EverCurious452

ok, I don't think anyone is disputing the mortality demographics so I'm not sure of your point here. Not that I've heard. It was basically shutting the door after the horse has left so to speak. We knew about the virus (i.e. that some unknown virus was serious in Wuhan in mid December but we did nothing (and the Chinese actively suppressed this). Since only a few percent of those infected get seriously ill that means that there would have been many more infections than just those that ended up in the hospital in Wuhan and for some weeks at least previously. About 4,000 people a month fly from Wuhan to the US (and likewise all over the world). So by the time in late jan after China declared that it had a problem and Trump but up the ban ONLY FOR NON US CITIZENS, the virus was already spared all over the world.. To stop it at that point we would have had to check people at airports all over the word, and jump on any outbreak anywhere by contact tracing all those exposed and isolating the ones infected possible locking down small areas. But we didn't do any of that. Indeed the primary reason for everyone to wear a mask is to protect others since you do not know if you are infected or not. Its different for Trump. The reason for him to wear one is to normalize that behavior for his supporters, to say look "wear a mask". Doing it is different than reading it off of a teleprompter. Trump is indeed crass but it is his total lack of empathy, his narcism, his disillusion about his greatness, his executive incompetence and his inability to tell the truth that makes him unfit for office. The only thing he is good at is lying about his accomplishments and he is very good at that, so good that people believe him. He has no policy, the whole Presidency is just reality TV for him.

Totally agree. Alas I think the Trump administration's recent change to require data to go to HHS instead of the CDC is only going to make this more muddled. I'm not asserting that the CDC reporting system was great, Im guessing it was pretty old, but maybe changing this in the middle of a pandemic is not a great idea and why not fund an upgrade for the CDC instead of having everyone change their reporting protocol.

First The Washington Examiner where Bearman publishes does not even pretend to be objective. I'll cut to the one part of his article that is worth examining (I'll do it for you as I know you did not). If you actually go to the journal link and look at the paper you will see a series of responses from the very clinicians Risch references pointing out the major flaws in his paper and wondering how it ever could have been accepted for publication. At the risk of oversimplifying he compares death rates in widely different cohorts (one mostly representing the French population overall that got hydroxychloroquine and one representing only those in critical care for covid in hospitals that did not). He also makes serious errors with sample size (one of the many non-intuitive results of statistics is that even a large change in a very small sample does NOT imply that change will be reflected in a large sample). The very people he sites strongly disagree with his conclusions. They can actually. The whole point of the scientific method is that humans, no matter how well credentialed, are not capable of being objective. A doctor using a particular treatment of course thinks it will work so they are predisposed to find exactly that result. That is why large randomized clinical trials are essential and the only way to tell if something works (short of a miracle cure such as a patient is about to be pronounced dead jumps up and runs a marathon and no one, not even Ricsh is claiming anything of the sort). Publication is a big step and Risch got over that hurdle, but its only the first step. Publication allows for wider review and replication and that is essential (papers are commonly retracted after publication). He appears to be failing rather badly on that score.

True enough! I have heard people say some people actually believe this though I have never met one (well discounting the one guy I ran into that claimed it was true but I am pretty sure he was seriously high on something).. I have browed the supposed evidence the put in various websites and its just silly. Such things do not bode well for the future of our civilization.

Except of course that unfortunately Chloroquine has at best little (and perhaps no) impact on COID-19.

Snopes shows all the documentation that lead them to their determination and is a non-profit. Talk radio just makse random assertions and the more outlandish the more listeners they get and the money they make. You're being lead and you don't even know it. 911 was really the US Sandyhook was all actors Hillarious Clinton is running a satanic pedofile ring out of the basement of Comet Pingpong. COVID-19 is just a flu. COVID-19 is spared by 5G That parrot is not dead he's just resting. ok I threw that one in just for fun.

