Readit Newshannob commented on Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality jamanetwork.com/journals/... · Posted by u/bpierre
The problem is that 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality is too big to be explained solely by the vaccine. The reduction is similar when excluding deaths due to COVID-19, and is probably driven by people who got the vaccine being different in some ways that the observational study isn’t controlling for.
Yeah, but there's a plausible explanation for this: Likely, people who get vaccinated also are more likely to do other things to improve their health.
hannob commented on The effect of shingles vaccination at different stages of dementia cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0... · Posted by u/Archelaos
Anyone skilled in the medical arts got a dumbed down synopsis of this?
(I just had my first shingles vaccine 2 weeks ago)
It looks like the shingles vaccine has positive effects that prevent dementia. (Well, that's in the title.)
This study was possible due to a "natural experiment" where one country gave people from a very specific birth date the vaccine (so people born right before and right after that date were very similar, except for the vaccine).
It's not clear why this is the case. It might be that the virus the vaccine supresses plays a role in dementia development, or it might be that the vaccine causes an immune response that has other indirect positive impacts.
hannob commented on Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality jamanetwork.com/journals/... · Posted by u/bpierre
I found the intro very confusing, tbh.
Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").
You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.
hannob commented on Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT groups.google.com/a/chrom... · Posted by u/CharlesW
> maintaining anything to do with XML or XSLT either.
These aren't horrible formats or standards. XSLT is actually somewhat elegant.
Counterpoint: XML is a horrible format.
Why? Answer this question: how can you use XML in a way that does not create horrible security vulnerabilities?
I know the answer, but it is extremely nontrivial, and highly dependent on which programming language, library, and sometimes even which library function you use. The fact that there's no easy way to use XML without creating a security footgun is reason enough to avoid it.
hannob commented on ProEnergy repurposes jet engines to power data centers datacenterdynamics.com/en... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
Oh, great, they found another way to power energy-hungry chatbots with inefficient fossil fuels.
While true, it is completely unrelated in this context.
This comes up on a regular basis in the discussion around hydrogen, sometimes it's also known as turquoise hydrogen. The claims made here are very misleading, let me quickly explain why.
The idea here is that you make hydrogen from fossil methane by splitting it into hydrogen and carbon. Now, the claim is that you now have "clean" or "climate neutral" hydrogen. But it's made from fossil gas, and there's carbon. If you would now bury that carbon or do something else that guarantees that carbon never ends up in the atmosphere, ok, you might claim that. (Still with caveats: your fossil gas production has upstream emissions you need to account for.)
But that is not economically feasible. So the idea is: sell that carbon as a co-product. But now, that carbon will in almost all cases eventually still end up as CO2 emissions. But these pitches never talk about that. Claiming that hydrogen is "climate neutral" is, then, more an accounting trick. If you are honest, you would have to do something like associate half of the eventual emissions to it.
I wrote about it in more detail before: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/the-problem-with-tu...