Taf the Ghost

The Source Modding scene is the ones that had the code. The code was actually leaked back in 2018. It just got out into the "wild" today because someone had a vendetta against other members of a modding group. The source code came from a former Valve employee that worked as a Repository Dev. They also might be in prison for an attempted Murder-Suicide. A little unclear on that last bit, but "mentally unstable" keeps coming up.

One of the "side benefits" to creating semi-accurate but twisted narratives, by the Media, is it creates a default secondary, counter-narrative that's always wrong in the same way that the mainline narrative is wrong. However, the Media can then switch to mocking/yelling/attacking that narrative and do their standard shaming approach. Without direct links to the deceased man's statements, depending on exactly when they were said and against what narrative, you can't actually say they were on the Right, Left, Center or Fringe. The one thing that'll definitely not survive this pandemic is any credibility the Media had. Not that they had much left anyway.

http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/media/mediapubhpdetail.cfm?prid=2328 First round of what's been fairly obvious in the early testing data but was always going to take time to play out. The actual infection rate of the virus is fairly low and it's likely been running around hard since January, just being lumped in with the Flu, while having a high asymptomatic rate. The cruise ship testing rates were the first give away that testing was going to be an issue, but this line of research will give us a better understanding over time. Note: While this is going to end up being the late season "flu" that blew up the global economy, the risks to those within whatever the final High-Risk Profile ends up being is quite real. There's a definite lethality to a sub-set of all populations that is separate from a normal Flu Season. However, we won't know exactly what that profile looks like that for a while.

Having dealt with Adobe for years, I've actually had a higher opinion of Microsoft the entire time. There was a period where there was a great team on Photoshop and each iteration really was pushing the technology forward rapidly, but most of their programs have always been buggy messes with obtuse UIs that required learning their way that just don't crash "enough" to get companies to change their purchases. Adobe is the kings of "Maximum Allowable Bugs" for a live product, while also making sure the product doesn't crash just idling. Thinking about it, Microsoft comes across as a nimble Startup compared to Adobe. At least MS doesn't expect you pay 400USD per license for effectively bug fixes.

Main thing was Photoshop was the primary image editing program through the late 90s and, during the period where a lot of professional work was done on Macs, the only real option for a lot of stuff. This let them get all of the corporate money, which let them buy up everyone that was a risk. Once they bought Macromedia, the "design" space was basically under complete Adobe hegemony. Adobe has always been the less competent cousin of Microsoft, if anyone is confused why they get so much flack.

I knew there were some solutions out there, but I also haven't had to deal with Premiere (or most of Adobe) in a number of years, thankfully. But that doesn't surprise me in the least. My experience with Adobe is long and painful, and their iron-grip on much of the creative industry has always bothered me quite a lot. And all because they had one actually good product (Photoshop) that they didn't screw up for ages.

It's Premiere still. Physical VRAM address space matters. It also makes for this weird world where the Radeon VII and RTX Titan are the best choices for Adobe. This is also the reason I was complaining about how long its taken Adobe to add something I'm sure some github regular probably could have turned out in a week. Adobe is a company that makes you head-desk a lot if you have to deal with their products constantly.

It's only how many years late?

The stimulus "checks" (almost all of it is direct bank transfers) hits all tax-payers under a threshold in the USA, so it's a blanket 85% of tax payers approach. There's also all of the other unemployment benefits/social services for those hit by layoffs. The worst case scenario is 80% of people that were working are still working, so the Stimulus approach is far more about preventing a "liquidity crunch" than anything else. On the political angle, the Democrats are going to be back demanding "more" in a couple of days, more than likely. Though a friend told me that Federal Student Loan programs are being suspended for being paid until September. That's probably a bigger shot of stimulus than most other things that can be done. On the more long-term realities, I think people should get to know the name Dave Ramsey. Would save a lot of people a lot of stress right now.

That's unsurprising and was kind of expected. Though anyone dying in a hospital right now is probably exposed anyway. Though there's a sub-issue that either a lot of stuff looks like COVID or COVID looks like everything else, at the normal diagnostic level. Seen a few news articles squawking that the tests seem inaccurate (which they very well might be)., so it's just going to make the data situation worse.

That San Diego doctor was brewing a concoction of: an anti-viral, an anti-bacterial, anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. Sounds like a brilliant way to pickle your Liver and Central Nervous System at the same time. Can they make his punishment being kicked in the butt from San Diego to Florida? This level of "cunning stupidity" needs some sort of special punishment.

