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Quarantine by Jez Rider [Insta: Jezbags]

Predjama Castle, Slovenia by -soccerkid6

Apocalypse Green Grocer by Keith Reed

after the medical emergencies...would make a nice GWP

https://twitter.com/DomJMoore/status/1247863605795717120?s=20

I am done listening to your drivel and anti-US rhetoric. This is an American site and you are a guest here, so tread lightly. As for the Czech Republic, you should thank the USA. You would be speaking Russian without us.

Some personal responsibility to keep your own financial records and not be dependent on another entity comes into play here. I miss it, but understand it's not mine.

come on, it hasn't even been a day 🤯

Now is as good a time as any to go throw a keychain into your cart so you don’t forget next time.

Am I the only one who immediately think of Goldeneye on seeing that satellite dish ??

That is some stellar box art, for sure.

Assuming the insurance company does not go bankrupt due to that policy

Wow! Dr John Campbell drops a huge bomb on the WHO. This guy has no agenda and constantly puts humanity first (no politics). In fact, he seems to be the only one worrying about Africa. My link takes you to the WHO quote. 30 second clip.

Schindler's List by Patrick B.

The box art is great looking like one of those Comic-con exclusives. If there are stickers across the panels then whomever placed them for the photos did a heck of a job aligning each perfectly. I am fairly certain they are printed for this lack of variance. Anyway the build has some nice details plus an assortment of parts in 'earthy' tones with tan & nougat.

I've listened to the negativity and US bashing for weeks now. Enough.

Agreed, just read a good response to this from JD Vance: "There’s a way in which this claim is sort of interesting as an academic argument: effectively, how do we track deaths in an accelerating pandemic, where it isn’t possible to test everyone who’s dying? A lot of folks have picked up on CDC guidelines that don’t require a test to confirm a case of COVID. Others have focused on the “with/or” question—just because someone dies *with* COVID doesn’t mean that’s the cause of mortality. A few responses. First, people are right to say the situation is fluid and it’s tough to record every death accurately. But importantly, 1) this is true for every disease (do you think every flu death has a confirmed flu test? No, just check the CDC guidelines) and 2) miscounting goes both ways. There’s a lot of reason to think we’re undercounting deaths. First, it has happened in nearly every major European country. NYC public health officials have argued that where normally 20-25 people die per day at home, that number has been higher than 200 as the crisis has peaked. But the truth is that we won’t know until we can look at the all cause mortality numbers, and see how they’ve spiked or not in response to COVID. (To be clear, I have some qualms with how useful the all cause numbers will be here, but they’re probably the best we’ll have.) Many have argued that all cause mortality numbers are dropping lately (can’t find the tweets). This is wrong: CDC usually takes months to fully tabulate the data. There’s been a lot of misinformation here—a suggestion that pneumonia deaths are dropping because health officials are overstating COVID numbers, for instance, is widespread on twitter. All of this stems from the fact that our mortality numbers don’t fully come in for months. One exception here is NYC, which usually reports vital statistics rapidly (and has done so for many years). Finally, I think the “with/or” debate misunderstands something pretty fundamental about comorbidity. Most people who die of a respiratory illness (including, yes, the flu) aren’t totally healthy people. If a dude with a heart condition gets the flu and dies, but would have lived another 10 months absent influenza, did he die of the flu? This **** is complicated, but that doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy to inflate COVID deaths."

My Walmart doesn't even know which side of the Lego box is the front, so I'm not sure if this will help them or confuse them more.

That is some fuzzy math....hmmmm

Paper in Nature Medicine discounts the possibility of the disease originating in a lab https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

For retail could be smart as well as it encourages people to pick up the box. Although that doesn't work well with my glass-cased walmarts.

I stopped by LEGOLAND and had them divert the boxes to the back of my car.

