While MBBs partner was a victim of circumstance not everyone out and about at the moment is acting innocently.
There are some horror stories coming out of various outer metro regions from last weekend relating the abhorrent behaviour of antivaxxers targeting small businesses. I feel genuinely sorry for the small business owners, they have every right to make a living and they are also free to choose compliance or non-compliance with the law, when they choose to comply they should not have to put up with cockheads roaming around lighting fires!
Several small café owners have also been targeted with vandalism for complying with the current laws.
Of course this is why vigilantism is illegal, no matter what side of the debate it exists on it will nearly always hurt the innocent! I also fear there is a rising intolerance that might see some very bad outcomes.
I also find it ironic that the staunch anti-vaxers aren't out targeting and closing some big venue like a popular pub full of punters, instead they seem to always target Ma and Pa type businesses, it's gutless and exposes the protestors as the parasites that they are!
My very first question when hearing of this tragedy was 'how the hell did a live round get onto a movie set?'
It doesn't need live rounds on set to kill someone, it can be a Brandon Lee type scenario.
In Lee's case they used dummy shells c/w projectile but no charge for a close up filming of the handgun being loaded, but when they swapped out the dummy rounds for blanks nobody noticed one of the projectiles had come off the shell and was lodged in the barrel. When they fired the blanks at the actor the round left lodged in the barrel killed him!
I believe people have also been killed by the wadding used in some blanks, but this can't be the case given the round went right through the victim and hit the director standing behind.
Thinking more about the Aus Open, we need to avoid thinking about current restrictions. What will be the restrictions come the start of the new year? It may be that there won't be many restrictions in Victoria save perhaps for mask mandates and perhaps vaccine passports. Maybe they won't even exist.
I think one of the problems is the Feds are perceived to be having a bob each way, calling for states to open up but then enforcing quarantine rules confuses the public, but I don't see those decisions as a contradiction at all!
They won't make any genuine changes for months, it'll be early in the New Year before we see significant changes if any. At the moment the current conditions favour vaccinated and healthy people, the politicians see themselves in that group with very few acknowledging their own age or fragility. That's a problem of human perception, old, frail or vulnerable is always someone else when the observer is healthy! But the risk is some new variant won't respect those boundaries, in much the same way that Delta has bent the age limits.
As much as some new variant can be a negative, it also has some positives, because vaccine refusal has plummeted as more and more youthful cases of COVID surface. There are very few youthful hold outs now, and rightly so, adolescents are no longer seeing themselves as immune!
Unvaccinated tennis players will be allowed at the Aus open but they have to quarantine for 14 days.
They have to do hard quarantine, then stay in a bubble outside of being on court, very few will take up that offer as they will be at a huge disadvantage unable to practise, prepare and socialise to the same degree as vaccinated players. They are basically segregated from everybody else outside of being on court.
By the authorities not saying no it basically puts the decision back onto the individual regarding vaccination or no vaccination, it's basically the same as the rules for unvaccinated locals and I don't see it as a double standard at all!
You are free not to be unvaccinated, but everyone else is not obliged to make special arrangements to comply with your choice.
As far as I can tell, they are the same basic quarantine rules for returning unvaccinated Australian's, and the reduced freedoms are basically the same, excluding the bubble the international players must obey after quarantine ends.
They're good people but a bit slow in reaction to their covid problems.
Early on Indian officials initially got sucked into the Bolsonaro solution, a HCQ / Ivermectin black hole, I presume sold on the idea those options were effective and a safe cheap solution given the enormity of the billion people problem!
Things unravelled so quickly there they had no choice but to go down the vaccine route.
India and Bangladesh have also completed some very good fundamental work. India did very good early work on the efficacy of masks and how to make functional home made versions and importantly how to use them effectively.
Bangladesh did even better and they have published the definitive double blind randomised trial that proved masks work in both indoor and outdoor spaces beyond doubt, the Bangladesh study covered more than 380,000 people in two cities. They even did it in a manner that conformed to the highest standards of medical ethics, and by comparison all other studies are so small they are now irrelevant!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqwHxTjXgS4 This bloke posts health reports on a finance report I follow and I rate his opinions, he is a cardiologist by trade and gives an overview on the vaccines and while I have had Pfizer myself and havent been a fan of AstraZ he gives a decent explanation and opinion on AZ and breaks down the technology into simple terms along with the other vaccines.
Thanks for that video, don't know much about the doctor but it's a nice plain language explanation.
As each week passes they find more and more explanations why the few people that get side-effects from various vaccines get them, and they then work to manage that accordingly.
No matter what new vaccine or treatment they introduce, the more doses they issue the more side-effects they will find, it's just a simply statistical relationship.
This means in someway the safest vaccines are the ones they have already issued lots of doses for, as they are now the known knowns!
