That it seems nobody wants to sell you anything anymore. Now, they want to rent you things. A car? TV? Fridge? A BBQ grill?...Everything has to be connected. Everything has to be "smart". Which means you have to open an account online and click ok on the "Terms and Conditions" page before you can use the thing you supposedly bought. You can't even fix it yourself if it breaks. And while you're using it, they collect data on every microsecond of use to sell to third parties.
The vaccines were released to the public barely a year ago. There is no way to know exactly how safe or effective they are, supposing they are. We just don't have the data yet. What we have, however, is an aggressive censorship of any information or person critical of the vaccines.
This is wrong. We know how the ingredients of the vaccine interact inside the body and we know they leave the body pretty rapidly. We have a good idea of the side effects as over 6 billion doses have been administered worldwide.
The great thing about falsifying information is that it can come from anywhere.
The idea that it's fine for a bunch of snot-nosed purple haired leftist activists (sorry, I meant wise and scholarly even-handed moderators) to censor the de-facto public knowledge search infrastructure is ridiculous.
I love finding out that my hypothesis is falsified -- no matter where the data comes from. It means I'm about to learn something that I didn't expect. The best moments of my day.
Maybe that comes from being a programmer for 40 years. After being surprisingly wrong tens of times a day, you start to look forward to it.
Perhaps the self-proclaimed overlords of society's collective knowledge need to ... learn to learn, before putting the brakes on all that unruly and uncomfortable data?
Google made a business decision that may (or may not) align with the values of their organization. You are welcome to criticize the business decision. You are welcome to criticize the values of the organization. Yet making unsubstantiated claims is only contributing to the problem.
The thing is, Google has decided not to accept money from people who are promoting a particular political agenda. It's their right to do so. Perhaps they should have gone a bit further and said that they were not going to accept money from people promoting the opposite agenda since advertising is not the place for scholarly discourse, but that wasn't the decision they made and it's their right to make that decision as a private entity.
>There is a big difference between Scientists and Political Activists with science degrees.
Not to Google there isn’t.
I don’t want to ever been seen as defending Alex Jones, but everyone should have seen this coming.
When it was OK for FAANG to deplatform a person for legal but annoying things, when it was OK to shadow ban things you just don’t like, not only OK but rewarded to repeat intelligence community lies by saying things inconvenient truths are just “Russian Disinformation”, when someone felt the need to fact-check and obituary of a woman that died of the Covid vaccine, I mean… how many times do we need to slide down it to see call a low traction ramp what it is?
I hate that I sound like a conspiracy theorist, but is it really a conspiracy if they admit to it? This can not continue, I don’t think.
The plan appears to me to push it as far as they can and welcome in regulation as a capture scheme. I have no other explanations.
The Covid vaccine does not work by directly stimulating the immune system, like all other vaccines do. Instead, it inserts synthetic molecules into some cells, turning them into little machines that constantly produce a toxin that is released into the blood stream. The immune system is supposed to learn to fight this toxin. This has NEVER before been done in any other vaccine. We could speculate for hours about what could go wrong, but for the moment lets just say that myocarditis and blood clots are definitely NOT mild side effects.
Myocarditis and blood clots are also (more frequently) side effects from getting C19.
Just because it's never been done before does not mean we have no idea what it will or won't do. Biology is uncertain, but it's important to examine the vaccine risks AGAINST COVID RISKS.
Nothing is no-risk, including the vaccine. However, the accurate comparison is getting covid without the vax, versus with the vax. Looking at the vaccine risks in isolation is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.
The vaccine can 1) hurt me with probability p1, and 2) help me with probability p2, in case I get COVID later in a few-month-window after the vaccine when it is efficient.
I can choose to not get the vaccine, but I can't choose to not get COVID. COVID may hurt me either way.
Depending on the values p1, p2, it's better to get the vaccine or not get it. The problem is, most people have no idea about values of p1, p2 and that they are highly dependent on personal details.
Transmission to others is still an issue in the un-vaccinated.
Your logic doesn't make sense. You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions. Even your second sentence: "COVID may hurt me either way" doesn't reflect reality - it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated.
And while personal details may vary, we can estimate covid risks pretty well with the population base rate, sliced by a few basic dimensions (age, BMI, smoker status). We also have a pretty good idea of vaccine risks - almost none.
