totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[YNM]

100 years of medical and public health breakthroughs upended by new influenza-black death mix.

 

[richfiles]

I bought some RAM in May. It was advertised as 8GBx2 (16GB)
Due to having a lot of work, etc, I have not had a chance to get around to testing it or installing it. Looked at the part number... It's actually 4GBx2 (8GB) 

Saw a company that builds up economy servers for home/small business using older generation hardware.
$150 shipped for a 1U rack that has an Ivy Bridge era 4 core Xeon, 14 SATA ports on the motherboard, a 400W 80+Gold PSU, and 12x 3.5" bays + a spot for a 2.5" SSD. Not gonna lie, for a small home server or NAS, that is a ridiculously good price. The catch, it doesn't ship with memory. Also, one generally loads a server board with ECC memory... It will work with unbuffered ECC memory... Now the question is, will it work with straight up non-ECC RAM? 8GB is the suggested minimum for running FreeNAS, and well... I have 8GB of RAM that I suddenly have no other use for, but it's not ECC... And I honestly have no idea if it'll even work on that motherboard or not. 

[DDE]

TransSib right now

Send struts

[kerbiloid]

1.12, do you see, what you did?

[Lisias]

On 7/18/2021 at 5:46 AM, richfiles said:

I bought some RAM in May. It was advertised as 8GBx2 (16GB)
Due to having a lot of work, etc, I have not had a chance to get around to testing it or installing it. Looked at the part number... It's actually 4GBx2 (8GB) 

Feel your pain, same thing here. I have some parts standing on the storage for 9 months. And the backlog doesn't stop to grows… (sigh)

Once I finally manage to fix something, another one breaks (when not two) and...

 

On 7/18/2021 at 5:46 AM, richfiles said:

Saw a company that builds up economy servers for home/small business using older generation hardware.
$150 shipped for a 1U rack that has an Ivy Bridge era 4 core Xeon, 14 SATA ports on the motherboard, a 400W 80+Gold PSU, and 12x 3.5" bays + a spot for a 2.5" SSD. Not gonna lie, for a small home server or NAS, that is a ridiculously good price.

Nice rig. I bought a Dell SC1425 for peanuts two years ago, spend a bit of money expanding the CPU and the memory, and now that damned thing is one of the fastest computers on the house!!!  (and the loudest…  )

 

On 7/18/2021 at 5:46 AM, richfiles said:

The catch, it doesn't ship with memory. Also, one generally loads a server board with ECC memory... It will work with unbuffered ECC memory... Now the question is, will it work with straight up non-ECC RAM? 8GB is the suggested minimum for running FreeNAS, and well... I have 8GB of RAM that I suddenly have no other use for, but it's not ECC... And I honestly have no idea if it'll even work on that motherboard or not. 

Probably not. But the final word on the subject is on the motherboard's service manual.

Some high end motherboards are also used on Workstations, where non ECC memory is preferred (as they are slightly faster than ECC counter-parts, and for some tasks this matters), but since the thingy is on a 1U case, it appears to be highly customised as a server and I doubt it will accept non ECC memory sticks.

[YNM]

Seems like humans have a hard time learning things.

 

[Chemp]

On 7/24/2021 at 11:31 AM, YNM said:

Seems like humans have a hard time learning things.

The director-general of the World Health Organisation:

More than 3.5 billion vaccine doses have now been administered globally, and more than one in four people have received at least one vaccine dose, according to Ghebreyesus.

“On the surface, that’s good news. But it masks a horrifying injustice,” he said. “75% of vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries. In low-income countries, only 1% of people have received at least one dose, compared with more than half of people in high-income countries.” [...]

Ghebreyesus stressed that this is “not just a moral outrage,” but also epidemiologically and economically self-defeating.

source

[DDE]

We may have a serious problem. Including in learning things.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext

16 hours ago, Chemp said:

Ghebreyesus stressed that this is “not just a moral outrage,” but also epidemiologically and economically self-defeating.

After the international scuffles over PPEs in early 2020, is anyone surprised? COVID has massively empowered the proponents of economic autarky and "Country X First". 

