i really greatly prefer firefox. i'm sorry...

i think i should be able to take it down to 46, and maybe as far as 28, before i lose youtube support.

the comodo setup wouldn't load.

i was able to get the thing to run using an esr version of firefox 52, so i at least know i'm not missing files. but, even that is painfully slow....

i'm going to actually eat, because it's just been too long. but, i should be able to optimize it better than that afterwards.

so, comodo has a firefox fork, apparently?

hrmmn.

ok.

i'm caught up.

completely.

finally....

i need to reimage the 90s laptop again before i eat and shower, as i've been having difficulty finding the right combination of software. the reason i moved to the laptop in the first place was that the processor on the 90s pc (the one that shipped with windows 98....) couldn't load a modern browser, and thus couldn't get native html5 support. it consequently couldn't access youtube.

the workaround i found was with chrome & xp, but i thought i had saved the setup files for chrome, and apparently had not. i don't know what version it was. the versions i've tried haven't worked. worse, i don't remember what image i was using. i should have taken better notes.

what i want is just a front end for youtube; it really doesn't need to do anything else.

so, i should at least start with the most primitive versions of chrome, firefox and opera that will run html5 video natively.

i'd really rather find something even lighter, though. and, i'm toying with a minimal linux distro, if none of that works.

could the republicans win california?

how much longer does this go on for?

well, these people don't get out of the house much, do they?

their phones are the only reflection of reality that they have.

i bet the 0.5% of people that twitter represents will have some mean things to say about the beachgoers in california today, as well - who are vastly representative of the dominant majority.

and, our out of touch political leaders that pathetically live vicariously through their phones won't get the point. at all. they'll just snicker...

whatever.

can we have an election asap, please?

where? everywhere...

maybe, if you put just a pinch of bleach in your cocaine before you snort it?

see, there we are. that's how you do it.

bleach would be better than salt, though, clearly.

what if you use bleach, though?

the virus is said to live in your upper respiratory tract. so, supplementing your water with bleach is unlikely to be helpful, because it's unlikely to come into contact with it - you're just going to end up with bleach in your stomach, which might increase your likelihood of ulcers.

but, what if you could find a way to kind of gargle the bleach through your nose?

if you doused this contraption in a low-level bleach solution, it would probably be more useful than meditation, at least.

broadly speaking, the recommendation to put bleach in water is to protect against water-borne illnesses - parasites and bacteria, mostly. hepatitis and polio are also known to spread through water, although the water is just a medium for the real vector, which is......shit. well, we still dump it in the river in a lot of places...

if you think there's polio in your water, i'd say you should find a different source of water. if you can't? well, that's what the rec is for.

is there any reason to think that something like this would be useful for covid-19?

well, we've found it in feces, indicating it is potentially in the water supply in some places. but, you'd think that the things we're doing to get rid of other viruses would be largely useful for this one, too. and, what do we do to our water at the purification plant?

the answer is that we basically bleach it.

drinking bleach is actually recommended in some scenarios....

https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/pdf/emergency/09_202278-B_Make_Water_Safe_Flyer_508.pdf

should we all drink bleach to protect ourselves from the virus?

you realize this is the internet, right?

i'm going to email this to the pmo.

this virus is not unlike any other virus. it's feisty, sure, but it's a relatively weak virus...

naturally produced antibodies will be protective.

a vaccine will work.

and, the prime minister is an ignorant fucking idiot.

i repeat: if we discover that this virus is unlike any other virus and that natural immunity won't protect against it, then that actually proves that a vaccine is also impossible, because that's what a vaccine does - it stimulates your body into producing protective antibodies.

if that's actually true, then we're fucked and we'd might as well reopen tomorrow.

do you understand that?

i am not worried about this - i am confident in the effectiveness of natural immunity, and willing to blame these weird results out of asia on human error.

and, as i have done previously, i would call on the director of the who to resign for publishing what he must know is ridiculous nonsense.

you'd also want to note the following - while we have been unable to create vaccines for some viruses like aids/hiv, if natural immunity does not exist for this virus then we can't find a vaccine.

so, you have to understand that arguing that we need to wait for a vaccine because we can't rely on immunity is a distressingly ignorant and stupid position, despite being the one that the prime minister and his office appear to be taking.

if we can't build immunity, we can't get a vaccine either. it's the same fucking thing...

i'm going to flip the issue over.

if you could somehow demonstrate that antibodies don't produce immunity for this virus, you would be presenting exceedingly strong evidence that it's bioengineered - because every other virus, ever, leaves us with immunity in the presence of antibodies.

you'd probably have to stop calling it a virus - it would be something else, entirely.

alright, back to what i was doing.

the frustrating thing is that we had good planning documents here, and they were following them, initially.

but, at some point, twitter became a better source of information to the people that are making decisions than the existing white papers, based on peer-reviewed science.

now, we're all suffering for it.

that's what they're basing their concept of public opinion on: twitter feeds.

it's why we're in such a ridiculous situation, where we've lost every meaningful freedom we had in order to chase policies that no educated person thought would be effective, have utterly failed and are failing more and more every day.