Finally, one point in relation to the doctors post. The way that companies and countries calculate efficacy is not standardised, and in some cases the way the data is treated and collected is protected and subject to NDAs as commercial in confidence. So it's very hard to compare the efficacy of one versus the other based on the claimed figures, the best way to cut through to the truth is the effect of the vaccine to treatment on the public. Because so many doses of all have been issued globally, the emergency use is 1000x greater than any typical trial, the real world effects are a much more reliable indicator than any manufacturer's claim.
Mrs Baggers is one of those them thar Gemini dudes. I showed her the stats and away she went... talking, analyzing, talking, analyzing... I fully expect a thesis by later this evening, and a Ph.D by Friday.
Tea Leaf time!
Our head of house means business when the runes come out, but maybe we are a bit older, I think she believes Vikings is our family documentary!
When Win 10 came out it's performance and level of compatibility was awful, it failed to support a lot of legacy hardware, and degraded the end user experience relative to existing Win 8 or Win 8.1 installations.
At about the 6 month mark after launch most of those issues had been resolved and Win 10 became the better option even on a lot of older hardware.
I can't claim it's going to be the same this time around with Win 11, but the early experiences are very similar, a lot might come down to whether Microsoft want to push new hardware sales in the short term.
If you are an Android phone user, in the long term there are some significant advantages built into Win 11, because it looks like a Win 11 device will have an AppStore that lets you load your favourite Android / Google Play phone Apps on the computer desktop. At the moment this is only going to be Win 11 but it may even come to Win 10 long term.
Lost me when he started to heavily blame the letting go of senior players, as a major reason for struggling - then mentioned Hendo, and showed Jeffy and Bryce.....
The most likely problem is that they didn't cut Henderson soon enough, for me he and Tuohy are persona non grata, I don't really care how well they play football!
For me losing Betts and Robinson were the only obvious big mistakes, most of the other guys that left other than Tuohy haven't really done much.
Gibbs was a very good footballer, but he was pretty much on the slide when he left.
Windows 11...anyone upgraded or know anything about it ?, I usually wait till the user jury post the pros and cons in consumer reviews etc before I take the plunge with upgrades. It is a free upgrade at the minute I believe but if its no great improvement and more big brother add ons from Microsoft then I might pass...
I wouldn't go just yet, it's very early.
Many will also find that at the moment it won't even install on laptops that are only two years old, requires quite a new hardware with the Trusted Platform Module 2.0 enabled. However, there are rumours they will extend the range of compatible hardware further down the track, they will probably have to because nobody is going to dump a laptop or desktop that is only 2 years old just to get the newest version of Windows.
Another problem, is that some of the pre-existing existing software is not yet 100% compatible, I've been reading a lot of websites discussing the upgrade / rollback cycle where people have upgraded only to find they had to immediately downgrade to get some program they want to use working again.
They specifically targeted the QR check-in codes, hand-sanitiser stations and social distancing posters in two supermarkets that are 150m apart and touched nothing in-between!
There is no limit to the amount of damage one dickhead can do, check out the morons using Nazi slogans as part of the anti-vax process. This sort of behaviour will lead to someone getting killed and not from a virus, it's abhorrent!
Woolworths, apparently Australia’s largest private employer, is now mandating vaccines.
It seems the opposition to vaccine mandates has subsided. A storm in a tea cup.
That explains the aftermath of something I saw last night, a group of thugs invaded a local supermarket hit and run style ripping down the QR codes and safety messages while spray painting some illegible graffiti. Perhaps that was the motivation of this protest, except they attacked both a Woolworths and IGA using the same technique, leaving a bunch of junior staff to clean up the mess they had created in just a few minutes!
The curfews should have been scrapped weeks ago but the andrews government created a millstone for themselves with their lockdown strategy. It couldn't be eased with rising cases because it became an admission of it not being warranted.
Agree, but the big problem I see isn't the removal of restrictions or lockdowns but the inability of sections of the public to accept things aren't going back to the way it was anytime soon.
The idea things become 'normal' at midnight is just a lockdown lifting myth spread by the various forms of media.
Away from our local region they are just starting to learn about this is areas that are now showing the early signs of reduced immunity. Too many holdouts and too many in a rush to return to 'normal' are causing massive issues in various health systems. I've friends and associates in Europe that describe some public behaviour as wilful self-destruction, a pandemic anarchy!
If the public was willing and sensible about it's behaviour, wearing masks and social distancing, the lockdowns and restrictions could have been lifted a long time ago, it's not the health authorities, public servants or politicians that are to blame, it's the behaviour of some segments of the general public!
Wait and see what happens this weekend when the "breaking loose" brigade hit the semi-suburban regions like the Bass Coast, Mornington or Bellarine Peninsula and find vaccinaton certificates are required and roudy visitors are far less than broadly welcome. Having been fully closed for so long no small trader is going to risk a Health Authority forcing them into a fresh quarantine just to satisfy some hold-outs demand for independance. My advice is to keep yourself and your family well away until the surge ends!
In my area authorities have also already warned us of inside information they have relating to crooks targeting the tourist destinations as visitors drop their guard, in particular make sure you've a good car lock, that is if you can find a car park without getting into a dispute! The poor weather might be a godsend!
