Nobody has done a good parody movie since Dewey Cox.
Another measure I've been following is percentage of deaths due to PIC (pneumonia, influenza, or covid), which also just dropped to the pre-covid baseline for the first time: https://gis.cdc.gov/GRASP/Fluview/mortality.html
I like that this measure has some robustness because covid deaths without a positive test are mostly going to be coded pneumonia anyway. It does have some flaws (the denominator could be influenced by an increase in opioid overdoses, could be some covid-related heart attacks or strokes that are missed, lots of people already died of covid so pneumonia deaths may be down due to fewer unhealthy old people still being alive), but since it tells the same story as excess deaths that's good evidence that the decrease is real.
It's hard to watch actual music documentaries after Dewey Cox. It perfected the genre.
Airplane! made it hard to watch grown men ask children about gladiator movies.
Presumably, covid carried off lots of the more frail. If covid were really good and over, wouldn't deaths drop below baseline for a bit?
Hawaii did a literal spittake over "I like my coffee black... like my men."
12 thousandth in line for Taylor Swift tickets, don't think the odds are good...
I was trying to figure out a tactful way to ask the question in 7.
I feel like 10 is implying I'm not tactful. Which is fair.
12: and great casting. Such solemn kids.
Kareem was one of the writers for the Veronica Mars reboot.
That's got nothing to do with Roger Murdock.
Presumably, covid carried off lots of the more frail. If covid were really good and over, wouldn't deaths drop below baseline for a bit?
Long COVID (and indeed lack of routine health care) may have enfrailened a lot more to replace them, though.
The CDC does have excess deaths slightly below 0.
But there's a lot of noise, excess deaths were way below 0 in Jan 2020, I guess cause it was a better than typical flu season? Anyway, it doesn't mean that covid is having no effect, it just means the effects of covid are the same order of magnitude as all the other noise.
We still have about 110 excess deaths every day here in the UK, and 100 of those are not people dying of COVID (very few deaths now with COVID on the death cert).
Interestingly, for most of the COVID pandemic we did *not* have net excess deaths once you excluded COVID deaths - presumably because a lot of the people dying of COVID would have died of something else. We've got them now, though, big style.
The link also mentions the point in 7, which is called "mortality displacement".
I just want to be able to go back to the grocery store.
You can't make a movie like Airplane these days because they stopped serving meals on domestic flights.
At least they still serve drinks to people with drinking problems.
Got the opportunity to buy tickets for 680 pounds each... Decided that was out of my budget.
I guess I'm 8 days post symptoms, so I can do weekday I want if I'm masked?
SSA disability applications are also hugely down - just looking at initial applications to avoid factoring in the approval process, 2022 receipts were 27% lower than the average of all ten years of the 2010s.
Or if you want to factor out the Great Recession long-term-unemployment overhang - 11% less than 2019.
A lot of that is certainly the strong labor market, as many disabled people can work when employers are desperate enough to actually want to give them accommodations, but it certainly speaks against long COVID having any significant macro level effects. If even 5% of working-age adults who ever contracted COVID got long-COVID at a debilitating level, and 20% of those got it together enough to submit an application, then those numbers would have skyrocketed.
IMO Top Secret! is even better. I do wish the ZAZ movies didn't make so many explicit sex jokes but they do tend to go over heads.
We watched Dumb & Dumber recently and it was a hit. It was hard to explain how truly revolutionary it was in just how stupid a comedy could be.
I feel like Airplane!, like Blazing Saddles, falls into that very short era between the complete fall of the Hays Code and the establishment of new norms.
My concern is what things are going to look like in five years when everyone has had covid four or five times - how much long covid will be out there, how much preventable early-onset dementia, how many early heart attacks, etc.
I had covid in April. It was unpleasant but I got Paxlovid within hours of a positive test and didn't feel really bad for more than a couple of days. HOWEVER! I have had lung/heart weird feelings when I bike ever since. They have gotten a bit better over time, so I'm taking a wait and see approach. AND! I used to get ocular migraines about once a year. I've had four since April. Post-covid ocular migraines are, the internet tells me, a thing, possibly because of nerve inflammation.
