The counter argument is that Black Mirror is an insanely popular TV show that shows exactly what technology innovation could bring - but again, from a dystopian perspective.
Another comment on a recent thread pointed out that Black Mirror isn't so much speculating about the future as it is using tech storylines to expose things that make us uncomfortable about the present. The depressing content decades ago was about nuclear war, but now the source of people's anxiety isn't just faraway Soviets; it's pervasive surveillance within their own communities, corrupt politicians selling them out, and the inability to reach the standard of living of their parents.
If this is rare enough, it could fall into the false positive rate of the COVID test they've previously done (i.e. while the test said they had COVID, they didn't)
The tests are designed to have high false positives because they have to bias toward few false negatives and there are no perfect tests. What gets me is that the negative result is the one bearing meaningful information but not the positive result, yet everyone mistakenly talks about positives as if they are far more informative than they actually are.
I'm not sure what test you have in mind, and I'm guessing that such tests with high false positive bias might exist, for example the antibody tests. It's very difficult to get a genuine false positive with a PCR-based test: whatever you're reading out should have the same sequence as the part of the virus you're sequencing. The only reasonable way to get a false positive is that you contaminate the sample, but I don't think that the possibility of contamination is part of the design in any of the commercially available tests.
Certainly the case with the PCR test, because it is so sensitive. It can detect Covid fragments at such a low level that no symptoms would show and no adaptive immune response would arise. That's not enough Covid to generate memory and immunity.
You could be PCR tested positive, while experiencing a cold or flu (which you would now understandably think were Covid symptoms), but would not have immunity for a future, larger infection from Covid.
Though statistically unlikely, it's bound to happen sometimes.
Could be - but the case I remember reading about involved hospitalisation.
Remember that immunisation makes antibodies but only provides something like 50-95% protection (depending on the vaccine) - it's not surprising that actually catching it does the same thing
But the Bay Area's high prices are driven by scarcity + demand, not intrinsic cost. So if everyone had a higher tax burden, I'd expect costs to come down.
Unless a huge earthquake hits it, the Bay area will always be worth more than central Kansas.
At a minimum, there is one simple reason for this - the amount of infrastructure investment over the years (power, sewer, roads, etc), of which there is basically none in central Kansas, but loads of in the bay area.
The value of the land at Burning Man is much lower than the Bay Area, even though it has many of the same people.
I think the infrastructure is pretty important. Disregarding it entirely seems a bit much. Even a bad neighborhood in Philly has more value per square foot than farmland in Kansas.
> The value of the land at Burning Man is much lower than the Bay Area, even though it has many of the same people.
You're proving GP's point. People from the Bay Area go to a desolate desert in the dead of summer because of the social aspects of Burning Man - the land is worthless because its a desert, owned by the Federal government, and they only stay a week out of the year. They bring the infrastructure with them, from stadium audio equipment to porta-poties to wireless equipment.
That's absurd. If everyone had a higher tax burden social mobility would be completely destroyed.
Californians will never vote away prop 13 so property taxes will never go up, even in this imaginary increased tax burden scenario. With incomes taxed higher, prices would not come down at all.
No one would want to sell their houses, as they could never afford a new one after taxes. Prices would continue to be propped up by real estate investment wealth that is largely unaffected by this increased tax burden. No one could afford to buy a first home as their income is taxed to a degree that saving up for a 20% down payment would require being in the 1% of CA income or saving up frugally for >10 years.
Cancel culture is not responding to an argument with counter-argument. Cancel culture is responding to an argument with an effort to personally destroy whoever dared to voice that argument, exclude them from the discussion and silence them. That's why it is "cancel" culture and not "debate" culture - you're not supposed to criticize somebody, you're supposed to end ("cancel") their presence in the society. In older, harsher, times, this was done by literally murdering people, but we have, thankfully, evolved past that. Now it's done by removing these people from their jobs, blocking their social media accounts, preventing them (sometimes by violent action) from speaking on any public forum and attacking (again, sometimes violently) of anybody who dares to give them support and comfort. Much more civilized!
> In older, harsher, times, this was done by literally murdering people,
In past times, nonviolent forms of 'cancelling' that would seem familiar to us today were also employed. It was/is called 'shunning.' Our modern term is just a euphemism for that.
This looks like a semantic/identity disagreement. What you call cancel culture is the most extreme minority of cases of what I call cancel culture. It's common to serve one's biases by using a well heard label to refer only to the cases in some ideological context that are "doing it right", or, on the opposite end, to refer to the worst version of cases in that ideological context. Hopefully we're both trying not to fall toward the edges.
Agree. Reddit has a unique ability among large social networks to bring up sanity and good discussion. If there is misinformation being being spread I'd expect information disputing it to be in the comments 90%+ of the time. (Except for the niche subreddits as you mentioned)
