Mallard

Going for a triple...

For the comments that Isreal has the highest % vaccinated yet has a massive outbreak...that's only if you count the % of the population that is eligible for the vaccine.

Remember when I wrote a few posts ago that population vaccination percentages aren't evenly distributed across age groups and demographics? Well, Isreal has a very young population, and over 25% of their population is ineligible for the shot.

Secondly, they got vaccinated very quickly, and 90% of those vaccinated received their 2nd dose over 5 months ago. Does this point to waning immunity? Some people want to say that's why we need a booster, based off antibodies present in blood tests (some even say it's not surprising that we would need one because typically we all would have gotten our 2nd shot a lot longer after the first, but we chose speed over efficacy). Other studies say not so fast, antibodies always wane over time, but are looking at bone marrow to understand whether there's some memory and our immune system will mount a response regardless. Don't take this as scientists flip flopping on issues either. Recommendations are made based on data, data is gathered through studies that take time, and those studies can be run in different ways, and results must be peer reviewed. Science is hard.

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You really think the virus is spread more from the vaccinated people in public than the unvaccinated? Ive met VERY few vaccine hesitant people compared to those that are convinced its either a hoax, won't be anything more than a cold or strictly won't get it just because they are being asked to get it.

My favorite are the people who say that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity, so they are taking Vitamin C, D, and going out without masks to "exercise their immune system" in order to prepare for the infection.

Yes, this is real shit from real people in my community that are actively protesting masks in schools and the vaccine in general.

If you look at a quick stat I read the other day from 13 states from April to July 2021, 92% (569,142) of the Covid cases were UNvaccinated. 8% (46,312) were vaccinated. If what you said is correct its even more obvious how well the vaccine works if people that are vaccinated are engaging in "unsafe" behavior.

Yea, but someone's brother's sisters friend said on the internet that everyone they know who got the vaccine got COVID and died, so that's totally proof that the government is falsifying all the data in order to CONTROL everyone into getting the vax. Totally New World Order shit. For reals. Tucker told me so.

...I really need to stop reading the comments on my local community Facebook pages.

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A better way to respect Mallard's dad would be to stop parroting this lie that only overweight and unhealthy people are dying. Tell everyone you know who's anti-vax about this guy you know whose dad was totally healthy and died anyway. And then encourage them to get the vaccine even if they're also healthy, so they don't suffer the same fate.

I'm not offended by this, I actually agree with it 100%. Had my dad not gotten sick in Oct, he would have had his first dose of the vaccine in Jan and been fully vaccinated in Feb. It's ~3 months. If he got COVID ~3 months later I believe he would still be alive.

Get vaccinated.

...

 

2)You have a shortage of staff. (at my aunt's hospital they are currently at 10% understaffing) So your solution is to fire people for not getting the vaccine. (currently 33% of the staff at her hospital are on the list for termination for refusal to vaccinate) So now you are even more understaffed.

The hospitals likely see some potential liability for having an unvaccinated staff member infecting the people they care for. If your business revolves around serving people who are immuno compromised or vulnerable to infection, I believe you do have a responsibility to get vaccinated.

The government has a $100B fund that they are using to pay 20% extra for all people labeled COVID that are on medicare. Add in all the money for testing paid by the government. Hospitals should have more money to pay staff (which is proven when they pay travel nurses). If they quit lining their pockets, hospitals wouldn't be so "full".

I wouldn't say that extra 20% is "lining the pockets" of the hospitals. When treating COVID patients they go through a lot more PPE than they used to, and costs of PPE as well as O2 hasn't remained stagnant. I would like more evidence that hospitals are making massive profits from this then an anecdote.

And looking at just COVID deaths doesn't account for the effects of the Pandemic. There were 1.5M excess deaths so far. 900,000 attributed to COVID. 600,000 other excess deaths. Those include people not getting vaccines because it was termed "elective" (over 17 million children worldwide missed vaccinations during "social distancing") and elective procedures were being denied, suicide/mental health, alcoholism, etc. Not to mention economic effects because of having to shut down "Joe's Diner" meanwhile we can still go to Big Box stores or cram 100K screaming fans into a sporting event.

There are lots of articles about these excess deaths and how COVID deaths are likely undercounted. It's not that 600k people OD'd on meth, died in a car accident, or committed suicide. The evidence points to COVID being undercounted.

While I cannot give you hard numbers on this, I can tell you my experience as a First Responder. In early 2020 we received direction from the State Fire Marshal and the Ohio Board of EMS. If we responded to a house fire, and it was determined that you had left a pot of food on the stove and forgot about it because you got tied up in a ZOOM meeting, we were supposed to ask if you normally worked from home. If you were home because of the shutdown, that was a "COVID Incident". If you were driving to the grocery store and got in a car accident during hours you normally would have been at work, that is a "COVID Incident". Cut your hand making your kids lunch who normally would have ate at school? "COVID Incident." Just like there are press conferences where it was specifically stated "Dying with COVID is the same as dying from COVID". When I started seeing things like this is when I really started getting hesitant and wanting more information.

