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Topic: What's Going on in the Americas? (Read 260385 times)

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1375 –
Quote
While COVID-19 policy is one of the most important problems of our time, the circumstances under which those policies were enacted severely hamper our ability to study and understand their effects. Claimed conclusions are only as valuable as the methods by which they are produced. Replicable, rigorous, intense, and methodologically guided review is needed to both communicate our limitations and make more actionable inference. Weak, unreliable, and overconfident evidence leads to poor decisions and undermines trust in science.[15,71] In the case of COVID-19 health policy, a frank appraisal of the strength of the studies on which policies are based is needed, alongside the understanding that we often must make decisions when strong evidence is not feasible.[72]
(source)

This paragraph concludes the discussion section of the paper... (It's slightly more authoritative than my "complaints," no? :) )
Just something I came across in my reading: An Atlantic article. Don't know if you can get past its paywall...I just checked, using a different profile...
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
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Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1376 –
Does the paper complain about anything at all? Does it hint something towards like masks do not work? Your quoted text only says that they have not figured out how to study the effects of the policies - which is the inability of the authors of the paper, not of politicians. Dig deeper and you may find some smarter authors who know how to observe and make remarks on ongoing events.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1377 –
Quote from: ersi on
Dig deeper and you may find some smarter authors who know how to observe and make remarks on ongoing events.
You mean find someone (with credentials) who's published something that agrees with your beliefs,, and take that as gospel? :(
Not very rational, ersi... (Did you read enough of the paper to understand what it was about and what it found? It doesn't seem so.)
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1378 –
There has never been a claim that masks protect against more than large particles. It's been suggested that receiving a smaller dose of the virus is actually helpful in mounting a defense.

For reference, here's an older article https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8

But it seems the paper is talking about policies, which is a slightly different question.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1379 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Quote from: ersi on
Dig deeper and you may find some smarter authors who know how to observe and make remarks on ongoing events.
You mean find someone (with credentials) who's published something that agrees with your beliefs,, and take that as gospel? :( Not very rational, ersi...
The thing you quoted does not line up with your beliefs! I mean, you have all those silly beliefs that you are desperately trying to hide, yet you come to this forum to tease them, but you have nothing to back them up with. Dig deeper until you find support because the thing you quoted for now is not it.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
(Did you read enough of the paper to understand what it was about and what it found? It doesn't seem so.)
I did not read it at all, because I am not in need of any support here. You are. So you do it. I will not do your job for you. If you are unable to summarise the point of the paper (which I then will verify by reading the paper and debunk, just as I did with the part you quoted), then so be it.

Quote from: Frenzie on
But it seems the paper is talking about policies, which is a slightly different question.
Based on the title and the quoted part, the paper is onto a very specialised subtlety: It is about evidence-based assessment of the impact of policies. Policies are done by politicians, but the assessment of the policies is done by researchers - and the latter, the job of the researchers, seems to be the subject of the paper. The paper is NOT critiquing the politicians, but researchers!

As in the direct quote provided by Oakdale: " Weak, unreliable, and overconfident evidence leads to poor decisions and undermines trust in science." The authors are more directly worried about the reputation of science/scientists, not of politicians. Further, "a frank appraisal of the strength of the studies on which policies are based is needed, alongside the understanding that we often must make decisions when strong evidence is not feasible." We can appraise the studies that are there. We cannot appraise studies that are not there. And, this appraisal is again the job of scientists/specialists advising the politicians. The appraisal is not the job of the politicians themselves. As to politicians themselves, the paper understands that policies and decision-making must be in place regardless whether any studies exist or not - which is the correct understanding of the role of politicians.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1380 –
Quote from: ersi on
I mean, you have all those silly beliefs that you are desperately trying to hide
...Your presumption of my "hidden" beliefs is -- a perversity peculiar to you (I hope!). But it's in line with your refusal to read...
Must all your "information" be pureed and spoon-fed to you? And must anything that disagrees with your (pre-) conceptions be regurgitated by you so that it's so mixed with your bile as to be unrecognizable?[1]

