Cameroni

If you seriously believe that Musk thought we're all going to be deported to the Falklands, then you probably believe Father Christmas lives in Greenland. Some people can get humor. Other's can't. That was not "disinfomation". That was a joke.

The problem with that theory is that women, too get older. If you pick a woman your age, when you're 78 what will she look like at that age? And do you still wan to lie next to her then? We just need to recall Brigitte Bardot then and now to mind, or Pamela Anderson then and now. The horror is palpable. Yet if you choose a young girl, your odds in this regard are much improved. And that's just looks. I'm not even talking about grouchiness, laziness, declining desire to please, declining desire for sex, menopause, and all this...

Australia and New Zealand did well. Norway did a bit better. And Sweden did better than Denmark. If you take the OECD' excess death figures as a measure. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/1e53cf80-en/1/3/3/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/1e53cf80-en&_csp_=da51eb48eaaeedf7fcdf3f0f2a953149&itemIGO=oecd&itemContentType=book#section-d1e10677-66f043643c

It certainly is, I have the same with rabbit food, 74 baht one day 45 Baht the next .

I hope you pointed out how they charged you too little and scolded them appropriately for this incompetence?

The Guardian, champion of free speech, lamenting that no regulatory or penalty persecution of Musk can get him to be quiet. You gotta laugh at the hipocrisy.

He's not making excuses about any lisp, he's rightfully pointing out that audio and transmission had a technical issue, but it was very sporadic and did not detract from his dulcet tones in the slightest. No lisp, No Tyson, people who listen to the actual recording expecting that will be sorely disappointed.

But you agree the figures for Sweden, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan which Ferguson predicted are completely wrong? Looking at their final death tollls and Ferguson's model, his figures were way off, were they not?

Yes, and I don't agree with it, which is why I didn't post it. You're the one who posted it, not me.

You would have to quantify if that is the case, by how much and if having enforced lockdowns is worth the acillary cost, economic loss, the elderly unable to see their families, etc. Then if having no lockdowns, with populations adopting sensible behavioural modification out of themselves, as Ferguson had already written in 2006 in Nature is the case, would not achieve similar results. Later, when Ferguson was called to give evidence in the inquiry, he was asked "Would enough have been done without enforced lockdowns" and he replied "We will never know". So Ferguson himself said that it is possible that lockdowns were not necessary.

Yes there is. It is on the UK website of the Thai government. Also if you look at the evisa website you will see that tourist visas are also only possibe within a 6 month period.

Pure speculation unsupported by data. In reality we KNOW as a FACT that the population of the UK also out of itself modified its social behaviour in the pandemic. Even Ferguson conceded under questioning that populations act in this way. This was not unique behaviour to Sweden, Denmark or Norway. The UK in absolute numbers, with 30% of single households has far more single households than Sweden, where 50% of households are single but the population figures for the UK and Sweden are different. In absolute numbers the UK has far more single households. Yes, low population density, but Sweden is not just red houses in the country, they have major cities like Stockholm, Malmo, Goteburg too. And again, there is absolutely zero data or evidence that these factors are what caused Sweden's mortality figures to be among the lowest in the pandemic. I don't think you understand the point. The point is that Sweden has excess death rates considerably better than the vast majority of countries who used enforced lockdowns, despite Sweden not using enfoced lockdowns in the same way. This means that populations CAN survive Covid-19 without draconian lockdowns.

I am aware of Ionnidis own flawed figures, this is precisely the point I am making, that reality has far too many variables in order for any academic to produce accurate models. The reason is obvious, the model can only output based on what is put in, and if the facts are not known, or are too complex, they can not be fed into the model. So even very smart people will come out with totally flawed models. We saw this with Neil Ferguson as well. You say his modelling was correct, but actually when it is put to proper scrutiny it was flawed. In this table below one can see how Ferguson's Imperial model overestimated deaths, both with lockdown measures and without. https://www.aier.org/article/the-failure-of-imperial-college-modeling-is-far-worse-than-we-knew/