You're insinuating here (whether on purpose or not) that COVID was falsely listed as a cause of death for a large number of people and for frivolous reasons, but an emergency response report is not a death certificate. Again, there are not hundreds of thousands of people that died from some random accident that got counted as a COVID death. The evidence points the other way; that COVID deaths are severely undercounted.

How many of those were due to COVID and how many were just listed as COVID when they were already dying of something else and may or may not have contracted it? Genuinely curious. Seeking learning and understanding.

There are not large numbers of people being counted as a COVID death when they were killed by some other random event, like a car accident, or a piano falling from the sky.

But this is where people try to cast doubt at the numbers of dead. Let's say you get COVID and you end up in the hospital. Your condition deteriorates and you need oxygen due to COVID pneumonia, eventually get intubated. Your blood pressure is also fluctuating and now you're on meds to try to stabilize this. Your kidney function decreases and you require dialysis. Then you get sepsis, or a number of many other complications that typically result. Organs start shutting down, blood pressure is harder to maintain. They stop the blood pressure meds and you die. What killed you? Was it sepsis? Renal failure? Heart failure? Etc? None of these would have happened if not for the COVID infection. COVID is one of several things listed on the death certificate, but without the COVID infection none of the rest would have happened.

However, people on the internet will try to tell you that it should only be counted as a COVID death if COVID is the ONLY thing listed on the death certificate, and equate sepsis/kidney failure/etc with someone who was in a car accident while COVID positive and claim COVID didn't kill you.

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want to know how I save on hospital money... not going and being healthy. i spend the time doing that. folks who spend the time investing in there health daily, save your insurance cost and reduce covid cost. should talk to those whos an easy 50 pounds plus over weight and lecture them about impact to others covid or not.

While I don't think Biden should have gone ahead with the mandate right now (politically), I think private industry was already on the path to take care of this through insurance surcharges (same as they already do smoking) and job-specific mandates.

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78% of eligible Israelis are vaccinated. They also have one of the highest daily infection rates worldwide despite one of the highest vaccination rates.

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we're talking about a 99.983% survival rate in our country overall without considering any health issues. I and kiddos are in the 99.999 group. it's all one big game of fuck around and find out. I'll take my chances how I see fit and you're welcome to do the same.

The mortality rate is around 2%, not 0.017%, and that is using death statistics that are believed to be severely undercounted. And yes, the mortality rate does vary by age group, but you're not 99.999% likely to survive. The post/meme the originated statistics like this is fake news.

As said many times before, just looking at survival also doesn't account for all the long term effects many survivors have (a larger group than the 2% that die). Yes, some people have little to no symptoms, while others can't walk to their mailbox 6 months later.

Keep in mind on vaccination statistics that the distribution of vaccinations across age groups and demographics are not uniform. The lower age groups have done a possible poor job getting vaccinated, and children aren't even eligible yet.

Then there's the added problem of beds full of COVID patients causing people with other conditions to get turned away and die.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/13/1036593269/coronavirus-alabama-43-icus-at-capacity-ray-demonia

As several have pointed out trump had a pact with the taliban to get all troops out of afganastan and sleepy joe COULDN'T negate it.

 

 

 

AAAAAAAAA..wait a second, wasn't trumps deal supposed to have us out in may, but this is august and we are just getting out. Didn't the deal break when june 1 arrived ??

 

 

 

And maybe if milley wasn't so busy writing a book trashing trump,maybe just maybe he would have a better plan on getting the Americans out.

- I have Trump supporting friends on Facebook saying that Biden is negotiating with terrorists (the Taliban) about the terms of our evacuation and that Trump would never have done this. They went so far as to call the Taliban "Biden’s boys."

- Those same friends also say Trump had a perfect plan for withdrawing from Afghanistan while keeping the peace.

- Withdrawing from Afganistan was not a partisan issue.

- Trump's deal was negotiated directly with the Taliban, without involving the Afgan government we put in place.

- Trump's deal with the Taliban also released 5000 Taliban prisoners. (Art of the Deal, right?)

- Trump's deal had a public withdrawal date of May 1. There are people saying that Biden is at fault for publicly telling the Taliban what day we were leaving, and again that this would never have happened under Trump, but Trump also had a date set.

- Trump's deal already had a significant draw down of US troops in the country, going from 17,000 down to 2500 by the time Biden took office.

