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The Boston Globe - A small group of ‘superdodgers’ insist they’ve never had COVID. Here’s why they may be wrong. By Sarah Rahal Updated June 3, 2026, 5:30 a.m. Last month, The Boston Globe asked readers who believe they’ve never caught the coronavirus to share their experiences. The response was overwhelming. More than 500 people wrote in, many offering to sign up for clinical trials, convinced their stories might help researchers uncover why some people appear to have evaded the pandemic. In fact, researchers are already working to answer that question. Their most definitive finding so far: NOVIDs are exceedingly rare. “There’s a difference between people who believe they’ve never had COVID and those who truly haven’t,” said Dr. Sabrina Assoumou, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center and a researcher at Boston University. Data suggest only about 2 to 3 percent of people have no COVID antibodies worldwide, meaning they may never have been infected, Assoumou said. Even that may be an overestimate, since most people who feel like outliers likely had asymptomatic or mild infections that went undetected. But the possibility that a tiny fraction truly escaped infection has intrigued researchers. They formed an international consortium of 250 scientists, known as the COVID Human Genetic Effort, who are hunting for an even smaller group: people with genetic variants that may make them resistant to the virus.

We’ve known about asymptomatic covid since the get go of the pandemic, because that’s how the spread was so diabolical. So it’s true there are probably many cases where people have no idea they had covid. All you have to do is look at the amount of people who just assume they have a really really really bad cold, or the flu, without even bothering to test. I hear that all the time from podcasters, pundits, and other content creators. We also know that there could be things that make people more or less likely to be resistant to other things, like HIV, for example. I remember decades ago being riveted by a PBS NOVA episode about Stephen Cohn. But of course there are also people such as myself who have never been sick with covid and never tested positive for covid. I even had an antibody test a month or two after a known exposure in March 2020, and that was negative. I’ve not even had an actual cold-like illness since January 2020. And even so, I couldn’t say for sure. In my case, avoiding covid is likely a mix of luck and because I actually take precautions. I say it’s a mix of luck because I do in fact likely get exposed from time to time, at dental or medical appointments, for example, though I request healthcare providers to mask when I’m having to unmask, and my dentist, who masked prior to the pandemic because he doesn’t want to breathe in tooth dust, canceled when he had cold symptoms. I do think there are probably more people avoiding covid, at least to some extent, than people realize. There’s been marketing research all along that has showed that behaviour patterns remained shifted even after the push to get back to normal for The Economy. The reason that it’s not so obvious is in my opinion a damning one; it’s because it’s largely groups that are already ignored and marginalized otherwise as well: the elderly & disabled.

it’s the same picture the office meme with the 2 white cards one says AI boosters the other says AI doomers and the person is saying “they’re the same picture”

The loopholes in Maryland’s surveillance pricing law make it a real deal breaker.

If you’re in any type of loyalty program at all, or clicked “yes” or “I agree” at some point, to a store’s program to get coupons or whatever, you will probably have signed your right away to be protected by surveillance pricing law in Maryland. And we all know that nobody reads every little part of all those things one has to agree to in order to get the sale price. These programs have been a problem for decades, the realtime corporate surveillance has just put the unfairness and target marketing exploitation on hyperdrive.

iapp - Maryland enacts a first-of-its-kind surveillance pricing law, but there are loopholes Questions around baseline pricing, loyalty program exemptions and enforcement may limit how Maryland’s grocery pricing rules work in practice. Published 13 May 2026 Four loopholes. The legislation leaves four potential paths for businesses to bypass the surveillance pricing ban and keep earning extra money from consumers. No baseline price. Both prohibitions require proving the consumer paid a higher price than they otherwise would have paid. However, the bill does not define a baseline price for comparison. Any price charged will be interpreted as a discount from the implied price, even if the retailer sets a nominal regular price and offers personalized discounts. This means consumers who do not receive a discount may have to pay a higher price for the same product. The segment gap. Both prohibitions contained in §13-321 apply only to prices set for one consumer. Dynamic pricing prohibition refers to “a specific consumer.” Personal data use prohibition refers to “a single consumer.” At first, the enrolled version of the law contained language allowing banning of the use of personal data to set prices for “a specific consumer or a group of consumers,” was intentionally removed from the final bill. Loyalty programs carve-out. The bill explicitly provides that any discounts given by food retailers to consumers participating in loyalty, membership, or rewards programs and subscription pricing are not covered by this prohibition. Loyalty programs are the primary way to collect granular data. Thus, removing loyalty programs from the ban list means removing the biggest chunk of surveillance activity. Limited enforcement mechanisms. This is perhaps the most significant loophole. It is also the only one that might affect plaintiffs’ decisions. There is no private right of action regarding surveillance pricing ban provided in §13-321. No citizen of Maryland may sue the violator for any compensation or injunctive relief because of a violation of this prohibition. (emphasis added)

