July 2022 Current Events: F*ck You I Won't Do What You Tell Me

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Internet VFW > July 2022 Current Events: F*ck You I Won't Do What You Tell Me

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Satire is (still) dead

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1544092380265070594?cxt=HHwWhICyodj12-0qAAAA

# ¿ Jul 5, 2022 00:35

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 03:18

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Isn't he technically immune from a vote of no confidence since they just had an election a little while ago? Lol if he just decides to squat 10 Downing even if the rest of his government bails.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2022 23:18

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

There was also the whole 'Abenomics' reforms to try and get the Japanese economy out of it's decades long slump. I didn't think there was a huge amount of controversy around it, mostly straightforward stimulus measures like increased government spending and monetary easing that at least didn't make things objectively worse.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2022 11:47

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

psydude posted:

None of that knife poo poo, either. loving homemade shotguns and sarin gas.

Or at least when they do knife poo poo they go whole hog:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Inejir%C5%8D_Asanuma?wprov=sfla1

# ¿ Jul 8, 2022 12:56

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

golden bubble posted:

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1545440070156648450
https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1545517590860255232

It took them two full weeks (over nine weeks if you count from the leaked draft) to come up with that :pathetic:

# ¿ Jul 8, 2022 22:52

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

golden bubble posted:

Guess I might as well post this for anyone who wants to know more about who Abe was

Just wanted to say thanks for the Abexplainer, that was super helpful. Sounds like Abe was a way bigger piece of work than the news generally makes him out to be, I always got the vague impression he was in the same mold as Bush Jr, Blair, and the other wannabe empire builders.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2022 01:13

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Sri Lanka's effectively had a non-functional government for the past few months - the country is out of money, food, and fuel, their prime minister resigned back in May when protesters burnt down a bunch of politicians' homes, and the president has been trying to use his remaining supporters and military loyalists to crack down on the population even though they're grossly outnumbered at this point.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2022 13:10

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Pakistan's the scary one, things have been getting a bit shaky there with the impacts from worldwide oil price hikes and agricultural shortages.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2022 15:11

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Fetterman's memewar is starting to feel like the Council of Elrond but for the Mid-atlantic instead of Middle-earth:

https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1547683652791717891?cxt=HHwWhsCi1aGFvfoqAAAA

# ¿ Jul 17, 2022 17:27

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

fknlo posted:

https://twitter.com/tweetermeyer/status/1549105274287403008?s=21&t=HXnOu7wjQ-yj1YQmqzAfoA

That is the pastiest person I've ever seen.

Oh hey I didn't know Musk was a relative of Ted Cruz.

The family resemblance is striking.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2022 22:22

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Bring back the Old Northwest to distinguish from the Plains states :colbert:

# ¿ Jul 20, 2022 11:42

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

There are both some cursed and hilarious options on the current succession list. 100% on board for President Haaland restoring indigenous control of the country.

Comedy option - Biden passes away, #2-13 all die in simultaneous freak transportation related accidents and Mayor Pete's long game is complete.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2022 11:44

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

shame on an IGA posted:

https://www.al.com/business/2022/07...?outputType=amp

there's plenty more in the article

Alabama may or may not need tougher workplace child labor rules, but it�s entirely appropriate for Alabama to have different�and, indeed, lower�child labor standards than the rest of the United States. The reason is that while having a minimum working age is good, money is also good. Alabama is a lot poorer than the rest of the United States, and there are very good reasons for Alabamans to make different choices in this regard than other Americans. That�s true whether you�re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Child labor rules that are appropriate for the rest of the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Alabama. Rules that are appropriate in Alabama would be far too flimsy for the richer and more child welfare conscious US states. Split the difference and you�ll get rules that are appropriate for nobody. The current system of letting different states have different rules is working fine. Children in California and New York have gotten much safer over the past 20 years, and Alabama has gotten a lot richer. *

# ¿ Jul 22, 2022 19:54

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

The NYTimes recently had a fairly decent (if bleak) article on where we're at with Covid:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/opinion/covid-19-deaths-vaccines-endemic.html

quote:

Bedford is reluctant to dwell on semantic debates about what constitutes a �pandemic phase� rather than an �endemic phase� for Covid-19, for instance. But if we insist that the country is still in a pandemic phase, he says, we�re not going to be able to downshift from that anytime soon, since conditions aren�t likely to look very different for years � and the country�s accumulating immunological protection, if imperfect, is still a categorical break from those earlier phases in which we first calibrated our fears. �If we�re saying that we�re still in a pandemic right now, it�s still going to be a pandemic in year seven � we�ll still be in a pandemic then,� Bedford says. �So I think it�s better to acknowledge that we�re at 98 percent of the population having immunity of some form � certainly over 95 percent. There�s not much more that could change in that regard.�

There are technical reasons other epidemiologists would dispute the term �endemic.� With respiratory diseases, it can refer to diseases where the average sick person infects fewer than one new person, and each of this year�s variants is more infectious than that. And while many use �endemic� to imply viral stability, there remains the possibility of a �surprise� in viral evolution, of course; no one I spoke to for this article was comfortable ruling it out.

But in a vernacular sense, the term fits: A large majority of the country has gotten infected with the coronavirus, probably most of us with a strain of Omicron, and 67 percent of us are vaccinated as well (though only 32 percent boosted). And for all the variant-after-variant turbulence of the past few months, from another perspective, the Covid experience in America has been for months in something like a steady state.

quote:

It is natural to look at those charts and feel some relief, appreciating how much immune protection the country has accumulated over time, particularly against severe disease and hospitalization. But the footprint of that steady state is also disconcertingly heavy. More than 300 Americans have been dying nearly every day for months; the number is today above 400, and growing.

