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Chip McDonald

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About Chip McDonald

  • Birthday 11/30/1999

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  • homepage
    http://www.chipmcdonald.com
  • occupation
    Guitar teacher, freelance engineer
  • hobbies
    Life, French impressionism, F1 racing, mountain bikes, technology
  • Location
    Augusta, Ga. USA

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  1. I hope covid never impacts you personally Craig, and you can continue to maintain a "politically distanced" attitude towards talking about playing gigs during a pandemic. I can't, and will not. I'll return when covid is over.
  2. Which has no bearing on their procedures. Auckland has an outbreak, they do something about it for that area. Is Auckland an island? Is Auckland somehow different than Dekalb Georgia, Austin Texas? No. Which means what? Everybody is perfectly spaced apart from each other, and it has no cities? Citing population densities as a comparison is non-sequiter unless both distributions are perfectly diffuse. There are places in North Dakota that are thinner in population than places in NZ, and cities in NZ that are denser than cities in the U.S.. That has no bearing on the PROCEDURES implemented that has controlled it. It's absolutely ridiculous, as you say, to insist that there is some unknown reason a city with a million people in New Zealand has some capability that a city of a million, or 3 million, in the States doesn't have. Whether their political system is better or more effective is beside the point as to whether their procedures have worked. I could go into my own "lesson" about what powers can be enacted, and have been during war time and can say all of their procedures could be implemented in the U.S. if the government had the will to do so. "Please stop insisting what New Zealand has done is impossible in the U.S.". We were close to implementing similar restraint in the U.S. in March 2020. Sheriffs were prepared to stop people from crossing State lines. Curfews have been implemented all over the U.S. plenty of times. 9/11 there were no planes flying. That doesn't require anything beyond the will to do it, that there is a political divide based on idiocy IS my whole point: New Zealanders as a whole were willing to take necessary steps where the U.S. faltered. There are zero technical reasons the U.S. couldn't do what New Zealand has done, except governments allow idiots to have political sway. Enough people get tired of the way it's going here, and it can happen here. As evidence of that, the social pressure now having switched to anti-anti-vax sentiment relative to wrecking our hospital system - Kimmel feeling safe in saying the remarks he's made, and doctors/nurses agreeing publicly. Biden's weak, but better than nothing vaccine mandate for businesses. Events requiring vaccination proof. School systems rebelling against idiot governors anti-mask bs. If we get a surge at the end of the year like last year, it will ramp that up another notch; and if lambda, or a more vaccine resistant or communicable variant takes hold, it will go another notch towards active measures. Active measures is the difference. I say 8 years ago *we wouldn't be having this conversation*, because we would have already implemented similar active measures to contain the pandemic. FEMA has had plans for it for decades, there should be nothing functionally different in this disaster than any other. All that aside, I will continue to proselytize the value of the procedures New Zealand has implemented (and partially other nations as well) until the sentiment in the U.S. changes.
  3. No it's not. If I have a friend from high school, that makes 20 posts every day but the only one Fb puts in front of me is a political opinion, *that was Facebook's doing*, not me. Actually no, if Fb has a redeeming feature it's that I *don't* have to interact with all of these people. It's a comfortable distance, actually. I've had my browser set up so that I haven't seen ads in... maybe forever, but *you can't control what it puts in front of you*, you can only try to edit it out. I'm not going to the trouble, because again, Fb wins; what's left over is *still not going to be reality*. Without FB, I can almost assuredly say that I would not have a book publishing deal or be writing for Photofocus or several other things that I cannot think of. And that's really the LEAST of it. The main benefit for me is that I've made friends and learned a lot. It's worked *for you*, and I can see a photography centric person could get something from it if you have the time. I've conversed with my literally my favorite photographer, gotten photo press passes for political events and other events, gotten some freelance photo work via little effort on Twitter - and I'm just a hack peasant photography nerd. I'm pretty sure none of that would have happened on Fb.