IMO, with the restrictions Trump put on the visa process, and a timeline of May 1 for withdrawal I don't see how it would have been possible for him to evacuate 100,000+ people. Those allies were going to be left there. It was going to be just like Syria; a US military withdrawal and fuck all those left behind that stood with us.

And now Trump advocating for us to go back in there, saying we should never have left is complete political BS. He's always playing both sides of the coin.

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Even Trump knew it (he was saying it at rallies back in March/April).

However, from the interviews that were even happening back in early Aug, the US thought it would take 6 to 9 months for the Taliban to take the entire country. This is why I said above that everyone understood and accepted this would happen, and the Taliban would get ahold of US equipment in the process, it was just the timetable that was wrong.

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To pass the buck onto someone else is weak and the exact opposite thing Biden preached will getting elected. He’s only blamed other people for his admins failures.

Actually, he's done the exact opposite. He's said multiple times that the buck stops with him, that it was his decision and he takes full responsibility. Trump never took the blame for anything.

If the problem is the way in which we left, what would you have done differently?

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"Are the Taliban now using captured U.S. Blackhawks to hang enemies and parade their corpses around town?"

It seems the answer might be "no."

Also, this shows and talks about how almost everything at the Kabul airport was decommissioned:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42204/taliban-show-off-captured-aircraft-and-other-spoils-after-taking-over-kabuls-airport

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This has to be one of the biggest military failures of any modern day president. Its shocking how poorly this was executed.

We need to remember that as part of the Doha Agreement the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban, US troops had already been down down significantly in the country. There were only 2500 US troops in Afghanistan when Biden took office. On Aug 1 there were around 650 left. Between the 12th and 16th of August Biden deployed an additional 7000 troops back to Afghanistan.

Trump had publicly set a withdrawal date of May this year, Biden pushed it to September 11, then August 31.

One of the reasons there was trouble with getting our allies out was a crippled visa system that was dismantled under Trump. They could not process the volume of requests coming in, even before the mess of the last 2 weeks. Biden did remove those hurdles in order to quickly get people out of there.

Over 100,000 (I think the number is over 117k) people have been airlifted out of Afghanistan, which makes it one of the largest operations (if not the largest) in history.

With Trump's withdrawl date in May, the crippled visa system, and the drawdown of troops, I just don't believe anyone when they say that Trump had some grand plan to get everyone out and Biden dropped the ball on something he had set in motion. All of our allies would have been left in Afghanistan, just like Syria. There were casualties, but to use your words, Biden put warheads on foreheads and there's no telling how many civilians would have been killed if that vehicle had made it to the airport.

It is bad that the Taliban now has a lot of our equipment, but it seems like that outcome had already been predicted, just not so fast. Luckily some things were decommissioned at the Kabul airport before we left. We gave the Afganistan army a bunch of equipment to fight the war, we trained them for 20 years, and they surrendered the country in 2 weeks.

Yes, an airstrike to destroy helicopters and such would be nice, but it's clear from Trump's peace agreement with the Taliban that we don't consider ourselves at war with them. We agreed to leave to country, provided the Taliban didn't harbor al-Qaeda, and that agreement was made between the US (Trunp administration) and the Taliban, without the Afgan government that we put in place.

I want to see congressional investigations worse than any Benghazi commission so all the facts can be out in the open. However, with all of the stuff I listed above, I'm having a hard time putting this all on Biden.

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serious question, if trump were still in office do we think he'd get impeached for a 3rd time over this disaster?

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I wanted to keep the focus on ideas for next vehicle and not what's wrong with the Jeep. And not that anyone here ever owes anyone an explanation. But if I owe anyone here an explanation it would be you since I know how it feels to pour yourself into a product.

 

It's been a great car, exactly what I wanted... but...

 

Since I got it in December it's been in the shop 3 times for diesel emissions systems related issues; 1 recall and 2 other fixes. Luckily most of it's been covered under recalls or by (class action court ordered) extended warranty. But, it's just too much for my liking, and this last time it was in the shop too long and finally I had to cover $4xx of what I felt should have been covered. It now has a new DOC/DPF, DEF line, injector and pump, 1 of the EGTs, EGR cooler (recall). I think this would have been $4-5k if not covered under warranty. Am I dumb to get rid of a used car with coverage one of the major systems that seems to have issues, to get a different used car with no coverage but I think should be better? What happens when another system fails that's not covered (air sus, there are possible a few electrical issues that are common problems)?

 

To top it off when I got it back from the EGR recall I go to poke around under the hood to check out the fix and one of the sound deadeners and engine cover is missing, 1st trip back to the dealership post fix. After this time I get home and notice a loud gurgling. Quickly realize the coolant reservoir is boiling, had spit out some coolant. The cap wasn't tightened down fully, just lightly put on. Luckily our house isn't far from the dealer so it only got slightly over normal temp. Need to go back again today so the can 'top off and bleed to make sure no air got into the system'. I'm not even sure why they would have been in the coolant system for DOC/DPF, EGT and EGR injector and lines. Did they do the test drives like this?

