i almost tricked myself into posting an argument about the child ifr using total case statistics, which would be misleading at best.

but, do you want real world stats, here? empirical probabilities?

i don't know how many children have contracted the coronavirus in california right now, but there has been a total of one death. it seems that roughly 17% of the population in california is under 18. if we naively assume that 17% of the 600,000 cases are in children, that is 102,000 cases. 1/102000 = 0.00000980392 = 0.000980392%.

those are not quite real world numbers; an ifr would need to be calculated from actual cases, which are probably closer to six million than 600,000. but, it is clear that even if a few more children perish, the empirically derived, real world probability is going to remain infinitessimally small.

the facts are that the ifr is just so low.....

with kids, it really is least concern. but, it's real - and expect your kid to get sick, and to need to take precautions regarding that, at least.

kamala harris will be the black sarah palin - picked to rev up a portion of the base that required little incentive to vote, and in truth representing them only transparently. a more representative pick would express more consistent conservative values.

she will simultaneously repel those she was not picked to woo, and fail to increase turnout amongst those she's been targeted towards. we already saw her fail to generate interest in her own constituency during the primaries. let us recall that she dropped out because she had no path to victory, in no small part due to disinterest towards her from black voters.

i will say this, though: the kamala harris that you get on one day is a different kamala harris than you get on another. there's some possibility she may be handed a golden script and hold to it, but i think that possibility is remote.

she was the most toxic candidate possible, and perhaps the only certain way that he'd lose.

ironically, this shifts my calculation in the other direction. as i believe that harris will sink the ticket rather badly, i'm left looking downballot and not wanting to endorse the greens too heavily. for, remember - my choice is between supporting the democrats, or passively supporting their opponents by advocating for a third party.

i would expect the polls to tighten up, and in the places biden had to swing to win.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/nuclear-war-global-warming_n_828496?ri18n=true

it's true, though.

nuclear winter is one solution to climate change.

i just think we can do a little better than that, even if it's not an empirical deduction.

i keep getting trapped in adding categories to the travel blog, which is preventing me from crossreferencing 2014.

there is going to be a major update soon that is going to increase the size and scope of the blog dramatically.

the rate of community transmission is lower in canada because it's had less time to spread.

at some point, we've lost the plot with this. the whole point of it being safe to send kids to school is that they don't experience serious symptoms, not that they're impervious to getting it. so, we send them to school in masks and worry that they'll get it; the point is that sending them to school is of least concern because it's of little consequence if they get it.

well, 99.998% of them anyways.

when schools open in september, lots and lots and lots and lots of kids are going to get sick. but, if you didn't know any better, you wouldn't tell the difference between any other year.

just keep the kids away from the elderly for a while.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7262819/children-coronavirus-schools-reopening/

again: this kind of thing doesn't really irk me that much. this is the reality of governing in a capitalist system; every government does it, and the next government will do it, too.

but, you have to make a stink of it when it happens, anyways.

and, they're kind of swimming in it right now, because they're not even...the term they use is "the appearance of conflict", or something. their actual legal obligation is merely to make it look like they're not skimming money out, and they're not even trying, it's just rampant corruption and nepotism every which way.

i might not care myself, but this is how conservatives win back, and ultimately then lose, power. these are gifts.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/pmo-and-morneaus-office-wont-say-if-katie-telfords-husband-communicated-with-them-since-joining-private-mortgage-company/

russia is always the guinea pigs.

"We see this as part of competitive behaviour by some western pharma companies that want to dominate the vaccine market and do not want to have competition,” RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev said

that is anthony sutton's explanation for the confusing level of capitalist support for the soviet union, from day one. see, if you're a market libertarian (like sutton was.) then the kind of monopolized economy inherent to marxism sounds like a catastrophe, but if you're actually a shareholder at an actual corporation, monopoly access sounds like a great idea! so, these western bankers just shoveled money into the soviet union to fund the experiment, to see if that kind of model would lead to the total corporate dominance they always dreamed of. sutton called these people vulgar marxists, because they co-opted marxist theory and utilized it's insights for the benefits of maximizing accumulation. in their private communication, they often sounded like marxists, as they were funding marxists, but they flipped the whole thing over; it was the marxists that became the useful idiots for capital.

not much has changed apparently.

after all, russia was chosen because it was backwards, because it had always been backwards. it's the great paradox of white supremacy; the direct descendants of the ancestral white homeland have been at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy since year zero - past capitalism, past feudalism and into classical times.

somebody has to be a guinea pig.

if they're doing this, let's hope they can track it well enough to study it.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/industry-body-calls-russian-covid-19-vaccine-a-pandoras-box