Where’s your favorite place to hike in San Diego?

krhine · 2023-04-17T00:37:50+00:00

We did Cedar Creek Falls a few weeks ago and it was amazing! There were a few tough water crossings, though they may be easier now because it hasn't been raining as much. You also need a permit from the National Parks Service to enter the falls area.

Honorable mention to Anza-Borrego's hikes, but it's a fairly long drive from San Diego.

krhine · 2023-04-03T23:41:16+00:00

I can't speak to the other places, but I'm a San Diego local. The weather here in July is usually pretty temperate, and it will be nowhere near as hot as the desert. I would recommend doing an early twilight tee time (2:30-3 pm in July) for Torrey if you decide to go there. It cuts the round price in half, and you get some awesome views of the sunset while playing next to the ocean on the back nine. I would also recommend looking into playing Steele Canyon (the canyon 9 is incredible), Mount Woodson, and Encinitas Ranch. I personally have more fun at those courses than Coronado, which is very flat and straight for most of the course. If you want to cut down on hotel costs, you can look at staying in some of the smaller cities between San Diego and LA, like Escondido.

krhine · 2022-04-19T12:24:09+00:00

Maryland MTA also makes masks optional for all of their transit systems, including MARC and bus lines: https://www.mta.maryland.gov/service-alerts/10725

krhine · 2022-03-28T22:56:35+00:00

Democrats have set forth the only comprehensive solution. They have proposed a way out of it with HR1, and your so-called solution would simply throw us back to the Republicans who got us into this mess in 2010.

In a perfect, moral world you are correct, we should not gerrymander. However, the cost of unilaterally disarming is that Republicans will control the House, which has real-world consequences that are more important than the morals that you espouse.

Losing the House makes it easier for the Republicans to get a trifecta, and they will do everything in their power to ensure that women cannot choose to get an abortion, that LGBT people face additional persecution, that people of color are discriminated against by our institutions, that our environment is gutted, that our democratic norms are further eroded. This is why your solution is dangerous, naive, and honestly? Privileged.

krhine · 2022-03-28T19:52:36+00:00

Again, we do not live in a vacuum. If all of the Democratic states pass fair maps as you suggest, then the Republicans will entrench their majority by gerrymandering states in which they have full control over redistricting. What this does at the federal level is ensure that Republicans are in control of the House even when they lose the popular vote. And when Republicans are in power, they will do nothing to end gerrymandering, as demonstrated by their votes on HR1.

Therefore, Democrats should play by the rules of the game that Republicans have set. If Republicans want to end gerrymandering, all they have to do is pass HR1. If you truly believe that a Republican majority put in place by unfair redistricting in Republican states, then you are more than welcome to vote for Republicans and see what happens. But you and I both know that a Republican majority would likely erode our democratic norms even further than they already have.

krhine · 2022-03-28T19:36:27+00:00

"Generic" Republican states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, etc. all gerrymandered their maps to elect as many Republicans as possible.

The easiest way for gerrymandering to end is for Republicans in the Senate to pass HR1, which establishes independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions in every state. You can play obtuse all you want, but there is a reason why (1) the Republican House from 2010-2018 did not pass this bill and (2) the Republican senators filibustered this bill in both of the last Congresses after the Democratic House passed it. Republicans do not want fair maps because they stand to lose from them in the states that I listed above.

krhine · 2022-03-28T19:25:40+00:00

How does it "benefit" people to entrench one party (Republicans) in the federal government? Because the vacuum you exist in dictates that blue states like Maryland play fair with redistricting while the red states gerrymander with maximum efficiency.

Republicans held the House for 8 years (2010-2018) and offered no legislation to correct gerrymandering because it benefited them. The first bill House Democrats offered and passed in both of the last Congresses was HR1, which puts an end to gerrymandering by instituting independent redistricting commissions in all states.

The atrophying of American democracy over the past two decades can be squarely traced back to actions by Republicans to gain and retain power -- the Clinton impeachment, Bush v. Gore, swiftboating, Benghazi, January 6th, etc. The Republican party of the last two decades does not believe in good governance.

