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

[Dientus]

58 minutes ago, YNM said:

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.

Mainstream media claims two vaccines here, although one is claimed to have issues #allegedly #unverified

And yes, they mutate in the wild where targeted vaccines can no longer work properly.

1 hour ago, YNM said:

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

(I look at moderators)

All I can say is please do this. Run an anonymous, good VPN. Bounce out of different countries using different search engines, and you decide for yourself.

[StrandedonEarth]

Dammit.

My cat got out yesterday morning. Normally when he gets out, he's back later in the morning, but he didn't come back. Cats are not allowed to roam in our strata, but try telling a cat it's not allowed outside. It'll find a way, and if it doesn't want to be caught, then good luck if you don't have some help and some good treats.

Then my cat was found dead at the base of a tree in the complex this morning .  No apparent injury, so the consensus (without spending stupid money on a post-mortem) is poison of some sort. Maybe coolant? Quite possibly a poisoned rodent, since there are baits around. And my dog found a mouse behaving oddly (to me; it didn't seem to be trying very hard to hide) this morning while I was walking her, but we didn't harm it.

So yeah, I left work to come home and collect Malibu and bury him. Then while running errands for our almost-done kitchen reno, I stopped at the vet to pick up the footprint memorial plaque of our old dog that we had just put to sleep a month or two ago. So Oreo has gone from two furry companions to none. We will probably have to fix that, so she has company while everyone is away during the day. Not quite sure whether to go canine or feline (pros and cons, etc) but the name will definitely be "Gilligan" aka 'Little Buddy'

The hazards of having a cat that likes to be outside, but I suppose he died enjoying his short, four year life.

He's still the undefeated champ.

This was unexpected and it freakin hurts

E: On the bright side Oreo, you get your bed back...

Edited July 29, 2021 by StrandedonEarth

[YNM]

My condolences for your lost cat.

 

7 hours ago, Dientus said:

Mainstream media claims two vaccines here, although one is claimed to have issues

You can always turn into papers and government reports.

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

7 hours ago, Dientus said:

Run an anonymous, good VPN. Bounce out of different countries using different search engines, and you decide for yourself.

Or just overcome the language barrier or something.

Edited July 29, 2021 by YNM

[iamn00b]

general bad stuff: lots of people from family got covid

[richfiles]

8 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

So Oreo has gone from two furry companions to none.

Yeah... I hope you find a new "Little Buddy" soon... It's been over a year since I lost my little sweetie girl, and I still miss her... She gave me 13 years of purrs and licks... I miss having that... 

Saw some reports that there may be studies showing that Covid boosters might be useful... Sign me up for Jab Three: The Pokening.

Finally, I get to hurry up and wait. I have to return some RAM that was not what I ordered (got 2x 4GB instead of 2x 8GB), and I already sent out those 9 hard drives that were wrong. I don't understand why these big tech orders are getting screwed up so badly... Oh well... Both sellers seem fine with fixing the problem. I did seem to once again prove the universe will find a thing only after you purchase it's replacement. Ordered a bag of rubber grommets for mounting the hard drives... I found TWO bags of rubber grommets that I KNEW I had in my workshop, and looked for THREE times! Where did I find them? Eye level, the shelf right by the door, that I face directly every time I leave the room, right under the 4060 lumen LED light fixture I have installed... 

[Dientus]

21 minutes ago, richfiles said:

 

Finally, I get to hurry up and wait. I have to return some RAM that was not what I ordered (got 2x 4GB instead of 2x 8GB), and I already sent out those 9 hard drives that were wrong. I don't understand why these big tech orders are getting screwed up so badly..

I hope it gets straightened out. Do you think it's due to the chip shortage? Or the worker shortage?

 

I know the dozen Consult 3 tools ordered awhile back are still on backorder, Nismo claims its the chip shortage and at the time gave up to a possible two year delivery date!

But like with parts, such as the forward distance sensing radars, even after the warehouses dried up, it takes 3-6 weeks for new parts sometimes.

This is only my experiences mind you, but everything I deal with, It seems hard to figure out. This issue seems to be shortages of some kind, but then turn around and that issue seems like pandemic is used as an excuse for poor service. Six of one and half a dozen of the other still results in the same thing. Unhappy people and excessive delays. 

[TheSaint]

If i had to describe how my week went...

[richfiles]

2 hours ago, TheSaint said:

If i had to describe how my week went...

How your day went is entirely dependent on whether the magic wand results in frosty beverages, or warm beverages... 
...
Oh wait... Donkey isn't our protagonist here, is he? 
Darn... he was so relatable! 

Visitors from the meddling department are always unwelcome guests when you just wanna get your stuff done. T-that was the message here, right? It wasn't replace everyone around you with a frosty beverage and some pretzels? 

Quote

hope it gets straightened out. Do you think it's due to the chip shortage? Or the worker shortage?