Death total wouldn't have been that high, but we had no way of taking that calculation into consideration since China was being China for two months. It's also not "crazy contagious" but is crazy environmentally persistent. This is why it can turn any public space into a virus well pretty quickly. Infection rates of those with high exposure is pretty low compared to something like Swine Flu. What makes COVID-19 a problem is the vulnerable population isn't well characterized. There is a very definite profile where it's rather lethal, but it, sadly, is going to pass before we probably understand what that profile is. Or if we could even test for it. This is going to result in figuring out how dangerous it actually is only after a good number of years. As for the graph, I feel like everyone is skipping over that period in February where the Media already did the "we're over-reacting! It's fine!". Somehow, they hit the narrative 6 months early, though they'll return to it in October when they want to push narratives for the election season. On the potential death toll, from the actuarial stand point, right now it kind of looks like in the "we did nothing" scenario & the current understanding of the vulnerability profile, it looks like all that would happen is the expected yearly deaths from Heart Disease, Kidney Disease, Diabetes and Cancer would just have a COVID-19 flag on them. Unless there is an echo mutation cycle that goes lethal for the Working Age population, like the Spanish Flu had happen.

I'm not sure how a Virus thread got over into terrible theories on economics, but the answer to most of this discussion is literally "end most immigration". You'll understand the lack of higher paying jobs when you realize the point of large scale immigration is mostly to drive wages down. That quality doesn't instantly drop is the only reason the executives can avoid that reality. Most of the "AI will eliminate X jobs" has already been disproven, along with the fact humans will retrain themselves. Modern economies also have a significant reserve of Net Jobs that could be lost without much issue given 2-Earner Households with Children, if wages were higher. The 2-Wage Household, in the USA, is the result of the large immigration wave starting after 1965. Also, populations will self-regulate to the environment. The normal discussion point is Japan, but it applies to practically everywhere that isn't getting massive shipments of free food: the societies will shrink their numbers because humans have group adaptability at mass scale. It's why populations decline after empires collapse or a large city is no longer viable in a location. There were large cities with >100k population stretching back thousands of years. Many of them no longer exist because of environmental changes, mostly. Back to Virus discussion, looks the State of Washington is about wrapped up on its outbreak. https://www.doh.wa.gov/emergencies/coronavirus Second Data tab for the New Cases chart. So we're still on track for the last week of April to see a State that was a hotspot unwind the restrictions. Granted, the big issue for a while is Travel between locations is an issue, especially given a few places are only now starting to peak. Everyone is suddenly going to be really suspicious of people from out of the area for the rest of the year, which is a very human response. As a reminder, it's really public restrooms, eating locations and door handles that are the worrisome infection vectors. Starting to see why gloves are historically so popular.

I've used "properly whelmed" a few times in conversation. It's always been a serious issue, but it isn't airborne Ebola. Issue is that the Media can't do subtlety. They've been running the "Is this the next plague?" narrative since before anyone here was born. They want people to over-react because its good for them, but this is also why there's zero middle ground on the subject. It's also why in the course of 8 weeks, the Wuhan Virus went from "eh, what was that?" to "It's racist to restrict China" to "there's nothing to worry about" to "IT'S THE BLACK DEATH! AND I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU WERE IGNORING IT!". They began scrubbing their old headlines a few weeks back so no one notices this happened. The issue going forward is that the data is extremely messy, which makes the decision making very difficult. You have to end the lockdowns quite soon. You're going to get weird outbreaks in hotspots that require local lockdowns in the future and that's just the way you have to roll. But if you don't stagger the unwinding of the lockdown, you're going to have a crush on medical resources because there are other viruses than COVID19 out there. Schools, Concerts and large Festivals are likely the things to reopen last, but you need to get businesses back open.

The information I've seen is on Kidney Disease, but I have zero clue how lacking a kidney effects things. Don't know if it's total efficiency or total volume that's the issue. Though the data I'm thinking about was from hospital admittance analysis. But I'm having trouble finding the right article that discussed it at the moment. As for the cell-surface receptors, you would expect there's a possibility of being different by racial groups. You don't know until you have enough of a genetic map to check it against, along with age-based data. It might be expressed more with age in certain groups, leading to the issue. Or it could be accumulation of damage to some clearance process, so it's on the "backend" where things are actually lethal. Which would still be a genetic differential, just not a direct one.

https://health.ri.gov/data/covid-19/ https://govstatus.egov.com/OR-OHA-COVID-19 Found some data from some US-states. Rhode Island is running at a 6% hospitalization rate to Confirmed cases rate; Oregon is running at 23%. Thus, Belgium could have between ~52k and 200k COVID19 cases, thus explaining the seemingly high fatality rates & bringing it in line with most other regions. We'll know more in the years ahead.

The general consensus entry point is a cell-surface receptor. Which means differential expression rates matter. Isomorphic expression rates matter. Does the receptor accumulate with age? (Would explain the mortality rate post age-40.) The really trick part is the highly asymptomatic vs high risk population. Other options are the sub-40 Age population will have infection in the nose/throat vs lungs, resulting in extremely minor symptoms but the over-40 Age population gets it in the lungs & thus has great issues. Maybe mucous type matters more? One of the largest data sets, so far, from the States puts Kidney disorders as the biggest risk factor for needing hospitalization from COVID19, so maybe the issue is more fluid clearance around the lungs than anything else, if you get a "serious" case.

