How long before the liberals define any sex as “trafficking?” Doesn’t seem that far off, really.

Wind generation capacity increased three times faster than optimistic expert projections 5 years ago. A large part of the reason was underestimation of how fast technology & manufacturing capability would grow. A good source of hope for the future! https://t.co/IXovaWhjsU

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) April 16, 2021

I remember about 25 years ago when “experts” confidently predicted we’d never have the solar and wind generation capacity that we had…a decade ago (It’s way more now).

Got banned from forums for disagreeing with those mooks.

Woman Goes On Punching And Biting Spree After Being Asked To Wear a Mask.

And they wonder why people don’t want to work for $8 an hour. It’s a huge mystery for sure.

An Astra Zeneca first shot was made available a few weeks ago to a very close family relative who declined, wanting to wait for another brand, and who came down with COVID afterwards. The funeral is tomorrow. Misinformation kills. Get vaccinated.

— Ian C Davies (@iancdavieseval) April 15, 2021

The real risk (for most). Preventable tragedy, and we’ve had so many of these this past year.

(1/3) Study of real-world effectiveness of the Pfizer-BNT vaccine in Israel in over 1.1 million people.

Any infection: 92% (88-95%)
Symptomatic: 94% (87-98%)
Hospitalisation: 87% (55-100%)
Severe disease 92%% (75-100%)

The second dose was crucial.https://t.co/Rvd93hw8Mq pic.twitter.com/r6K6svoGed

— Dr Zoë Hyde (@DrZoeHyde) April 15, 2021

What say ye, doomers?

Ignore the pessimism: Covid vaccines are quietly prevailing. Nightmare scenarios involving deadly new variants are making us all too gloomy – but there’s a scientific case for optimism.

The press gets clicks and makes money from doom-mongering, and liberals are more than happy to sing the same tune. It’s sad to see but this constant focus on doom has little to do with reality.

It can be quite easy, reading the press, to believe that the pandemic will never end. Even when good news about vaccines started to arrive in the autumn, this grim narrative managed to harden. In the past month, you could read “five reasons that herd immunity is probably impossible”, even with mass vaccination; breathless reports about yet-uncharacterised but potentially ruinous variants, such as the “double mutant” variant in India, or two concerning variants potentially swapping mutations and teaming up in a “nightmare scenario” in California; get ready, some analysts said, for the “permanent pandemic”.

The contention that “herd immunity is probably impossible, even with vaccines” was conventional expert wisdom a few months ago, though it was obviously wrong and delusional. So it doesn’t get forgotten I’ve taken a few screenshots of that and other clearly unsound prognostications so I can rub it in their faces later on — because of course it’ll be memory-holed and then become a “conspiracy theory,” as is the way of things now.

Before Covid, giving up flying was taking off. We need to get that momentum back.

Fuck that. Let’s not diminish the world, but instead find ways to make it better. We have the tech. We have the resources. Let’s make it happen.

Reject asceticism. Reject this nonsense. These people need to be binned.

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via. “There is no gentle and earthly way to the stars.”

Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like "he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine" and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used.

— Anosognosiogenesis (@pookleblinky) September 25, 2020

People have real trouble believing any already-existing sytem could be any different than it is. And of course those who heartily benefit from such a system encourage and produce loads of propaganda promoting such beliefs.

There’s a single New Jersey deli doing $35,000 in sales valued at $100 million in the stock market.

I can smell the money laundering from here. OTC stocks are great for that sort of thing. I mean, I’ve heard that. Yeah, heard that around. Somewhere.

The year is 2157. As spring blooms, parks are cordoned off with tape—an annual ritual origins of which are lost to time. Some believe tape markings ward of the evil eye that brings on disease. Others think its bright yellow stimulates the immune system. 🧿https://t.co/FdRgtDnlme

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) April 15, 2021

This is likely. Same with lockdown worship.

This persuasive article will make a good teaching example. Doing good science doesn't always mean doing fancy experiments or doing sophisticated modeling. Sometimes it means a principled verbal analysis of what can and cannot simultaneously explain all the phenomena we observe. https://t.co/yxhBYNIPD5

— Dylan Morris (@dylanhmorris) April 15, 2021

But the quants tell us that this method is absolutely worthless, and anything that involves reading comprehension, verbal fluency and data synthesis is “fake.”