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01:00 - 09:0010:00 - 22:00

01:15
"Just by not moving for about two weeks, some college-age subjects' arteries responded as if they were 55 or 60 years old instead of 20 years old" - makes it all the more amazing that some limited-movement patients retain clarity of mind. Like Stephen Hawking.
02:05
What a racket! Johnson and Johnson are breaking up with pharmaceuticals going to Johnson and Johnson getting the band-aids.
failure to parse
Would you like to buy a comma? :)
Johnson and Johnson are breaking up, with pharmaceuticals going to Johnson, and Johnson getting the band-aids.
Either that or they decided to double their profits as soon as the FDA approved them for a two-shot regimen.
> Would you like to buy a comma?
Would you like to buy a .com, ma?
> Johnson & Johnson, the world's largest health products company, is splitting up. The company, which traces its roots back to 1886, will break into two: One company will focus on consumer health products customers can buy over the counter, including Benadryl, Band-Aids and Tylenol. The other business will sell prescription drugs and medical devices. Both will be publicly traded companies.
@tchrist Ahh.
02:13
@Cerberus How's lockdown vN?
So Janssen will be with Johnson.
Janssen and Johnson.
@tchrist What's v?
"version"
Version Netherlands?
02:14
Russia introduced QR codes throughout the country yesterday, in a suprise decision. Looks like the figures are bad.
I guess you're in N+1. I haven't been keeping track of how many.
What is that number?
How many waves are you at?
And how many lockdowns?
All ho-re-ca have been closing at midnight since last lockdown; from today, they will close at 20.00.
I don't know the numbers.
02:15
And some other stuff that is minor to, like cancelling all large events.
I have cousins who live in Horicon.
You should rally become acquainted with the term horeca, it's really handy!
Looking at all the antivaxxers, I now understand what will happen if scientists detect an asteriod on a collision course with Earth.
Hotels/restaurants/cafés.
Why is 20 > 00? What good does it do to close at 8? Should it be 7 instead? Or 9? What about 6?
02:17
Basically any place where you can eat or drink something on the premises.
> The term is a syllabic abbreviation of the words Hotel/Restaurant/Café.
@tchrist It is a bit arbitrary, but the idea is that people get drunk and hug and shout at each other after supper.
Is closing 4 hours early more effective than opening 4 hours later? Why does it even matter?
@Cerberus Oh! Well, I don't go to those restaurants. :)
People breathe more actively in the evening, thus the transmission rate is higher.
It's mostly cafés where this will happen, of course.
02:18
You would think that all they would have to is forbid the sale of alcohol to fix that problem. No need to close early.
Clubs have been closed since March 2020.
The Bated Breath mandate is being dicussed that will ban active breathing.
@tchrist Well, that would be worse for the public, almost as bad as closing everything down altogether.
But shops will also close at 20.00, so you cannot buy alcohol anywhere after that hour.
Why would you need to get drunk at a restaurant? That sounds like a bunch of frat-boy barbarians.
Maybe restaurants would keep some proportion of their clientèle.
But not the rest.
Restaurants make most of their money from drinks.
02:21
Lots and lots and lots of restaurants are unlicensed, and nobody minds.
They will likely not open altogether if they may not serve alcohol.
Maybe some would stay open, I don't know.
Then that's ok then, since it seems they've identified the source of the problem?
The problem is also that it is nearly impossible to check.
The government are hardly checking the horeca with current rules, like the QR codes.
They haven't the capacity.
Cop walks in, orders a drink. They serve him, he arrests them. Seems simple.
People should then just switch from alcohol to Pregabalin. Works the same way, does not ruin your liver, and overdose results in sedation, and in rare cases, seizures, but not death.
02:22
@tchrist Yes, but it would make very little difference.
@tchrist They would get a warning. But anyway, there is absolutely nowhere near the manpower available to check that.
They want measures that are as easy to check as possible.
Here the state pulls their business licence when they don't comply. It's really quite effective, because now they cannot even open at all.
That specifically happened here, in a famous case. About masking.
Maybe they could have tried no alcohol, I don't know.
I'm sure they have thought about it.
The State Institute of Health and others have issued official advice.
I had thought they did that in Africa or India or somewhere.
That's what the government base their new measures on.
Who did what?
Banned alcohol sales because of the virus.
02:26
Yes, I think it was done in South Africa.
Selling alcohol after 18.00 was forbidden here as well for a couple of months.
But banning it altogether? That is quite a drastic measure, invading in people's private lives.
I think 2G is imminent.