[YNM]

On 7/25/2021 at 8:27 PM, Chemp said:

“On the surface, that’s good news. But it masks a horrifying injustice,” he said. “75% of vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries. In low-income countries, only 1% of people have received at least one dose, compared with more than half of people in high-income countries.” [...]

Yeah. Filled cemeteries and lost relatives can't lie...

12 hours ago, DDE said:

We may have a serious problem. Including in learning things.

... and that's not counting the impact it have on survivors.

Like, at this point, I have to admit pandemics are worse than the usual physical natural disasters (tropical storms/cyclones, volcano eruptions, earthquake, tsunamis) - you can't misinform those physical disasters, and even if you do additional damage is rarely a result, but you can very easily misinform a pandemic and creates many more deaths than otherwise.

[richfiles]

Oh Krakens! 

I ordered over half a grand worth of hard drives in March, NINE hard drives... And somehow, despite looking them over back when I first got them, I missed the one minor detail that they were not the part number I ordered! 

I had ordered 9 HGST Megascale Coolspin series drives for an 8 drive high efficiency NAS. The Coolspin series drives are slower, running at only 5700 RPM, but they use almost half the energy as a normal 7200 RPM drive, are quieter, run cooler, and induce less overall vibration in the enclosure they are mounted into. They come highly recommended, as they have the distinction of holding the lowest recorded statistical failure rate out of all drives Backblaze has ever recorded failure statistics for. When I found the good deal on the 12 bay server, I decided I'd order 3 more drives and just fill it out... Well, those three new drives arrived yesterday, and when I set them beside the ones ordered in March, the minor differences suddenly became glaring differences. Checked all the drives, and discovered my entire first order had been incorrectly fulfilled. Every single one of the nine drives were the wrong part number.

I had a VERY nerve-wracking night last night, knowing the drives were outside of normal return windows, given the time that has passed since March, and knowing I had nearly $600 tied up into this error.

I finally got a message, and the seller seems willing to fix the error, but I'm still nervous. I suppose I'm just gonna have to just hope all goes well, that the seller is true to their word, and that I end up with those nine hard drives safely and quickly replaced.

Edited July 27, 2021 by richfiles

[tater]

On 7/26/2021 at 11:59 AM, YNM said:

Yeah. Filled cemeteries and lost relatives can't lie...

I'm old enough to remember... literally every single year for some decades before the mid-2000s. Back then mortality was higher each year than it has been in the last year, and a higher mortality every year you go backwards for the most part (I assume the curve is a little wobbly). Since I don't recall the cemeteries overflowing then, why would they be now (they certainly were not here in hard-hit (by COVID standards) NM)?

The year my teenage daughter was born had higher mortality than 2020, and it was just "a year." Actually, my grandmother died a little before that, and she was nearing 90. She died of a respiratory illness in a care facility. Flu, RSV, or cold (coronavirus), presumably. Didn't have a catchy name, though.

 

 

Edited July 27, 2021 by tater

[Dientus]

3 hours ago, tater said:

I'm old enough to remember... literally every single year for some decades before the mid-2000s. Back then mortality was higher each year than it has been in the last year, and a higher mortality every year you go backwards for the most part (I assume the curve is a little wobbly). Since I don't recall the cemeteries overflowing then, why would they be now (they certainly were not here in hard-hit (by COVID standards) NM)?

The year my teenage daughter was born had higher mortality than 2020, and it was just "a year." Actually, my grandmother died a little before that, and she was nearing 90. She died of a respiratory illness in a care facility. Flu, RSV, or cold (coronavirus), presumably. Didn't have a catchy name, though.

 

 

Similar experience here and I know exactly what you are saying. I normally avoid all talk of the pandemic because of such terrible information, stretched truths, and outright lies that push and control people to the point of mob mentality. So I will say no more on that subject because people's passion overruns common sense and I expect no different here.

 

Instead I will say that while the pandemic is not near over, we as a species, will survive this like we did other pandemics and anyone who believes that people are not trying their best are on the other side of the fence where they think the side they are not on is greener.

