This is true regardless of symptom severity or health status, every person is at risk. I think most people really aren’t aware of this, they absorbed the narrative that it’s gone, mild, only kills/harms the vulnerable, etc. This isn’t really their fault, there are a lot of factors that have led people to that belief, but people should know their lives and livelihoods are much more at risk now than 4 years ago.
And that this isn’t inevitable, there are simple methods of disrupting transmission and protecting yourself and others. COVID-19 is here to stay (unless we do something about that) and it has impacts on every person infected and on society at large. That shouldn’t mean folks accept illness and worse quality of life. We adapt and adopt precautions in our life to reduce long-term health impacts, like we’ve done before with many other illnesses that plague humanity.
And the possible risks are compounded with each infection. People are acting like covid just isn't a problem anymore, like it's gone away. Meanwhile, roughly 100 Americans are dying of covid every day - and we're not even in a surge at the moment.
The CDC themselves, from the very link you just posted…
100 a day is 36 500 deaths per year. Have a look at the deaths per year on your link:
2010-2011: 37 000
2012-2013: 43 000
2013-2014: 38 000
2014-2015: 51 000
2016-2017: 38 000
2017-2018: 52 000
From 2010-2011 to 2018-2019, a 9 year range, 322 000 flu deaths were estimated. That is 35 778 deaths per year from the flu. That’s almost 100 per day.
Covid onward can’t be used because anyone that had covid or covid symptoms just got ruled as a covid death, even if they died with covid but not because of covid. The actual deaths caused by covid are significantly lower than what is reported due to this, and this isn’t some conspiracy theory either. This is just how covid deaths are counted. Died and had covid? Covid death even if they had a heart attack or got hit by a bus. Many of the covid deaths actually would have been flu deaths in reality.
What exactly were you looking at on that page to make you think I was wrong? That’s literally where I got the numbers from in the first place lol
I apologize. For some reason, when I read your comment, my brain said, "100,000 flu deaths a year?! That can't be right!" So yes, there's an average of 100 American flu deaths per day. Thank you for the correction, and I apologize again.
I’m too lazy to verify your numbers, but realistically, covid nowadays is simply just another life risk. Yes, people are still dying and that’s bad, but most of them are just in the age where people tend to die of such infections.
I’d guess, there are about 4 million deaths a year in a country the size of the US. So having something on the order of 100k per year due to covid isn’t that concerning, if the lifespan isn’t affected that much.
We have vaccinations against covid. If you’re properly vaccinated, you’ll probably be fine and younger children will grow up in a world where you just get covid once in a while and get better immunity than we old folks could ever have.
Get this though: many children still do end up hospitalized. The majority of them have no underlying comorbidities or conditions. Their only reason for ending up in hospital is luck of the draw. That was presented at the CDC meeting where the recent booster was approved. It’s not just the elderly or infirm who end up in the hospital and die from it. It’s still killing, hospitalizing, and making seriously ill way more people than flu.
You’re getting all raved up about covid, but in reality, this is just a tiny bit more risk. Yes, more risk is bad, but what is the alternative? Continuous shutdown forever?
You have to accept, that there are just some risks that we have to accept. If you’re going out on the street, there’s a chance you’ll be run over, do you stay indoors all the time because of that?
No, we don’t have to just accept continuous illness and death. Why do you think that it’s necessary for people to suffer when there are simple solutions? There are steps between nothing and total shutdown, read above for some of them.
Covid isn’t like people going in the street risking getting hit. Covid is a communicable illness spread by others, not a personal choice someone makes. People can’t just choose to never be exposed even if they wanted, we have to interact with others. Further, people can and do avoid being run over in the street by walking on sidewalks and crosswalks, riding in vehicles with protections, with lots of traffic safety rules in place to minimize accidents. Right now our covid elimination strategies are similar to that of traffic safety in the early days of automobiles when there were no safety regulations. Right now we have a bunch of people driving wildly with at best ineffective vaccines, we need a lot more than that if we want to stop repeatedly trying to dodge covid crashes and have any sense of stability in actually living with covid.
There are no simple solutions. Vaccines solve 95% of the problem, but not 100%, and the remaining 5% are what you’re complaining about.
All other solutions can only be temporary, since they require massive changes in pretty much any aspect of our lives, and they will cause massive problems in other areas.
You’re basically proposing suicide for fear of death.
Actually I’m proposing life is valuable and we should protect it.
