COVID vaccine works - we're saved!

You forgot to mention that he's setting most of the fires.

No could do. At first it looked like the blue states were the ones affected, so fuck them. Then when the red states were also getting affected, nobody was paying attention anymore so fuck them too. It's the Republican way to always seek to punish the victims! (the authoritarian follower, actually, as discovered by psychology professor (ret.) Bob Altemeyer)Am I the only one who saw this? Trump was having a photo op in the Oval Office with front-line nurses and he started bragging about how because of him they were getting all to protective personal equipment (PPE) they needed. So one of the nurses started schooling him on how they were still having to deal with the PPE shortages that he had never done anything about. He just stared at her vacantly, like a deer caught in the headlights. 
As for the masks not being worn properly. There was (and most likely still is) a web site with drawings that draw an analogy with leaving your nose hanging out there for all to see (enough foreshadowing?).The two drawings showed an adult male wearing his underwear correctly and incorrectly (with his penis hanging out over the waistband. Now I cannot see an idiot with his filthy contagious nose hanging out without that penis visual popping up in my head).

So what if Republicans are killing off their voters? They've got that covered. They are busy rigging the elections so that even with a much smaller number of votes they can still cheat and get their people into office.

Could you please describe the symptoms of that?We move our fingers with tendons that connect them to muscles in the forearm. Those tendons route through ligament tunnels (consult your Gray's Anatomy for more details). Any obstruction in those tunnels can cause problems.After my 9-day bout with COVID exactly one year ago (pre-vaccine for me), I developed a "trick thumb" in my left hand. It could remain extended just fine (and I used that as the resting position at night), but if I tried to bend it then it would resist my movement and then suddenly snap to a curled position accompanied with pain. Similarly, extending it again would be just the same, also accompanied with pain, so once I got it extended I tried to keep it there. I could not curl and extend it smoothly as we normally can do with all our digits, but rather it had basically just two positions that it would snap between painfully. And on the inside of my left hand (palmar side) toward the top of the metacarpal bone (distal end), just below (proximal to) the first phalanx of the thumb, there was a painful knot, the apparent location of the inflammation.That was in my left hand and it took weeks for it to go away, but then the same thing showed up with my right thumb and ring finger. The ring finger lingered longer than the thumb, but it wasn't as bad as with my left thumb.Is that what "COVID finger" is? BTW, I kept my senses of smell and taste, but still have a lingering cough.And of course I've been fully vaccinated since then. I'm no idiot!Edited by dwise1, : slight improvements in the description of symptoms

When you get heckled by mask-holes for wearing your mask at the store, I heard a couple responses:

1. Remove your mask and get as close to them as you can, right in their face. And tell them that you tested positive just this morning. Having to cough a couple times would help.
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2. Tell them that you're wearing your mask because of the Deep State's facial recognition software.

In a Progressive Radio program this morning (Stephanie Miller, Sirius XM) they discussed how China is having to go into lockdown. It appears to be the Omicron variant that we had just gone through that's hitting them now. They had been able to hold it back for a time with better measures against it, but it's breaking through. Denmark's situation appears to be the same what with most of them being vaccinated, so when they dropped other mitigation methods (masking, etc) they got another surge.The idea they discussed was that because of all our COVIDiots we fell victim to Omicron much sooner and now we have higher rates of immunity against Omicron, so other parts of the world entering into Omicron-fueled surges should not affect us.A caveat that occurs to me is the question of "what about sub-variant BA.2?" If we are pretty much cool with Omicron because of our COVIDiots, does that also include BA.2? Or is that still on the horizon for us?ADDENDUM
Before someone pipes in with "I told you we don't need vaccines; NATURAL IMMUNITY RULES!", the problem was that our vaccines weren't as effective against Omicron so we saw a higher number of break-through infections. I think I might have had a break-through in mid-December in which I had a massive head cold for a couple days, more so than I used to in the past and lasting much shorter than in the past, plus I've had a persistent cough since then.

But how much longer will that service continue? Early on and for a long time grocery stores offered a "seniors hour" at the beginning of the day where they either opened one hour early (eg, CostCo) or didn't allow young'uns (under 65) in for the first hour of regular hours (eg, Trader Joe's, Stater Bros). Then over time, especially after enough progress had been made with vaccination, those senior hours started going away. First they went to only certain days of the week and then finally they just got rid of it.Offering such services is good for customer relations, but there's also a cost that needs to balance out.

Oh I hope not! You never know what's still going to work after the update (actually, version upgrades are the really scary ones).