Amen for Boris, and everyone else who is sick. re: the USS TR. This has nothing to do with PR. First we would like to believe that someone doesn't become captain of a $10-12 Billion warship (including aircraft) + all the support and escorts without understanding strategy. When the issues with the ship became public the first question I asked my wife was, "How do we in the public know there is a problem with a fleet carrier?!" No fleet carrier operates alone. They are the focal point of a small Task Force of ships (escorts, support, and including an nuke attack submarine). It doesn't matter that we're currently at peace. The captain, in his effort to raise awareness, made his ship and support fleet vulnerable. It doesn't matter how much you're hurting, you never admit vulnerability because someone stupid will take advantage of it. For that reason alone he needs to be removed. Unless the captain was completely ignored by his superiors and THEY were the ones placing his command in jeopardy. If that is the case, then he isn't the one that needs to go, but them. He still should never have made the situation public. I don't know how he'll ever be trusted with secrets again. I caught Trump yesterday saying he hates for the captain to be removed from the navy because the guy has an otherwise stellar career. So who knows...

C'mon...he's gonna turn the car around and we'll never get any ice cream

We can meet up at TRU parking lot

I love kids.. my daughter was eating toast while I was watching GMA and she blurts out "Dad, look, it's the Lego Masters guy!" Hahaha, made my heart smile while my brain said errr not quite but I could see how she saw some resemblance. Jamie has certainly got some salt and pepper going on!

I wanted to create a new thread in order to give progress on my site updates. I want explain a bit on what happened and what I am doing. What happened with the site? Honestly nothing really exciting or dramatic, overall in the end, I did not want to support the host I was with for the past four years after not really offering too much help with managed servers. They would spend 30 seconds looking, say they can ping the server so its up and then just say, "hey not my problem". I was on aging hardware, paying the same amount of money, so I took the opportunity to move to a new host with better/faster hardware and a staff that does help to support you when run into an issue that you can't handle on your own. I have been doing this a long time and pretty good monitoring and handling 99% of what comes my way, but there are issues that you need the next level up to help figure out what to do. I wasn't getting anything like that, but paying for it. Not anymore. What my goal is... I know more than anyone that the site needed some TLC. It's been a while since I have done any drastic updates, the site looked tired and I know the site can be so much better than what it's current state was. LEGO investing has changed since Ed and I launched the site and it's time to remove the dead content and bring more of what people are looking for. Below is the short term list of items planned for updating. I have been working on the nightly, just like the early days and enjoying seeing parts of it coming to life. Fix the login. This has been messed up and quirky for a while. This has been resolved and working well. It's a simple thing overall, but nice that it actually works how it's supposed to Overall price guide site design update. The site was tired and disjointed. I hated it and pained me to look at it. Time to start over. Brickfolio update. All the Brickfolio data is safe. I have close to three million rows of data for Brickfolio entries. Time to bring this thing to 2020. I will probably create another thread at some point to solicit some feedback on some new requests for the brickfolio Fix the data syncing with Brickset. A lot of people used this feature, but it's time to make it work the way it should. Later I will work on the content portions. The news and blogs. I have some good ideas for this, but want to get the price guide and brickfolio to you sooner than later. What I am asking for if possible... If you can, please stop asking where the brickfolio is. Again, the data is safe and I am working as fast as I can to bring it all back to you. It won't be a few days, but more like a few weeks, but it will be worth it. I setup my dev environment to push releases quick and easy. I want to create a true changelog so that you can follow updates to see what was done/fixed/new/removed, you know like what real software companies do. I really do appreciate your patience with this. It wasn't planned, but if there was going to be a time to do it, it was going to be now.

They can't but its all relative. Someone on BBC News last night was deploring how kids are getting anxious because they might not see their friends before they break for summer (mid July here in the UK) - they've only been off school two (or is three?) weeks!! When I was my sons school age we had power cuts, strikes, waste amassing in the streets, riots, IRA bombings, etc. When my dad was at school he was running to a bomb shelter most nights during 1941 and has rationing through to his mid-teens. As I said it's all relative and people need to focus on the big picture. A prolonged life is generally worth waiting for, even if it does carry an inconvenience by todays standards.

