As someone who did choose to get the latest booster despite being a young male (highest risk group for myocarditis I believe), we should always be questioning what we put in our bodies.
I partially agree, or at least think we shouldn't be discouraged from questioning, but there's only so many hours in a day, and a person can digest a finite amount of information.
I choose to trust US health authorities. Flawed as they may be, I think it would be worse to somehow try to verify every claim, or come to my own conclusions on every single question. I won't judge you for making a choice different from my own, but for me, and I suspect many (most?) people, having a doctor who you trust, following their recommendations, and getting on with your life might be the best strategy.
Given the information i had at the time, I am fine with my unforced decision to get the first two doses, but I will not be getting a third barring some surprising new information, new variant, etc.
> we should always be questioning what we put in our bodies
If we did a better job of that, health problems associated with obesity, smoking, drinking, etc... would be reduced and that would have a pretty big impact on cardiovascular health too.
It's safer to be around strangers than relatives in every study's sampling, because most people don't leave their kids with strangers. They spend most of their time with relatives, friends and acquaintances. If they did spend as much time with strangers as with relatives, you'd conclude it's safer to be around relatives.
It's like saying cyanide is safe because most people don't die from cyanide. Yeah, because most people don't take cyanide.
Children spend waaaay more time around parents and relatives.
Same reason why you are more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than a stranger. (This is not monocausal, and I do not mean to imply that simply spending time with someone will cause a crime)
It really depends on the exact framing of the question.
Are children safer ALONE with a random stranger or with a family member? Why is the child alone with a random stranger?
There are some broad daylight kidnappings, but they are relatively rare. They are relatively rare because it's much easier for a kidnapper to abscond with someone who trusts them.
I'm not sure of the statistics, but even so, it's something you have more control over than a lightning strike.
Edit: at first glance I'm not sure the numbers are right...
Google says: "Lightning damage in the U.S. [...] In 2021, there were a total of 11 fatalities and 69 injuries reported due to lighting in the United States."
Also: "In the United States, an estimated 460,000 children are reported missing every year. Federal Bureau of Investigation, NCIC."
Edit again to be more specific: Many of the "goes missing" doesn't mean kidnaps, and according to wikipedia, "The vast majority of child abduction cases in the United States are parental kidnapping".
However it also says: "Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year, on average, between 2010–2017."
This number is still a high multiple of the number of people (not just children) struck by lightning each year.
My uninformed guess is that a not insignificant percentage of "children reported missing" are teenagers who run away or stay out past the time they were supposed to return home.
One must remember that about 11% of children are eligible for a drivers license.
So we shouldn't allow children to go outside where the lightning could get them! (/s, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone seriously believes it is what we should do..)
I know a guy who continually insisted he was doing the right thing telling his child to get out of the pool if there was thunder. You know what? Far more people die from accidental pool electrocutions due to bad wiring than lighting (yes, I know this may be due to people getting out of the pool and avoiding death).
I went to an Ivy League (recently, graduated in last 5 years). This describes me to a T. Started out in CS, dropped to a libarts major because I felt like I couldn't keep up with my peers.
I still work in SWE, and began doing it in HS when I was 17.
Partner and I discuss frequently that I would have been better off somewhere else.
I know loads of SWEs who dropped out of CS degrees outright or changed majors and graduated with a liberal arts degree (I myself am a SWE but a liberal arts grad; I never took a single CS course but worked as a sysadmin for the I/O department at my school). I can't think of a single one of them that regrets dropping out or switching. It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt their career opportunities or their compensation.
The only thing I've found that they do regret is spending the tuition money and walking away without a degree.
This is truly awesome. Been using hacky scripts for this purpose for a while – seeing a more formal solution is very exciting. Kudos. Also, would definitely pay for this, FWIW
I was also a little confused, you'll get an email in a bit explaining that there is a queue for signing up and they'll inform you when you're in and that kinda thing.
I trust this about as much as I trust my horoscope. There is a reason economists are scolded left and right, and it's because of ludicrous claims like this.
> There is a reason economists are scolded left and right, and it's because of ludicrous claims like this.
Ludicrous? Not at all. With evidence of people re-infecting themselves with different strains of coronavirus appearing (https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-reinfections-confirmed-in-...), we are looking at years of dealing with a deadly pandemic - which means that anything regarding travel and major events is out of the question for a long time, and that assumes that people religiously vaccine themselves (a bold assumption given the rise of conspiracy myths about "vaccines being used to implant mind control chips" and further absurd).
That in turn has many effects: economies like Croatia which are dependant on foreign tourism will be straight fucked, they will not survive without massive aid - while the EU may prop up at least their governments, the situation for other primarily tourist economies is even worse. The effect will also hit many industries and their supply chains - most obviously plane makers and car makers, both of which are huge cash cows and mega employers, as demand from industry (airplanes) and private consumers falls to rock bottom (people will hoard all money they can).
To make it worse, Chinese demand of its rising middle class has been the thing that propped both their and our economy - in fact, depending on manufacturer, anything from 24-40% of cars sold in 2018 went to China. And that's just cars. With the trade war looming to escalate (which is one of the few things of Trump that were an actually good idea) and that no matter if Biden or Trump wins, China won't prop up the world economy again, Europe is too busy to save its own butts, the US is too much in debt plus its social construct is falling apart left and right...
Reinfections aren't a serious concern. Symptoms tend to be much less severe the second time due to the actions of immune system memory cells. SARS-CoV-2 is just like every other coronavirus in that regard. For example see the natural history of the OC43 coronavirus.
They are, because reinfected people can infect people that have not had corona before and it makes vaccine success rates lower (similar to the seasonal flu).
In the essence it will lead to yet another attempt of "herd immunity" and a shitload of deaths.
Experts and health officials were already expecting vaccines to be only 50-75% effective, so this isn't new information.
That's what's so frustrating to me about the "herd immunity" discourse. Health officials have consistently said there's no way the disease is going to be eradicated, but because of the way it gets discussed, a lot of smart people have become convinced that the goal of a vaccine is to make sure nobody catches it.
