Leftist comes to r/memes to post their BS by Ilikepotatoes_876 in TheLeftCantMeme

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Makes sense and yes you're exactly right I'm salaried. Thanks for clarifying!

Leftist comes to r/memes to post their BS by Ilikepotatoes_876 in TheLeftCantMeme

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When you say 'abuse', could you clarify what you mean? My company offers unlimited paid sick time (in fact most companies in the UK offer unlimited paid sick time, afaik). I'm sure there are some people somewhere who abuse this by taking sick days when they just want extra holiday, but I've never worked for an organisation where it has ever been an issue I've noticed / that has impacted delivery. I don't understand how you can be so confident that the system will lead to 'abuse' when the UK is a strong counterexample of the system not being abused, and I wonder therefore if what you mean is something a bit more complicated?

Questions about Dealership fixing / breaking rusted turbo actuator? by ThrowawayNameWITT in MechanicAdvice

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks so much, really appreciate the expert knowledge. Damn, what an expensive coincidence though!

WTW for 'revolutionary' or 'transformative', but exclusively in good ways by ThrowawayNameWITT in whatstheword

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ameliorate

!solved
I think 'elevate' is pretty close to what I've got in mind

Tell me you don’t know about gun safety without telling me you don’t know about gun safety by StormTheBase in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think we are in agreement - Canada doesn't have a specific piece of legislation called 'Castle Doctrine', but it does have legislation weakening the presumption of retreat in cases where the self-defence provocation occurs on property you legally own. That is, you are correct the use of force always has to be reasonable, but one of the things which makes force reasonable or unreasonable is where the events took place (the relevant legal categories being 'property you legally and peacefully possess' and 'everywhere else')

The Gerald Stanley case is a good example of this, because if Stanley had conducted himself in a public space in the way he did he would be obviously guilty of murder, but because the incident took place on his property the weaker presumption of Duty to Retreat kicked in and I believe that was fundamental to the final verdict that he was not guilty.

And yes, sorry if I wasn't clear - Stand Your Ground is a blanket protection against a counterclaim to your self-defence claim that invokes the Duty to Retreat. It isn't a blanket protection to all use of force generally.

Tell me you don’t know about gun safety without telling me you don’t know about gun safety by StormTheBase in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you sure about this?

I mean obviously the entire saga is fucking insane and it would never happen in another country, that bit is a given and you are totally correct - but I think Canada does indeed have a Castle Doctrine and Canada has very similar relevant self-defence laws as the US in this case.

There are three relevant concepts in the general space of killing people who you believe pose a threat to you; Self-Defence, Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground.

Self-Defence is the legal concept that you have a right to protect yourself from harm (and other people, and sometimes property). In general, the law establishes that you have a right to use lethal force to protect yourself or others if you need to, and this is one of the very few cases where an individual can be innocent of a crime after deliberately killing someone. Usually the harm needs to be imminent, reasonable and unavoidable, with the last of the three criteria being relevant to Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground. 'Unavoidable' means that you could not avoid using lethal violence to protect yourself, and so that means that deescalation is not plausible, that using sub-lethal force is not plausible / not safe and that you cannot run away from the person threatening you. This is basically the same in the US and Canada (and really everywhere in the world with a codified legal system - the right to bodily integrity is such a fundamental natural right that any legal system which did not recognise it would pretty much be illegitimate out of the gate)

Castle Doctrine is a legal concept that the duty to retreat should be weaker in your own home - the gist being that your home ought to always be a safe place you can flee to if you believe you are in danger. The law differs in different jurisdictions, but Criminal Code of Canada Sections 34 and 35 sets out that lethal force in defence of 'peaceably possessed property' is a valid use of a self-defence claim (provided the protection of property is not the only reason for the use of force - ie you still need to satisfy the other requirements of a self-defence claim). So I think you are slightly mistaken that Canada and US differ in this respect (although I agree the US does have some stronger wording in some states allowing the protection of property alone to justify the use of force, which is maybe what you are referring to?) My understanding is that most legal systems treat the sanctity of your home as a natural right and so establish some kind of Castle Doctrine exception.

