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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Indeed, I’m not sure even testing is sufficient. My family recently got it (my wife and I visiting my parents), but thought nothing of it for a week. My father had a sore throat, my mother had watery eyes and some nasal congestion. My father masked indoors (because I don’t want a regular cold either) and chalked my mother’s symptoms to seasonal allergies (the cars were covered with Pine pollen all week). Then, on the drive home, my wife felt off. 10 hours in the car together. She slept in the guest room that night and, just for grins, tested for Covid the next morning. She was positive. We called and had my parent’s test - both positive. I tested negative so I packed my things and rented a hotel room for the week and worked there alone. I tested every other day and was never positive, but I cancelled all my client meetings.

    I still never “got it” but…is it really feasible I didn’t have some low level? This is my second trip in a car for multiple hours with someone who tested positive the next day. Granted, I’m about 4 vaccines in (2xOG, 1 updated, 1 XBB variant), but so is my wife. I have to think that I had some sub-clinical level of viral load, or at least below the antigen test threshold, but I’m thankful I escaped symptoms.





  • This is buying into the Republican way of thinking, which is that you criticize someone’s performance for any shortcoming you feel. A progressive stance is to elevate other people (There is more than one person in Government) who are doing things correctly without tearing down the current leader. It s the difference between a collaborative government and a competitive one. Within a (generally speaking) unified political block which values diversity of opinions, a collaborative approach is much more productive than a competitive one.

    The strength of a movement is in the sum of the effort.






  • I agree that there are statistical methods to everything, and they are quite powerful. My concern is that population sample is limited and, in many ways self-selecting, due to the ability of pollsters to access a representative cross section of the (population/voting population). I noted the impossibility of getting a representative sample using telephone polling. Online would be just as fraught - huge demographics literally don’t participate in those communication methods, by choice. Granted, actual voting is similarly inaccurate, and can be wildly so, do to voluntary non-participation; but the cross product of phone/internet poll users and voters, I would suspect, is pretty far from 1.0.


  • according to the polls.

    Yeah, about those - I’ve been wondering who and how they’re polling. Nobody I know under 50 even has a real landline, and most of them don’t pick up calls on their cell unless it comes up as someone in their contacts. Same with SMS or any messaging. Web ads? Facebook ads (LOL)? It sure as hell isn’t email, either. It’s probably nearly impossible to get any realistic data in person since most people avoid in-person marketing even harder than online. The only people I know who do answer the telephone are old people - like over 55 or 60, and that’s a pretty skewed demographic.


  • If he wants to have a third party doctor give him a cognizant test, and he passes it, and he publicly notifies all of us voters of that, then I would be up for voting for him again.

    Except for the fact that it’s generally military physicians who treat the President, he gets a cognitive test every year as part of his physical. Trump got one every year too, and was as proud as a toddler with a gold star sticker when he “passed” it. The white house releases the results of the President’s annual exam and, presuming you do not distrust the doctor, it is what it is.

    Nobody is going to be administering some mental agility test on the President any more than they’ll be asking him to complete and pass the ACFT (Army Combat Fitness Test).

    (IMO he should have stepped aside last year and let Kamala Harris take over as President to give her a chance to make her own case for re-election, making way for the next generation to lead.)



  • You could say the same for a finite element model. A junior engineer with just 4 years of training can solve, explicitly, the deflection at the center of a slender, simple-simple beam of prismatic section and produce an exact (if slightly incorrect) answer. Building a FEM of the same can solve the problem and take longer (to make the model) with similar accuracy, both of which are good enough for design work.

    Only a fool wouldn’t have a FEM around though, as it can solve problem that would take centuries for a human to solve. They may as well make a cartoon with the child digging a 3” hole in beach sand and then showing a backhoe making a jagged edged hole of the same size.



  • A movie-set must have certain features (full, even, ready for shooting on schedule) and there are millions of dollars on the line - you don’t just plant a field and hope it meets spec - I would think someone was making case it would be ready for filming. That that’s time and effort. The movie industry unions have livable - one might say exceptional - wages, even for someone just checking to make sure the corn field is maturing properly, much less planting and tending the crop.

    An un-referenced medium article says he invested $100,000 in the corn field and he generated $162,000 in revenue, with no indication of the expenses of monitoring or harvesting. The best result would be $62k (compared to the $20,000,000 Nolan was paid for the film) in profit if the “investment “ included all of the miscellaneous expenses I mentioned above (as well as the lawyers cost for acquisition, travel and time spent finding the plot and securing all of the contracts for farming and harvest) and wasn’t absorbed in the “film budget”.