Here's my risk analysis for DEFCON hacker conference on August 5.
tl;dr: I'm not changing travel plans, but instead changing plans of what I'll do in Vegas. Namely, spend most of the time going out on hikes in the area.
The concern is the "Delta variant", which infects even some vaccinated people, though it doesn't seem to harm vaccinated people.
The numbers from the UK are predictive of what the United States is going to see in a month or two.
The UK has better vaccination rates than the United States. So the reason for the next wave of infections isn't because they don't vaccinate enough.
On the other hand, because of vaccinations, people aren't dying to the new variant. If you are vaccinated, you are still likely "safe" (for some unknown value of safe). Even accounting for the several week lag between "new cases" and "deaths", the number of deaths isn't high.
Here are the numbers for Nevada, which is a hotspot for the Delta variant. They'll be 50% to 100% higher in the next two weeks, following the curve demonstrated by the UK.
If you aren't vaccinated, you should be scared by these graphs, and huddle up in home, as (like the UK) we aren't going to be doing any lockdowns to stop the coming wave. Regardless of which state you live in.
But I'm vaccinated so I'm not so worried.
The risk of airplanes is small (they do a great job filtering the air), so I figure the risk of travel is small.
So the issue is what I do while in Vegas. I've never actually been to anything but conferences. So instead of canceling the flight, I plan on doing other things.
Specifically, I've been on a hiking craze lately. So I'm looking forward to going to nearby areas and hiking up in nature, especially the higher elevation treks where the air is cooler.
And probably a 2 hour drive to the Grand Canyon, which I've never seen.
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Because I'm an idiot, I'm writing my own static analyzer for C. I'm kinda stuck at the C preprocessing stage, because it's really poorly defined, so I'm on my third rewrite of that part trying to get things to work.
The history of the C preprocessor is this:
The C language is designed according to nice abstract theories of languages and LALR grammars.
The C preprocessor is an ugly hack dropped like a turd on tope of that.
On the other hand, I wrote my own Regex library for tokenization (the step before preprocessing). That went really well -- I finally understand things about Regexx that have long been a mystery.
Note that they'll never appear to agree with you. They'll keep bringing up new objections, some of which they got from crazy conspiracy theorists. It'll be frustrating for you.
You won't see how weeks later they just go out and get vaccinated.
"The vaccine is in your own (and kids) best interest" is a winning argument, clearly supported by the evidence.
"What you want doesn't matter, get vaccinated for the common good, asshole" is a losing argument.
In such cases, it's probable that the researchers got a bunch of things wrong. Which puts NSO in a bad position: they can't point out the actual errors without confirming that the rest of the stuff is true.
Whether or not their analysis is correct, Amnesty International has done a phenomenal job in transparency: amnesty.org/en/latest/rese…
But normally, I'm on the side of media targets like the NSO. The problem is that the media makes no effort in actually being fair here. Even if NSO were to make arguments defending itself, the media wouldn't care. Their efforts to get NSO's point-of-view is perfunctory.
This is a good example of the political bias of the media: Paul's accusations may be wrong, but they are clearly "substantiated". That was the entire point of the exchange, forcing Fauci to respond directly to well-substantiated facts. thehill.com/policy/healthc…
Rand Paul may still be wrong. That isn't the issue here. The issue is substantiation. In the hearing, Rand Paul clearly substantiated his claims, citing this specific study: journals.plos.org/plospathogens/…
Rand Paul claims the paper including the specific NIH grant number where they got their funding, which is NIAID R01AI110964. reporter.nih.gov/project-detail…
To be fair to Marjorie Taylor Green (and her comments on "HIPAA"), the left-wing can be equally obtuse when it suits them. A good example is the tweet below. As far as anybody can tell, Bezos and Musk pay all their income taxes.
I mention this because of stories like this from ProPublica that deliberately twist the data to make people believe these guys aren't paying their fair share of income taxes. propublica.org/article/the-se…
The ProPublica piece just exploits peoples ignorance of tax law, lack of common sense, and political bias in order to drive readership, but fails at rationality, just like Marjorie Taylor Green's views of HIPAA and Section 230.