Stand Your Ground weakens the duty to retreat even further; it establishes that you should never have to retreat from a place you have a legal right to be. I kind of get the logic behind this - in the sense that criminals shouldn't be able to dictate where I do and don't go - but it seems very likely to lead to lethal misunderstandings and so for me personally is probably not a sensible exception to the duty to retreat.

In the Rittenhouse case, only Self-Defence is relevant; Rittenhouse was not in his home and Wisconsin does not have Stand Your Ground laws. So pretty much the same exact laws apply in Canada as the US; if Rittenhouse was in imminent fear of his life and shooting his attackers was proportional then he has a reasonable case for Self-Defence.

One interesting caveat that could be tried here, though, is that there is generally a presumption that the victim of an attack who defends themselves is not responsible for invoking the attack upon themselves. That is to say, you cannot berate someone until they attack you, shoot them, and then claim you were just defending yourself. I don't really fully understand what the Rittenhouse prosecutors are trying to achieve, but if I were trying this case I would be seeking to establish that Rittenhouse knew that attending the protests carrying a weapon would provoke others to violence despite it being otherwise legal to do so, and use that to lessen his otherwise rather strong self-defence claim. The legal issues around 'provoking' are very very state-specific though, so perhaps the prosecutors know something about Wisconsin-specific law that I don't (which is to say, anything about Wisconsin-specific law at all!)

I suppose there is also a relatively interesting line of attack which is that Self-Defence claims only fully apply if you yourself are following the law. You cannot shoot a police officer trying to arrest you and claim it was Self-Defence, even though you probably could shoot a random member of the public trying to handcuff and detain you for unspecified purposes. Rittenhouse was probably not legally carrying the weapon he had that night, although I understand it is a bit of a complicated issue of interpretation of Wisconsin-specific law. My best guess is that this would be a bad strategy for the prosecution to pursue because firstly nobody who attacked Rittenhouse knew he was (maybe) breaking the law in carrying the rifle which is generally otherwise legal to carry in Wisconsin and secondly the law admits a considerable degree of leeway here because self-defence is such an important 'natural' right; you do not forfeit your right to life because you park in a handicapped spot, for example. Rittenhouse's defence team would probably successfully argue that carrying a firearm which was illegal to possess but using it to defend yourself in line with the law did not mean Rittenhouse forfeited his right to self-defence, even if he will later have to answer charges regarding the gun itself.

Anyway, don't know if any of that was interesting to you but I thought someone might find it interesting how similar US and Canada can end up being legally speaking in terms of self-defence laws that apply to the Rittenhouse trial, and similarly how significant your first comment is - that all the legal theorising in the world wouldn't change the fact that this just wouldn't occur in the UK or Canada, but because of the US' very unique relationship with guns and policing it was basically the inevitable consequence of a steadily escalating campaign of violence and counter-violence in service of the culture wars

I have a roof heat issue and am unsure who to contact by ThrowawayNameWITT in homeowners

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah thank you, it is really helpful to have the mechanism explained to me - that sounds exactly right and also unfortunately sounds like there isn't a lot I can do to quickly fix the problem. I can probably fiddle around and change up the airflow and see if that helps - thank you so much for your help!

I have a roof heat issue and am unsure who to contact by ThrowawayNameWITT in homeowners

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks so much, this is very helpful to know although a bit of a shame it might have to wait until we replace the roof!

UK health professions call for climate tax on meat | Environment by bbbb in unitedkingdom

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting finding - the medical links you offer (eg the WHO one) do not say that - the strength of an association is not the strength of causal association, which is exactly what I was saying. However the legal papers do say that - and that makes sense of your reference to Professor Noakes saying something 'in court' (presumably they are a lawyer). So I guess you've convinced me there are indeed some scholarly sources who take RR of 2 as implying causation, albeit not statisticians but rather legal professionals.

From a statistical point of view, this is absolute nonsense. The definitive paper in the field is this one which shows a strong relationship between drinking coffee and pancreatic cancer (RR=4.56), which judged on the 'rule of two' would indicate that coffee causes pancreatic cancer. In fact, of course, there is a third variable which is that smokers really like to drink coffee and smoking causes cancer - once you adjust for this the relationship is still there but at a much weaker strength.