  4. I don't care about tracking at this point, it's impossible to get away from unless one doesn't own a phone. What I *do* care about is being manipulated. Facebook uses a.i. to keep you engaged, and it works differently for different people/accounts, depending. For some people it's putting posts in front of them that are related to flowers. Or talking about college football. For me, it's - surprise - politics. Being "left wing" in a MAGA centric town, 99% of my 1,000+ "friends" don't have anything in common with me politically or philosophically. While I'd like to know what's going on with people I know, as Facebook once did longggg ago, what it does with me is put posts the algorithm *knows* will get under my skin in front of me. People don't realize that *what you see on Facebook is customized for YOU*. It's not a level playing field. You're not going to automatically see the latest post from the friend from high school, that just wrote something innocuous about cars a minute ago. Instead, you're going to see what a person you may have only met once, years ago, wrote YESTERDAY about a political debate that the algorithm KNOWS you have a very strong opinion on. It's doing that over, and over, and over. It knows how to get certain neuro chemical responses to happen. You are being manipulated on Facebook. I have some friends that are in my Venn diagram. If I go on Facebook, I have to literally hunt them down to see anything from them. And vice-versa, they never see my posts; I've watched with them on their accounts, and I'm shadow banned. Sometimes my posts *can't be found*. I'm always in a bad mood after going on Facebook because of that. For people that live on Facebook, literally, the algorithm has learned a happy medium for them that keeps them hooked. I can't go on without having 20 things in a row that make me tense. So I absolutely hate it, but I have to because for some people "the internet" is *literally* "Facebook": they want to talk to me about guitar lessons there, they want to send messages there instead of in email, on and on... ahgh.
  5. I'm mad because covid derailed a live project I had in the works 2 years ago, and now it seems like it's never going to happen. I'm further mad because, *we could so easily have a normal gigging life*, a NORMAL way of life*. It's very simple, obviously works, and costs a whole lot less than what is happening now. It's pathetic, ridiculously pathetic, that "patriotic" "Americans" insist the U.S. can't do what little New Zealand has managed - or England or Canada, that "freedumbs" are more important. I'm still maintaining ultimately people will get tired of this, tired of people around them dying, tired of finding out they can't go to the hospital because it's filled with unvaccinated people, tired of finding out that they now have a kidney problem, heart problem, brain problem, because they got a "mild" case of covid, tired of getting that "mild case" that puts them in bed for a week or more every year... at some point it will dawn on the herd that "wait... why don't we JUST LOCKDOWN AND GET RID OF IT?" Look up video of daily life in New Zealand. It almost looks fake, or from years ago. Zero reason the same procedures can't be applied in any country.
  6. I wouldn't touch that site with a ten foot vaccination needle. The Israeli *studies* are being taken out of context so much. Israel's community is not representational of the world; The results are not linear across age groups - for a reason; Without the context of deaths relative to other nations, it's not valid; Hospitalization rate in Israel.... is NOT the same thing as hospitalizations in, say, rural South Carolina. Cherry pick fallacies are a scourge in social media. The parameters are known: you stand a better chance with the vaccines, presuming you survive you're risking long term health if you get infected, immunity from vaccines and infection is not permanent (unfortunately). Masks help, distancing helps, lock downs work. With hospitals at capacity you're killing many more people that do not show up statistically, because people are missing operations/procedures/care for other maladies. And with tens of thousands out of work for days routinely, the economy is negatively affected. That's it. People that are busy posting some distorted headline are ultimately wanting what is in the above paragraph to not be true, somehow. Delusional wishful thinking. Without a breakthrough - Oxford Principle study has positive results, a cheap/free/accurate instant test is invented, magically universal-epitope vaccine is concocted - there is ONLY ONE WAY OUT. New Zealand is showing the way, THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.
  7. The problem is that *everyone is not acquiring their immunity at the same time, to the same strain*. My point is that I know people that are walking around saying "I had it already (last year...) so I'm immune", "I got vaccinated (back in March) so I'm immune" - and that's not true. It's a sliding scale. While the Sturgis crowd (who got infected) *are* temporarily immunized, they're going to be around people in the above categories - and will infect them. Everybody has to be immune *the same amount, at the same time*. We blew the opportunity to do that at the start of the year. My point back then was that was a *UNIQUE* opportunity we'll never have again, a clean sheet of paper. We were lucky then, in that (people don't realize/know this) people had already been working on a SARS-COV1 vaccine for years. Pfizer and Moderna can try to tweak for variants, but they'll never get *ahead* of the variants. We have no options now except the New Zealand approach. It is the only logical way.
  8. "Mask up to keep it up" - study There are other studies that indicate similar implications. While mostly blood is altered, SARS-COV2 attacks all tissues.
