jerryskids

This is basically me, except no more than 2 or 3 years older. Started dating wife at 23, married at 26. In fact she is 1.5 years older than me, and I joke that she is the only girl I've dated who is older than me. I had plenty of hookups prior, but they were all in my age range. My best friend from my hometown used to bang cougars all of the time. I remember one time at a club he pointed a few out to me who were looking to hook up. In hindsight it felt like fight club -- once he said it I could see what he meant, but I had never noticed, I guess because my antennae weren't looking for horny 40-sumthins. In hindsight I wish I would have ventured into those waters a few times for the experience, but oh well.

I worry about this as well, although I try not to be jaded. My daughter has Type 1 diabetes and I find it, well, let's just say a little surprising that they haven't figured it out and determined a cure. Lots of money made on insulin, pumps, CGMs, etc. That being said, the scientist in me thinks that things like T1D and cancer will eventually be cured. Well, "cancer" is a bit of a catch-all for a lot of different things that cause cells to go rogue in the body, so I doubt there is a single cure. I'm less confident about things like dementia. They strike me as associated with inevitable decay. We may be able to slow it, but eventually it seems it will happen. (sorry TNG, I really don't know anything, just riffing here). It is an interesting question that someone brought up: will we ever defeat natural death? Do we want to?

Good point. I try very hard to use "leftist" to describe, say, fascist behavior by government and media to control speech and information.

I'm going to have some fun with that as well.

Again, it's a risk management analysis. Heck, some new super deadly could show up tomorrow, should we isolate now? Of course not, the risk doesn't justify the reward. Honestly it is quite naive of you to look back on what happened and chalk it all up to mistakes, learning, science, that's life. There was some of that of course, but there was also a whole lotta intentional lies as time went on. I suppose that you could say that the powers that be were afraid that if they took the pedal off the gas, they could never regain traction again, so let's just keep keeping on with it, and call that a "mistake."

Warp Speed made sense when we were facing a potential existential crisis. If the option was to take a shot which grows a third eye or face a 99% chance of death, you take the third eye. The overriding problem IMO is that the government didn't call off the dogs once the crisis reduced. I also find it interesting, and I'm sure I said it here before, that the same people who say "oops it didn't last as long as we thought" will say with confidence that there are no/minimal long term effects. Kinda by definition we proved that we didn't know what the vax would do 6 months out (i.e., stop being effective), yet we know that long term there are no negative impacts? Those are the things you miss out on for a Warp Speed. But again, the crisis determines the tradeoffs.

I don't think this is a fair assessment. Here is how I see it: 1. Vaccines provided immunity for the initial strain, alpha, maybe delta? (Honestly I don't recall at this point.) 2. At some point they stopped providing immunity for a mutation (Omicron?) but the gubment kept with the protecting grandma message, that is where the lies were in full force. They do however provide some therapeutic relief which helps especially with the elderly and infirmed. But young/healthy people should not have been pushed to get it. 3. The insistence on vaxing healthy young children was diabolical and the people who did that should be drawn and quartered. I can only presume it was to appease teachers' unions who were afraid older teachers might get it and die (but, see #2 above). 4. Early on, I and some other super smartz people here predicted that this would become like the annual flu shot. And here we are.

OK. I'm not sure I've ever said you get immunity from the virus. People clearly have gotten Covid multiple times.

Can we just get to your big reveal? This is tiring.

If what I get from natural Covid infection gives me a significant protection against getting Covid again, I would call that immunity. If a vaccine gives me significant protection against getting Covid, I would call that immunity. Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more vac·cine /vakˈsēn,ˈvakˌsēn/ noun a substance used to stimulate immunity to a particular infectious disease or pathogen, typically prepared from an inactivated or weakened form of the causative agent or from its constituents or products. Apparently the Oxford dictionary hasn't caught up to the CDC definition change from immunity to protection.

So, what term would you use? Because at the end of the day, we need a descriptor to describe them. You can wish away physiological differences like prostates, breast tissue, etc. with linguistic tricks, but it doesn't make them go away in reality.

Very sorry to hear. I wish for you that you can someday get some sort of peace about your brother.

So, a vaccine always included therapeutics which provided no immunity, and they just had a typo when they had immunity in the original definition?

But they changed the definition of a vaccine, substantively, to make it fit. I feel like I'm having a Spinal Tap "this one goes to 11" discussion.

I'm confused by your position on this, which you are being quite aggressive about. You do realize that they substantively removed "immunity" from the definition of vaccine, right? I know it's been said, but if you do realize it, why are you defending it so hard?