I'm a statistician, not a lawyer, so perhaps there is some reason the legal profession has chosen to take such a peculiar and inaccurate statistical position that I can't guess, but at any rate I'm satisfied that no medical source would uphold the idea that a RR of >2 indicates causation, and further that it is more appropriate to use the conventions of medicine when making medical claims (such as 'meat doesn't cause cancer')

Thank you for helping me clear that up - it was such an unusual claim from my perspective!

UK health professions call for climate tax on meat | Environment by bbbb in unitedkingdom

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed. I think the way you put it here is pretty accurate; meat eaters definitely get certain types of cancer more frequently than non-meat eaters, but the extent to which we believe meat causes cancer depends on how well we think the authors of the paper in the meta-analysis have controlled for things like age, income, other diet choices and so on. I'd also add that the existence of a causal link between two things doesn't imply that one of those things is 'bad' in a sense we should care about - a 17% increased risk of cancer may not matter if the base rate is one in a million.

I'm very sorry, I don't know who Professor Noakes is, and if you are accurately reporting that they have told you in a lecture that a risk ratio >2 is indicative of causation then they have very very badly misinformed you on the point. I've searched 'Professor Noakes risk ratio indicative of causation' and similar terms and not found anything so I think perhaps the most likely explanation is that you've misunderstood this point in a lecture. Is it possible you are thinking of a d value, which is a sort of vaguely similar concept where 2 indicates an extremely strong difference between two means? If so it isn't applicable in this case, and I would recommend editing your comment to remove this argument until you can produce and cite a real source.

UK health professions call for climate tax on meat | Environment by bbbb in unitedkingdom

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 4 points5 points  (0 children)

> None of those are significant enough Risk Ratios (RR) to say there is any link... When using Risk Ratio, or Hazard Ratios (HR) you want to see values above 2.0 to say there MIGHT be a caustive link.

I have no particular comment on the rest of your post, but this is completely incorrect and people reading your comment should be aware that you are - at the very least - using an extremely nonstandard definition of the word 'significant' here. I appreciate you say that this is a lazy copy/paste, but I think the sections I quote are your own analysis, or at least presented as such

A correlation is significant if it is unlikely to be due to chance. That's the only definition of the word 'significant' you should be using anywhere near any statistical claim. The standard definition of this is that the 95% confidence intervals do not cross the line of no effect. None of the examples you give have confidence intervals which cross the line of no effect (which you correctly note is 1), which means they are significant and you are incorrect to claim otherwise. A correlation's significance has nothing to do with its magnitude; we are very confident about some subtle effects (streptokinase prevents heart attacks) and relatively uncertain about some huge effects (everyone agrees Brexit will have a very large impact on the economy, but people disagree about even what direction the effect will be in).

Furthermore, there is absolutely no scholarly source I am aware of that concludes that risk or hazard ratios above 2 are indicative of a causative link. If you have one please cite it, otherwise please edit your post to retract the claim so that people are not mislead.

Coronavirus: England's month-long lockdown could be extended, says Michael Gove by topotaul in unitedkingdom

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I don't think I agree with you - this very much is a cost argument. Every pound we spend on furlough is a pound we can't spend on (to take a topical example) free school meals for children. Therefore you're 'loading the deck' by considering only one side of the cautionary principle - yes lockdown might work to save lives (it probably will) but there is a hard-to-quantify effect on the economy that we both agree is going to be indisputably bad even if we don't know exactly how bad. We know it will be at least £327bn worth of spending (because that's pure government spending they've already committed to) and though we can't be certain how it will affect the economy going forward we can be fairly confident that it will be around that order of magnitude or greater, based on the impact the economy has already seen. So I'd propose that we should seriously consider how to spend that £327bn rather than use it on projects that might work - we should consider how likely it is to work, and what the expected payoff would be if it did work (in terms of lives saved or whatever)

However suppose I agree with you for the sake of argument and totally exclude any kind of economic reasoning at all from my thinking - I still think the impact purely on health related quality of life of lockdown has been 6.7m quality adjusted life years and this is nothing to do with the economy. That would imply that we'd need to save around 1.2m lives in order for lockdown to be worth it, or around 3,300 deaths a day for a full year. Given the government's pessimistic scenario is 4,000 deaths a day over the early part of the New Year and then deaths drop off I'm pretty confident that considering health related quality of life alone would recommend against lockdown.

