The person in the video is either a troll or an imbecile.

It's not so difficult to overcome a simple printing error, when a) there are literally millions of boxes of the vaccine, and b) the internet exists.
The solution is either a) open another box, or b) simply look up the relevant guidance, it's easy enough, the document is here: https://www.fda.gov/media/146304/download

It's 564m to the first corner, so yes, a great overtaking opportunity. Pole isn't necessarily a huge advantage.
But I think a key consideration is the under-performance of Perez in qualifying once again. If the top three keep those positions - in whatever order - and start to pull away from the pack, then it seems likely that all three, Hamilton, Verstappen, Bottas, will be fairly close to each other when the pit stop window opens... and it's advantage Mercedes, they can effectively decide when Max stops by pulling one car in to attempt the undercut. Max then has to stop to cover it off, leaving the other Mercedes with track position. We've seen it often enough before, and it's why it's vital when two teams are so evenly matched that the second driver steps up in qualifying to be near the front, rather than halfway down the grid.

True, I suppose. You'd imagine (and there are certainly stories reported of such instances) that plenty of people had coins in the early days, and then just forgot about them, lost access etc... because it wasn't a big deal until years later when the price increased so dramatically. But as for actual numbers and proof, no. Perhaps common opinion is an overestimate.


Yes, I'm uncomfortable with the burning option, too.
My understanding on this subject is much more from the quantum mechanical side than from the bitcoin side. I know comparatively little about cryptography, so perhaps it's not as black and white as I've outlined, and some more palatable third option will become apparent.

Hamilton 1m16.741s, Verstappen 1m16.777s... 3/100ths of a second... that's hardly conclusive evidence of Mercedes superiority. Looks to me like they're quite evenly matched in qualifying pace. Of course race pace may be a different story, but we will see tomorrow. Disappointing from Perez again, not helped by that spin. We need 2x Red Bull up at the front with 2x Mercedes so that no team has a strategic advantage coming into the pit stops.

BTW 100 pole positions now for Hamilton!

The trend in highly-vaccinated nations does seem to be a dramatic reduction in cases. It's worth noting that in the UK, new cases were dropping significantly prior to the vaccine rollout (due to a strict lockdown after Christmas)... which I think goes some way towards invalidating your 'scare people into taking the vaccine' hypothesis (as does the widespread media hysteria about blood clots).

And then once the lockdown was eased, vaccination was at a sufficient level that case numbers continued to fall. I'm not as familiar with the situation in Israel.


https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-kingdom

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/israel

In case anyone is interested in some wider context...

The Washington Post has a database of police killings since 2015.
And there is also The Guardian's award-winning 2 year investigation, covering 2015-16.




There's also a decent summary of available data by Nature.

Here's the image from your video:


Kinda blurry, but weirdly for this sort of video, the chart does seem accurate. Source here with clearer charts and links to data: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/india

So the data are accurate. But is the conclusion accurate, that vaccination is causing the increase in cases? Well, no.

The reason the conclusion is flawed is because those two lines use different scales. Are cases increasing dramatically in India? Yes. Is vaccination increasing? Yes.
But vaccination is still at a very very low rate, and so is likely to have only a very small impact, and certainly not enough to prevent case numbers from surging. If the vaccination level were considerably higher, then we would expect case numbers to begin to fall - as indeed we see in the UK, where doses administered per 100 people is 75, compared with India's 11.


https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccination-doses-per-capita


---
edit: I should add that spurious correlations are everywhere. But we often need to dig deeper to determine whether or not there is a causal relationship...


https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

There is some evidence, as we've seen, that moderate Vitamin D supplementation helps to protect to an extent against the worst effects of Covid.

But I still don't understand why those who want to take something to protect themselves are unwilling to take the obvious and best protection, which is the vaccine.

Is the objection a moral one, that they don't want to support profit-seeking Big Pharma? in which case, why is there such an overlap between those who dislike the profit-seeking and those who in every other circumstance advocate zero government intervention, and to let the money flow according to free capitalism? And how does Biden's proposed patent waiver fit into all this?

Or is the objection that the vaccines don't work or aren't safe? Evidence, as I've linked to dozens of times in P&S, clearly shows that they do work and are safe, and that case numbers drop hugely once a vaccination programme gets into full swing - as we've seen to such dramatic effect in the UK.

Objection to the vaccine seems to be baseless-conclusion-led rather than data-led.

There is an ideal response to the finger-in-the-air, data-free, citation-free 'fact' above - which you are yourself implying is nonsense by qualifying it with the word "possibly".
That ideal response is:


You may find that many of them are lunatics ranting from their basement. Like that 'Satan Soldiers' guy from a few weeks back. Or the guy in that other video you linked to who kept saying that Bill Gates has a forked tongue.