Whilst Sweden's response was not perfect, in hindsight, it was the right approach. Sweden had one of Europe’s lowest Covid-19 death rates despite shunning most lockdown restrictions, data released in May by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested. But according to the WHO figures, Sweden had an excess death rate of 56 per 100,000 – well below the global average of 96. By comparison, between 2020 and 2021, the UK’s excess death rate was 109, Spain’s was 111, and Germany’s was 116. “The incidence of severe acute Covid in children has been low” and a study showed that Swedish children “didn’t suffer the learning loss seen in many other countries”, she said. At the end of the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that Sweden’s economy would shrink by 7%. This proved to be a pessimistic forecast, with the country’s economy shrinking by just 2.8%, “significantly lower” than the EU average of 6% and the UK’s “staggering” 9.8%, said The Telegraph. https://theweek.com/news/science-health/956673/did-sweden-covid-experiment-pay-off

It is helpful, but one has to use it with care because the excess death figures do not establish if a death was caused by Covid 19 directly, during the pandemic if you recall resources were diverted to Covid 19 and people could not have operations due them being cancelled due to lack of staff and resources. So a death counted in the excess death figures could be, medically, caused by something else rather than Covid 19, for example a cancer patient not getting a vital examination or operation. Even now we continue to see higher excess death figures. This can be due to the effects of Covid or the acute pressures on NHS acute services resulting in poorer outcomes from episodes of acute illness and disruption to chronic disease detection and management. Nobody really knows for sure.

That is really not convincing because if you think back the hysterical fear that existed around Covid was in part caused by medical practitioners NOT KNOWING what effects Covid-19 would have, since it was a new disease. So without knowing this, how could doctors possibly attribute a death, in whole or in part, to Covid-19, accurately? Without doing autopsies it was just guesswork. Only much later were the real effects of Covid documented, when sufficent people contracted the disease. The government itself realised its Covid death figures were flawed, since they initially counted someone who died "with Covid" in the Covid 19 death figures, if they died with Covid 28 days after contracting the disease. "This review found that there remains a divergence between the 28 day measure and the number of deaths where COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate as explained below. COVID-19 death registrations should continue to be used as the primary figure for measuring COVID-19 deaths. The number of deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test is no longer recommended. https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2023/01/27/changes-to-the-way-we-report-on-covid-19-deaths/ Yes, but the point surely is that going through the pandemic substantially WITHOUT hardcore lockdowns was MORE successful than imposing the hardcore lockdowns Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK imposed. There was no need for these lockdowns, as we saw Sweden, who bravely resisted the pressure to impose them, did perfectly fine without them. Now, that the dust has settled Norway's leading epidemiologist complimented Sweden's performance. https://unherd.com/newsroom/norways-top-epidemiologist-sweden-handled-covid-well/

Very doubtful. No proper autopsies to determine the actual cause of death was done in the case of almos all very old peole who contracted Covid and subsequently died. They were automatically counted as "death by Covid". Most likely the true death toll from Covid-19 in the UK is far lower. Not avoiding it at all. Let's talk about it. You can see here the whole mess the UK government made with the death figures from Covid. The government itself recognised that it made an error in that they at the beginning counted deaths "with" covid in the actual death figures, ie where someone died within 28 days of contracting Covid they were automatically counted as having died due to Covid. However, the government saw the folly of this approach and later changed that approach, saying now you should only count a Covid death where it says on the death registration certificate "Covid 19". Even then there was no requirement for an autopsy to really determine that Covid 19 was the cause of death, a doctor putting Covid 19 on the death certificate sufficed to include that death in the Covid 19 death tally. You can read that from the horse's mouth, ie the UK gov, here: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2023/01/27/changes-to-the-way-we-report-on-covid-19-deaths/ If proper autopsies had been done in each case, it is virtually 100% certain that the death from Covid 19 figures in the UK would be substantially lower, alas, the expense and risk at the time ensured it was not done.

