Lurker > adjl

SunWuKung420 posted...

Not the first time innocent civilians were dragged out of there housing. horrible.

1. He was guilty of violating the school's policy, not innocent
2. It wasn't his housing, it was a classroom
3. Their*

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wolfy42 posted...

It is far more likely that intelligent design was used to create such logical laws, then that they just happened randomly.

Here's the thing, though: "Far more likely" becomes completely meaningless when we're dealing with eternity. Literally every possible outcome has already happened an infinite number of times and will happen another infinite times in the future. Operating on an infinite scale, being improbable can't prevent something from ever happening. Something has to be genuinely impossible to end up with that outcome.

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PeterPumpknhead posted...

in a way you do

You do, but not to nearly the same extent as people working front-of-house.

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I believe many places are also accepting rapid self-tests, and those kits can be purchased relatively cheaply by the workplaces that require them, if that's how the workplace wants to do it. Given that that cost can be passed on to the non-compliant employee if desired, that's likely to be the long-term future of such policies.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Especially considering how long it took them to say something, and they're only coming out on record once it feels "safe" to do so.

Specifically, once it looks like that's the direction things are going to go and speaking out against him becomes a matter of aligning with the current popular PR position. If it's been all but confirmed that he's leaving, calling for him to leave doesn't change his fate, it just means you reap the PR benefits of being one of the first to publicly (claim to) agree with what's happening.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's sort of like Harvey Weinstein - apparently everyone in Hollywood knew what he was up to, but almost no one ever said anything. The only people who ever really spoke up generally presented it in the context of jokes, which meant people didn't take them entirely seriously. Even most of the victims refused to say anything until much later. Which leaves the question, how many women might have been saved from harassment (or worse) if someone had just taken a strong stance against it 10 years earlier? Or 20? If you knew and said nothing, coming out after the fact to denounce him or support the victims starts to feel more self-serving than genuine.

Eeyup. Throwing a few more testimonies into the mix after allegations have come out does lend some credibility to those allegations, so it's not like there's no value at all in doing so, but it's not exactly a secret that the people sitting on those testimonies for years did so because they were more concerned about not stepping on the establishment's toes than about the safety of Weinstein's victims.

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Criminalt posted...

Let' hope you don't get a junior doctor who's unable to tell the difference between a drug that effects something (makes it happen) and a drug that affects something (has an impact on it, e.g. modifies or mitigates what's happening).

Medicating mood disorders effects the effect of affecting your affect.

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LinkPizza posted...

I guess. Still seems excessive to me, though And a lot of wasted time and resources But it doesnt matter that much to me. Just seemed a little over the top

At this point, most Canadians are fully vaccinated. Nationally, we're sitting at around 85% of the >12 crowd, so it's not actually that many people left that will need to be tested so often. Workplaces that deal with more vulnerable people also employ stricter policies (namely, get vaxxed or get out, barring medical exemptions), so their policies don't create any additional testing burden. I don't have exact numbers, but with case rates going down by enough of an extent that there's so much less symptomatic testing going on and no need for precautionary asymptomatic testing (unless you're in one of the areas that's blowing up because they really suck at this), I'd expect even such intense testing requirements are going to require less testing resources than earlier waves.

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SunWuKung420 posted...

Incorrect. I'm intimately involved with 2 local businesses that pay liveable wages struggling to find people willing to do the 30-40 hours of work a week because they can stay home and do nothing.

The word "overwhelmingly" does not mean "exclusively." Being able to find two anecdotes that conflict with the generalization (without providing any details that allow me to confirm that they're not mistreating workers to enough of an extent that those wages are inadequate to attract people) does not mean the generalization is incorrect. That would require actual statistics.

Man, you really struggle with understanding when it's appropriate to generalize your personal experience, don't you?

SunWuKung420 posted...

Meanwhile, s***ty paying jobs like Wal-Mart and other corporations controlling the government, are still open since the corporate oligarchy is established.

If Wal-Mart is able to attract workers but your friends' businesses aren't, that's a really damning reflection of your friends' businesses. Nobody is stopping people from working at your friends' businesses and allowing them to work at Wal-Mart. Not the government, not the corporate oligarchy, nobody. People just want to work for Wal-Mart more than they want to work for your friends. That's gotta sting.

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I hope they refund his tuition.