Edited July 28, 2021 by Dientus
tried to clarify

[YNM]

5 hours ago, tater said:

I'm old enough to remember... literally every single year for some decades before the mid-2000s. Back then mortality was higher each year than it has been in the last year, and a higher mortality every year you go backwards for the most part (I assume the curve is a little wobbly). Since I don't recall the cemeteries overflowing then, why would they be now (they certainly were not here in hard-hit (by COVID standards) NM)?

Even then that's not a reason humans don't try to be better. The problem here is that we're literally reversing the situation.

Also you should be aware of where I come from. It's a lot worse here because of the choices we took, sure, but experts (and those who cared about the country) have exerted all the knew.

1 hour ago, Dientus said:

anyone who believes that people are not trying their best are on the other side of the fence where they think the side they are not on is greener.

Yeah I really hope that we have the mRNA vaccines here and 50% of the population is already vaccinated, and the gov't actually knows how to act on public health basis, sure.

[tater]

12 minutes ago, YNM said:

Even then that's not a reason humans don't try to be better. The problem here is that we're literally reversing the situation.

Also you should be aware of where I come from. It's a lot worse here because of the choices we took, sure, but experts (and those who cared about the country) have exerted all the knew.

You have 15% the per capita COVID mortality in Indonesia of my State, NM. NM is 208:100,000, you appear to be 32:100,000.

Unconcerning, even here in NM where my state has a total annual mortality in 2020 about like the years my kids were born. To be concerned about mortality rates that are the same as another year I was not concerned about would be irrational. My risk of auto death in 2020 was actually HIGHER than 2019 due to lockdowns for some reason (US auto deaths were up like 12% in spite of less driving). I didn't think twice about driving, even as this became clear. No one else did, either. Why not?

 

12 minutes ago, YNM said:

Yeah I really hope that we have the mRNA vaccines here and 50% of the population is already vaccinated, and the gov't actually knows how to act on public health basis, sure.

Our public health messaging here was awful, and pointless. The lockdowns, etc did nothing, sadly, half of us were infected anyway, and since herd immunity is around 60% (per CDC best guess of R₀), any mitigation only saved those 10% remaining (it'd still be around, but not as a mass outbreak, and it's been endemic now since well before this time last year).

Places with and without shutdowns, etc? You can't look at outcomes and tell which did which thing. NY, NM and HI all have similar stringency (per Oxford index), NY is among the very worst hit, NM not far behind, and HI lowest mortality in the county (slightly higher than Indonesia). The CDC here says that of the 900k excess deaths, only 2/3 are COVID. That means the shutdowns killed the other 300k, or at least a good fraction of them, the shutdowns being the only thing different about the last 18 months. If the medical practice of my wife, and many of our doctor friends are any example this is completely unsurprising having watched the empty hospital as people avoided care, or could not get it by gov action. 10% more infections (from 50% to 60%), even if the same patient pop as the worse peak, means another 100k dead. That's bad, but 300k not-COVID excess deaths is worse. Killing 300k to save 100k is a trolley problem fail. (COVID deaths have not been  undercounted in the US unless we missed a bunch in 2019 conflating them for the less interesting "flu")

Terrible public health messaging and public policy here. Probably did more harm than good.

The only NPI that works for sure? Sick people stay home, and the elderly should be particularly careful. Nursing homes? Yeah, they need a harsh PPE protocol—they are literally elderly people in a sort of long term hospice. Definitionally the most fragile people (average stay in a nursing home before 2020 was 13 months). All this Zoom crap... they should have used it to allow sick people to work from home, and everyone else could be normal. Same with schools. My kids don't want to miss school because of illness for fear of getting behind, extra work, etc. Stay home, watch class on Zoom. Stay home 2 days instead of, "I haven't thrown up or had a fever in >24 hours, I am allowed to go to school!" (usual drill here).
 

 

[YNM]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

You have 15% the per capita COVID mortality in Indonesia of my State, NM. NM is 208:100,000, you appear to be 32:100,000.

Except that undercounting is a thing here. We literally don't count coffins.

4 minutes ago, tater said:

I didn't think twice about driving, even as this became clear. No one else did, either. Why not?