My letter to reps:

We need laws on surveillance pricing that do not default allow a loophole to treat people unfairly because they’re in a store “loyalty program” for people who have opted in to get some coupon or signed up for a mailing list. Meaningful crackdown on this abusive business practice needs to not set up a situation to blame the customer for not having read some tiny little print somewhere on a page they were anxious to get past in order to move on with their day. There should also be a mandate for stores to set baseline prices storewide in order to not obfuscate what they’re doing with discounts, coupons, and sneak in surveillance pricing and hyper-individual target marketing that way. Transparency should be required.

Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.

We Found The Radical Solution To Surveillance Pricing  More Perfect Union Jun 10, 2026 To understand the danger surveillance pricing bills face, we wanted to investigate how those lobbyists gutted the Maryland bill so effectively. We looked at public disclosure documents for some clues. Members of the state Senate committees debating the bill were gifted over $10,000 in dinners by the Maryland Retail Alliance at restaurants serving up salmon Wellington and $150 Wagyu tomahawk ribeye. I mean, I don't know if that's what they ordered, but if a lobbyist was paying, you’d be stupid not to. The disclosures don't actually show what was discussed, but the first dinner was just one day after the legislature began considering the surveillance pricing bill. The Maryland Retail Alliance initially opposed it until those carve-outs were added to make the bill impotent. On their board of directors: executives from Target and Amazon. And the bill's passage got high praise from the head of the Chamber of Progress, a former Google exec. What we've seen in terms of pushback on a lot of these bills is attempts to get exemptions from the protection that really swallow the rule. Now, this blunder could go national — a way for lawmakers to say they've banned the practice, but in reality, not. 

I’ve been noticing that a lot of people who call themselves progressives are actually parroting the positions of corporations. And this is why I keep saying don’t use shorthand, spell things out and say what you mean because if you use shorthand, people might not even be talking about the same things.

Just Say No to Bernie Sanders’s AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Don’t give more money to the billionaires Dean Baker Jun 09, 2026 The economics on this look even worse. The job-killing effect of AI exists much more in the minds of our political elite than in the data. Productivity growth, the measure of job killing, has been extremely weak the last two quarters. Quarterly data are erratic and perhaps the future will be different, but if AI is killing off large numbers of jobs, it is doing a great job concealing the evidence. Most likely the AI sector is in a massive bubble. At its peak value, Nvidia’s market capitalization was roughly 20% of U.S. GDP. In the late 1990s tech bubble, Microsoft’s market cap peaked at less than 6% of GDP. An AI sovereign wealth fund is likely to end up being a mechanism to shovel yet more money to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of the right-wing billionaire gang. We have already given this crew enough money. I doubt that we will see massive AI-related job displacement, but if we do, we have old remedies that should work just fine.

And Dean Baker goes on to give suggestions that are pretty standard and not at all novel, like higher tax on the rich, stronger labor standards, and better antitrust enforcement. It reminds me a little of all these false climate solutions that get trotted out, because nobody making money off the bad things happening wants to do what we already know we need to do to mitigate the climate damage, there’s no mystery, just rich people who are resistant, and people who want to sell the snake oil solutions.

My comment: I agree this is wrong headed in every way. But I don’t think it’s anything to do with Donald Trump per se. I still want medicare for all, even if those beef tallow snake oil whackadoos RFKJr & Dr. Oz are temporarily in charge of medicare in the federal govt. I don’t think this wealth fund investment in these companies is good because yeah they shouldn’t even be given government contracts. They need to stop funneling my money to these tycoons. But also I don’t want to invest in this crap they’re doing because I think it’s at best useless, but actually very very bad. I do not want “ai mass surveillance for the people”, I don’t want “ai slop for the people”, I don’t want “gas plants and data centers in Archbald Pennsylvania for the people”. And it’s not a new species holy shit just stop with the new species I made fun out of Maureen Dowd saying that on MSNBC and I have proof I was complaining back then because I mentioned it on TheLetterhack livestream over a year ago, now I heard Bernie saying “species” in a clip they played on Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast, and I feel like I’m losing my gosh darn mind. MAKE IT STOP!!! Everyone needs to just stop parroting PR buzzwords from tech execs high on their own supply suffering from chatbot psychosis. If you're tempted to call chatbots a new species please put your phone down slowly, back away from it, and go outside and if you don't want to touch grass, just look at a tree, or just look at the sky, or just something farther away from you than 2ft away.