Unless he wasn't informed of the policy before tuition was due (which is unlikely, based on my first-hand experience with having to declare vaccination status this term to the Canadian university from which I'm taking a class), there's no basis for a refund. Paying tuition entails agreeing to the policy. He's only entitled to a tuition refund if the university fails to live up to their end of the deal, not if he chooses not to live up to his.

If the policy was implemented after tuition was due, he might have a case, though even then the time to push for that refund was when the policy was implemented, not after attending for most of the semester in hopes that they wouldn't do anything about it.

LinkPizza posted...

This seems excessive

It's pretty standard for Canadian vaccination policies. The aim is to use that as a prerequisite for getting rid of other precautions and returning to normal operation, so the tests need to be frequent enough to effectively prove the person isn't infectious. Arguably, even that frequency fails to meet that threshold of proof, given that test results take a couple days and there's a ~9% false negative rate, but it's a reasonable compromise.

Bear in mind that testing is currently free for Canadians, and there aren't any plans to change that, so the time and discomfort involved are the only costs the individuals in question face.

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The last of the beef and broccoli I made on Tuesday, with a cucumber salad. Tomorrow is chicken tagine with apricots and almonds, which should last for ~4 days. After that, meatloaf.

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JOExHIGASHI posted...

Effect is a noun

Affect is a verb

Actually, both have both noun and verb definitions, though they're used less often.

Effect (Noun): The consequence of doing something (the effect of dropping a brick on your toe)

Effect (Verb): To facilitate or carry out (pass me a brick to effect dropping it on your toe)

Affect (Verb): To have an impact (dropping a brick on your toe would affect your ability to walk)

Affect (Noun): Observable emotional state (dropping a brick on your toe resulted in a negative affect)

The noun form of "Affect" is almost exclusively used in medical/psychological contexts, so it's by far the most obscure in most people's experiences.

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BEERandWEED posted...

I don't recall saying they do.

The businesses that are struggling to find workers are overwhelmingly the ones paying sub-living wages and resisting the idea of paying more. Those sub-living wages also are overwhelmingly not a matter of employees not actually doing work while on the job, they're a result of poor management and a broken economy that undervalues labour.

Zeus posted...

...many employers struggle to pay workers in the first place.

Then why should those employers remain in business?

Zeus posted...

lolwut? Makes no f***ing sense. The government can always outspend companies because it can just print money with little regard for the economics involved.

While true, this ignores one very important point: The government's not trying to compete with anyone. They're just trying to make sure people can get by in a time when businesses that are supposed to be doing so are doing a pretty terrible job of it. It doesn't matter that the government can hypothetically pay people more not to work than businesses can to work, because that's not the goal at all.

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BEERandWEED posted...

Businesses do pay livable wages to employees that earn it.

But not to the employees that can't earn it because the business is run so poorly that the positions in question don't generate a livable wage worth of value. Why do businesses that are run so poorly deserve to exist?

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Zeus posted...

You also had in Canada, where they might enforce s*** like that. I was told to stay there, nobody checked on me. iirc, twenty minutes later, I was like, "Eh, f*** it," and left. Had I not brought somebody, there was a chance I might have passed out while driving. However, when they did the whole lead-up, apparently all the pharmacist does is call 911 which is worthless anyway.

If you stuck around for 20 minutes, then you had roughly the same experience and were at no greater risk driving home afterwards than I was (except for the part where I walked home from the first shot, but that's largely beside the point). Either way, all they really can do is call 911 and provide basic first aid, given that they aren't doctors, so I'm not sure what else you're expecting.

Zeus posted...

If you take that bulls*** to its logical (or illogical) conclusion, where does it end? What don't you force people to disclose?

Mostly, anything that doesn't present a significant public health risk, which is most personal health information. Obviously, there's room for interpretation as far as defining a threshold for "significant" goes, but as much as people want to characterize this as a dangerous slippery slope, there is a clear basis for defining what should and should not be shared, and this does not set any sort of precedent for crossing that line.

Quite simply, this is a situation where failing to request your personal health information may cause considerable harm to others. Therefore, requesting it is justifiable. You retain the right to refuse to do so, at the cost of being unable to access certain privileges, and there would be room to argue against the request in circumstances where disclosing your information was likely to cause greater harm than failing to request it would (which this is not), but that does not mean requesting it is not justifiable.

Zeus posted...

More importantly, anybody who actually hasn't taken it is more likely to just lie about having taken it anyway.

Everyone does indeed have the option of committing fraud at any time.

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Metalsonic66 posted...

Yer slippin brosef

Dammit. I need to go back to bed.