Right now, Bedford says, around 5 percent of the country is getting infected with the coronavirus each month and he expects that pattern to largely continue. What would that imply death-wise, I ask? As a ballpark estimate, he says, going forward we can expect that every year, around 50 percent of Americans will be infected and more than 100,000 will die.

This year has been considerably worse than that, largely because it includes the initial arrival of Omicron � which, though often described as �mild,� killed more than 100,000 Americans in the first six weeks of the year. And so although the country�s current trajectory is following an annualized pace of 100,000 deaths, more than 200,000 Americans have died already this year, which implies over 250,000 deaths by the end of 2022.

Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who left Harvard to become the chief scientist at the online medical portal eMed in 2021 after spending most of the pandemic as the country�s leading rapid-testing evangelist, believes it could get worse. With a combination of seasonality and waning immunity among older people, he said, there�s potential for a fall wave of perhaps 1,000 a day. That would bring the number of American deaths, this year, to potentially 300,000 or more.

quote:

Where is that, exactly? Mina calls it a �long, bumpy off-ramp,� defined by the imperfect but predictable and reliable accumulation of additional immune protection.

�We are not seeing the same levels of death,� he says. �We�re just not. And that�s really important because this is reflecting not just the fact that we have treatments but a combination of immunity from infections and vaccines.�

Before the pandemic, Mina�s research was focused on the development of immunity in babies and children, and his mental model for our collective experience here is the same. �I�ve always said that we have to grow out of this pandemic,� he said. �We have to literally just build up enough immunity for us to get out of the pandemic as a human species.� Right now, he said, we are the equivalent of 2- or 3-year-olds immunologically speaking � having passed through �the real risk zone,� we are now for the first time able to navigate a world of viruses and bacteria without the same acute medical risks as before. �We know that 3-year-olds still go to the hospital a lot, but we know that given the same infections, 3-year-olds do a lot better than 1-year-olds. And that�s because of immunity.�

The novel coronavirus is no longer novel to us, in other words. Our immunity to Covid-19 is growing up. �That�s where we are as humans,� Mina says.

For many of us, he says, the process will continue. The immunological gains aren�t necessarily huge anymore, given how many times most of us have been exposed � and will be, going forward. �Those who get through it will probably actually have then seen the virus, maybe 10 or 15 times over the next five years,� he says. But each exposure, vaccination or boost does add to the tool kit and makes the risks of future infections less scary � one reason a recent small-scale social-media panic about possible heightened risk from second infections is so misplaced. �Eventually, it will settle out, and then our immune histories will really protect us more and more and more each year,� Mina says.

Of course, there are those who cannot build that additional immunity so well, primarily older people. Thanks to what�s called immunosenescence, the older you are the harder time you have forming new protections against new diseases, and the easier it is for you to lose those protections over time. So if the rest of the world is now building a higher and higher immunity wall, with each additional booster or infection adding some amount of protection � and future variant-specific boosters or pan-coronavirus vaccines potentially adding even more � the vulnerable old are building their own walls a bit more slowly and fitfully.

Covid-19 has always been a disease of the elderly, defined almost more by its age skew of mortality than by any of its other characteristics, with risk doubling roughly every eight years and octogenarians hundreds of times more at risk of death than young adults. But in a time of widespread vaccination and almost universal infection, that gap may well expand.

Mina compares the building of immunity to the learning of a language. �It�s a fact of the biology of immunity that it�s really hard to build a brand-new memory and keep it if you�re old,� he says. �And so I do think that for quite a while our elderly population is going to keep having really big problems because they just can�t retain these new memories.� People exposed today, who will become 80 years old in 25 years or so, won�t have the same problem, Mina says, because they will have built their immune memory at a younger age.

None of this should surprise us, Mina says. �I�ve always said, this is very much a textbook respiratory virus,� he said. �It�s new, which is why it�s mutating a lot. And we�re watching it mutate, which is why it�s scary.� But it�s really just �a baby virus,� he says. �It�s mutating because it�s growing up and learning how to live in us.�

tldr being that technical endemicity will continue for many years. Covid will be a new and steady drag on life expectancy on the order of Alzheimers and diabetes as it affects the vulnerable and elderly. Eventually with multi-generational replacement you'll have people who will have been exposed to Covid all their lives and hopefully retain protection into old age.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2022 17:14

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

I was doing some Wikipedia sleuthing, and did you know that the United States once had a battleship called the USS Maine, that blew up...in Cuba? Little known facts of American history, I wonder how the press and public at the time handled such an incredible accident.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2022 14:56

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

The way I've heard it explained, a business can make a ton of money: 1) selling/leasing/maintaining aircraft (and in particular engines) or 2) renting out landing & gating slots at airports, and almost impossible to make a cent operating an actual airline since the other two will adjust their fees accordingly to siphon off any margin you might accumulate. Competing airlines are always just going to be crabs in a bucket racing to the bottom in terms of service trying to eke out as much excess value they can to waste on stock buy-backs while Boeing/Airbus/GE/P&W and the lease-holders of ATL/DFW/DEN/ORD/... make off like bandits.

So in other words, America needs to get on the same wavelength as the rest of the world and ~~adopt socialism now~~ nationalize the US airline industry.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2022 23:33

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 03:18

Terrifying Effigies: Oct 22, 2008; Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Older but still good write-up on the craziness behind Neom: https://malekafzali.substack.com/p/neom-the-line-to-oblivion

Guess every dictator eventually ends up with their own Germania project.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2022 12:00

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Internet VFW > July 2022 Current Events: F*ck You I Won't Do What You Tell Me