2022-12-17

etc

(2018) When acrylic aquariums fail | plasticstoday.com
Fraktur - 99% Invisible

Alt-right nationalism remains on the rise in Germany, especially since the refugee crisis and controversies surrounding the use of the typeface seem to be happening with more frequency. No mainstream conservative politician publicly uses Fraktur, but in 2017, a police anti-terror unit in the state of Saxony was sanctioned for using a logo on the interior of their vehicles that featured a blackletter typeface. Mostly though, the only people to openly use Fraktur are neo-Nazi groups promoting a hyper-traditional version of German nationalism. Apparently, most of them still don’t realize that Hitler considered the typeface hopelessly tacky and provincial.
‘Unexpected item’: how self-checkouts failed to live up to their promise
The Fall of Freenode
The internet wants to be fragmented - by Noah Smith

Nearly 15M excess deaths occurred globally in 2020 and 2021
Long Covid: An update and gauging risk
The Great Barrington Plan: Would Focused Protection Have Worked?

keep in mind that the United States did focused protection. Visits to nursing homes were stopped and residents and staff were tested to a high degree. What the US did was focused protection and lockdowns and masking and we still we had a tremendous death toll in the nursing homes. Focused protection without community controls would have led to higher more deaths, both in the nursing homes and in the larger community. Whether that would have been a reasonable tradeoff is another question but there is no evidence that we could have lifted community controls and also better protected the nursing homes. I