NoPie

From another perspective – she wants to restore democracy in her country and wishes it again to become a prosperous society with growing economy.

And perhaps your attitude is why it is more globally relevant than many people think. Many countries have fallen into this lack of democracy that needs to be restored. Cuba is the closest example.

If m-dashes becomes a turn off, GPT users will simply replace them with hyphens and using m-dashes will become a sign of real professionalism or alternatively a sing of completely clueless.

It is actually stupid to adjust to writing without m-dashes because one can easily replace all m-dashes to hyphens in chatGPT generated text. I predict that obsession with detecting chatGPT by m-dashes will be short-lived because it will be exploited as soon as it will have any real world consequences.

The RTCs didn't find significant difference between N95 and surgical masks in hospital settings.

How can a request for evidence be absurd?

That applies only to lab conditions. No RCTs have found much effectiveness so far in real life.

We now know that masks were barely effective or not effective at all. They could even be net negative by causing people to take more risks.

Isolating was the only way. A lot of elderly in the UK did this successfully and never got covid. Lockdowns, masks and schools closures did not affect the spread significantly. We know this because Sweden did not mandate these things and had about the same amount of people getting covid until vaccines arrived. The benefits were that Sweden had less mortality from other causes.

I was actually commenting for Herman Cain. Sorry, for this mistake.

Yes, they made announcements without clearly thinking how they will be perceived. I agree that it was unnecessary and then dying suddenly didn't look good.

Nevertheless, if I had a situation like where I know for sure that my odds are not great, I would do the same. I would live full life today because tomorrow I could be dead. Herman Cain most likely knew that he is not going to last long. It didn't make sense for him to be afraid of death and isolate for indefinite period of time. His bravery is an example to follow.

The problem with this is that he had been diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in 2006. It is rare for a person with stage IV cancer to survive for another 14 years. He received treatment but most likely eventually he would have died anyway. Covid may have fastened his demise but his odds of dying were quite high even without covid.

It's actually quite clever from the part of the scientist.

The incentive would be money, maybe the pay for doing this test was not good enough.

Or maybe the scientist was motivated by thirst of discovering something good for humanity like cure for cancer and didn't want to get distracted by other things. Funding is also needed but angel bones are clearly impossibility. Why even spend time on disproving that? But if she had engaged in discussion with people clearly believing in this nonsense it would have taken too much time. Saying, the tests are inconclusive lets her be distanced from all this and allow people to leave her alone, mostly that the groups will continue their disputes among themselves.

Santa Cruz where most of the local population lives gets half of its water from desalination plant.

Desalination is already cost-effective and can provide water for tourists if needed. They would just need to build a desalination plant in the south.

Electricity already is largely generated by wind, solar and tide.

Air transportation probably causes the biggest pollution.

Apart from that such tourism is very sustainable. It provides value to people who need to go on holidays. It doesn't matter if the food and necessities are imported because tourists would have consumed the food anyway if they had stayed at home.

While it causes unsustainable rent increases to local population, that can be managed somehow. Maybe give subsidies to them by using the profits from tourism. Tourism tax is not unusual invention in many places.

I find him more relatable than most musicians, journalists and actors.

What do you mean by high bar? Cochrane group are specialists who do exactly that and provide gold standard of evidence. Sometimes the evidence goes against accepted wisdom. That's how science work.

>> That's one paper out of dozens, feel free to pick another.

It is not. It is the review of all available evidence (studies).

>> If the claim masks don't work didn't come from the same people who said isolating didn't work, I might take them seriously.

It didn't. The claim came from Cochrane group.

So, are you taking it seriously now?