Having consulted my deep European genetic-race memory (read: playing
Bloodborne), I’ve determined that the best strategy is to get a
mask with a long beak, stuffed with straw and herbs, and a wax overcoat,
then go count the number of people with COVID-19. This will somehow
revive Western Civilization.
> I've determined that the best strategy is to get a mask with a long beak, stuffed with straw and herbs, and a wax overcoat, then go ~~count the number of people with COVID-19~~ murder the people infected with COVID-19.
Corrected your reference.
More like
> I've determined that the best strategy is to get a mask with a long beak, stuffed with straw and herbs, and a wax overcoat, then go ~~count the number of people with COVID-19~~ dodge roll around the people infected with COVID-19 for, like, five minutes straight to only be one-hit-killed.
Wow, Scott was actually rolling a little in Nietzsche's grave over how nazis love his commentary.
Seriously, though, the "rolling in his grave" idiom is here because live people generally adjust their words based on what the words actually *do* (so e.g. if you don't like nazis but you are popular with the nazis you don't keep saying things that nazis love to hear), but dead people can't adjust their words, so dead people, but not live people, end up in this predicament unwillingly.
Bottom line is, he should stop rolling in Nietzsche's grave. It is entirely his responsibility what his words actually *do*. When his audience is largely racists and they're getting more racist from reading him, that's entirely on him.
Of course, instead he just makes an excuse that he's speaking some (reader independent) truth, as if it was an actual thing.
They don't say to wear a full stalker suit at all times so I'm just gonna dress like I'm in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and subsist on tourist's breakfast, vodka, and energy drinks until it blows over. Just have to make sure my mask filters aren't the ones with asbestos.
Kind of like a dry run for when the brexit fully kicks in.
> That’s it
>
> That’s the advice, everything else is just bluster and a waste of time
I think at this point people should also seriously consider not going to bars, restaurants, events, working from home (if possible), etc.
Not Sneer Club material, but since there are people talking about
buying five oxygen concentrators and hooking them up together, I feel
like this
/r/LegalAdvice thread may entertain you. Engineers!
edit: poptart is attempt to hoard all the loo roll, do not heed the
“don’t stockpile” lies
Just a quick rundown and why the advice is pretty bad:
Copper tape: There is no reliable source suggestion that, and
reliable sources suggest the virus survives as long on copper as it does
on stainless steel. That said, other medical sources indicate we do not
know whether copper helps against this virus. So while it may
turn out to be ok advice, this is not the “rational” advice.
Wash your hands after handling packages: Well yeah but you should
do so anyway
Get oximeter: well no, absolutely do not buy extra medical
equipment in times of crisis, because you don’t know whether they are in
short supply and needed more elsewhere
Vitamin D: There is no scientific knowledge about this as far as
I can tell
Electrolyte powder: OK I personally prefer chicken soup but you
do you
“Bayesian” model whether you should stay home - need I say
more
Make your own hand sanitizer: OK good to know but hardly very
important, given that so far the recommendation is to wash your
hands
Don’t self quarantine if you are young: No, if you have symptoms,
you ABSOLUTELY should self-quarantine
Fever screening for events: LOL no won’t help won’t catch
enough
yeah but why apply the common sense advice of washing your hands after handling packages when you can make an 8 bullet point list and investigate via Google whether cardboard retains viruses
also the problem isn't necessarily the supply of pulse oximeters, but that it adds no helpful information. you either have the symptoms (i.e., shortness of breath) or not. deciding you have coronavirus because of a low oxygen reading with questionable accuracy on a cheap pulse oximeter is ridiculous. one might have a low oxygen percentage for plenty of other reasons.
I think the idea there is if you know you probably have it but can’t get tested or hospitals are full so you are self treating at home, you can tell if you’re doing ok or really need to be admitted. Idk whether they are actually accurate enough.
you don't need a pulse oximeter to tell you that you’re having difficulty breathing.
if you have the symptoms and difficulty breathing, but test at 95%, that doesn’t rule out coronavirus in anyway. on the other hand, if you’re breathing fine with the other symptoms, 93% oxygen doesn’t indicate you have coronavirus.
one of the comments over there asked a doctor who explained this better than me. i didn’t want to give them that much credit tho.
This this this
Undertake serious measures only if you’re feeling ill enough that you would undertake serious measures ANYWAY
Doctors and healthcare professionals are much better at apportioning resources than you are
> you don't need a pulse oximeter to tell you that you’re having difficulty breathing.
