Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, December 4, 2024
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81 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
I believe we should have universal healthcare. There are dozens of models around the world that work. Pick one. However, I’m feeling churlish about giving anything to rural America that continually votes in legislatures and policies that go against me and my family’s interests. Whether it’s education, healthcare, or energy. I should be a better person but right now I’m not feeling it.
Rural providers, advocates push Texas Legislature to “rescue” maternal health care system
@Scott: Same for this:
Texas has billions pledged to expand broadband. Spending it is taking a while.
@Scott:
Rather than continuing to subsidize the “rural” lifestyle, simply buy them out and let them move to the suburbs.
@Scott: Obviously, offering medical care to pregnant women is a deliberate violation of God’s will — if He wants them to die in childbirth, who are we to oppose Him?
This is very strange:
C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare Is Fatally Shot in Midtown Manhattan
The executive, Brian Thompson, was shot in the chest in what people briefed on the investigations said appeared to be a targeted attack.
A manhunt is underway. Here’s the latest.
The chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, was fatally shot in the chest in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday morning, according to a police report and two people familiar with the matter.
The report said that the executive, Brian Thompson, 50, was shot just after 6:45 a.m. at 1335 Sixth Avenue, the address for the New York Hilton Midtown, according to the report. Mr. Thompson was taken to Mount Sinai West in critical condition.
Police officers are still searching for the gunman, who fled east on foot along Sixth Avenue, the report said. He was wearing a cream-colored jacket, a black face mask and a gray backpack.
The police believe Mr. Thompson was targeted in the attack, which happened during the company’s annual investor conference in New York City.
Mr. Thompson had arrived early to prepare, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The gunman apparently knew which door Mr. Thompson was going to enter and shot him several times from mere feet away, then fled. The gunman, the people said, ran, jumped on a bicycle and pedaled away. […]
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/04/nyregion/brian-thompson-uhc-ceo-shot?
I fixed the spatula that I broke, then decided I can’t use it. The problem is the putty used to fix it will wind up inside whatever I’m stirring in the pot. I don’t think it’s a good idea to let who knows what chemicals be exposed to hot liquids one later intends to consume.
So, I got a similar one.
I should explain it’s kind of a combo spatula and spoon, made of silicon. It’s more for scraping and stirring than spreading or lifting (though it’s great for lifting loose stuff like onions being browned). It’s often called a spoon-spatula or, in ridiculous portmanteau, spoonula (that will do for an ugly word until one trumps it.. oh…)
The new one seems ok, but it’s more flexible and thinner. We’ll see. Once I find one I like, I’m getting a few more.
Meantime, it looks like I’ll try making chili, or a beef stew with beans, next week. I’m thinking about how to go about it. I prefer ground beef in chili, but it would be a terrible idea to cook it under pressure with the beans. Beef cubes, on the other hand, can be browned first, and then allowed to cook under pressure so they fall apart, and all the beef flavor goes into the stew.
@Jen:
I’m guessing someone saw a medical bill United Healthcare wouldn’t reimburse.
Obviously I’m against murder. But there are degrees, and I’ll be interested to hear about the killer’s motivation.
@Michael Reynolds: While I had the same “disgruntled customer” reaction to this news, this sounds much more planned than disgruntlement normally produces. I, too, will be interested to hear more.
@Kathy: Why not make guisada with frijoles. I think I’ll try it myself just to see how it turns out.
So this is a first for me, been feeling super cruddy since late Sunday and took a Covid test and tested positive. First time I have officially tested positive. I was vaccinated against Covid again a few weeks back, but that has only lightly lessened the impact, guess since this is my bodies first time having Covid and I am on the other side of 50 it is hitting me harder than I though it would. Registering for teledoc services so I can get some meds and get on the mend right quick.
I do not believe anyone should have a belief they cannot explain and justify.