The vaccines don’t solve the problem and the solutions do not require massive change, but they do require people reflect on what’s important and adjust their behavior accordingly. I think that living a good life is important so I believe we should do things to better those odds, like reducing the amount of damage covid does to the body. Choosing continuous illness and your worse years coming much sooner sounds closer to suicide to me. Masking, improved ventilation and filtration, paid sick leave, and other simple steps are not absurd and shouldn’t be temporary. We know easy ways to reduce massive suffering, it’s ridiculous to me that people oppose it.
You still don’t seem to understand the opportunity costs you’re overlooking here.
Reducing people’s freedom is justifiable to a certain extent, if it saves lives. But that’s a trade off. Currently, the death and illnesses due to covid are very rare, so overall the “sickness load” is rather low. Changing behavior in a way that reduces that load significantly will necessarily cause reduced freedom for huge amounts of people. You’re taking away more than you’re saving.
That’s what I meant by suicide for fear of death. Sacrificing very much to protect very little.
These misunderstandings about covid are what I mentioned in my original post. Covid is currently killing fewer people than it did the first few years, it already burned through the most vulnerable and you can only die once. But illness is not rare at all. Aside from the rampant acute illness, Nearly One in Five American Adults Who Have Had COVID-19 Still Have “Long COVID” and about 10% of infections results in long covid. We don’t even know what the long term effects are, we do know it’s already having impacts on people’s health and on healthcare services, and that there is no lasting immunity. People used to suffer and die from preventable diseases, a lot. We didn’t say oh well, sucks to suck. We learned and adapted, that’s what we need to do that again.
You mentioned costs and freedom, what does freedom mean to you in this context?
Most of the current long term cases are in people without vaccination - either because they refused, or simply because it wasn’t available at the time.
There is a lasting immunity, or better, the residual immunity lasts long enough until the next wave/winter hits. Especially the amount of severe or long covid cases drops drastically.
Freedom can mean pretty much anything that could be affected by “measures”. Lockdowns might be the most obvious case, but even mask mandates are limiting how and where you can go, they also put financial (and environmental) strains on people. Stay at home orders for infected people are also pretty drastic reductions of freedom.
No, I’m continuing the original statements I made. That covid is causing long term health issues, and while vaccines can lower the odds of long term impacts they do not prevent them. The only way to prevent long covid is to not get Covid.
I agree masks are cost prohibitive, I support free distribution of n95s or elastomeric and fit testing in communities, but how are they limiting where folks go? When we had widescale masking I was able to go the places I wanted, safely. I disagree that asking people to stay home while sick is a drastic reduction in freedom, I actually believe people’s desire to go in public and spread disease that can cause serious problems for them is a much great reduction in overall freedom. Another drastic reduction in freedom is what people who don’t want to get covid have been experiencing, which is being cut off from all public life. One-way masking is not enough, it’s like wearing a helmet in a monster truck rally, helpful but insufficient. Even hospitals are not places one can go without getting ill.
I can’t convince you to care about yours and others wellbeing. I believe that freedom is something we share and create for each other, not simply being able to move about and do whatever I want as an individual. I truly hope you educate yourself on the risks of covid and take proper care to avoid it. Peace.
For workplaces and businesses, improved air filtration would be a huge big deal for reducing respiratory illnesses. It also helps with allergens and with stinky coworkers. Smarter workplaces are already doing this; but there’s a long tail of people working in spaces with grossly inadequate ventilation to begin with. Air filtration is an occupational safety issue.
They don’t want to be told they have to wear a mask or that people should stay home from work when they’re sick. Anything that would impinge on the rights of businesses to make money is against my freedoms.
It’s the climate crisis but for health. Some people just can’t bear to give up their treats in order to save lives.
Anecdotal evidence but I have collected the 4 big strains and albeit vaccinated correctly it was quite the hassle each time (a week in bed or more), and yeah short of breath and more after each (once for around 3-4 months with brain fog, with the addition that I didn’t really feel spicy food at all spicy during that period, just very good).
It’s definitely not a joke and I hope I won’t catch it again.
To add to this, SiDock is an awesome project working on an open-source, patent-free, self-stable antiviral for covid using the computers of volunteers. Anybody can volunteer their spare computational power with a few clicks. I have been crunching it since 2020 and find it very fun.
It’s important to remember that - unless you work directly for the owner or an executive appointed by the board - they’re not your boss’ advocate either.
If the company is worth a shit, they don’t want bosses that abuse their power or make their subordinates miserable. Happy employees are productive employees.
We’ve rid ourselves of a few problem bosses that way. Of course, this only applies to legitimate issues. If a boss is causing people to quit, you’ve got a good case.