By "an agenda" I presume you mean some hidden nefarious agenda not the obvious one of providing information and care. Do you have actual evidence of this, or is that just a covenant way for you to rationalize ignoring what they say or publish? This is exactly what I said. Initially it was not thought masks would be that useful to the public but they are essential for workers who are inches away from likely infected people all day so give the shortage they should be allocated to the medical workers. We now know that the part about not helping for the public was wrong. If you want unchaining dogma science is not for you. So first is she speaking of the entire hospital or just her coworkers? If the infection rate in the area has been low (and this varies a lot) and their precautions are good then why is this odd? As I said the "indoor bad outdoor good" rule is likely too simplistic. Using a large tent sounds like a loophole to me since that is just a soft building. But the fact that the rules in place are far from perfect and have loopholes does not mean its all some sort of fraud not actually intended to curb transmission. Sweet! But why is this so "beating the odds". If none of you had the virus then once isolated on the boat. What is the infection rate in your county and what does that say about the probability that 1 in 25 would be infected? and "a week later all of us are fine". A week is little borderline, but have you actually contacted all 27 others to see if they are fine? So you claim general living expenses are 20% higher now then 2 years ago? I sure don't experience that. The outside is the outside. Its breathing in near someone else (who is infected) who is breathing out the issue and people do not tend to social distance or wear masks on the beach, but they do in grocery stores.

Of course talk radio is a completely trustworthy source. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cdc-guidelines-covid19/

No actually. I think the initial message was that we think transmission is mostly from touch AND front line medical workers need the limited supply of masks we have so the public should not be using them. Then it became clear that air transmission is a key vector AND the supply increased so now the recommendation is to wear a cloth mask (not an N95) primarily to keep the cloud of exhaled droplets closer to you and not to send them over long distances. That's the thing with fact/science based recommendations, they are going to change when we know more. No, I'm a programmer. There is a bioinformatics expert in my family (medical statistics) but I have no medial background. Maybe this is trying to take a complex issue (how does the environment impact transmissibility) and simplify it to one or two simple rules and complex things sometimes just can not be simplified. "Outdoors" I suspect was meant to be exposed to wind, so a tent should be in fact "indoors". Where do you see tents being allowed but sold buildings not allowed? Perhaps the idea was that beach goers are simply unlikely to social distance or wear masks, I don't know I'm just speculating. But again the simple open this close that rule is invariably not going to fully adhere to the actual complexity of how to curb transmission. That does not mean that curbing transmission is not possible. So following your lead I should now ask what are you economic qualifications? :-) There are numerous sources of data on covid that are not wholly from the government but gathered by various universities (e.g. John's Hopkins). I think it is usually a mistake to take you own day to day experience and assume that such translates to a view of a much lager domain like the nation let alone the world. One of the things that was most altering to my world view when I went though a science/engineering education is that our individual perceptions of the world are often not very well correlated to actual reality. The reach of the seat of one's pants doesn't extent much past your own chair and for some things that is enough but for others it is totally inadequate and can be very misleading. As far as inflation goes from what I find (based on the CPI) it IS about 1% at the moment, though was more like 2.5% in Jan and has fallen due to the economic slowdown. Though numbers in realtime are always difficult to get right, its much easier to analyze things in the past, even if just the recent past. I don't suggest blindly accepting anything, but neither to blindly reject it.

Have you seen the death certificate? Cause of death is a tricky thing. Suppose some has a heart attack, but they were very overweight with high BP and high cholesterol, blocked arteries etc. I would guess the cause of death would be shown as heart attack. Hopefully the contributing factors are also listed but the cause is usually the actual thing that kills you not the factors that lead up to it. For most pancreatic cancer deaths the cause is going to be liver failure (again hopefully with the fact that such was brought about by pancreatic cancer listed as well). So if someone has pancreatic cancer gets covid and dies from respiratory failure, isn't covid the correct cause? (obviously I don't know if that was the case with your friend's father, I'm only saying "its complicated"). If deaths from other cases are significally mis-labeled so to speak, then we should see a major skew in the stats (lower numbers of death from other cases). Do we? not that I have heard. Different hospitals will of course see different situations. I know people in the medical community in Houston and there are hospitals there that are indeed feeling overwhelmed (but even there they are not pushing people into the street or anything). Both (without masks and without distance) would be dangerous but the beach is not helping the economy. Correct, even slightly more I think, but were we being shown last years numbers last year? COVID makes the news as its new and something the government could have greatly reduced with better coordination and early action. Heart disease has been slowly growing for many decades and no government can enforce a public policy of "eat less exercise more and stop smoking" to cut back on heart disease so its less of a news item. News is largely oriented around events, not steady state. Sure, SARS-cov2 (or COVID) is 79% the same as SAR-cov (or SARS). Its "novel" has they had not seen this particular variation and I'd say 21% is a pretty big change.

