CharonY

There were also older studies trying to figure out whether temperature had an effect on rhinovirus infections (it did not). But I think much of the research has moved precisely due to the unfavourable effort/cost to insight ratio.

According to a report Scholz suggested a neutral status for Ukraine with guarantees from Russia and the US. Zelensky responded that Putin could not be trusted to uphold such an agreement and seemingly with good reason. Before that, in the meeting between Scholz and Putin, Putin again reiterated the one people claim of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. As such his motivation does not seem to be borne out of fear of the West, but rather a desire of the creation of an USSR style Russia in his image.

A few things to that. Those studies usually aim to establish the minimal infectious dose and only establish limited, dose-response relationships. I.e. you can have dose escalation, but you would want to keep levels overall low and mostly monitor binary outcomes. I.e. you do not want the patients to get very sick for very obvious reasons. Another study goal can be to evaluate protective properties drugs to prevent disease and here different treatment groups would be exposed to an infectious dose of the pathogen. However, these studies are not very common a) due to the need to mitigate risk, b) are often fairly expensive, but also b) because for certain diseases somewhat decent animal models have been established that mimic human exposure and are used instead. That being said there are quite a few studies around. For influenza you can go back to at least the 60s and there are occasional updates when new variants come around, for example. For more harmless diseases these study might also exist, but are less likely to get funded, if they there is not some kind of public health interest behind them (e.g. for the development of antivirals or other drugs).

I think the laws are fairly strong in Canada (at least superficial they look somewhat similar to Germany, though Germany is probably a bit stronger in job security for certain parts of the public sector). That being said, I think that misconduct and incompetence are actually one of the few reasons that are grounds for dismissal. Performance might be a bit iffy, depending on how they are measured. Regarding serfdom, I may be misremembering but IIRC serfdom was on the decline well before the plague throughout Western Europe. Mostly in England, the drop in number of servile peasants does fit the timing of the black death better. Interestingly, a book (written by Mark Bailey) has specifically studied the decline of serfdom in medieval England actually called out the overemphasis of the Black Death. Conversely, in Eastern Europe serfdom increased after the the Black Death and in other parts. So it is potentially one of those things where one event had likely an impact on the other, but the precise relationship is likely somewhat more complicated than assumed, once one starts looking into it in detail.

Or ligament issues. As you mentioned, biological systems are complex and they have the annoying tendency not to work precisely as predicted.

The theoretical answer is probably yes, the practical almost certainly no. The effects of exercise are very complex and while there is some rough understanding on the macro level (e.g. on average what level of exercise seems to correlate with a certain outcome) but what is really happening mechanistically is barely understood. Pretty much the same can be said for respiration rate, generation of ROS and all the factors that may account not only for individual differences but potentially also day-to-day differences in a given person. Slept badly? It may or may not influence your metabolism in terms of ROS generation. Moreover, we also do not understand relative contribution to a given factor very well. Are exercise benefits on cardiovascular health offset by eating bacon once? How about twice? Weekly? Again, individual differences are huge and as we age, or get stressed, a lot in our physiology changes. Trying to achieve the level of desired precision with the lack of data we have got is simply put impossible. Only folks like Dr. Oz and their ilk will tell you that we have clear and definite answers to that. What we do have are rough guidelines which apply to some degree to a population with a given set of characteristics. Pretty much everything beyond that is extrapolation.

Uh, since we all came from Africa, how is it possible that we only have fragments of what you call African DNA? Do you think our DNA goes becomes something else once we move out of a region? The way to think about it is pretty much all our DNA is shared with our African ancestors, but Eurasian populations have lost some of the diversity (bottleneck effect). While there are new alleles that are more prevalent or even exclusive to non-African populations, they are just relatively small bits of our shared genetic backbone. That is a bit problematic if the given information is not based on mainstream information and therefore makes it impossible for folks to join the dots in a correct way.

What? Are you referring to the holocaust? There, early computers were used to facilitate the genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust Not sure why switching over to some nebulous AI would make things better. Policies and global strategies matter. Tools are subservient to those and can make things better or worse. Also, I note that you keep using "AI" and "algorithm" similar to the term "magic wand". As in, it seems to magically solve the problem without exactly being clear how. And no, we just calculate something is not an explanation. It is just using different words to explain nothing. Can more data help? Sure, but it depends on exactly how we use it. But if we are not willing to either mitigate climate change or develop policies to address its impact or develop some sort of strategy to help each other, the AI might as well tell us to run in circles until we die, for all the good it will be doing.

