Lack of (real) oversight and regulation=we can do what we want (and get rich).  See Great Texas Grid Failure of 2021.

What’s that you say? Lack of regulatory oversight and bought-and-sold politicians in thrall to their power-company benefactors screws over everyone who isn’t already rich?

Not all of Texas was part of ERCOT and up north where I live there was minimal effect from the big freeze even though were were much colder in many respects. My home fortunately never lost power. And of course my city was already on the approved road to join ERCOT even though everyone wondered if that was such a good…

Remember when Greg Abbott went on Fox News, days after the storm, and blamed the power grid failure on The Green New Deal? And then everyone reminded him that Texas doesn’t follow the Green New Deal?

Well, used 2012 I bought for my niece. Checked the carfax and did a visual inspection with a real Italian car mechanic.  it’s all original with no work orders in the database. If COVID hadn’t hit, it would have already crossed the 100,000 mile mark.

9-year old Fiat Abarth, no issue. Just regular maintenance.

People aren’t reasonable in this state, we are in a battle with Mississippi for the lowest vaccination rate in the country, we’re both sub 30% and not climbing much. I expect far fewer people to get the flu shot this year as anti-vax is now chic for the right and a lot of this state is on the right. This winter I…

Less than half the people in the US got the flu shot in the past, and approximately nobody wore a mask.

We need birds.

I have irrefutable proof against that dumb ass. I work in a pharmacy. During a usual flu season we will sell about 20 prescriptions for Tamiflu per day. This past flu season we only sold about 5 or 10 total for the entire year.

You’re an idiot. In a typical year, I’ll have 3 or 4 flu-positive patients a day. At my hospital, anybody who so much as sneezed wrong got swabbed for both influenza and COVID-19. I didn’t have a single positive influenza patient the entire pandemic. Meanwhile, I took care of enough COVID-19 patients to last a…

And yet you can see the impact of masks in the numbers. Month to month, day to day.

The data currently is suggesting the infected won’t have long-term immunity, so you would still want to get vaccinated. Also, probably not best to take epidemiology advice from a former ophthalmologist.

Oh, this again. Got some actual proof for that?

Feb 2020 before everything went to shit, the flu was pretty bad, and we knew of covid. Which is when I told my boss we should have two weeks of stay-at-home every February.

We saw only a handful of hospitalized influenza cases this year, usually have a few dozen even in a slow year. Did have a couple flu/COVID co-infections but almost all our positive viral cases were COVID. I expect next flu season to be a bitch with the higher vaccine hesitancy extending to flu shots, very few masks…

I’m not a fan of banning people from social media, especially politicians who can then moan about being censored

It’s almost like wearing masks when you’re sick is a GOOD thing!

...which means the collective population may have lost a lot of antibodies and such from being exposed yearly.

It really saddens me that a former President ordered a mob of fanatics to storm the US Capitol where the votes were being tallied, people died, and the harshest punishment he’s getting is “No Facebook for two years”.