We may not know vaccine side effects long term, but we also don't know the effects of long term covid. We do know that short term, the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.
Look, I'm all for people making their own choice when it comes to the vaccine. Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.
> You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions.
That is not strictly true. Vaccination decreases the chance of bad COVID, but it does not eliminate it. This benefit is working for some people, but it is not for some other people (bad breakthrough cases, people with weak/no immune response to the vaccine who later get COVID).
Limiting contact with strangers via distancing and masks is a sensible strategy for someone afraid to get bad COVID. Except for intoxicating with CO2/H20 and being short on O2, there are little risks to this so I do practice that.
> it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated
Yes but both numbers are too small for me to care enough to risk the vaccine. This isn't the first week of the pandemic - we got more than a year and in this time people around me are still completely fine living their life, the virus has literally no impact where I live. It is different for other people who knew people who died from COVID, so they think COVID is much more scary. But numbers are clear - COVID isn't a plague-level problem and not everybody needs to get vaccinated for their benefit.
> the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.
That is not obviously true. There is a competing opinion that it is not good policy to mass vaccinate with too leaky a vaccine, because there is the dire possibility that it will put pressure on the virus evolution so it gets better at evading this kind of vaccine. I am not saying one or the other is obviously the correct one, but I do not think anybody can say with certainty.
> Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.
Society has a discussion - and there is still no clear consensus on what to do. Different states/countries do different strategies. I think that is a good thing - in case some policy turns out to be quite bad, at least it won't kill everybody.
I call bullshit here. If you're that worried, get the J&J vaccine, it's just like all the others. Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID versus had these side effects so the argument that you're doing the safe thing does not hold water.
> Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID
Yes but a very small part of those are relevant to my personal assessment of risk of bad COVID. The risk depends strongly on age, health status, lifestyle and so on. Absolute numbers of deaths are not that important to personal risk assessment.
I would be completely shocked if your "personal risk assessment" is accurate. There is no clear indications on which folks will get long COVID, "age, health status, lifestyle, and so on" are generalizations not absolutes. Your chance of dying of COVID, regardless of your health status, is much greater than the chance of experiencing serious side effects in what is probably one of the most widely distributed vaccines in history.
"Feelings" have no place in science. These are numbers not subjective anecdotes, which appear to be what you're basing your decision on. Say what you like, the data doesn't lie, only people do.
Risk assessment given missing data is very much personal and subjective. It's ridiculous that some try to use "the science" as a justification for their personal values or risk assessments.
Do no harm. You have no idea of the real risk from the vaccine because they really aren’t looking. Not 1 child should have been made to suffer myocarditis or died from the vaccine vs their risk of covid. Not one. But many have.
"Think of the children!" one of my favorite ways to see people trying to get out of an argument. Who could possibly argue for wanting to hurt children!
I would love some citations here, as this seems to be the exact type of misinformation this act is trying to combat. The thought that hundreds of thousands of medical professionals across the world are willingly ignoring potentially fatal consequences for children out of some nefarious political agenda is ludicrous. If this was really happening, it would be trivial to show it, anecdotes are not hard data.
In the same vein, not 1 immunocompromised child should die from COVID when there is an easy and safe way to combat it. Not one. But many have.
I don't think it's from a nefarious political agenda, but more so ignorance, stubbornness and scientism/cargo cult science (trust the science is not scientific).
As many folks as we have dog piling onto "vax bad" train, there is no shortage of people with incentive to dig in here. The fact the vaccine has been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine seems to be lost on most folks. Additionally, this seems to be an extension of general vaccine hesitancy which has absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever but continues be a problem in the US.
When you have nuts sticking spoons to their face, claiming to have been magnetized, and those folks are speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem.
> The fact the vaccine has been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine seems to be lost on most folks.
In terms of time, these vaccines very much have not been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine.
> this seems to be an extension of general vaccine hesitancy
In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.
> hesitancy which has absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever
You mean Scientific(TM) basis? Because there are numerous reason to be HESITANT in terms of science (the process of uncovering what is and is not true). E.g. vaccine reactions are not a myth - we should study them more; vaccine mechanism is still sometimes opaque - we should know more about that and how someone's genetic play a part; adjuvants that have side effects are also not a myth - what about finding safer adjuvants?
> nuts ... speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem
To be clear, you're saying they should be censored?