If you have no interest in the topic, why participate, even at your snarky level?
Quote from: Frenzie on
For reference, here's an older article [...] But it seems the paper is talking about policies, which is a slightly different question.
The policy questions are a major impetus for rigorous studies, as the article (and a great many since...) mentions: Public skepticism and fatigue, etc., have led to greater lack of confidence in authorities...which is a serious problem.
Yes, the article is old. But it has pointed me to at least two must-read studies! Thanks, Frenzie. (I'm especially interested in Benn's study and in Benfield's, whose results must surely have been reported by now?)
1 Yeah, I know I'm prone to pushing metaphors too far... :)↵
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
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Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1381 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
If you have no interest in the topic, why participate, even at your snarky level?
Just now, in my two last posts, I demonstrated enough interest in the topic, I read what you posted with perfect accuracy and corrected your vague reading of your own postings on the fly, wasting just about the right amount of time, no more than needed. I wish you success working on your own level of interest and attention span. And your online insults are not very sharp either, work on them too.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1382 –
Quote from: ersi on
And your online insults are not very sharp either, work on them too.
Nah! That's for something more frivolous, like the good-old days, eh? :)
(I don't mean to insult you. But you do seem to have assumed RJ Howie's throne... And you seem quite myopic from that high perch! :) )
Has anyone else been reading this?
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1383 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
I don't mean to insult you. But you do seem to have assumed RJ Howie's throne...
Different from Howie, I always post the link to the thing I am commenting on. And you are different from Howie too. Your opinion is always extremely vague (except for the blame-the-Dems aspect) and hardly has any connection to the links you post. You post a link, but it has no connection to anything you say, neither does it often speak for itself, so I mostly don't click on them because I have found it not worth it over the years.

Howie always had a perfectly defined and well-spoken tripe opinion, so that even though he never posted links, it was often possible to reverse-engineer what he had seen on his telly. He was unique. Even our joint efforts cannot replace Howie.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Has anyone else been reading this?
Yup, exactly what I mean. Why don't you properly copy-paste the digestible part that you actually mean to post, along with the point *you* are making, if it is anything different from what is posted there? My take: It stands proven now that you prefer conspiracy to science.

And are you aware that many of your urls are full of privacy-breaking garbage? Can you clean them before posting? Or is it some Mac thing that you don't have a way to take a look at urls?

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1384 –
Quote from: ersi on
And are you aware that many of your urls are full of privacy-breaking garbage? Can you clean them before posting?
No, I wasn't; and I'm not sure what you mean... [1] (Example, please.)

I can give you my take on eugyppius's recent posts on Containment Across the World: Reader Reports, which I came to at the second installment; I'm reading the first now... (He's posted some interesting argumentation over the last six months or so, but since they're mostly "philosophical" I didn't bring them here. :) )

Suffice to say, the Reader Reports are -what's the word?- worrying. Very worrying!
There seems to be much consternation over governments' policies and their implementation. much scoffing at authorities -including public health bureaucracies, and considerable fear that "bureau-crazies" are running amok! (There's more than a smattering of conspiracy theorizing...) As I thought I'd said: The more solid the science is, the better the justification of various policies, the greater the likelihood such will swamp the crazies's influence; and curtail rebellious activity.
(I don't post examples mainly because they'd take up space unnecessarily. If clicking a link is too much trouble, reading excerpts wouldn't likely help. And, of course, my selections would become, themselves, mere targets -- rather counterproductively.)

It's hard not to use pejorative language about this: Few countries are populated by "sheeple" and few "bureau-crazies are mal-intentioned. But this coming year and Omicron's fate will make or break many previously civil societies...
That, my friend, is what concerns me most. Comprende vous? :)
For Frenzie and others: A recent Bloomberg article, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-03/omicron-up-close-south-africa-s-experts-tell-their-stories
(Nothing up my sleeve... :) )
1  Did I inadvertently copy a link to a page I received in a newsletter? That's all I can think of; and I've been more careful, of late...↵
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1385 –
Take a good look at the url you posted here https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=230.msg86390#msg86390

You perhaps understand that everything after the question mark in the url is crap, along with the question mark.

During old Opera times I developed a habit of examining the url before clicking and I even created a function to extract the url of links and edit them, if needed, before clicking. But even with precautions, clicking *your* links has been a mistake every time for many years now.

My take about the policies: The main policies themselves (mask and vaccination requirements) are not worrying to the least. They are perfectly understandable given that the global pandemic is real. What is worrying is the flip-flopping between loosening and tightening of the policies, which leaves the impression of toying with the population. Inconsistency of the policies is very bad. Also corruption in enforcing the policies is very bad. And many secondary consequences are very bad: People losing jobs, children losing school education (particularly the current high-school children will become the next lost generation, I think).