Point understood. That said, we will figure out a way to get kids back in school safely. Believe me, it will be a dicey situation at first, but people cannot sit at home forever.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Study-investigates-if-COVID-19-came-to-Calif-in-15187085.php So there's suspicion CV hit SF Bay Area fall of 2019. As of Tuesday, the state had 374 reported COVID-19 fatalities in a state of 40 million people, compared to New York which has seen 14 times as many fatalities and has a population half that of California. Social distancing could be playing a role but New York's stay-at-order went into effect on March 22, three days after California implemented its order. "Something is going on that we haven't quite found out yet," said Victor Davis Hanson a senior fellow with Stanford's Hoover Institute.Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China. "When you add it all up it would be naïve to think that California did not have some exposure," said Hanson. For years California has been the No. 1 travel destination for Chinese tourists in the United States. Even after the U.S. halted flights from China this winter Chinese travelers were still able to come to California on flights from Europe and Canada. Hanson said through all of this the Chinese have been disingenuous about the timing of the initial outbreak of COVID-19. "They originally said it was in early January, then it got backdated to December and then early December and now they are saying as early as November 17," said Hanson. If Californians were exposed earlier than the rest of the country to COVID-19 we may have had a chance to build up some herd immunity to the disease. We won't know if that is the case until results from the Stanford Medicine study come back. Anectdotally; a really weird flu bug hit our school all at once this past January...about a 3rd of the school were sick within a single week...and within our social circle similar flu-like sickness from pretty much every household within a 2-week span in Jan...2 households I know had to take sick family members to ER and were immediately given Tami-flu anti-virus.

Getter One by Marco De Bon

No one's mind has ever been changed on politics from an internet forum so let's give it a rest. Let's agree to disagree on the topic of Trump who is very polarizing. Similarly for the jingo-ism sentiment...(OK, you've all done it now...I haven't had to actually use that term since High School Social Science over 30 years ago) I wholly enjoy discussing CV developments from across the nation and across the pond, in this forum and would like to continue doing so.

David Bowie by vakaisme

Staples.com: $15 off your online order of $60 or more.† Coupon code: 45242. Online only, not applicable in retail stores. Ends 4/8/20. Excludes technology/PCs.

Have you checked FedEx Delivery Manager (you need a free account). I have not gotten anything from Legoland CA apart from the initial order confirmation. If it wasnt for FedEx I would be in the same boat as you...

