Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the the-cows-come-home dept

This week, we’ve got a double-winner on the insightful side with Thad taking both the top spots. In first place, it’s a simple, often-useful reply to (in this instance) Amazon’s ability to take away movies people have “bought”:

Pirates, as always, are unaffected.

In second place, it’s a longer debunking of another comment making some silly assertions about COVID-19:

Well, okay. First of all, it’s pretty clear you haven’t actually read any of those links you just provided.

Some of your sources are pretty questionable: your first link is a video of something called “The Fat Emperor Podcast”. You’re fucking joking, right?

And some of your sources are reliable but don’t actually say anything about COVID-19. That Mayo Clinic link has nothing to do with vitamin D’s effect on respiratory illness; it’s about bone disease.

Now, a handful of your links do appear to be legit, and several of them do seem to make a reasonable case that there’s a correlation between vitamin D deficiency, likelihood of getting COVID-19 and other similar respiratory diseases, and having worse cases of them when infected.

As such, you may well be right that people should be taking vitamin D to reduce the risk of COVID-19 and other types of illness.

However, you are speaking about it as if it were some kind of miracle drug. It isn’t. It may well be more effective than remdesivir (which may not be effective at all), but it’s not a vaccine. It may reduce your likelihood of getting COVID-19, and it may reduce the severity of the disease if you do get it. Those are certainly good things, and vitamin D has other health benefits besides.

But I think you’re greatly overstating your case when you say “vit D, vit C, zinc combo is already, well proven, in countless places around the world, to be effective against not only CV19, but regular flu.”

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about how not every business closure can be blamed on the coronavirus, but a lot will be:

SARS-CoV-2 will be the scapegoat for unrelated failures for years to come. If there was a stock ticker I could invest in for “things SARS-CoV-2 had nothing to do with but was blamed for anyway” this would be the time to go long.

Next, it’s Tim R responding to the neverending attacks on Google News:

Even if Google News were monetized, he makes it sound like Google is in competition with newspapers, trying to wipe them out. It’s a news aggregator. It aggregates news. Without the newspapers and other online media, Google News doesn’t exist. It’s in their best interest for online properties to be successful. And there’s no better way to do that than sending them traffic. You know, that very metric that any other advertising web site on the planet treats like gold.

Over on the funny side, we’ve got a one-two punch regarding the possible legal fees and sanctions looming over Devin Nunes and his lawyer, with the first quip coming from an anonymous commenter:

Oh boy!
Nunes is going to have a cow.

Not to be out done, another anonymous commenter won second place with a reply:

Maybe he’ll finally put these cases out to pasture.

And for completion’s sake, the first editor’s choice on the funny side goes to Samuel Abram for continuing the riff:

Good point. After all, he’s milked those cases for all they’re worth?

And last but not least, pivoting to the subject of a Texas appeals court brushing off Section 230, we’ve got That Anonymous Coward with a pretty scathing jab:

If Facebook had shown up with a badge would the Judges have understood immunity then?

That’s all for this week, folks!