Herd Mentality

The TeeVee was on in another room, with news on of course, and I heard one of the pundits describe 'herd immunity' as the result of survivors of Covid-19 passing on their immunity to others!!! How? All those who survive get an 'I' tattooed on their forehead, and go around giving ten-second tongue kisses to those not tattooed?? About the dumbest thing I've read/heard about the pandemic yet.

Well... there's always Boris.

Since he's dumb as a sack of hair, UK Boris Badenough asserted that 'herd immunity' would happen there, and why the UK government wasn't taking any steps to curtail the virus.

On Twitter, the former director of maternal, child, and adolescent health at the World Health Organization, Anthony Costello, wrote that researchers don't even yet know if people become immune to the novel coronavirus after catching it.

"Is it ethical to adopt a policy that threatens immediate casualties on the basis of an uncertain future benefit?" he wrote.

Boris has since backed off the induced herd immunity schtick, which some of his 'advisers' say was never the policy. Right.

Based on vaccination experience, most folks (humble self included) assume that immunity lasts at least long enough to protect from the next exposure. Turns out, immunity varies

First, we don't know how long immunity against the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 [Covid-19], lasts. When people are infected with OC43 and HKU1—two other coronaviruses that regularly circulate among humans and cause common colds—they stay immune for less than a year. By contrast, immunity against the first SARS virus (from 2003) holds for much longer. No one knows whether SARS-CoV-2 will hew to either of these extremes, and according to one recent study, its behavior could mean anything from annual outbreaks to a decades-long quiet spell.

What herd immunity really means is explained in the wiki.

Moo.

Thought For The Day - 17 March 2020

Happy St. Paddy's day, all. Not so happy for the Pat's fans in Southie, of course. But it was predictable, surely.

Belichick dumped Bledsoe for Brady.

Belichick Bledsoed Brady.

The earth returns to its axis.

Not that anyone knows who Belichick plans as the next Tom Terrific. May haps Bill will exit stage, right?

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the tenth

Well, more proof that capital, in the age of hyperautomation, is in trouble. The issue with automated production, from at least the days of Ford's River Rouge plant, return on capital derives entirely from the removal of labor from production. The downside to that is: if production doesn't increase while amortizing said capital, average cost can't be driven down. Ya gotta pay the vig no matter whether you shift one widget or a million.

So Intel and Micron made a new agreement on 3D Xpoint memory. They need to boost output, aka sales, in order to get average cost under control. Intel sees off-shoring to China as the way to drive out what little labor there remains. But it'll fail, if nothing is done to promote demand. They just ain't much labor left in semi-conductor manufacturing; for the 300mm fab (far and away the mainstay) overhead labor is 10 times direct.

Intel should have folks smart enough to go back to the future with a lean cpu doing all operations in memory. Yes the TI-990. I said it againa

This is How

Early on in the Covid-19 infection, the The Manchurian President said it would soon go to zero, and the experts guesstimated that the transfer rate would be 2 or 3 per infected person, based largely on the 'fact' that Covid-19 infected people were contagious for about 2 weeks prior to symptoms. This contagion rate was enough for the epidemiologists to expect widespread infection.

Boy, were they optimistic. How about 50 per?? Now, this may be the exception rather than the norm for Covid-19. He's a Jewish man, and the stereotype is a 'close knit' community and all that. Which, stereotypically, means lots of close contact. From the report, what happened doesn't seem out of norm for any middle-class person.

50. And we have a fucking moron president trying to convince his idiot followers that all is well, and that it's all a Democrat hoax anyway.

Back To The Future

[W]hen you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done.
-- The Manchurian President/26 February 2020

In order to block the Radical Democrats from staging a coup to oust My Government, and protect real Americans from COVID-19, which is a Radical Democrat plot, I hereby suspend the 2020 elections at all levels.
-- The Manchurian President/Labor Day 2020

Thought for the Day - 6 March 2020

You want to know something difficult:
Theoretically, you can play these 1200 chords in 7 different octaves on a piano, which results in a total of 8400 possible chords.
-- Quora

Memorize that.

Yellow Bellies

American CxO class reveals its true color: Yellow Bellied Coward. They've been chasing 'risk-free' Treasuries for some time, but they've reached new low.

The 10-year Treasury yield falls below 1.0% for the first time ever in the wake of the Fed's surprise 50-basis point rate cut.

Who was it who said that Powell wouldn't suck The Manchurian President's dick? Free money for the monied class. Swell.