I suppose it might at least help one distinguish actual difficulty breathing from coronavirus-fear-induced hyperventilation?
>yeah but why apply the common sense advice of washing your hands after handling packages when you can make an 8 bullet point list and investigate via Google whether cardboard retains viruses
Because (some) people have nothing better to do in quarantine.
Fever screening at airports: they have so far found one case that way, while two of the screeners have caught the disease.
If you're at the point where you wonder if you should screen at events, you should be cancelling events.
> Copper tape: There is no reliable source suggestion that, and reliable sources suggest the virus survives as long on copper as it does on stainless steel. That said, other medical sources indicate we do not know whether copper helps against this virus. So while it may turn out to be ok advice, this is not the "rational" advice.
Uh also almost all of the copper tape you can buy is coated in plastic that will make it entirely useless. Uncoated copper tape is a specialty thing for... I think glasswork, mostly? All I know is that you need special tape to properly seal electrical stuff against low frequency RF because the strips themselves are insulating.
> Vitamin D
It does seem to increase immunocompetence regarding respiratory infections, especially in case of people with vitamin D deficiency which affects up to 30% of Whites and 80% of Blacks:
https://www.bmj.com/content/356/bmj.i6583
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/20/246393329/how-a-vitamin-d-test-misdiagnosed-african-americans
> Fever screening for events: LOL no won't help won't catch enough
It's useful for catching the [87.9%](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#the-symptoms-of-covid-19) with fever though.
> It's useful for catching the 87.9% with fever though.
That's really wrong: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/why-airport-screening-wont-stop-spread-coronavirus
ECDC estimates it could detect 25%. Will it prevent spread? No. Will it reduce spread? Yes. It will also reduce the R0 of other contagious respiratory diseases with fever symptoms which will relieve the hospitals. Is it worth it? No idea.
> “Ultimately, measures aimed at catching infections in travelers will only delay a local epidemic and not prevent it,” says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong. He and others say screening is often instituted to show that a government is taking action, even if the impact is marginal.
See also the other comment on how one country only caught one case, but had two screeners infected
Well, according to that one study copper works on another coronavirus: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4659470/
and it seems other studies do treat those viruses as similar:
https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-6701(20)30046-3/fulltext
I'd think copper probably works, provided it is actual bare copper. Dunno how much of a health hazard it is otherwise, though - copper is toxic. Also copper tape is a good way to cut your fingers.
I'd give a pass for this, I can't find any actual studies that copper doesn't work (I find some remarks but not source studies), and I can find a study that it works on different viruses, and the mechanism is simply that copper is toxic as fuck, copper ions fuck with lipids. This is how you can smell copper, you smell reaction products between your sweat and copper.
> the mechanism is simply that copper is toxic as fuck, copper ions fuck with lipids.
Unless you're a salt water creature (trace copper can kill a lot of them), copper is very mildly toxic, to the point that it's basically negligible. It does kill microbes by fucking with lipids, but most metals do that. Copper is just at the intersection of relatively cheap, slowly oxidizing, and effective catalytic action. Pure nickel for instance is fairly antibacterial, but significantly more toxic.
The action that kills microbes is totally harmless to humans. Platinum is definitely more effective than copper and is totally skin safe. Gold is AFAIK more effective than copper, and utterly nontoxic.
Quick googling gives 30 mg/kg in rats (not sure which copper ion), okay, not "toxic as fuck" but pretty toxic (cyanide is 10mg/kg in rats). edit: that's for LD50.
I'd need a cite about gold and platinum, the issue with those is that they are rather un-reactive, so as metals they're going to be very safe simply due to not being bio available edit: and also thus ineffective as a metal surface I think, kind of like stainless steel even though stainless steel is iron with chromium and nickel.
Salt injections are very different, sure. But c'mon, we're talking about metallic surfaces here. Copper doesn't have any of the material safety recommendations of toxic heavy metals or other things. It's fine to handle. The world would not work the way it does if copper was as toxic as asbestos.
I don't have university access any more but [this paper specifically calls out gold and platinum as oligodynamic](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3939057).
> also thus ineffective as a metal surface I think, kind of like stainless steel even though stainless steel is iron with chromium and nickel.
