The costs of disaster related to Climate Change events has noticeably gone up since 1980

~hat-tip to Barry Ritholz

From the Washington Post

The preprint paper, which tracked more than 340,000 adults across 600 villages in rural Bangladesh, is by far the largest randomized study on the effectiveness of masks at limiting the spread of coronavirus infections.

Its authors say this provides conclusive, real-world evidence for what laboratory work and other research already strongly suggest: mask-wearing can have a significant impact on limiting the spread of symptomatic covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

“I think this should basically end any scientific debate about whether masks can be effective in combating covid at the population level,” Jason Abaluck, an economist at Yale who helped lead the study, said in an interview, calling it “a nail in the coffin” of the arguments against masks.

The researchers estimate that among a group of Bangladeshi adults in the study that were encouraged to wear masks, mask-wearing increased by 28.8 percentage points after the intervention. When tracked, this group saw a 9.3 percent reduction in symptomatic covid-19 seroprevalence, meaning the virus was confirmed by bloodwork, as well as a further 11.9 percent reduction in covid-19 symptoms.

...

“This is an incredibly challenging but important study to pull off,” said Megan L. Ranney, an emergency medicine physician and professor at Brown University who was not involved with this research. “Anti-mask people keep saying, ‘Where’s the randomized controlled trial?’ Well, here you go.”

“It’s not just modeling or looking back at studies,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, who also was not involved. “This is the gold standard of scientific knowledge.”

...

The sheer scale of the project, which began in November and concluded in April 2021, is notable. About 178,000 Bangladeshi villagers were in an intervention group and encouraged to use masks. An additional 163,000 were in a control group, where no interventions were made.

The project assessed the levels of mask-wearing and physical distancing through direct observations from plain-clothed staff in the community at mosques, markets and other gathering places.

“This is a project that cannot be done by a handful of people,” Abaluck said. “This is why there are hundreds of people involved in this project. That’s why the paper has … I don’t even know how many co-authors it has. Dozens of co-authors.”

Here is a link to the paper.

So an 28.8% increase in mask wearing is correlated to an 11.9% decrease in symptoms AND a 9.3% reduction in detecting the virus in the blood. Mathematically that means if 100 people who are not wearing mask get just 29 people to wear masks, There will be 9.3 people more people with no prevalence of the virus in the blood. Stated another way, a ratio of 9.3 to 29 is 0.32 less virus per each increase of one person who wears a mask, or 1 less person for every 3 more people who wear a mask. In a population of 100,000 that means 32,000 less cases of covid if all 100,000 people wore a freaking mask.

QED

Here are two comments on the video.

The ruling elite would rather flush $trillions down sewers of dead end ponzi schemes and military folly than to offer up a single dime on behalf of the greater good.

People demand freedom, but give up that right every other minute of the day

I agree with this, except that out here in San Francisco, our urban planners close the streets and don't invest in public transportation. People rely on Uber and Lyft when there are no options.

The Great Highway debacle has been totally mismanaged. Recently opened Monday to Friday, the genius's decided to close the highway on the weekend at Noon on Friday. Hence the traffic around Lincoln is insane and dangerous. So much for the effort to reduce traffic and traffic accidents. Why not close the highway at midnight on Friday?

Imagine a world in which there was train service everywhere with multiple train lines going North-South and East-West. That is the world of Europe, Japan, and parts of China. Not here in the US. We get to rely on crappy bus lines and automobiles. I have a 17 mile trip to work everyday. If I used public transportation, that would entail 3 bus or train connections and would take more than 2 hours when a car trip takes only 25 minutes. That's not an option I would call "freedom".

...who read what they are told to read or who know how to squeeze the current issues into the small thimbles their employers give them, where relevance and context disappears.

It is difficult to get someone to understand when they are well paid to not understand and to carry water for the hierarchy that hires them to be gate keepers framing the public and over-simplifying issues into teams and simplistic memes

I am 24 year HS Math teacher who is considered a very good teacher. I work in a good school south of San Francisco.

Culling the administrators works when you have a top heavy bureaucracy, like in large urban districts. But for smaller districts, it might have a negative effect because the reality is that there is not a lot of upper level clutter for schools with limited budgets. So I would be careful with that. Schools need the hierarchy in some shape or form.