The fundamental issue is that rich countries are at the front of the queue for the vaccines. Poorer countries such as India are made to wait.
It is always the case that the poor suffer the most. Those countries that are least able to bankroll themselves through lockdowns are the same that have poor healthcare and the same that have very low quantities of the vaccine.

Yes. Urban areas have suffered tremendously, and now the problem is rolling out to rural areas, such as Bihar:

• one doctor per 43,788 people (the WHO guidelines advise one doctor per 1,000 people)
• hospitals sometimes hundreds of miles away
• 207 ventilators have been given to the state, they have been gathering dust because no-one is trained to operate them
• hospital staff were treating Covid patients as social outcasts and did not want to touch them, particularly as they were not being given adequate protective equipment
• medicines and vitamins recommended for Covid treatment have all run out

Poverty is the problem. Rich countries such as the US, the UK and Israel can buy themselves out of it. Countries such as India suffer.

Bold isn't working. Have you considered alternating capitals?

I'm interested: what's the conspiracy theorist take on Biden's patent waiver? How does this fit in with everything else?



I suspect the massive global pandemic may have caused a sense of urgency over the last year, which might have increased the focus on developing a vaccine.

No, they didn't skip animal trials. This myth was debunked months ago: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9792931264

Taking the two points together, yes, there was certainly a sense of urgency, a need to get the vaccines out quickly. But that doesn't mean that safety procedures and proper processes were simply skipped.

Yes, potentially. There's a distinction to be made between

• post-quantum cryptography, which uses 'normal' classical computers to build defences from quantum attack, and
• quantum cryptography, which exploits the laws of quantum mechanics to build defences.

Most current work is in post-quantum cryptography. This is where the early quantum-proof bitcoin solutions will come from.

Quantum cryptography is more of a future solution. The possibilities are exciting. Because any act of measurement causes the wave function to collapse, then there is the possibility of absolute security based on immutable laws of physics.

Potentially true, but the mining improvement is much smaller than we might anticipate. The biggest advantage of a QC is using Shor's algorithm to break asymmetric cryptography. This isn't an approach that can be used for mining - the QC advantage here would be that PoW can be exploited using Grover's algorithm. IIRC that's only an advantage over classical of a couple of orders of magnitude. Big, but not huge.

This is certainly true for us as individuals right now... but there is a large quantity of bitcoin in reused addresses, and there are plenty of coins that are effectively lost. When bitcoin forks to deal with the quantum threat, all coins will need to be moved to new, quantum-safe addresses. Those that aren't moved or can't be moved can then be stolen by a QC running Shor. Admittedly we don't have QCs capable of this right now, but the field is advancing rapidly, and because of superposition and entanglement QC processing power scales 2^n, so if you go from say 9 qubits to 10, the capability doubles... which is quite counterintuitive from a classical perspective. I'm not trying to be alarmist, and there are certainly engineering challenges to overcome with larger QCs, particularly in maintaining coherence, but the time will come when we're forced into a choice of whether to burn any coins that aren't moved by a given date, or else leave them to be stolen. Neither option is great, and I assume both would be hugely contentious. Achieving a consensus on this would I'd imagine be quite a challenge.

As a side note, ignore DWave and similar. These are annealers rather than universal gate QCs; they have a specific use case, and won't be running Shor's alogrithm. DWave is not a threat to bitcoin.

In that case, I'm not clear on why you're advertising a Covid cure* in your signature:



* Covid "cure"

What happens with any protest about anything is that most of the protestors are genuine, and then a few troublemakers turn up and attach themselves to the protest just because they want to fight with the police. It happens every single time that there is a protest of sufficient size that is reasonably well publicised in advance... I'd think it very likely that the same thing happened here.

I would imagine that there's a considerable overlap between those who think that vaccines kill people, and those who think that the vaccine implants a Bill Gates 5G chip that turns you into a zombie.
Perhaps the second option in the poll should be changed to 'undead'... this is I assume what those who voted for the second option meant.

Yes, I was thinking the same. In the Europa League, Man United are almost through already after that 6-2 win in the first leg. Arsenal are 2-1 behind... but they are playing at home in the second leg, and they have that away goal advantage... a 1-0 home win for Arsenal would mean all English finals in both competitions.

You can actually buy these for only $5.

Because neither the EU nor Pakistan has either any incentive or any logical reason to make this happen.

If you are imposing sanctions on a country, it's inconceivable that you'd simultaneously think that that country would be a superb candidate to join your bloc. The same reason that the US does not invite Iran or North Korea to become an additional State of America.

Pakistan is certainly an important and populous country, but I'm skeptical of the '30-40%' claim.