Bill Gates calls Trump’s COVID advisor a fake expert

[Hans Blaster]

Is not Europe's numbers going back up again, ever after long lock downs?

Yes, COVID19 infections are going up in Europe, but there seem to be some wide variation among countries.

Belgium (which had the worst outbreak in the spring) is up as is France and Spain (two other countries with bad spring outbreaks).

The Czech Republic is bad after a fairly light spring followed by a mid-summer end-of-the-pandemic party (oops).

Relative to its neighbors, Germany is doing much better right now.

We don't know how these trends will hold. The inter-Europe borders are not very tight (and have prior to the pandemic been mostly open like between US states for years) and we can't say how those countries will trend. They are starting to reapply restrictions again after a fairly quiet summer.

I'm not very well versed on the current status in Europe so I can't generally identify the sources of the recent growth in Europe.

 

[Belk]

A scientist? I well remember the early days of the PC. DOS stood for Dodgy Operating System. In those days you had to pay for bug fixes, oops, upgrades. I remember how Bill Gates made his fortune. I would not call his methods scientific.

You wouldn't call evolution scientific either.

 

[Aussie Pete]

You wouldn't call evolution scientific either.

And I would be right.

 

[Aussie Pete]

MS became a successful company by some pretty hard nosed tactics: monopoly power, etc., not on the "spectacular quality" of their product. (It probably worked OK, I wouldn't know. I have never chosen to use *any* MS product, though I am occasionally forced to. Currently I despise their email service. No MS software is on my computer.)

And you are correct. Gates is not and never has been a scientist. He did take some computer science classes in college, but did not complete a degree in CS, which is not a science anyway, but a branch of applied mathematics.

Bill Gates made the best business deal ever, buying some not so good software and reselling it to IBM. IBM was convinced that the PC was never going to take off and handed Mr Gates a goldmine. It was not until Win 95 that the OS became even a semblance of a reasonable operating system. I once owned an Amiga. It was streets ahead of the PC. Unfortunately the Amiga was overpriced and way too expensive to upgrade.

 

[Aussie Pete]

FYI: IBM made DOS. Microsoft made MS-DOS. The upgrades alternated between the two.

Not so. IBM was a mainframe company. The PC was a nuisance product to them. MS bought DOS. IBM agreed to install MS-DOS on every PC ever sold. Other OS's were tried and failed. Who wants to pay extra when the PC already comes with an OS? So MS had effectively a monopoly. If it was not for Apple, I imagine that we'd be on DOS 63 about now.

 

[Tanj]

And I would be right.

No, no you really wouldn't.

 

[Belk]

And I would be right.

Actual scientists disagree with you.

 

[Aussie Pete]

Actual scientists disagree with you.

Obviously some scientists disagree with me. Others are in 100% agreement. I was happy when evolution was taught as a theory. I did not accept it. Now it is taught as fact and that is false.

 

[The Ant]

Obviously some scientists disagree with me. Others are in 100% agreement. I was happy when evolution was taught as a theory. I did not accept it. Now it is taught as fact and that is false.

Actually, it is both a fact and a theory.

Sorry for the off topic comment.

 

[SigurdReginson]

I don't pretend to have an expert opinion on this. I'm merely one who asks questions. What if herd immunity truly is one of the main things that will get us through this? Help me to understand.

Well, herd immunity is the ONLY thing that will truly stop the deadliness of the virus. It's the end goal, though. To suggest that it's the method of achieving that goal is just... Well... Reckless. It will kill scores of people needlessly.

Imagine that you have a child with the end result of them becoming an adult. You can just kick them out of the house onto the streets and say "Sorry kid, it's time to grow up," or do you prepare them with an upbringing and give them the tools and skills needed to excell against the struggles of life to become well rounded and healthy adults in society.

The kid who gets kicked out into the streets still becomes an adult eventually, but he gets scarred in ways that will effect him forever... Needlessly.

Is not Europe's numbers going back up again, ever after long lock downs? Doesn't that mean if you try to run from the virus (figuratively speaking) shutting things down....YES numbers starting trending down.....you think you've got success....open back up and here it comes again. What if there's really no avoiding everyone from getting it and how many times do you keep destroying the economy hurting untold millions of people in the process?