I’ve mentioned here before a traumatic (well…) experience when I was maybe 13. At that point I was still a Christian. I got into a debate with a smart kid who was an atheist. I won the debate, but only by virtue of skill at debating. I knew I should have lost. What I took from that is that I would never again believe anything I could not explain and honestly defend. If I am confronted with counter-arguments which I cannot refute and yet cling to my position, I would see that as dishonest and cowardly.
Which is why I so dislike our resident Trumpies. I think they are dishonest and cowardly. Almost 60 years later it still bothers me that I got a dishonest ‘win.’
@Jen: @Michael Reynolds: @Joe:
Thompson’s wife Pauline said he had been receiving “some threats” recently.
I wish there were an app for that…
excising images of the orange wannabe fuhrer from news articles. I’d even pay for it.
Gee whillickers, what a treat:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/donating-1m-for-trumps-inauguration-gets-you-dinner-with-melania/
@Jen:
The list of suspects could be very long:
disgruntled customer
disgruntled employee
disgruntled doctor/hospital administrator
family matters
ambitious executive
ambitious board member
competitor
rival
@CSK: If you are a billionaire and sign something that guarantees no pre-nup, she’ll divorce Donald and marry you.
@Michael Reynolds: Well, I definitely am in favor of examining one’s self and one’s beliefs closely, and being skeptical.
AND, I think finding a human with a belief that is unjustified, and rests on a completely emotional basis is about as newsworthy as “Dog Bites Man”.
@inhumans99: Ugh, so sorry. Get on Paxlovid for sure. I finally got COVID last January and started on it 48 hours after I first started showing symptoms. Within the first 12 hours on Paxlovid, the symptoms started to recede. At the end of the five day course of treatment, I had a brief resurgence for about a day and a half.
There’s no doubt in my mind that it would have taken a much worse course without the meds.
This argument for re-designing the Democratic Party deserves your time:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-party-civic-life-local-membership/
@CSK:
From the NYT
Not a disgruntled customer.
@Jay L Gischer:
Oh, it’s very, very common. Think about how much misery and horror has come from people believing things they could neither explain nor defend. It’s what makes people sheep to be led around by the ruthless.
Funny if Hunter Biden refuses to cooperate with or testify before Congress and gets charged with the criminal contempt of Congress charges: one count of not providing documents, and one count of not testifying used against Steve Bannon.
I found the COVID vaccines made me feel worst than actually having COVID.
Being immunofortified vaccinated and boosted (8 times) against COVID should make having COVID a minor inconvenience. Or is COVID still mutating into a more lethal variant as predicted in 2020 because of the unvaccinated.
@Paul L.:
Covid, like other viruses, is constantly mutating. It’s what viruses do. Sometimes they become more contagious, sometimes less; sometimes more lethal, sometimes less. They are a wily enemy. Given that they don’t have brains (or much of anything being many times smaller than the smallest bacterium) it’s disturbing that the Big Brains of homo sapiens can’t outwit them.
I’ve had two rounds, both knocked down quickly by Paxlovid. Wife ditto. Eldest daughter too.
Covid we more or less have under some degree of control. Be more afraid of bird flu which makes Covid look like seasonal allergies. And of course, there’s measles, because Trump is turning our healthcare over to an unhinged nutcase. Flu is very clever at spreading, but measles is the Einstein of contagion.
I was in the first generation of kids to get the polio vaccine. At that time there were still thousands of people in iron lungs. Smallpox (I dare you to Google some images) killed millions over the course of centuries, and now it’s all gone, thanks to what? Vaccines. Which our new HHS Secretary doesn’t believe in.
@Michael Reynolds:
I was told by Rachel Maddow that we must have COVID Vaccine mandates or COVID will mutate into a more lethal variant and kill us all.
Every lifeform on Earth mutates not just viruses.
@Joe:
According to the Daily Mail (yeah, I know), Thompson was facing a DOJ investigation for fraud and insider trading.
@Kathy: are we sure it’s not just like RFK jr?