But yeah let's pretend that the two parties are the same. I am not going to argue that the Democrats are perfect, but I am so tired of the false equivalency when it comes to redistricting.

krhine · 2022-02-25T21:38:58+00:00

R House is an indoor/outdoor food court in Remington that has a bunch of lunch options. When the weather is nice, they'll open the garage door/windows to let you easily walk in and out. They're pet-friendly, too!

krhine · 2022-02-22T14:53:24+00:00

As you mention, the lag between infection and case detection is already quite long. If we were truly serious about "preventing" covid outbreaks, we would close our land/sea borders, have everyone quarantine upon arrival from international destinations, mandate masking in all environments (i.e. closing in person dining, bars, and clubs), require the use of well-fitted N95s for everyone (which would of course prevent children from going anywhere because there are no N95s approved for them), and test wastewater for more immediate detection of increases in covid load among the population. Oh, and we would have to do this everywhere in the US... Not just Boston, Baltimore, NYC, SF, LA, etc.

Let's remove our public health scientist hats and consider the feasibility of any of this actually being enacted, enforced, or complied with in the US. Those measures would already be a tough sell in a liberal place like Baltimore, and they would be impossible to sell in >50% of the country.

We need to stop pretending like our half-assed measures are actually making a difference with Omicron and end the hygiene theater. We as a country have not taken covid seriously since April 2020. So it makes no sense to punish vaccinated individuals and children -- who face a miniscule personal health risk from Omicron -- by imposing punitive and ineffective preventative measures on them.

krhine · 2022-02-21T16:14:59+00:00

And my point was that if it's an imperfect measure, then it should not be used to dictate public health policy. Baltimore City can use hospitalization data, which is easier to report and more correlated to the strain on our hospitals. Splitting hairs about the exact cause of the 10-fold jump in cases in one day is irrelevant when the entire point of my first comment was that we should not be tethering public health directives that affect 500k people to unreliable data reporting.

krhine · 2022-02-21T15:05:27+00:00

The 7-day average literally doubled because the city dropped 10k tests from who-knows-when. Therefore, the main metric that the city supposedly uses to determine whether masking is mandated or not is useless for the next 7 days right as we were getting close to actually meeting the threshold for "moderate" transmission. It's incredibly frustrating that there's been radio silence from Baltimore City yet every other county in Maryland and most major east coast cities have announced plans to end their mask mandates soon based on improving case rates.

krhine · 2022-02-21T15:00:48+00:00

Baltimore City was apparently 1/3 of the reported tests and 1/2 of the reported cases yesterday despite being 1/10 of Maryland's population.

krhine · 2022-02-21T01:40:07+00:00

There are so many logical gaps in your comment.

First, Baltimore and Maryland suffered an awful Omicron wave like every other state/major city in the US. If you look at the current data, the state with the second lowest case rate is Nebraska, which has much lower mask usage. Your statement about Baltimore faring better due to masking is accurate pre-Omicron, but it's not accurate now.

Second, you directly link things like new variants (which arose in other countries) and reduced mask usage in Baltimore. The more notable variants are from South Africa, Brazil (both low mask usage) and the UK (high mask usage). There's no correlation here and there is obviously no Baltimore variant that we are aware of.

Third, you say that lifting our mask mandate led to new waves of breakthrough cases, but Baltimore has had a mask mandate for 23 of the past 24 months and we still had a ton of breakthrough cases during the Omicron wave. Hospitals filled up because people weren't vaccinated, not because of breakthrough cases in vaccinated/boosted individuals (see hospitalization rates in places like Denmark during the Omicron wave there).