Yes... Probably yes... I think with some new parts being either way overpriced, or outright unobtainium, more and more parts are being sourced second hand. Lots of places probably have inconvenient ppe requirements that might potentially obscure vision and lead to errors (barriers, face shields, glasses fogging from face masks, etc). They might be understaffed, and just under stress to keep up. Honestly, there's lot's of potential reasons for errors and delays. I was utterly shocked at the time it took to prepare my last Digikey order, in comparison to "The Before Times". I can't fault them. Everyone is dealing with problems. It just was a sudden shock to see how much had changed since my last (pre-pandemic) order from them.

As for my own issues... I'm doing a new custom PC case build, and what I need is a chassis that will mount a standard ATX motherboard, with 7 PCIe slots, but those slots need to be low-profile slots. That's not a very common configuration in desktops... Most low profile cases are built for either Micro-ATX or Mini-ATX, and will have either 1, 2, 3, or 4 slots... Not the 7 slots that I'm looking for. Where I know this configuration exists, is in 2u servers that take ATX motherboards. The problem with this is that unless I can find one as scrap somewhere, I'm not likely to get it for cheap. ebay seems to price them at $140-180... 

$140-180 chassis from ebay, that I'm gonna still have to chop up...
or...
Janky, cobbled together setup made from chopped up Mini and Micro ATX low profile desktops, salvaged from the local PC repair shop's recycling for free...

Hmm... Yeah, unless I can find a scraped 2u ATX server chassis, I think this choice is more or less already made for me... 

Edited July 30, 2021 by richfiles

[DDE]

On 7/28/2021 at 9:47 PM, YNM said:

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.

Again a rather weak statement: there are cases of vaccinated COVID deaths. With underlying conditioms, of course, but still - I've got one inveterate anti-jab guy in my family, and every bit of news like this is reinforcing his opposition.

Spoiler

In reality, he's just afraid of needles.

 

On 7/28/2021 at 10:52 PM, Dientus said:

Run an anonymous, good VPN.

Assuming it's legal.

[YNM]

11 minutes ago, DDE said:

there are cases of vaccinated COVID deaths.

With efficacy in the 90%+ against severe disease and deaths honestly I wouldn't be as worried. Problem is that these are generally only for the mRNA vaccines (either the usual one or the adenovirus-based one - there have been researches that shows a combined mRNA vaccine regime might result in ~99% efficacy from severe disease and deaths), there have been quite a good number of cases of deaths from COVID after full vaccination (2 shots) of inactivated virus vaccines. And the latter is all we got for now here.

In any case, already-vaccinated or unvaccinated-and-waiting-for-turn, masks and good hygiene will have to continue around the world until we really drive transmission down and get everyone vaccinated. Only then can the world breath in undisturbed fresh air again (although granted during lockdowns the air is fresher... ).

Edited July 30, 2021 by YNM

[Dientus]

7 hours ago, DDE said:

Assuming it's legal.

Point taken. Verify all laws in your country, province, state, and with your internet service provider before doing anything with networking, p2p, VPNs and the like.

 

Good catch.

 

7 hours ago, YNM said:

In any case, already-vaccinated or unvaccinated-and-waiting-for-turn, masks and good hygiene will have to continue around the world until we really drive transmission down and get everyone vaccinated. Only then can the world breath in undisturbed fresh air again (although granted during lockdowns the air is fresher... ).

Just so you are ready, the COVID virus is likely to never be cured and more than likely to continue mutating in the wild.

[YNM]

5 hours ago, Dientus said:

Just so you are ready, the COVID virus is likely to never be cured and more than likely to continue mutating in the wild.

Then don't do wildlife exposure with stuff we don't really actually need... bats or whatever it was.

I mean SARS-Cov the original flavor has no vaccines and no cures either, but it's not here rampaging wild anymore, same with MERS, same with The Plague^TM, limiting transmission is a possibility (that honestly should've been pursued much harder much earlier).

[Dientus]

40 minutes ago, YNM said:

Then don't do wildlife exposure with stuff we don't really actually need... bats or whatever it was.

Clarification is needed.

When I say "in the wild" I mean out of laboratories and free in nature. Nature meaning any and all hosts including human.

So I meant that now that a population has been infected with it, it is here to stay.

 

I am sorry for the confusion.

[YNM]

1 hour ago, Dientus said:

So I meant that now that a population has been infected with it, it is here to stay.

Yeah, that much is obvious, but it's possible to drive it down from being something spreading around the world to only spreading where they're not careful.

And sadly that seems to be including ours in the list.

[tater]

People misunderstand vaccine efficacy data.

They counted infections in the experimental and control group, and divided by the number of people in each of the 2 groups times the number of time units.

10 people infected out of 10,000 people over 60 days, for example.

