justdoit
I know two things. I really like to be right about stuff and if we’re going by the usual tests a majority of people are going to be near average intelligence.
So I’m most likely average and real smug about it.
The “old idea” is actually baked into one of the parameters of the new model. It’s why I said the old hypothesis “was not in line with observation” rather than being “wrong”. It predicted some trends correctly, but failed to predict many others. Like all science, it needed to update as we gathered more info.
The “new” hypothesis also isn’t perfectly predictive of viral evolution, but it’s more accurate with the observed spread of other diseases. Like all models, it’ll get replaced eventually by something more powerful. Likely sooner rather than later specifically because COVID put a spotlight on a lot of holes in the idea.
Just a very small correction- as with all biology, natural selection will drive a virus to replicate more effectively, that’s it. This does NOT mean a virus will automatically become less lethal over time. That’s an older hypothesis that scientists found was not in line with observation.
The newer hypothesis is known as “virulence-transmission trade-off”. The oversimplification of the idea is that if a mutation increases both transmission and virulence, it will also tend to be selected for. COVID is inconsistent with both hypotheses in certain ways though, so really predicting its virulence in the short or long term has proven difficult. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10066022/
Republican leadership is a festering pile of shit across the country, and yet somehow Texas Senate Republicans manage to stand out as an even more vile faction
Ah yes, as everyone knows, the economy is made up entirely of our interactions with pharma companies.
US Census data definitely hasn’t recorded a yet another year of decline for real median household income. Supplemental Poverty definitely didn’t see its first overall rise in the last year in over a decade.. Child Supplemental Poverty definitely didn’t double last year after maintaining a historic low due to the expiration of child tax credits. The Gini Index certainly isn’t maintaining its 50 year high.. Personal savings as a percentage of disposable income definitely didn’t decrease by 13% in three years. And in conjunction with all this, the ticking time bomb of the household debt service ratio is certainly not recently tending upwards and is projected to continue due to high interest rates
But yeah, totally, us stupid ungrateful American workers who went a couple years without wage growth and are further squeezed out of the possibility of homeownership probably just haven’t read the IRA. Otherwise we’d join all you very well-read geniuses celebrating an inflation-locked price increase specifically for a portion of Medicare Part B and D biologics which lack generics and which doesn’t limit launch prices at all. Oh, and whose non-interference exceptions don’t take effect for another two years and are contingent on a good-faith agreement from a presidential cabinet position which has a very real chance of falling into Republican control. Specifically, the Republican who has already made overtures towards getting rid of drug rebates.
Crazy that some of us are not more excited about the economy. Probably just in our imagination, huh?
While I don’t necessarily disagree with you, it’s important to note that a centerpiece of Biden’s reelection campaign is “Bidenomics”. HE’S the one trying to link the current/future economic trajectory to his presidency here, not us.
That’s just one of the many reasons this message feels so tone-deaf. It reminds me of those ridiculous “I did that!” stickers that people were putting on gas pumps. Only now, it’s the Biden campaign that’s basically saying “yup, we really did do that” but for the entire economy.
Me freezing my glove in leftover LN2
I long so desperately for the days when I didn’t know who Elon Musk was