Just to refute John's points one by one, in fact the Influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 has death figures in the 17 million to 100 million range. The total death toll from Covid 19 is around 7 million, and those figures include millions of old people who happened to get Covid, then died and were caught in the statistics as "deaths from covid". So actually, we have had pandemics before that were FAR, FAR worse than the Covid pandemic, and there were no crippling lockdowns imposed and yet humanity survived. This fact of course supports the conclusion that the lockdowns were excessive and unnecessary. Yes, first Ferguson predicted 250,000 deaths, then he conceded his original model was flawed and instead doubled the prediction to 500,000 deaths. The actual figure of 232,000 deaths of course includes a substantial number of old people who contracted Covid-19, subsequently died and were automatically counted as "deaths from covid". Some more mathematical modelling. On what basis and what data was the figure calculated? If we have learnt one thing from the pandemic it is that the supposed leading insttutions, like Imperial College, get things spectacularly wrong. You need to read and actually understand what you are quoting. The Nature article where this quote says "efforts to reproduce results were successful" refers not to Fergusons death predictions, but rather to the technical software code that was used in the model, ie not the data that was fed to the model, or the data it produced. A bunch of coders examined the code because reports of bugs had been made and found that the code worked fine. This in no way can be understood as a vindication of Ferguson's death figures. Not in Sweden, were neither enforced social distancing nor enforced mask wearing was used the way it was in the UK, and yet Sweden's excess death figures were far better than in countries which used hardcore enforced social distancing and enforced mask wearing, like Italy, Spain or UK. So how can one possibly argue that enforced lockdowns and face masks had any significant effect? Sweden proves the exact opposite.

That Daffy Duck stuff is a distortion, I listened to the interview and Trump sounds perfectly normal and nothing like Daffy Duck. Was actually a funny interview worth a listen.

Ekachan, close to L'Opera, is always busy and the food is good and moderately priced. But the busy amossphere and sketchy service may annoy some.