Sorry, this is very long but has some very very interesting data points and observations. Article can be found here: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ Northern Italy has one of the oldest populations and the worst air quality in Europe, which has already led to an increased number of respiratory diseases and deaths in the past and is likely an additional risk factor in the current epidemic. South Korea, for instance, has experienced a much milder course than Italy and has already passed the peak of the epidemic. In South Korea, only about 70 deaths with a positive test result have been reported so far. As in Italy, those affected were mostly high-risk patients. ..... According to the latest data of the Italian National Health Institute ISS, the average age of the positively-tested deceased in Italy is currently about 81 years. 10% of the deceased are over 90 years old. 90% of the deceased are over 70 years old. 80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases. 50% of the deceased had suffered from three or more chronic diseases. The chronic diseases include in particular cardiovascular problems, diabetes, respiratory problems and cancer. ..... Furthermore, according to a first Chinese study, the internationally used virus test kits may give a false positive result in some cases. In these cases, the persons may not have contracted the new coronavirus, but presumably one of the many existing human coronaviruses that are part of the annual (and currently ongoing) common cold and flu epidemics. (1) ..... Important reference values include the number of annual flu deaths, which is up to 8,000 in Italy and up to 60,000 in the US; normal overall mortality, which in Italy is up to 2,000 deaths per day; and the average number of pneumonia cases per year, which in Italy is over 120,000. Current all-cause mortality in Europe and in Italy is still normal or even below-average. Any excess mortality due to Covid-19 should become visible in the European monitoring charts. ..... The younger test-positive deceased almost always had severe pre-existing conditions. For example, a 21-year-old Spanish soccer coach had died test-positive, making international headlines. However, the doctors diagnosed an unrecognized leukemia, whose typical complications include severe pneumonia. ..... In Switzerland, some emergency units are already overloaded simply because of the large number of people who want to be tested. This points to an additional psychological and logistical component of the current situation. ..... Italian immunology professor Sergio Romagnani from the University of Florence comes to the conclusion in a study on 3000 people that 50 to 75% of the test-positive people of all ages remain completely symptom-free – significantly more than previously assumed. The occupancy rate of the North Italian ICUs in the winter months is typically already 85 to 90%. Some or many of these existing patients could also be test-positive by now. However, the number of additional unexpected pneumonia cases is not yet known. A hospital doctor in the Spanish city of Malaga writes on Twitter that people are currently more likely to die from panic and systemic collapse than from the virus. The hospital is being overrun by people with colds, flu and possibly Covid19 and doctors have lost control. ..... A new epidemiological study (preprint) concludes that the fatality of Covid19 even in the Chinese city of Wuhan was only 0.04% to 0.12% and thus rather lower than that of seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1%. As a reason for the overestimated fatality of Covid19, the researchers suspect that initially only a small number of cases were recorded in Wuhan, as the disease was probably asymptomatic or mild in many people. Chinese researchers argue that extreme winter smog in the city of Wuhan may have played a causal role in the outbreak of pneumonia. In the summer of 2019, public protests were already taking place in Wuhan because of the poor air quality. New satellite images show how Northern Italy has the highest levels of air pollution in Europe, and how this air pollution has been greatly reduced by the quarantine. ..... A report in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera points out that Italian intensive care units already collapsed under the marked flu wave in 2017/2018. They had to postpone operations, call nurses back from holiday and ran out of blood donations. German virologist Hendrik Streeck argues that Covid19 is unlikely to increase total mortality in Germany, which normally is around 2500 people per day. Streeck mentions the case of a 78-year-old man with preconditions who died of heart failure, subsequently tested positive for Covid19 and thus was included in the statistics of Covid19 deaths. According to Stanford Professor John Ioannidis, the new coronavirus may be no more dangerous than some of the common coronaviruses, even in older people. Ioannidis argues that there is no reliable medical data backing the measures currently decided upon. ..... According to the latest German statistics, the median age of test-positive deaths is about 83 years, most with pre-existing health conditions that might be a possible cause of death. According to Italian news reports, 90% of test-positive deceased in the Lombardy region have died outside of intensive care units, mostly at home or in general care sections. Their cause of death and the possible role of quarantine measures in their deaths remain unclear. Only 260 out of 2168 test-positive persons have died in ICUs. ..... The Japan Times asks: Japan was expecting a coronavirus explosion. Where is it? Despite being one of the first countries getting positive test results and having imposed no lockdown, Japan is one of the least-affected nations. Quote: "Even if Japan may not be counting all those infected, hospitals aren’t being stretched thin and there has been no spike in pneumonia cases." Italian researchers argue that the extreme smog in Northern Italy, the worst in Europe, may be playing a causative role in the current pneumonia outbreak there, as in Wuhan before. In a new interview, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, a world renowned expert in medical microbiology, says blaming the new coronavirus alone for deaths is "wrong“ and "dangerously misleading“, as there are other more important factors at play, notably pre-existing health conditions and poor air quality in Chinese and Northern Italian cities. Professor Bhakdi describes the currently discussed or imposed measures as "grotesque“, "useless“, "self-destructive“ and a "collective suicide“ that will shorten the lifespan of the elderly and should not be accepted by society. ..... As Professors Ioannidis and Bhakdi have shown, countries like South Korea and Japan that introduced no lockdown measures have experienced near-zero excess mortality in connection with Covid-19, while the Diamond Princess cruise ship experienced an extra­polated mortality figure in the per mille range, i.e. at or below the level of the seasonal flu. ..... According to press reports, oxygen bottles may become scarce. The reason, however, is not a currently higher usage, but rather hoarding due to fear of future shortages. ..... According to Italian Professor Walter Ricciardi, "only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus“, whereas in public reports "all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus“. This means that Italian death figures reported by the media have to be reduced by at least a factor of 8 to obtain actual deaths caused by the virus. Thus one ends up with at most a few dozen deaths per day, compared to an overall daily mortality of 1800 deaths and up to 20,000 flu deaths per year. ..... An Italian study of August 2019 found that flu deaths in Italy were between 7,000 and 25,000 in recent years. This value is higher than in most other European countries due to the large elderly population in Italy, and much higher than anything attributed to Covid-19 so far. In a new fact sheet, the World Health Organization WHO reports that Covid-19 is in fact spreading slower, not faster, than influenza by a factor of about 50%. Moreover, pre-symptomatic transmission appears to be much lower with Covid-19 than with influenza. A leading Italian doctor reports that "strange cases of pneumonia“ were seen in the Lombardy region already in November 2019, raising again the question if they were caused by the new virus (which officially only appeared in Italy in February 2020), or by other factors, such as the dangerously high smog levels in Northern Italy. Danish researcher Peter Gøtzsche, founder of the renowned Cochrane Medical Collaboration, writes that Corona is "an epidemic of mass panic“ and "logic was one of the first victims.“ Former Israeli Health Minister, Professor Yoram Lass, says that the new coronavirus is "less dangerous than the flu“ and lockdown measures "will kill more people than the virus“. He adds that "the numbers do not match the panic“ and "psychology is prevailing over science“. He also notes that "Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country.“ Pietro Vernazza, a Swiss infectious disease specialist, argues that many of the imposed measures are not based on science and should be reversed. According to Vernazza, mass testing makes no sense because 90% of the population will see no symptoms, and lockdowns and closing schools are even "counterproductive“. He recommends protecting only risk groups while keeping the economy and society at large undisturbed. The President of the World Doctors Federation, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, argues that lockdown measures as in Italy are "unreasonable“ and "counterproductive“ and should be reversed. Switzerland: Despite media panic, excess mortality still at or near zero: the latest testpositive "victims“ were a 96yo in palliative care and a 97yo with pre-existing conditions.