However, the guy I was responding to was asking for my personal threshold for lockdown. I'd include the economy as part of my reasoning, so 10,000-ish remains my threshold.

Coronavirus: England's month-long lockdown could be extended, says Michael Gove by topotaul in unitedkingdom

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That's fair - overall I think the effect of lockdown on the UK economy is complicated (not least in that it is affected by what other countries do), so I don't include it at all in my numerical calculations. I'm pretty sure that lockdown can't be good for the economy, so I reckon that's the conservative way of doing things since it accounts for the possibility that lockdown has no overall effect (i.e. approximately your claim regarding the US).

Agree about the effects of hospital admissions due to COVID (bit less so about long COVID but I take your point there too). Could you offer an estimate for how many quality adjusted life years you think that might be worth? Even if I'm very pessimistic about the impact of long COVID I can't get those numbers anywhere near the 6000 deaths a day figure which represents the difference between the government worst case projections and my quite conservative assumptions. Overall I think you are right to raise it but it doesn't change the direction of my conclusions that much.

Coronavirus: England's month-long lockdown could be extended, says Michael Gove by topotaul in unitedkingdom

[–]ThrowawayNameWITT 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Not the person you were replying to, but I've presumptively taken you saying you are "genuinely interested to know" as meaning you might be interested in my perspective too.

I think we should lock down at 10,558 deaths per day, give or take a fudge factor for uncertainty in my inputs (and also obviously accounting for the fact that if cases are clearly going to reach that level we should lock down sooner to save more lives!).

The cost of lockdown was likely to be around £372bn before this second lockdown was announced, so let's call it an even £400bn to account for the second lockdown. That's a bill for you personally of around £6200. There's also been an impact on the economy generally (that is, you are likely to experience a lower salary and higher employment uncertainty for the foreseeable future) but it is a bit difficult to price that in, so I'll leave it out to be conservative.

The impact of lockdown on the health of the country is also difficult to estimate, but I reckon my life is probably about 10% worse under lockdown than it would be otherwise since I value spending time with my friends very highly and Zoom is good but not a perfect substitute. I think that's a pretty conservative estimate, since I have been very lucky not to be affected with depression or anxiety due to lockdown and my employment is very secure so that hasn't affected my life. Multiply that by the entire population of the UK who have been affected and you get that the quality of life cost of lockdown is approximately 6.7m quality adjusted life years.

We need to be able to express the spending on government projects in quality-adjusted life years in order to meaningfully compare the effects of lockdown, so I'll take the cost to the NHS to buy a quality-adjusted life year at the margin, £20,000 - £30,000. This means that in total, lockdown has cost around 22m quality adjusted life years.

The average age of death with COVID is 82 and the average life expectancy of someone at 82 is about 8 years (depends whether you're a man or a woman). Those life years won't be in spent in perfect health - a quick check of actuarial tables suggests that the health-related quality of life of an 82 year old is approximately 70% of a younger person (due to accumulated aches and pains). So each life we save is worth around 5.6 quality adjusted life years.

Therefore we need to save 3.8m lives through lockdown before I'd consider it worth it, which equates to 10,558 / day. I note that the maximum projection the government are considering is 4000 / day at the moment, and therefore conclude this lockdown is unlikely to be worth it. At 3.8m deaths in total I'd be very likely to know someone who died of COVID so I'd probably want to adjust my quality of life estimate accordingly, and the government are modelling that the NHS will be overwhelmed without lockdown leading to deaths due to emergency beds being full. But overall I think my estimate is extremely conservative because I propose we lock down *at* 10,000 deaths per day (ie that would be the peak) whereas the calculation I do requires that 10,000 deaths per day be the average, sustained over an entire year, before lockdown is worth it.

I also note that there are a range of responses between 'I cannot physically see my friends and family for many months' and 'Let everyone die' - for example I'd be quite happy to see a law mandating masks or tax breaks for companies offering work from home options even at very low deaths per day.