That was my initial reaction, thinking China MUST hold more treasury bonds than anyone else, right? Turns out that’s typically Japan ($1 trillion), and the UK has generally held roughly the same number as China (both in the $700B range). Maybe the US anticipated and had contingencies ready if it was just China doing the selling, but when the other big holders started a slow bleed, it might’ve given them pause? Dunno.
We also don’t know who held what more recently than January and I don’t know if the data gap is the usual lag or if the the people who do this work at the Treasury department got “DOGE’d”.
Bottom line, it’s been fun to think about but I don’t think we should put too much stock in conspiracy theories originating on Substack.
There’s a theory being batted around without too much evidence (hold tight, Snopes is on it) that Mark Carney talked European and Japanese leaders into accumulating US Treasury bonds, and then slow-selling them to make Trump squirm once he imposed the broad-brush tariffs to spook the T-bill market.
The theory sounds mostly plausible in that Carney was in Europe for closed door meetings with European leaders shortly after being designated PM, and that Trump backed off so quickly and used the language of “the bond market is tricky” to justify the change in direction. Dropping demand for T-bills leads the Fed to increase yields to keep the borrowing taps on, means expensive borrowing for them, means no money for tax cuts for billionaires.
On the other hand, the story originates from a twice-fired shock-jock’s Substack.
But it sounds like something a wicked smart Harvard/Oxford educated economist would dream up and pull off…
The deceased girl’s father insisted that measles helps build up a person’s immune system.
So here’s the thing…and I know that everyone here knows this, but it doesn’t.
Measles causes immune amnesia.
It’s pretty sneaky - integrating into respiratory tract macrophages, and avoiding destructive phagocytosis by binding directly to certain membrane receptors, and then being transported to lymph nodes where B and T cells get infected by the measles virus too. These memory B and T cells contain the memory of past infections, and when they’re destroyed (because they’re infected), you no longer have the ability to quickly ramp up a response to past infections and you get to start all over from the start.
So even if their other kids survived, their chances of dying from another infection goes up. It takes somewhere between 2.5 and 5 years for that risk to come back to baseline.
The infection itself might not have been “that bad” (despite killing one of their children) but the mortality risk isn’t over by a long shot.
The tariffs are being explicitly selected to avoid harm to Canadian consumers (e.g. on items for which there are available and suitably priced alternatives) and on items which create the most effective political pressure.
Given (in our house, anyway) cover songs don’t count, I’m going to make a ruling that as a derivative work, your Wham!-ageddon streak remains safe…for now
You may want check out Infuse for the AppleTV. I have found it fixed every audio drift and video jitter concern that I’ve ever had with Plex or Jellyfin.
You can point it either directly at an SMB share, or a library hosted on Jellyfin or Plex. The advantage of this is it caches the artwork in the library, not on the AppleTV, because the AppleTV will periodically flush its local cache, leading to long re-fetching times and waiting to watch things.
Maybe. I was a kid so probably was given crap equipment anf cheap film and likely didn’t treat it well. But the principle is the same. Having deeper shadows that preserve detail, and brighter highlights that aren’t blown out is what, for me, evokes a more visceral response when watching content, whereas Increasing the number of pixels from 1080p to 4K doesn’t.
First, good job on not having a smart TV. They’re truly awful.
I would de-emphasize the actual resolution benefits of 4K. Most of us don’t sit close enough to notice the difference.
For me, it’s about high dynamic range (HDR).
For example, when I was a kid, I was always annoyed by how the photos I took of what I thought was a gorgeous landscape, and then developed the film (yes, I’m an old) it always looked horribly bland and drab.
Watching 4K content on a TV for the first time was like looking at the beautiful landscape again. (It actually was - Netflix’s Marco Polo had the most stunning vistas!)
Most answers here are missing the benefits of a home Mac running 24/7 if you’re already part of the Apple ecosystem. For example, you can have it sync all your iCloud data (documents, photos, iTunes content) and back them up locally, then elsewhere outside of Apple’s ecosystem. You can also have it act as a local CDN for OS updates, whereby it will cache OS downloads locally so any subsequent updates will be super quick.
On the downside, I found native Docker on macOS kinda sucked, and just installed Ubuntu on my 2012 Mac Mini (now running Proxmox for funsies), but I have an old iMac to do the caching. You could probably virtualize and get both benefits, and I am considering moving to a new M4 mini for the power savings and sheer speed. That M4 Pro chip has absolutely incredible Geekbench numbers while sipping power.
To properly answer, we need to define what we mean as “airborne” which has gotten a bunch of people very upset recently. Prior to the COVID pandemic, the transmission model for respiratory viruses focussed on 3 distinct models of transmission:
Fomites are collections of excretions on surfaces containing live virus. An infectious person cough into their hand, pick their nose, or similar, then touch the doorknob. The next person touches the doorknob, then their mucus membrane (nose, eye, mouth) and they get infected.
Droplets are large collections of excretions that are transmitted during talking, shouting, singing, coughing, or sneezing. They are ballistically expelled, but don’t remain in the air. An infected person expels these droplets, and must be in range of another person who is struck by these droplets in their mucus membranes to be infected.
Finally, airborne transmission occurs when micro droplets small enough to ride on air currents are expelled from infected people, and non infected people inhale them into their airways.
COVID was presumed to only be transmitted through the first 2 methods. But weird things were observed, where transmission occurred when people (or ferret model experiments) were separated by barriers through which ballistic droplets couldn’t pass, like air ducts with multiple 90° bends. People also got sick after being in rooms many minutes after infected people had been present, long after ballistic droplets would have harmlessly fallen to the ground.
In reality, droplet models were just close range transmission, and airborne long range transmission of bio-aerosols, or micro droplets created from breathing, shouting, singing, coughing, or sneezing. The range was more a function of the transmissibility of the virus. Highly infective things can infect at low doses at long range. Less infective things occur with much higher doses, when people are quite close to one another. This folded in the prior models quite nicely. It was, however, not well accepted.
If a disease is to be transmitted by bio-aerosols, the disease vector needs to be able to enter the body through the surfaces with which it will interact upon being “breathed in”. This doesn’t work well for the STI viruses or bacteria, nor the malarial parasite, as they aren’t actively expelled in the respiratory system, so don’t generate bio-aerosols, and require access to highly specific host cells not easily accessed through the respiratory system at the necessary volumes to create an infection.
So, no, not really possible for non-respiratory viruses to become “airborne” in that sense.there would need to be a LOT of intermediate steps.
But diseases that we used to consider to be transmitted by the now defunct ballistic droplet model can become “airborne” (instead of “droplet”) if their ability to infect a subject becomes more successful at lower doses of pathogen such that it can occur at longer range, and over longer times.
That was my initial reaction, thinking China MUST hold more treasury bonds than anyone else, right? Turns out that’s typically Japan ($1 trillion), and the UK has generally held roughly the same number as China (both in the $700B range). Maybe the US anticipated and had contingencies ready if it was just China doing the selling, but when the other big holders started a slow bleed, it might’ve given them pause? Dunno.
We also don’t know who held what more recently than January and I don’t know if the data gap is the usual lag or if the the people who do this work at the Treasury department got “DOGE’d”.
Bottom line, it’s been fun to think about but I don’t think we should put too much stock in conspiracy theories originating on Substack.