I think I saw some graphs that showed that most of the stats that contributed to life expectancy dropping was mostly the 50+ white male group over the past few years having life expectancy drop much more than other segments.
@MattE.Эллен I've heard that stopping smoking actually increases lifetime health costs, because they didn't die earlier and quicklier from lung cancer they lived long full lives of getting sicker form other more expensive things.
My son, a scientist who works on cancer drugs, says there is no cure for cancer, only reprieves. In his industry, you're not considered cancer-free until you die of something else.
and the dialog in the courtroom scene was so awful, the 'alleged' murderer the witness saying the most ludicrous lieful sounding things but that really could be taken as plausible deniability, like well maybe that's really what happened because we don't really know except circumstantially, but the words were so unbelievable and blaming others and hateful and ad hominem and I was trying to help and ... I mean the writing was terrible but also if that what was really said it was terrible but...
and anyway it was strange how I kinda recognized how this guy was talking... even if it was badly written... (the guy had killed a bunch of girls over the years.)
but none of the stuff he said was incriminating but it was so... that guy is obviously lying but there's no way to really -know-...
and I realized the guy (or the way he was written) was talking just like that twitter creep.
@MattE.Эллен Hmm...don't recognize that name. But anyway, they've been on ELU for awhile. But still, why do they insist on giving cut and paste answers lately?
@JohanLarsson Are there interesting conversations/communities on discord?
@Mitch my Hypothesis is that the Mordor lot are the good guys. You put up gargoyles to scare off demons and the like. If they're demons why do they have all those gargoyles? And the "good guys" have all the statues of the angles and stuff, like they're trying to fools people into thinking they're safe. Very suspicious
And wise old Sauron with his inner glow, leads him to make good choices, so he can come back to his beautiful orchette wife and beautiful orcula children and stlll save the world so he can live out his retirement in his own little metallurgy lab back in his homey little slag mine and slurry pit.
@Robusto exactly. That's the really interesting bit. It's the exact same tool that can both keep the piece going and serve as punctuation, as Rick correctly points out.
Like, take any piece by Bach or Chopin at all, and it probably ends on a suspension. As does every phrase.
@MattE.Эллен Frankly I didn't follow any of that stuff when reading the books. The Twin Towers just bored me put of my mind. I just remember fireworks at the beginning, a chase scene on horses, that weird gollum character (what's his deal anyway?), a big spider, the big ring ceremony at a volcano? then people going off in ships like they're dying.
@Mitch I think partly because masks don't work well, partly because people tend to touch their faces more, partly because it gives a false sense of security, making people obey other ruless less, like 1.5 metres etc.
Also because of shortages of those masks that actually protect.
I'm not sure what to think about it.
@Jasper I hope not!
Aeroplanes are terrible for the environment; mass tourism is terrible for the environment; and it makes our cities unliveable.
@MattE.Эллен what you need to know about Russia is two things. One, vodka. Two, bears. No wait, that's not it. One: autopsy is obligatory for every death. In other jurisdictions, it has to be ordered by a judge. So you will get a complete and thorough examination, and if you carry the virus but die of something else, your death certificate will state just that. It's very different in other places where it will say "Corona" even if you die in a plane crash.
@JohanLarsson as with the flu, people can be asymptomatic carriers. It's all about reducing probabilities with limited resources when testing isn't universal.
And two, Russian doctors get an 80k rouble bonus for every Corona patient that they treat. So there is a strong, and monetary, incentive to inflate the numbers rather than keep them down.
So if you hear that the Russian numbers are somehow too low, that's a bunch of bollocks.
@Cerberus everyday people don't need the masks that people with high contact do (eg health care, shop keepers). give the bulk of masks to those people. For the rest, make your own or get cheap ones and reuse.
@Cerberus That seems like complaints that people make about vaccines. It may annoy you to do it yourself, but in addition to helping yourself it helps a lot of other people (and not doing it is much worse for other people.
@Cerberus Whoever is making masks should prioritize be sending them to people in most need (health care). That doesn't reduce the utility of wearing a mask for everybody.
@RegDwigнt Well, people in many countries are still afraid you might catch it from someone on the street walking by at close range and sneezing or something.
@RegDwigнt They closed months ago.
Those shops that serve actual Amsterdammers mostly remained open.
All shops receive government support, but they still need income from customers or it won't be enough, so we're hoping all those disgusting tourist shops go bankrupt.
The Zeitgeist has been turning rapidly against mass tourism here.
@RegDwigнt Even the people that work in those shops are mostly foreigners. And the owners will be rich people owning many shops, and living somewhere else. They really do nothing for our city.
And lots of buildings have been bought by the likes of Goldman Sachs (no joke: they bought an entire block a few years ago).
Thankfully, city politics have also changed radically, over the past couple of years.
The opening of all new shops or cafés or snackbars catering mostly to tourists has been forbidden.
it'll be like the most beautiful planet in the universe in the HHGTTG, where tourists had to weigh the same when the left as they did when they arrived
Anyway. My point is very simple, really. I myself never buy ugly useless junk, but I especially can't buy ugly useless junk that does not exist from a shop that's not there. If you cater to idiots, idiots will come. If you don't, they won't.
Nobody prevents you from catering to, say, Daniel Barenboim and that's it.
Look at this chat right here. Very, very few tourists. That's because we do not sell garbage.
@RegDwigнt The problem is, if you have ten million tourists each year, willing to spend stupid amounts of money, there is a lot of pressure on the economy. If you own a building, you'll make the most money if you put a tourist shop in it.
If you cater to Barenboim, you'll make less money.
And, like, it's not the location or the beauty or anything. All of said places are like on the UN Heritage Sites list, and all have excellent infrastructure so you can reach them from any place in Europe in a matter of hours. Yet some had a million tourists and others had just myself.
@Cerberus see, the moon cannot be reached from any place in Europe in a matter of hours.
I am talking more like Maulbronn, or Dilijan, or Moscow.
The largest city in all of Europe, and it has fewer tourists than Vlieland.
Anyway. Now with the Corona you know what'll happen next. All those laws will be shelved and laws from Opposite Land will be put in place to attract tourists.
For example, the mayoress is continuing the plan to build a large "prostitution hotel" outside the inner city while closing lots of prostitution windows in the inner city.
@RegDwigнt More is needed.
And it isn't going fast enough.
But, yeah, at the moment, we're very happy with the demise of mass tourism.
@Cerberus that's not solving the problem, that's just moving it somewhere else. Where someone else will complain about it rather than yourself. What if the mayoress built the large prostitution hotel in the street that you happened to live in?
Well. The problem is that people just don't live evenly spread from one another. And they don't build churches every ten miles. They build like twenty all in the same spot, and then it's all just tulip fields for a hundred miles every which way.
@Cerberus It is illegal in Moscow to not have your ID on you. You don't carry your passport with you, you pay a fine and spend a night in jail. Does that prevent people from going out without their passport? Does it bollocks. Did it prevent one of my friends from forgetting his on our last night in the city, eight hours before our flight home went? Did it bollocks.
People are people. You cannot be thinking about all the things all the time.
Now, we didn't spend a night in jail of course, but that's because I was there and it was my whole job to deal with shit like that.
But that's the thing. You can just as easily have people lugging entire cargo containers through your streets under supervision of a local who will know how to get rid of the police.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…