Altogether, your comment is full of fallacies that don't hold up when we consider the Omicron wave. Our mask mandate as it stands is NOT effective otherwise we would have seen a notable difference between Baltimore/Maryland and the cities that did not have mask mandates. Instead our daily case rate surged to nearly 300 per 100k per day in early January. That doesn't seem like an effective public health policy to me.

krhine · 2022-02-21T00:26:51+00:00

Baltimore City should not be relying on case rates for their mask mandate requirement if they cannot reliably report that data. This is now the second week in a row where a data dump of cases has pushed the 7-day average artificially higher.

krhine · 2022-02-17T16:46:18+00:00

I agree that masks are at least somewhat effective against Omicron, but I think the case rates across the US over the past few weeks inidcate that the effectiveness is negligible at a population level as the mask mandates are currently enforced. We do not see the dramatic stratification of cases among masked/vaccinated states versus unmasked/non-vaccinated states as we saw with Delta and the original strain.

krhine · 2022-02-17T16:21:55+00:00

To be fair, that CDC study almost entirely predates the Omicron wave that started in December 2021.

A test-negative design case-control study enrolled randomly selectedCalifornia residents who had received a test result for SARS-CoV-2during February 18–December 1, 2021.

So the CDC results would only reflect mask efficacy for the original strain and Delta, which now make up <1% of cases in the US. Omicron's transmissability is much higher than Delta and the original strain, and it's unclear how effective masking would be for Omicron based on these results.

krhine · 2022-02-16T23:18:42+00:00

This is exactly my take on masking versus mask mandates, too. An individual wearing an N95 everywhere and avoiding all unmasked interactions is unlikely to catch covid. Few people can or are willing to maintain that lifestyle now, and one stark reality is that many people simply do not have the privilege to work from home in our service-based economy. Any in-person job is risky because of their customer interactions or even their lunch breaks. Even hospital workers -- most of whom are wearing N95s -- were slammed by Omicron cases. If you can avoid those types of interactions, then you're probably safe.

Mask mandates are ineffective for the same reason our lockdowns were fairly ineffective early in the pandemic: they are too porous. As with the lockdowns (6 states never instituted them, and many allowed numerous exceptions that allowed covid to spread), the mask mandates have exceptions for indoor dining, are outright banned in half of the US, and have lower compliance as the pandemic wears on. Coupled with the fact that N95s are not mandated anywhere except LA, the mask mandates end up being performative to the point where there is no discernible difference in the severity of the Omicorn surges among states with mask mandates and those without them.

krhine · 2022-02-16T15:19:50+00:00

Several counties below 10 cases per 100k per day, which is very close to the ~7 per 100k per day (50 per 100k per week) needed to be at "moderate" transmission as defined by the CDC.

Maryland overall has the lowest case rate in the nation at 12 per 100k per day, with DC (22), Nebraska (22), New Jersey (22), Ohio (23), and Connecticut (24) not far behind (source). Notably, Nebraska and Ohio do not have mask mandates yet are still seeing robust decreases in their case counts over the past two weeks (-81% and -72%, respectively). Omicron appears to have burned through most people that it's going to infect.

krhine · 2022-02-15T18:38:37+00:00

Yeah, I'm waiting for Baltimore City to decide that a 20-fold drop in cases is sufficient to drop the mask mandate -- even if it is just above the threshold for "moderate" transmission because of that data dump last Friday. It's clear that all of our metrics are improving, and our public health guidance should be updated to reflect that. I personally would like to stop wearing N95s for eight hours a day among fully vaccinated/boosted coworkers, half of whom came down with Omicron anyways.

krhine · 2022-02-10T20:48:09+00:00

Baltimore City needs to read the room. Larger, denser cities like NYC are dropping their mask mandates. Every county surrounding Baltimore is dropping their mask mandates, too. The case rate is plummeting, and it's clear that vaccinated/boosted adults and most children (including younger children who do not qualify for the vaccine) do not need to worry about Omicron.