The trick is knowing how to phrase it so it’s clear it’s a problem for the company. They usually love SBIN (situation behavior impact next steps) so it’s good format to use:
Dear HR,
On the meeting XYZ
My boss Bully McIdiot was screaming like a toddler at everyone that disagreed with him
This is preventing the free flow of ideas and Innovation and creating an »»hostile work environment««
This is the part everyone misses. I worked in HR for a number of years and 90% of my job was telling low/middle level managers “you can’t do that to your employee.” (I wasnt high up enough to be dealing with c-suite level complaintants), 9% was recruiting and paperwork, and 1% was telling an employee “You did something potentially terminable.”
Most people only seem to recall that 1% and then keep talking about how “HR isn’t your friend/on your side theyre on the company’s side.” Which is true! But they also didn’t see the 1000 times I slapped their managers hand because I was on the companies side not the managers. Unless your really high up your manager is someone’s employee too. HR isn’t siding with you manager for shits and giggles, there is a reason management won a complaint against you and it isn’t “HR likes management better.” It’s that they framed your problematic behavior better than you framed theirs. Frame everything you report to HR as “this is why it’s a liability for the company” not “I don’t like x,y,z. So-and-so is mean.”
Also remeber just being a bad manager (not doing something immediately terminable) isn’t a firable offense. Yelling/being a low level dick for example may not be something deemed firable. One complaint isn’t gonna e enough and ideally multiple people will complain as well.
… which makes sense, because the reason some actions have legal repercussions is that people have passed laws for the purpose of discouraging them!
We have sexual harassment liability laws because we expect that if we make companies have HR departments that tell managers to not sexually harass their employees, then somewhat less sexual harassment will happen than without those laws.
The law isn’t just there to compensate victims, but to align the company’s incentive (“we don’t want to pay out a bunch of money”) with the worker’s incentive (“I don’t want to be sexually harassed”). The company can avoid paying out a lot of money by not tolerating sexual harassment in the workplace.
It doesn’t always work out that way, because corruption springs eternal; but I expect more nonconsenting asses would be grabbed if it weren’t someone’s job to say “don’t grab asses in the workplace”.
Unions are all workers friend, but they are not your advocate. If your salary is up to the agreed national contract and there is little they can do.
it depends on the country, and where exactly you work, but in many countries (ehem Italia) they are somewhat too comfortable with the company management to be effective at their job.
It is still true, at least in Europe. I mean, they’re not actually trying to destroy your life, you know, but they’re after the company’s best interests. They might help you, and might make things not the worst they possibly can, because that’ll give a bad rep, but they’re not your friend.
However, the two things aren't mutally exclusive. Bad behaviour that risks reputational or legal damage to the company will make HR cross. Think about how you frame things when talking to HR
I had a conversation with ChatGPT on that subject. It could not stress enough how terrible it would be for the duck if I brought it home with me, and that was despite me informing the AI that the duck in question was special, that it could talk and had specifically requested to come home with me.
I just took my cat to the petrol station to give it a try, and have to report that not only does she not have any indicators like this, she also was vehemently opposed to being refuelled and scratched me up badly.
A friend of mine took their cat to the gas station, after refuelling the cat took a couple of steps and dropped on the floor. I was like “Damn, already out of fuel? What did you say the milage was?”
When you’re about to face a high risk, high reward situation, you should willfully, willingly start to hyperventilate, as this helps your brain …
NEVER take any stranger’s advice on the internet as credible without checking it with a specialist. This is especially true when said advice relates to your health and/or safety.
Drowning is very fast, seconds not minutes like in the movies. People in distress can take minutes before they are actively drowning. Active drowning is silent, they will not be yelling for help. It looks like the person is “climbing” or pushing down at the water. They will be vertical in the water and may be “bobbing”, going underwater and resurfacing. They will have their head tilted back parallel to the surface of the water.
If you see someone go under in open water keep looking at where they went under while calling for help, don’t take your eyes off it. If you are the only one who saw them go under, your job is to direct others to where they went down. In open water it’s very hard to find people because the bottom isn’t visible.
I know a farmer who lived to tell the tale. He had a bunch of empty sacks, and he had piled them up and was ready to burn them. He poured some gasoline on them so that the fire would start easily. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that one of the sacks contained a little bit of ammonium nitrate, which happily combined with the gasoline and fire. Next, the mixture exploded, throwing burning gasoline everywhere.
After he managed to put the fires out he was taken to the hospital. Today, he still has some nasty burn marks on his skin, but he survived.