If you've ever heard of 'vision zero' people are paying attention there too, but again it's something that kept getting normalized. We don't need more on top.

6 minutes ago, tater said:

The only NPI that works for sure? Sick people stay home, and the elderly should be particularly careful.

We already have people dropping dead on the streets.

[tater]

4 minutes ago, YNM said:

Except that undercounting is a thing here. We literally don't count coffins.

Yeah, that's not useful data then (the Hopkins data I was looking at).

Still, off by a factor of 10 and you're NY or NJ. Even there was not terribly concerning (except for the elderly, obviously).

I hope it's not off by that much.

 

4 minutes ago, YNM said:

If you've ever heard of 'vision zero' people are paying attention there too, but again it's something that kept getting normalized. We don't need more on top.

We already have people dropping dead on the streets.

We have that here too, though I'd imagine most ore ODs (except the 4 that were doing some sort of drug in a drainage ditch when a storm hit the mountains and sent a wave down the concrete arroyo). Don't do drugs, kids!

Edited July 28, 2021 by tater

[YNM]

28 minutes ago, tater said:

We have that here too, though I'd imagine most ore ODs

People here don't do that.

Also to the more recent end lots of these are people who died while seeking medical help, and died while self-isolating (which is the only response available when your hospitals are filled beyond the brim and is equally running out of resources and manpower).

28 minutes ago, tater said:

Still, off by a factor of 10 and you're NY or NJ. Even there was not terribly concerning (except for the elderly, obviously).

I hope it's not off by that much.

It's definitely off by that much, even one city only officially reported 2 deaths in a day when the city's main gov't hospital have 7 coffins laying on their front door (all gov't hospitals have long since been dedicated for covid treatment), clearly photographed when a legislative member visited. And that's only counting the current wave of cases post-Delta, not pre-Delta. Taking those into account it's likely to be even higher.

India only reported 400k deaths, but recent testing shows 600 mil infected and potentially 10 mil deaths. Expect here to be equally worse - they already predicted Delta to hit 50% of the population here at least and taking the CFR we could see something like 2-2.5 million deaths.

And that's in a single wave. This thing's not stopping at one wave.

And lord bless us if we get a worse strain... we'd literally be sent back into the dark ages.

Edited July 28, 2021 by YNM

[tater]

1 minute ago, YNM said:

India only reported 400k deaths, but recent testing shows 600 mil infected and potentially 10 mil deaths. Expect here to be equally worse - they already predicted Delta to hit 50% of the population here at least and taking the CFR we could see something like 2-2.5 million deaths.

The population of Indonesia is 270M?

Even at the worst IFR populations in the US that would be more like 500k deaths with 50% infection. Outside the US and Europe the IFR seems to be substantially lower, all the multivariate analysis I have seen shows worse outcomes in the richer countries because they have more old people. Ave age Indonesia is 29, vs 38 in the US, and 42 in Belgium (really badly hit). This should skew IFR well downwards.

IFR from a meta analysis of antibody data shows it to vary by country between under 0.2% to about 0.4%. Those are of course averages, and skew heavily towards the very old who are at a few orders of magnitude more risk than people under 20.

I think countries like mine should not push to vaccinate people already immune (infected), or people not at risk (almost all people under 25 are at virtually zero risk except those already severely ill). Those vaccines should be sent to people in need in other countries where they are not or less available.

 

[YNM]

3 hours ago, tater said:

Even at the worst IFR populations in the US that would be more like 500k deaths with 50% infection. Outside the US and Europe the IFR seems to be substantially lower, all the multivariate analysis I have seen shows worse outcomes in the richer countries because they have more old people. Ave age Indonesia is 29, vs 38 in the US, and 42 in Belgium (really badly hit). This should skew IFR well downwards.

We don't have good medical capability, there are a lot less doctors per capita - only 1%-10% of the US I think. I've heard ECMO being used in the US and Europe and other developed countries for very severe cases, and ethics have gone to those, but here not a single mention of it even appears, here even ventilators and more importantly medical oxygen are at critical situation, and ICUs have like 20% survival rate. And that's considering those that even gets medical help - a ton more aren't. IFR of 1% seems more likely here in the long term if the trend continues.