I've always just gone into the store even from the start, masked of course. I set aside an older pair of Dockers and an older polo-like shirt (being an engineer, I've always gotten the style with a pocket which polo shirts don't have; just don't know what the proper ones are called). I called that my EVA gear. In the beginning, upon returning from the store I would take them off and straight into the washing machine. Non-perishables I would set out in the garage to air-sanitize and I would wipe down the perishables with a chlorox wipe before putting them in the fridge. As time went by, I became more lax. But I didn't wear my levis for months in order to keep from washing them too often.I didn't get sick until Jan 2021, just a couple weeks before I was eligible for my first shot so I had to postpone it as per my doctor's orders. Nine days of sleeping upright in a recliner and taking maximum dosages of Mucinex extra strength. Lost ten pounds which I slowly regained after recovering, so my net COVID weight gain was zero -- I've heard a lot of references to others' "COVID pounds" that they had gained from eating and staying indoors and now have to lose. And as I said, I think I had a two-day case of Omicron in mid-Dec which was mainly a bad head cold.Oh and toilet paper. I get the big bundle at CostCo which lasts me about seven months. I still had about 2/3 of a bundle left when the shutdown started, so it was back in CostCo again when I needed to replenish. Took the longest time for yeast to show up in the grocery store, so I toyed with sourdough but didn't have a good feeling about my culture. I even looked into the German custom of Hefewasser ("yeast water") where you culture the natural yeast on the skin of dates or raisins but never got motivated to try it.

Matches something I heard on the radio this morning. We're hearing about celebrity cases, most of them breakthrough, but those were diagnosed with home test kits and so were very unlikely to have been added to the official case tally. Home test results do not normally not reported to the statistics gatherers and hence tend to not be included in the statistics, whereas the hospitalized cases would get reported. That would mean that positive COVID cases are underreported. There are more people getting infected than we are aware of.

Just so long as the microchips are not from Apple. Those things are incompatible with everything!

My big complaint is that they won't let you do the basic computer things that you need to do. Like connecting your phone to your computer and transferring files between them. When I needed a new phone a couple years ago I did consider and iPhone (my friend had just gotten one and I loved that we could read the screen outdoors), so I told the Genius at the Apple store what I needed to be able to do with the phone (namely transfer files between my computer and the phone). He assured me that I would not be able to do that, so I got a Samsung (which I just had to replace, this time with a Google Pixel (because it's supposed to not be bogged down with the kind of extraneous bloatware that killed my Samsung)).As for turtlenecks, dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer! My polo shirts need to have a pocket!