It is quite shocking and unbelievable that some people even now are claiming Ferguson's modelling was accurate. I find that both amusing and terrifying. The UK's own Covid-19 inquiry, constituted by none other than Boris Johnson, has been widely criticised for determining the result before the inquiry had even finished its work. Forme Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption went so far as to call it a farce. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/covid-19-inquiry-farce-jonathan-sumption-7vgtxp037 Not just Lord Sumption, but also the director of the University of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Carl Heneghan, has criticised the inquiry, for "for refusing to engage in the core issues of the pandemic and "silencing science"". Why did Heneghan say this? Because the inquiry refused to investigate " the accuracy and use of epidemiological modelling in decision making". In other words the very reason why politicians in the UK adopted draconian lockdown measures, the various papers Neil Ferguson provided to government, were not evaluated in any way. As a result Michael Simmons in the Spectator wrote "that the Inquiry was asking the wrong questions and had learned nothing about the problems of the use of modelling which he thought had led to inaccuracies in decision making." Simmons says that the models failed to consider the effects of behaviour change, citing historic work by Neil Ferguson, and evidence given Ben Warner, the data scientist. Carl Heneghan said that rather than assessing whether lockdowns were an effective policy the inquiry assumed that the correct policy was to impose more severe lockdown restrictions earlier. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-needed-a-covid-inquiry-but-this-isnt-it/ Anyway, so much for the UK government's post pandemic inquiry which is failing to look at the evidence of whether modelling was accurate. Let's see. shall we? "Epidemiological models will always have monstrous error margins: there are too many variables, as we knew long before Covid. The botched reactions to BSE and foot-and-mouth were both driven by overly pessimistic models. Professor Neil Ferguson, who led Imperial’s Covid work, said that ‘up to 200 million people could be killed’ by bird flu. The government started stockpiling antivirals at a substantial cost after being told that the ‘best-case’ scenario would involve 3,100 deaths in the UK. The actual death toll across the world was 457. Was the Covid modelling any more accurate? If not, why not?" So we already knew way before Covid-19 that the mathematical modelling work of Professor Ferguson was wildly inaccurate. Was Ferguson's Covid-19 modelling accurate? Ferguson was called to account and gave evidence. "The KC wanted to know if modelling had factored in how different population groups were affected by pandemic measures. How effective would stay at home orders be among different ethnic groups, for example. ‘None of the models looked at the indirect consequences of interventions’, came the reply." Interestingly Ferguson predicted that Sweden would have 85000 deaths. Despite refusing to lockdown in the same way as the UK Sweden had less than a third of that. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-inquiry-asked-the-wrong-questions-of-neil-ferguson/ Did Neil Ferguson's models take into account that the population would make behaviour changes of their own accord? No, even though Ferguson himself was aware of this issue with his modelling in 2006: " It was hardly considered that Brits might regulate themselves in such a way that a legally enforced lockdown – a lockdown that is still chasing people through the courts – might not have been needed. There are no such ‘validated’ models to do that, said Ferguson. Indeed he himself pointed this problem out in an article in Nature in 2006. We do not assume any spontaneous change in the behaviour of uninfected individuals as the pandemic progresses but note that behavioural changes that increased social distance together with some school and workplace closure occurred in past pandemics and might be likely to occur in a future pandemic even if not part of official policy. So nearly 15 years before Covid struck Ferguson knew how crucial self-governed behaviour change might be and how unprepared modelling was to take account of it." ‘Was that [first] lockdown necessary?’ ‘This is not a question we can definitively answer, the professor replied. Would voluntary measures have been enough? ‘We’ll never know.’ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-inquiry-asked-the-wrong-questions-of-neil-ferguson/ But more importantly, was the modelling done by Ferguson anywhere near correct? There are actually several scientific studies that have been menioned in UK parliament which show how Ferguson's modelling was deeply flawed: "That work is now being challenged. Because of time, I will quote only a small selection. In a paper entitled, “The effect of interventions on COVID-19”, 13 Swedish academics—Ferguson ain’t popular in Sweden, I can tell Members that much—said that the conclusions of the Imperial study were not justified and went beyond the data. Regensburg and Leibniz university academics directly refuted Imperial College in a paper entitled “The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe”, which said that the authors of the Imperial study “allege that non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by 11 European countries saved millions of lives. We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.” Former chief epidemiologist Johan Giesecke said Ferguson’s model was “almost hysterical”. In the House of Lords, Viscount Ridley talked of a huge discrepancy and flaws in the model and the modelling. John Ioannidis from Stanford University said that the “assumptions and estimates” seemed “substantially inflated”. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2022-01-18/debates/AB251DCA-8088-485C-BF49-3999C4EE9AC5/Covid-19ForecastingAndModelling So what about the countries that ignored Feguson's modelling or saw it as flawed and did not implement draconian lockdowns? ".. numerous studies have shown Sweden’s excess death rate to be among the lowest in Europe. Figures by the World Health Organisation, for example, show that in 2020 and 2021, the country had an average excess death rate of 56 per 100,000 — compared to 109 in the UK, 111 in Spain, 116 in Germany and 133 in Italy." https://unherd.com/newsroom/norways-top-epidemiologist-sweden-handled-covid-well/ Regarding the effectiveness of masks: "It is even harder to pin down the evidence for compulsory wearing of face masks in public. At the beginning of the pandemic, most experts seemed to agree that masks were a waste of time. Yet within a year, mask-wearing had become compulsory. What happened to change policy? The most important new study was from Copenhagen University Hospital, and it seemed to support the original policy of discouraging masks, showing no significant effect for mask-wearers. The government’s own ‘evidence summary’ for the use of face coverings in schools found a difference in Covid absences of just 0.6 per cent between schools where masks had been worn and those where they had not, which the authors of the report had to admit was statistically insignificant. The abandonment of scientific debate and the failure to conduct new studies left the field wide open for radical views to influence government policy." https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-needed-a-covid-inquiry-but-this-isnt-it/

