@M.A.R. Maybe all life is just degrees of misery so we can only tell relative levels? Or is that too depressing?

Mom is that you?

Mom always says that when she's encouraging us to do chores

@Cowp you might be interested in

@M.A.R. Interestingly, I have read this question before, judging by the upvotes I left on it.

Ha, it's +37°C. This is the hottest 17th of July in history in Yekaterinburg.

We've had about 5 hottest ever dates in history this July already.

@M.A.R. Horses weren’t native to North America were they?

Bummer the article link is dead

Ah, they were prehistoric “... by about 12,000 BCE, they had migrated to other parts of the world,[5] becoming extinct in the Americas.”

Yekaterinburg on the night between 16th and 17th July

The Holy Cross Procession to the Ganina Yama monastery.

I wonder how many people got the COVID that night.

It's only a small part of the huge procession

rubs temple in frustration

No, it seems to be smaller than in 2019

I don't understand why they couldn't space out and wear masks. Frankly I blame the people who politicized the pandemic and made people think it wasn't serious. We had journalists in the US that lied about having COVID so they could write an article about it. We had people saying the massive BLM protests somehow didn't cause a spike in COVID cases.

Yeah, the problem is not studying it but that it gets sensationalized and then the public feels like their bad decisions are perfectly reasonable because they misinterpreted the results.

Well I'm personally more like "bah another democrat republican cat fight, gonna stay out of it"

When it gets politicized, people feel they should form a strict opinion early on and defend it avariciously

Early opinions on COVID have been no more than educated guesses, often controversial, and hyperbolic

In my ideal fantasy world, science is never political and always about trying to understand our reality.

Hahahahahhaha. Good one

Is there such a thing as a "planned for" pandemic? I'm assuming if we had a plan, we would nip it in the bud and it would never become a pandemic.

I guess we learned a lot from previous pandemics, but it seems we still have a long way to go.

This is the sort of crap that undermines public confidence in the data and leads them to believe in conspiracy theories...

fox35orlando.com/news/…

@ColleenV I guess you know much more about a new strain of flu starting out in a well-documented urban area with good healthcare

@ColleenV That URL looks weird, that's still Fox News, right?

F*** them. I mean it.

@M.A.R. It's a local fox affiliate

and frankly, fuck all of the major cable news outlets

None of them are reporting the unvarnished truth

Some are more outrageous than others

That's true

The local news stations tend to be more factual

That story is just reporting what a government official said

But then you have out propaganda-ridden state media and you have The Guardian

@ColleenV that's what they always do. This guy said that, that guy did this. They propose the loaded questions, then wait until people make their own conclusions that are really not their own.

Allows for legal liability

The only news media I can stomach right now is justthenews.com and sometimes I look at ground.news

The only news media I can stomach is chat.stackexchange.com

@M.A.R. Yes, undoubtedly that's a thing. The article I linked isn't quite that..

Everything else makes me think

> FOX 35 News found this out after asking Orange County Health Officer Dr. Raul Pino whether two coronavirus victims who were in their 20s had any underlying conditions. One of his answers surprised us.

@ColleenV didn't even check it, probably censored here. But the URL suffices for the most part.

They were asking about underlying conditions and, surprise, one died in a motorcycle accident

And that just causes more people to doubt the data is accurate, even if only one death out of 100 is reported incorrectly

And, I don't think one is more outrageous than the other when it comes to the media conglomerates. They are just outrageous in different ways so that they can attract a particular audience that wants their bias confirmed

Ha, they even legitimize it these days with managementese

"Focus groups" "target groups" "Market groups"

Parket groups

There are certain things that should not be primarily done to make a profit.

Law enforcement. Medicine. Dissemination of information.

Basic research. Art.

These are things we should be willing to pay people to do even if we get nothing back

@ColleenV Over the last 10 years, people have gotten used to the fact the the authorities distor the truth. And during this epdiemic the authorities changed their stance several times. Hence a lot of rumors and a lot of 'covid dissidents'

That's more or less true everywhere Cowp

@CowperKettle Yes it’s disturbing. That’s why I changed my avatar to puppies and kittens instead of a big black blob ;)