Not at all dumb. Source: I worked summers making toothpicks in one of the Forster mills (the name is in the patent). Toothpick making was big business in Maine until the late 1970's. It's mostly done overseas now.
The idiom "ferret away" means to store something in a secret place, and the idiom "ferret out" means to find something by careful searching. Seems like a pretty good name for a database.
He said that masks wouldn't be helpful march 08 2020. A month layer New York had a thousand detected covid deaths a day, so people really should have started to wear masks march 08 2020 since deaths lags infections by about a month. If they were giving proper advice instead of telling people that covid wasn't a big deal at the time then maybe that disaster could have been averted from the start? At the time the dangers of covid spread was well documented based on how quickly it got into Italy, but at the time it was the democrat party line to downplay the disease to avoid racism against the Chinese so that was the line Fauci took.
> "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask," infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes.
> While masks may block some droplets, Fauci said, they do not provide the level of protection people think they do. Wearing a mask may also have unintended consequences: People who wear masks tend to touch their face more often to adjust them, which can spread germs from their hands.
What I find ironic about the people that criticize Fauci for lying about the need for masks are often somehow still anti-mask.
Like, they acknowledge Fauci lying about not needing masks, which would imply that they should be wearing masks, but will now refuse to wear a mask because they think Fauci is lying about needing masks.
I'm sort of tired of being downvoted for saying this, but the data on masks other than well-fitted N95s is pretty shotty. Lots of P-hacking, lots of motivated reasoning, and the results pre-2020 differ in notable ways from that post-2020.
The situation gets even murkier when you talk about mask _mandates_ instead of individual decision making. The argument that mask mandates are helpful is tough to support in the face of the differences in the delta-variant curve, for example, in different counties in California.
Just to say it: even daring to compare the results in contra costa county and san diego county, california (which have different mask requirements) got me shadow-banned on reddit. The reasoning here is mostly political, not scientific/rational. No one cares what the science says.
A lot of the problem I think comes from messaging and deliberate bad-faith interpretations of messages.
Claims that "Masks slow the spread of COVID" gets interpreted as "Masks stop the spread of COVID", and so when we have mask mandates and yet COVID still spreads, people use that as evidence that masks are worthless.
It's interesting that people can draw opposite conclusions from the same scenario. COVID has continued to spread despite mask mandates. Some claim that means the masks are worthless. Others (including me) would claim that, despite how bad it is, the spread would be even worse without them.
> individual decision making
In most cases, I agree that people should be able to make their own health choices. You wanna eat McDonald's for every meal and walk less than 50 steps a day? Go for it. Hell, snort a few lines of cocaine for dessert if you want to.
But when it comes to a pandemic, it's different. Sure, the vaccines are 95+% effective, and masks might be X% effective, and social distancing is Y% effective, and so on...but when >30% of the population has zero interest in doing any of that, then you can take every protective measure you can (Besides just staying in your house) and still get the disease from some asshole at the grocery store that doesn't care if they spread it.
Also, consider last year's toilet paper shortage, and the short gas shortage a few months ago. Individuals will often act irrationally in their own interests rather than what's good for everyone as a whole.
To think of it another way, when at a pizza party, you will have some people who take 3 slices of pizza because there might not be enough for everyone so they want to make sure they get their share. Others might only take a single slice because there might not be enough for everyone so they want to make sure as many people get some.
Individual decision making only makes sense if people aren't selfish.
I agree that the data on masks can be interpreted both ways. This suggests to me the effect is small and probably second- or third-order (i.e. masks encourage more distancing, and that's actually what matters).
It isn't just that COVID continues to spread despite mask mandates. It's that the curves look nearly identical in areas with and without mask mandates. And, to show their effectiveness, epidemiologists have resorted to pretty serious P-value hacking.
Separately, I find it hard to get worried for my personal safety because of the 30 percent of people refusing to vaccinate themselves. It's just not that hard to avoid the sorts of places where such people are likely to be. And, being vaccinated and healthy makes it less of an issue for me than, say, the risk of a car accident. Sure, I could pass it on to someone else if I get it, but with reasonable precautions I don't think that's likely at all.