This. Whatever role China played in the Covid-19 saga, once the virus emerged in our borders it was up to OUR politicians how we respond. And Boris Johnson and his government were the first European government to introduce draconian lockdowns, based on the flawed mathematical guesswork of one Neil Ferguson. According to Lord Sumption, a retired Supreme Court Judge, the infamous "Report 9" by Neil Ferguson was the cause of "one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times". As you may recall this report by Ferguson dealt not only with the UK but also the US, and Neil Ferguson and his fellow academic geniuses got it spectacularly wrong but nevertheless both the UK and US adopted it as gospel. This report changed UK government policy, causing ever harder, and longer, lockdowns, based on the flawed predictions of Neil Ferguson and other academics from the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist) And it is not as if Covid-19 was Ferguson's first blunder, there was a long history of Ferguson making Cassandra like hysteric predictions that did not come to pass. He had a history of being wrong long before Covid 19. As we later found out. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-real-scandal-is-why-did-anyone-ever-listen-to-this-guy/ Britain's draconian lockdowns, caused by Ferguson's false predictions, were copied all over the world, by almost all governments. Thereby causing trillions of dollars of economic damage and bringing people to economic ruin. Ferguson had to resign in shame and disgrace from the government advisory body, but not because of his incompetent work, but because he ignored his own lockdown advice and went about banging some broad during a lockdown. It is an absolute scandal, that the incompetent Boris Johnson government and this complete failure of an academic, Neil Ferguson, were never brought to justice to account for all the damage they caused all over the world with their criminal recklessness and incompetence.

I know I know, I'm not implying you did, but because Ashkenazis score somewhat higher IQ tests, Sephardim don't surprise surprise because they did not enjoy the same Central European education systems, that argument is sometimes trotted out. Even though Chinese, Japanese and S Koreans score highest. But pretty smart, I can certainly get on board with. It's their moral rectitude I admire, Normal Finkelstein is a class act all the way. As for the Russian economy, it is soaring at the moment, according to the Economist: "Across the world worries are mounting about the economy. In America and Canada unemployment is rising, while consumer sentiment remains depressed. Europe continues to flirt with recession. Don’t even mention China. Yet there is one place where the mood is quite different. Despite fierce sanctions and pariah status, Russia’s economy is growing strongly. It turns out that bacchanalian spending, at a time of war, really juices an economy." "This year Russian GDP is expected to rise by over 3% in real terms, continuing its fastest growth streak since the early 2010s" ."Other “real time” measures of activity, including one published by Goldman Sachs, a bank, suggest the economy is accelerating (see chart 1). Unemployment is close to an all-time low; the rouble is doing fine." "You might expect Mr Putin to be goosing the numbers. But the Levada Centre, an independent pollster, finds equally startling trends (see chart 2). Only once in the past three decades has sentiment been higher." https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/08/11/vladimir-putin-spends-big-and-sends-russias-economy-soaring It's an excellent article, well worth a read. Friendly countries like China and India will continue to invest in Russia. By sheer population size Russia is still an interesting market and its economy will continue to grow. However, in 5 years the enormous reserves Russia has accumulated since 2010 will be gone. This is why I don't think Putin will want this war to last forever. But of course Ukraine is in a much worse situation, economically.

Yes, in theory South Koreans, Chinese and Japanese should be outperforming everyone in terms of Nobel, as they score higher on IQ tests, but that may come in the future. South Koreans in particular seem terrifyingly smart, but Japanese too. Yes, survival for Israel is a focus, but they also have normal universities where the subjects forming the Nobel categories are taught. However, you will find very few nobel laureates from Israeli universities, which does not fit with their supposed super intelligence. I think Trump has a good rapport with Putin, and being the prime backer of Ukraine, they can tell them "if you don't sign this we'll pull the plug". It should be fairly straight forward, yes Putin will keep some of the land, but he's going to be highly pragmatic, as always, because this war, as you rightly pointed out is extremely costly for Russia and they cannot afford it indefinitely. Though clearly longer than Ukraine.

Speaking of San Khampaeng, along the San Kamphaeng road to Mae on is Nasi Jumpru. A superb thai restaurant. Nice inventive and original menu, good service and surroundings and moderate mid-range pricing