I didn't see the last few pages of this thread, but I caught this gem. You can just see Hillary trying to figure out how to suicide him during this.

Agreed with others, great tip. A variation is to talk while tossing a football in the backyard (or other mindless physical activity) I've done this multiple times when my son was younger. Heck, I'd do it tomorrow if he had a serious problem.

Meh, I heard snippets today. He caught himself early on with "Toronto errrr Chicago" and otherwise uninspiring. Also I don't want to hijack this thread, but I'd be interested in discussing the topic of his talk: Medicare negotiating drug prices. Maybe I'll start a thread later.

I think we need to isolate the social / psych / behavioral from the medical when defining "gender affirming". I generally support the former, but medical changes it to "gender modifying".

Yeah, and it's growing all of the time. The president, Michael Crow, sucks at sports but is good at the academic side of things. Crow believes colleges should be inclusive, so they look for ways to grow and provide education to more people. For instance, they have an agreement with Starbucks where employees can take classes online: https://www.starbucks.com/careers/working-at-starbucks/education/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw0bunBhD9ARIsAAZl0E1BqFp7MICvF-jBKEmH4yqlhIdjkPwEk0S5KIe0xzHwCkMWRF8-kAEaAgLGEALw_wcB ASU's fashion school recently merged with FIDM in LA, which is a super smart idea (and my daughter, a recent ASU fashion grad, already has "ASU FIDM" on her LinkedIn profile for name recognition). https://asufidm.asu.edu/fidm-transition Another thing the AZ state schools do is provide basically free tuition to smart in-state kids, in hopes of keeping them here to spur the economy. My two older kids got these full tuition scholarships and majored in engineering/comp sci, for which ASU is ranked 41st nationally (the third one, in fashion, got a 3/4 scholarship). That being said, Crow will forever fight ASU's reputation as a party school, which is somewhat still deserved and fueled a lot by out of state students, who are typically wealthy and come here for the awesome weather and hardbodies during the school year.

Well played. I was also thinking of RicemanX out in SF; IIRC he posted about some van outside of his place, then never posted again.

Look, I'm not challenging your personal decision on schools for your kids, I'm confident you did what you thought best. I'm not familiar with Chapman so have no opinion on it. I also know that Cali has a much different dynamic for universities than AZ -- here if you stay in state you basically have 4 choices: ASU, UofA (comparable), NAU (granolas) are the public schools, and Grand Canyon is a private Christian university in Phoenix getting some steam. In Cali you've got a ton of choices including school sizes (the AZ ones are all degrees of large), but the UC and CSU schools are fairly exclusive (and expensive I believe, even in state). Also, if you look at that list I provided, despite being in AZ, I believe Stanford is the only school west of the central time zone. In general we westerners aren't considered blue blood enough, but I suspect Stanford had too many cross pollinations with graduates from places like Harvard and Yale to be ignored. All 3 of my kids ended up going to ASU; I'll skip the details of why unless you are interested. When I've mentioned this at Ivy events, people looked at me like I have 3 eyes. In that crowd you get introduced as follows: "Jerry, I'd like you to meet Biff, Harvard undergrad and Boudin MBA." Also my anecdotal observation was that a lot of the wives/moms came from the non-actual Ivies in that list, and married an Ivy.

Without going into the details of our cap, I'm keeping Ekeler, Kupp, Mixon, and Metcalf. The cap won't allow me to keep Taylor as well so I need to choose. For each keep we lose a round pick so I won't pick until the 5th. Unless... I keep Mattison and his lower cap hit, which I'm inclined to do. It's 1/2 PPR, 12 teams, start 2 RB/2 WR/1 TE/2 Flex. Mid 5th is around where he is going, but with so many RB/WR starters it pays to load up on them. A little help$#@!

Note that I edited my post since you replied: I'm confident that they presume the education is first rate, since they are paying $70K/year so their kid can get a degree in Proust's Impact on French Literature. But it's not a driving factor. I'm a member of the Phoenix Ivy Council, which actually includes a bunch of other expensive private schools: I'm actually surprised that Oberlin is not on this list. Anyway, my wife went to Michigan which is public so it will never be accepted into this elite group, even though it is a pretty good school.

Small, expensive, liberal arts schools like Oberlin exist for wealthy parents to send their kids so that those kids (1) are isolated from riff raff, and (2) can find their spouse to keep the blood lines pure blue. ETA: and (3) so those parents can virtue signal to their other wealthy parent friends that they sent their kids to an appropriate school.