Peter Todd @pete@petertodd.org

https://theprint.in/opinion/indians-must-have-no-confusion-about-how-we-reached-impressive-covid-herd-immunity/591489/

"Indians must have no confusion about how we reached impressive Covid herd immunity"

tl;dr: covid just isn't that deadly, and has spread very widely in India. Other diseases like TB kill many more people, and the population correctly recognized the low risk. Based on antibody testing, there's probably 50+ undetected infections in India for every known case.

Case numbers have been dropping since Sept for the simple reason that herd immunity is real.

https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2014/02/11/roots-of-rcm/

Excellent article on how planes are _actually_ maintained.

tl;dr: the stuff you thought you knew about lifetime limits and preventative maintenance is probably wrong. Most parts don't actually wear out, and replacement parts aren't better. So planes are generally run until failure, and that's actually better in most circumstances than trying to do preventative maintenance.

@rusty @jimmysong Citation needed.

...and I won't be the slightest bit surprised if you come up with said citation... :/

@verretor There's this myth that many people have been pushing - including mainstream media - that diseases evolve to become less deadly over time. That can be true in things like ebola, which kill a huge % of the people who are infected. But covid is usually a mild illness; it kills a tiny minority. There's no direct evolutionary pressure there to become less deadly, because the people it kills are mostly irrelevant to it's fitness.

@verretor There's still debate on whether or not these new variants are actually more infectious, more deadly, etc. It's hard to tell, because random chance also makes some variants get lucky, and there are examples where they haven't become more common.

But assuming they are real, then they're 100% expected from lockdown: whatever lets the virus spread faster will be selected for. Unfortunately, spreading better can absolutely mean being more deadly to the small minority of people at risk.

@verretor What do I mean by "serial transmission"?

I mean the average distance between different infected people. Because evolution is incremental, it needs lots of steps to evolve new abilities.

Without lockdown, each person might infect, say, 5 people. That explodes, so everyone gets infected in just a few steps.

Without lockdown, each person might infect, say, 1.1 people. That grows slowly, so there's tons of steps between you and the first infection. Yet it still reaches ~100% eventually.

@verretor Though as much as we make fun of that, remember that the problem is that we _succeeded_ beyond all expectations. We crushed that curve with unsustainable measures.

The problem is almost no country could get that curve to zero. So it came back. Probably with new mutations, just like antibiotic resistance, because lockdown's serial transmission is actually the worst scenario re: evolutionary resistance.

Flattening the curve was supposed to end in herd immunity, slowly.

@crunklord420 What is the best decentralized/federated alternative to discord right now anyway?

Not sure I've ever actually used discord, lol.

"Merriam-Webster Changes Definition Of ‘White Supremacist’ To ‘Anyone Who Wins In The Stock Market When They’re Not Supposed To’"

https://babylonbee.com/news/merriam-webster-changes-definition-of-white-supremacist-to-anyone-who-wins-at-the-stock-market-when-theyre-not-supposed-to/

Re: Discord banning wallstreetbets:

We just might be living in a world where multi-billion dollar hedge funds are hiring people to type "n̷͕̘͝i̵͖͋̆g̴̨̼̀g̴͎̜̀ê̷̡͉̅r̶̜̣͗" in chat channels in a desperate attempt to avoid bankruptcy. #cyberpunk

"We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore."

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/where_do_we_go_from_here_and_who_is_going_to_step/

"Outsider trading" is the best new phrase of 2021, and we're just getting started.

@keith It gets MSM attention because WSB makes it into a story that can be sold to people who don't understand what's going on.

Risky investment fails for complex reasons isn't a very interesting story by itself.

https://lbry.tv/@rossmanngroup:a/why-mainstream-media-s-slander-of:c

Great explanation of what's really going on re: GameStop.

tl;dr: a bunch of short sellers screwed up by selling more than 100% of the stock that actually exists. They're on the hook for that, and they have to buy it back.

Under this circumstance, buying GameStop stock *is* economically rational. Risky however, because the rules can change...

...and that's why there is a massive media campaign against Wall Street Bets right now. To get the rules changed.

@NunyaBidness You know, in game theory, it's quite often that the mere existence of non-ideal/randomized actors radically changes the strategies that can work...

@NunyaBidness Not sure we're disagreeing really. The fact is, shorting more stock than actually exists is crazy, and obviously if those 3 million users take the risk, the shorters can get wiped out.

But there's guaranteed to be even _more_ sophisticated strategies at an even higher level of meta, involving manipulation of wsb. Though given the randomness of wsb, it'll probably be hard to make money on a big scale off that...

...and they're stepping in to stop people buying GameStop.

Looks like I got in just in time. 😂

@NunyaBidness Yup. I will not be surprised if ~all the current short sellers get wiped out in this first round. But the strategy will change, and people will figure out how to profit from wsb.