Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Since you're such an expert on California, why don't you tell us all how much it cost California to save those 50,000 lives?

Given what my wife does, I'm pretty sure that's false, but that hasn't stopped you yet.

I'll believe that when the real estate prices here are more like Eastern Pennsylvania.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Too much; you were in her office?; you’re in a flight state.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I had surgery just before Christmas and had about 5 days in the Hospital during recover. All private rooms were reserved for COVID patients, so I had a roomie. My roomie's wife, who visited, was unvaccinated (he described her as a loon, he apologized, but she still visited). She took off her mask, in a room where two of us were recovering from significant surgery. (My sister has officially named her "the Fucktard", and when we talk of her, that is now her name). So we got a hotel room next to the hospital where they literally wheeled me over to my room and I checked out 48 hours early and my wife and sister (who is an NP) and niece took care of me.

I've had stuff postponed, I've had appointments shifted, I've had important things that needed to be put off three weeks when they should have occurred immediately, all because of the unvaccinated Fuckwads.

SEBBY, if you think these Fuckwads are only affecting themselves, your head is totally up your ass. Pull it out, open your eyes, scrape the shit off them, and look at the world.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/043/

You spend way too much time listening to moronic memes. PA's pop growth is lower than CA.

The only reason California isn't growing faster is because of real estate prices, which are the cost of its success.

Sure, a few tech bros try to redomicile to Texas to play games with their taxes, but guess what - they usually don't sell the California house and they tend to live in California about 170 days out of the year - tax games. And they can hire up some folks in Austin or Houston, but the mothership in California never really slows down.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

One would think that having contracted the thing would lead to less confidence about the correctness of one's personal choices, and yet...

Anyway, kid was exposed for the second time at preschool, leading to a fever and sore throat, but negative Covis and strep tests. Whatever that means.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Of course it is. Did I say it wasn't?

I doubted the data on CA flight myself. But if one asks the actual residents, the story holds. About 30% of my friends from college live in LA or SF areas. About 75% of them are moving.

If you visit Utah, Colorado, Oregon, or Arizona, the locals sing the same song: "Californians are buying everything, and living year round." The ski towns are now having to grapple with massive year round population increases.

WFH changed the game. And it's just getting started.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

If the vulnerable avoid public settings, they decrease their chance of contracting the virus. This is indisputable.

The interests here are those of the vulnerable and the HC system, on one hand, and those of the rest of society that can go about their lives normally, on the other.

To balance them there has to be a policy that:

1. Allows people to visit establishments in which masking cannot be done effectively (restaurants, bars, anywhere one eats or drinks);
2. Provides protections for the vulnerable and limits transmission in other settings.

OK. So it really comes down to policy regarding bars, restaurants, clubs, gyms, and other places where masking cannot be done all the time.

I would advocate the following:

1. Vaccine cards for admission, barring admission of the intentionally unvaccinated;
2. Warnings to the vulnerable, who should be allowed to enter if they chose to take the risk, that there is a chance they will contract the virus within the place.

This seems sane.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

The indirect negative impacts on HC delivery are significant. People in hospitals are vulnerable. I agree that the unvaccinated are causing harm to people who are compromised, and they are taxing the HC system.

But this brings us back to the balancing. The overwhelming majority of people are not compromised, and not in the hospital, and are vaccinated. So you have the interests of Group A (the vulnerable, the involuntarily unvaccinated, and the intentionally unvaccinated), which is, let's say, 30% of society. Then you have Group B (the vaccinated), the other 70%.

I would say, rather than carp about mandates:

1. The intentionally unvaccinated be given lowest rung status in all health care systems (you didn't get the vaccine? enjoy the waiting room... you get a room only if we have one after all the responsible people receive care).
2. Insurers be allowed to deny coverage, or apply steep co-pays, for care provided as a result of an intentional decision to not be vaccinated.
3. Vaccine cards be required at all indoor settings. No exceptions.

You don't want the vaccine? Okay. We won't make you get it. But we'll put you on an island.

This would allow the 70% to go about their lives while protecting the vulnerable.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Ty:

1. Do you think people should be able to eat in restaurants, go to concerts, or go to bars (all being indoor)?
2. If you think so, what would be the precautions you would prescribe?
3. If not, when do you think people should be able to do those things?
4. If not, what metrics, what standard, would you require before you would allow people to resume doing those things?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

How many are having trouble selling their house?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Like Yogi Berra said, nobody goes there anymore. It got too crowded.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

This describes how it worked when we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium last weekend (narrator: In California). There are states which are making it illegal to require vaccine cards for admission. They are run by conservatives.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Under what circumstances? I have done all three in the last six months. I wouldn't have done any in late December.