justin trudeau is perhaps the first demonstration of the catastrophe that happens when you let government base policy on twitter.

it's just ignorant policy after ignorant policy - defined by hashtags and trending nonsense.

how long is this going to go on for?

we're going to have to get out on the streets, clearly.

right now, the government seems to think we want to stay inside.

we'll need to demonstrate otherwise with a show of force; otherwise, we're waiting two-three years for a vaccine. that's their messaging, right now - not weeks, not months but years.

so, why would he say something so ignorant?

he's no doubt calculated, correctly or not, that the public wants fascism, right now.

so, that is what we will get.

uber alles, canada. sieg heil, mr. trudeau. sieg heil...

again - this idiot will stand up on the podium day in and day out and pretend he's following the recommendations of experts and relying on the science.

he is not.

it's a smokescreen.

and, his response is entirely political.

testing to ensure that you can't get reinfected by a virus you have antibodies for is not "being cautious".

it is foolishly reinventing the wheel - and either driven by ignorance or stupidity.

perhaps it is true that we don't have studies to back the claim up directly, but this is a situation where this is such basic science that it isn't necessary. we know that. it's not a high risk deduction.

what we need to be concerned about is if the virus is mutating or not, not whether or not we can be "reinfected", which is an incoherent concept.

let's get doug ford real angry, ontario.

let's make him mad as hell.

it's too bad he didn't get so angry that he had a heart attack.

again: i'd rather see people just move on. stop protesting, and just do it...

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/a-bunch-of-yahoos-ford-says-of-people-protesting-covid-19-emergency-measures-1.4911861

“But it’s very clear that the science is not decided on whether or not having COVID once prevents you from getting it again… it is something that we need to get clearer answers to and until we have those clear answers, we have to err on the side of more caution.” - justin trudeau

ugh.

this guy is an ignorant fucking idiot....

see, i'm an anarchist - i like voluntarism.

but, it comes with a concept of personal responsibility, absolutely.

the fact that your health is your own individual responsibility means you also have an obligation to avoid the vulnerable if you're a potential carrier. it's actually the latter issue that we seem to be getting wrong here, but i wonder how much of it is due to widespread misplaced faith in authority.

if our governments had given us more personal responsibility in dealing with this, would we have risen to the challenge? as an anarchist, that's what i'd like to see - and it's encouraging to see the swedes deliver.

we always say this, right. the social revolution must come first. perhaps it's already begun in scandinavia....

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x

this was entirely predictable, too.

hey - i'm consistent. i want to be more like sweden all of the time.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52395866

leftists are weird, huh?

lol.

you've probably never even had a conversation with an actual leftist in your life.

this society was built on the exploitation of slave labour, and the truth is that not much has changed, besides the justifications to continue to uphold it.

if you opposed slavery in the past, you should continue to oppose it, today. i don't want to hear justifications for it.

i'm a few days behind on eating now, so i need to get to it relatively soon.

but, i got about halfway done what i was doing this morning before my batteries went out on me.

let's hope that they've recharged enough now to get this finished.

at this stage in history, the proper evolution is from a prison-industrial complex to a system of mechanized labour. that's what abolition means, now - past the agrarian era of free markets, and past the industrial area of socialization in production.

we are post-industrial.

we should start acting like it.

i also want to clarify the realities in the united states around the issue, as the debate largely exists in the realm of fantasy. both sides of the debate in the united states are utterly delusional, with democrats pretending that they're dealing with people fleeing violence that need sanctuary, and republicans pretending that they're dealing with rapists and drug dealers.

what exists in the united states is a prison-industrial complex. chomsky has a daughter, and she wrote the book on this.

the jails acts as intake systems for influxes of cheap labour, which end up distributed to participating property owners. the state is a human resources department. and, the status quo continues because the system wants it to continue - because it benefits capital, at the expense of labour.

so, you end up with democrats that want to make the system a little more humane, and republicans that don't care - it's the choice between what is presented as the enlightened capitalists, and what is presented as the evil bastards.

but, i'm not in solidarity with capitalists that want to make the system a little bit better while essentially keeping it in place.

no.

i want to abolish this system altogether - and that means going after the real criminals, which are the corporations driving the abuses.

as mentioned, in the long-run, i would support essentially erasing the borders of the nafta states to start, and then gradually erasing more and more borders as the class relationships absolve.

but, i do see the world in terms of class, and i know which class i stand with. so long as the rules in this country are erected so that migrant labour benefits the middle class at the expense of the working class in a way that is strictly exploitative, the state should be implementing rules to prevent that exploitation from occurring - which means criminalizing illegal border crossings, however nominally.

there should also be a strict crackdown on people that "sponsor" these refugees in order to exploit them. let's drop the bullshit - these people are buying and importing slaves. that should be ended immediately, and they should face steep punishments for it. it's the unscrupulous employers that really deserve stiff and lengthy jail sentences, not the imported workers.

the point is to incentivize proper entry procedures, and if the policy is successful then it will lead to lower crossings, not more people in jail.

but, there is nothing left-wing about supporting systems that exploit migrant labour - that is support for modern day slavery.

if you can't work that out, or you're too selfish to care, you should be ashamed of yourself.

so, what is my proposal for dealing with illegal immigration?