> He said that masks wouldn't be helpful march 08 2020. A month layer New York had a thousand detected covid deaths a day, so people really should have started to wear masks march 08 2020 since deaths lags infections by about a month.
I don't see how that is necessarily a lie. It could have been the best public health recommendation he could make at the time based on the available information. Research into how best to use masks is ongoing, so I would not expect today's masking recommendations to be the same as tomorrow's.
No, watch the interview. He actually says that wearing masks could actually be worse than not wearing them. In a later interview, he admits the suggestions against wearing masks was a lie because they were afraid of PPE shortages.
It's also not the only lie he's told and admitted to. See his claims about herd immunity, where the numbers kept going up, and when he was questioned on this, he outright said he just gave out numbers that he thought the public would accept at the time.
I don't know which interview you're talking about, but in any event you don't know what his motivation was for saying what he said when he said it. Perhaps he was wrong, perhaps he changed his mind, perhaps he was rationalizing on the fly, or perhaps he lied.
It's clear that what he and other scientists said about masks early in the pandemic certainly changed over time. I think science is like that. People who like simple, certain, unchanging answers can get them from religion or ideology. People who don't mind complexity, nuance, and change are more comfortable with science.
Assuming Fauci was lying because what he said then isn't what he is saying now just isn't logical.
The point of these arguments is to show that public health pronouncements can be political in nature and our chief authorities are not afraid to lie in order to achieve what they believe is a greater good.
It is not the specific content of the lie that is the issue, but the lack of integrity on display. It is used as a retort to "official X declared Y", and is meant to undermine the integrity of official pronouncements in general. There are many who bristled at these initial claims by pointing out (correctly) that promoting "noble lies" is terrible for public health officials and doing so would come back to bite them. For some reason, the medical profession seems to accept noble lies as being justified when the rest of society does not. This goes back to the old saw of doctors lying to their patients about their own health. It's a blemish on the profession, and one that needs to be erased and apologized for ASAP, and IMO, Fauci belongs to that old school and doesn't really get it -- and probably never will.
Also, as a protip to your finding of the fact that masks were being lied about but they themselves don't want to wear masks as being "ironic": the literal meaning of "irony" refers to saying something but meaning the opposite. For instance "Sure, I trust you", when the speaker clearly doesn't. There is also situational irony, which would be when the opposite of what is intended happens. E.g. trying to kill someone by giving them a poison that ends up curing them. So in this case, the irony would be saying a "noble lie" with the intention of saving lives but actually causing more lives to be lost -- that would be the true irony here.
The title suggested by the URL slug seems especially odd in this case, since the article seems generally positive and says nothing about "brainwashing".
I have a similar problem with my 2017 Pacifica that replaced my 2005 Voyager. Using the touch screen to control the heat and air-conditioning is extremely slow in the Pacifica, and you can't do it without looking at the screen which can't be used with gloves.
There are physical buttons and knobs for a few of the controls, but it seems that they're just talking to the same software as the touch-screen, so they're just as slow to respond. Adjusting the heat without looking at the touch-screen is pretty much impossible.
IMO the touch screen should not be used to control any aspect of the car's operation. It should only be for phone, navigation, backup camera, and entertainment.
It might depend on the trim of the Pacifica? But for the hvac controls that have buttons (fan speed, driver/passenger temps, mode) the physical controls seem responsive enough and I don't use the touchscreen ones, except maybe sometimes for defrost if I can't find the button; cycling through the modes can be painful. You can't get the different zones back in sync without the screen though, which is annoying.
And going from lo to hi takes forever, too. At least the fan speed knob seems good enough. The touch screen in general is decidedly not great; it's better than my C-max (sync2) in many ways, but I really like how the sync2 was designed --- they clearly considered how to make it useful, but then implemented it in the slowest environment possible.
I also have a 2017 Pacifica, and for the most part I don't mind the controls (the physical buttons are responsive enough that it doesn't bother me), but there are definitely a few functions (heated/cooled seats, mainly) that I wish I didn't have to dig through menus to find. Such a contrast from my 2009 Civic (albeit no heated/cooled seats on that vehicle).