@Kathy: If it helps any, the thing you’re describing is called a “spurtle” (sp?) in Ireland. I have a bamboo one that came with a kitchen tools set I got for purchasing some foodstuff/culinary item while I was in Korea. They are great tools.
@wr:..
Is this the “biblical stance” on women?
@Paul L.:
Rachel Maddow was absolutely correct. Listen to people who know WTF they’re talking about, ie: not Fox News et al. Look at it this way: we are at war with this virus. Refusing to be vaccinated and refusing to follow health guidelines is like throwing down your weapons and refusing to fight.
@Jen: “The report said that the executive, Brian Thompson, 50, was shot just after 6:45 a.m. at 1335 Sixth Avenue,”
That’s like three blocks from my building…
@Kingdaddy: Interesting idea. My only question is how you restart this phenomenon in a nation where we pay people to deliver groceries to us. If we won’t even shop for food, how do you get people who are so divorced from reality to join quixotic efforts like grassroots politics?*
*And no, I’m not interested in joining a ward-level political action committee, either.
@Paul L.:
They generally mutate to less lethal forms lest they kill off their hosts, and therefore themselves.
Maddow is a nut.
@Paul L.: It took me all of two minutes to find the following quote from people who know what they’re talking about:
In other words, the larger the infected population, the more rapidly mutations will develop. Which is why curtailing the disease, not letting it run rampant, is the better approach.
Please go ahead and believe what you want about transubstantiation, who would win a fight between the Hulk and Superman, or the best hot sauce on the market. When it comes to immunology, however, not listening to people who know what they’re talking about has deadly consequences.
And before anyone jumps in to say, “But the scientists in 2020 kept changing what they said about COVID-19!!!” That’s because we were dealing with a new disease, whose method of transmission, lethality, and other characteristics weren’t initially known. How viruses work wasn’t ever in question, even if there were unknowns about this particular virus.
@CSK: $1m and you get just Melania, no Donald?
This might have been Melania’s idea to avoid dining with that man she married.
@Mister Bluster: It’s the Texas Biblical stance as I understand it…
@just nutha: I don’t think it’s hard to get people to join organizations when they think they can be part of something bigger than themselves, make a useful contribution, and socialize with new people. I do think that the Democratic Party gave up on trying to do something like that. Almost every call to action (sign this petition, call your Representative, etc.) is a hidden fundraising pledge. It’s a lonely world when your primary relationship to the party, or any other group whose cause you support, is just contributions to a faceless entity.
This is where the Republicans have been kicking Democrats’ asses for decades. Many of the groups that support the modern Republican Party, such as right-wing churches, provide the kind of engagement that the article describes — and there is almost no equivalent on the left. Watching MSNBC and then clicking the Like and Subscribe buttons is no substitute.
It’s not that the Democratic Party, and other groups supporting it, can’t do this. It’s just that they increasingly lost interest in building and sustaining engagement (except around elections, and even then, the effort is pretty weak).
@Jack: “They generally mutate to less lethal forms lest they kill off their hosts, and therefore themselves.”
How did that work out with polio?
And even saying you’re right, in 1952 there were 57,000 cases in the US — 3145 died while more than 20,000 were left with some level of paralysis. Had we done what MAGAs want and thrown Dr. Salk in prison for attempting to create a vaccine, how many more children would die or become paralyzed before the virus mutated to something safer? Before you answer, remember that it had spent the previous half century growing increasingly more virulent.
Or maybe we should consider HIV. We know how many people AIDS killed in the US before drug treatments were developed. Should we just have continued to let the virus wipe out another hundred thousand people in the 90s in the hope that maybe it would just decide to go away?
@Joe: we have lots of ex-military in this country, and presumably some police are well trained. And guns everywhere. And health insurance companies make money by denying care.
Also, I expect even professional hit men have health insurance.
Health insurance is pretty ubiquitous. I would not rule out disgruntled customer (or close family of disgruntled customer) just because the killing was competently done.
@wr: Where were you at 6:45 this morning?
@Paul L.:
Don’t listen to anyone else, you want to get natural immunity. You should get natural immunity for as many diseases as possible. Covid, polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough, malaria, plague, AIDS… go for it.
@Paul L.:
@Gustopher:
Good call.
@Joe: The whole thing feels more planned than your average disgruntled person, particularly possessing the apparent knowledge that he’d be arriving early to prep for the meeting. That seems like really specific knowledge of the individual, rather than a random person upset about being denied a claim. But who knows, maybe I’ve just watched too many shows on the telly.
Just ran across this:
Well, Mitch, payback is hell, isn’t it?
@wr:
Overall, viruses tend to adapt in a way that does not kill nor disable the host quickly. Those that do this tend to spread more than those that kill or disable fast. This does not mean all viruses tend to get less virulent, especially if they can infect multiple host species.
What long term damage they may cause their host matters little as regards spread and reproduction, which is the whole point of infection. The first COVID variants were about as bad as the original. Then we got the Delta variant, which was both more transmissible and more virulent than the original trump virus, and at the same time not as easily stopped by the vaccines at the time.
That later we got Omicron which is less virulent and more transmissible, is pure luck.
The thing to keep in mind is we also adapt to viruses and other pathogens. Why do we call it the adaptive immune system? And we can do this far more easily and cheaply, both in terms of money and overall suffering from disease, by the use of vaccines.
Now, some viruses haven’t adapted well to us, nor us to them. Stuff like Ebola and Marburg, for instance. They first disable and then kill their host rather fast. With a mortality rate of around 50%, few people survive to develop long term memory B and T cells.
Of course, part of the problem is that people try to contain the outbreaks. Patients are isolated, and those who treat them wear protective suits sealed off from the environment. If we allowed the virus to run rampant, and deliberately exposed lots of people to infected patients, both we and the viruses would adapt better to each other faster.
Or, crazy idea, we may instead develop a vaccine for these viruses, rather than undergo days or weeks of agonizing pain, bloody diarrhea, bloody vomit, dehydration, fever, etc. with a fifty/fifty chance of death.
Say, how about a controlled experiment to prove the superiority of herd immunity to hemorrhagic fevers? I volunteer all our trolls. They should like not taking a vaccine.
@Paul L.:
I’d like to see the actual transcript of that (or video).
Yeah, I thought so.
@Bobert:
Viewers demand apology from MSNBC, Rachel Maddow for previous COVID vaccine comment
And this is defended as she didn’t mean the COVID variants.
@Kingdaddy:
Experts are never wrong because SCIENCE!
Nobel Prize for Medicine for gastric ulcer breakthrough
@Jay L Gischer: I saw that last night and uttered a string of words that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap back in the day. What an unvarnished hypocrite. He can f&^% right off with that complaint, allllll the way back to Kentucky.
@Paul L.: I was told by Rachel Maddow that we must have COVID Vaccine mandates or COVID will mutate into a more lethal variant and kill us all.
I like Rachel Maddow, she’s smart and I agree with a lot of her takes on politics. That being said, I don’t turn to her show for medical advice. I have a SIL who is board certified in immunology, a brother who is doctor, and we have a friend who is an epidemiologist working for the CDC. I think I’ll take their advice over that of a television pundit. And the friend who works for the CDC is already looking, no way he’ll stay there if ant-vaxer is head of the CDC.
@Franklin:
I don’t get it.
@just nutha:
I bought my old one at a kitchen supply store in Vegas, of all places, sometime around 2012. I don’t recall exactly why, but I found it useful for lots of things.
@Paul L.: You said:
Experts are often wrong. This is the entire reason behind the scientific method. Which is that it’s not the expertise, it’s the data.
AND, if you don’t know the data – if you don’t know what experiments have been done, and how much data supports or contradicts some idea – you are behind. You don’t have a better idea, you have a worse idea, that is more poorly supported.
The idea behind the Flat Earth Society – at least for some – is that they refuse to take anyone’s word for some scientific assertion that they cannot verify for themselves.
This makes it a fun hobby – how can I prove to a person with normal resources that the earth is round. So they go up in balloons and so on.
In the meantime, we use Einstein’s General Relativity to make GPS work.
@Jay L Gischer:
They could just stand at a port and watch departing ships. The hull will disappear below the horizon while the superstructure is visible above it, as though there were a curved planet between the ship and the dock.
Proofs for relativity, both kinds, is looking at data from very accurate instruments that measure very tiny things. Not very exciting. It’s like looking at the Wow! Signal: completely meaningless to most people.
@Jack:
And sometimes, by the contingencies of evolution, they mutate to more lethal forms, so long as the infection rate is sufficient to outrun the host-killing rate.
How the heck do you suppose the virulent variations of Plague bacillus, influenza virus, smallpox, etc emerged in the first place?
So long as the viral, or bacterial, reservoir remains, such outbreaks are possible.
That does not mean social isolation must be enforced to prevent any possible infection outbreak.
It does mean it’s sensible to keep a wary eye on known break-out candidates, and pre-prep vaccination programmes.
There’s good reason to think measles, pertussis, and some others, were on a potential break-out track prior to mass vaccination.
@JohnSF:
Exactly. With something like ebola, the virus moves so fast and kills so quickly that it used to be “contained” by wiping out small groups quickly. Now that people travel, really the only thing preventing a big ebola outbreak is the simple fact that it moves so fast you usually don’t get too far before feeling really lousy.
@Jay L Gischer:
@Kathy:
Also, shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse.
Angle of the Sun at noon on a certain date, see Erastophenes c.250 BC.
Day length variation, if you think about it.
It’s a bit of a canard that medieval Europeans thought the Earth was flat; the educated were perfectly aware that it was not. Biblical references to such were not taken seriously.
@Gustopher:
@Michael Reynolds:
Last week I had a vax for pneumococcus, which is a twice in a lifetime thing.
(And seeing as I’m not an infant, yet a another sign of getting elderly, *sigh*)
Felt utterly cruddy for four days, and my left shoulder still aches.
Of course it’s a bloody good thing to get it.
Because acute pneumonia and/or meningitis are no effin joke.
Ask any doctor who’s seen severe cases.
@Jay L Gischer:
Physicists are correct so are Biologists.
Science question puzzling me: If Black holes/Singularities are infinitely dense how do they get bigger when additional mass is added?
See Sagittarius A* v. TON 618
@Paul L.:
Does that mean I can get a vaccine against an imminent outbreak of planetoftheapesia?
Just in case? 🙂
Or squirrels?
Never trusted those little sods.
@Kingdaddy: I hope, for the sake of you and people who are like you, that you are right. The Nation’s record on forecasting social phenomena is spotty at best, though. Either way, the process will be long enough so that I’m unlikely to see it. Good luck all the same.
@JohnSF:
Columbus had the idea of a shorter route to Asia, because he had the wrong figures for the Earth’s circumference. Not because he alone knew the planet was a spheroid.
Vaccines against bacterial diseases are very important to get. A lof of bugs are becoming resistant to antibiotics, and pharmaceutical firms are slow coming up with new ones. The vaccine is the best bet.
Mutations are also a thing the public gets waaaaaaaay wrong due to pop culture, in particular comic books.
@Paul L.:
If things are infinitely dense …
(Oh Lord, deliver me from temptation…)
Because the singularity point is infinitely dense, but infinite density does not equal infinite mass.
That’s the very short version of the consensus: the detailed mathematics are rather abstruse, much debated, and WAY beyond my level.
In addition, we simply DO NOT fully understand the physics of singularities, seeing as experimenting with them is a bit, shall we say, problematic.
And in many respect known physics collapses at the singularity, along with matter, and quite possible the sanity of physicists.
Therefore we have to rely on astronomical evidence, and working out the mathematical physics of what we do know and can infer.