If one must use liquid accelerants, kerosene or (gasp) charcoal lighting fluid are good choices because they don’t turn into gas as readily or burn as quickly as gas. Again only of you must. Solid fire starters are more reliable and safe anyway.
I think he must have left a bit out. To make it explosive, typically it needs to be in a space that will allow it to compress when ignited. That can be a hole in the ground or a large quantity in that it will create its own compressive reaction. Also generally to set it off, you generally need a shock wave type of igniter. A small amount will simply burn.
Dynamite is same way. I worked with it quite often when younger. Old dynamite can begin to sweat and when like that, it is a bit unstable. Few times just burnt it to destroy it. Otherwise you would need to use a blasting cap to set it off. That was now expensive and might annoy neighbours if you do it above ground.
It straight up reads like cult craziness or crazy 2 am infomercials. HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD! I'm glad you've placebo'd yourself into happiness though lol.
You said Exercise grows your hippocampus in 4 different bullet points lmfao. Great, it increases size by 2%. It proves nothing about whether it affects depression in adults. In fact, the studies show they do jack shit except help memory lol.
Exercise training increased hippocampal volume by 2%, effectively reversing age-related loss in volume by 1 to 2 y.
The effect of aerobic exercise on hippocampal volume in patients with psychotic disorders
Four studies examined the effect of aerobic exercise on hippocampal volume in people with schizophrenia or first episode psychosis (n = 107). Aerobic exercise did not significantly increase total hippocampal volume compared to control conditions (g = 0.149, 95% CI: -0.31 to 0.60, p = 0.53, Table 2). Among the two studies which reported effects on left/right hippocampus separately, there was no evidence of effects in either region (both p > 0.1). There was also no evidence of heterogeneity or publication bias influencing these results.
The effect of aerobic exercise on hippocampal volume in other populations
Data in other populations was insufficient for pooled meta-analyses, and so results from individual trials are summarised below. Individual trials which examined effects of aerobic exercise in patients with depression (Krogh et al., 2014), mild cognitive impairment (Brinke et al., 2014) and probable Alzheimer's disease (Morris et al., 2017) all found no significant effects on total or left/right hippocampal volumes. One study examining the effects of exercise in young-to-middle-aged adults found no change in total hippocampal volume but did find a significant increase in anterior hippocampal volume following 6 weeks of aerobic exercise (Thomas et al., 2016).
Effects of exercise in relation to participant age
Meta-regression analyses were performed to examine the relationship between mean sample age and effects of exercise on hippocampal volume. No statistically significant associations of effects of exercise with sample age were found for total, right or left hippocampal volume (all p > 0.05).
In conclusion, this meta-analysis found no effects of exercise on total hippocampal volume, but did find that exercise interventions retained left hippocampal volume significantly more than control conditions. As these positive effects were also observed among the subgroup of studies of healthy older adults, the findings hold promising implications for using exercise to attenuate age-related neurological decline. Currently, the overall quality of the evidence is compromised by the fact that 10 of the 12 studies included some risk of bias, therefore more high-quality RCTs are now required. In additional to RCTs, a prospective meta-analysis examining how changes in physical activity and fitness predict hippocampal retention/deterioration across the lifespan would provide novel insights into longer-term neural effects of exercise, while also reducing the impact of methodological heterogeneity often found across exercise RCTs. Further research is also required to determine effects in younger people (Riggs et al., 2016), and establish the neurobiological mechanisms through which exercise exerts these effects, in order to design optimal exercise programs for producing neurocognitive enhancements. However, the functional relevance of structural improvements has also yet to be ascertained. Nonetheless, the link between cardiorespiratory fitness with both structural and performance increases indicates this as a suitable target for aerobic training programs to improve brain health.
In conclusion, this meta-analysis found no effects of exercise on total hippocampal volume, but did find that exercise interventions retained left hippocampal volume significantly more than control conditions.
Apparently it simultaneously shrinks your right hippocampus while growing your left, for an average change of zero while the left grows?
Okay so it’s not making anything grow. Yeah that’s probably it.
Though that is still an effect on hippocampal volume.
Maybe they meant to say something like:
“Overall exercise doesn’t affect hippocampal volume, except in cases the hippocampus is actively shrinking in which case it can slow down the left side” (and reading between the lines possibly on the right side with a p value a little higher than significant?)
I wonder if it would “regenerate” an atrophied or shrunken hippocampus. Like the way rest and nutrition won’t make your skin larger but it will heal missing patches of skin.
I know I’ve seen claims from reputable sources that exercise raised BDNF levels, and that BDNF leads to hippocampal neurogenesis. I can find the sources again I’m sure if you’d like; let me know.
