If someone doesn't want to get vaccinated, they're very welcome to go work in a job that doesn't require it; I know people that are happily earning a living while unvaccinated. There is no right to be able to work exactly the job you want on your own terms.
At 35, it's not an uncommon feeling, some call it a mid-life crisis.
The reason imo is it's an age when we start feeling our body is getting old, the feeling of "immortality" of our 20s is gone, we realize the clock is ticking.
Add to that what happens those last 2 years, the isolation, especially if you're single, and so of course it's a hard period for you.
Personally, the way I dealt with it, was through reading everything I could find about philosophy, particularly stoicism and buddhism. It helped me a lot, taught me how those feelings are unavoidable at times, how the mind create that pain and how to make it more easily manageable.
But there's no secret weapon, no magic cure, life is painful at time, and things get better by themselves as long as we don't add to it by feeling guity or thinking "it's not fair". Some realization takes time, so be patient and gentle to yourself, one day at a time.
- "Enchiridion" of Epictetus.
- "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius (my personal favorite that I keep reading over and over).
- "Letters from a stoic" from Seneca.
It's not a lot of authors but they're pretty dense and should keep you busy for a long time.
For buddhism, it's a very vast subject, but I'd start with:
- "Siddhartha", this is a novel but will give you an overview on the buddhist system of thoughts. It's also very well written and inspiring.
- "What the Buddha Taught", also an introductory book on buddhist toughts.
- Another introductory book is "Buddhism for Beginners".
From there, and based on your interests that you will discover along the way, go into the "suttas" which are the religious texts. You may even want to go to a time before buddhism with the vedas and the Upanishads that have so much to teach us.
There are many schools of buddhism, some closer to what we'd call a religion in the west while others purely philosophical (without any emphasis on a god). Zen buddhism is yet another category, where the teaching is based almost entirely on mediation alone but it's the exception, even if in the west we often think buddhism = meditation, but it's not so.
So, as you can see, it's more a tree than a line and you'll figure it out as you go if it resonnates with you and how deep you want to go.
The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday is the book that I read daily (it has an entry for each day) for the past 5 years and has helped me immensely. I tend to write one sentence in it after reading it, and then compare to all the previous one's I wrote - useful for uncovering (bad) patterns.
2 years in, we don't even have the numbers of people hospitalized from covid or with covid. It's not science reportings that is dead, it's science itself.
Currently about half of COVID-19 patients in hospitals are incidental cases who were admitted for another reason and then tested positive during admission screening.
There are many people who have these numbers and study them.
Public health officials in the US have both the reported numbers as well as piggy backing on the system set up for influenza monitoring (CLI & ILI).
Simply because not all public reporting is as rich as, say, Illinois or Pennsylvania's, doesn't mean these figures aren't carefully scrutinized -- especially when threatened by political leaning from either side of aisle (such as when the then-current administration pressured the CDC to change and alter reports).
In my experience, hospital operations officers, health information exchanges, and, depending on the state, state HHS agencies don't mess around.
Are you sure you are on the right side of the argument yourself?
Suppose next year, the government mandate that you lose weight, or stop smoking or run everyday, all that of course for the "greater good". And then the year after that, it requires that you give pills to your children because that makes them "less indisciplined" and so on and so forth.
Stop being so certain and think a little bit. By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.
This is a classic slippery slope argument. Losing weight is not the same thing as a pandemic like this. The two-fold reason that these measures are taken is A) over-filling of hospitals and shut-down of all non-emergency services and B) extremely high death rate. Smoking or whatever scary slippery slope you think we're on is not the same thing as the ICU's filling up way over capacity and hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't.
The idea that we should be against common-sense measures to promote herd immunity during a very real pandemic because "the government will make you stop smoking" is frankly an outrageously claim.
It's long been held, since at least America began, that herd immunity is vital to the success and security of a nation. Our militaries require these vaccinations because a fighting force must be healthy. Our schools require these vaccines because sick kids and sick cities don't learn.
The idea that a vaccine mandate is anything more than a century-old, bog-standard, completely required part of the human war against disease is a radical and anti-civilized position. Herd immunity is non-negotiable for our level of modern society to exist.
I swear, we are killing ourselves. Dense civilization requires trade offs, and in the war against pandemic disease, that does include vaccination.
> ICU's filling up way over capacity and hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't
This claim is mostly overblown at this point. It was a legitimate concern early on, but it hasn't been true for some time.
The vaccine claims are also misleading. Herd immunity by vaccination is not the only way to protect society, and the distinct lack of discussion or recognition of immunity from infection is conspicuous. COVID's infection fatality rate for certain cohorts is low enough that vaccination isn't strictly needed, and arguably taking a different tack on this could potentially have saved far more lives.