While these are extremely manageable lingering symptoms that I expect to dissipate over time, I worry about getting covid over and over and over every winter if we just sort of drop the ol' precautions.
We are definitely getting to a point where I'm considering relaxing precautions, at least while the wastewater numbers stay as low as they are now. As low as they are now, I'm thinking it's a good time for movies (masked - too much sitting inside with too many strangers) or restaurants at off hours.
If we get to a point where wastewater levels are basically like this all the time, I'd probably stop masking.
I wore a mask on the train today -- where maybe 20 percent were masked -- and over the weekend at Costco, where there were very few masks.
I think the mask on the train is going to be the new normal for me for a long time, and I'm not ready to sit in a movie theater for a few hours among the same individuals. But intellectually, I'm satisfied that Covid is essentially over, and I no longer feel a sense of contempt for the unmasked.
I still don't eat at indoor restaurants, or otherwise mingle with crowds indoors, though.
I stopped doing anything preventative with no problems except that I got covid.
I do wish the ZAZ movies didn't make so many explicit sex jokes but they do tend to go over heads.
I waited until the 8 and 10 year old went to sleepaway camp, primarily because of the scene where Elaine gives the automatic pilot a blowjob.
I remembered Airplane as one of the funniest movies ever, but found it didn't really hold up well for me when I watched it a few years ago. In sort of the same way that television shows with laugh tracks feel off and of a different era.
30: I totally failed to comprehend that when I saw it in the theater at the age of nine or ten.
I never saw it in the theater. It just wouldn't have occurred to my parents to go to that kind of a movie, let alone take us.
I was raised by the decadent coastal elite. No, actually in retrospect I bet Mom was somewhat taken aback by how smutty it was, and just carried it off insouciantly rather than admitting she wouldn't have taken us if she'd realized.
My mom's brother insisted we rent it, but this was years later.
It had a few moments but I really didn't like Dewey Cox and I just don't get the love for it. It doesn't hold a candle to Spinal Tap or Fear of a Black Hat.
22. 680 pounds for a movie!!!? I don't care whether it holds up or not, that's robbery.
22 to 9, I was hoping at least Moby would show me some sympathy. I'm more disappointed than I thought I would be.
Apologetically off-topic: the reporting over the weekend regarding the captured Long Island serial killer indicated that he was present at a location on my street last year. There are women and children -- specifically, a small school for emotionally vulnerable children -- on this street, but few or none in the "less dead" devalued groups targeted by such monstrosities. Nonetheless, horrifying and infuriating.
38: That's why I didn't go too. The system is rigged.
I guess the problem is covid can cause lasting health problems. While I'm not an alarmist about covid, I think people aren't making this up.
39: I'm glad they caught your serial killer.
I was mortified to be sitting beside my mom when the jiggling jello/boobs gag happened. I don't think I got the blow job joke. I would've been almost 8.
What I've read is that the more serious long COVID effects were mostly limited to earlier strains and pre-vaccine infections. Tracking methods that caught long COVID early in the pandemic mostly stopped catching anything by IIRC last summer. Not that people don't still get ongoing effects, but weird feelings while biking aren't a disability, at least not in the way that ca. 2020 ongoing effects were.
I had a weird cluster of ocular migraines* 2-3 weeks ago, after not having any in years, but that was 50 weeks after I got COVID, so pretty unlikely to be related. I do feel some heart pounding while climbing big hills on my bike, but that's because my blood pressure pills ran out and the stupid doctor's office won't call me back to make an appointment.
I know a fair amount of people, including me for a couple months, had what I would call lung discomfort while exercising* for a few months post-Covid, for post-vaccine infections.
*Even just hiking at a moderate pace on flat ground.
43. And the monologue about sitting on his face passed you by?
39 not off topic because excess deaths.
What I've read is that the more serious long COVID effects were mostly limited to earlier strains and pre-vaccine infections.
I feel like what I know from people I have direct contact with don't match the overall statistics. For reasons like 24 I am skeptical that long-covid is as frequent as some of the higher estimates would suggest. At the same time, my cousin-in-law (who had all of the boosters) caught COVID 2 months ago and is still struggling many days (and said that they heard from their doctor that a lot of people were taking 6-8 weeks to recover).
