It's called "beauty." If you don't have an eye for it, well, that's your taste. You aren't going to convince anyone with utilitarian arguments, any more than "those shoes are uncomfortable!" will convince anyone to wear sneakers instead of high heels or wingtips.
I've been to both Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax building. They're both beautiful.
> Many of those houses have required work as well
and the owners were quite happy to do that work. I don't think anyone hired FLW expecting to get a regular old tract house.
I have kinda mixed feelings on this. Protecting an endangered species against human hunting, habitat reduction, or other unnatural dangers makes total sense.
But what's unnatural about grizzlies? Were they introduced onto the island by man? Nope. For that matter, the bears on Kodiak -- how did they get there in the first place? They have plenty of salmon so they probably don't need to eat marmots, if there are any. But maybe they wiped out other species we don't know about.
What are you going to do to protect them against other natural predators? And why not introduce them into other suitable habitats, like we've done with wolves in the US? Then we wouldn't be so dependent on one island.
Edit: this is in marked contrast to New Zealand trying to eliminate the stoats and other introduced mammals who are not native and are wiping out the bird species who are. The bears got there on their own.
The article says "As the first known female grizzly on Vancouver Island, she could be the progenitor of an entirely new, self-sustaining grizzly population—the first in as many as 12,500 years".
They might be waiting for a long time for other bears to come
The authorities could always bring over some other ones, if that's really what they want.
In any case, the drive to mate is pretty powerful. I would think a female in heat would swim back to the mainland if that was the only way to find a male.
'On Vancouver Island—about 10 times closer to the mainland—the genetic diversity of any future grizzly population shouldn’t be a problem. As we’ve seen, “there’ll be males coming over to mix up the genes,” McLellan says. And now, perhaps, the odd female too."'
In fact, I use NeilMed, a commercial saline & bicarb powder together with distilled water, and I know from past exchanges on HN that lots of others here do, too. My own doctor said it was fine and lots of her patients do it. The solution runs out the other nostril, which is gross so you do it in private.
I have very few colds, allergies, or sinus infections since starting it, although it doesn't eliminate them all.
This Fort Detrick guy, though... that might be misinformation. I use the spray once a day, twice if I have a cold. Definitely not constantly.
Sure, in many applications, such as congestion where you can't breathe, you'd need to break up the mucus and eliminate it, without snarfing it in. Your solution sounds wonderful for doing just that.
I happen to sport a full beard, and I'm rather pleased with zero coronavirus infections in five years, not to mention a low incidence of colds and influenzas. A beard represents a man's unique natural defenses against all enemies, foreign and domestic, of the respiratory and digestive systems. Oiling, cleaning, and combing the beard are integral parts of that defense.
But, simply Use As Directed, because as we've seen with talc, oxygen, and religion, if/when people misuse/overuse them, turns into cancer...
I've been up REAL close to grizzlies, on Kodiak Island [1]. However, that has a population of 13,000 [2], whereas Vancouver has 840,000, according to that article.
That means on Kodiak, the bears have the land mostly to themselves, and humans aren't much of a threat to them. You wouldn't try this in Yellowstone, where fatal bear-human encounters happen regularly. And probably will on Vancouver, too.
It’s important to distinguish “Vancouver” (a city on the mainland) and “Vancouver Island” (an island off the coast).
Vancouver Island has a population nearing a million, but half of it live in the greater Victoria area, which occupies a tiny little peninsula and change on the southern tip. Most of the island - which is huge, approximately four times the size of Kodiak Island, for what it’s worth - is pretty wild and untamed.
I'm sure, but the question is, do the populations intersect? Looking at the map, I see three Provincial Parks up in the north, plus towns and roads. That will mean vacationers will encounter them.
Whereas on Kodiak, there is nothing on one side of the island.
I think it's time that we start to make room once again for the animals we almost drove to extinction. This would be a good, controlled setting to see if we can do this responsibly.