I've got to be honest, I paid a lot of attention to the research about how people were getting infected early in the pandemic, and I just don't anymore. It's exhausting. I want public-health officials to set ground rules, and I want people to follow them. If I hear something from my wife that makes me uncomfortable, say, eating out even though the county is permitting it, I can opt out, and that's our call, and I'm not going to bitch about the county.

When the public-health professionals say it's a good idea.

When the public-health professionals say it's a good idea.

Predictably, if you let everyone make their own decision about something with substantial externalities, they will make a decision that suits themselves but is bad in aggregate. So I'm not OK with letting everyone decide for themselves. See also: speed limits, traffic lights, food safety, childhood vaccinations, etc.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Isn't the easy answer here that there should be metrics, but they should be developed by actual experts and not by the loudest asshole out there? I really don't give a shit what YOU think the metrics should be. I don't care what Ty thinks either. Suck it up, buttercup.

I've been in the position of trying to organize concerts for organizations whose board I'm on. Our approach has been to consistently look to do better than the venue and the requirements, because it gives people comfort. If you do a concert, and you aren't careful, expect some people to walk in, feel unsafe, and walk out, and realize that may include people who are part of the performers and the stage crew. And any concert you schedule right now has risk of a last minute cancelation, which carries a lot of costs and overhead to it, because the performers may get sick. Saying "go ahead, do it" is very different than making it possible to do an event safely, which requires a certain amount of support, including devoting public resources to the process (because every event needs more security and police help thanks to, you know, THE ASSHOLES).


Badly run big events can quickly become superspreaders.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You're the person carping (whining, really) about mandates. Really, why not just suck it up, it's not a big deal to put on a mask.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Your hysteria is costing us too much money. What we need is a Republican to decide things.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

OK, I'll put you down for "loudest asshole"

That's one person for someone who knows shit, one for the loudest asshole.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

O.K., I’ll break the tie. I vote for the decision to be made by the loudest asshole. All the screaming and wailing about how fucking hard it is to put on a mask is giving me a headache, so maybe this will shut them the fuck up.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Damn, I hate losing.

Especially since I know the loudest asshole isn't going to shut up, he's just going to go back to complaining about how teachers should be replaced by Trumpers and how the hippies want to take away their guns.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I love masks! Take it up with this guy: https://mobile.twitter.com/GavinNews...-refuses-do-so

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Or a non-Republican…. https://abc7ny.com/amp/mask-mandate-...chul/11548122/

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Yes. Metrics from experts would be great. The problem is there is disagreement over who is a truly qualified expert, and those who are trotted out as experts often say conflicting things from day to day.

Having Fauci and WHO and CDC people speaking day in/day out destroyed the messaging from the outset. Fauci should have done written releases each week, a brief conference every two weeks, and otherwise stayed off the air.

There were too many voices speaking too frequently and they were wrong an awful lot. Trust was destroyed early and never regained.

Ty wrote, effectively, one should blindly trust the “experts.” But this was a novel virus, and the experts frequently seemed anything but. I think it’s madness to trust anybody claiming know how to handle a novel virus 100%. It’s more prudent to assess where they appear correct and where they’re wrong, or acting politically, or just lying.

Adults soberly assessing situations can and will agree on metrics as guides. But we can’t have that. Because we have a partially dishonest media, a social media establishment that is happy to engage in pushing narratives it prefers, and a lunatic reactive alt-media/social media that traffics in outright fantasy and conspiracy theories.

So no. Don’t just “trust the experts.” If you’ve a brain, you have to research where they’re full of shit, or flawed, and make some decisions for yourself.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

So I guess he's hysterical only when he disagrees with you? I mean, duh.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

A friend of mine died last week from cancer. The surgery to put a shunt in her brain was delayed quite a few times because of the Covid related staffing issues at the hospital. She probably would have died anyways--it was a bitch of a cancer--but that certainly didn't help. We're getting better here in Houston in terms of capacity, but it has definitely been a dicey thing, and the Omicron surge was just as bad, and worse in some ways, than any of the others. Sheer number of total cases meant that there were going to be a higher number of really sick ones.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Is it any surprise to you that when there's a pandemic of a brand new diseases, maybe the experts don't have all the answers right away? Adults soberly assessing the situation are going to have a hard time -- it was literally a brand new disease. The idea that an ordinary person is going to "research" (research what?) and make a better decision is silly in those circumstances.

You have a separate set of complaints about how the government lost trust in the first months of the pandemic. Noted. It would be all too easy for me to point to the clowns running the federal government back then, so I won't. The point you make about the media & social media giving people terrible information is exactly right -- but that's where you want people doing their "research" instead of letting public-health officials set policy.