For instance, consider if we had only isolated and vaccinated those at greatest risk of death and complications from COVID (40 and older, immunocompromised, comorbidities), and then shipped the remaining vaccine supply to the third world to suppress the emergence of variants. We might not have had Delta or Omicron at all. It's not at all clear that this would not have saved more people in the long run.
Beating this vaccine mandate drum is blinding people to other rational solutions. It's not going to end well. This convoy is probably only the beginning.
It's not overblown all across America where the omicron wave did once again force ICU to capacity and cause the cancellation of non-emergency care across the country.
Herd immunity by vaccination is the only way to protect society without requiring infection, which fills hospitals and leads to deaths. Vaccination means you're about 40x less likely to be hospitalized or die, which saves our health system. Do you honestly believe there should be more discussion of infection immunity as a solution, when it results in 40X more hospitalization and death? I've seen anti-vaxxers call public health officials "genociders" for decisions far less death-causing than that.
If you think the vaccine mandate is why this convoy happened, instead of conservative fake news creating vast conspiracy theories from the "NWO" to "Q-ANON", funded by conservatives billionaires and the governments of multiple countries, to help destabilize and bring down the west, then to each their own. But how many Americans are among them? How many fans do they have abroad? It's not about Canadian mandates, it's about the global right wing conspiracy movement.
But I do not believe that the vaccine anti-mandate stuff is anything more than todays convenient whip for the very powerful forces of conservative media control to use to continue their war after Trump lost. Just another issue politicized for convenience, as until conservative media flipped the switch, vaccine hesitancy was almost entirely left-wing. Even in America anti-vaccination attitudes on the right did not start until post-election and post-vaccine rollout, and there's a large group of vaccinated conservatives who regret it because now it's seen as a mistake in that ideology.
Furthermore, unvaccinated people are occupying fewer beds than vaccinated people in terms of numbers. Even if they all got vaccinated, we'd be basically in exactly the same place, so how do you expect vaccine mandates to help here?
The reason Ontario (and Canada in general) is doing well is because they have a much higher vaccination rate and a healthier population in general. In the US, the high numbers of hospitalization and death are overwhelmingly unvaccinated and/or extremely unhealthy individuals. Also, comparing absolute numbers is disingenuous when the vaccination rate is so high.
Yes, Canada does have a higher vaccination rate, but Canada and Ontario in particular has a very low number of ICU beds per capita compared to other nations in the developed world, so the picture presented by those numbers is actually pessimistic. That's also why we've had far more lockdowns here than the US, because our underinvestment in healthcare has come back to bite us.
In any case, I think it's clear that the claim I responded to that "hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't" is overblown regardless of these numbers. The people dying are mostly the elderly and the sickly, which are exactly the people who we would in fact expect to die suddenly, and healthy people would not be dropping dead in those numbers even if the ICUs were overflowing.
No, that's absurd. You need to think a bit first. Those things are more easily taxed to "solve". And you being fat doesn't impact me in the least, unless I am unfortunately stuck next to you on a plane. I can't catch it from you. So that isn't comparable to COVID.
Notice how smoking has long been regulated and limited, but not banned? That slippery slope argument doesn't work either.
And the bit about giving kids pills is paranoid nonsense. And ironically, kids have had required vaccines for a very long time. With no sliding down any slopes.
>By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.
No we're not. Accepting mandates doesn't somehow force everyone to automatically accept anything any politician claims or does in the future. That's not how anything works.
1918 had some cities implement lockdowns as a response to the rapidly spreading Spanish Flu. And then there were anti-lockdown protests which caused some cities to lift their lockdowns early and the virus surged. Business owners also railed against the lockdowns, and were sometimes successful in getting them lifted.
There was a similar situation with mandatory masks, and then loud anti-mask protests which resulted in the lifting of some mask mandates.
What happened over the past two years has happened before, and will probably happen again. You can find examples of lockdowns in other pandemic eras. Venice partially locked down in 1575 due to the plague.
You may disagree with lockdowns, but there's plenty of precedent. Your "fact" is incorrect.
My dude, "nothing in history" is a very strong statement. You should read up about what state actors did to limit the spread of the plague. I'm sure someone could find something older, but lockdowns are attested to as a public health measure since at least ~500 BCE (whenever Leviticus was written).
I don't feel like you're engaging in good faith, so I'm going to go ahead and quit responding.