The single most fit person I know has been utterly debilitated by Long COVID, and I've already had a months-long terrifying bout of what was probably a viral illness. Unless and until we have effective treatment to prevent Long COVID, or transmission really is demonstrably curtailed (biobot and Walgreens say it is not right now) I'm masking.
What people mean by long-COVID seems hopelessly variable in severity.
E.g., when the CDC wrote the headline "nearly one in five Americans still have long COVID," the survey questions were "Did you have any symptoms lasting 3 months or longer that you did not have prior to having coronavirus or COVID-19?" followed by "Do you have symptoms now?" Yes to both became "still has long COVID."
"Significant activity limitations from long COVID" is 1.6% of all adults in the most recent Pulse survey.
Did anyone else go see Joy Ride? I can't remember the last time I saw something that was a hard R, but it was absolutely hilarious.
Was that based on the Amy Tan novel?
Minivet, help me understand the relationship between these two numbers:
If even 5% of working-age adults who ever contracted COVID got long-COVID at a debilitating level, and 20% of those got it together enough to submit an application, then those numbers would have skyrocketed.
and
"Significant activity limitations from long COVID" is 1.6% of all adults in the most recent Pulse survey.
Those numbers seem closer together than I would have thought given the respective comments (1.6% of adults is, what, 2% of all adults who ever contracted COVID; it's less than half of 5% but not an order of magnitude difference).
I realize that "debilitating" and "significant activity limitations" are not the same thing, but that still seems pretty high. Given that most people who had post-COVID symptoms will recover within 12 months; 1.6% with current significant symptoms does make it sound like 6-12% had at least multiple months of significant limitation?
55: Sort of different things being measured. The numbers make it look like of those people with significant activity limitations (which does seem like a real share of the population*), for most of them that was still not significant enough to necessitate disability benefits.
*Though I do wonder how many would have gotten something similar pre-covid and had more trouble naming it, wrestled with getting fibromyalgia diagnoses or some such. Hard to tell the counterfactual.
54: The working title was apparently "The Joy F*ck Club."
The Census Bureau found 2-4M people out of work due to Long COVID: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-data-shows-long-covid-is-keeping-as-many-as-4-million-people-out-of-work/.
I agree that Long COVID is a broad constellation of symptoms, many of which seem to resolve; I'm personally most worred about being disabled or having my immune system (further) compromised. I reckon the increase in those risks are somewhere in the 10x-100x range, were I to revert to a 2019 lifestyle. For me, not betting odds.
The Census Bureau found 2-4M people out of work due to Long COVID: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-data-shows-long-covid-is-keeping-as-many-as-4-million-people-out-of-work/.
I agree that Long COVID is a broad constellation of symptoms, many of which seem to resolve; I'm personally most worred about being disabled or having my immune system (further) compromised. I reckon the increase in those risks are somewhere in the 10x-100x range, were I to revert to a 2019 lifestyle. For me, not betting odds.
*Though I do wonder how many would have gotten something similar pre-covid and had more trouble naming it, wrestled with getting fibromyalgia diagnoses or some such. Hard to tell the counterfactual.
Yes, that's an important question which is extremely difficult to answer from the available data.
I spent basically a year taking next to no precautions and didn't get covid. Then I declared myself immune and loudly announced that I'll never get my comeuppance. Then I got covid in a few weeks.
"The Census Bureau found 2-4M people out of work due to Long COVID:"
That article is from June 2022. The latest figures are:
6% currently experiencing Long COVID (down from 8% in the June 2022 survey)
1.6% experiencing "significant activity limitations".
The Brookings Institute (not the Census Bureau) estimated (not found) that 1.8% of the civilian workforce were off work due to COVID. That is considerably higher than 1.6% of *all adults* experiencing significant activity limitations because of course a lot of adults aren't in the workforce (especially the old ones most likely to get serious COVID!) and also because a lot of people with significant activity limitations will still be in work.
So if the situation was ever as bad as Brookings thought, it is now considerably better.
...also because a lot of people with significant activity limitations will still be in work
Mandatory sick leave is socialism.
