It's important what "immunity" you're referring to.

At this point with the number of variants, it's more helpful to think of COVID as a family of illnesses, rather than an illness. Immunity to other variants won't work against Omicron very well. But if you have immunity to Omicron, it works against Omicron.

> Cars these days are governed by hundreds of computers

That's an exaggeration. There is no car out there that has "hundreds of computers" in it, unless you take an extremely loose definition of "computer" that is something like "a chip with transistors in it". I think any reasonable definition of a computer involves being reprogrammable (even if only with in-depth servicing), and I don't think you'll find hundreds of devices in a car that meet that definition.

What's with this recent trend of people acting like definitions are God?

Exactly. Cars are an absolute budget killer.

I make 40k a year (so well under the limit) (and have never had a higher paying job) and have 70k of savings in the bank. I put away about $10k a year. I'm sure there are other folks like me who live frugally on low salaries and can therefore afford to pay using accumulated savings.

Sorry friend but you seem to be misinformed. Please reduce your level of vitriol, especially given that your facts aren't quite right.

The extinction caused by an impacting meteorite is not related to directly getting hit. The biggest issue is that it kicks up so much dust that the atmosphere can lose its transparency. When less sunlight reaches the ground, plants can't thrive, and then we have a food crisis. Doesn't matter where it hits, everyone is affected. If it hits ocean, then we have tsunamis that destroy multiple coastal cities all at once.

Of course not every asteroid hits earth, but we don't know which ones are headed our way (or, more accurately, which ones have orbits which, factoring in uncertainty, may result in a conjunction with the orbit of the earth) until we find them and track them.

Having the moon is nice, but the moon isn't a magic vacuum cleaner. Asteroids have every capability of coming down. One killed the dinosaurs, one caused the Tunguska event, and one was in Chelyabinsk just a decade ago. Clearly the moon isn't sufficient to protect us. It orbits around so it only has an effect on one side of earth at a time.

The atmosphere is a joke compared to an extinction-level meteorite. The velocity is high enough to not be sufficiently slowed to a safe level, and the object's mass is sufficient to maintain integrity despite aerothermal ablation.

How would we know if we saw most of the asteroids? We don't know which ones we're missing because... we're missing them. And what makes you think that the top scientists are choosing asteroid-hunting as their science of choice? Why aren't the top scientists biologists, geologists, chemists, or anything else? How many organizations can you name which have a chief purpose of asteroid hunting?

What would it change? If we can detect asteroids early enough, then we can do something about them and prevent them from impacting us. That was the whole point of the DART mission last year. We took an asteroid that wasn't coming toward us, and deflected it into a different path, which was still not coming toward us. But it proved that we have the active, current, present technology to deflect an asteroid, presuming we can send a spacecraft to it soon enough. But we can only do that if we detect the asteroid and have enough time to deflect it onto a new course.

Please, chill a bit. This type of hostility won't win anyone over to your side. Have a nice day.

Just to be clear - I'm imagining a self-promotion being something like "Hey folks, I finally opened my pizza shop! Come in today if you'd like to try a free slice :)". And in that case, I'd see no problem with it. I like the idea of letting cool local businesses support themselves, on the condition that there has to be a free event involved, and if someone gets spammy about it, they can be asked to stop.

How do you feel about that? Is that considered a commercial event, which you'd be opposed to?

I'm not a mod or anything, just curious to make conversation with other people.

Yep, it's 527 CMR 10.12.5

Sure, but you need to think bigger picture.

We need to make investments in our society so that the situation you describe doesn't end up happening, and so that we don't get to the point where shooting them is our last remaining option.

> I think the city has great services if one seeks them out. No one is talking about this young man’s history. Was this the first episode? Was he suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness?

Can we expect a person who is experiencing mental illness (and therefore lacking reliable mental function) to identify that for themselves and seek out resources?

You're quite right, the whole country is a mess when it comes to mental health and it would be great if our city could lead the way on making things better.

What do you think was mis-handled in this situation?

There are a few major decision points that happened in this encounter. Which one should have gone differently?

First, police responded. There was the decision for them to show up to a call about a person jumping out a window and cutting themselves with glass and a knife. It would be great if we had a mental health task force to respond to these incidents, but we don't. Police are, currently, the only option. So you've got two options. Either police respond, or we decide that from now on, people are allowed to run around town with knives.

If the police respond, then when they showed up, he ran. Some people see an issue here. Should the police pursue the potentially dangerous person, or should we say "if you don't want to be around the cops, you should be allowed to run away"?