You are conflating two distinct and largely orthogonal things. Medical care going digital, and how are people identified. If you do not have a card, or our phone, the EMT just needs to snap a picture of your face and facial recognition brings up your records.

Omniscience is not required to see logical/factual inconsistencies in such posts. Such data is easily available, all you have to do is make teh small effort to look i up, but you don't do that do you? You are a perfect example of selection bias. There are Amazon women on the moon! Do you have to accept the possibility that that is true just because someone said it? What bearing does that have on this discussion?

So who is he and what project did he work on? Where is the documentation? Much of what he says makes no sense so I am skeptical that he is telling the truth about what he worked on. What would be the point of putting such a tiny power source into such a device? it wouldn't be sufficient to transmit anything. Also the temperature of a Li-ion battery is important for battery chemistry not for "current to flow". So he doesn't seem to know what he is talking about. They were looking for a warm spot in the body? How about any internal area? The forehead is a good place to read a temperature from the OUTSIDE as it has lots of blood vessels close to the surface. Once you can go inside the body its pretty much warm everywhere. He was lured into this by getting $250,000? Please, that's nothing. Finally as I have said before biometrics is the ID technology that is rapidly taking over, not any physical device. Further there was NOTHING in that video that said this would be bundled with the covid or any other vaccine (A 25 gauge needle typically used for a vaccine has an inside diameter of .26mm so a .75mm diameter and 7mm long device that he claims even if that was the final package size would be vastly too big.) And you do not get vaccine injections in the hand let alone the forehead. Whoever posted this originally just made up the vaccine part and you have just passed it along as it fits with your beliefs not because its credible. Shame on you. THINK for yourself! I agree about the advice not to get chipped. Doing so would be stupid. But it won't be an issue as no one will be trying to do it. Vaccines are an entirely different matter and once a safe and effective covid vaccine is available I encourage everyone to get it (I certainly will be doing so).

"the forex" certainly includes a reporting service but it's a pretty fuzzy term in that "the forex" is often used to denote the trading relationships between the banks that comprised the interbank foreign currency market, the market makers in minor currencies and often even encompassing retail currency brokers. What it is NOT (as we have both said) is a centralized exchange that a currency can "get on" if it meets some set of requirements. While the Bank of International Settlements regulates its member central banks as to reserve requirements, I do not think they impose any regulation about what currencies those banks may or may not trade or (ironically given their name) how currency transactions must be settled. Further I think most of the activity on the interbank forex is not from central banks but just the worlds largest commercial banks and those are not regulated by the BIS (I'm not sure if central banks trade directly on the IBF at all, they don't usually engage in such trades unless trying to influence their currency, if it is floating, and they might do that through one or several commercial banks).. Even the central banks are "regulated" only as when they become a member of the BIS to avail themselves of its services they agree to abide by certain rules, but the BIS has no global authority to force a non-member central bank (of which there are very few) to comply with its rules (e.g. reserve capacity). I don't think the BIS can even force a member central bank into compliance in some way other than dropping its membership (which would be extremely bad press for the respective economy). Global commercial banks are each regulated to varying degrees by their respective host country's but there is no global entity (that I know of) that regulates how settlements in foreign currencies must occur or who is liable if one party does not carry out the trade etc. That is all up to the two banks executing the transaction and the regulation jurisdiction each is under in its host country. So each side of a transaction may be subject to a different set of regulations which is why each bank has separate agreements in place with each of the other banks which is what makes "the forex" a distributed market with no central exchange.