There have always been anti-vaccer kooks, and we did pretty well in spite of them. What's changed in this pandemic, as I was saying the other day, is that conservatives have decided to oppose reasonable public-health measures, not only of any deep principle, but out of oppositional behavior. (Not everyone who doesn't want to get vaccinated is reflecting this, but some of them are surely deciding that the vaccine isn't to be trusted at least in part because there is an organized campaign to push those views.)

The choices are pretty simple: We either let government experts decide, or the government abdicates that role and lets everyone decide on their own what to do based on what their lunatic cousin says on Facebook.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I actually DO have a degree in public health. Plus have been working in a large academic health center throughout the pandemic, standing up telemedicine practices in weeks that should have taken years, dealing with massive staffing shortages due to illness, opening a vaccination center, yo-yoing with regs regarding vaccination mandates, and doing the daily work of supporting a practice with well over 1500 providers with hundreds of daily patient encounters in clinical and hospital settings.

The interventions that work in public health are the interventions that most people actually will follow. And with respiratory diseases, they always go back to the same thing well over 100 years: wash your hands, stay home when you're sick, wear a goddamned mask, get vaccinated if one comes out. It's been pretty consistent this entire time, aside from the initial masking confusion.

Human beings can be selfish assholes who are terrible at assessing risk, which goes both ways. There are the overly cautious that are practically agoraphobic at this point making visitors quarantine for three days (It used to be a 10!) take a PRC test and verify vaccination before agreeing to an outside lunch of no more than 30 minutes at distance of ten feet. They twitch the entire time. Then, there are the cavalier idiots who have had Covid 3 times and probably killed their grandmother back during Delta, but it could have been church, so why feel guilty? and surely Omicron gave them natural immunity so blathering on about the vaccine makes no sense now. They go to funeral after parties.

Most people are somewhere in the middle. They follow the rules that make sense, ignore the ones that are ridiculous, and seek guidance from trusted sources when they're not sure.

The problem, of course, is "trusted source" has become for some people a perversion. For better or worse, the internet has totally destroyed universal messaging, and public health people were caught off guard because it never occurred to them that there'd be active sabotage of their efforts. They should have known better, because this anti-vax bullshit has been bubbling up for years. OTOH, who the hell would have thought that the White House, would be actively working against public health?

So we end up with dipshits like Joe Rogan becoming "trusted sources", and well regarded researchers like Dr. Hotez having to repel the internet mob because somehow he's supposedly underpants gnome-ing himself rich through vaccine development in the third world.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Well, in fairness, I know the hippies, and they do in fact want to take away the loud assholes’ guns. But let’s just keep that on the DL for now.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Here's a thought, let's train the loud assholes to be social workers. Then we send them out to deal with active shooter situations- that way they'd have to give up their guns.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Universal messaging is almost dead, but there is a Hail Mary out there which might save it: Being honest, concise, and circumspect.

I see two villains in the Covid messaging/policy debacle:

1. The zero tolerance “treat people like children” voices. People saw thru them easily and registered that they were issuing draconian directives assuming people would follow 50% of what was demanded.

2. The “everything is a lie until proven true” voices. They attacked every directive, however reasonable. Wearing a mask and leaving packages outside for three days to allow surface Covid to die were treated with the same level of skepticism. No laddering of quality and saneness of protective measures was allowed.

These two voices feed off each other. They create a vicious whirlpool of dumbness in which people grasp at tribalism as life preservers. (Pathetically, when overwhelmed, they cling to the comfort of groupthink.)

Instead of doing that, the govt could have been honest with the American people about what policies made sense and what ones were overkill, and spoken curtly, officially, with a single voice (as opposed to a legion of them in all sorts of outlets, 24/7). We could do that. We used to do things like that. And it helped create national unity.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That’s cute. I think you forget that, when this whole thing started, the possibility of honest, unified messaging about Covid was undercut by, for example, people going around insisting with no factual basis whatsoever that Covid was no worse than a mild case of the flu and that we would see, at most, 2-3000 deaths in this country. And those same people, whether for political reasons or self interest, refused to take issue with the intentionally dishonest messaging about Covid that was coming from the executive branch. All of which made the job of the experts being honest with the American public in a unified voice about the best policies (already difficult in an extremely fluid environment) virtually impossible. Is any of this ringing any bells?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Some adult, somewhere in the administration, had to have reckoned that Trump holding news conferences where various people spoke, and not infrequently disagreed, was gas on a fire.