  9. That study finished in June, pre-delta. If it held true to now, then nobody would be getting reinfected if they'd had covid since the beginning of the year. I know at least 2 people that has had it twice in the past year; what's actually happening is that they're getting reinfected with *delta* - a different strain. Also , in vitro response that is half what it was at one point is not the same as "immunity". If infected people would get vaccinated they would have a tremendous advantage, but to not get vaccinated based on in vitro response from a prior strain is illogical - nobody at Emory is going to say you don't need to get vaccinated if you've been infected, nor are they going to say you're protected indefinitely. That's a different concept. People infected with *delta* is not the same as people infected last year. There can't be herd immunity unless the virus decides to not to mutate, and it goes to statistical zero infections. If we'd locked down ala New Zealand when the vaccines came out, stopped it before delta had a chance to catch on, we could have done it. *The situation now is NOT what it was a year ago*, thanks to errant ignorant behavior. Unless your "strategy" is to continually get sick again, every year in order to have "immunity", there can be no long term option aside from a real 28+ day lockdown with contact tracing/isolation. Get reinfected 3-4 times, you may end up with B cell drift that covers enough epitopes that you can *then* truly claim something akin to "immunity" - but that requires many more thousands to die, probably the destruction of our hospital system, health insurance system as organ damage complications are revealed as endemic. We could have "herd immunity" after a few million have died, and everyone has questionable physical and mental health after being infected multiple times. A society of crippled and mental deficient people. Not a good "strategy" touting "natural immunity" as a panacea IMO, YMMV.
  10. "He's really exploring pan-tonality and microtonal expression, in a blithely arhythmic manner". Kinda like the Shaggs are a pop music group like the Beatles. John Lee Hooker was out of tune, and would get off beat. Morrissey sings off pitch. Lars Ulrich has to do funny fills to get back in time with songs, Tom Waits sounds like he drinks formic acid, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan uses notes that don't exist in the Western system. This is not the same thing IMO.
  11. I see Australia as of yesterday has given up. And the UK; both health ministries going into the "living with covid" spiel. "Living with it" means changing a lot of things we take for granted. Just a few days ago here in Augusta Georgia, the hospital system implemented a new pseudo-triage policy that is probably going to be adopted in a lot of places; involving the logistics of what happens when you're taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Effectively changing the parameters of responsibility for what happens from the ambulance>hospital, deregulating in a sense the ambulance services. Instead of waiting to set the status of patients coming in, it looks like they're going to get to drop people off and leave. Might work out fine, for now. Kids in ICUs that can't breathe. Much lower lifespan. I was kind of looking forward to making it to 100; that's much less likely now. Elective surgery. My wife hopefully doesn't need another parathyroid procedure, but she can't even get an appointment with an oncologist surgeon at a hospital until February of next year. Which is presuming something will have changed with the hospital situation by then. Insurance that won't cover you if you've tested positive. Because people can insist long covid isn't real, but it's real enough they're not going to want to cover you indefinitely for the plethora of things that are going to start becoming a burden on the health care system in itself: kidney, stomach problems on top of COPD syndromes. Mental health problems from covid fog. I know of one athlete it's affected drastically. Probably the greatest race car drive in history, 7 time world champion - long covid, a couple of races ago he had to be helped onto the victory podium, trouble breathing, exhaustion. Another driver in Formula 1 today made his team put a reserve driver in his car because he tested positive. What's His Face the boxer that had to cancel the fight yesterday because he's in the hospital with covid. Basketball players, football players - look at what it did to the Olympics. Some of these people are not going to be able to perform at the same level because of it. And of course, it's going to periodically kill people. ...but sure, we can "live" with it. I disagree. Eventually people, the herd, will get tired of dealing with it. A nation's leader will get tired of it, and see the obvious advantage of being rid of it. Which is definitely possible, New Zealand has controlled it, effectively almost eliminated it at one point except for bozos wrecking their efforts. Some authoritarian nation like Singapore, Malaysia, maybe Duerte in the Phillipines will order a long, 30+ day lockdown until it burns out. Contact trace the outliers, and use zero covid strategies ala New Zealand until it's gone. They'll have a big economic advantage, and like in New Zealand (and Australia until recently) nobody will be thinking twice about going to concerts or shows there. No hospital systems