In order to show that literally it turned out fine. It didn't turn into us being mandated to lose weight or whatever that commentator is scared of happening
It's justification for the sake of allaying that commentator's fears. Most people that support the mandate support it because it makes sense and they've thought about it. In fact, I'd wager that those who are against the mandate are more often susceptible to being brainwashed than those who are enthusiastically for it
That's a pretty cool slippery slope you just constructed. You've almost convinced me, but you forgot to tell me that they'll take my guns and make me gay.
The parent slightly misquoted it and it really needs the context.
The Silicon Valley of Iowa, is actually the nothing of nowhere. He is saying that when you are using the name of the original place to claim yours is the new place, it's more likely what you've got is a nothing of nowhere (ie the new place really doesn't matter, thus you're attempting to borrow reputation in naming in the form of the Silicon Valley of country/city/location).
The same usually goes for products/services as well. The Uber of XYZ is most likely garbage if that's how you're identifying your service. We're building the Airbnb of lawnmowers. And so on. Thiel's quote is essentially about knock-offs, copying, derivatives and how effective (or not) that process tends to be.
Elaborated quote from Thiel (from seven or eight years ago; may be extracted from his book, Zero to One, in which case it probably actually dates back to the Stanford lectures he did):
"There are a few different problems with it, one is that it is not even clear why Silicon Valley works. It is a singular thing, it is one time, one place. It’s very hard to figure out what are the factors which drive it. Is it the fact that it has good weather? Is it the fact that you have this whole network effect of people and some very successful companies which have been built over years? Is it the unenforceability of non-compete agreements so that employees can leave from one company and go and work in another in the state of California?"
"And then I always think that once you have set out to copy something you have already put yourself in somewhat of an inferior position somehow. The something of somewhere is the nothing of nowhere. The Oxford of Iceland is not Oxford. So all these – Silicon Beach, Silicon Roundabout – these all sound like inferior knockoffs."
"You don’t want to start with an inferior derivative. The question always has to be, what is it that you can do that is better than elsewhere? In the London context, there is a sense that it is the most cosmopolitan city in Europe and that is probably the strength that London should be pushing towards. There has been a lot of interesting finance innovation in London and so that seems natural."
Another way of saying this would be "it is harder to copy something than it is to make something". For example try building a successful search engine today, to beat Google at their own game, you need to solve all this technical problems plus beat a heavily intrenched incumbent. You can point to something like duck duck go and sure they did find a successful niche of privacy aware people that want to "degoogle" their lives, but even this doesn't mean that you can just be DuckDuckGo yourself.
This doesn't always hold.. You might argue that google probably aspired to be a yahoo, but I agree itt's bad to market yourself as a konckoff of something else.
And the next time the government will want to force you to do something you disagree with, who is gonna fight it, the spineless white collars that we pretty much all have become?
There’s a big difference: we know antibodies are effective. That’s relatively well understood part of how the immune system works and it’s reasonable to assume that a high defensive response will translate into protection — not perfect, biology is complicated, but the most likely outcome is good.
Ivermectin, on the other hand, has no established mechanism which would make us expect it to work. It’s not impossible but given how only dodgy studies have shown beneficial effects by now it’d be a pretty big surprise to see benefits.
I read a bunch of the early Omicron research, and your assertion is kind of misleading.
Sure, the antibody reactivity tests are first because those tests are fast. But a ton of the subsequent research focused on observational studies to quantify relative hospitalization risk.
I don’t know whether or not this is true, but I’d imagine that’s the only quick way to get a rough estimate, before unbiased population-level statistics can be gathered.
Interesting, it sounds like they took antibodies from patients who were vaccinated and test them against a virus with some given mutation. Theoretically, if the immune system detects and responds to the mutated virus in the same way as with the non-mutant, the immunity should provide good protection.
Testing a drug that is meant to act at a specific target to elicit response is a little different when considering in vitro studies. Usually there will be some tissue sample, such as lung tissue, which is infected with a virus. These infected samples are then tested with varying concentrations of the drug in question, but what makes the usual difference when moving to in vivo is primarily Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion (ADME). This changes how much of the drug and in what form gets to the target tissue, for example it could be run through first pass metabolism which may add or remove functional groups or break the compound down in some other way. This can change how much drug reaches the target, on top of the usual distribution mechanics that may prevent the drug from reaching some tissues at all.
Immunology isn't quite my field, so my understanding of the mechanics there are a bit lacking. The immune system is quite a bit different mechanically than drug distribution.
I'm no antivaxxer, but how are you ever going to uncover side effects that occur in 1 in 10,000 doses if you only have 1,500 patients? I certainly wouldn't want my child to be at the front of the line getting this vaccine.