There’s ice under that basketball court and this arena has its own superspy mass surveillance state policing people for personal vendettas of the magnate who owns it.

gift link:

Amazing to see the machine politics online influence operations glom onto this thread like nobody’s business.

It’s not just on Reddit, but Reddit seems to be coming up a lot recently, and is worth revisiting considering the implications.

Companies have been spamming Reddit with inauthentic content to push peptides in order to manipulate results by AI chatbots that scrape the content.

Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search Jason Koebler · Jun 3, 2026 at 10:29 AM Peptide companies have been doing AI-engine optimization by spamming the biohackers subreddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google. “As AI search engines increasingly pull answers from Reddit, companies are using us for AEO. On top of that, there’s been an explosion of peptide interest and AI usage flooding the sub. Together, this has put serious pressure on content quality,” a post by the moderators read. AEO is AI-engine optimization, and it is an evolution of search engine optimization where brands and marketing companies attempt to create content that they hope will be scraped by large language models. Manipulating Reddit with bots, sock puppet accounts, and human accounts that are paid to promote brands has become a core strategy of firms that do AEO, because Reddit has become one of most-often cited sources by popular AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search. For example, a company called RedRover offers AEO and SEO for companies; on its home page, it says “rank #1 on Search and get cited by AI: AI agents that mass publish content to help you rank on Google, ChatGPT, and Reddit—driving traffic to your site from every corner of the internet.” “An army of agents publishing blog content & reddit posts that solves both SEO & AEO at scale,” RedRover advertises.

Of course this isn’t the first time a medical product has been the subject of some kind of meme stock scheme, like was tried with the Novavax vaccine, and many wellness products are promoted using dubious marketing and tricky regulatory dodging, like any number of nasal sprays marketed without good evidence for covid, are deceptively pushed on social media. And cryptocurrency sometimes games the information space with buzzwords. All these things get promoted on Reddit and the other platforms. And it’s common for forum moderators to be pushed to the point where they just have to ban talk about something altogether because inauthentic advertising is pushing in, often under the guise of “personal testimonials”. But it seems like the AI Engine Optimization really is trying to scale beyond the already ridiculous gaming of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and with error-prone AI this can’t be anything but more messy.

Tinuiti is reporting that Perplexity AI is citing Reddit less in recent times. And that Gemini is citing Youtubes more. Though I don’t even understand who really wants regurgitated Reddit posts or Youtube video content anyway.

Tinuiti on Linkedin May 2026 “The Al search landscape is shifting fast. In the latest edition of Tinuiti’s Q2 2026 Al Citation Trends Report, Andy Taylor breaks down the massive shakeups happening across the Al landscape over the last quarter. Key takeaways you need to know: Perplexity pulls back on social: Social media citation share has dropped, with Reddit seeing a massive decline from 25% in February down to just 7% in April. Google doubles down on YouTube: Google-owned Al tools are doing the opposite, with YouTube citation share more than quadrupling for Al Mode and doubling for Al Overviews. Amazon dominates e-commerce citations: Amazon’s footprint is growing steadily, jumping to a massive 19% share on Microsoft Copilot this April. What do these shifts mean for your brand’s visibility in Al-generated search results?”

Side note: Tinuiti, a company that specializes in PR and online marketing operations, was founded by a guy who’s now a top official appointed by Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania government and was found in RTK emails acting like a concierge for AWS data center plans.

I am sometimes sent links to various things by other people, and sometimes that’s on reddit, and I checked out this post, which was clearly labeled “vent”, and it was someone who is avoiding covid and described feeling let down by a friend who basically overstated the level of caution they use, and then they were found being less than cautious when it comes to covid and the myriad of contagious stuff that’s going around perpetually year round anymore. Considering this was in a subreddit dedicated ostensibly to being in the pro-precaution camp, it seemed notable to me that the most upvoted replies were people chastising the OP, telling them it’s a you problem, giving unsolicited and peculiar self-help advice on not demanding so much from friends, (like not making you sick?). The post certainly didn’t give the impression they were demanding much of anything, but every post where the OP tried to clarify and defend themself against these mischaracterizing replies, that were basically accusations of overreacting or something, the OP’s defending and clarifying remarks had been downvoted into the negatives so much they almost always hidden. Everyone offering the OP any kind of kind sympathy, or saying hey that stinks, or just hey what a shame that everyone’s really at risk… All of those were also being downvoted, and downvoted enough to offset the upvotes of agreement, to the point they were mostly located down the bottom of the thread, and sometimes hidden! I don’t think this is just happenstance or authentic interaction on the internet.