Last spring, Belarusian ruler Lukashenko advised people to drink a cup of vodka and go to the sauna in order to prevent covid infection.
The Christen-Unie are against it, because they are a small, evangelical party with lots of anti-vaxxers.
> It could be argued that South Africa didn’t have much of a choice: by early August, it had the fifth most Covid cases in the world, and the virus’s widespread penetration demanded more hospital beds.
Interesting line of reasoning, eh?
02:29
Meanwhile, I have made good progress with highlighting text in TEXTAREAs.
@tchrist It is one of many measures one could take.
> The Christen-Unie still has ideological strong links with so-called pillarised organisations.
This "interference in private lives" reasoning seems the same as the antimaskers and the antivaxers and the antitaxers.
A new term. Pillarized organizations.
Yup!
02:31
Probably the term derives from the album Jagged Little Pill
Society used to be divided into informal 'pillars': Catholic, traditional Protestant, Reformed (orthodox Calvinist), Liberal, and Socialist.
I thought the fifth column was revolutionaries
The leaders of the pillars formed coalitions and talked to each other, but the common man mostly read newspapers from his own pillar, and possibly even shopped in its shops.
Oh right, socialists.
02:33
Live and learn. We have a rosy picture of the "West".
What is "liberal"?
This is fairly common in various forms in various countries, but it was especially marked in mid-century Holland.
@CowperKettle That's pretty alien in North America.
@tchrist Politically liberal, both socially and economically.
@tchrist There is no pillarization in North America?
02:34
Although most liberals were traditional Protestants...I don't know too much about the system.
@CowperKettle It mostly disappeared after the fifties, so you wouldn't have noticed.
And it was not some formal or legal system, just an informal way for society to organise itself in.
I don't know. It's not a word I know. It's hard to know whether one shop owner is circumcised and the next one is not. But the split for media consumption between the Democrats and the Trumpistas is beyond compare.
Yes, it was a bit like that, except much less hostile.
Catholics were just different: you didn't hate them, nor did not generally congregate with them.
Sounds like an old fashioned Jewish ghetto.
They had Catholic newspapers, while you read your liberal newspaper.
Yes, you could say Jews were also a pillar.
There were Catholic newspapers? Wow.
02:37
Certainly!
Didn't you have any Catholic newspapers?
We have an Orthodox TV channel.
Never heard of any. Most people here can't read Latin. :)
One of the oldest and most respected newspapers today, the Volkskrant, used to be the Catholic pillar's main newspaper.
krant is probably related to current
Indeed.
02:38
Church newsletters work differently than newspapers.
The old-fashioned word is courant, from French.
This article is a list of Catholic newspapers and magazines in the United States. For the frequency listings, the terminology will be as follows Bimonthly: every two months, not two per month Biweekly: every two weeks, not two per week. == By state and diocese or eparchy == The following is a list containing the official newspaper, newsletter, magazine or other publication of the dioceses of the United States, organized alphabetically by state followed by diocese: == Non-diocesan newspapers and magazines == == References ==
But what the hell that is I have no effing clue!!!
Churches were not explicitly leading pillars.
Each pillar had secular political leaders.
02:41
Can you tell I didn't grow up in a Catholic world? Once we'd kicked out all the French and the Indians, Wisconsin was thereafter mainly settled by the English, Germans, and Scandinavians, none of which are hotbeds of Catholicism this side of Bavaria.
@Cerberus That's unsettling to me.
@CowperKettle Definitely gets them out of the child rearing business that way, doesn't it just?
I dunno. All this obsession with religion is...unseemly.
It's like having Microsoft users all living in one part of town with their own shops and restaurants and clubs and newspapers and rules, and Unix users all living in the other part with their own of the same.
At least then the shunning would be understandable. :)
Reminds me of medieval merchant guilds. And of company towns.
@tchrist Nor I!
Of course my grandparents wouldn't go to Catholic shops!
@tchrist What, secular leaders are unsettling?
@Cerberus I don't understand why you would have sectarian polticians.
We still have several major parties left from that time, including the largest party, the liberal party (which is now centre right).
@tchrist Secular.
Labour is also still there.
And so is the fusion part of Catholica and traditional protestants.
@Cerberus Again, how could you know? Because the crosses they hung at the shop doors had dead guys on them and the Protestant shop doors hung crosses unadorned by mortal flesh?
And so are two smaller, Calvinist parties, including the Christen-Unie.
@tchrist You just knew!
One of the largest chains, Vroom & Dreesman, for example, was widely known to be Catholic.
02:53
You mean a Calvinist political party?
@tchrist Yes, political parties.
