Klye @khird@qoto.org
Mod
Joined Sep 2018
The hospital in question is considering opening an additional COVID unit to deal with the influx, so that suggests to me:
- they have staff, or think they can find staff, to operate another such unit, and
- they think increasing capacity to treat COVID is going to free up enough ICU beds to make it worthwhile.
Empirically, it doesn't seem to be - just yesterday the news reported another major regional hospital reached capacity in its ICU and has to use alternative means to care for new critical patients. I guess it might've been enough before the delta variant, or if vaccination rates were uniform across a wider area, because there wouldn't be low-adoption areas acting as reservoirs, which would make it harder for the virus to keep circulating.
The actual [CNN quote](https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/02/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html) reads (emphasis mine):
> More than 80% of Americans 16 and older have *some level of immunity* against the coronavirus, *mostly through vaccination*, a survey of blood donations indicates.
Two things are important here:
- the poster conveniently edited out the "some level" qualifier, implying a higher degree of immunity than the study claims
- that isn't the prevalence of immunity among the unvaccinated, but among the whole population
From the same article:
> By May, 83.3% of samples had antibodies to the virus, most of them from vaccination.
> Roughly 62% of the total US population has received at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose, according to CDC data, and about 52.7% is fully vaccinated.
> More than 39 million Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus infection since the pandemic started in 2020.
If the US population is 328 million, that 39 million diagnosed represents about 12%. So we could estimate the population breakdown with a couple simplifying assumptions.
- 62% have some immunity from at least one dose of vaccine
- 12% have some immunity from a diagnosed infection
- 17% have no immunity
- 9% have some immunity from some other cause
What might that "other cause" be? Well...
> The survey, led by the CDC, also indicates that about twice as many people have been infected with the virus as have been officially counted.
Far from "no point in the vaccines", they account for about three quarters of partially- or fully-immune Americans, with diagnosed and undiagnosed infections making up the remainder in about equal proportions.
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@valleyforge He might, but from what I understand this support is too concentrated to translate into seats efficiently. They win by huge margins in the west and lose by small ones in the east.
Here's a bit of electoral math I did immediately following the 2019 election which you might find interesting: https://qoto.org/@khird/103007706897700431
@freemo I don't know how they got the numbers they did. I see some things that suggest they underestimated the foreign support the Taliban had been receiving, and so the strength of the advance was significantly higher that the assessments would have suggested.
> In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in over a week, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, *an American military assessment estimated it would be a month* before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.
> we knew very early on that wasnt happening
I don't think we did though. Even up until the fall of Kabul, the projections were for a months-long holdout with the Ghani regime controlling the airspace, which would've given ample time to evacuate or organise a counteroffensive. A week prior to that, they were expected to control most of the major cities indefinitely.
Should he have had the military try and retake the country for a month to give everyone time to get out? I don't know what his other options would have been.
In fairness to Biden, the plan was never for civilians and equipment to go first, last, or in between. They'd simply stay and carry on under the Ghani regime, so the military was the *only* group supposed to exit.
So much for the plan.
@valleyforge s/The US/Canada/
Since NHL players have been allowed at the Olympics, the Americans have never won gold in men's hockey.
@realcaseyrollins Doesn't it require a database engine that runs server-side? My understanding is that GitHub Pages is for serving static content.
@realcaseyrollins Yup. Hornbostel-Sachs 314, and all classifications with a leading three are stringed.
xkcd ran something similar recently.
@bctnry@mastodon.social you've never heard of the term Baha'iphobia, or you've never heard of them being persecuted? I think you're right on the former count (I've never heard it called that either), but not on the latter (it certainly happens).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%ADs
@freemo Sure but there's a wide gulf between "we can take on the US government with these weapons" and "we can raid villages and hide until the Americans get bored and go home". In particular, the militia types who think they constitute any sort of an effective check on the government can't feasibly pursue the latter strategy, because the military's already operating on its home turf. If you transplant the Taliban from the mountains of Kandahar to those of Colorado, there's no way they aren't completely overrun just as fast as they took power this week.
I think the militia might have a role to play in a hypothetical civil war scenario, if the army splits so nearly down the middle that they can tip the balance one way or the other, but then they're fighting alongside F-15s and nukes anyway.
@freemo Were the Americans strongarmed into signing the agreement though? My understanding was they wanted out because an isolationist administration was in power, and they just wanted the Taliban to stop doing terrorism long enough that the army could leave without being accused of abandoning the civilians to the terrorists. @swiley
@AlexLevesque Advertising is one of the few things that results in a banning here. I try to catch QOTO accounts when they spam, but unfortunately we can't do anything about accounts on other instances. If you come across advertising from a QOTO user, please help out the mods by filing a report.
@freemo @swiley Well it was his peace talks that set up the problem, right?
> Washington under then-president Donald Trump signed a deal with the Taliban in February 2020 that limited direct military action against the insurgents. That allowed the fighters to gather strength and move quickly to seize key areas when President Joe Biden announced his plans to withdraw all American forces by the end of this month.[[1]](https://cbc.ca/1.6141568)
> If the Taliban meet their commitments, all U.S. troops would leave in 14 months [from February 2020]. U.S. troops are to be withdrawn to 8,600 from about 13,000 in the weeks following Saturday's signing.[[2]](https://cbc.ca/1.5481070)
If the government agrees not to engage in direct action against you and to withdraw its military, you no longer need to take it on at all, with or without F-15s or nukes.
The Democrats criticised Trump for reneging on the nuclear deal with Iran that Obama entered into, so now that Biden was faced with a deal with the Taliban that Trump entered into, they had backed themselves into a corner politically. Had they not made such a big deal that Trump was setting a *bad* precedent, Biden could have followed the precedent without coming off as overtly hypocritical.
I think the broader point, that a force comprising solely small arms is almost certainly incapable of defeating the US military, still stands. If the Taliban had retaken the country while the US forces were still actively trying to hold it, you'd have a much better counterexample.
.py is the file extension for Python scripts, not the TLD of a URL. :)
Here's the [software](https://github.com/halcy/Mastodon.py) and here's the [documentation](https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/).
Look into mastodon.py - it doesn't provide exactly what you're asking for, but it exposes the tools you'd need to script a solution yourself.
🇳🇱