 

 

Even driving it home last night I was wondering if I should keep it. I think it's exactly what I wanted out of a vehicle and anything else I get won't drive as nice (body-on-frame and coil sus VS air sus on unibody) and be more expensive.

 

To be fair, I'm not laying all of the blame for this system on FCA (or is this VM Motori's part?). Everyone seems to have varying levels of issues with the new diesel emissions systems. Which seem to be too complicated for anyone to figure out how to do with high reliability, at least not in an economic way. The emissions systems mandates on diesels now are really strict, specific and seem overbearing. This is coming from someone who would rather sell this than do an emissions systems delete kit.

 

Congrats on the new job! Where did you go (GM?), what will you be doing?

I took a job at GM working on UltraCruise, so staying in the same general field (AD). Probably not much else I can say besides that lol.

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It's an FCA vehicle. [emoji38]

Had zero problems with my '18 Durango so far with 76k miles on it. <fingers crossed> But might have to get something from GM as I rack up the miles (now that I switched jobs).

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I'm sure we're all looking at $5-$10k fun cars all the time and I see a few chewy Solstices up in that range.

 

It's just tough to not go either Miata or even a C5 Corvette (if you stretch the budget a bit) at that point.

https://pittsburgh.craigslist.org/cto/d/new-castle-97-c5-corvette/7366203520.html

https://houston.craigslist.org/cto/d/spring-2000-corvette-ls1-speed/7355743608.html

https://www.ebay.com/itm/224553464342?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&siteid=0&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&toolid=20008&campid=5336658105&customid=

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On my way into work today, there was a group of people with large signs of "Impeach Biden" by the 270 on ramp. No surprise there, given the current shit show...

It's a constant shit show around me though...there is still a Trump rally every Sat and Sun on the street corner, and up north near my cabin there's Trump propaganda everywhere. It's like it's still in the middle of the campaign.

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Nice! At times I do miss my Sky and I just switched jobs to work at GM, so I feel like I should pick up something like this again...

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Must have been a lot of someones. They are now on their second recall because the first recall didn't work. It would not make sense to recall 61,000 cars for the second time (69,000 the first time) due to shoddy wiring in people's homes. Changing the car would not fix the problem. The issue seems to be battery related. Hence why they are saying don't charge over 90%, don't deplete below 70 mile range, park it away from everything after charging, and don't charge it overnight. Some of the recent fires have had people injured from smoke inhalation. This points to a vehicle in use not charging.

 

 

 

I think EV have there place and that place will expand in the future but, it is still a developing technology. Both the vehicle/battery itself, and the infrastructure to support them.

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Yeah, I had a first gen Volt too...added about a dollar a day to my electric bill charging from 0 mi every weekday and multiple charges during weekends due to many short trips.

I think your dad got hit harder from his buddies charging there too.

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Sunday and Monday it was very hazy up here. Even visibility looking across our lake or down the highway was reduced. Camera phones don't do it justice though.

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Unplugged Performance has one at Pikes Peak with Randy Probst behind the wheel. If he doesn't stuff it, it looks like they'll do well.

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I have a Sylvan Tri-toon with a 115 on it for putzing to the sandbars and pulling the kids in a tube. It actually moves pretty good for being a big, heavy tank.

Have a couple of kayaks too, but I end up with a kid on my lap and towing the other, so I don't do that too much.

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I just wish the "F150 Lightning" would be more sportsting in the same vein of the previous Lightnings.

I would expect this to be quicker than any of their ICE-powered models, at least in the higher trim levels.

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Agreed.

 

 

 

I think the point I was trying to drive home with Panduh - who I have personally met and think is a really good guy - is that we need to treat COVID not as a political football but as a dangerous unknown amongst us. Mask up, wash your hands, or get the vaccine. I’m not supporting Biden with that statement, just supporting the science.

IMO, I would have rather seen a more phased approach to returning everything to 'normal.' I think the bandaid has been ripped off too fast when my state (MI) was just in the midst of a crisis only ~2 weeks ago and we don't understand enough about what's going on in India (where lots of people who previously had COVID and recovered are getting sick again, but with worse symptoms). Also, it still seems like it's unknown whether a vaccinated person can pass the virus to someone else, and that does concern me with my kids. Their odds are better than mine with this virus, but a friend of theirs just had MIS-C following asymptomatic COVID and almost died several times over the course of a week. Because of these unknowns I'm going to continue to wear a mask until we know more and I see what happens to numbers in the US.

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Almost a copy cat of the RAM 1000/FIAT Toro sold in Mexico/South America.

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