The mathematics of gravitational physics indicate singularities in “Black Holes”, the astronomical evidence is for their existence at a variety of mass levels, and the particle physics just shrugs in embarrassment and wanders off to do other stuff.
@Gustopher:
Good idea, but I would suggest, Paul, that you start with Ebola. Get the heavy lifting done early, I always say.
@Kathy:
Yes, that why a lot of people at the time thought the idea of getting to Asia via the Atlantic was daft.
There are indications that Portuguese and Breton sailors had a shrewd idea there were, at least, islands in the western Atlantic. Seem various fishermen visited the Grand Banks well before Columbus; it would be rather surprising if none had never happened upon Newfoundland or Nova Scotia.
@JohnSF:
What’s denser, a kilo of feathers or a kilo of rocks? 😀
The answer is obvious.
Infinities are problematic in science, especially in physics (I don’t think mathematicians mind them much). See Renormalization, which I don’t come close to understanding. It feels like “let’s just say it’s no infinite, and it’s not!” But it works.
@Paul L.: “Physicists are correct so are Biologists.”
This statement gives me the sense that you didn’t understand anything about what I said. Not a damn thing. That makes me sad. Maybe I’ll try again another day.
David Frum calls out Morning Joe for being weak-kneed in the face of intimidation:
@Bobert:
Do you want two + years of Russia, Russia, Russia until she had to, tears in eyes, finally admit she is a fool, and that HRC, approved by JB and BO just ran a dirty political op. Filthy pigs.
The American people figured it out.
@JohnSF:
And sizes! Depending on whether you quantify a black hole as the event horizon, or the mathematical singularity contained within the event horizon. Also rotation.
But, if you measure from the event horizon, which makes sense because we cannot see inside the event horizon, there are very clear, not infinite densities.
Measuring inside the event horizon would also be complicated by the compression of space inside. It’s basically like a cube that is 1 meter on all sides having a volume of 0.5 cubic-meters rather than 1 cubic-meter*. I don’t think a layman’s definition of density works at that point, and I have no idea what a physicist’s definition would be.
——
*: traditionally you simplify things into spheres, but the math is harder in this case. Think of it as a very round cube.
I’ll give Trump this, at least the corruption isn’t hidden
https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/04/but-his-crypto/
Well, isn’t this interesting:
Revealed: the Operators Behind Four Major Neo-Nazi X Accounts
Banality of evil indeed.
@Gustopher:
Assume a spherical cow.
@wr:
Except they don’t consider HIV/AIDS. Hell, Kennedy Jr. seems to think that Poppers causes AIDS. The Right wing seems to think that HIV/AIDS is a moral failing of drug users and gay men and if we just hand waive way those populations or let them die, AIDS will go away and herd immunity will be achieved. Not realizing that Mike Pence is responsible for making an AIDS outbreak worse by making the same sort of nonsense arguments that Paul is making.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/02/how-mike-pence-made-indianas-hiv-outbreak-worse-118648
Between being old enough to remember the AIDS crisis and being in the queer community most of my life, this stuff is my history. Pop quiz, without looking anything up, who is the first person you remember learning about having AIDS. Doesn’t matter if it was a public figure or a friend.
For me it’s Ryan White. Not a gay man. Not a drug user.
This is the future that Republicans want.
I am not seeing why some guys discovering the cause of gastric ulcers is an indictment of science. It was a good discovery. Earlier beliefs that ulcers were caused by stress weren’t really based on scientific discovery but assumptions. One of those assumptions was that bacteria really couldn’t thrive in gastric contents. Someone took a scientific approach and figured it out.
Steve
Re Paul L and Maddow. Maddow did indeed say what L claimed. He may have had the quote in front of him, hoping somebody would question it and he could chalk up a win in his own mind. What he didn’t mention was that his link is to a FOX story from December ’21 saying social media users were demanding an apology for a statement Maddow made in March of that year. First, the situation was a lot more confused in early ’21. Second, this is typical FOX, it’s seldom liberal X did or said X, it’s liberal X is being being criticized by somebody for it. In this case randos on social media. Third, FOX had to reach that hard to take a shot at Maddow.
