Peter Todd @pete@petertodd.org

@stevejail @alex Flammable liquids are terrifying things.

@stevejail @alex Can also be used as booby traps: dump a bunch of gasoline in a house in response to a police raid via a sprinkler system and burn everyone inside.

Gasoline and piping are readily available; no way to regulate that. Hell, even a bunch of high proof alcohol, cooking oil, etc would work well once gasoline gets banned.

@stevejail @alex Seriously, water pistol flamethrowers would probably make excellent ambush weapons, eg when answering doors to police. Particularly for semi-suicide attacks where you don't expect to survive.

You don't even need to kill the target: police officers would change their behavior radically if many of them ended up with horrible 3rd degree burns on their faces and hands.

@alex @stevejail Much easier to make a knife. And you don't need any ammo.

@alex Why waste effort on that when guys are far more effective?

Also, making knives at home of any length is very easy.

"Prosecutors couldn't charge Blalock with taking illegal drugs, because she had a prescription. They couldn't charge her with abusing the drugs, either. (Not for lack of trying, though: DHR had actually counted how many pills she had taken.) Nor could the authorities charge her with getting the legal drugs by illegal means... What they could and did charge her with was not informing her doctor that she was pregnant. They labeled this prescription fraud: a felony."

https://reason.com/2021/06/23/pregnant-mom-prescription-drug-charge-alabama/

@icedquinn Problem is, that sensible advice would require health authorities to admit that there are in fact trade-offs to these vaccines...

@icedquinn There's highly suggestive evidence that covid vaccines do in fact increase your risk of getting covid temporarily. And prior vaccines have had temporary immunosuppressive effects. So yes, that could absolutely be happening.

Yet even then, for someone who is immunosuppressed, the higher chance of catching covid for a few days may be worth it in exchange for longer term protection. It's not an obvious decision.

Probably best for those ppl is get vaxed and quarantine for a few days.

@icedquinn The mRNA covid vaccines are completely synthetic and don't pose an infection risk like traditional live vaccines do.

In fact, they seem to be safest in people with weak immune systems. It's the younger, healthy, population that seems to be getting dangerous side effects from them. Probably in part due to their immune systems over reacting in certain ways.

@jb55 TIL Feynman didn't know about telomeres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

@mystik Meh, I'm not going to entertain silliness like claiming viruses don't exist.

For contagious diseases that can be spread by the type of contact that happens between doctors and patients, doctors certainly get infected by patients on occasion.

But the vast majority of actually contagious diseases are mild enough that doesn't matter: they only harm the very young, very old, and very sick. And of course, natural immunity is very real, so they aren't getting reinfected over and over.

After Bitcoin Miami, I did a bit of a road trip to Austin, Texas, driving a total of 1700 miles (I took the scenic route).

At 1.2 deaths / 100 million miles, I had a 20 in 1 million chance of dying in a car crash during that road trip.

For my 18 to 49 age group, the CDC estimates 500 deaths / 1 million covid infections.

For my risk of dying from covid caught at the conference to equal that of my road trip, you'd have to assume 4% of the conference got infected. 😂

@verretor Indeed...

...and yes, I actually ran the numbers on that 1 in 100,000 chance of dying due to the driving: about 1.2 deaths / 100 million miles, with a total of 1000km driven round trip between both of us.

I'm not going to go into details for the sake of their privacy. But suffice to say the project in question isn't work related, and probably has about a 1 in 100,000 chance of one of us getting killed doing it just due to the driving involved. What we're actually doing for the project is probably 1 in 10,000 or worse.