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Yeah wouldn't they pull out all the stops if this were the case? Including running these drones during the day and all night (and making up a cover story)?

The actual quote from the Coast Guard says they saw some drones but they weren't a threat. The Congressman is that one that says the Coast Guard says they were followed by drones.


I'm really sick of guys like Eric Topol who are basically covid influencers, bc they love to post studies but are completely unable to critically examine any studies. Pre-covid I thought that's what scientists did, but if they're doing that, they're not doing it in the public eye at all.


The last chart in the first study section is really quite special. The authors seem to have normalized a bunch of outcome measurements in units of standard deviations and then sorted them by something resembling the average differences, but they couldn’t be bothered to normalize the sign of the measurement? If you’re trying to tell me that 30-ish scores are all Gaussian enough to be worthy of using standard deviation units but that they don’t even all agree as to whether large or small numbers are good, I’m suspicious of the normalization procedure. (If “accuracy” means what I think it does, it’s obvious not even close to Gaussian. 90% might be good, 100% is perfect, and 101% is not “just z standard deviations better.”) There are decent techniques to deal with this (e.g. nonparametric models), but blindly normalizing, sorting, and adding a little caption to indicate that you did in fact notice that a bunch of the tests are backwards is not one of them.

I hoped the article would make some mention of how believable the results were, but no.

(Also, maybe mention that the pre-Omicron strains are not much of an ongoing risk and that those results, while potentially interesting, are probably unhelpful for informing future policy decisions?)

edit: It seems worse than this. Quoting the first paper:

> This invited subsample comprised participants who reported positive results on a SARS-CoV-2 test or who suspected that they had had Covid-19 and whose symptoms persisted for at least 12 weeks; participants who, as part of the REACT study, either had a positive result on a polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test for SARS-CoV-2 or were unvaccinated and had a positive test for SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies on an at-home lateral flow immunoassay device16; and participants who were randomly selected from the remaining REACT study population.

Eric Topol calls this a “prospective” study, although the study, fortunately, does not advertise itself as prospective. This is a retrospective study with an obviously biased study population. And the >12-week-symptoms group contains self-selected participants who may never have even had COVID!

Getting sick for 12 weeks sucks. Finding a detectable effect on an intelligence test should not be remotely surprising. Going from that to anything that should print COVID policy seems like quite a leap.


Topol may or may not be an idiot, but his tweets certain read like they were created by someone incapable of critical analysis (i.e. an idiot).


Or if you work from home and never go out to restaurants or do anything that you need to be unmasked and around other people for (or hang out indoors unmasked with anyone who does such things), the social isolation can be pretty bad too. I guess there's no real incentive to run studies about that but I bet they'd show all sorts of ill effects of essentially locking down in perpetuity.

...or you're just fine catching covid outside of work but it's so much worse to catch it in an office


Corporate personhood means that you can own a piece of a company without being personally liable, because the corporation is its own legal entity. This is why people can start businesses without worrying about being in debt for the rest of their lives if it fails. After all, if the corporation isn't a separate legal entity but just a collection of investors, if the corporation wronged someone, the investors could be sued personally.

Maybe the concept is taken too far in terms of political donations and free speech but no corporate personhood would mean that very few people would stick out their necks to start or invest in companies. I don't think a modern economy would even be possible.


> no corporate personhood would mean that very few people would stick out their necks to start or invest in companies.

What a dystopia that would be.


-sent from my iPhone


Does Spotify still not have a way to pick up where you left off on a podcast after venturing into music for a while and coming back? I remember there being something extremely annoying about that very obvious usecase which made me just go back to Pocket Casts, even though that app can't even stream a podcast without some sort of skip or fast forward.


It goes back to the moment you last listened (minus a couple of seconds) by default. Spotify is a decent podcast player, not AntennaPod but OK.


Assuming that the murderer has lots of priors, why is it so hard for cities to (1) not overpolice minor crimes (i.e. weed) and also (2) take violent crimes seriously and incarcerate anyone who commits X number or X severity of them?

Instead every time at least in NYC when you hear about someone killing an elderly Asian, turns out they had like 20+ priors, including some violent misdemeanors, which are often quite serious. No one wants to put people in jail for stealing a loaf of bread (a straw man that often comes out) but if repeat violent offenders keep committing more violent crimes, maybe we actually need to keep them in prison longer?

Why are people such bleeding hearts for repeat violent offenders?


Don't you know we can only compare the US to Europe???


Homicide rate is 5-10x larger in US than Europe.


Gonna go out on a limb and say that a US vs Europe comparison on crime rates is not going to show the US in a good light either.


For legal research, lawyers already use third party sites like Westlaw. You can do legal research without giving up any confidential client information.

I just asked GPT-3 a research question that took me hours of searching back in the day and it returned the single seminal case for that topic immediately. As long as the lawyers then actually read the case and make sure it's right, I don't see why they can't use it.


I've heard that many people who don't know any coding at all often apply to bootcamps and simply just flunk the first coding assessment they get. They probably help account for much of the low admissions rate at any half decent bootcamp (that have coding assessments).


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