But overall, the global pandemic is real and this is what life looks like in a real global pandemic. Science cannot help us out of it.

Think of medieval plague. What could the scientists at the time, the elect, the respected and the wealthy done better? Not much.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1386 –
Quote from: ersi on
You perhaps understand that everything after the question mark in the url is crap, along with the question mark.
My apologies. Sorry for the inconvenience, if there was one... (Fixed it, now. I'll be more careful in the future.) BTW: I assume "the crap" allows the site to know that a visit came as the result of an email re-direct... Do you oppose such analytics?
Quote from: ersi on
overall, the global pandemic is real and this is what life looks like in a real global pandemic. Science cannot help us out of it.
That's a very pessimistic view...  And not everyone will accept such fatalism.
Quote from: ersi on
Think of medieval plague. What could the scientists at the time, the elect, the respected and the wealthy done better? Not much.
Well, we did get Boccaccio's Decameron! (And the Epidemiological Fallacy...)
The "at the time" proviso does allow us considerable leeway: We've learned a bit since the Middle Ages. Of medicine, of sanitation, of administration. About the latter, I'd agree that most states seem not to have learned much; but I also expect political action will remove many an incompetent leader. And -in time- allow a more rational ambit to minor functionaries and a more realistic recognition of in what expertise consists.
I don't expect we'll get a perfect world! Nor do I believe we'll just live with dystopia.
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1387 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
BTW: I assume "the crap" allows the site to know that a visit came as the result of an email re-direct... Do you oppose such analytics?
Yes, I strongly oppose it. I oppose crap links and I oppose cookies too. The only legitimate cookies are for login. Otherwise I reject them all.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Quote from: ersi on
overall, the global pandemic is real and this is what life looks like in a real global pandemic. Science cannot help us out of it.
That's a very pessimistic view...  And not everyone will accept such fatalism.
No. It's a realistic view. Science did not help us out of medieval plagues either - we got out of them without its help. Science is totally beside the point in the current pandemic too.

Edit: An earlier situation that caused a comparable scare was perhaps AIDS. Did science help us out of it? Not at all. We just gradually came to accept to count the numbers of the affected/dead and leave it at that. It will be the same with covid - once the waves reduce to about once a year as with ordinary flu, the scare will fade away.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1388 –
Quote from: ersi on
Science is totally beside the point in the current pandemic [...]
I confess, I don't understand your attitude, ersi.
Do you miss the good old days of Gopher and Usenet? :)

进行 ...
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1389 –
Quote from: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-03/omicron-up-close-south-africa-s-experts-tell-their-stories
Marc Mendelson, the head of infectious diseases at the University of Cape Town, who also works at Groote Schuur Hospital
South Africans have a way with words, don't they? "Large Barn Hospital"; I don't think you'd see that around here.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1390 –
Both the EU and SU have a strong tendency to bureaucratise the naming conventions. They absolutely must have a "Regional Hospital"[1] that officially spans most of the hospitals across several counties or even half of the country, so that nobody can guess the specific location by the name. To indicate specific hospital houses with specific locations, the people use an unofficial folk nomenclature in parallel, because the official nomenclature doesn't acknowledge that hospitals exist as specific houses with specific locations.

If we had something like "Large Barn Hospital", there might be some sense that the EU has a human face and feel. But there is not.
1 I.e. the name consists of a compass direction + "regional" or "district" something. I get that in old Germanic naming conventions the compass directions are common and normal, but in Estonian and Finnish naming conventions they are not at all, so the cold sense of remoteness with those EU namings is very strong here.↵

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1391 –
In leaving things implicit, I think we're completely talking past each other.

Broadly speaking hospitals here have two different kind of names. You have more straightforward names, such as
Het Oogziekenhuis Rotterdam, The Rotterdam Eye Hospital. Another common naming scheme is UZA, University Hospital Antwerp. It's common to have a name along those lines in most cities that have a medical education.

Still in the straightforward category, a name like Middelheim refers to the neighborhood it's in. I suppose it depends a bit on your perspective if that's more or less straightforward. If you're familiar with the city you know that Middelheim is a neighborhood in the southeast of Antwerp. It sounds like you think it would be called Southeast Antwerp Hospital? That sounds very American to me, not like anything we'd do in Europe. For example see here.