But how could hippocampal neurogenesis be happening without volume change? Could it be replacing dead cells (and preventing shrinkage)? Packing neurons in more densely?
Something that applies when you get a little older - if you’re in a relatively specific job field, don’t burn your bridges at a job you’re going to leave. You never know who will be sitting across the table from you at the interview, at the meeting table, on the job site. People in the same field tend to move around in the same jobs as you. If it’s someone you burned, you may not get the job, or if you do, it could be pretty miserable.
I am now the client of a company I worked at for over 15 years.
Because I handled a difficult situation leaving well, we still have a very good working relationship.
It’s a very niche industry, and I’ve worked for or with almost all the players in my region. My former employer, while small, is the best at what they do.
Magnetic USB connectors are a thing and can save your cables/devices not just from wear and tear (unplugging/replugging constantly) but also from cables being tripped over or otherwise pulled. Highly recommended if you’re using VR! Sadly there are no standards to these.
Bonus tip: get as many as you need, and then a couple more. Sounds like I’m some kind of salesman, but trust me. I bought some to create a simple charging station for my vr controllers. Works great. Now I want some more to charge other things with the cables I already have laying around (I had some more). Didn’t have the right adapter pieced for in my devices. (Needed usb c, only had micro b and lightning). Now, a few years after I bought them to make that charging stand thingy, they don’t sell this exact one anymore. Bummer.
My dad has Parkinson’s Disease, so he has poor coordination in his hands and can’t plug in small cords like a charging cable.
My sister bought him magnetic USB connectors and it’s changed his life! There’s a small USB end that plugs into his smartphone port, and the cable connects to it via magnets. Takes my dad almost no effort; he just needs to get his phone near the end of the cable and it latches on.
There are regular charging cables and fast-charging cables. Depending on your device, make sure you know which one you’re buying. The regular cables take half a day to charge my phone.
True, but magnetic cables are better. My elderly dad has terrible eyesight and low sensation in his fingers, so unless you have a magnet to properly align the phone on the pad like the iPhones do, wireless charging is unreliable for him. A magnetic connector is better because he only needs it to be near and it will just snap into place.
There are, but are recommended against. Since they expose all the pins in a way it doesn’t happen normally in the connector. If a device is not 100% perfectly protected you might send 20V in a data line that’s expecting <1V, therefore frying something.
In the same vein, wanting different outcomes requires different incomes.
Take all your actions and add them up = this. If you wanted that not this, all your inputs need to be under the spotlight and changes made; including and especially habits, vices, behaviours, opinions, assumptions, collection and quality of knowledge, relationships, etc etc. Sometimes the cost or sacrifice from and of yr current self is large and largely invisible.
Being uncomfortable means you’re learning. Learning means you’re growing. If you’re never uncomfortable, you haven’t reached luxury and made it, you’ve reached stagnation and have stopped ‘living’ your life.
Choosing the lesser of two evils, or the devil you know, or never doing anything about a life you don’t like or want, is cowardice and will slowly crush your soul into despair. Choosing the unknown might end up sucking, but it might be better. If the known is guaranteed to suck, take the unknown - at least there’s hope there and despair, a feeling worse than pain, is a failing to find hope.
Everyone should know that, very often, they are just wrong. And that’s ok. We all are.
The more ready you are to really accept that you could be wrong about anything, and admit when you are wrong about something, the better you will make your own life, as well as the lives of those around you.
If you’re swayed to their side, then bullied for it, ask them why do they even bother arguing then and why not just go fight random strangers? Then tell them to have some self respect and act like they’ve been here before. Say “for fucks sake” under your breath but still in earshot, shaking your head as you walk away.
Sorry, but the solution to being correct is not being wrong. You are just not wrong, and that makes me correct. And that makes you correct. Therefore we cannot be wrong.
And not only will you make everyone's lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you're often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you'll be right.
That's the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you're wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you're wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won't be. You'll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.
If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you're wrong, then you're instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you'll actually be right. And if you don't get it that time, that's fine - just freely admit that you're wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.
So you'll not only make everyone's lives more pleasant - you'll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?
Ironically, most people I know doesn’t know how to use their phones or computers at all.
Not all of the people require more knowledge than Excel, but it’s very useful to recognize types of errors, backups, where are the settings you may need and how to find your device options.
Most of what society tells us will make us feel happy and fulfilled in life is bullshit. Living a good life is primarily about your personal relationships. Things like social status and personal wealth are far less important.
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