One of my favorites was from Bender: “Oh, but you can, but you might have to ‘metaphorically’ make a deal with the ‘devil’. And by ‘devil’, I mean Robot Devil, and by ‘metaphorically’, I mean get your coat.”

I’ve been quoting Farnsworth’s “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore” a lot lately.

Except the commercial aggregators have all started filtering the data of specific planes on request - you won’t find Elon’s or Swift’s ADSB data on popular sites/apps like FlightAware or Flightradar24. (I’m not familiar with PlaneLogger). Open source aggregators like OpenSky or ADSB Exchange will have them though, but the UIs of those sites are far less polished and have fewer features.

Yes. I don’t believe much of anything he says, but “dictator on day one” was very obviously his real plan.

Those costs became salaries and paid engineers and skilled tradespeople, lawyers and financiers, auditors and test pilots, illustrators and modelors, janitors and security guards, truck drivers and inventory specialists, logisticians and mathmericians, scientists and metallurgists, flight doctors and software developers… and on, and on, and on - it may be one of the single biggest job creating programs in the USA in a Generation. That money also got routed into mutual funds and 401k’s and into the communities where all those people live and work. While there are certainly more noble and more effective uses for money, the F35 program has provided a living for a great many people.

[JULES] They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?

[VINCENT] No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

[JULES] Then what do they call it?

[VINCENT] They call it Royale with Cheese.

[JULES] Royale with Cheese. What do they call a Big Mac?

[VINCENT] Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.

While at-home testing kits are hard to come by now, and community testing is all but shut down, hospitals still have plenty of availability to run tests. If someone is admitted as an inpatient to a hospital for respiratory issues so severe they end in death, there is an overwhelming likelihood that patient is getting tested for COVID. Particularly due to their legal liability for allowing someone to die due to an undiagnosed infection.

So yeah, we don’t have good numbers for a raw number of active community infections anymore, but the fatality numbers should still be around as accurate as they ever were.

Completely agree on your other points though!

As a response to the assertions you shared, particularly the second paragraph:

This is all true, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t have a good idea what’s going on without testing individual potential cases - most cities are still monitoring sewage that gives incredibly accurate data on how prevalent COVID (among other diseases) is, which neighborhoods are having surges, which variants are infecting people, etc. Plus limited sampling and testing of individuals can still be pretty darn accurate at identifying what’s going on with the rest of the population.

But yeah, a layperson looking at raw case numbers without any kind of error correction is going to come to the wrong conclusions on how things are going with COVID.

I don’t necessarily blame governments for ending the major individual testing efforts - large chunks of the population were disregarding masking / isolation / quarantine protocols anyway and there was little of any means of enforcement. Sucks that it makes it much harder for an individual to protect themselves and their family, but the responsible people will continue to mask up and isolate when warranted, and doing all that testing for a bunch of assholes to disregard anyway is quite a waste of resources.

I remember all this, and I fell for it. Due to years of propaganda against her, I just had this mild feeling of revulsion to Hillary. I primaried for Bernie in a district that’s very close in demographics to the national average, and was stunned that Hillary had about a 4x as many supporters. But once she became the official Dem candidate, I started watching her campaign events, debates and researched her political history. Hillary was a fantastic candidate and after watching her in action I fully understood WHY there had been decades of propaganda from the right against her - she was incredibly dangerous to them - not only because of her likelihood to win, but even moreso due to how effective she would be as president.

I think the right not to be shot is a weeee more important than the right to be the shooter.