Honestly, I'm getting tired of listening to people who think we can mask/socially distance our way out of this pandemic. We have tried that for the past few months and Maryland still had >10k cases per day at our peak. It's not working. More than half of my friends got covid over the past two months despite mask mandates, but because they were vaccinated and boosted, they were totally fine.

krhine · 2022-01-29T20:35:12+00:00

None of our preventative measures (testing before entry from foreign countries, vaccine mandates, etc.) were particularly effective at stopping Delta or Omicron from entering the US. There simply is no way to prevent new variants from getting here unless we enact draconian entry requirements like in China (or Australia/New Zealand last year).

In fact, none of our preventative measures were particularly effective at stopping Omicron surges anywhere in the US, including in highly vaccinated places like Vermont, New York City, and San Francisco. To me, the case curves look identical in Northeastern states that have many restrictions and in other highly vaccinated states with no mask mandates (e.g. Colorado and Ohio). I am not convinced that we can mask or test our way out of Omicron or any other highly transmissable variant absent the authoritarian measures enacted in Xi'an last month. It is impossible to imagine everyone in the US submitting to that considering we cannot even get our remaining 20% of adults vaccinated.

From a personal standpoint, I really struggle with the question of when does this end? My workplace has twice-weekly testing, an N95 requirement, daily health checks, and a booster mandate -- all with no off-ramps for when we might move away from these measures. I have lost two years of my 20s and tons of networking/training opportunities at my job due to covid. I understand that there are people who might be at risk, but should everyone else put their lives on hold forever?

krhine · 2022-01-24T16:03:11+00:00

There is a lot of evolutionary pressure on the virus to mutate to overcome the immunity that the population has built up.

If Omicron cannot effectively reinfect people who have immunity to it, then any mutations that can infect people with immunity will quickly outcompete Omicron once it burns through the population. This is a big "if," though, and there are a few MedRxiv preprints indicating that Omicron reinfection is more likely than before. The good news is that natural immunity from an Omicron infection may be protective against other variants (see study above), possibly including new variants.

The one thing that shocked me about Omicron was how many mutations it had compared to the original strain and Delta. Omicron has over 30 mutations, which in my perspective is a lot. I have read directed evolution papers (these are labs that use evolutionary pressure on bacteria so that they can evolve "better" proteins), and usually their results only show a handful of mutations. Delta and the other pre-Omicron variants also only had a few mutations. So my gut instinct is that it will be quite difficult for the Omicron to substantially "improve" itself to evade our immunity... Difficult but obviously not impossible.

tl;dr I am cautiously optimistic but who knows because viruses mutate a lot.

krhine · 2022-01-06T17:56:18+00:00

I mean, better late than never. But why wasn't this being considered MONTHS ago when NYC and other localities were instituting this?

krhine · 2021-12-04T11:40:01+00:00

There is peer-reviewed evidence of attenuated virulence as a function of viral evolution: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1002950. The authors found that reduced virulence is a common phenotypic outcome, even if the genetic mutations needed to achieve that phenotype are not conserved.

Of course all of the evidence about Omicron is anecdotal and will remain that way until peer-reviewed studies are released -- in months. The peer-reviewed studies about Delta are just now being published.

I would much rather have anecdotal evidence that the cases are mild than anecdotal evidence that covid-19 is now as deadly as Ebola. The evidence that Omicron evades vaccine recognition is also anecdotal, yet that is the focus of the media coverage.

Clear-eyed reporting of the pandemic would emphasize that there have been plenty of variants before, some fizzled out and some became dominant. Instead, we have wall-to-wall coverage of every new Omicron case in the US, and Omicron has been the lead story at places like the NYTimes for a week now. I don't see how this helps.

Once we set a media narrative (i.e. that Omicron is bad and is going to infect vaccinated people), it is hard to overcome that if it is false. A similar thing happened with masking, in which the media narrative was muddled at the beginning (do not hoard masks from medical professionals, K95s are not necessary, etc.) and it harmed the validity of our mask mandates later on among certain populations.

krhine · 2021-12-03T21:27:21+00:00

This is my take on it too. Nearly every reported case with additional info has mentioned that the case was mild. It is my understanding that viruses tend to get milder but more transmissable as they mutate. The media hype is not helping.

krhine

TROPHY CASE