The first thing to understand about "the Forex" is that there is no globally regulated single exchange called "the Forex". like the NYSE or the NASQD or the CBoT That term refers to a number of markets (not exchanges) that trade currencies. At the top is the Interbank Foreign Exchange market which consists of the dozen or so largest banks in the world that have mutual currency trading agreements with each other and all use Reuters Dealing and EBS to trade currency pairs in very large amounts (the smallest trade here is likely in the millions of dollars). They mostly only trade the 5 major pairs being EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, USD/CHF, AUD/USD and USD/CAD (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/06/interbank.asp) Other minor or exotic currency pairs have individual market makers that have established a reputation for knowledge about that currency. All of that is over the counter in the sense that there is no exchange that guarantees the transaction it's strictly between buyer and seller. Likewise there is no overall regulation dictating what currencies can or can not be traded. It's all a matter of supply and demand. When folks look at something like forex.com that is an aggregation by a broker of the various currencies even if they are not actually offered (i.e. just because a currencies exchange rate to some other currency is show that does not mean there is a market in that pair). Markets develop for currency pairs needed by importers and then if those get big enough there will be demand from speculators as well. Pegged currencies are of little interest in these markets since if they are available at all then their associated central bank is the best source (through downstream banks) and their exchange rate against other currencies if they change at all are mostly due to the other currency (i.e. peg's don't move that much). Main take away: the IQD will never be "on the forex" (Rock is correct on that one). But also If there is profit to be made getting a currency across borders whether it is legal or not, then a way will likely be found to do so. Whether or not entering into a transaction with such parties is wise is another question. If Iraq ever executes a redenomination then the market to buy IQD (eBay, dealers, etc) will collapse. At that point there may be a market to buy them back at a substantial discount and some means found to get them back to Iraq (so the dealer can make money) but that all remains to be seen and "buyer (or in this case seller) beware" would be good advise.

individual loses when a contract is sold do not change the price. Its only the actually selling price, so in your example it would be $1, very low but not negative. But for a brief time, NO ONE was buying even at $1, so if you did not want to risk having to make arrangements to actually take possession of the oil, you had to pay to have some one take them. Folks likely could have just waited another day and there would have been buyers at a very low (but not negative) price as this happened on April 21st or 22nd (something like that) so not at the very very end of the month, but people panicked with a week left ("what if I'm stuck with this...") and paid to get rid of it.

What went negative, and really DID go negative (i.e this was no reporting / clerical error) was WTI oil futures for delivery in May. WTI futures are handled with "physical settlement". That is if you hold the contract when it expires (monthly) you actually get the oil. Some traders really want this (refiners or users big enough to contract for their own refining like airlines) but most traders do not as they are only there for speculation. So in the end of April with the virus bringing transportation to a near stand still and oil / fuel storage capacity already full to bursting the buyers actually wanting physical oil weren't buying, thus leaving those holding contracts only for speculation in the position of having to take delivery if they couldn't sell which they are completely unprepared to do. So they were briefly willing to pay to having others take it, In any market if conditions are right, prices can go negative. That is when the costs of holding onto a large supply of something is costing the owner more than the item is worth so they pay others to take it. Perhaps environmental regulations has made its storage very expensive or a past use is no longer allowed. It's rare but possible. The oil case is such an example.

Folks on this site constantly claim they do not pay any attention to those silly "gurus". Yet among the persistent themes many here keep repeating is the importance of Executive Order 13303. That it is what allowed US citizens to invest in Iraq including allowing the purchase of Dinars. This is of course nonsense. It is not illegal to hold currency of another country even if there are sanctions against doing business with (businesses in) that country. EO 13303 signed by President George W Bush on May 22, 2003 has nothing to do with granting rights to anyone but of removing them nor has it anything to do with currency Its all about protecting the Development Fund for Iraq (the DFI) from lawsuits. Read it here on the whitehouse archives https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030522-15.html or here on the wiki https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13303 Please point out where it says anything about allowing investment or allowing US citizens to own Dinar.

"I just know". More precisely you have the sensation that you know. I didn't ask if you know why some people believe they have been abducted by ET, but if you believe those claimed events really happend. I'm not saying that the son is lying. All he is stating is that he believes what his father told him. The father may well have believed what he said, just like the folks that say they have been abducted by ET. I'm saying that such claims by themselves offer next to nothing in the convincing evidence department unless you have already decided that they are true. Video was available in the 80s as was film and both were certainly available to the Israeli government. Yes merely announcing the find would be little more than what you have already presented, it is offering clear undeniable evidence that would be convincing. People believe in all sorts of stuff, some of those beliefs can be beneficial to the believer whether they are true or not. But in neither case is that evidence that the thing believed in exists. Again I would say to read The Big Picture, if you dare.

