Duke87

because it was getting long. Original post: I will have to say... City_Master

(6125) It hasn't been above freezing in a week and aside from the high forecast for 33 on Tuesday, it won't do so in the next week either. This is... not normal here and it's annoying. (To be clear highs below freezing in January aren't abnormal, two weeks straight of nothing but them absolutely is though)

(6121) Man the digits in the year after the "20" are climbing high.

was getting reeeeeaaaalllly long. So, time to start over. As before: Come up with a dumb reason to ban me. You guys know the drill.

(6112) You're in Japan but your signature has a quote in Italian. Fun.

(6109) They're only juuuuust starting here, but we have more maritime moderation and less elevation than you do even though we have a bit more latitude.

(6107) Greetings from the Admirals Club at La Guardia

I still think the most nefarious April Fools joke was the 2004 one where it was announced that EA was buying Simtropolis and paid subscriptions would be introduced. (pardon the eye-bleeding custom Windows theme I was using when I was in high school)

(6101) Man I stopped bothering to update that thing years ago I can tell you we were at 5461 as of 2/8/2016 which means we've managed to advance 600 posts and change in the last nine years or so. (yikes, it has been a while hasn't it...)

(6079) I'll help out. I spent some time last week at work reading up on German building codes. Interesting observation: I recognized the word "abstand" because it appears on road signs in Germany referring to safe following distance. Well apparently in building codes it also is used to refer to setbacks from property lines.

(6074) What's wild is that as I'm typing this I'm also glancing at my daughter sleeping on the baby monitor. Yeah that's a thing that happened, hi.

(6070) I still live in the US and am not intent on changing that, though the total number of countries I've been to grew this year from 5 to 25... so there's that.

(6057) The moon got in the sun's way

(6053) Vertical Horizon is an underappreciated band

(6049) I finished driving the entirety of every state highway in Vermont last weekend. This is now the sixth state I've done that with. Whole scoreboard for anyone curious: https://travelmapping.net/user/?units=miles&u=duke87&

(6044) Starting to lose my hair, apparently. Time does things. (wonder what my newly-registered self in 2003 would have thought seeing this post)

(6041) I still exist

Moderna is the one that wallops people the most since it's a larger dose (about 3x what Pfizer is), though in exchange for this it is possibly slightly more effective. Do note that the Moderna booster shot is a half dose (so, 1.5x Pfizer) and therefore may not hit you as hard. Myself, I ended up getting a Moderna booster even though my first two shots were Pfizer, just because that was what the pharmacy down the street happened to have that day. It actually didn't hit me as bad as dose 2 did. I wouldn't worry too much about vaccine performance against variants or wait around to see if a tweaked vaccine is deployed before getting a shot (be it your first, second, or third) - thus far, the existing vaccines seem to still work just fine, with maybe modest penalties in efficacy against infection but... importantly, still very effective in preventing severe outcomes. Meanwhile deployment of a tweaked vaccine will take a few months, if it is done, and you don't want to go around less protected/unprotected for that time.

(6033) There was almost another entire human gestation period!

So, this isn't actually true. 61.2% of Israel's population is fully vaccinated, which currently ranks them 30th in the world on this metric and, in fact, just a hair behind the EU average (61.5%). This is per Bloomberg. What complicates matters for Israel is their population skews younger than other nations do, so they have a larger percentage of their population not yet eligible since no shots have been approved for anyone under age 12 yet. One also cannot fairly compare reported case incidence without acknowledging that Israel has been performing more tests per capita recently than most other countries have - which, naturally, impacts the reported case counts. Indeed, there are several countries not reporting as many cases per capita whose outbreaks are likely actually worse than Israel's but they aren't testing as much. This includes the US, which has reported about 62% as many cases per capita as Israel in the last 7 days but from only 29% as many tests per capita. (take a gander at some figures here) Meanwhile if any of this is worrying, the crucial thing to remember here is that for diseases like measles, polio, etc. 90+% of the population in any developed nation is likely vaccinated against them. 60-something percent vaccinated may sound like a good number and indeed it's far better than zero, but it's still a long way from 90+%. So the results seen in countries like Israel DO NOT mean the vaccines aren't working - they just mean not enough people have gotten one yet for them to work optimally. Give it time, more people will get jabbed (or get their immunity the hard way), and this too shall pass.

Some interesting statisticizing regarding the situation in the US: https://covid19dashboardgt.shinyapps.io/us_immunitylevel/ Essentially, there are a few states which between vaccines and prior infections are estimated to already have an immunity level approaching or even exceeding 70%. This includes the densely populated northeastern states that had a really nasty time of things last spring, as well as North and South Dakota where infection rates went crazy last fall. On the flipside, states which have managed to avoid ever having a really nasty outbreak are now really behind in the game in spite of having competitive vaccination rates, because they don't have as much natural immunity from prior infections to compliment it. This also helps explain why states like Washington and Oregon are seeing an uptick in cases against a national downward trend: their past successes now create a current challenge; they need to vaccinate more people than most other states in order to achieve high population-level immunity. On a personal note, I just got my second dose of the Pfizer shot yesterday, so now just need to wait out the two week buffering period. Oh and where I live all restrictions go away on May 19th, except for an indoor mask mandate which will be retained until TBD.

Ah, I see you have politicians that don't follow their own rules over there too. We've certainly had a few of those over here in the US, even with our rules not being nearly as strict. I will say, it's been... interesting watching some other parts of the world drive themselves absolutely crazy with lockdowns and whatnot. Over here, there are no rules about when or why you're allowed to leave your home. And other than leaving the country being mostly out of the question due to other nations not being willing to let Americans in (don't blame them, under the circumstances), there aren't really very many rules about where you're allowed to go, either. Wanna get on a plane and fly somewhere domestically? You'll have to wear a mask but otherwise you can do so freely for whatever reason you like. 41 out of 50 states have no rules requiring inbound travelers to quarantine and/or produce a negative test result, and of the 9 that do only a couple are actually making any serious effort to enforce them. We're mostly just focused on ensuring safe practice within businesses and it seems to do the trick generally. Around where I live, seeing someone at the store not wearing a mask is like seeing someone at the store not wearing pants. You just don't, it's firmly been made not socially acceptable.

(6030) I love how after the passage of an entire human gestation period, a calendar change suddenly prodded this thread to see some activity again.

(6024) "Master of Nuclear Science" So you're now a perfect supervillain.

(6019) My wife is watching Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel because of course she is.