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Messages - Frumple

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4021
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: March 26, 2020, 10:09:11 pm »
Apparently, there are new nonbinary heroes in Marvel's New Warriors called Safespace and Snowflake and they thought it would be good representation.
How did they think this was a good idea?

Everything I have seen so far is them getting hate from all sides, and like, I can't disagree that its poor design.
I'unno, quick eyeball suggests while the like, naming, is kinda' shit the character design itself looks pretty a'ight otherwise? Arguably the least bad of what seems to be the team they're associated with, even, heh. If their names had been basically anything else I could see giving the pair a pretty easy pass.

4022
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: March 26, 2020, 04:44:47 pm »
I mean, we got our hand so far up the sauds ass you can see tiny US flag patterned fingernails inside their leadership's mouths when they talk, just as a sort of representative example. There's others I can't be arsed to remember. Plenty of places are heavily dependent on U.S. whims to the point puppet state isn't exactly out of line, and we've murdered (directly or otherwise) heads of state or whatev' and replaced them with our personal tinpot dictators, like... repeatedly... over the course of our history. There's not a perfect dance tune to the puppeteering mostly because we're A) kinda' inept chucklefucks with more power than sense and B) don't actually give a damn about what they do so long as the money et al is flowing in.

Our history courses don't tend to teach much about that stuff until college at best, though. The general state of U.S. history education is nearly as memetically bad as the state of our geography education.

4023
I like the graph circulating for it. You got decades of your normal little craggy graph peaks, and then at the end just this gigantic straight up fucking flat vertical line literally several times higher than anything before it and showing no indication of slowing down. It's like a little pack of appalachian mountains waddling up to Olympus Mons or somethin'.

4024
Our government decreed that people who cannot pay their rent anymore cannot be evicted by their landlords / housing corporations for the duration of the crisis.

Furthermore, they cannot be charged any collection costs for being behind on payment.
Good for them, at least. Now if only more countries would follow the examples like that :-\

4025
Far as I'm aware, the crow plague doesn't seem to be mutating particularly fast, no. Nor does it seem to be mutating in a way to render vaccines ineffective against parts of it (some of the confusion on that front appears to be coming from specialists using the term 'strain' differently than casual conversations would -- don't remember much about details, but short version is there being multiple strains doesn't mean we'll need multiple vaccines).

Like, on the vaccination front we frankly seem borderline blessed by CoV-SARS-2. It's so far not showing signs of actually being that "slippery", to use that comic's terminology. At the moment, our timeline on that front is still looking like a year or so for a vaccine being ready to roll out for more or less the global population.

4026
It's not just Trump - nobody wants the draconian quarantines.  I mean I'm already down to 50% my normal pay, and if things don't change soon - like in 4 weeks - I'll likely lose my job entirely.

World leaders have a tough job - they have to weigh things like "do I really destroy my economy for all 300 million of my country to save the lives of 2 or 4 or 10 million? Or do I just eat those deaths - as horrible as it sounds - so that the remaining hundreds of millions have a more or less normal life?"  And that's even if you have a leader that doesn't present as a pompous child.
Honey, it's literally goddamn impossible to have more or less a normal life when you're dealing with additional casualty counts in the millions, nevermind tens of them. There is no normal if the world's looking down the barrel of experiencing a fucking world war's worth of bodies to deal with. The economy's fucked regardless, either by the lockdown or the secondary effects of dealing with thousands and thousands of new corpses and some multiple of that of people too sick to work, it's just a matter of how many people die in the process.

4027
I was reading about the 1918 glu and now I have another bout of terror

I have begun audibly holding my breath as covid hits Syria (and Turkey, Iraq).
Don't forget brazil/south america and africa, home of millions of immunocompromised folks. And russia. Australia. Look, the shit's just flat global at this point, it's everywhere.

But haha yeah Syria's probably fucked, what was it like three ICU beds in the country or something thanks to fighting blowing up hospitals? Crow plague likely gonna' reap real hard there.

4028
South Korea didn't have full lockdown.

Bars, cafes, restaurants all stayed open.
People did all wear facemasks though, so perhaps they are more important than our government has been telling us.
Or maybe not, because the other thing SK did was test everyone and trace and test all the contacts of those infected using phone records, CCTV images and public transport card records, and when infected, quaratined those.
Which is something we can't, because, no tests available.
Yeah, SK has managed as well as they have by going hardcore panopticon, super aggro on testing, and locking down people who turned up positive. So they've actually been fairly confident they're keeping track of things and keeping the virus under control. If you legitimately have those sorts of conditions, full lockdown isn't as necessary.