Oh Come on Markinsa, this is a video of Ron Wyatt''s son telling what his farther told him. If the first hand story is worthless the second hand one is even more so. I was asking for video of the official Israeli government excavation. You want me to believe that the most important religious, archaeological, scientific find in modern history if not recored history is know to the Israeli government and religions leaders but they chose to not tell anyone and just leave it buried but accessible to anyone who wants to dig around. Someone telling you that they believe X, is not evidence that X is true (even if they do in fact truthfully believe it). There are plenty of folks who (as far as I can tell) genuinely believe that they have had various sorts of encounters with extraterrestrials including being taken aboard spacecraft and "probed". Do you accept that as true (not just that they believe it but that what the say really happened)? If not why not?

and the evidence of that is what? Where is the video record of this effort?

It's an assertion of that, but it offers no evidence. The CGI video itself adds nothing. Personal testimony alone means nothing. A find of this importance to Christianity/Judaism and it was just left there? You find him truthful because you WANT to believe him. Suppose instead of claiming to have found the Ark of the Covenant he claimed to have found a fully intact alien space craft, but with the same total lack of evidence, just his say so. Would you believe that?

If that were to come to pass (proof of vacine required to do certain things) it would only entail being registered in a database that you have had the vaccine, there is no RFID chip involved. Just you fingerprint, or face scan (the Austin program isn't even that frat they are just giving the participants cards tight QR code). This is about blockchain being used for record keeping (possible a good use of it) and eventually biometrics and does not involve RFID tags. Numerous conspiracy promoters have posted outright lies about this program. From https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-gates-id2020/

To each their own of course. What do you think that video demonstrates? Its a slick production but otherwise is just assertions. We would expect that (for example) any ancient text dealing with aspects of daily life or current (from back then) events would have references to things that actually existed at the time of its writing. So the Bible containing such references is hardly surprising. What you call "evidence" is to me just your bias. If you want to understand how we decided what is true in the world (i.e. how science does so) I would suggest reading (or listening to) The Bg Picture by Sean Carol which has an excellent discussion of Bayesian Reasoning with examples specifically about about the supernatural. If we apply the same methodology to the question of "does God (any God) exist" as we do to other questions of interest like "will this plane fly", "why does eating this make you sick", "what are those bright things the night sky" and so on, the answer is "no". More precisely the probability of the hypothesis "God exists" being true is vanishingly small, but not 0. You can never to 100% certainty about anything as its possible we could all be brains in jars so to speak, though the likelihood of that is also extremely small from what we can tell. We all implicitly use and hence trust that methodology every time we interact with the modern world (i.e. constantly). But in matters of religion the believer says that methodology does not apply. I disagree.

I see there is a thread upstairs entitled "Dr. Fauci knew about HCQ in 2005 -- nobody needed to die". Gee sounds serious, but does anyone actually read the stuff they cut and paste? If you had looked at the 2005 NIH paper ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/ ) on using chloroquine on SARS (or SARS-CoV) you would see even on the first page (emphasis mine) It was a bench study on primate cells (which is of course where you start). It was not any sort of clinical trial even on animals but a test on cells in a petri dish and not even human cells (yes humans are primates but if human cells are used they usually say so). So this is a good first step, but only a very first step and since it was in 2005 and there was and is huge world wide interest in SARS every epidemiologist on the planet would have read this years ago. So its not only Dr Fauci that knew this and this is NOT an indication that these results would materialize in actual human use. The other claims also sound impressive (Dr ... treated 500 people with Chloroquine and none needed hospitalization and none died (which is of course redundant but sounds good). Does this tell us anything? No. Without a control group this is meaningless. How sick were these people, apparently not sick enough to require immediate hospitalization. The majority maybe the vast majority of people who contract COViD-19 have mild symptoms (especially if younger) so without knowing the demographics and having a control this random claim tells us nothing (is it even true? where did it come from). The human body is an incredibly complex system and the only way to understand how things work and what impacts various treatments have is good statistics. Just going by the seat of you pants is doomed to failure. Its annoying, but true. People want there to be a magic bullet, who wouldn't? (people also seem to want there to be some sinister conspiracy, which I do not understand). But so far there does not appear to be one including Chloroquine. The data so far (that I've seen) is contradictory. On the one hand it can result in a 30% reduction in the length of time people are hospitalized (which might seem small but would in fact be very good if true), on the other it has no impact on mortality. So is it worth study, likely even use as long as the side effects are monitored? Sure. But these wild accusations "no one had to die" are just nonsense.