As with virtually all biological systems an one-dimensional view is not helpful. Yes, higher metabolic rate means higher rate of ROS generation. It also means that the system needs to ramp up its antioxidative defenses to cope. How much it can do so, is dependent on many, many factors. Then if the defenses are overwhelmed and damages happen on the cellular level, you then would have to look at how much of the tissue can be repaired. And then you go even higher to the systemic level and ask about health detriment/benefit, you then need to balance out those damages with all the benefits you get from activity. Ultimately oxidative damages will accumulate, regardless of exercise level. But we also know that without exercise the risk of cardiovascular and other failures increase. Extreme exercise can be detrimental, but I suspect it is less due to oxidative damages but more to injuries and other effects of regular overexertion.

I do not understand the comparison with Germany, to be honest. Germany has or had fairly strong trade unions, and the strike rate is the closest there is within OECD countries to the UK (21 strike days per 1000 employees UK vs 16 Germany between 2008-2017). Compare that to US (5) or Canada (74). France is of course top of the list (118).

Well, to me that looks a typical distraction. Instead of negotiating for higher wages, just limit immigration? Hey here is a bad situation, let's not address it, but instead blame something else. Meanwhile, the effects of immigration on the UK labor market have been relatively small and mostly affect the segment of wages that are occupied by immigrants in the first place. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-labour-market-effects-of-immigration/ In 2021 about 240k work visa were approved (which seems a bit of a far cry from the claim of unrestricted immigration, especially compared to, say, Canada). Even assuming that all of those are unskilled workers the impact on salaries would be miniscule. And this is under the most favourable assumption. Also, I thought the discussion is about essential workers. Also based on the OP, are you assuming that essential work is only (or mostly) done by unskilled and predominant immigrant workers? Because other groups appear to benefit salary-wise from immigration.

There is a good point in there as wage increases can increase inflation. That being said, some companies have made record profits for their shareholders and that is not in line with keeping wages flat. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-30/2021-was-best-year-for-u-s-corporation-profits-since-1950 Here you can see the profit margin of companies and compare that to the wage development. Since around 2000 there has been quite a separation of these values and after a pandemic bump employee compensation is dropping again. On the microlevel wage increases might not be ideal for certain businesses, but on the macrolevel it makes sense to push for wage increases when shareholders are having record profits. Otherwise we are just redistributing money upward.

! Moderator Note Trashed.

I think if they do it, it is more likely to see whether there has been unauthorized access.

Statues reminding us of the atrocities? Sure. Statues celebrating those responsible for it? No. A Hitler Statues is not a good way to remember the holocaust.

I do not think that is accurate, there are big differences in ideology and approach, and especially the religious right had always used wedge issues (evolution, race etc.) to exclude critical thinking approaches. But in parallel there has been a systemic change, in which increasingly high-schools cater to grades and both, parents and students are increasingly invested in optimizing that part at the cost of more complex intellectual development. If you cannot quantify it via a simple test it is of no interest to any party (except the teacher, perhaps). Increasingly, even good students seek out accomodations in college so that they can a score boost over their peers. Highschool teachers have started to provide model answers so that the student can memorize them and so on. Academic standards are falling, grade inflation is real, and administration is more than happy with that, as long a it puts bums on a seat. Try to make them think critically and ask open questions? Student evaluations will skewer you and there will be discussions with the dean. Better hope you are tenured. Add that together with increasing anxiety and the comfort of just knowing simple facts and you have a recipe to kneecap critical thinking skills without actually actively trying to do so. Perhaps it is not as bleak as I make it sound, but the trend over the last 10 years or so is going into that direction. In part it is because much of the critical thinking development had been moved from school to college in the past, but now, especially across North America (but also elsewhere) college is seen as an investment to build a career based on degrees. Academic skills per se are taking a bit of a back seat. And to be fair, I do see their point to some degree. If you paid tens of thousands of dollars and fail to get a degree, it can financially ruin you or put you on a very bad trajectory.

I think the race issue is so deeply coded that folks reacting to that are not even quite sure anymore that it is related to race at all. To many, this is about losing identity and norms. But of course, these norms were heavily associated with being white whereas the rest is just a deviation or fringe. Having the "fringe" now entering the main spaces is what makes many feel threatened. Not as such. Individual bets might be closer to polls, but they are also vulnerable to manipulations (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimrossi/2020/10/29/election-odds-is-political-betting-more-accurate-than-polling/) It is also important to note that many parents are not in favour of their kids learning (or being forced to learn) critical thinking. In many cases it turns out that their kids will struggle with the concept for a while at least and some are inevitably going to fail. As parents and kids associate high academic grades with (financial) success, it becomes a risk to take challenging courses or being forced to go through them. We see a continuation of this line of thinking also increasingly in colleges. I think there are lot of knock-on effects going on.

The voters really came out against traditional conservatism and really marched into, well whatever this is.