Also, I just clicked through the links from that Brookings piece and that is a simply inexcusable piece of unscientific hackery. Their source for the estimate of how many people with long COVID are not working was a survey by the British Trades Union Congress. First of all, that's dubious because of the differences in sick pay, time off rules etc (20% were on *paid sick leave* the survey found) between the UK and the US.
Second, it was an online survey that invited people who self selected as having Long COVID to describe their experiences. It isn't representative. That doesn't make it useless in every respect - the TUC is using it to argue for better treatment of workers with long COVID - but it does not make it a good source of population data for a completely different country.
64: well, yeah, but also if you now can't climb two flights of stairs without getting wheezy that's not going to stop you from doing your desk job.
"You know why they don't make movies like Airplane any more? China!"
"Surely you're kidding."
"Stop calling me Shirley, unless you can make it equally funny in Chinese."
When Hollywood realized that an untranslatable movie loses two thirds of the audience, puns were out and physical humor like Dumb and Dumber took over. Even bad sitcoms avoid puns these days. Sad.
That's obviously an issue, but they make more narrowly targeted movies still. I think they just don't want to pay for good writing.
And here I am three-quarters of the way through a cuneiform tablet translation degree that's now going to be useless.
If it's any consolation, it was already going to be pretty useless.
70 me. And AIMHMHB this awesome lecture discusses the cuneiform translation backlog. Guys! Exciting! Multiple millennia of history are about to open up!
69: STRIKE! It's exciting! Historic! Capital! Labor! Automation! Post- and pre- during-industrial! Post- and pre- during-scarcity! Macro cycles! Inflation! Shocks exo- and endog-! Maslow goods 0-∞! Babylon! Everything Everywhere All At Once! All at once!
70 is amazing but I would rather like to hurt the person who wrote "While cuneiform could be written on papyrus, it was more often scribed onto clay or stone. These materials stand up much better to the fires and floods that ravaged their pithy peers." Hurt them really quite memorably.
"Their pithy peers".
It would be great to have an oral drug that's safe for trsnsplant patients. One of the drugs in Paxlovid is contra-indicated and getting remdedivir infusions is a hassle.
53: We saw Joy Ride Sunday. Yeah, funny. Between this and No Hard Feelings, are R-rated comedies experiencing a resurgence? Not that two is a strong trend, but it sticks out in my mind just because I'm going to the movies more than usual at the moment, since the kid is out of town.
62: I remain uninfected AFAIK, and I've been back to my normal routine of licking handrails and making out with strangers at the county Health Department for at least a year now. [shrug]
We watched Election last night, which was not as solid a choice. I still love it as a movie, but they were too young to really get the dark humor, so it just ended up being me watching cringey sex scenes with my kids.
Hawaii mostly got it, but Pokey mostly did not.
Did I mention that my brother was almost Broderick's stand-in for that?
Was it actually filmed in Omaha?
Part of what makes it so dark is that it's so fucking on-the-nose realistic. Just perfectly re-immerses you in the 90s.
It was filmed in Papillion (pronounced exactly the way a French person wouldn't), an Omaha suburb.
78 OTOH they'll carry that memory forever so you did good
If we've only translated less than a thousand tablets in 150 years, much of that surely tentative, can we really have enough data to train an AI on - and will there be the resources to validate its work sufficiently?
And if it's the GPT type of AI, I suspect at least some of the time it's going to generate text that looks like the other translated texts but doesn't actually match the original.
84: even a very imperfect translation is going to be better than nothing because it'll catch at least some of the interesting-looking tablets and you can always get them looked at by a human before basing any actual scholarship on them. Think of it as a machine to answer the question "which of these thousands of tablets should our human translator focus on next?" It's noticeable that it was very good at identifying the genre of the text even when its translation was completely off the wall - so it can reliably classify texts, which isn't bad.
Reading the actual paper, though, there is still work to be done. "Out of 32 sentences randomly sampled from the test set, 14 were properly translated, 5 had interesting hallucinations, and 13 were improperly translated".
63: Using the Minneapolis Fed, TUC, and Lancet data on extent of work reductions gives us 2 million, 3 million, and 4 million full-time equivalent workers out of the labor force due to long Covid, respectively.
You're entitled to your judgment of the hackery, of course, but it's poor form to pretend the conclusion is based entirely on one metric.
