So, ah, the particles don’t grow in size—the number of viruses grows in quantity? I think that’s what you meant, and you just wrote down the wrong words?
Ericf
Karma: 507
Yeah: “are left” has an ambiguous definition. Also, too, what hunter is using a rifle to shoot birds that sit in a tree? Every kind of tree sitting bird I know of is either endangered or a songbird. And hunters typically use a shotgun with birds hot to hunt duck or quail or what have you, not a rifle. The whole thing doesn’t actually work, once given some thought. Especially as the “trick” relies on experience with birds that an urban child may not even have.
Are you describing an existing set of millions of people, or an aspiration that the values of your immediate circle be spread to include millions?
I’m not saying there are no alternatives to college for learning those—I’m sharing that college was designed as one way to provide those.
Although a few had some useful information, most of them were worthless
That looks like fallacy of the excluded middle?
Most of college has never been about providing information to students. It’s always been about
Teaching how to get information (research, paying attention)
Teaching how to understand and interact with an authority figure
Interacting with other young adults to network. (Common courses give you something to small talk about with other humans)
Teaching a few specific things that you will use later.
Mentally, I categorize “donating half your income” as “exceptional circumstance” and trust people in that 1% sliver of the population to make the right choice for them. Also, too, heavy donors probably aren’t the same people looking to retire early
From https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/how-the-cares-act-changes-deducting-charitable-contributions
Here’s how the CARES Act changes deducting charitable contributions made in 2020:
Previously, charitable contributions could only be deducted if taxpayers itemized their deductions.
However, taxpayers who don’t itemize deductions may take a charitable deduction of up to $300 for cash contributions made in 2020 to qualifying organizations. For the purposes of this deduction, qualifying organizations are those that are religious, charitable, educational, scientific or literary in purpose. The law changed in this area due to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.
The CARES Act also temporarily suspends limits on charitable contributions and temporarily increases limits on contributions of food inventory. More information about these changes is available on IRS.gov.
Good points—don’t forget to diversify your life: you’re already putting a lot of eggs in the basket of “my employer does well enough to not have to lay me off”—no need to double down with an equity position in the same company.
There are a number of ways to half-retire. If you’re valuable enough, your employer might be OK with keeping you on with reduced hours & proportional reduced pay (could be either fewer days/week or months on leave each year). In some fields you can become a consultant/contractor and just work one 3-6 month project every year or two. If you were keeping your expenses at 1⁄2 your salary, going to half-time once you have ~20x expenses saved can bridge you to full retirement with less risk (you stop contributing new $, but don’t draw down)
Note: As of 2017, mortgage interest is (effectively) no longer tax deductible for families, because the Standard Deduction was increased, making all deductions that aren’t given special treatment moot (cash contributions to charity have a special call-out, and there may be others like student loan interest—consult your tax professional, I am not one).
If you are single, and have a large mortgage, the amount of interest(and other deductions like property taxes) over your standard deduction does provide some tax advantage.
This was a bigger deal back pre-2000 when mortgage interest rates were ~6% instead of the ~3% they are now: prices have gone up, and more of the monthly payment is non-deductible principal, not interest.
The human immune system is constantly detecting and destroying foreign cells/viruses. People only get sick when too many of a self-replicator get into their system at the same time, and the replication outpaces the immune system response. Note that the immune response also ramps up, and eventually outpaces the replication (or the human dies). That was all covered in my high school biology textbook.
There is substantial evidence that COVID isn’t some magical exception to the well understood immune response process.
That’s just messing with definitions. You can pick any level of sustained viral load to define as “infected” and the same consideration (exposure to N viral particles with 15 minutes of immune system response is more likely to result in that level of viral load than exposure to the same N particles spread out over 15 days of immune system response).
That is, in fact, one of the variances that is disregarded by the question since “everything else about the risk factors is constant”
Bob is more likely to develop COVID-19, as he is getting 15x the initial viral load (given that this is a thought experiment and we are assuming “all else equal”—in reality, of course, all else is never equal).
This is because COVID is primarily spread via exhalation droplets, and people breath several times per minute, so it can be usefully modeled as a smooth virus particles encountered / second, and cleared from body / hour, with a (variable by subject, and not precise) threshold of exposure leading to infection. This is in contrast to something like “standing by the target at an archery range” where it doesn’t matter if you are there for 15 minutes in a row, or 15 separate minutes, you have the same chance of getting hit by an arrow (and arrow hits are huge chunks of damage, not a smooth gradient with time based mediation). Contrast also with something like cooking, where you are more likely to burn yourself cooking for 1 minute on 15 days than 15 minutes on one day.
Two notes:
If you polled only people who saw your Twitter poll, that is a highly biased group, in that everyone polled had heard of you, and probably had heard your reporting on how bad it was in New York. A huge number of people did not actually hear that news in the first place, so would be highly unlikely to think NY was hardest hit.
The second wave happened around June, which isn’t autumn. The third wave started in Autumn, but didn’t peak until Winter. So I would have rated that one False on all counts for getting the timing wrong.
Keep just barely enough money in your “auto-pay” account to cover the expected debits. If you don’t physically have the money accessible, the worst that can happen is a couple of Insufficient Funds fees (one from the bank, and one from your creditor), and you can then deal with the charges at your lesiure.
Headline doesn’t follow from the text body. Political donations are not obviously a PD situation, and this essay does not prove that they are.
Specifically: Even in the case cited, political spending is an all-pay auction, not a PD There are externalities to having people donate: civic engagement, better targeting of message, etc. Because of those (and the incentives of the parties) the parties might prefer High/High spending to Low/Low spending.
There is no such thing as a [one currency] to [other currency] rate. They are constantly fluctuating, and whoever is making the market is taking value out, either as a fee or in the bid/ask spread.
Also, 90% of the ways a government or malicious actor can interfere with an electronic transfer of wealth apply to crypto transfers. Specifically, they can threaten your trading partner with reprisals, and the whoke point of crypto is that it keeps a public log of all transactions forever.
There’s no evidence to suggest that this mental substitution will lead to better outcomes.
My understanding of the infection process for viruses (such as SARS-COV-19) is that when one or more viruses get past the physical defenses (mucous, stomach acid, etc) they inject their RNA payload into a cell, and produce more copies of the virus. This is an exponential growth process, dealing exponential damage to the body with time.
Of course, having 100 cells out of trillions get infected and killed is completely unnoticeable, but if the infection grows to millions, that starts to have an impact.
The body then has a step-wise defense. First there are general purpose immune response cells that catch and kill generic intruders. So, if you literally had one copy of a virus get in, it (or it’s children or grandchildren) would just get rounded up and disposed of without any impact. This happens all the time, as there are viruses everywhere and we are constantly bombarded by a low level of self-replicating intruders.
If the initial (or repeated) exposure generates enough of the same virus, the body creates a set of special response cells (T-cells), which provide a super-exponential response (the T-cells are not consumed as they dismantle viruses, and they replicate exponentially), which allows the immune system to catch up to the viral growth and get rid of it.
In some cases a Fever or other bio-kinetic response can make your body a less hospitable environment for the invader.
The general malaise and “feeling sick” comes from a combination of your cells dying to the virus, and your body re-directing energy away from normal maintenance & activity to produce enough immune response cells to catch up to the exponential growth.