Then you have Greek/Latin/science-y names like Gemini, the constellation. You've also got names like Medisch Spectrum Twente, which merges a scientific-sounding term with the region it's in. Perhaps this last one fits under your definition of regional, in the sense that you might be up to a 30-40 minute drive away from it at the outer edges of the region. But that's because you'd go to such a place when in need of something more specialized; for regular care you've got a hospital in your own (nearby) town.

What they're not called is something like Large Barn, which presumably describes the look of the building or the look it once had. But this is not America. We don't have compass directions, unless we include that I could imagine a hospital being called Polaris.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1392 –
But more important, what does the EU have to do with hospital names? At all? That doesn't make one lick of sense as a proposition. That's not how anything works. [Edit: it may or may not be how the SU works; the EU does not!]

Edit: The closest I can imagine is if the EU requires the use some working title while dealing with subsidies for the proposed North Pölva Hospital.[1] But whatever name it's got, that's a local affair.
1 Completely made up, of course.↵

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1393 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
What they're not called is something like Large Barn, which presumably describes the look of the building or the look it once had. But this is not America. We don't have compass directions, unless we include that I could imagine a hospital being called Polaris.
Another category is Holy This and Saint That. Less common (if at all) in the traditionally Protestant north, fairly common in the Catholic south. With a bit of imagination this does still tend to fall under the medical and/or Latin name category, however. Think of the Holy Heart hospital and the Sint Elisabeth hospital. Technically that's Hebrew, but you get my point. ;)

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1394 –
Sounds like your naming conventions are reasonable throughout. Here during the meanwhile-years (from post-Soviet to pre-EU) we had the sanest names for hospitals, basically matching the folksy names, like Mustamäe haigla located in the corresponding neighbourhood in Tallinn, and elsewhere in Estonia mostly according to the city name. Outside Tallinn we generally have one hospital per city (actually an increasing number of cities is without a hospital due to an ongoing abolishment of hospitals).

The erstwhile Mustamäe haigla is now, in translation, North Estonian Regional Hospital, where "North Estonia" is a non-region[1] and the Hospital is not just the hospital in Mustamäe, but all (state) hospitals of Northern Estonia combined. Maybe good for the Ministry of Health, but absolutely not good for the people who call for ambulance nor for the ambulance teams who have to navigate this idiotic nightmare.

The "university hospital" thing I have seen in Scandinavia. Here Tartu University has copied the same thing to their Tartu University Clinic, which earlier was a hospital with no direct connection to the university. And since Tartu University has essentially enforced that they are the only university, it's the only such example. No saints or holies either.

Quote from: Frenzie on
But more important, what does the EU have to do with hospital names? At all? That doesn't make one lick of sense as a proposition. That's not how anything works. [Edit: it may or may not be how the SU works; the EU does not!]
Let's just say that the EU may work differently over there in the Western/older parts. Here it works the way I have described before. Namely, our govt says, "We will now do so-and-so in order to be in line with EU requirements." This may be either our govt's "honest" misinterpretation of the EU requirements or it may be full-out malicious deception (i.e. there are no such EU requirements and they know it, but they want to push something through and the surest way to push anything through is to say that it's due to EU requirements). Since the EU is never anywhere to be seen correcting this picture, then the end result is that this is how the EU works over here. Incidentally, Soviet Union worked the same way in principle, except that back then our govt probably mitigated the demands that had been handed down from Moscow, whereas now they severely exacerbate the demands that come down from Brussels. Like it or not, the EU is not too different from SU over here - it's the govt of our little member state/banana republic taking orders uberobediently, be they real or imaginary orders. And seriously, I am not exaggerating. The situation is probably worse than I make it sound.
1 We do not have any administrative "regions" whatsoever. We have counties, but the government for some reason hates to make use of counties and county names, even though these are still official administrative subdivisions of the country. Hardly any govt authority is making use of the counties and county names, and instead they make up "regions" and "districts" which combine a bunch of counties. The ministry of health has its own regions, the police has its own districts etc. The names of these have compass directions like Northern, Eastern etc. which is not how Estonian place names used to work historically. Additionally, I am super-annoyed by the recent "reform" of municipal divisions, which proceeded very messily and resulted in a host of ahistorical, bureaucratic-sounding and just plain false place names, erasing several well-known names that had stayed safely put for a thousand years.↵

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1395 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
South Africans have a way with words, don't they? "Large Barn Hospital"; I don't think you'd see that around here.

Barn, you say?