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SunWuKung420 posted...

Employers are dealing with being shut down, supply chain shortages, increased cost of goods, workforce shortages and lazy employees.

That's nice, but they should still step up their game. If a business can't pay its employees enough to live comfortably, why should that business get to exist? The entitlement of business owners who want to get away with paying a sub-living wage or doing nothing to make working their more pleasant for their employees is disgusting. Stop expecting people to be thankful for whatever garbage you offer them and start genuinely competing.

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IronBornCorps posted...

Lol, wait until some of you learn what cookies are, and how they are used.

Looking at it, on my phone with this browser this site uses about 20 cookies, and I block 3 of them because they are 3rd party.

Noscript currently lists 11 different domains for me, only one of which is gamespot.com. It's quite alarming just how many extra websites seem to need to be involved to deliver content.

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Nichtcrawler X posted...

Now I am wondering about the current regulations in the US.

It varies by region. Some places are ramping up requirements again. Some places are making it illegal for any place to request that people wear masks. Large swaths of the US have become festering hellscapes of stupidity since this whole pandemic business started. It's kind of a problem.

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@BEERandWEED

adjl posted...

I don't really care about him speaking to me, I just want to see the experimental data that justifies believing that God has reduced influenza rates by more than 40%.

Heck, for that matter, even if God has reduced flu rates by more than 40%, why should that in any way preclude reducing them by a further 40%? They're still very comfortably above zero, with fatal consequences, so there's obviously still plenty of reason to strive toward even partially reducing that.

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BlackScythe0 posted...

It's bad that every time I see stuff like this I always wonder if they are any better.

Indeed. I'm much more inclined to believe criticizing him is a matter of optics than to believe it's a matter of genuinely disapproving of how he's run the company.

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Zeus posted...

Yet somehow it's still overpriced.

By what metric?

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Entity13 posted...

They can't sell info they don't have.

You'd be surprised how much info they have.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Obviously. It's pretty much the entire point of the polls these days (doing market research).

I'm not even sure poll results would be included in a request to not sell info, since the overall results aren't personalized at all and the information is being voluntarily given. The stuff covered under that request would be the more invasive data collection: Where you're posting from, various analytics of what you're saying, demographic information (both from your ISP and building a profile from what your posts indicate), which boards/topics you frequent... The extent to which social media collects data on its users is far, far greater than most people realize, and there's no reason to expect GameFAQs to be an exception to that.

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Sarcasthma posted...

I propose my butthole.

I'm sure it would all fit, but I have my doubts about its ability to hold on to any of it. Assuming yours is anything like your mom's, that is.

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Unbridled9 posted...

The point I'm trying to make here is that being 'inbreeding free' is both a statistical impossibility (because the number of ancestors you'd need is insane just to have 0 inbreeding) and a logical one (because there's been so many bottlenecks for a multitude of reasons). The whole 'village where everyone ends up second cousins' is more an example of how, even when trying to avoid it, it becomes near-impossible to do so in a relatively closed-off community with little to no chance to travel.

I mean, it doesn't stop being inbreeding just because interbreeding is impractical. In those populations that are isolated from the rest of the species and have no choice but to inbreed, you will see a general reduction in fitness compared to the general population, which is called "inbreeding depression." The extent to which that becomes a problem depends on just how bad the inbreeding is, but it's still going to happen.

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Zeus posted...

No, it SHOULD be different because this is an elected office. If you could fire people from elected office, then you don't have a democracy.

So elected officials should have complete freedom to threaten the lives of their coworkers, purely for the sake of protecting democracy? There should be no mechanisms in place to fire them in circumstances that show that they are a credible threat to others present?

Because that makes sense.

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streamofthesky posted...

Her friend was a fully functional adult capable of making her own decisions, she wasn't "pimped".

Eh, depends how much drugs were involved in it. I could believe that she slept with him for a drug hookup, if addiction's a factor for all involved parties. Of course, that's purely speculation, and it's also quite possible that didn't happen, so meh.

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Unbridled9 posted...

But here's the thing. Inbreeding happens a lot already. Think of yourself. You exist (that's 1) and you have two parents (that's 3). Each of those parents have two parents (7) and each of them has 2 (15), and so-on and so-on. If you had 0 inbreeding you wouldn't even be able to get back to medieval times IIRC before your number of unique ancestors would outnumber the total number of humans that ever existed. And God forbid you wanna get married to someone who is also completely genetically independent from you (that doubles the load) and your kid also wants to marry someone genetically different.