84, 85: Yeah, this is potentially a useful tool for making a first cut at prioritizing untranslated tablets for further work, though it sounds like it still needs a lot of work. The backlog is definitely huge and the number of people capable of doing the translation is and will remain very small, so it's definitely worth pursuing. Just not a game-changer quite yet.
I just want to know who has the fix copper.
86: it's poor form to take a badly sourced report from a think tank and pretend it came from the US Census Bureau, I'd say, if we're going to have that conversation.
The other two sources also don't look good.
The Lancet study was another online survey of self selected Long COVID patients, contacted through Long COVID support groups - very far from representative, and therefore quantitatively worthless.
The Minneapolis Fed study actually says that there's no correlation between Long COVID and unemployment, or between Long COVID and reduced salary. The correlation only appears if you reduce the sample to people who say Long COVID affected their work, which seems a bit circular to me.
OT: we must always remember that people form their beliefs about the world, even their very erroneous beliefs, largely from what they see about them.
Take a hypothetical New York child. His father is a jazz musician. His mother is a jazz musician. All his parents' friends are jazz men, or jazz women, or at least very keen on jazz. He goes along to hear his mum sjng in clubs. His dad playing trumpet is his earliest memory. His room is lined with jazz LPs
That child, however intelligent, is probably going to grow up with a very distorted view of how popular jazz is. Not his fault.
So, when we halear about people who sincerely believe that actual demons - minions of the Dark One - creep among us in human skin, threatening our children, we must be charitable, and remember that they have probably seen stuff like this. https://images.app.goo.gl/knKJqR5REjJz5VaU6
I've been trying to rediscover this comic, I thought Wondermark but may not:
A: "In my experience people are just awful and depraved. Most people can and do commit horrible acts all the time."
B: "What's your profession?"
A: "I litigate fraud against seniors."
C: "I'm an undertaker, and in my experience most people are dead."
That child, however intelligent, is probably going to grow up with a very distorted view of how popular jazz is. Not his fault.
Years ago, the child of a friend of mine had a very heated argument with my friend on whether gay people were a minority, and heterosexuals were the majority, or if gay people were the majority and heterosexuals were the minority. The child was incorrect.
The child was incorrect.
Or maybe he's got the shine and just knows things.
I've probably told this story before, and it's not really on topic, but 92 reminded me that when our family moved to a white neighborhood (after an early childhood spent in East LA), I thought my school was full of blind children, because my previous experience of blue-eyed people had been limited to Mary from Little House.
We had one student with albinism. She was close to legally blind.
Not at all on topic, but I used to have a coworker who would say "That's mighty white of you" when you did something nice for him, but only if the something was really easy.
98 is interesting. I grew up hearing that fairly often, but always used in a sarcastic tone with the implication that you'd done the least possible amount to still count as having done something. So now I'm unsure just what the racial stereotype at play here is.
99: That's a better way of putting it. The racial stereotype is that white people are selfish.
Some of us never even left the baseline.
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/07/briefly-published-zhejiang-cremation-statistics-hint-at-true-covid-death-toll/
We also had the 78 experience. Iris was old enough (barely), Kai was not.
82: I camped for a night in Papillion 12 or 13 years ago. Got dinner at Johnny's Cafe.
I didn't know you could camp there. I've never actually been there. Just drive past the exit.
92 is amazing.
Reminds me of the time BOGF and I took these 3 Jewish kids she/we babysat to drive through a Christmas light display (with parental approval; the oldest was ~5, they weren't worried about them wanting Xmas presents or whatever). The oldest saw snowflake lights and shouted "It's a Star of David!"
When we told their parents, the mom shook her head and said, "We gotta get him out of that [Jewish day] school: he thinks the whole world is Jewish, and he's in a for a rude awakening."
It's funny, it's basically just a community park amidst suburbs, but there's a small, grassy campground. In the morning there was a huge thunderstorm coming our way, so we had to pack up camp licketty-split.
Last fall, I was a poll watcher in Browning, Montana, the administrative center of the Blackfeet Nation. A voter (a woman nearly my age) asked me what I thought the statewide percentage of Native voters might be, and insisted it was at least 25%.
Life's always Rashomon.