Do you have data to that shows that it is true (aside from gut feeling, that is)? The primaries in which traditional conservatives (such as Cheney) are losing their seats to crazy pro-Trumpists suggest otherwise.

And the crazy bit is that her opponent then claimed that she never conceded, so she had to release an audio recording. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/17/cheney-releases-concession-call-audio-to-refute-primary-opponents-claims-00052593 I am not sure if related, but there are a lot of cases (I see it mostly from the pandemic perspective) where folks are utterly divorced from reality and are not even internally consistent. As such, it is not just US-specific but for some reasons folks do not seem to be able to deal with information anymore and at one point or another seem to just make things up and treat it as reality. And it is no longer limited to political spin or opinions.

In case you are curious, here is the warrant https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/mar-a-lago-search-warrant-and-inventory/6478c5980764438f/full.pdf

The title refers to Chinese women because the study involved a cohort of Chinese women.

The reason is pretty obvious, isn't it? It has been a repeated talking point of anti-feminist sentiments for quite a while. It is pretty much the only example that folks could think of, by cherry picking data in a very myopic way. Meanwhile, the very same voices ignore the large literature demonstrating medical sexism against women (for an historic perspective see e.g. https://time.com/6074224/gender-medicine-history/ , but there is a lot of peer-reviewer lit out there, too).

It would be great if you didn't just make things up. The differences in lethality between breast and prostate cancer is well documented across various metrics. Take 5-year and 10-year survival rates for example. These are common measures to identify how long patients survive after diagnosis, which includes treatments. It is important to note that the survival rate does not necessarily mean that the patients actually died from the particular cancer. That being said, in the US using SEER data (you can find them on the NIH website) the 5 year relative survival rate for prostate cancer is 97% (or 3% die) whereas in breast cancer the 5-year survival rate is about 90% (10% die). So from there we can already see that that the death for breast cancer is about 3x higher for a 5 year period (funding is roughly 2x higher, so as @swansont pointed out, prostate cancer is actually overfunded relative to breast cancer, and both relative to other, deadlier cancer forms) . Looking at longer survival it is even worse. 10-yr prostate cancer survival rate is basically the same as 5 -yr (97%). As I mentioned before, more folks die with rather than of prostate cancer. In comparison, the 10-yr survival rate of breast cancer drops to 84%. So if we look at longer-term survival, the difference increases to ~5-fold. An interesting aspect is to look at untreated effects. While the data is a bit spotty, there some data for breast cancer suggesting a 5-yr survival rate of 19.8% and 10-yr survival of 3.7%. There were some interventions when symptoms presented, so not all patients were left entirely untreated, but it shows that breast cancer left untreated can have significant impact. (https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1096-9098(200004)73:4<273::aid-jso15>3.0.co;2-h) In contrast, the 10-yr survival rate with untreated prostate cancer was 86%, showing that interventions in breast cancer are more important than for prostate cancer. Also just as an anecdote, way back we proposed to develop a simple urine-based diagnosis for prostate cancer and while there was some interest, ultimately it was canned as the attitudes were changing regarding prostate cancer. Physicians started to doubt that early diagnosis of most forms of prostate cancers would be beneficial to patients. The reasons is that most interventions would be more harmful than just let it be, unless they develop into some of the more rare aggressive cases. I.e. unless an assay is able to distinguish these forms, it can add to mental stress to the patients, whereas in breast cancer early diagnosis is more likely to save lives.

I think the confusion comes from a difference how literature uses the term "status threat" and your interpretation of the term. Status threat in the lit (see also e.g. https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/150/2/56/98322/Status-Threat-Moving-the-Right-Further-to-the) refers to a perceived threat to personal or group status. It does not matter as such whether hierarchies are changing or not or whether an actual threat exists. The key here is that status threat can be enhanced by a number of factors. One of them is the observation of upward mobility of folks which, in a particular mindset, should not be moving up, which is then seen as evidence of a challenge to ones own status. Conversely, upward mobility of the in-group is much less likely seen as a status threat. Both effects are independent of the actual impact in a given hierarchy. Or to put in a concrete example, a black woman moving in a white men dominated area is more likely to be seen as evidence for status threat than a white woman or a visible minority man (details can be very group-specific), whereas a white man would be seen as "normal" (i.e. no threat). Again, regardless on whether any of those hires would have a real impact on existing hierarchies or not. A well studies aspect is for example a subset/variation called racial threat, in which the perceived threat (again, regardless of actual impact) by any given racial group can be increased by factors simply as being a bigger group or more prominent in everyday life. While the foundations are still valid, the overall attitude has changed a bit in some societies if you compare the studies from the 70s with more recent one for example. Or to make it short: what I am referring is the perceived threat to status, not any actual economic or social impact.