Meanwhile, you have the United 'I'm not responsible, also what's this testing thing' States or the United 'herd immunity lol' Kingdom, or all the other places... not... doing things like SK did. Basically they're bleeding out, so now you tourniquet and hope they live long enough a doctor can do something about it :-\

4029
Don't hold your breath for a vaccine being ready in about a year.
There might never be a vaccine.
There's still no vaccines for many other corona virusses, like the ones responsible for common cold.
Untrue on like several fronts. CoV stuff only accounts for a fraction of the slew of viruses that causes "the" common cold (which is largely why not much has been done on that front, a cold vaccine would be like a dozen different vaccines, not one, and folks haven't been deciding the resource/return ratio was good enough... particularly for the virus family that only accounts for a minority of cases), and there's explicitly been vaccines made for coronaviruses before -- it's just they're for CoV varieties that target non-humans, hence why we have cow and dog CoV vaccines currently in existence.

The year or so is probably accurate. If we didn't care about possible side effects we could have vaccines out, like, now, or in very short order. Most of the time involved with that 14 or so months is testing, to make sure the vaccines produced don't have significant negative effects.

4030
I'm pretty sure I'm repeating it, but iirc initial studies on the crow plague specifically suggested masks -- even less than ideal, high end ones -- reduces the chance of infection by like 20%, somewhere in that region. It is, again, not a silver bullet, but it very much does help. Dropping infection rates by a fifth could easily be a six figure or better difference in eventual body count.

4031
I mean, for what it's worth it (well, the crow plague specifically) probably will be mostly dealt with within a year or two? 14-18 months to finish rolling out a vaccine, then a bit more to ramp up production and inoculation. Lots of knock on effects during and after but there is something of a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. Sorta'. On specific fronts.

In less specific fronts, the latest relief bill in the US failed to even make cloture, thanks in part to a handful of GOP senators now being quarantined after testing positive for covid. So there's that. E: Also the bill was apparently pretty shit anyway, so I guess no actual loss there for the general american public *shrugs*

4032
There's been word from those areas, yes. Mostly consisting of 'yes they're getting cases', 'no they're not testing aggressively', and 'no their medical capacity isn't even remotely ready for the stress the crow plague is bringing it'. So word, yes, word of pestilence cosplaying mumra and going all 'ancient spirits of evil, transform this decaying form' as its prep work for the next few weeks :-\

4033
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: March 22, 2020, 09:38:27 am »
I mean... if Thatcher was running on the dem ticket she probably would be an improvement over whatever the GOP fielded. Hell, she'd probably be better than the current batch of shitsacks even if zombie thatcher ran R. Pretty sure she'd represent a leftward swing or general mellowing for the conservative parties.

Sexism probably would be invoked for opponents, assuming whoever ran against her wasn't also female, but, like. Zombie thatcher would probably represent a general win for the american populace, as fucked up a thought as that is. Either a generally better human being than most GOP politicians if running R, or still a better one if running against them.

All that said, someone like abrams would probably be a pretty decent VP pick for biden (maybe even bernie, if bernie hadn't gotten roflstomped again). I'm not sure pandering is the right word for trying to leverage that kind of symbol to, y'know, like half the fucking population. Especially if there's not some super better choice (and there ain't, as far as I know). Warren I'd rather see as sec of treasury or just still a congresscritter but heavily called on for advice and support and whatnot. Picking a veep that's not going to undermine margins in congress is probably a good idea.

4034
Eh, backlog is getting caught up to, more or less, I think. They were expecting a major spike because labs were just starting to clear out testing queues, or something like that, followed by continuing but lesser increases.

Mind we're still massively fucking under testing the population, especially in a way to catch asymptomatic or mild cases, or folks that's got infected without anyone noticing and then hauled off somewhere else. Things are improving on that front (if far too goddamn slowly), but we're functionally still flying fucking blind as a nation.

Which is to say that's probably not good news. It's more a condemnation of our testing capacity and patterns than anything hopeful about the state of the spread.

And yeah, you can see the criteria some states or the CDC is using to recommend testing by, just go hopping around state health department websites or the CDC's stuff. Frankly, they're complete fucking shit for trying to find cases that have already escaped the stupidly goddamn anemic testing net.

4035
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: March 22, 2020, 12:15:38 am »
Generally when housing or land is cheap in the US, that means that, y'know, people don't want to live there. Usually for pretty good reason, heh.

Frankly, having lived in places being talked about (if rural florida hellswamp rather than corn hell), these places are just a persistent drain on everyone living in them. They're places people basically go to die, because there's not really much living to do for most folks there. Just a constant steady struggle to get to the next day, with few to none of the little perks you can find in some other areas. Easier to be left alone or get to nature-y places, but that's about all they got going for 'em.

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