For good reason. Brown bears eat people. You are no more than a slow meal to them. Coexistence means accepting that people will be eaten by bears or bears will be killed by people defending themselves. I think it is worth noting that native tribes prepared for war if the needed to kill a brown bear.
Says somebody that has never lived where brown bears do. They can and will gladly eat you if you are the best meal around. Salmon are only around for maybe 1/4 of the year.
The problem is, written policy doesn't count for anything if you can still be sued for obeying the policy.
And if you can't be sued for following the policy, that's guaranteed release from liability, and the public haaaaates that. Vaccine companies have release from liability, for example, because otherwise nobody would make a product which is more-or-less mandatory and guarantees at least some complications over a large enough sample size, and this has spawned an entire culture of angry conspiracy theories.
There's no mechanistic way around this problem other than user education.
It’s not necessarily about education, it’s just hard to cope with psychologically. Lives aren’t valued with unlimited resources. When it’s someone you care about you wish more was done.
Tax, recording of births and deaths, court appearances, product information, delivery of goods and services in the event of payment for said goods and services, driver education...
natural immunity cured covid, the rest was vaccination theater which the drug companies made billions from without incurring any liability. Our political culture spawned an entire culture of angry conspiracy theories of which yours is one, "this is what the deplorables think"
like sending too many blue alerts, the vaccination theatrics, regulatory capture, and conspiracy theories have now done true damage to actual vaccines that confer lasting immunity.
I'm genuinely curious. How can you be sure natural immunity cured Covid and not the vaccination? The vaccinations were correlated with steep declines in deaths and severe illness, isn't that good enough to motivate the vaccinations?
Or is your point that the vaccine just gave a temporary respite that ultimately saved few lives relative to the cost?
Because it used to be called the flu, and the rise of Covid is correlated to the decline in flu related deaths. And suddenly as Covid started to decline flu related to increased. The mortality rate, however, did not change.
But it's still "cured" in the sense that fewer people die from it today compared to 2020, right? Intensive care units are not under the same pressure as they were during the pandemic years. It's a much less severe illness today than it was before, and many people attribute that change to the vaccinations.
That's probably the evolution to less deadly variants. We are lucky that happened, because we humans sure as shit weren't going to improve things ourselves.
countries around the world, rich and poor, pursued different public health responses, some because of choices, some had no choices. But people around the world are not getting serious covid any more, it's just not something anybody even thinks about more than say the flu. That's the attenuation of the virus and natural immunity (and you might as well lump attenutation of the virus with natural immunity because they occur on the same timescale in the same interactions), which was predictable and was predicted. The UK initially followed that idea as a strategy, and Sweden followed it, it was accepted science.
The people who died with covid didn't necessarily die of covid, but public health officials followed policies of lumping them together, and govts incented them to do it: "more money for covid". Old and infirm people, the morbidly obese, respiratory illnesses, etc. suffered the worst, as they do from the flu. Young people were hardly affected, though young people seem to have suffered more from the vaccine side effects and the socialization developmental deficit.
The conferred immunity from catching covid protects you from reinfection far longer than the so-called vaccines, because these mRNA vaccines don't work as traditional vaccines do, that's why (along with the profit motive) we were all told to start getting boosters essentially right away.
When an event like this causes excess deaths, it is followed by a period with a death deficit, simply because many of people "who were going to die soon anyway" died early, and they aren't around to die later, it's accepted science. That has to have happened with covid because they told us those people were dying, but try to get your hands on the statistics. I'm not saying people didn't get sick from covid or that it wasn't serious, But the coverups and stonewalling stop us from getting to the truth about what happened.
but it is not because of vaccinations that we don't worry about covid today, and the vaccinations we got had more side effects (in no small part because they were not tested).
I knew I would get downvoted for this because there is a political class that is, in HN terms, not comfortable with people "being curious" about it, they'd rather censor. But since GP engaged in gratuitous soapboxing and propagandizing I thought I'd spend some karma to speak up.