It's not about running from the virus, it's about softening it's blow. By taking measures to stop an unbridled spread of the virus, it allows hospitals to stay open and treat people. If we just let the virus spread unchecked, hospitals would become inundated with people, and doctors would have to choose between saving the guy with an immuno deficiency who has covid and is dying vs. the guy who is dying of liver failure.

Another problem with covid and hospitals is that entire wings are wasted space since they are reserved to quarantine covid patients, which is what happened with the outbreak at my hospital that I worked at. Flooding hospitals with sick and dying patients all at once because we didn't take on smart precautions against a pandemic isn't a good idea. It's a woefully terrible and irresponsible idea.

The problem with this country and the virus is that we didn't prepare ourselves for this. We had plenty of time to get ready, and we squandered it. Now we are reaping the rewards of what happens when we get caught with our pants down. Now we have to decide what an acceptable number of human deaths is vs. our pocket book, and in this country that glorifies greed, I don't hold out much hope for the truly vulnerable folks who are gonna die in the end.

 

[Tanj]

Obviously some scientists disagree with me.

We all disagree with you.

Others are in 100% agreement

Name one. Name one actual biologist/biomedical researcher that thinks evolution is not scientific.

 

[7thKeeper]

Obviously some scientists disagree with me. Others are in 100% agreement. I was happy when evolution was taught as a theory. I did not accept it. Now it is taught as fact and that is false.

Oof, this blatant lack of knowledge about what theory means always makes me sigh. And the some disagree/others agree arguement is a... Let's call it an imaginative way to put it. If the vast vast majority of the people working in the field disagree with me, I wouldn't call it "some".

 

[Kentonio]

Obviously some scientists disagree with me. Others are in 100% agreement. I was happy when evolution was taught as a theory. I did not accept it. Now it is taught as fact and that is false.

Ah yes, just like that pesky Theory of Gravity that we can all chose to accept or not..

 

[Kentonio]

I don't pretend to have an expert opinion on this. I'm merely one who asks questions. What if herd immunity truly is one of the main things that will get us through this? Help me to understand. Is not Europe's numbers going back up again, ever after long lock downs? Doesn't that mean if you try to run from the virus (figuratively speaking) shutting things down....YES numbers starting trending down.....you think you've got success....open back up and here it comes again. What if there's really no avoiding everyone from getting it and how many times do you keep destroying the economy hurting untold millions of people in the process?

Say you have 100m people in a country. If the virus effected everyone in the country equally, then it would potentially kill around 2m of them.

So why not just let it run its course and get it over with, its going to happen anyway right? Well no..

• The country only has a limited healthcare capacity, and this isn't something you can endlessly expand overnight. Even if you build a thousand new hospitals there are only so many trained doctors and nurses to actually staff them, and those take a long time to train.
• As we saw happen in Italy, this virus quickly sucks up your available medical capacity. Large numbers of people need to be placed on ventilation and painstakingly nursed back to health if they don't succumb. Again, creating new beds or machines isn't enough, you actually need people to care for the patients in them.
  
• Doctors and nurses are just as vulnerable as anyone else to the virus, and protecting them against it makes their jobs considerably harder. Imagine working 18 hours wearing heavy protective clothes. The result is this..

• If you allow Covid to just spread through the population freely then all your healthcare capacity becomes completely overwhelmed. Which is a problem for a variety of reasons, not least of which that the death rate of Covid as we know it is predicated on our medical treatment of patients suffering from it. If large numbers of people are unable to receive that treatment because all the hospitals are overwhelmed, then the death rate rises substantially. Let's say for the sake of argument that instead of 2% suddenly it rises to 4%. That's an extra 2m people who just died because treatment wasn't available.
• Except it's even worse than that, because Covid isn't the only thing that people need treatment for. Hospitals are usually already running at fairly high capacity. Those doctors and nurses who you need to treat the Covid patients aren't just sitting around doing nothing, they're already dealing with vast numbers of everyday patients who need their help to avoid dying of lots of other causes. So if the hospitals are overwhelmed you suddenly get huge numbers of people dying of all sorts of other things that usually they wouldn't have died of.