I'm a retired software engineer, mostly working in embedded programming. All our development computers ran MS-DOS and then later Windows, though we also worked a bit with Linux. But never with Macs because they wouldn't do the work. For example, besides editing, compiling/making programs, performing version control, etc, we also needed to do a lot of file management, including generating hex dumps of files. We learned very quickly that we could not do that on a Mac, because every time we had to try to do anything on a Mac it persistently made it extremely difficult if not outright impossible to perform the simplest, most basic, and very necessary computer tasks that we needed to do.The consensus among us engineers was that Macs are for people who don't know anything about computers and hence don't even realize what a computer can do. If you're happy with nothing more than doing email, surfing the Web, or using a word processor, then a Mac might be OK, but if you need to do meaningful work then that Mac becomes an albatross around your neck.But Apple was very smart about their marketing. Almost from the beginning, they either subsidized or donated Apple IIs (and later Macs) to schools so that the kids would grow up using Apple computers and hence would grow up to buy Apple computers as adults (not to mention school children getting their parents to buy Apple computers for the home). Of course, that didn't quite work out since businesses found PCs to be more productive and cost-effective, especially with networking as Microsoft developed a presence in the server market.I don't know his wife's story, but an engineer at work had to get a Mac at home for his wife because she insisted. Of course, he had to solve all the problems that she would have with it, which drove him absolutely crazy since Macs do everything completely differently and illogically. He's the one who decided that Macs are "user-friendly" only to those who don't know anything about computers.My ex-wife was a teacher (and hence worked with those donated Macs), so she lobbied me to get a Mac for the home. We could only afford one computer for the home and I would also have to be able to use it, so a Mac would not have worked. Besides, I had to tell her that if she had any problems with that Mac then I would not be able to help her. Our Windows box was the right choice, because she could never learn the most basic rule of using a word processor, which is to name your document and know which directory you stored it in. She would create a document and then come to me very upset because "your stupid computer lost my document!", and I had to find it for her. "OK, where did you save it?" "I don't know!" "OK, what did you name it?" "I didn't!" Fortunately, that was before Microsoft completely screwed up its file find utility (ie, pre-Vista/Win7) so I just did a search on *.doc files created/updated within the past day or days and I'd find it for her. And the moment I tried to explain to her how to keep this from happening again she refused to hear any of it (she clinged to her ignorance even more than a creationist does). Then to make matters even worse, after I replaced our Gateway computer's crashed WinME hard disk with Win2000 and each of us got our own account on the computer, she would take the computer over from our son without him logging off and her logging on and create a document which belonged to our son and not to her, so when she tried to use it later logged on as herself and she couldn't, then it was all my fault again ... and yet again she would refuse to learn how to keep that from happening again.If any of that had happened on a family Mac, she would have just been completely SOL ("sh*t out of luck") because I would not have been able to have helped her.Another Mac disaster was in ballroom class. At the end of every dance class (this is pretty much universal) someone, usually the teacher, demonstrates the steps or routine we had covered while everybody records it on our phones or cameras. At the start of one particular class, the teacher wanted us to review the previous class' routine, so I popped the card out of my digital camera and plugged it into the studio's new Mac. After finally figuring out how to open that device without benefit of a right mouse button (The Doctor's comment after restarting one of his two hearts that had stopped: "How do you ever manage with only one?"), I tried to open the appropriate WAV file ... and the stupid computer refused to recognized its file format which had been universally ubiquitous for at least a decade! F*cking stupid Apple was pulling "not invented here" crap on us? That had a definite attitude formation effect.This just occurred to me this morning. Almost every programming book or course starts with Brian Kernighan's (contributor to the creation of UNIX and co-designer of C (he's the "K" in "K&R C")) "Hello, World!" program. All it does is print out the message, "Hello, World!", but in doing that you must be able to successfully write the program, compile it, get it to run, and display output on the screen, basically everything you need to know to reach that first milestone in programming. IOW, once you have created your "Hello, World!" program, you know how to create any other program in that development environment.I am totally convinced that the Apple version of that program is "F*CK YOU, WORLD!" As per Bill Maher's segment, I can't prove it, but I know that it's true. Almost all my file transfers between computers have been via sneakernet using floppies in the beginning and later USB flash drives. Of course, larger file sizes presented problems for lower-capacity sneakernet media, so we needed to come up with more clever approaches. I think there was a shareware utility that would split a large binary file into segments, each of which could fit on a floppy, and then in the target computer reconstitute those segments into a copy of the original file. Later when email became available we could use that. The early flash drives had capacities less than 1 GB, but now you can get capacities of 64 GB and more for about $25.Here's a war story (USAF-speak; "sea story" in the Navy) which is also the only time I was ever able to do something useful on a Mac. My sister-in-law's husband, a PhD who had only ever used a Mac throughout his college career, had just bought a new eMac which came with the new OS X (which was the first to be built atop BSD UNIX, as I recall). He also bought a new hP laser printer and made the mistake of installing the printer drivers that came with the printer. Those drivers were for OS9 and overwrote the OSX drivers already installed in the computer (I would assume). So of course the printer didn't work and he called me for help.I found the proper drivers from the hP website, but the file was too big to fit on a flash drive (this was around 2001 and my largest flash drive was only 256 MB). So I got creative. I downloaded the file onto my Windows laptop and brought it with me to their house. On the eMac, I found the network settings and set the eMac up as an FTP server -- they used dial-up to connect to the Internet, so the computer's RJ45 connector was not in use. Assigning appropriate private network IP addresses to both computers, I connected my laptop to the eMac with a crossover cable and FTP'd the drivers from my laptop to the eMac using the command-line FTP utility. On the eMac I installed the drivers and verified that I had fixed their printer problem. Then I cleaned up after myself, mainly getting rid of that FTP server.Along the way, I stumbled upon the eMac's text editor hidden away deep down in some subdirectory. It appeared to be little more than Windows' Notepad (doesn't compare with my multi-file text editor where I do most of my work ... and which doesn't have a Mac version). While reporting the successful fixing of his printer problem I told him about my having found the text editor and his reaction was, "What's a text editor?" That PhD. I also had to explain to them what that second button on the mouse, the right button, was for. I could never understand how anybody could do anything useful with a mouse that only had a single button, but then years later someone told me about the "command key" on the keyboard meaning that you had to use both hands to right-click something, which makes even less sense to me. And that's not even counting the "you need to know the secret handshake that nobody's going to tell you about" factor.OK, Apple. Same to you, buddy!

