IkmoIkmo

In part I think it’s because young people’s worlds have massively expanded, on average. I traveled to 5 continents mostly without parents as a teenager, and I’m a pretty average guy who just put his mind to it. It’d be unthinkable for my parents to have done the same.

In part I think we also have more time, life expectancy grew by about 7 years in the past 50 years. And our ability to have kids at a later age is growing with medical advances. Going to school for longer and getting kids later, makes sense in that context.

Anyway I think it’s a bit misleading to take particular ages and then compare percentages (e.g. 21yos with a kid in 1980 vs 2021) This way of presenting data can exaggerate the differences, average age of first kid would be better for example. I don’t know how to call this statistics phenomenon, but imagine the light blue area to be ‘kids in the house at 21yo’ and then imagine a minor shift in the average age of having the first kid, the resulting figure would seem much more pronounced than the minor shift in average age. Would’ve been nice to see the data presented differently.

Oh god that first one… It’s really nice in podcast form on the way to work or in the bathtub, absolutely terrible to keep my attention when trying to understand news in readable form, and always suspect of being mere anecdata and generally wrong. Especially when it concerns a country or industry or phenomenon I have no experience in.

Not sure about that. If you’re competing with an adversary in the cybersecurity space, it’s likely that you’ll go quite far to win. It’s a matter of national security after all, plus it is strictly legal soon to start your activities and slow down the ex-post checks and balances, do you really expect these hackers to self-regulate based on some kind of personal value system, and resist any challenge to these values from colleagues, managers or indeed your adversaries?

Unlikely, plus there have been plenty of reasons to think otherwise. Just look at how the ministries are treating WOB/FOIA requests, frustrating the process, breaking every regulatory deadline and very willing to pay the silly fines for always being way late with taxpayer money. It’s a joke.

Besides, we have the toeslagenschandaal showing how civil servants are completely willing to screw over tens of thousands of civilians, driving people to divorces, bankruptcies, suicides, kids to foster homes etc. We NEED checks and balances, desperately so, also in the Netherlands. God knows what happens when we don’t. NL is relatively good, but it’s all relative, at the end of the day it’s a bunch of humans that will fuck up without good governance.

Would be cool to see two comparison pictures (no head needed). 110lbs is a fantastic result, I wonder if it’s hard to see for you because it was a gradual change?

> Most countries in western Europe and many states seem to have less than 10 ℅ excess deaths in 2021

That may well be true, but it cannot in and of itself be a reason to decide to relax measures.

It's like saying the number of traffic accidents are low, thus we can abolish drivers licenses, speed limits, age limits on driving, alcohol limits on driving, seatbelts etc.

No: the measures (e.g. seatbelts) cause the good results (low traffic deaths). Simply looking at the good results can never in and of itself be a reason to remove the measures.

You'd want to evidence that the desirable results will remain without the measures, before removing the measures. e.g. if there's evidence that removing speeding limits does not impact traffic accidents/deaths, then you can remove the limit.

In terms of excess death, those are correct interpretations. But a true measure of successful policy would've been some kind of death vs impact, corrected for difficult factor.

Death is what the article covers. Impact would be the cost of the policy on everything else, e.g. mental health due to lockdowns, kids' learning falling behind due to lockdowns, bankruptcies and debt due to lockdowns etc.

Some countries were able to get the same results with fewer strict lockdown measures of other countries, those countries can be said to be more successful.

Of course one could correct for difficulty factor. That's a gray area. For example, do you include Japanese culture of masking and rule abidance? Depends on your perspective. But in any case, it's clear that countries with for example an average age of 18 like Nigeria, will be less impacted as a country like Italy, where the average person is 46. Knowing 50% of the population is almost over 50, make a big medical difference. Similarly, countries with high population density will do better than countries with little population density, etc.

There's a ton of these factors that determine 'difficulty factor'. As such it's hard to really say who did well and who didn't.

But no, Sweden wasn't a disaster. Australia and Germany did quite well, but Australia had some harsh measures that must be taken into account. Brazil indeed wasn't the worst of the bunch (although a top-25 spot is certainly not a good look, especially as only one other country in that list of 25 (Russia) has more absolute deaths, and outside the top 25 only the US has more, 600 thousand dead in Brazil is a disaster if you ask me, it's >10 years of homicides worth of death, in a country known for some of the worst gun violence and gang violence in the world.

roommates

Agreed, in a lot of cases it makes little sense to upgrade. That's true just about always when you don't have a 4k TV.

When you do have a 4k TV and it's large enough, a PS5 can look a lot better. Especially versus the regular PS4 (rather than the PS4 Pro).

But historically the Playstations are known for upgrades every 6-7 years (from 1994 to 2000, to 2006, to 2013, to 2020), and then a support of about 3-4 years after, for a 10-year lifecycle.

The PS5 has been out for a year, making a PS5 exclusive at this time that's totally specialised for the hardware makes little sense. There's 14 million PS5s out there, and 115 million PS4s.

But the big games are in the pipeline that utilise the PS5 hardware specifically, and after a while these new games won't run on 4 anymore, or will, but will look a lot better on the 5 or be very slow on the 4.

Paying scalper prices makes no sense at the moment, but the PS5 will eventually take over the 4. If you can get one at retail prices, I'd rather have one sooner than later, if you're switching some day anyway. The loading-time improvements are quite nice.

On the whole FB account, does it require you to actually do anything with it? Can it literally just be an e-mail and random password, which only logs into the Oculus. If so, what's the problem?

Does anyone believe one would disappear from public appearances for 5-6 weeks due to ostensibly her 'resting at home', somehow oblivious to the fact that literally the entire world media is talking about your disappearance.

This would be in a context of you having made a matter-of-fact accusation of sexual abuse of one of the 10 most powerful people in the country, that you recant only 5 weeks later as if it was some kind of metaphor that was misinterpreted.

You'd think in such a situation, you'd at least be prone to say, at most within a few days, to call a few media outlets to indeed show the world that you haven't been kidnapped but are instead just chilling at home. Not only every media outlet around the world was talking about this for weeks, but also Amnesty International, the Olympic Committee, the International Tennis Federation, the European Union, the president of the United States, the nr 1 world tennis player etc etc, are all commenting on your disappearance by the state...

Quite a weak attempt at propaganda.

On the contrary, I see most western media continue to host 'let's hear both sides of the story' type forums on their talkshows and interviewee lists, when one side are medical experts, and the other side are frankly a bunch of idiots.

It's not much different to teaching creationism in biology class next to evolutionary theory.

In this case it's not because of some big conspiracy, but simply because this type of reporting generates clicks and views much more so than inviting a bunch of medical researchers to present tables full of data on-air.

As far as I know, virtually every serious medical forum, whether it's pharmaceutical companies, health ministries, WHO, groups of hospitals, universities etc are constantly researching, monitoring and reporting on side-effects and taking this very seriously. What makes you say they aren't?

Japan's health ministry just reported a 15 per million, or 0.0015% risk of inflammation when taking Pfizer. This doesn't change their policy position, which is to recommend and urge as many people as possible to get the vaccine, as the risks of contracting covid and its effects far outweigh this 0.0015% sideeffect risk.

I highly doubt you average 35 km/h on a regular bike, especially when overweight, and then regularly get overtaken as well, in a city.

It's simply an average. People ride bikes in Amsterdam in their everyday clothes for work or going to a club., they're not looking to build up a sweat but to get from A to B. Recreational biking is a different story and typically brings people outside the city in less busy wide lanes across nature without traffic, stop signs or double-parked cars, where none of this is an issue.