This is a great example of what I think should be a well known, listed in WIKI with a Latin name, fallacy, the fallacy of imperfection. Google Translate suggests fallacia imperfectionis. I found a flaw in X therefore X is bad. It’s sort of like the Nirvana fallacy, but really a special case of the fallacy of composition. L is implying Maddow is bad, or science is bad, or, with him, gawd knows what. Maddow makes mistakes, science makes mistakes, NYT makes mistakes. They still beat hell out of Tucker Carlson, or RFK Jr., or FOX.
@steve:
I’ve brought this up a number of times. another factor, as far as I know, is that bland diets, stress management, and beta blockers did ease symptoms.
@Beth:
I’m sure I read at least a few names of AIDS patients in news magazines and in particular in Discover magazine, but I can’t say I recall any of them.
Isaac Asimov contracted HIV from a blood transfusion in the course of a coronary bypass operation in 1983. He never disclosed this. His memoir, “I, Asimov”, tells of kidney and heart disease in his latter years, and the cause of death in 1992 given to the press was heart and kidney failure.
It wasn’t until 2002 that his widow revealed he died of AIDS. I remember feeling angry at the revelation, because it shouldn’t have been something anyone felt they had to hide.
@gVOR10:
I found something like that in a video about LED traffic lights, of all things, on a Youtube channel called Technology Connections. Here’s the link. The host calls it “But sometimes!”
The point is LED traffic lights last a lot longer, use up a lot less power, are much brighter (and thus easier to see in daytime), BUT SOMETIMES!!11!! it gets covered in snow when there’s heavy snowfall, and the light can’t be seen at all.
As downsides go, this is a small one, far outweighed by the upsides. Opponents of LED lights use this as an argument against them.
It has a simple solution. The higher efficiency of LEDs means they put out little waste heat*, that’s why they can be covered by snow. The more inefficient incandescent bulbs put out a lot of waste heat, which melts any accumulating snow. So, install a heater that is activated only when there’s heavy snowfall. Yes, it raises installation costs a bit, but it keeps the lower maintenance costs and lower operating costs. No-brainer.
besides, it doesn’t snow every day, even in winter, never mind heavy snowfall. In some places it never snows at all. I mean, would you be concerned about snow obscuring traffic lights in LA or Miami or Mexico City?
*I switched the bulbs in my old place with compact fluorescents in the middle of winter. My bedroom was definitely a bit colder at night, due to the lower waste heat. Again, small downside. Simple solution: wear a second sweatshirt (it doesn’t get that cold here).
@Jack: Seriously, whatever human being is behind your ID, take a walk outdoors. Re-watch the funniest movie you’ve enjoyed. Hug your kids, grandkids, dog, cat, whatever. Or, as I suggested the other day, watch A Christmas Carol. You might find it meaningful, even uplifting.
@Jack:
No hablo. Could you please repeat that in English? Seriously.
@Paul L.: have you ever been wrong about anything you believed was correct? How true did that belief feel before you discovered it was wrong? Does anything that you currently believe feel true like that? How do you know that belief won’t also turn out to be wrong?
@Jack: I would much prefer someone who has the humility to admit a mistake, and more importantly the ability to recognize when they’ve made a mistake, than someone who is so dead certain that they can’t be wrong that they continue living in a fantasy world against all evidence to the contrary
@Paul L.: @Jack:
I wonder if you’ve noticed that a bunch of us here, none who agree with you politically, are nevertheless trying to keep you healthy. While your compadre Jack – much like Trump – DGAF.
@Scott:
Those 4 guys all follow each other. Two of them have about 225,000 followers which is only a small fraction of the total number of people on Twitter. Their follower count is rising rapidly though, image here:
https://www.texasobserver.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/image-768×551.png
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