would be copied onto DNA.brimstoneSalad wrote:The fact that there are viral sequences in human genetics isn't because they came from us, but rather the other way around; viral genetic information gets stuck in the genes of other species when their replication mechanisms go wrong for whatever reason and the cells survive to replicate because it ended up somewhere useless.
Well, this is like saying things got copied from RAM to ROM by mistake: there is no known mechanism by which information can be copied from RAM to ROM, yet alone by mistake. Similarly, there is no known mechanism by which information from RNA can be copied into DNA, yet alone by mistake.brimstoneSalad wrote:their replication mechanisms go wrong
I think it would take time I don't have to properly study that and that it's unlikely to be productive. The conclusion we reach might seem perfectly sensible to us, but sound silly to a virologist.brimstoneSalad wrote:Here, read this
Now, obviously, John Stossel, the author of the article, is not conservative.brimstoneSalad wrote:FYI, that's a conservative right-wing think tank, not a scientific group.
I haven't even heard of Snopes. Why would I know that? I am a Croatian who is reading mostly Croatian media. Do those sites publish something that is remotely relevant to me, like something about Croatian politics?brimstoneSalad wrote:It's a very well known political fact checking site, similar to Snopes. I'm surprised you don't know what it is, it's like you just declared you don't know what Wikipedia is.
I wouldn't expect it to get into international headlines, but I would expect the national media to stop reporting the figure of there being only 8 people with coronavirus in Osijek and claim there are no new cases.brimstoneSalad wrote:It might just be lost on page ten of some local newspaper. It wouldn't exactly make it into the international headlines.
Where are you getting the perception that Croatia has less free speech than countries such as US or Germany? My perception is that Croatia has more free speech than those countries. In Croatia, people publicly deny Bleiburg Massacre (most notably the linguist Mate Kapović), Jasenovac Massacre (most notably Igor Vukić) and Varivode Massacre (most notably Franjo Tuđman) all the time and they don't get punished for that. If you publicly deny Holocaust in Germany, you can easily get in jail for that, and you can also get in jail for that in the US. The media in Croatia rarely mention political correctness, and, when they do that, they do that to mock the political movements in other countries. Political correctness is the biggest obstacle to free speech in the western world, and Croatia appears to be mostly free of that.brimstoneSalad wrote:Also, your country isn't exactly known for freedom of the press, so that complicates things further when stories can just be suppressed.
@teo123 I estimate 30-60 IQ points separate you and Brimstonesalad. Intelligent people know what they don't know and rarely comment about things they do not understand. This is significantly different from the behavior of people in the sub 115 IQ group.
At first I was shocked when I read this. After reflecting it started to make sense. Snopes is attractive to people who want to get to the truth. You don't come across as such a person.
Why did you join this forum? We are not interested in Croatian politics. Which nationality do you think would be more likely to appreciate truth seeking websites like Snopes?
IQ measures your ability to reason in and of itself, not your level of open-mindedness. Yes, if you're able to reason, it seems like you'd realize a lack of knowledge prevents you from considering potentially relevant factors. But there are reasons why that doesn't always happen. It could be your lack of experience, the people around you, etc. It's unfair to make an assumption about someone's intelligence (if you're using IQ to define that) because you perceive them to be closed-minded.Jebus wrote:@teo123 I estimate 30-60 IQ points separate you and Brimstonesalad. Intelligent people know what they don't know and rarely comment about things they do not understand. This is significantly different from the behavior of people in the sub 115 IQ group.
What now? Are you suggesting there is no correlation between intelligence and open-mindedness?
I agree that would be unfair. What's your point?
I said that a higher IQ (if that's how you're defining intelligence) often leads to more open-mindedness, but not always. There's a correlation, but they aren't the same inherently.Jebus wrote:What now? Are you suggesting there is no correlation between intelligence and open-mindedness?
You were accusing someone of having a lower IQ based on perceived closed-mindedness.I agree that would be unfair. What's your point?