Then, he ran at police with a knife. Should they have to wait until one of them is bleeding out before they can use their guns?

I'm particularly confused about this event in the wake of the criticism around Uvalde. Are police supposed to respond to people causing physical harm or not? Yes, in this case the guy started with harming himself, but he was running through the streets and it's not a stretch to think he could have moved on to other people. And of course we can't create a world where anyone can go on a knife rampage, as long as they start by cutting themselves.

I am legitimately interested in hearing your opinion, and if it's compelling, I'll change mine too but what particularly should have been done differently, and what does it have to do with fascism?

Police brutality is obviously a very serious and real problem, but I just don't see why this is an example of it.

Yes, someone fleeing from the police in that situation is clearly a danger who should be apprehended. I wish he would have checked himself into a mental hospital. I don't want anyone who's experiencing the state you describe to continue running around the city.

Are you suggesting that we take each conceivable weapon a person could be walking around with, and give one of each to every cop? That's ridiculous.

Tasers are unfortunately prone to failure, and their range is limited. You need two barbs to fly through the air, both strike their target and stick, and for neither wire to break. Generally, the distance they're effective over is comparable to the distance that someone can get you with a knife faster than you can react. The rule of thumb is that a person with a knife will beat you, if they initiate their attack from less than 21 feet - 21 feet is about the length of 3 long strides plus an outstretched arm, which someone can do in 1 second. So police are supposed to never let a knife-wielder get within 21 feet of them, which is about how far a taser is useful. The police statements say they used sponge rounds against the victim, which had no effect on him. They couldn't do anything else to get him to drop the knife, and eventually when he came at them, they were left without a choice but to defend themselves with their last available option.

While the story from the police is questionable, the story from his family is definitely misleading. Their gofundme page says that "The footage shows him running away from the police, not engaging or attacking them. "

Frankly, that's absurd. You can't say someone fleeing law enforcement while in possession of a deadly weapon is an innocent victim. This guy presented a clear and active danger to the community, and needed to be dealt with. The cops chasing him is what I would hope would happen. I definitely don't want to live in a city where people can run around with 10 inch knives and we all have to say "Yeah, that's Knifey Jim, we can't do anything about him".

If he approached police while in possession of the knife, that's a problem, because it puts their safety at risk. They tried sponge rounds, which failed to make him stop. If he closed the distance, they need to be able to protect themselves - we can't create a world where if I want to kill a cop, all I have to do is hold a knife to myself until the final moment when I strike.

This guy was clearly not in a proper mental state, and it would be great if we could improve our social services to have intervened before he got to this point. But once he's jumping out of windows and running around with knives, I don't think the police did anything wrong. The real protest shouldn't be about police brutality, because I don't see what use of force was unwarranted here. What we should be protesting is why mental health services are impossible to access - if you wanted to get a therapist today, you'd need to call dozens of offices and have them say "Sorry, Dr. Wiggenstein is not taking new patients at this time", before eventually finding one, that doesn't take your insurance, and charges $300 a session, with earliest availability in 3 months. That needs to change.

We need to subsidize mental health treatment and make it something anyone can access smoothly, quickly, and easily. That's how you catch these issues before they go from issue to crisis.

Do they have a final day of business set?

This sucks though, Blick is too upscale, A&C has always been perfect, it's a great walking distance from MIT and has crazy good selection of everything. I hate all the rent-raising happening everywhere, have to assume that's what's causing this.

Radar guns are hard to use - it's hard to know if you're measuring what you think you're measuring.

You'd be much better off making marks on the road (piece of masking tape or something) spaced out by a known distance (30 feet or something), and then take video and count how long it takes for a car's front tire to go from one mark to the next.

... No, but you literally asked the question "Why the hate". I'm just answering.

Attention gives me no benefit. Their presence generates obstruction and inconvenience which is a non-benefit.

Luckily it's... a grid. And therefore power can be transported over wires from elsewhere.

Paraffin vapors are carcinogenic.

Not a reasonable long-term investment with renewables growing as fast as they are. By the time we don't need gas at all anymore, the gas lines wouldn't have paid for themselves.

Probably not at 70, but if it was pushing 80 they definitely should or they'll get tons of people passing out

Generally marathon organizing experts indicate that a marathon should be held at a temperature of 45-50 degrees. If it's 70, they should strongly consider canceling or suspending the event until cooler weather. We were at, or damn near, that. Your body heats up a ton when you're running those crazy distances.