Man dies after jumping off Panama City Beach hotel balcony with parachute.

That’s 14 stories, or around 140 feet. That’s not high enough for any chute to reliably deploy, so that he died is not surprising at all. Darwin Award winner.

The below is something I’ve been thinking about a lot:

I don’t believe any of the current narratives actually really work for why some countries experienced drastically different outcomes than others with Covid. Yes, I think masks work, but perhaps only on the margins in many cases. And the same with test and trace.

My pet theory: there are two main factors influencing better outcomes with Covid. The first is past exposure to similar respiratory viruses, ones that didn’t cause mass (or any) sickness, but thereby granted sterilizing immunity to much of the population. This would explain most of Asia and even Australia and New Zealand’s results (much travel from the region both ways). They defeated Covid simply by having a vastly easier battle.

The second important factor is age composition of countries combined with obesity. If your country is old and fat and you lacked any pre-existing immunity, you were gonna have a bad time.

This is the only way I can make sense of any of the data. Sure, lockdowns have some effect (especially early on), yes masks do work, yada yada, but with a highly-transmissible respiratory virus, only on the margins.

I bet I am right, but it’ll never be confirmed because it contradicts existing narratives and doctrine.

I pay for tinder and bumble, swipe right on 85% of the girls I see. I'm lucky to get a match a week across both platforms. Of these matches, I have had one successful friendship, apart from that 0 that have even gotten to a single date. I've been swiping for 7 years.

— Cole Osborne (@BKDenied) March 21, 2021

Women don’t realize it, because they get so, so many offers (if they are not in the bottom ~5% of attractiveness), but that’s the average man’s experience dating.

Average woman: gets approached 2-3 times a day.

Average man: gets approached 1-2 times in his lifetime, gets rejected constantly starting from childhood.

Quite a difference! It’s no mystery why some men get bitter about it all. It’s an extremely asymmetric and bad experience, for life.

Hasn't this been the case for like 30 years, and common knowledge for 10? Or am I totally mistaken? https://t.co/QWJZE2Z7Sc

— Wolf Tivy (@wolftivy) March 22, 2021

It has been common knowledge among non-dumbasses for a long time. The friend is not that smart. It’s a post-diction. This has been obvious since at least Greenspan’s jackassery in the early 2000s, inflating a housing bubble.

also I think I was testing something on this VM
or I was just trying to trick myself pic.twitter.com/A9fyKB925w

— foone (@Foone) March 22, 2021

Be careful, one can summon demons this way. They look like Clippy and jump in your way offering to help you at every turn, but each offer diminishes your soul a bit, saps your essence, until you become a wraith yourself and your bones orient themselves to resemble Clippy until you are only capable of roaming the planet, “helping” others.

Be very careful indeed.

I know no one now will believe it, but it’s a very possible turn that the left/libs argue for resegregation as their dominant view, in a kind of renascent Plessy vs. Ferguson reimagining, while conservatives become the radical equality party, though not on the basis of true egalitarian impulses of course, but because that creates the largest free labor pool to exploit.

It sounds absurd now but many views that now seem completely ordinary were once thought to be just as preposterous (women and men are equal, the universe is expanding, etc.).

Saying we shouldn't have nations is like saying we shouldn't have toothbrushes. Yes, someday we'll have a benevolent one-world government, and someday we'll have nanotech that cleans your teeth for you. But in the meantime, let's not tell people to stop brushing their teeth.

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) March 22, 2021

Aye. Nations are about so much more than borders, but borders are what liberals obsess over*. And I think they don’t know their own history, but earlier generations of libs were the ones who helped so many nations gain independence and start the decolonialization process. Not that groups and their views can’t evolve, but eliminating nations and borders now would mean that there’d be endless war and conflict and that Apple, Google, et al. would have carte blanche (and hundreds of other very bad things).

*I think libs obsess over borders because they are mostly rich and white and believe they should have the privilege to cross any border anywhere at any time, no matter what, even if the people across that border don’t want them there.