It's not the magnitude of demand that affects price - it's the price elasticity - the demand and supply curves matter. Demand for petroleum (e.g. gas, etc.) is very stiff - so small changes in supply can have large impacts on price.
While I'm sure some of that does occur some places in the region, my experience in the Utah/Idaho region is very much the opposite. Friendly and very merit oriented work environments.
Tithing is common in most christian denominations, and is legally mandated (and automated) in several European countries via a "church tax" if you're officially registered as a member.
Even the 10% number is derived from the Bible (LEV. 27:30–34). There's nothing particularly nefarious about the Mormons here.
I don't have the moral fortitude to defend Mormonism as a religion, but based on the model of organized religion as a theocratic social insurance program (which it has been since, at least, Leviticus), your complaints don't seem entirely unreasonable:
> membership costs 10% of all you earn
10% is less than I currently pay into my state's social safety net programs.
> If you are in dire straights as a member and require assistance, the program is geared to get you off their assistance ASAP.
Shouldn't "returning people to self-sufficiency" be the goal of any social safety net? As far as I can tell, when you build classes of people whose lives are exclusively and indefinitely supported by welfare, things don't go well (especially when the people who fund the social welfare system get a bit strapped for cash).
The point is, they've amassed hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars with this stingy pyramid scheme. The "social safety net" they offer is a joke. Enjoy your knitted blanket and can of baked beans.
The institution is only generous with their marketing budget (e.g. BYU, which is also run on a shoestring budget) or when they're on the receiving end of generosity.
The whole enterprise feeds on the exploitation of human souls for free labor.
It'd be nice if they looked outside themselves a little and invested their resources into efforts to help human-beings. Does "god" really only want them helping themselves?
Depending on who you talk to and your definitions, nuclear is generally considered dispatchable. The only definitively non-dispatchable sources are e.g. wind and solar where they cannot guarantee power levels and availability during the dispatching window. It is a bit of a spectrum - some sources (i.e. nat gas plants) are considered highly dispatchable because they can be spun up and down and adjust power levels very quickly (i.e. load following).
Global supply chain problems. Inflation problems. China still doing rolling lockdowns. Geopolitical conflicts. Ukraine. China-Taiwan. Off the heels of a not unlikely a lab evolved virus pandemic. Extreme political polarization in the U.S. Increasing anxiety and other mental health problems in youth. I'm going to go with very worried. But maybe I'm just becoming an old cynical curmudgeon.
The illustration is wrong, but the claim is correct; multiplication between units and scalars is just as associative as you'd expect. Multiplying one kilowatt by an hour gives you exactly the same result as multiplying 1 by a kilowatt-hour.
No they are technically correct. In the reactor world "shut down" explicitly and specifically refers to chain-reaction-running mode. The reactors do still require active cooling for several days+ to avoid plant damage scenarios. Several comments on this page seem to not have a clear understanding of this difference.
Once the chain reaction is shut down - there is basically no way for the reactor to come alive (chain-reaction-wise) again on its own - not even if it's being bombed, shelled, etc. And run-away super(prompt)critical reactions are not even possible with this reactor design. These reactors are water-moderated - which means that water is used to slow down neutrons to increase their reaction probability. As the reactor heats up, the water gets less dense (even if it is still a liquid) making it a less effective moderator - this density decrease is enough to passively/automatically keep the reactor in a shut-down state. Residual decay heat from radioactivity of the fission byproducts post-shutdown is enough to damage the reactor internals for several days - hence the need for active cooling post-shutdown.
I've seen lots of crazy-exaggerated news reporting on how "bad" or "dangerous" this entire situation could be. It's not good, but neither is the war in Ukraine. It's not even remotely possible for this to be anything like Chernobyl, and I think unlikely to be nearly as bad as Fukushima (which in the grand scheme of the Tsunami - wasn't really that bad). In the war context, I don't think this nuclear plant situation is particularly notable beyond it providing a large fraction of Ukraine's power.
Why is twitter not letting people see and talk about this? What happened to discourse? I'm completely unsurprised that a tweet that shows how extreme our covid discourse/mitigations have become has been removed/deleted.
This is not a defense of Twitter's moderation policies around Covid issues in general, but the original tweet did have some PII of the administrator who sent the denial letter. A new version is up with the details redacted here: https://twitter.com/tgeitner/status/1445461608117927938
That's a pretty poor analogy. Nails are often the right and often the wrong tool for different circumstances. And there are different kinds of nails. Lots of carpenters have preferences for what types of hardware they use - based on their own experience and that of experience from others. And even if I disagreed with a carpenter on what tools were right for any given particular circumstance, it would be silly to try to micromanage them doing their job - just let them do their work!
But if an expert in fasteners says "use this nail/bolt, made of this material and grade, for this application"...and then Joe Roofer says "WELL I actually work on roofs unlike those ivory tower mechanical and structural engineers, I'll use what I think is best" and then years later a couple people get killed...
