how far would she have had to swim?

well, the scale here is just copy and pasted from the scale in the lower right-hand corner of the screen shot. i just opened it up in paste and copied it across.

it's roughly 1 km. if she was out a bit, it'd be less than that. that's a workout, no doubt, but it's not insurmountable, for somebody in athletic shape. i bicycled 110 km a few weeks ago, out of the blue.

the kid says he didn't see her leave the water, but what does that mean? are you going to rely on a child's ability to discern characters a km in the distance, over open water? i dunno.

hey, if they find her mutilated corpse, desecrated by a tree branch, snapped at the sternum three ways, the sanctity of her existence irrelevant to the forces of physics, then so be it.

but, if they don't?

if she vanishes without a trace?

that's a doable swim. certainly. does naya swim?

so, is it possible that naya rivera could have swam out to the other side of the lake and got out and taken off?

it's weird that her life jacket was left in the boat. if she was going for a leisurely swim, she surely would have worn it - she took it with her, and if not for that reason than for what reason? so, was she suicidal? then, why bring it at all? and why bring the kid?

it's almost like she left the life jacket there as evidence that she was last seen in the boat.

it's a very strange situation, all around. and, if they don't find her? well, maybe she's not there...

nobody gets a point for the question about facebook. the right answer is that we need to teach kids better critical thinking skills, so the disinformation stops working.

nobody gets a point for the question about rural v urban, which they all reduced to a question about internet access. there are deep changes coming to rural areas that are going to blur the difference between urban and rural, and fundamentally change the concept of a rural settlement. increasing internet access to these regions is going to a part of the changing infrastructure, but it's such a shallow point to hit on. the actual answer is that the growth of exurban regions is likely to blur the differences between rural and urban regions, as rural north america really goes through a sort of reformation.

nobody gets a point for the question about how to work with indigenous groups, as everybody just produced politically correct boilerplate.

there were apparently no questions about climate change policy, and almost no discussion of it at all.

i believe in free voting, although it may be reasonable to bring up the issue with certain members that consistently vote against the party. nobody gets a point for that.

on the question of vote splitting with the ndp, i think the greens should actually be aggressively positioning themselves to replace the ndp. but, can you represent multiple parties in canada? that would be the answer, of course - have somebody run simultaneously for the greens and ndp and then run that one person for both parties. standing down is a goofy idea. but, this is something that a preferential ballot would address best...

nobody gets a point for the second thing, either.

i'm going to zero out the third question as well, and note simply that it is somewhat unusual for a moderator to ask about threats to democracy at a green party debate and get mostly answers about inequality and identity; only one of them mentioned the climate crisis, and only in french.

the second question actually seemed to be phishing for a discussion of the guaranteed income, but it got a mishmash of answers that i'm going to zero out across the board.

i would support redistricting to allow for a more equitable population distribution across ridings before i supported any kind of mmp or whatever hybrid system.

here's a question.

is proportional representation so unpopular in canada that the ndp might have gained more influence by dropping support for it than they would have gained by implementing it?

cause it's this albatross around the neck of the canadian left; support for pr has long been a massively unpopular major reason that the left can't break through here, but it sees it as it's only path to power...

maybe the apparatchiks are wrong. maybe the left would be better off leaving this idea behind and putting more focus back into more participatory forms of democracy...

so, i'm sorting through this.

i don't consider the first question to be worth grading. the second question was about proportional representation.

again - i liked dimitri lascaris' answer on proportional representation the best, even though i don't actually support proportional representation. he's pushing the right strategy for aggressive, leftist reform, even if i think this particular reform is neither very left wing nor a very good idea (i would support ranked ballots to help prevent false majorities, but i want to maintain a strong traditional riding system and flat out reject party lists outright. no taxation without representation.). i don't consider my opposition to proportional representation to be a reason to vote against the greens or ndp, even if i actually agree more with the left side of the liberal party, as represented by a stephane dion, on this particular issue than i do with the protest parties. glenn murray was also thinking tactically instead of idealistically, which is good to see/hear. anamie paul was right to question merner & haddad for their horrifically anti-democratic responses, but she basically just reproduced the broken liberal plan.

judy green claims people keep voting against pr because they don't understand it, rather than that they don't support it. amita kuttner claims she'll figure it out when she forms government, suggesting she's maybe been spending too much time under the telescope, lately. these weren't serious answers and deserve particular ridicule.

so, these are the scores for the first question:

lascaris: +1
murray: +1
paul: 0
merner: -1
haddad: -1
kuttner: -2
green -2

just as a reality check, i've carefully sorted through posts until the end of august, 2013 (a few days into september, actually) and found 16 posts to add to the travel blog and 0 to add to the others. so, it's clear enough what i'm going to need to do, just let me finish it up until the end of january.

ok, so we're starting to see the kinds of numbers, now, that we were hoping to see at the end of april, it's just taken a little longer.

new york was hit first, so you're looking at what? 5-6 months to get to herd immunity?

we also saw transmission flatten enough to allow for a manageable case load at around 20-30%, although my error analysis suggested the true prevalence of antibodies may have been much higher than reported. subsequent testing on these antibody tests have in fact indicated that they tend to produce more false negatives than false positives, so i had the right line of thinking. but, the point i'm making is that merely having a moderate level of immunity actually seems to have slowed this virus down a lot, meaning it's probably only that initial couple of weeks where immunity is at near zero that hospitals needs to seriously concern themselves about reaching capacity. distancing aside, 20% immunity seems to be putting enough of a dent in transmission to make it manageable...

so, that's just what's happening in the south right now - the virus is running through a population with almost no immunity. this is the first wave. it may take a long time to burn itself out, but it should slow down considerably when immunity gets to around 20%.

up here in canada, it's harder to tell if we've been slowly and quietly inching towards those initial ramp down numbers, or if we managed to actually stop it at a lower rate of precedence through public health measures. you know what i think, but we don't actually know. there's some randomized bloodbank tests underway that should give a better picture...and this will help us understand how vulnerable we remain...

you have to understand that my position from the start of this is that herd immunity isn't a policy decision, it's an inevitable reality. we can't decide to have herd immunity or not; we will have it, whether we like it or not. so, i'm quite adamantly avoiding this idea of needing to take this position that one thing is more important than the other; i'm rather arguing that the public health measures are only going to, at most, slow it down - at great cost.

is new york the first place to actually measure this? are they first to the end of this? they won't be the last - this is going to be reality in most places in the world, in a year, while the anti-immunity idiots sit around waiting for a vaccine.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/health/queens-antibody-testing-coronavirus/index.html