That's disgusting.
What's disgusting?
You should never have religion in politics.
We also have a Muslim party now.
02:54
That's just wrong.
It's a violation of the separation of church and state.
We have had religious parties since the late 19th century (before that time, Catholics were oppressed, and everyone else were traditional protestants).
It's difficult to describe the crazies here sixty years ago regarding JFK and the Roman Bishop.
Well, of course I do not like religious parties.
But they are just normal political parties, who just happen to represent certain groups in society.
The Christen-Unie, for example, while against abortion and euthanasia, otherwise behave decently and constructively. They have behaved that way for as long as I remember.
Even the most orthodox Calvinist party, the SGP, is called 'the conscience of Parliament'.
Sounds like the Freemasons or the Elks Club or the Rotary Club or the Knights of Columbus or the Knights Templar, wait how did we land in the crusades again now? :)
You really do not want them to have more than a handful of seats, and they do block progressive laws when there is no majority, but otherwise they behave well.
We also have the Party for the Animals.
They are pretty orthodox in their own way.
I think many are against pets.
02:59
You sound as splintered as the Italians, who are known to have as many "political" "parties" as they have flavors of gelato, but none so tasty.
@Cerberus There are no pet owners in Boulder. We only have pet guardians here, statutorily at least.
It's confusing to have more political parties than people.
We are very much splintered, but I think that is a good thing. It means less party discipline and more voting for what you actually believe in, I think. Or at least it can.
Factions are fatal. And unavoidable, pace George Washington. It's just terrible.
Factions?
Why fatal?
It's working well enough.
Political parties. He didn't want any.
Haha.
We're heading the Scandinavian way, minority coalitions.
Yes, our parliaments were never intended to have political parties.
03:05
Here you get both choices: you can be ruled by the millionaires or you can be ruled by the billionaires. Complete freedom to choose.
They have seemed unavoidable for quite some time, but you could see many smaller parties as similar to each representative voting for her own cause.
@tchrist It's funny how he designed the system towards bipertisanry, which has very strong parties, even though he was against political parties...
We used to have a district system too, I think those were more common before 1900.
We are come to a point where nothing the other team wants is anything you must ever let past. It's a complete breakdown of a working government.
@Cerberus Um what? Washington didn't design political parties.
Or even a system in which those were required.
He refused to have anything to do with them.
Perhaps, if the stalemate becomes too unworkable, people will at last vote for a third party.
@tchrist Unwittingly.
@Cerberus You sweet summer child.
Winner-take-all tends towards few parties, and very strong ones.
Isn't that how he designed it?
03:08
But that's just it. It wasn't supposed to be winner takes all.
That's a recent thing.
Wasn't supposed to.
That's what makes it 'funny', how his design turned out to be counter to his intentions.
If I understand the situation correctly.
The electoral college is not a winner takes all system in the Constitution.
> What most interesting about our current system for selecting a president is that it’s an unintended quirk that isn’t even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. States determine how they select their electors. In fact, for the first 13 presidential elections, states experimented with many different electoral systems.
> By 1832, every state except South Carolina awarded its electors by the popular vote, although not all states followed the winner-take-all custom that emerged later. Since 1868, every state has awarded its electors in a way related to that state’s popular vote tally.
Unintended, is what I meant.
@tchrist Ah, I see
@tchrist "Has awarded": I am confused?
@Cerberus =now awards
It suggests that's still the way?
Yes.
03:12
But that still doesn't have to be winner takes all!!
Or perhaps "by the popular vote" is unclear.
And in Maine and Nebraska, it is not so.
I thought it meant proportionally.
Oh it used to be that the states just did weird random things.
The way they did with Senators, which was not an elected position initially.
It was always an appointed position.
Maine and Nebraska award electors proportionate to the vote. The other states do not do so.
Winner-take-all electors make sense in a situation when the state level is supposed to be the most important level: then each state can speak with one vote.
Like governments of European member-states: they, too, speak with one voice when things need to be decided on the continental level.
03:14
In that regard, each seat is itself winner takes all because each seat is one human speaking for it.
Yeah.
You cannot have millions of representatives.
Suppose Boulder has to send exactly one representative to Congress. Which in fact is the case. It can send only one.
You always have to throw some votes away.
But the number you throw away can vary.
Well, here we only throw away the Republican votes. :)
When 17 million people elect 1 King, you could have 16.4 million people who get no representation altogether.
03:16
There aren't very many of them. Like 4 to 1. So they feel like their votes are discarded.
If they voted for the other candidate.
@tchrist Hmm that's quite a left-leaning state then.