bogged down, and no scourges of workers having to lay off from work for 10 days. We'll have instant tests at some point, and there will be a two tiered society. Lambda will kick in late October, because I'm predicting there will be a lagged drop in cases any day now that people will again - falsely - insists "it's over!" and - again, idiotically - wreck it by going out and being reckless. BUT - for those of us that get the booster, people that get it *after* being infected, there will be a separate curve: People that are trying to be smart, and those that aren't. Because lambda is going to blitz the remaining people that are anti-vax. Yes, vaccine breakthrough will happen, and more because it's lambda, but not as many of us will end up in the hospital. This time next year, I'm predicting it will be even more obvious the unvaccinated/anti-mask contingent are the problem, those not killed will be touting their "natural immunity" while everyone else will have increasing immunity through the boosters. Even now I'm seeing a little bit of muting of the anti-mask anti-vax people in my Venn diagram; a year from now it will finally be a socially unacceptable thing (that it should be now). At which point we'll go in two directions: continued vaccination, testing, while the resisters will continue to self-marginalize via Darwinning themselves. "Living with it", knowing a marginalized demographic is WHY we'll continue to have variants WILL NOT forever be acceptable. For instance, right now I'm quite sure there are a LOT of parents who have either changed their perspective about what we need to do, or have become more polarized by bad experiences with their kids. Attitudes will change, but it's ridiculous thousands will die, and it will be at least another 2 years before it reaches a common-sense saturation point to want to actually eradicate it. Otherwise, once the 1%'ers see New Zealand immigration+real estate packages becoming the Cool Thing for the hoi polloi, Kanye moves there or something like that, some other place will decide "hey... there's no reason we can't do that". The CDC drives me nuts. I know people there, they're segmented by bureaucracy, they can't have a unified presentation of reality. I tried to get someone's ear regarding the premise that showing *one* curve as being THE curve leading to garbage interpretations of data, and ... it's wrecking us. We're on the same curve the UK was on with delta, lagged 2-3 months; the *original strain's curve* fell off where it the *delta curve* started, but people used it to say "LOOK! IT'S OVER!!!" as well as "we FLATTENED THE CURVE!!!". The "vaccination numbers" are a vector. Because while the number of vaccinations is still rising, you can't make a linear correlation to anything else because it's a scaled function, 1) you can't count people that were vaccinated in March as having the same immunity today as in April; 2) you can't use a function against the original strain to show any relevance to delta, a NEW curve. BECAUSE.... people will start saying, maybe as soon as next week (guessing, I could be off a week with the numbers going down) "LOOK!!! The amount of people vaccinated is having an impact!", or "LOOK!!! We're seeing HERD IMMUNITY!!". And both statements will be wrong, and lead to dumb behavior, and COMPLETELY IGNORES LAMBDA. Frakking frak, on the CDC website if you enter "lambda" as a search term it brings back articles from 3 years ago about mosquitos. The numbers will fall off - like the cure in the UK a few months ago - but will *level out* instead of drop as it did in June, because we don't have enough vaccinated relative to the UK initially, AND we DON'T HAVE MASK MANDATES. By November Florida and Texas will have allowed lambda to get going, and we'll be back on the original strain's curve we saw at the same time last year. But hopefully the deaths will be lower because of the vaccines. And again, hopefully there will be some residual effect of the vaccines against lambda, making it - AGAIN OBVIOUS - anti-vaxxers will be filling ICUs. Attitudes changing: I'm starting to see a dividing line now with HCW, doctors and nurses finally not hoding their tongues. If there is a surge towards the end of the year scaled up by lambda, as last year - what was formerly politically incorrect to say in public at the beginning of the year won't be anymore. The social pressure to get boosters, TO GET VACCINATED, will be what it should have been in April. The tide is already turning in that direction; when the drive for boosters happens in November. Talk of unvaccinated triage won't be just hushed talk by December. The problem is the scaling as I was writing about above. Nobody seems to have caught on to this yet: "natural immunity" effectively goes away in about 3 months. And depending on which one, the vaccines wane to half efficacy in about 6 months. So right now there are people who are bragging about their "natural immunity" - totally ignoring all of the repeat infection cases - and people vaccinated, such as myself, but back in April - which means the "big picture" is as I was saying *2 different curves*: a sliding scale for immunity, and the prevalence. The "natural immunity" myth is going to screw up continued vaccination efforts, despite the effect that "they" could say in selling boosters as "look, you'll be even BETTER having been infected if you get the vax!". So going into December it will again be a