There are a lot of infamous incidents caused by people thinking they know better than the people who designed stuff and actually had training, experience, and education in that field. Doing things like changing fastener grades, or styles, or completely changing how something is put together. The most ready example I can think of is the hotel bridge collapse that killed a couple dozen people, because some mouth-breather thought he knew better than the structural engineers that drew up plans on how to anchor the bridge to its overhead supports.
Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines, and the people who do are people I don't want anywhere near patient care because they're going to second-guess other experts, like the doctors they work with, the instructions for equipment and drugs, etc.
> Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines
...and the people in the hospital are also in a great position to verify that (1) vaccines work.
Let P(H|V) be the probability that had outcome H happens if you are vaccinated, and let P(H|~V) be the probability of that had outcome when you are not vaccinated.
Then P(H|V) / P(H|~V) = P(~V) / P(V) x P(V|H) / P(~V|H)
where P(V|H) is the probability that someone with outcome H was vaccinated, and P(~V|H) is the probability that someone with outcome H was not vaccinated.
All they need to do is look at their patients that have outcome H (such as being hospitalized, or dying) and count how many were vaccinated and how many were not, find out the vaccination rate of the community their patients came from, and they can calculate P(H|V) / P(H|~V) which is how much vaccination reduces your chances of H.
For example, if 70% of the people in your community are vaccinated, and you have 50 people who died from COVID in the last month, 5 vaccinated and 45 not vaccinated, you'd get that P(H|V) / P(H|~V) = 0.048. Vaccination is reducing a person's chances of dying by 95%.
So even if they don't want to just trust the experts they can see for themselves that the experts are telling the truth.
Would you listen to an expert doctor who didn't wash his hands before childbirth or a old wive's tail midwife? BEcause this is an actual life and death scenario, and history doesn't look well on the 'experts'.
I can see "nails vs screws" ending in a brawl if enough alcohol is served beforehand. The first punch would probably be thrown after the clipboard warrior makes some quip about dovetails and other "fastener free" joints and gets everyone riled up.
Where is the discussion about the fact that a very large fraction of these employees likely already had far superior natural immunity - which is provable. So they were fired for refusing to undergo what amounts to an unnecessary medical procedure. And these vaccines are non-sterilizing - so it's not like other vaccinations that are routinely required in other public health contexts.
"Provably" is doing a lot of work here. Could they screen each of the employees for immunity? Yes. And the cost of that would be high, and you wouldn't get results back for two weeks or more.
And, natural immunity fades faster than vaccine immunity[0], so it's _not_ unnecessary. Hybrid immunity is "provably" better than natural immunity alone.
> Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
Yes - infected+vaccinated is more protected than infected. But infected is way more protected than vaccinated only. If your position is that everyone should meet the highest standard of infected+vaccinated - which is only marginally better than just being infected - then we should be mandating mandatory covid infection. But if your position is that vaccination alone provides acceptable protection, then infection alone already far far surpasses that in both lasting immunity and total efficacy.
[edit] Here is an excerpt from their conclusion:
"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity."
> But infected is way more protected than vaccinated only.
For the Pfizer vaccine, against the Delta variant specifically.
> If your position is that everyone should meet the highest standard of infected+vaccinated - which is only marginally better than just being infected - then we should be mandating mandatory covid infection. But if your position is that vaccination alone provides acceptable protection, then infection alone already far far surpasses that in both lasting immunity and total efficacy.
This is an absurd argument to make. There's no ethical argument to infect people. And the absolute material difference between vaccinated and natural immunity is literally dozens out of a population of over 600,000. Natural immunity might be "way more protected" but that's speaking in relative terms.
I agree it's absurd - which is why I wasn't sure why it sounded like you were making it. So since we established natural immunity is superior - why is it being ignored? Apparently it's not part of _the_ science.
See my original comment: proving natural immunity requires money, the testing is slow, and it's still less good than simply also getting the shot. And even with natural immunity, it's only somewhat better in some cases as shown by a small number of studies. OR logic is not subtractive to the social and political problem, it's additive.
Why is it absurd to believe in natural immunity and still hold folks accountable for using the zero-cost, (virtually) zero risk option?
Everyone shouldn't be required to meet the highest standard of protection. Everyone should be required to meet the highest standard of protection that can be achieved with neglible risks.
COVID infection has significant risks that rule it out as a medical intervention, even it is sometimes beneficial. Vaccination is virtually risk-free.
But what about people that have already engaged and benefited from that risk? For many of those people, the vaccine risk is not so negligible compared to the additional benefit they gain from any (much smaller) immune boost they might get. Also, how is policy making "following _the_ science" if it doesn't even acknowledge the superiority of natural immunity. The least they could do is own their disregard and say - we're ignoring some science for [reasons] instead of simply demonizing a large fraction of the population as bigoted selfish backward uneducated scum - which is my interpretation of POTUS declaring war on 20% of Americans - a so called "pandemic of the unvaccinated" in his own words (or whoever wrote the speech).
Mandating vaccination and ignoring naturally acquired immunity is selectively following the science. It is deceitful and reckless to ignore natural immunity and demonize the unvaccinated.