In Norwegian "skur" is some small building, supposedly originally an addition, but now mostly standalone and quite often ramshackle. Swedish and Norwegian dictionaries agree the original meaning was the skin around almond kernels. Dutch "schuur" would have its own etymology, but I am curious how we got from there to here.

https://naob.no/ordbok/skur_2



Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1396 –
Quote from: ersi on
"We will now do so-and-so in order to be in line with EU requirements." This may be either our govt's "honest" misinterpretation of the EU requirements or it may be full-out malicious deception (i.e. there are no such EU requirements and they know it, but they want to push something through and the surest way to push anything through is to say that it's due to EU requirements).
The EU has many requirements regarding hospitals, ranging from how they're funded to various medical and patient care standards.

It's not inconceivable that in some dark corner you can find a guideline for hospital naming conventions, but unless you called your hospital the Kuala Lumpur Travel Agency I find it hard to imagine anyone would bat an eye even if such guidelines do exist.[1]

Quote from: jax on
In Norwegian "skur" is some small building, supposedly originally an addition, but now mostly standalone and quite often ramshackle. Swedish and Norwegian dictionaries agree the original meaning was the skin around almond kernels. Dutch "schuur" would have its own etymology, but I am curious how we got from there to here.
I think a schuur means a simple covering without necessarily implying much about size. Rephrasing that in English, a barn is a very large shed, and a shed is a very small barn. I picked barn instead of shed due to context — even a fairly large shed could only house maybe 12 people. Of course it's always possible that's simply how it started historically, as a regional doctor's post in a large shed.

For etymology, also see https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/schuur1
1 A quick search would seem to suggest they don't, in contrast to for example medicine naming guidelines.↵

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1397 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
I think a schuur means a simple covering without necessarily implying much about size. Rephrasing that in English, a barn is a very large shed, and a shed is a very small barn. I picked barn instead of shed due to context — even a fairly large shed could only house maybe 12 people. Of course it's always possible that's simply how it started historically, as a regional doctor's post in a large shed.

For etymology, also see https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/schuur1

As in obscure, that makes a lot of sense. Or to quote Etymonline,

Quote
It forms all or part of: chiaroscuro; cunnilingus; custody; cutaneous; cuticle; -cyte; cyto-; hide (v.1) "to conceal;" hide (n.1) "skin of a large animal;" hoard; hose; huddle; hut; kishke; lederhosen; meerschaum; obscure; scum; skewbald; skim; sky.


Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1398 –
Quote from: jax on
As in obscure, that makes a lot of sense.
It sounds plausible; I'm not sure if there's any evidence for it. (If there is, the summary in the dictionary doesn't show it.) Anyway, here's a little bike shed (fietsschuur):


While here's a tiendschuur (tenth barn, as in the tenth a medieval person had to pay in taxes to a church or lord):

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1399 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
It's not inconceivable that in some dark corner you can find a guideline for hospital naming conventions, but unless you called your hospital the Kuala Lumpur Travel Agency I find it hard to imagine anyone would bat an eye even if such guidelines do exist.
You went to look up if actual guidelines on this topic exist, whereas the point that I am getting at is that whether these guidelines actually exist or not is what matters least. What matters is that the term "EU requirements" with its variations (EU directives, European standards etc. which all have their different levels of mandatoriness, but whichever level of mandatoriness-voluntariness the EU intended also matters not at all here) has been regularly used by local governments and political parties for propaganda purposes, either to push through any particular agenda or to deliberately antagonise the population. The "requirements" may be completely imaginary, but the result of letting the manipulation live is things like Hungary, Poland, and Brexit, which are all real.

All along, the EU has never once stepped in to correct the abuse of its own image. Of course, if it did, it could add more fuel to the fire because the EU has historically been rather incompetent in correcting anything whatsoever (Bosnia, Greece, Ukraine/Crimea, Nord Stream etc.). But if it doesn't, and it won't, it keeps the fire burning until the EU crumbles apart in the long term, unfortunately rather slowly and painfully, which is the worst possible way to go.

Quote from: Frenzie on
For etymology, also see https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/schuur1
In Estonian there's the word "kuur" (meaning "a shed") which has all the hallmarks of a (Low) German or Swedish loan.  It is often hard to distinguish between (Low) German and Swedish loanwords, because the vocabulary in them is occasionally identical. But the closest I can remember from Swedish is "ett skjul".