mish-mash of people who *do* have some natural immunity, because they recently had covid, people who have had their 3rd shot - but also people that think because they had covid in April that they're covered. Which is dumb. People will continue to spread it, allowing it to replicate. And while it hasn't been said, it's pretty obvious - with this many people infected, the mutation rate almost insures a new more-optimized variant will show up 3 months past the lambda surge. Or maybe Delta+ forces it out; regardless, going into 2023 the anti-vax people will be marginalized: the "natural immunity is perfect". (some people I see are saying they WANT to get covid so that... THEY'LL HAVE IMMUNITY FROM COVID???????) demographic will probably not have gotten on well with lambda by February 2023 I would imagine. All I've typed above is to say: "let's see if attitudes have changed this time next year". If it's the same then I'll need to figure out how to emigrate to New Zealand, because I don't want to "live with covid" when it infects you every year on average, and ultimately kills you or at best, gives you debilitating organ damage of some sort. If you're vaccinated the odds are low. The problem with what you're thinking is that you're ignoring the "live with covid" life: you'll get it. Not just once, but over and over. Vaccines will change the odds, but eventually they won't, and your luck will run out. And in the mean time you've accepted a pretty crappy world as "living with covid". Some studies show it's much closer to 30%, although with the vax it's lower. Those "worst odds" start accumulating once you're getting it over and over. Which is where we're headed: everyone getting it. And allowing it to replicate to a new variant, getting that. 150 years of that will probably yield t-cell drift that covers it, makes it more akin to a DNA virus, plus we're going to be going through a genetic culling process on top of that. BUT IT'S GOING TO SUCK FOR OUR LIVES. It's ridiculous to give up when it DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. I personally know maybe 2 dozen people that have had it. One guy - vaccinated - in his 30s ended up in the hospital for 5 days, lost weight, hair, is on oxygen at home. I know someone else that is having mental problems from it, vaccinated. My father in law is recovering from it - thankfully vaccinated, otherwise being obese, diabetic and in his 70's he'd be dead. But my wife's sister, a school teacher, who has asthma, is not faring as well - despite being vaccinated. "92% chance" is for the original strain, if you're "actively" vaccinated; but even that doesn't count things that aren't going to show up for a few years, or long covid. Of the people I know that have had it, how many are really not going to have "a problem*? Those that had asnosmia, lost their taste/sense of smell? That had trouble breathing for a few days; are their lungs actually going to be 100% normal? *It attacks all organs*; it *changes your blood*. If you read studies on autopsies, a different picture of "not having a problem" emerges. People die because their lungs stop supplying oxygen to them, cytokine storm. *But other organs are damaged*. In basically all cases. Brain, kidneys, heart, liver, stomach - it may not kill you this year, but you don't know what it's done to you. Given what can be *seen* - radiologists can *see* if people are infected by CAT scans - getting covid means a good probability you're going to have complications at some point. IMO throwing around the "it's not a big deal" stats without context is ignoring reality, like the person that smokes but pretends a lung x-ray couldn't represent themselves, because "I'm fine!". No we haven't. No, it doesn't work that way. You'll find it harder and harder to locate an epidemiologist that still thinks herd immunity can happen. Variants are outrunning vaccines and "natural immunity". That's sociopathic rubbish. Wait until it kills someone you know, and then tell that to their family, "that's life!", explain your point of view to them, I'm sure they'll love to hear it.
  12. YouTube is lit up with "Sweetwater has been bought out" stories.... interesting to hear the different angles people are presenting. Hope Chuck isn't subject to people wanting to eke out Even More Money, I can't see an investment firm running it as well as a single person. "There will be a few minor changes" heard in the corridors can be enough to ruin companies...
  13. I agreed with you and posted many examples supporting live stream music, I'm not sure where the aggro is coming from? I am saying it can't supplant the live-touring industry without a way to serialize the distribution; I'm not saying "it can't be done" (it's been done since the 70's with HBO) or "you can't make money from it", but it's not going to be "Big", "a thing" without it being a big business tied to profit. One can be moved, kama muta, by a live stream of many things - but whether it's viable as a replacement for live touring, even fractionally, I doubt without a reasonable way of controlling the distribution. My post was more about the *technological idea* of what I'm calling "cryptographic video steganography", burying a unique identifier in the video stream so that even if someone tries to use their phone to make a video to put on Youtube, one can find out where it came from. That's all....
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