It's just my congressional district, the Colorado 2nd.
Ah, OK.
The Colorado 1st is Denver.
My city is very left wing.
Then again, most cities are on the left side of the spectrum.
03:18
They're the capital, we're the university. Everybody else came after us. And still do sometimes. :)
Yes.
It's why we have a split congressional delegation.
What does that mean?
It has been 7 districts, so there was always a clear majority. You can't have a tie with 7. But then too many people moved here so we have to redraw everything to make an 8th.
Or maybe we just made extra babies, not sure.
Oh, you mean your town is now two districts instead of one?
City?
I sure as hell hope not. But there have been crazier schemes.
That crap still happens in most states. It's terrible. Called gerrymandering. All done by computers now. Whichever party is in power every ten years cuts up the other party's districts so they can't ever manage to elect people.
Colorado doesn't do that. We passed some sort of constitutional amendment making it illegal. It has to never favor one side or another now. So it's been taking a while to see how it all shakes out. At one point they were indeed talking about cleaving off part of Boulder County.
I have heard of that.
03:24
> The Colorado Independent Congressional and Legislative Redistricting Commissions, established by Amendments Y and Z in 2018, are drawing Colorado's congressional and state legislative districts in 2021.
It is good that you have a laws against it.
It's better than a law.
It's an amendment to the constitution itself. Two of them, apparently.
That quote was from redistricting.colorado.gov
Oh it's been approved by the supreme court just a few days ago.
Oh my.
So yes, the new district has grabbed up most of Boulder County. I have no idea what this means for us.
Duh no.
My computer is on drugs.
District 2 is the blue one in the top middle. District 8 is the new little one. I don't even know what district I'm in anymore.
Is Boulder near Denver on this map?
Yes and no.
Yes.
It's about 30 miles away or so.
Ok that's probably nearby to your standards.
03:30
Nope, I'm still in 2.
The colors are different on that locator map.
It kind of matters. We'll be ok.
I think they managed to keep the two big colleges together.
The other is up in Ft Collins to the north, in Larimer County.
Is that important?
One of the proposed maps, not this one, had coupled us up with a bunch of Republican counties.
Ask me again after next year's election, if I'm still around.
Hmm.
It's pretty difficult to cut up everybody into equal-sized districts.
Which is what the U.S. Constitution requires.
Because size means number of residents.
So anywhere that there are a lot of people, you get small districts and vice versa.
That's the Denver-Boulder metroplex.
Look at how there are all kinds of colors, each a different U.S. Congressional District.
And for what type of districts was it that even non-citizens counted?
03:37
But out around the edges of the state where it's just prairie or desert, it's different.
Electoral votes?
That's this.
So seats in the lower house?
You count humans, not voters.
Yes.
There is a difference between voters, citizens, and humans each.
03:38
Otherwise you rig the system to create crimes against humanity.
We have no districts.
You're tiny.
We used to have 100 districts, one for each member of the lower house.
I think in the 19th century.
But the district system was abolished.
You can't award money from like the federal education budget or the federal health care budget proportionate to the number of people who voted for you, or even people who vote. You have to award it based on humans.
Uhh...
03:40
I don't know that those are real things. I'm just inventing examples.
I do know that that is why it matters, though.
It's like allocating transportation money based on cars on the road instead of cars driven by people who are allowed to vote.
An incredible number of people are not allowed to vote in the American South due to felony records, an overwhelming proportion of whom are black.
It's just one of the ways that the old slavers still retain power there.
I rather meant immigrants who are not citizens.
They still require support from the state.
We rearrange the lines so that each vote in the lower chamber is equal.
It's kind of weird, I know.
@tchrist But they cannot vote.
Neither could slaves.
No, indeed.
03:52
But the slavers still wanted them to count for congressional power.
So the vote of a voter in a slave state counts for more?
Yes.
Hmm is that the original reason behind this?
I wonder how other countries with districts do this.
England?
So the "three-fifths compromise" that was the only way the slave states would vote for the new constitution became one the founding original sins that we are still suffering from.
Without districts, this issue does not exist.
What is this compromise?
03:54
That a slave counts as three-fifths of a person for congressional representation even though they could not vote and were not citizens.
And were not subject to the laws that protect human beings. They could be murdered by a slave owner at his whim. Many lesser crimes were taken for granted.
Rape is not a crime if it's a slave, etc.
It was not legally possible to steal from a slave because a slave could not legally own anything.
Ahh.
A fascination proportion.
Slaves often had few rights.
I believe they had some rights under Roman law.
They did.