Censorship is a Russian Doll problem. It's turtles all the way down. Who makes the censors unbiased? Science should continue to be about questioning what is believed and believed to be true.
There are skeptics on both sides of the bell curve of intelligence. A nut, as you say, and an intelligent scientist may both come to the same conclusion - it doesn't make the nut's reasoning correct, but it also doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.
> In terms of time, these vaccines very much have not been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine.
This is a tired, out-dated argument, all 3 vaccines in distribution in the US have been fully vetted and passed all tests, there is no more "emergency approval". If time is what you want then you're just saying there is absolutely nothing that will convince you to take it.
> In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.
Yes, now that is has become a political issue instead of a scientific one (like it should be), many more people have been duped.
> what about finding safer adjuvants?
How about being realistic about the side effects of the vaccine? This is one of the most studied, most widely distributed vaccines in history. If there any data to back up any sort of hesitancy, I believe the amount of people desperately searching for something useful to use in their war on science would find it.
> you're saying they should be censored?
I'm saying viewpoints that obviously have absolutely no basis in reality (Bill Gates microchips, magnetizing face spoons, etc) should not have a place to flourish alongside real scientific discourse. How about we vet an idea before we let the masses with little to no critical thinking skills consume it.
> doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here, however if a "nut" says something sane, that doesn't make them sane. I think the larger problem is there are a lot of people with a lot of money to make by preaching vaccine hesitancy. If people are maliciously influencing public opinion for personal gain and the detriment of public good, how do you suggest we combat that?
I agree censorship is not the answer but I also don't support giving a platform to people in a society where people will accept absolutely anything in their echo chamber without question or serious discourse. The media has lost the confidence of the people and everyone is so caught up in bipartisanship, it's a literal crime the vaccine hesitancy falls along political lines, if anything that should tell you it is not based in science.
“mRNA vaccines tell our cells to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not harm the vaccine recipient, but it is antigenic and thus stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.”
>VITT is not associated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines.
We're talking 400 cases of VITT from two specific vaccines (AZ and J&J) out of 6.2 billion doses given. Furthermore, COVID itself is associated with getting blood clots. In fact, you have a much higher chance of getting blood clots by staying unvaccinated than getting the vaccine. Even further, blood clots are entirely treatable if caught early.
Of course, as others have said, blood clots aren't a legitimate concern for anyone. This is yet another shifting of the goalposts.
Then again, those 1/500 are old age or with existing debilitating health conditions. The rest of the people have a close to zero chance of dying from Covid. It is not a great idea to expose them to that 1/17000 chance of getting an unnecessary heart condition that will affect them for life. And remember, myocarditis and blood clot issues are secondary effects we know about now. The vaccine was invented and released very recently and there is no way to know the long term effects. And don't forget, this vaccine works with a brand-new genetic technology never before released to the public.
The thing is that death is not the only strongly negative outcome of CV19. It's not uncommon for young and formerly healthy individuals to experience long term effects, sometimes with debilitating severity. That is just as much worth avoiding as death is and needs to be factored into risk calculations.
"Notably, a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29 % of healthcare providers themselves expressed hesitancy about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The same survey found that among the general public, the group that reported that they “definitely will not get vaccinated” may be the hardest to reach via most traditional public health means. Only two emissaries were reported as trustworthy sources by at least half the people in this group: their personal health care provider (59 %) and former President Trump (56 %). These findings suggest that individual health care provider endorsement and support may be one of the sole avenues for reaching this group with reliable and timely vaccine information [60]."
I would pay a premium for NOT having all the extra electronics --a computer that controls the computer of the computer, a large TV on the dash, a car that only the dealership can fix because they are the only ones who have the equipment to read the codes, everything by wire...I prefer a car that lets me stranded in the road for something I can usually figure out and repair myself, instead of a car that just stops running and has to be towed directly to the dealership for service.
I agree, but also hold an extreme view on the other end. If you’re going to put tech in a car, I want that crap to be Tesla-levels of tech. Not this half-assed 6” “infotainment” crap.
Find a way to slap a straight up automotive grade 23” 144hz touchscreen in there. Or at least do what Tesla did and say screw it and use one that isn’t. Really push the envelope or don’t bother at all.
I expect more from BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen but they produce absolute garbage. Audi owner here.