Is the market for drugs really free though? I believe that in a free market there is supposed to be no coercion between the parties to a transaction. In the case of drug purchases there may be a kind of coercion involved -- a health issue (diabetes, cancer, etc.) that makes one party to the transaction unable to negotiate effectively.
Free markets mean that other sellers are free to compete. This is why food, an essential good, is generally cheap. Any seller of food can charge an arbitrarily high price but cannot exclude competing sellers.
In a free market no outside agent interferes with buyer and seller. Nature has no will and thus no agency and thus is not an agent. Indeed the free market is key to solving the disparity between what someone has versus what someone needs. It is one of the few systems we know that solves this issue efficiently
If I understand you correctly, then it does seem true to me that nature has no agency. However, when the choice a consumer has is to either pay the asking price for a <em>needed</em> drug or to die then I think the consumer has no meaningful choice at all. Given how unequal the bargaining power is between the buyer and seller in this situation, it's hard to see a free market solutions applies: it might be efficient, but it's also brutaly inhumane.
I know I've set up kind of a straw-man. It might be that the consumer could choose to forgo an expensive drug or medical procedure without fatal consequences, but that's not the interesting case.
The choice shouldnt be between whether they need the drug or not but rather who to buy it from. The fact that there exists someone who needs a product is what drives the profit to zero in a free market because newer manufacturers are incentivized to provide the product. The choice is among from whom to buy not whether to buy at all.
Right now insulin is expensive because the government is preventing companies that can produce it for cheaper from selling in the united states because of a lawsuit by the current market holder. That the government even has this power is a textbook example of the danger of governmental interference in the free market. People are literally dying because the government has made the market less free intentionally
Like food, right? If people stopped selling you food you would die, so surely they can charge extortionate rates for it.
Of course, there are competitive markets for both food and insulin in the US. Quoting from a letter to the WSJ yesterday,
> Eli Lilly makes three types of insulin, which in most states you can buy over-the-counter at Wal-Mart for $24 per 1000 unit bottle. One hundred syringes cost $12. I have serious diabetes mellitus and have managed it with Lilly insulin for a decade for under $100 a month.
For some drugs there aren't competitive markets, and in some cases the government prevents competition, but both are typically temporary situations (patents, first-mover advantages) that help to get the drug on the market in the first place. An extortionate price for a drug is better than no access at all, and doubly so when it is going to give way to genuine price competition.
The difference is (1) food isn't a specialty good, you can make it yourself and (2) food is provided by the government free of charge if you can't pay and (3) subsidized by the government to a massive degree even if you can pay. If this is the kind of system you're advocating for prescription drugs, I'm all in!
(1) Food producers unilaterally refusing to sell food could be just as disruptive as drug producers refusing to sell drugs. "You can just grow it yourself" isn't a reasonable distinction -- from a practical standpoint most people can't. The reason we don't need to prohibit that behaviour is that the market works.
(2) The government doesn't grow food. Sometimes it pays for it, and sometimes it gives people money so they can pay for it, but there isn't a public option in case farmers decide not to sell us beef, because the market works. (But yeah, the government does -- and should -- help people pay for drugs they can't afford when the prices are reasonable.)
(3) Food production is subsidised, but it shouldn't be. And these subsidies have little bearing on the possibility of extortion in the market.
If you feel like being specific, free markets have to exist without government regulation, without monopolies, without economic privilege, and without artificial scarcity, which doesn't really work in the real world under capitalism. Almost no markets are truly free markets, even the ones that look free, because there are general regulations you still have to follow (you can't legally sell poisonous handmade goods at a craft fair, for example -- laws about that act as a regulation).
It's pretty quick to plant bare-root seedlings using a spade or "dibble". About 45 years ago another Boy Scout and I planted approximately 1,000 pine seedlings on a tree farm in a single day using a variant of the method shown in [1]. Once we got a rhythm going we planted around 3 trees per minute.