The wealthy could care less about the education of the lower classes. Hence, class size increases, and it is so hard to attract excellent teachers in poor districts because of the vast disparities in pay.

I do agree with getting rid of all the damn hoops. Our system basically expects new teachers to be financially independent for a few years. And none of that preparation guarantees that you will be able to handle the enormous stress and work-load year-to-year. Teaching 5 times 30 students per year is insane. Dealing with irrational parents, and various ed code legal regulations adding more time and aggravation. Having to leave one class to go sit in a 504 accommodation meeting for 20 minutes means 1 of my 3 freshmen classes loses instruction.

I work 60 or more hours a week for 36 weeks. 60 times 36 is 2,160 hours. Compare that to a worker who does 40 hours a week for 50 weeks (14 days vacation and holidays). 40 times 50 is 2000. Teachers work at least 160 hours more per year, or 4 weeks more -- all crammed into a 36 week period. Imagine working every single day for 18 weeks, having a christmas break, and then working every single day for another 18 weeks. Add the mental stress. This is why not many people last in the public school teaching career. It's not as simple as what y'all were saying.

Some people just don't have the personality traits necessary in order to survive. Hence, half of the new teachers leave after 3 years, even after 2 years of training. I was thrown right into the fire, getting an emergency credential and working after school to get my credential over 7 years.

I agree with standardized testing. School districts should use their own assessments, guided by some sort of state-wide regulations to insure against impropriety. Assessments should also not be seen as a measure of success or failure, but rather as a gauge of where the students in the district are, and as a means of making good decisions towards addressing the attempts to improve the needs of the students.

The idea you pose of making Senior year different is good. In Germany, students go to high school for the first two years, after which the students go on to different tracks. Those who are scholastically inclined go one way, those who are trade-oriented go another. I agree with this plan. The stupidity of forcing every single kid into a STEM track when the actual STEM employment opportunities hover around 6% -- and has been declining.

What you speak of is a problem of circulation. People misunderstand money. Money is like the circulation system. When you get cancerous economic growth that hordes money, that money doesn't get re-circulated into actual real-world investment in the society -- which is the original purpose of money : to commodify human production into economic units that can enable economic transformation.

So when money gets obfuscated into nebulous asset investments that do not equate into any real social investment, that is what happens when money is horded, or churned into the asset casino. Nothing real actually got purchased. Nothing real that affects anyone actually got created.

Oh but a single individual named Jeff Bezos got to go to the edges of outer space. Meanwhile the rest of us peons drive iron/aluminum gasoline driven vehicles over the planet earth trying to make a living.

Click here for an interesting article on why modern humans get cavities even though they regularly brush their teeth.

Our dental health changed with our diets. Ancient humans and their hominin ancestors really didn’t have much of a problem with cavities. In fact, finding an ancient skull with a cavity is such a big deal that you can go and publish a whole paper just to show off the discovery. Unhappy smiles became more common only after the advent of farming led to humans eating a lot more carbs — a shift that went even further following the widespread availability of refined flour and sugar in the 19th century.

But in the past decade or so, scientists sequenced the DNA from ancient dental plaque and figured out that something else in our mouths was changing at the same time as our dental health. Turns out, there are specific strains of bacteria — streptococcus mutans, in particular — that are more common in mouths with cavities. And as human diets changed and cavities became more common, those bacteria started taking over our mouths. Our modern communities of oral bacteria are less diverse than our ancestors’ were, and they’re dominated by these cavity-causing strains.

Sheeple accept how freedom is defined to them by their chosen sources of information. Sheeple seek confirmation for their own ideological positions, and have been mentally trained to believe the framing of the economic system by the wealthy owners of multinational corporations. Sheeple think democracy is a voting consumer checking boxes or pushing a touch screen once every other year, and then are told that government is too corrupt to trust even while they shop at grocery stores where every item they purchase is owned by 5 or 6 corporations. Even while it is the money from the benieficiaries of monopolistic profit extraction that is how the politicians become corrupt in the first place. Any genuine legislator is then pigeon-holed or marginalized because the foxes in the hen house don't want cops on the beat who actually do their jobs.