India have median age of 26 and they're hit pretty badly (idk if anyone here saw the whole "bodies floating down the Ganges" thing). Young age is not a guarantee anymore now that we have Delta onboard.

And these are just talk of deaths. Long Covid is also a thing, and that's something you guys can worry about too, here our hands are full as-is with coffins, trying to get people masked, and getting people fed and not dying from hunger instead in lockdowns (the gov't wouldn't direct much help here).

And again, the concern here globally is of an even worse strain. You don't need to fall sick to contribute to the mutation rate, and vaccines alone does not stop infection. Delta already shows at least one significant mutation in the US and the UK... how long again must we wait for the one strain to end them all ? This is why I also think that this is a humanitarian disaster, in the sense that people are only thinking of what happens to them but doesn't realize what could come to them by letting the others go unnoticed.

I am vaccinated once, and I should be getting the 2nd shot in a few days, but it's not the mRNA vaccine (either the normal one or the Adenovirus-based one), it's the inactivated virus vaccine, and even right off the bat (ie. pre-Delta) it does have a lower efficacy. If we want this pandemic to end humans should really help every other humans.

Edited July 28, 2021 by YNM

[kerbiloid]

I'm far from insulting the ancient culture, but bodies floating down the river is a clear sign that there is a lot of other lethal infections around over there, to make the covid just a control shot.

Also, why smoking and tobacco planting is not prohibited everywhere?

They are killing the same lungs.

Edited July 28, 2021 by kerbiloid

[YNM]

4 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

bodies floating down the river is a clear sign that there is a lot of other lethal infections around over there

Yeah, secondary infection with fungus is a thing there (and probably here too, just that it hasn't surfaced yet, there were cases of it in the past albeit unrelated to covid).

In any case, not a good news.

Edited July 28, 2021 by YNM

[kerbiloid]

1 minute ago, YNM said:

Yeah, secondary infection with fungus is a thing there

I mean much more primary infections, like cholera and dysintery. 

Obviously, when the organism is under their attack, the covid will finish it much easier.

***

Before accusing the non-vaccinated, they should stop smokers from killing others' lungs which they need in case of covid.

[YNM]

9 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

I mean much more primary infections, like cholera and dysintery. 

Well one can only imagine.

But still, if those diseases were previously treatable because the medical capacity was there, now there're probably lots of it that goes untreated, and that can easily creates more deaths as well.

There's a reason pandemics are a bad thing.

[Dientus]

13 hours ago, YNM said:

Yeah I really hope that we have the mRNA vaccines here and 50% of the population is already vaccinated, and the gov't actually knows how to act on public health basis, sure.

I said nothing about governments. And I won't to abide by forum rules.

 

I will say that mainstream media claims to have verified a vaccinated person caught COVID. Regardless of this being true or not, a virus will always mutate, and animals that are immune will survive. Mankind has yet to my knowledge, completely cured any virus that is similar to this one.

 

Besides it's like my grandfather always used to say, "believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see." What you believe is entirely your choice.

10 hours ago, YNM said:

There's a reason pandemics are a bad thing.

One could argue that pandemics are a good thing because they strengthen a species. There are examples of that as well. But as in all things at the end of the day it's all opinions.

[YNM]

1 hour ago, Dientus said:

One could argue that pandemics are a good thing because they strengthen a species.

Well I thought we're off the shackles of merely limited by genetics and onto the new era of evolution by information.

1 hour ago, Dientus said:

I will say that mainstream media claims to have verified a vaccinated person caught COVID. Regardless of this being true or not, a virus will always mutate, and animals that are immune will survive. Mankind has yet to my knowledge, completely cured any virus that is similar to this one.

There have been no vaccines for coronavirus until this one, and the family of coronavirus causing common cold and the family that causes SARS and MERS is completely different. We're against the latter here.

And yeah vaccinated person (even fully vaccinated) getting a COVID infection is real. It's not just one person only anymore either - it's families at once.

Spoiler