From another perspective – she wants to restore democracy in her country and wishes it again to become a prosperous society with growing economy.
And perhaps your attitude is why it is more globally relevant than many people think. Many countries have fallen into this lack of democracy that needs to be restored. Cuba is the closest example.
If m-dashes becomes a turn off, GPT users will simply replace them with hyphens and using m-dashes will become a sign of real professionalism or alternatively a sing of completely clueless.
It is actually stupid to adjust to writing without m-dashes because one can easily replace all m-dashes to hyphens in chatGPT generated text. I predict that obsession with detecting chatGPT by m-dashes will be short-lived because it will be exploited as soon as it will have any real world consequences.
We now know that masks were barely effective or not effective at all. They could even be net negative by causing people to take more risks.
Isolating was the only way. A lot of elderly in the UK did this successfully and never got covid. Lockdowns, masks and schools closures did not affect the spread significantly. We know this because Sweden did not mandate these things and had about the same amount of people getting covid until vaccines arrived. The benefits were that Sweden had less mortality from other causes.
I was actually commenting for Herman Cain. Sorry, for this mistake.
Yes, they made announcements without clearly thinking how they will be perceived. I agree that it was unnecessary and then dying suddenly didn't look good.
Nevertheless, if I had a situation like where I know for sure that my odds are not great, I would do the same. I would live full life today because tomorrow I could be dead. Herman Cain most likely knew that he is not going to last long. It didn't make sense for him to be afraid of death and isolate for indefinite period of time. His bravery is an example to follow.
The problem with this is that he had been diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in 2006. It is rare for a person with stage IV cancer to survive for another 14 years. He received treatment but most likely eventually he would have died anyway. Covid may have fastened his demise but his odds of dying were quite high even without covid.
It's actually quite clever from the part of the scientist.
The incentive would be money, maybe the pay for doing this test was not good enough.
Or maybe the scientist was motivated by thirst of discovering something good for humanity like cure for cancer and didn't want to get distracted by other things. Funding is also needed but angel bones are clearly impossibility. Why even spend time on disproving that? But if she had engaged in discussion with people clearly believing in this nonsense it would have taken too much time. Saying, the tests are inconclusive lets her be distanced from all this and allow people to leave her alone, mostly that the groups will continue their disputes among themselves.
Santa Cruz where most of the local population lives gets half of its water from desalination plant.
Desalination is already cost-effective and can provide water for tourists if needed. They would just need to build a desalination plant in the south.
Electricity already is largely generated by wind, solar and tide.
Air transportation probably causes the biggest pollution.
Apart from that such tourism is very sustainable. It provides value to people who need to go on holidays. It doesn't matter if the food and necessities are imported because tourists would have consumed the food anyway if they had stayed at home.
While it causes unsustainable rent increases to local population, that can be managed somehow. Maybe give subsidies to them by using the profits from tourism. Tourism tax is not unusual invention in many places.
What do you mean by high bar? Cochrane group are specialists who do exactly that and provide gold standard of evidence. Sometimes the evidence goes against accepted wisdom. That's how science work.
If we already have strong evidence that the current vaccine is effective, then I agree, we don't need to to do another placebo controlled studies. But very often in medicine we don't have any evidence besides our beliefs.
Actually we could. Maybe we won't do such studies because they are irrelevant because avoiding spitting into the surgical opening is a reason good enough. But then we cannot claim that masks during the surgery prevent the spread of airborne viral diseases.
But if we needed to guard for them and the good evidence is lacking, then not testing would be unethical.
Yes, even covid vaccine today could be compared with placebo, for example, in children. Europe never mandated covid vaccine for children and today in the UK they cannot even get the vaccine unless in a risk group. The US however recommends covid vaccine for children without the evidence that it makes any difference today. It definitely should be tested in trials before such recommendations.
I don't think that IRB would reject such studies. At the start of pandemic everybody was saying that doing human challenge trials by infecting healthy volunteers would be unethical. And yet the UK did them. The red tape takes time and I can understand that during pandemics we may need to act quickly and cannot test everything. But in principle we can and do need to all kinds of trials to obtain proper evidence.
That's not accurate. Obviously there are many different studies with different conclusions. But by “evidence” we usually mean the total conclusion from all of them. In medicine it is usually done via metareviews and even then evidence can be graded to different levels and quality.
So, in short, Cochrane review shows that we don't have a good quality evidence that masks were effective. And the low quality evidence indicates that masks either had no or very little effect. Some people try to quote one or two studies out of context but that's not helpful because we need to take the totality of evidence into account.
It is possible that once we obtain high quality evidence, these conclusions will be overturned. Surprisingly there is very little interest in doing such studies.
I understand how public can misunderstand this phrase but scientifically it is clear and justified.
Sometimes “no evidence” means that we haven't found compelling evidence yet. Some people are desperate and want all the studies to be done immediately and evaluate the risk if the theory is real or not.
But for scientists the desire to reach certain outcome is actually counterproductive as it can introduce bias. Slower and less passionate process can lead to better results.
For example:
1) We had no evidence of covid being airborne and then we found this evidence.
2) We had no evidence that masks help and then we found no evidence.
Two different theories, two different outcomes. Covid is airborne and it changes our understanding (however, we gradually realized that it is impossible to limit the spread and all the measures ultimately were useless). And that masks most likely had very little effect.
The reporters could write better for lay public explaining that “no evidence” means that currently we don't have evidence but it could be found later or that “no evidence” is actually that we have a lot of evidence that is indicating in some other direction and the chance of new evidence that rejects those findings is smaller but still could happen.
And perhaps your attitude is why it is more globally relevant than many people think. Many countries have fallen into this lack of democracy that needs to be restored. Cuba is the closest example.