Metallic surfaces are required for the catalytic action of the oligodynamic effect that destroys envelopes. Stainless steel doesn't have strong enough catalytic effects because the passivation is thicker by a rough order of magnitude. Aluminum is the same. Pure nickel (and probably chromium too, but idk specifically) has a much thinner oxide layer and acts more like a catalyst. Conventional wisdom holds and platinum is probably the most antimicrobial, but it's also more toxic than copper (in the metallic form, idk about ions/nanoparticles).
My point is that the reason copper works is that copper is just generally toxic kind of like how hydrogen peroxide or alcohol is toxic.
I can't get to that paper either... I think the difference would be that of a degree, the copper is far more reactive, meaning that there will be a lot more copper ions in solution than there would be gold or platinum ions. Wouldn't do as good to catalyze on the very surface if there's a thin layer of snot...
As far as hands go I dunno, poisoning oneself outright does seem very far fetched but I wouldn't be surprised if a rationalist could OCD copper onto everything they touch to the point where they may exceed their copper RDA by a lot. The RDA is single digit milligrams.
Un-coated copper cookware is actually dangerous.
edit: here's MSDS for granular copper, for what its worth: https://beta-static.fishersci.com/content/dam/fishersci/en_US/documents/programs/education/regulatory-documents/sds/chemicals/chemicals-c/S25268.pdf
I generally wash hands after handling copper, and try to avoid making copper dust.
>generally toxic kind of like how hydrogen peroxide or alcohol is toxic.
I'd have permanent ethanol on my doorknobs if that was feasible.
They discuss the toxicity issue and are unsure, but think that the dose through your skin is probably too low to worry about.
I imagine they would acknowledge that they are increasing their risk of copper poisoning, but expect that they'e doing so by less than they decreas their risk of COVID-19.
Sure, but copper only kills viruses and bacteria on its surface. If you have the virus on your hands and you touch a copper doorknob, you still have the virus on your hand. Putting copper tape around your house won’t help you. Which is why that paper concludes, “Consequently, copper alloy surfaces could be employed in **communal areas and at any mass gatherings** to help reduce transmission of respiratory viruses from contaminated surfaces and protect the public health.” It’s not good advice for individuals.
Maybe this is for one of those weird "rational" communes, although I'm highly dubious anything short of a hazmat suit would keep people who live in close proximity from infecting each other.
[yes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6tJZx_KxSw)
edit: [*you may be in a simulation, and only the tacvisor can reveal the truth*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImzmlxNi0Og&list=PLINl9l0igYjzwh1o2pYDeG-9EGVvyydbj&index=7&t=0s)
> Vitamin D: There is no scientific knowledge about this as far as I can tell
This sort of stuff really worries me. Most people don't need to take vitamins, unless your doctor says you do, there's no evidence taking supplemental vitamins has any beneficial effect if you don't have a deficiency. But if people are gonna buy vitamins in bulk because they heard somewhere it will protect them against covid-19, like they did with face masks, I'm worried about the people who actually need those vitamins having access to them.
Having consulted my deep European genetic-race memory (read: playing Bloodborne), I’ve determined that the best strategy is to get a mask with a long beak, stuffed with straw and herbs, and a wax overcoat, then go count the number of people with COVID-19. This will somehow revive Western Civilization.
LW usually gives really good advice if you just do the opposite of what they say you should do.
[deleted]
Not Sneer Club material, but since there are people talking about buying five oxygen concentrators and hooking them up together, I feel like this /r/LegalAdvice thread may entertain you. Engineers!
edit: poptart is attempt to hoard all the loo roll, do not heed the “don’t stockpile” lies
Just a quick rundown and why the advice is pretty bad:
Copper tape: There is no reliable source suggestion that, and reliable sources suggest the virus survives as long on copper as it does on stainless steel. That said, other medical sources indicate we do not know whether copper helps against this virus. So while it may turn out to be ok advice, this is not the “rational” advice.
Wash your hands after handling packages: Well yeah but you should do so anyway
Get oximeter: well no, absolutely do not buy extra medical equipment in times of crisis, because you don’t know whether they are in short supply and needed more elsewhere
Vitamin D: There is no scientific knowledge about this as far as I can tell
Electrolyte powder: OK I personally prefer chicken soup but you do you
“Bayesian” model whether you should stay home - need I say more
Make your own hand sanitizer: OK good to know but hardly very important, given that so far the recommendation is to wash your hands
Don’t self quarantine if you are young: No, if you have symptoms, you ABSOLUTELY should self-quarantine
Fever screening for events: LOL no won’t help won’t catch enough
and so on.
Rationalism, in a sentence.