Back when our son was around 5, my wife and I were splitting our time between two different churches in different denominations. Both those churches, my parent's church, and her parent's church all had women as the senior pastor (and in most cases, only pastor). We had to have a conversation with him where we explained that yes, boys can be ministers too.
Back when our son was around 5, my wife and I were splitting our time between two different churches in different denominations. Both those churches, my parent's church, and her parent's church all had women as the senior pastor (and in most cases, only pastor). We had to have a conversation with him where we explained that yes, boys can be ministers too.
A voter (a woman nearly my age) asked me what I thought the statewide percentage of Native voters might be, and insisted it was at least 25%.
The average American survey respondent, at last! Who thinks 27% of the US population are Native American, 30% are Jewish, 41% are Black, and 40% are veterans.
And we spend 50% of our budget on aid to developing countries.
Jordan Ellenberg has this right: https://twitter.com/JSEllenberg/status/1504222073476075521
When someone says 25% what they mean is 1%. We've been over this at some point, even found some paper with a numerical model that explains this translation. It's the usual "brains work in logarithmic ways" issue.
114. A substantial percentage of Americans think they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight, so I think we might just be dumb.
27% of the US population are Native American, 30% are Jewish, 41% are Black
That leaves a pretty diverse last 2%.
Might be a spiders georg type of situation. One dude who's extremely diverse.
But they absolutely don't think 98% of the US population is one of Native American, Jewish, or Black, because they don't think percentages add! They'd say something like 45%.
The actual error in people's understanding in 112 is that they wildly overestimate the number of veterans. There's a lot more Black people than veterans! And it's clearly an error about veterans specifically, because if you look at the graph in the link in 112 you can see they get the comparison wrong for veterans and lots of other groups. They *should* be saying veterans are 30% and not 40%.
Do you get a knife while fighting the bear?
The actual error in people's understanding in 112 is that they wildly overestimate the number of veterans. There's a lot more Black people than veterans!
I would have got that wrong as well, but I think it's a timelag thing. Back in the 1990s it was probably true that there were more veterans; the black population is about 13% I think? Since then the WW2 and Korea veterans have mostly died, and the youngest Vietnam veteran is now 69 years old (if he served in 1973 at the age of 19). But people haven't updated their instinctive assumptions yet; it's still 1999 in their heads.
And since the end of conscription the armed services have been very small. (A bit of googling brought up the surprising fact that "the VA categorises post-Gulf War as peacetime"; didn't feel like it. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/05/the-changing-face-of-americas-veteran-population/)
It's true in Congress - 17% veterans, 13% black people - but of course Congress is much older than the population.
That makes a lot of sense. I wonder whether the other "wrong" answers have a similar explanation. Union Members was overestimated, and again union rates were higher in the past. First gen immigrants and Asians are underestimated and again I think your explanation works. Household income over 100k is way underestimated and inflation means your explanation works again!
I think your theory explains most of the errors on that list!
One major exception is gun owners, who have been under 50% since at least the 70s, but were estimated at over 50%. (Note that 50% is the one number that means the same theoretically and in what people think they mean.)
You can own a gun or not own a gun. 50-50.
Generally, if you don't know, you're likely to be less wrong by being closer to 50%: https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/why-do-people-overestimate-the-size?s=w
I still don't understand how the general run of people can know what a 10% discount is but not apply the same understanding to population discourse. But I guess it's not logical.
I think your theory explains most of the errors on that list!
Good heavens. (preens)
One major exception is gun owners, who have been under 50% since at least the 70s, but were estimated at over 50%.
Maybe people have a (correct) impression that there are a load of guns around, but underestimate the number of people who own multiple guns. "Armalite Georg, who owns 672 firearms, is an outlier and should be excluded."
It's not the militia people skewing, mostly. For Boomers with money, it's like collecting sneakers or commemorative spoons.
Estimate what percent of American collect commemorative spoons.
Our neighbors with the massive arsenal were evicted. I basically liked them, but boy were they extremely weird Jewish-Hispanic libertarian anarchists. With a billion pets and two feral children. Like what free range parents aspire to be but would actually recoil if presented with the reality.
I had to look up images but there's a certain resemblance to both, yes.