Natural immunity provides a stronger immune response than vaccination alone. So, there is a large group of people that have better immunity than any vaccine can give. But, they must still get vaccinated because the president says so? That is some fucked logic.
If all natural immunity people are required to get the vaccine because it gives them better immunity than they already had then by that same logic we should require all vaccinated people to get infected with COVID. Then everybody has the same immunity level.
Infecting someone with a deadly disease is not an ethical medical intervention. Vaccination is.
The requirement isn't to achieve the maximum level of immunity that is possible. It is to achieve the maximum level of immunity that is possible without incurring significant risk.
Natural immunity is better than the vaccine. There is a risk of adverse reactions to the vaccine. You are arguing that people who already have superior immunity take additional risk. This is as unethical as demanding the vaccinated get infected with COVID.
A headache isnt even listed as an adverse reaction. Please base your argument in fact. Getting the vaccine is not risk free and can rarely result in death. The chance of a natural immunity person getting COVID again and dying is lower than a vaccinated person.
> This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.
This is not published yet -- not even pass peer review... In graduate schools professors often give two papers stating contradictory conclusions. Gotta to find which one is correct.
To be in certain healthcare settings you’re often required to be vaccinated against some diseases e.g. if you’re going to be part of surgeries you need to get a TB vaccine. That’s a public health measure and this is no different.
This is the one thing I just don't get. I check the news everyday to see if the U.S. government has clarified the natural immunity part. The amount of research on it seems good, and other countries already acknowledge it and use it.
The only reasoning that makes sense at this point is that the US Government doesn't care if you have natural immunity. They want you to do as they say or suffer.
Vaccines are still beneficial and the more complicated the rules get the harder the administration of them becomes. Everyone[1] can, without any cost to themselves either monetarily or health-wise, go out and get a vaccine - if you suffered from COVID I'm sorry that you'll have long COVID systems but you'll also be supervaccinated at that point - which is even better!
1. With a few very very specific exceptions that should be respected.
Nah - the reason mandates are emerging is because people are acting irresponsibly and prolonging an event that's causing extreme amounts of economic damage. We want to get through this so that the country can return to normal economic activity.
The reason the mandates are so sweeping is because Americans are intensely litigious and making them targeted would potentially run afoul of all sorts of laws like the ADA.
From my evaluation and research, nearly all the economic damage is being caused by said mitigations - not the virus or pandemic itself. So... stop doing the things that damage the economy? People want to work. People want to travel. People want to play. Let. Them. Do. It. A few are fearful and want to hide - that's fine too.
These mitigations wouldn't be in place if there wasn't a pandemic on - the faster we can solve that the faster we can open things up again.
And this problem might be unsolvable - if that's the case then the vaccine mandates (which do lower risk) will probably become as set in stone as MMR shots which, if you went to school in America, you almost certainly got.
You mean the shots that provide sterilizing immunity for diseases that have orders of magnitude higher mortality rates for children and healthy people? None of which is true with COVID - and anyone that disagrees can just look up the stats on the CDCs website and read about sterilizing immunity on wikipedia.
2) Sterilizing immunity is a pointless distraction. Seatbelts don't provide 100% protection in a car crash, surgeons washing their hands doesn't prevent 100% of infection, and having smoke alarms and two points of egress in a bedroom will not 100% save your life during a disaster. In fact, I can't even think of a mandated public safety feature that is 100% effective.
I'm all for vaccines but all against mandates. Vaccine is for your own safety and won't affect spread rate (that much). There are many procedures you can do to your body that can benefit you or others yet we don't act like it's legitimate for government to force this.
Not true. 1. By not getting vaccinated you’re a potential
Burden to the health system and taxpayers so it’s a public health issue. 2. Data shows vaccines reduce spread.
1) You're burden for many life decisions. You're burden if you decide to smoke, if you decide to eat junk food and you're burden if you don't excercise. Still government should not have power to decide this.
2) So does natural immunity and it's frowned upon
So does natural immunity, but this is being suppressed.
> By not getting vaccinated you’re a potential Burden to the health system
This doesn't mean you can MANDATE someone to take the vaccine. This is a violation of medical ethics to use someone instrumentally for the sake of some other good (which is precisely that you're describing).
1) Nobody (that I've seen in this discussion section at least) is denying that natural immunity is quite effective at preventing spread and complications - though a lot of people are correctly mentioning that natural immunity + vaccination has been shown to be even more effective than just natural immunity (so why not get vaccinated anyways).
2. Living in a society means you can mandate a vaccine - it means you can mandate a whole lot of things. I'm still unable to drive a tank to work even though I probably wouldn't hurt anyone - how unjust is that! Being part of a society comes with rules and requirements you need to follow - even in freedom loving america. There is a way you can leave that society - it is still quite possible. Buying a cabin in remote Oregon won't suffice but you can emigrate to an area of the world that doesn't effectively enforce laws - they do still exist.
So no, nobody is mandating that your body receive the vaccine - the mandate is that if you want to keep living in a prosperous society you need to do the absolute minimum to keep everyone in that society safe.