Not here.
There were some things you could not do.
But you could rape them, and kill them under certain circumstances.
Still, I think it was better than in Greece.
The North wanted them to count for nothing, saying to free them if you want them to count.
Of course.
03:59
The South wanted them to count just like a normal person, but would not free them.
The 3/5th compromise was how the North got the South to join. It was terrible.
So do all those ineligible to vote in a state still count for 3/5?
No.
Nonslave women counted as full humans.
So did nonslave Indians of either sex.
I don't know that the Romans had birthright slavery.
Ah, I see.
And now?
@tchrist What is that?
@Cerberus Children of slaves were automatically slaves.
It was inheritable.
Hardly a "right"...
I think it was the same way with the Romans.
04:03
So you had generation after generation after generation of humans completely trapped in slavery. They could have no hope for their children.
It was fairly normal for slaves in Rome to be freed eventually by their owners.
There is nothing they could do to be freed.
And they could save up money.
Yes, well, not these ones.
You can't let them do that, or they might buy themselves.
Sounds more like Spartan slaves.
04:04
Then they would be free. That cannot be allowed.
Do you think the North should have forced its will upon the South?
As soon as it could?
Only if they had weapons of mass destruction. Then it's ok. :)
The whole American Revolution was forged on a lie that pretended slaves were not people.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Nope.
That's a lie.
They did not believe that.
Not those in the South at least.
Didn't the North still have slaves in that time, too?
And I think they truly did mean only men. Why should women not be equal?
04:23
@Cerberus No no no no.
It was illegal.
> Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region's businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, all of the northern states abolished slavery, but the institution of slavery remained absolutely vital to the South.
Isn't that mostly after the revolution?
YEs.
It was not illegal in 1619, say.
The Constitution wasn't until 1787.
It's easy to slip into thinking that 1776 was the foundation of the Republic, but really, it wasn't. Not in the way people think of it. Just in spirit.
It was the start of the armed rebellion.
Fair enough.
04:28
The 1787 Constitution was ratified in 1788. It was first operative in 1789.
04:58
I wonder how many slaves there still were by that time in the North.
05:13
Current weather. Minus 5°C
That building looks nice, is it old?
The sign on the boy's jacket says волонтер (volontyor), "volunteer"
@Cerberus I like it.
It dates back to 1863
Дом Севастья́нова (также Дом профсоюзов) — исторический и архитектурный памятник, расположенный в Екатеринбурге по адресу проспект Ленина, 35 (пересечение Ленина — Горького). Одна из местных достопримечательностей, архитектура которой особо выделяется среди особняков города. Здание бывшего Окружного суда, где в 1918 году находился первый в стране Уральский комиссариат труда. Построен в первой четверти XIX века на берегу Городского пруда, образованного плотиной на реке Исеть. Постановлением Совета Министров РСФСР № 624 от 4 декабря 1974 года признан памятником истории государственного значения....
Sevastyanov's House
In the 19th century eclectic style with elements of Mauretanian, Gothic, and Neobarocco
Mullioned windows are pleasant to look at
A mullion is a vertical element that forms a division between units of a window or screen, or is used decoratively. When dividing adjacent window units its primary purpose is a rigid support to the glazing of the window. Its secondary purpose is to provide structural support to an arch or lintel above the window opening. Horizontal elements separating the head of a door from a window above are both a head jamb and horizontal mullion and are called "transoms". == History == Stone mullions were used in Armenian, Saxon and Islamic architecture prior to the 10th century. They became a common and...
Nice and very Russian.
That is one gorgeous building.
05:29
We were running back from ParkRun, and talked with a woman runner. She said her old mother is not getting the vaccine, because she has "counter-indications", that is, she is diabetic and has high blood pressure.
Surely covid will be more sparing to an old hypertensive diabetic.
05:42
Indeed.
The KFConsole is a home video game console developed by KFC Gaming and Cooler Master. After its initial announcement in June 2020, it was widely believed to be a hoax, until its official reveal in December. The console boasts various features, including ray tracing, up to 4K resolution, and 240Hz output. The signature feature of the device is a proprietary "Chicken Chamber" that can store and warm chicken. == Design == The KFConsole's design is inspired by KFC's Bargain Bucket. The console itself is an all-black cylinder with a backlit red power button on the front below the Chicken Chamber, which...
Comes with a chicken chamber where you can warm chicken.
06:50
Art produced by Russian antivaxxers
A kind of cave art, only on Facebook
 
1 hour later…
08:10
Forty-one percent of children claimed that bacon came from a plant. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494421001584
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