Peptides are the investment speculative rage right now, especially with a snake oil friendly administration in charge of regulation in the U.S.

Marketplace Tech May 26, 2026 Startups are betting on a legalized peptide market Zara Stone, tech culture reporter at The San Francisco Standard, explains how startups are gearing up for potential FDA approval of compounded peptide drugs this summer.

There are serious risks of side-effects with peptides, including potentially speeding up cancer. Buyer beware.

The Conversation - Peptides: performance‑boosting, anti‑ageing drugs or dangerous snake oil? Published: August 1, 2025 9:28am EDT Once confined to elite labs and obscure bodybuilding forums, these amino acid chains are now flooding wellness spaces, social media feeds and online marketplaces. Although they are marketed as “next-generation biohacks” and “research chemicals”, many peptides are not approved for human use and lack basic clinical testing. Still, their popularity is growing – fuelled by testimonials, influencer hype and the seductive promise of turning back time. But beneath the surface of glossy marketing and fitness fantasies lies a far more sobering truth: many of these substances operate in a medical grey zone, with unknown long-term risks, questionable manufacturing standards, and in some cases, life-threatening side-effects.

Anyone considering this the invisible hand of a free market is confused. It’s the hiding in plain sight hand on the scale, paid for by big corporations and billionaire tycoons. The wellness industrial complex has been larger than big pharma for years now. Some predict the health and wellness industry will be worth over $11 trillion by 2034. The fossil fuel industry is predicted to be over $11 trillion by 2032. The AI industry is predicted to be $4.8 trillion by 2033. But Ed Zitron certainly doesn’t believe the AI industry will be worth that, and I agree, it sure looks like a bubble. And it’s not even worth saying how much crypto thinks the crypto industry is worth. All these industries pour loads into marketing, PR, advertising, and influence operations. Fossil fuel has been caught doing deceptive community infiltration operations, and private spies more openly known for military contracts, have been doing clandestine work for corporations for years. A lot of influence operations use forums, such as one crypto company that even detailed in their S-1 SEC form that their business model was based on training up influencers by creating communities on discord.

On the local reddit for the city where I live, if anyone criticizes any of the retail businesses in the town, or if anyone posts anything in support of unions, or gives any details about labor issues or poor working conditions in any of the businesses in the city, their posts so often are downvoted into the basement and hidden. It’s uncanny and happens pretty quickly. Any posts on the side of workers, or any posts that do anything but praise local businesses just happen to get multiple downvotes within a few minutes? Does that seem authentic or fake?

I’m not really saying anything new here, but the truth is that for a lot of people this will be news, because a lot of people just don’t know how this stuff works. And it’s frankly a pity anyone should have to, but it’s a matter of safety at this point. I don’t think anyone wants astroturfed PR and online influence campaigns to be running our communities, our society, do we?

TNW - Astroturfing Reddit is the future of political campaigning - July 11, 2017 - 1:23 pm Matthew Hughes “Right here is where things get a little sketchy, as Hack PR decided to look into gaming Reddit to bring some momentum to their campaign. “I knew that if I could get one of my links to the top of Reddit Politics, I would have a pretty good chance of making the idea spread, so I set that as my goal: Get to the top of Reddit Politics within 24 hours.” What it did next was simple. A Hack PR staffer published a link to a Washington Times article about the campaign, who then purchased every single upvote package on Fiverr.com, for a total cost of $35. The post soon blew up and became the most popular article on r/politics. Hack PR also anonymously spammed over 20,000 media contacts with a link to the Reddit post. Each time a publication covered the news, it would repeat the same process with the Washington Times article.”

I’m continually confirmed in my belief that it’s best to get to know people one on one, and focus on involving oneself in small groups of no more than a dozen, if you want to have meaningful communication with other humans. Everything isn’t about an audience, and authentic relationships don’t scale. There are no shortcuts to organizing, just pitfalls. Social media engagement isn’t the same as civic engagement.

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)