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Florida reporting under 10,000 new cases! CURVE HAS BEEN FLATTENED.
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It helps when you run less tests. See Trump is right?
Florida continuing it’s march into the abyss with a new record of 132 deaths and another 9,194 new cases on only 46,000 tests (20% positivity).
Nature is really cruel a lot of the time, and make no mistake humans are animals. We’re just the first monkeys that figured out fire, maybe not even that.
We’re living through something we’ve seen on a more local level many times in ecology. A species suddenly has no natural predators and is fantastically successful… so it invades everywhere and kills everything not resistant to it… and then nature adapts to that new state of affairs. Usually there’s a huge starving time when the species that got out of control runs out of easy food too. We see this happen hundreds of times per year around the world.
Humanity is just this event at a mass extinction scale… and after we kill ourselves off through some stupidity there will be some life left on earth and a new system will rise up and life will begin to regenerate into something new.
Or we’ll find some way to be in equilibrium and last for a few millions years, which is itself basically the blink of an eye in geological terms.
Either way it’s incredibly irrelevant. Knowing that nihilism is probably at least 90% likely to be right, but that if it’s right it doesn’t matter so we should look for something else is how I live with looking at the world through clear eyes.
There’s an enormous amount of pain out there and it’s truly everywhere. The US is not an exceptionally evil country. When you really dig down into almost any nation on earth there’s something rotten under the floor. If they seem better than us it’s because they are at a different point in some cycle than we are basically.
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This isn’t peer-reviewed yet, but it sounds not good for long term immunity. Maybe the smart people can weigh in, but it sounds like they’re saying immunity duration is similar to the common cold? What would that mean - vaccinations 4x a year?
Realistically, this is going to last another couple years in the US, while other western countries are going to be able to go back to normal (minus large gatherings). It’s not a bad idea to leave, if you can.
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Some of us were worried we wouldn’t be able to get out because of Trump. Turns out that was only indirectly.
The only places most of us (w/o dual citizenship or w/e) can go are going to be flooded with Americans bringing fresh rounds of disease.
15 Likes
I get that, and I’m working my way toward agreeing. The problem is that I’m three years into a grad degree that I would likely have to abandon if we leave.
What makes you think other Western countries are going to be able to go back to normal?
COVID Mental Health PSA: I am currently reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and find that the ancient philosophy of Stoicism stabilizes my mind in these troubling and discouraging times. While the letters of Seneca or Epictitus are perhaps more scholarly ways to learn the disciplines, behaviors and habits of Stoicism, the Meditations are way more accessible.
4 Likes
It depresses the shit out of me that most people think this is something to joke about and that people who care about privacy are the crazy ones.
San Andreas gets all the attention but if the New Madrid Fault ever goes nuts again, the damage would be in the billions. It had 4 earthquakes 7.0 or higher in 3 months between December 1811-February 1812. An AFTERSHOCK was 7.4 on the same day. And because there aren’t a lot of faults west of the Rockies, there’s nothing to absorb the shaking. People in Boston were able to feel the earthquake.
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ABC Family went on a tear of disaster movies back in the day. One of them was Earthquake in NY.
That’s all I’ve got.
Yep, goodbye Memphis, St Louis, Little Rock and Nashville if that thing ever goes nuclear
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In grade school we had drills to prepare for an earthquake. I think there was some predictions for one in the mid 90’s.
DUCK AND COVER! Needs to be the response to the next Trump LAW AND ORDER tweet
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Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis probably get hurt badly, as well.
Any city along the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers might be fucked for a long time if it radically alters the river system.
As for the plague, eh. Happens every year, media is just hyping them because of the 2020 shitshow. When we got stationed in New Mexico, our inprocessing briefing included a section about health risks specific to the region, plague and hantavirus were two notable bullets on that slide.
Coins: one of our local grocery stores is actually sorting them for no fee if you bring them to the register.
1 Like
Unless you’re retiring, Western countries accepting US citizens who fancy a move can be counted on one hand. South America - maybe. Africa? Canada? If you’re of working age, aren’t you still paying taxes to Uncle Sam (unless you renonuce citizenship too) whilst paying local taxes too, in countries that might accept a US citizen? (travel visa is different from living visa)