Just permanently lock this damn thread already, it's obviously cursed. Some people just can't stop attacking countries & insulting other members. Go build some LEGO or even spam your political views on Twitter, this is neithee a science thread, nor an election thread.

Looks like LEGO designed and made protective eye shields for medical personnel. Lookin' Good LEGO:)

Agreed on this. I'd love to sell some sets but have no idea how much I paid for them! I get the whole "backing things up" but also never imagined we wouldn't have access for six weeks or more.

Beef. 🤪

I feel as well as most military people I've heard from that he was 100% right in removing him from command but 100% wrong in belittling him the way he did. That's why he ended up resigning. Yeah, I think he resigned earlier today. You posted that right as I responded above.

Modly has resigned over his comments about the Captain of the TR https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/thomas-modly-resign-navy-secretary-captain-coronavirus-ship-letter-trump-a9453896.html

This is an innovation by LEGO - of creating unique box art - is definitely one I can get behind.

First discount that I've seen on the 21319 (w/coupon).... https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-6283895-Ideas-2019-4/dp/B07PX3X5WL/ref=sxts_b2b_sx_reorder?cv_ct_cx=lego+friends&dchild=1&keywords=lego+friends&pd_rd_i=B07PX3X5WL&pd_rd_r=327652e2-4a31-4320-9602-6635c610c43f&pd_rd_w=KiqoZ&pd_rd_wg=AUBqq&pf_rd_p=c8578112-5367-4af9-b0d7-8ea3833d7167&pf_rd_r=K1GPDJG4WD74V36W6PHB&qid=1586300228&sr=1-1-f5ebfd8e-82c1-4b4e-97d5-2aa47aa18b69

The rules are the rules for a reason. If you leave rules open to individual interpretation based on an individual then they are no longer rules but merely suggestions. As far as difference between peace and war time, there very much is a difference. If this had happened during war time he could be headed to the brig or court martialed for treason. Instead he now gets a desk job and will get to keep his benefits and pension when he retires.

He absolutely should have been removed from command. He circumvented the chain of command. This is like rule number 1 that every person in the military is taught not to do from day 1. He put the lives of the Sailors who are stationed aboard his ship at risk by publicly divulging fighting limitations that the TR currently had. I don't disagree with any Commanding Officer ever fighting for the health and safety of those placed under their command, but the military and the Navy have had a chain of command in place for a reason since the dawn of time. Once people circumvent or blatantly disregard the chain of command it dissolves unit cohesiveness and in extreme situations can lead to mutinous actions. There was a proper channel for him to follow to fight the good fight for his people, he should have used it. This is just a opinion from a salty old Sailor though.

Dare I unlock this thread? Please: Keep it civil No name calling of anyone. Whether it's a politician or another user. We're all better than that. Facts and opinions are fine. We're not going to stifle anyone's feelings or opinions. But you can express those in an adult manner without resorting to name calling. I'm hoping a couple days break got us all feeling a little bit better. If you're getting angry at someone in this thread, then it's time to step away from the thread, and build some LEGO. I did, and it feels great! Be kind to one another, stay safe and healthy.

Not even close to how neat most of your modular buildings are, but my daughter and I built this out of multiple daily bugles that kept falling apart and are really proud of it

“Stand beside her, and guide her,” we sing in “God Bless America.”