On average, you share roughly 5% of your variable genome (that is, the part of the genome that isn't common to every human simply for being part of the species) with every other person in the world. Each step along your family tree reduces genetic similarity by 50% (parents/siblings are 50% similar, uncles/aunts/grandparents are 25%, etc), which means that by the time you get to second cousins, you're only sharing an average of 3.13% of your genome, which is so little that you're likely sharing more than that just because of random chance. Generally speaking, "inbreeding" refers to reproduction among individuals that are more closely related than that background similarity, since there's really not much point to the concept if it applies to everyone (see Syndrome's contribution to the discussion). That's reflected in laws against incest: second cousins are fair game pretty much everywhere (though finding a date at a family reunion is still going to leave a funny taste in people's mouths) because they aren't any more closely related to you than a stranger would be.

wolfy42 posted...

How did the laws of the universe that we have discovered come to be? What makes gravity work the way it does, why does light travel at the speed it does. Something had to create those rules/laws, they didn't just poof appear, some intelligent design needed to be behind so many things that work together perfectly.

That's just the paradoxical nature of existence. The notion of something always existing is impossible for us to wrap our heads around, so the assumption remains that something must have created everything. That thing in turn, however, must have either existed forever or been created by something else, so ultimately, we eventually need to accept the concept of eternal existence.

That said, rather than thinking about the laws of physics in terms of a deity enforcing them, I think there's merit in thinking of those laws themselves as being deific. They are, after all, all-powerful forces that govern our universe, and what does that sound like if not a god? God didn't have to make physics, physics can just be God.

As for the idea that they must have been intelligently designed because they work perfectly together, that falls into the same trap that applying that logic to biological evolution does: If the complex systems in question didn't work properly together, they wouldn't have survived. There's no reason whatever primordial nothingness became the universe can't also be considered in terms of biological evolution, randomly forming with different rules until something eventually works. From our perspective, it looks like the dice have rolled nothing but sixes, but that's not as implausible as it seems when you take into account a selective force that's erased every non-6 result that's ever occurred.

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papercup posted...

I propose we fly giant magnets up there to eat up all the debris! :0

That would only catch the magnetic stuff. There's a lot of aluminum up there, which would be missed.

Instead, I propose giant balls of silly putty. That'll grab everything.

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SunWuKung420 posted...

Less than 0.013% of Americans die from the flu or pneumonia.

0.013% of Americans is still 42,000 people, no matter how much you want to dehumanize that very real cost by putting extra statistical layers in front of it. Allocating resources to preventing the 9th-leading cause of death is quite worthwhile.

That's also an exceedingly misleading way to present that statistic, given that you're presenting it as a percentage of all Americans instead of a percentage of Americans that die. which is itself only 0.87% of Americans, each year (at least in 2019; I'll welcome corrections from anyone that cares enough to calculate that with a bit more rigor). Look at it in terms of what percentage of deaths are caused by influenza/pneumonia, and you get 1.7% (coincidentally, your heart disease figure, though that coincidence is meaningless), which is a couple orders of magnitude harder to dismiss.

SunWuKung420 posted...

While heart disease tops the charts at 1.7% and yet, unhealthy fast food and soda are consumed in bulk by hundreds of millions daily.

Perhaps, diet and lifestyle are the biggest protection from illness. Just perhaps.

Based again on 2019 data, heart disease killed either 0.2% of the overall population or accounted for 23.1% of deaths. I'm not sure where you're getting 1.7% from, but either way, that doesn't seem to be a proper comparison because it doesn't have the same denominator as your flu numbers.

Of course, however broken your comparison is, heart disease is clearly significantly more dangerous than the flu, so your underlying point is accurate. People should indeed eat more healthily, that's correct. What I don't understand, though, is why you're presenting it as a dichotomy. People can eat more healthily to prevent heart disease and also get flu shots to protect themselves and those around them from the flu. Nobody ever has to choose between those two things, outside of relatively rare instances where the time it takes to get a flu shot means they're unable to work enough to afford to eat healthily (which is largely insconsequential on such a small scale and can be safely discounted).

SunWuKung420 posted...

Those same dangerous foods are deemed safe for consumption by the FDA. For what purpose would an organization allow dangerous foods to be consumed daily and then offer a pill or shot to cure what ails you? Think about that for a minute.