Here's the thing. The phone has its own file system with directories. Those directories include support for the camera and photo gallery, file downloads, text and PDF files. I need to be able to not only save off photos and videos, but also to load graphics files from my computer onto my phone. I also need to be able to copy text and PDF files onto my phone so that I can read them on my phone.Most of my requirements are for loading files into my phone, not from it. I'm having difficulty imagining email files from my computer to my phone; that entire approach just feels so contrived and convoluted. And, yes, attaching large files to an email has proven problematic in the past just in sending said files to somebody else (eg, real estate sales papers that needed to be signed and returned).Rather, the simple and direct method which I have used with my two past Android and my one past Windows phones has been to connect the phone to my computer (Windows, of course, because I need to be able to do useful things) with a USB cable, opening the phone as a device/directory in File Explorer (FE). From there, I navigate to the appropriate directories on the computer (running a second instance of FE) and the phone, select the file(s) I want to copy, and paste it/them in the other directory exactly as one would in any file copy operation. Clean, simple, couldn't be any easier. Yet Apple wants to make it extremely complicated and nearly impossible.BTW, I have had to resort to email to extract some photos and videos, especially videos of my grandsons that my son sends in text messages where they are too small to be able to see much. I have used the texting app's share feature to email them to myself, but that only reinforces my complaint that we have to use workarounds to perform common desired tasks.A side complaint is how they never tell you how to do these things. I really liked my iPod Nano (last of that product line I ever got since after that Apple dropped the best and most genius idea they ever had, that track-wheel control (though I think I saw that the new Apple streaming device's control has one)), which did a very great many things including a camera, video recording, pedometer, etc. The problem was that all they told you was how to charge it, turn it on, and what the symbols on the trackwheel meant. You could go to those other features through the menu, but they didn't tell you how to do anything else. In particular, I needed to delete some of the videos and I could not figure out how until I found a third-party users guide online that told me how.A common response to my complaining about that glaring lack of customer support has been that "exploring your device for what things you can do and how to do them is all part of the experience. Being told how to do things just ruins the experience." My phone is not a damned experience, but rather a tool for performing tasks! It is not a game!Part of my smartphone experience is for me to revert to practicing my German by cursing. Especially as I'm trying to navigate my calendar to another month when it suddenly exits the app and then, when I go back into the app, it returns me to the current month thus erasing any progress I had made. Scheißeschweinerei!

Of course I have a Windows machine; I also use some Linux, but as a virtual machine on one of my laptops. I could never use a Mac both because they are so user-hostile towards computer professionals and because I need to be able to do useful things with my computer. And because if I'm going to drive myself insane then it should at least be for a good reason. And since Netflix now provides me with plenty of German content, I no longer need to resort to cursing to keep current with the language.As for "easy", why must we resort to work-arounds in order to perform the most basic of computer tasks? A useful tool would be one that enables you to perform the tasks it is supposed to support, not to block you from being able to perform those tasks. If the only way to do your job with a given tool is to find convoluted ways of working around the tool, then that is not an acceptable tool. Time to find a better tool, one that actually does the job.I have it, having loaded and used it with my iPod and iPod Nano (I never upgraded to the iTouch since they had removed its essential feature, the track-wheel control). One benefit is that it created its own sandbox such that it did not mess up the rest of the computer's file system (at least not to my knowledge). The disadvantage is that it would sync the entire device, though at least it restricted itself to the iTunes sandbox (at least to my knowledge).My first smartphone was an Android, the HTC Thunderbolt. When I connected it to my computer it installed an HTC Sync utility (I forget the details of that). Many years later, it's still there in my taskbar, though I used it only once much to my horror. It went throughout my computer's file system and pulled out stuff to load into my phone. I have no idea in what manner it had otherwise violated my file system, but it does raise my hackles to be given such a rogering without a dinner first or at least a kiss, but the bottom line is that it was not consensual!The best I could find about how an iPhone would give a Windows computer a rogering (I would not call it a "good rogering") is that it would "perform a sync." Would it have defined a sandbox as iTunes did, thus keeping its damned dirty paws off the rest of the file system, or would it just go out and violate the entire file system wantonly? I could find no more "information" than that it would "perform a sync." 
"Easy" is just being able to connect the phone to the computer, open the phone's file system in the File Explorer, selecting the file(s) to be copied, and pasting that copy in the target directory. Now that is easy. But that is not the Apple way.Edited by dwise1, : Typo: "without a dinner first", not "with"