Do you happen to know if hospitalization rates are available? If the fatality rate in Belgium is actually in-line with NYC and it's simply the non-hospital admit testing that's low, it could be a simple as there's really around 60k cases and the numbers don't look too out of the ordinary. A lot of this is simply a data "fog of war" being active (and a lot of people are getting a good lessen in what that really means in practice), but I'm just curious if there's something ultra specific that makes it simply an outlier. Like there isn't an annual Benelux Hugging Fest that caused a mass outbreak. This is one of those viruses I highly suspect will have greater than 65% global population antibody rate within a few years. The Asymptomatic rate is just too high for it not to spread everywhere.

@Cora_Lie On Belgium, I simply noticed it because the fatality rate jumped out. With the population small enough, I was curious if there was some odd, singular group that got wiped out. Something like the "Benelux Asthmatics Association Annual Convention", as having roughly 1/4 the cases and about 55% the deaths as NYC simply stands out pretty prominently. A lot of this is simply differentials in testing (and there's still enough questions running around about the accuracy of tests) and will wash out over the months as general population antibody testing shows the actual extent of the spread, but death rate in Western Europe is still odd. Or the positive testing rate is wildly low.

@Cora_Lie The one thing we simply won't know is which strains were most deadly. The outside-of-China numbers don't really align well, as you can just compare South Korea or Germany to Italy and you're left with far more questions than answers.The Spanish Flu didn't become the mass killer until a good ways into its mutation cycles. It spread fast but didn't get ultra lethal until a period during late 1918. I suspect we'll see some aspect like that the Wuhan Virus, where the really lethal version only hit certain areas. This would result in really messy data. To the general thread, since I was just checking some information. Anyone have a clue what is going on in Belgium? They're currently running a ~13% fatality rate.

What'll cause the response is the coverup & lying, to the point even a Japanese cabinet minister was joking about needing to rename the WHO after China. If in official, open discussions in the Japanese diet they willingly bring that up, expect a lot of that after the dust settles. But, this is very much a "the cover-up is worse than the crime" situation. Because China is already untrustworthy, they didn't get the benefit available by being really upfront with everyone else. In what will be a deep irony, China could have improved their global standing by not acting like what we expect from the Chinese Government. Some weird virus pops up among your >1 billion people, no one is going to hold that against a country. Lying about it making it seem like they're responsible for Grandma getting sick? Yeah, that creates decades long resentments. The other reason "blame China" will end up being the acceptable response is that the movement of manufacturing to China was almost wholly orchestrated by the finance classes in other economies. They'll be able to displace the related blame for why China is always an issue onto China itself, which will be a great way to deflect "heat" & questions none of the elite classes want to openly answer. (Besides, they've already been moving manufacturing elsewhere because China isn't cheap anymore.)

It never went away in China, all it did was do a natural burnout rate and China just opened back up and will let the smaller number get infected as they go. Given the area that was likely infected, we'll eventually get a reasonable number for the dead in Wuhan. Probably 150-200k. The region has ~60 million population and was the epicenter of this. While still a number dead, that's really not too surprising.

The thing to expect is not full scale "all done, open everything!" from almost anyone. It'll be phased back out the way most phased-in. Though when all of the dust settles, it looks like a good number of places likely peaked for transmission before any lockdown procedures were activated, which is going to cause years of conflict among factions. Granted, we can mostly blame China for that because that's what everyone will end up doing anyway.

It's always about waiting out the mutation cycle, if you have a handle on the transmission vector. Treatment regimes are already at the "combat medicine" stage and should probably be codified either this week or next week. It's the reason for the sudden outbreak of anti-Chloroquinine news pieces the last few days. (Chloroquinine would only be effective at the fever/non-ICU hospital admittance stage, as it works against viral load rather than cascading cytokine issues.) So that should be good for everyone when it is. The lag time inherent in all stages of this virus are still the most confounding issue. Though that there are so many asymptomatic carriers might be a close second.

I believe you're missing the period where the Media and the Political establishment were screaming "racist" as much as possible back in January. And then February's "there's nothing to be worried about" period. While partially due to the media lacking any ability for subtlety, the reality is that the Jet Set's Christmas travels through Europe (especially Italy for Christmas) assured any country with a lot of points of entry was going to be hit. If only more people thought Germany was a better Christmas vacation destination, things would have gone a lot better. The environmental persistence of virus assured it was getting everywhere, and it's looking like even a few of the early spots hit in the States peaked a while ago. Data on this virus is going to take years to work through, because a lot of it is quite odd.