Mostly because not doing that would entail micromanaging people's diets to an extremely totalitarian level. They approve those dangerous foods because those foods are not dangerous enough to cause problems unless people abuse them, and because people like having the freedom to choose what they eat. They subsequently approve drugs to help cure the problems created by abusing those dangerous foods because people do abuse them and that creates demand for cures for those problems. It's not an FDA conspiracy (the FDA isn't particularly involved in creating any of those things), that's just the FDA responding to demand created by people making their own choices about what to consume.

Is there room to improve that process and reduce the amount of corruption involved? Absolutely. The extent to which food processing megacorps outright lie to consumers about the safety of what they eat is very much a problem, and part of that includes lobbying to keep the FDA from enforcing greater transparency. But ultimately, heart disease is not the FDA's fault. It's extremely common knowledge that eating too much unhealthy food has health consequences. There's little more the FDA could do to better inform consumers about that risk. The problem is that consumers are accepting that risk and choosing to eat unhealthily in spite of it, which the FDA can't reasonably stop.

Incidentally, if the FDA were to start banning unhealthy foods, pizza and beer would be pretty high up on that list, so you might want to be careful what you wish for.

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PeterPumpknhead posted...

Omg if you cranked one out right now

itd be hell but youd be a damn meme legend

Don't do that.

Trust me when I say: don't do that.

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SunWuKung420 posted...

Thankfully, we still have the choice.

Unfortunately, a lot of people insist on using that choice in a terribly silly way.

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BEERandWEED posted...

Pray more. He will speak to you also.

I don't really care about him speaking to me, I just want to see the experimental data that justifies believing that God has reduced influenza rates by more than 40%.

Heck, for that matter, even if God has reduced flu rates by more than 40%, why should that in any way preclude reducing them by a further 40%? They're still very comfortably above zero, with fatal consequences, so there's obviously still plenty of reason to strive toward even partially reducing that.

BlackScythe0 posted...

So it's working by making me sick when I wouldn't have otherwise been sick. Think at least a little harder about that.

Yes, that's exactly how it works. Your "sick" is purely an immune response, not an actual infection. By experiencing that, you're protected from an actual infection. That actual infection may not end up causing symptoms for you, but you can still end up infecting others, for whom it could be more serious.

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Flappers posted...

Bottom line, if nature is allowed to take its course, the problem will resolve itself. Some species may go extinct if they fail or are taken advantage of by quicker-evolving animals, but this too is a part of nature.

Pretty much. Whatever bottlenecks you start from, given enough time, new diversity will make its way into the population. Ultimately, even without believing that Noah's Ark happened, speciation events tend to result in some degree of bottleneck (stuff like ring species show that this doesn't necessarily happen every time), which new species eventually overcome.

Metalsonic66 posted...

Yes, thank you.

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It's a nice idea, but for most games that are high-profile enough to get remade, the development team is too large for it to be practical to have everyone comment on the decisions that they made. Most of the commentary you'd get would just be from managers to whom decisions were brought, who then said "I like that idea, keep it," who won't have much by way of interesting stories.

That said, for smaller teams, it can be quite nifty. That's one of the (many) things I really like about Factorio: Throughout its entire four-year Early Access period, the studio ran a weekly development blog where they talked about what they were working on, what they were hoping to accomplish, what was coming down the pipes, and other stuff like that. Sometimes it got more technical than a layperson like myself could appreciate, but having that behind-the-scenes view of everything that was happening was really cool, especially as it got closer to launch and most of the posts were just them talking about how excited they were about everything they'd accomplished.

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BEERandWEED posted...

I think it's wild that taxpayers are forced to subsidize the research and production of a product that has been less than 40% effective in the last 3 years of reported data.

In a typical year, influenza kills somewhere on the order of 30-40,000 Americans. It varies by year, but from some brief searching, it looks like a 50% vaccination rate is reasonably common for the US. If 50% of the population has reduced their risk of catching/transmitting the flu by 40% and 40,000 people still died, that means the vaccine can be credited with saving about 10,000 lives. That's if we assume it works linearly, which actually means that's likely a considerable under-estimate because of the exponential nature of viral spread.

All the things that tax dollars have been unambiguously wasted on, and you're choosing to complain about saving the equivalent of three 9/11's each year on average? Sure, 40% isn't a very impressive number and it'd be really nice to see a higher one, but thinking about this as though it's a grade is just plain stupid. You get a 1% on a test, you've failed. You reduce 10,000 deaths by 1% and that's a hundred people that are still alive thanks to you. That's not a failure. Don't you dare try to characterize it as one, especially when you have the power to make it even more effective by increasing that vaccination rate (just getting it up to 60% at that same 40% efficacy would be another ~2,000 lives saved), yet are choosing not to because... Well, no reason, really.