When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data? So far it looks like most (but not all) countries had an increase and then returned to the previous trendline: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year. For the world's total deaths per year, it definitely looks like the area under the curve increased due to covid.
>When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data?
right away. I'm not an epidemiologist, but it's simple logic. A certain number of people of every age die every year. infants, toddlers, tweens, adolescents, middle aged people, old people, in each group a certain %age of people die every year of "all cause mortality". More old people die than young people (we're talking about rates here, % chance of dying)
so, if there is a period where a whole bunch extra old people who die one year, that whole bunch extra old people are not around the very next year to die, because they're already dead.
If the numbers don't add up, somebody is hiding data. the numbers absolutely should make sense.
so, one explanation for what you are saying is that extra old people didn't die, it was the same number of old people; who died must have been young people, because those "missing deaths" will not show up in the "normal" death statistics for a long time. But that's not what we were told happened, so again, something is not right with the data.
I do want to believe what you're saying because it means fewer life-years lost but... the other explanation is that covid plus the countermeasures to it really did impact people's health (not just the fatalities) and increased net mortality. We can check back in a few years but so far this explanation seems likelier to me.
yeah, but that's not a significant point. covid "not having been the flu" is a different statement than covid is just the flu now. the Spanish flu (1919 or whenever that was) was not "just the flu" either, but it burned bright and then died out in a very short time.
the question is not whether covid-19 happened, it did. the question is whether our various responses did anything or much at all to help, and whether it was productive to turn it into an us/them political issue and suppress speech and criticism to maintain the facade of being right. qui bono?
There was more covid this summer than any summer before. Millions are disabled with long covid. The severity of an infection has barely anything do with outcomes.
The COVID vaccines were fairly effective in reducing infection rates and severity.
The problem comes when you present an experimental vaccine that hasn't gone through ordinary trials and requires you to sign a liability waiver before you can take it, but then superciliously impose penalties and restrictions on people who choose to decline. That is how you destroy public trust and foment conspiracy theories.
we were told the covid vaccines would prevent infection, then when they didn't, the narrative changed to reduced severity, is a more accurate statement of what you said.
In somewhat of a case in point on losing public trust, mentioning politicians and corporate media outlets lying about something seemed about as redundant to me as mentioning water being wet.
It's not politicians and media being embroiled in scandal that is surprising. It's that they still have their jobs. Politicians used to resign after scandal and reporters got fired. Now they get promoted
Politicians used to resign because of the expectation that they'd be voted out, in turn because of the expectation that the media would inform the voters of their mendacity.
The media has become so partisan that each side will attack the other with equal ferocity regardless of who was right on a particular issue, so now the politicians roll the dice and most of the time they still get reelected right after their own misbehavior.
The question is why the media continues to do this, given that they are clearly not benefiting from it -- their viewership/readership numbers are in the toilet, a lot of them have already gone out of business and the others are on the same trajectory.
I suspect it's something like, they've cultivated a partisan audience and if they now try to be neutral, they short-term lose partisans faster than they gain moderates and then some MBA who can't think past next quarter insists that they stop.
But returning to the original intercept course with the ground is hardly a genius plan.
How do you know that if you don’t have a way to compare it without vaccines. Oh wait, we do. More people died with the vaccine in 2021 than died in 2020.
they are high risk, not for covid infection, but because they have other comorbidities, i.e. what are they really dying of? doctor were forced to check "covid" even if the doctors didn't believe that.
It used to be the Eastern District of Texas, with Justice Rodney Gilstrap. I never went to Marshall or Tyler, but I knew a lot of people who did. They're small towns.
I don't know when it shifted to the Western District. Waco is not nearly as rural as East Texas; it's halfway between Dallas and Austin.
Plaintiffs file in Waco to get Albright -- if they filed in Austin, they wouldn't get him. Then they make a motion to move it to Austin, which he grants if he can based on schedules, and if it can move there, he still presides over it.
reply