1) try them for it.
2) send them to jail for a few months for breaking the law. these should not be lengthy sentences, and in most cases will reduce to time already served.
3) give them a criminal record for entering the country illegally.
4) release them, without deporting them.

they will leave on their own relatively quickly, when they realize they can't get jobs with a criminal record. and, this should incentivize refugees to go through the process properly.

i actually don't expect that the science would uphold the premise that being held in a jail increases the risk of contracting the disease if the alternative is living in a shelter. if anything, you're at least sitting in one place, so your access to random people is restricted.

rather, i would expect that they would have better access to health care inside of the facilities than outside of it, as canada's coverage for refugees is patchy and uneven (and, i think should be). some of these people may end up denied access to health care altogether, as soon as they end up released. but, anybody that is incarcerated in this country should (at least in theory) get proper health care on demand.

i don't tend to support deporting people, but i would argue that crossing borders illegally should result in a criminal record and a period of detention, because it is in fact a crime in this country to do so. it's a kind of compromise that i think addresses the issue properly - if you can find a way in, then you can stay, but you should have a criminal record for breaking the rules in doing so.

refugee applicants that wish to avoid criminal records should enter the country through official ports of entry, as is directed by international law. or, those would be the rules under my direction, anyways...

arguments to look the other way at illegal labour stand in solidarity with the middle class that benefits from the exploitation of refugee labour and not with the working class, which ends up harmed by it.

so, again - say what you will of this, but this isn't evidence-based. and, it will no doubt just increase strains on the social system, potentially making the problem worse in the shelters, where the chances of spread are likely far higher than they are in jails.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6861756/canada-releasing-immigration-detainees-coronavirus-covid-19/

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21078325/wuhan-china-coronavirus-travel-ban

and, this is a subsequent survey on the efficacy of travel restrictions after covid-19 began spreading, which upholds the point made by the earlier epistemological modeling.

again: this is not controversial research.

https://www.cato.org/blog/travel-restrictions-spread-covid-19-what-does-research-say

the border is not closed to stop the spread of the virus.

the border is closed because our politicians have decided that closing the border is popular, and leaving it open would create uprisings, or otherwise open up an electoral vulnerability.

it's a political decision, it's not a public health policy.

it's not often that i'll post a link to an article at the cato institute without ripping it apart. this is a survey of the existing literature, and is worth sorting through to realize just how stupid we're being right now.

they are mostly echoing points i've been making for weeks.

the fact that i am able to do this right now demonstrates how uncontroversial the point is. if there was any controversy around the topic at all, there's little question that i'd come down on the other side of the debate. but, there's certain things - like gravity - that i can agree with the cato institute on.

note that i said gravity and not something that has even the slightest bit of controversy, rightly or not. they wouldn't a post an article like this about climate change. and, i'm not sure you'd even get something from them upholding evolution.

why are our governments being so retarded about this?

because you're retarded, and they caved into your demands - it's a reflection of our own collective stupidity, our own mass ignorance.

the science was clear from the start: these borders should have stayed open through this entire process. but, you can't deal with that, and the government caved to your ignorance.

https://www.cato.org/blog/research-provides-no-basis-pandemic-travel-bans

so, these graphs where they normalize different cities or countries based on a number of days since the first known case, or since the first known death...

i wouldn't take them very seriously, in terms of actually comparing outcomes in different regions.

1) the decision to plot these graphs was taken back when we thought r-not was much smaller than we know it is now. we also thought the virus was much more deadly than we know it is now.
2) we now know that the virus was circulating in highly connected regions months before we really detected it, so the starting dates are very hard to pin with any accuracy.
3) as we've received more data about who the disease affects, the disparities have just become greater.

so, in city a, the first person that caught the disease might have come in contact with an elderly person within hours, and that elderly person may have died a fast and miserable death. if the first person is quickly isolated, that might be the end of that vector altogether.

on the other hand, the first person that caught the disease in city b may have flown in to the city to see a concert populated by teenagers, who then infected their relatively young and healthy parents. it could in theory take weeks or months for any sort of mortality to develop, and in the process you could see thousands or tens of thousands of cases.

these are extreme opposite scenarios, but it gets the point across - the metric is actually really not very standardized at all, and lining these curves up on top of each other based on it could very well lead to some very wrong conclusions about how the disease is spreading in any particular place.

you might be able to salvage the concept if you shift the alignment to a more advanced point in the curve, but it seems to me that this would mostly undo what people want to see, which is what's happening in early stages of transmission. really, this is a tool of analysis that should only be employed after the fact, and by lining the different cities up at their respective peaks. that would help us understand what already happened, but wouldn't help us predict the future.

a better idea to understand how the curve is growing is to dispense with the visual comparison and just rely on some basic calculus. after fitting the data to an equation, what is the derivative of that equation? how is the instantaneous rate of change evolving over time?