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I rarely even *see* my amazon drivers. I'm lucky if they even bother to ring the doorbell instead of just throwing the package at the door from the street, let alone actually give me a chance to interact with them by the time I answer. Tipping them isn't really an option.

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Sulugnaz posted...

Ahem! The new Superman is Bi!

I know that, and you know that, but I fear this mysterious identity thief might lose the ability to tell the difference upon completing the dastardly deed.

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Only sometimes, but often enough that even if we completely eradicated all human influenza infections (which is a pretty tall order, even last flu season didn't pull it off with unprecedented protective measures), I'd be surprised if we got more than a year or two of freedom before a new strain showed up and started ripping through our false sense of security.

Basically, we're never going to completely eliminate influenza. At best, we may someday end up with a vaccine that's more generally effective so we aren't playing such a desperate game of catch-up, and better antiviral drugs will help improve the prognosis of the infections that do happen. Full eradication, though, is largely impossible.

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rjsilverthorn posted...

The problem is that it is very difficult to remove an elected official from office.

Eh, he doesn't look that heavy.

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Zeus posted...

While the mandate on businesses likely is unconstitutional

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts

Of course, that's state law and not federal, but given that the National Guard is a federal agency, I'd say it applies well enough.

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Inbreeding depression results in a population that's generally less fit than other populations with less inbreeding, due to the lack of genetic diversity, but if every population is equally inbred, that's no longer a disadvantage and the population in question is just as competitive as every other one.

To invoke Syndrome, if everyone is inbred, no one will be.

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They don't call them "swine flu" and "avian flu" just for kicks, after all. Those variants actually originated in pigs and birds, respectively.

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MartianManchild posted...

Lmfao. Holy shit. That is just too funny you actually believe this.

I mean, we've demonstrated that it's quite possible to all but eliminate flu infections. The problem isn't that influenza is somehow too infinitely resilient to ever beat, it's that it doesn't need human hosts to survive and we're never going to be able to completely eliminate zoonotic transmission. Eradication is unrealistic, but last year has shown just how much better we could do at reducing flu deaths, part of which includes getting more flu shots.

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Arcturusisnow posted...

aside from Cyclop's VA who is dead atm.

Hopefully he gets better in time to start filming.

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I think it's a given that censuring him was the appropriate response. As Ted's tweet said, if anyone in literally any other job shared a video depicting them killing their coworkers, they'd be fired on the spot, if not outright arrested. Congress should be no different.

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PeterPumpknhead posted...

And just because the flu mutates doesnt mean that a previous vaccine necessarily stops being effective against it. That can be the case but sometimes the vaccine will still prove to be effective against new strains. It varies.

Mostly, it depends what the new antigens (surface markers) are. If the current strain shares some antigens with an older strain, a vaccine against that older strain will have some effect because it will induce antibodies that recognize those antigens. It won't be as effective as a vaccine that induces antibodies for all potential antigens, but it's better than nothing.

If no antigens are shared at all, then the older vaccine won't provide any immunity against the new strain.

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Unbridled9 posted...

It doesn't work because it's a vaccine against PRIOR versions of the flu. The flu is so highly mutating that it's impossible to keep up to date. The only thing that can be done is to stop prior versions from spreading. Even if 100% of people got it with 100% efficiency the flu would not go away.

It's not so much that it's against prior versions as it is that they try to make predictions about which antigens will be the most common in a given season. By and large, new antigens aren't emerging on a regular basis. The existing ones just get shuffled around, so you can look at trends in the infections that occur during the off season to guess which ones will be dominant. The unreliability comes from the fact that those predictions aren't always right, plus the possibility that the dominant strain ends up sharing the season with several others.

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Cacciato posted...

Imagine stealing TCs identity and then realizing it made you homophobic.

"I've got a bunch of new credit cards I'll never need to pay off because it's not my credit rating, but I just can't stop thinking about gay Superman. What a weird side effect."

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streamofthesky posted...

since it's apparently very unsafe to be on prednisone for longer than that.

Yeah, long-term steroid use is a very bad idea, especially at higher doses. If you ever get bored of having an immune system, though, that's a very easy way to fix that.

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