There should have been once weekly official statements. And the loons should have been ignored. Totally ignored. Getting into arguments with the anti-vaxxers and early anti-maskers was a colossal unforced error. That gave them a platform.

Brevity signals authority. We had anything but it.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

There has to be a willingness to adjust, however, and giving the experts total control often precludes this. They lock in a view that’s based on their expertise, and then they’re trapped with it. They can’t pivot or adjust substantially because of a mix of bias and fear of loss of face/authority. At that point, science and policy are polluted with PR and politics. (All of this is written about much more colorfully in that Martin Gurri book I recommended, btw.)

Our govt, our leaders, almost all of our institutions suffer from this tendency to lock in to methods, policies, aims, etc. we talk too much about them, oversell them, and become wedded to seeing them succeed. Our institutions outside tech suffer from an astonishing lack of nimbleness.

If we’d talked less, argued with conspiracy theorists less, and just pushed forward policies, we’d have had room room to change course as we learned more. It would have vaccinated us a bit against tribalism.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'm sorry, but who wasn't doing that?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You say that the Trump Administration screwed up the pandemic response with a vicious whirlpool of dumbness. OK. No argument here. If we could elect a new Republican Party not attracted by or beholden to Trump, maybe that would help.

Meanwhile, you are not talking about the state and local adoption of specific rules about things like restaurant closures and mask wearing, rules and decisions which might (or might not) follow CDC guidance but being made at a lower level. Here in California, that means Gavin Newsome at the state level, and the Santa Clara County Health Department for me (mostly).

You object to what they've done because you are tired of wearing a mask and you want things to go back to normal. Is that fair?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

But her emails.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

A day or two ago, you were defending the restaurant owner who went on TV and complained that the problem was the hospitals weren't stocking up on nurses and beds and ventilators.

EVERYTHING is polluted with politics and PR, but I trust the county's health officer to get the balance right in a pandemic more than I trust the guy who want to keep his sushi place open.

Where is Jim Baker when you need him?
 

By the by, you do an incredibly fantastic job of expressing the mainstream media's attitude towards Republican craziness -- it's the eternal hope for a responsible Republican who will manage the crazies, and the constant denial that the crazies are the party now.

Oh by the way
 

The best thing I ever did was to get a separate cell phone for work, with office number and e-mail by itself. When that shit gets turned off the day is over.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Haha! Cuter! I’m talking about pre-vaccines. When the loons were saying things like—well like I said, saying things like there would only 2-3,000 deaths in the U.S. total and it would be like a mild flu. There was no choice but to engage these loons because they already had a huge platform, and in fact were often just repeating “information” they heard on a major U.S. news network. This bizarre and widespread denial, even if it was motivated just because the loon loved talking about hysterical liberals with their hair on fire (over and over and over), could not be ignored because it was hindering the rest of us from preparing for the pandemic the actual epidemiologists warned was coming.

Re: Where is Jim Baker when you need him?
 

That's not going to happen. The tango analogy holds. As long as we have progressives demanding things that a majority of the country does not want, we will have crazies on the right reacting in opposition. Which came first? I don't know, and that's immaterial. (I'm of the opinion both extremes have been there all along, like viruses, waiting for the nation's immune system to weaken enough to allow them to emerge.)

But that doesn't mean the country won't normalize. The center is bigger than the poles -- many multiples of the extreme right and extreme left combined. YMMV, but there's a definite sentiment among the GOP in these parts that the age of Trump needs to be put in the rear view mirror. Far in the rear view mirror.

The problem is, Trump and the crazies occupy the media and social media spaces. So they give the false impression they're a powerful majority. It's a mirror of the extreme progressives on the left. Again, YMMV, but most Democrats I know (meaning most people I know) are not progressives. They want a centrist, neoliberal Democratic Party. That's why the moderate Rs and moderate Ds got together and voted for Joe!

Twitter isn't reality. AOC is not queen of the Democratic Party. The social justice nuts are not powerful. They're basement dwelling losers with laptops. The Trump fanatics are not the GOP. They're an angry slice of dead enders with no policy prescriptions. They just want to own the libs.

I say let them own somebody. But not the libs. Leave the libs alone. The libs are moderates. The libs believe in free speech, tolerance, and sanity.

I advocate doing as Leary once suggested: Tuning in, turning on, and dropping out...

...Of social media. And regular media.

Ignore these warring factions. Let Trump nation "pwn" the Progressives. Let them fight to their hearts content on Twitter all day, every day. Let them scream at each other about who can use which bathroom, CRT, and whatever other wedge issue they wish to use as a battlefield. And while they do so, let the sane, sober people in both parties - the adults in the room - run things.