• Basically herd immunity is likely our only long term solution, however how you reach it is critical. If you just say let it happen, then you plunge the country into complete chaos. Not only do you completely overwhelm your healthcare providers, but if everyone is getting sick at the same time then literally every part of your national infrastructure is being hit at once. All the military, all the hauliers, all the food producers, all the cops, all the transport providers, everyone all with large numbers of people sick and dying at the same time. Absolute national chaos.

As I hope you can see, this idea that you can just choose between economic damage or letting the virus run its course is completely false. If you let the virus run freely you end up with complete economic carnage on a scale never seen before. You end up with a death rate far, far higher than is necessary, and you don't actually gain anything at all other than shortening the crisis at the price of millions more deaths, and a far more terrifying economic outcome than trying to space out the event.

 

[dqhall]

A scientist? I well remember the early days of the PC. DOS stood for Dodgy Operating System. In those days you had to pay for bug fixes, oops, upgrades. I remember how Bill Gates made his fortune. I would not call his methods scientific.

My Dell laptop was running exceedingly slow. I was praying about the sad state of affairs. I got an answer, “Empty cache.” I went to a notepad file on my desktop and found my note: ctrl-shift-del. It ran faster after I used the shortcut.

I prefer my iPad for Internet use. It is much faster, but tapping the screen keyboard is slower.

 

[Aussie Pete]

My Dell laptop was running exceedingly slow. I was praying about the sad state of affairs. I got an answer, “Empty cache.” I went to a notepad file on my desktop and found my note: ctrl-shift-del. It ran faster after I used the shortcut.

I prefer my iPad for Internet use. It is much faster, but tapping the screen keyboard is slower.

I use something called System Mechanic. One of the older computers boots up using over 2 GB memory and sometimes programs crash as a result (it has 4 GB). System mechanic has a memory defrag utility. It recovers 1.5 GB. It shows how poorly Windows manages memory. Adding memory is not an option.

 

[Aussie Pete]

Ah yes, just like that pesky Theory of Gravity that we can all chose to accept or not..

Gravity is measurable and observable. Evolution is a hodge podge of conflicting ideas that cannot be reconciled with what is observed. Evolution as a theory is flawed. To call it fact is intellectually dishonest. Some of the greatest scientists have pointed out the flaws. When I've raised these points, most of the evolutionists I've spoken to resort to attacking the scientists who raises objections. There are always arguments and counter arguments, I accept that. But to say that evolution is proven is wrong.

 

[Aussie Pete]

Oof, this blatant lack of knowledge about what theory means always makes me sigh. And the some disagree/others agree arguement is a... Let's call it an imaginative way to put it. If the vast vast majority of the people working in the field disagree with me, I wouldn't call it "some".[/QUOTE
It's about time that the whole idea of evolution was thrown on the scrapheap. I'm being overly generous by calling it a theory. Science Against Evolution Official Home Page

 

[GreatLakes4Ever]

It's about time that the whole idea of evolution was thrown on the scrapheap. I'm being overly generous by calling it a theory. Science Against Evolution Official Home Page

The second paragraph they badly confuse evolution for abiogenesis. No scientist worth his salt would make that mistake. I don’t need to read any further.

 

[Kentonio]

Gravity is measurable and observable. Evolution is a hodge podge of conflicting ideas that cannot be reconciled with what is observed. Evolution as a theory is flawed. To call it fact is intellectually dishonest. Some of the greatest scientists have pointed out the flaws. When I've raised these points, most of the evolutionists I've spoken to resort to attacking the scientists who raises objections. There are always arguments and counter arguments, I accept that. But to say that evolution is proven is wrong.

All you've shown there is that you don't actually understand what evolution actually is. It's absolutely observable, as you can see for yourself if you bother to read any of the fruit fly studies.

As for flaws, its an incredibly complex subject which we don't completely understand right down to the genetic level yet. There are lots of debates and theories about how exactly it happens and so on, and yes I'm sure there are plenty of flaws in our current understanding. Just like there are in our understanding of pretty much any area of biology, chemistry or physics.

What we do know however is that evolution happens, you can see it happen in species with fast generational breeding rates, and it provides a very clear high level picture of how life as we know it developed.

It's not a coincidence that basically the only people who vehemently refuse to accept evolution are religious people. Plenty of scientists will argue endlessly about the details, but I'm yet to see a legitimate biologist reject evolution in general who isn't also strongly religious. If you have an example of one, I'd love to hear it.