V=infected_vaccinated/(Pop_vaccinated*time),

U=infected_unvaccinated/(Pop_unvaccinated*time)

Efficacy is then 100*(1 - V/U) with V and U as above.

That's where they got the 90-whatever % numbers over the course of the study.  Relative infection rates per unit time. So 90-something % less likely to be infected over a timeframe of some months with a somewhat low prevalence. Over an arbitrarily long timeframe?

As for protection from hospitalization or death, again, it's a rate over the measured time of the study. In the experimental group they had 0 deaths, but they have pretty few in the placebo as well. The uncertainty is bigger than the signal. It;s fair to say that vaccinated people are less likely to end up with a clinically significant infection upon exposure, but if they actually get infected, there is zero data they do better as far as I know. It saves lives because fewer get past killing it before they have any large scale infection.

The current messaging seems goofy to me. We expect people to get infected, just fewer of them. Some will get infected anyway, and they are likely those with the weakest immune systems.

As the population becomes more vaccinated (or the sub population) we should see the number of vaccinated people dying be a larger %. They are the bulk of the population at that point, so even with lower chance of infection, they still sometimes get it, still sometimes die.

Like COVID, the vaccine data is highly age specific. The death rate per infection is about 50% lower in the over 65 crowd in the real world. Under 65? Not so much of a change. This does NOT mean they don't work. This means that the risk for people under 65 is already very low, and they of course in any time period are less likely to get infected due to vaccination over that time period.

None of the vaccinations provide sterilizing immunity, however, so this will never be driven to zero. It was never possible to do so. This will remain a disease that kills almost entirely old, sick people.

There's an interesting CDC paper I read today about relative risk factors. This paper has a huge number of patients in it, almost 5 million hospitalized of which 540k had COVID. These are people who presented for care. A total of ~14% died—of that ~550k subset that were admitted at a hospital in this study.

https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/pdf/21_0123.pdf

Obesity is a major risk, but for the elderly, malnutrition is the major risk factor for ICU and death, followed by anxiety disorders and obesity. Anxiety/fear disorders are in the top 3 risk factors for all ages. Which is kinda interesting given all the messaging that results in... fear and anxiety.

Also, look at the number of comorbdities typical in patients who die. 39% of the dead had 6-10 of the listed comorbidities. 25% had 11+. So 64% of the dead had 6-11+ serious health problems coded via ICD-10 (medical coding system). 0.9% of the people who died (80k in this study) were healthy (no coded preexisting condition).

The % of people who are admitted to hospital for COVID is a subset of actual infections. Cumulative US hospitalizations is ~4% of infections per CDC best guess (and hospitalization counting is over broad since it's anyone in hospital with a + test). So healthy people (0-1 chronic problems) are 3.5% of deaths in hospitalized patients, and ~14% hospitalized die (0.02% of infected, healthy people of all ages—this is still massively skewed to elderly, healthy people by orders of magnitude).

If there are a lot of sick people, and or much worse hospital care, more deaths.

<EDIT> My wife pointed out that there might be a negative impact on the people with anxiety disorders due to medications they are on.

 

 

Edited August 1, 2021 by tater

[tater]

^%$#ing California's mismanagement has resulted in me not being able to see the mountains behind my house (not to mention having to breathe smoke). Again.

https://fire.airnow.gov/#

[GuessingEveryDay]

Dang parents complaining about me getting a B in Biology, while I got an A+ in Aerospace Engineering.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

Dang parents complaining about me getting a B in Biology, while I got an A+ in Aerospace Engineering.

Have you considered they might just be fans of McCoy?

[GuessingEveryDay]

11 minutes ago, DDE said:

Have you considered they might just be fans of McCoy?

No, they're both music teachers although my dad does teach AP Physics and taught AP Statistics before that.

It was just an 89 in Biology.

Edited August 8, 2021 by GuessingEveryDay

[StrandedonEarth]

21 minutes ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

No, they're both music teachers although my dad does teach AP Physics and taught AP Statistics before that.

It was just an 89 in Biology.

89? By the standards here an A starts at 86%

[GuessingEveryDay]

41 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

89? By the standards here an A starts at 86%

Hooray for Florida I guess? What place would start an A at 86?

[Dientus]

2 minutes ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

Hooray for Florida I guess? What place would start an A at 86?

When I was in school an A started at 93% my how times have changed!

[GuessingEveryDay]

My school does:

90-100%: A

80-89%: B

70-79%: C

60-69%: D

Anything less than 60 is F.

[StrandedonEarth]

2 minutes ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

Hooray for Florida I guess? What place would start an A at 86?

Well, at least in the British Columbia secondary school system. But there were no A+ or A-, just A, B, C+, C, C- , and F as final grades (D and E were interim grades), so I assume an 86 would be an A-. I don't recall what the post-secondary grades were...

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler