This came up in a recent conversation. Back in 2020, at least one person was saying 6 months. I'm at an age where I can get a booster every 6 months.
At the moment, just a simple cold has made me feel very bad.
It seems to me that natural immunity would last longer with repeated exposure. Doctors and hospital workers seem to be immune for long periods of time.
Natural immunity to COVID-19 typically lasts about 3 to 6 months against reinfection, though protection drops faster against newer variants.
UCLA Health
Duration of Protection
Against reinfection: Measurable antibody levels and protection against catching a mild or moderate infection start to fade after 3 to 6 months. Newer variants can bypass natural defenses more easily.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance
Against severe disease: Protection against severe illness, hospitalization, and death lasts much longer—often remaining strong for 10 months or more.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) | (.gov)
Factors That Affect Immunity
Variant changes: Mutations in the virus make it easier for reinfection to happen over time.
Severity of illness: People who had a severe COVID-19 infection sometimes build higher initial antibody levels than those with mild or asymptomatic cases.
BASS Medical Group
Hybrid Immunity
Getting vaccinated after recovering from a COVID-19 infection creates hybrid immunity. This combination provides a stronger, broader, and longer-lasting defense against current and future variants than natural infection alone. Health experts often suggest waiting 3 to 4 months after a natural infection before getting a booster shot.
I've eaten cottage cheese since childhood. I don't even think of it as cheese because the texture is so different. However, large-curd cottage cheese has a texture I don't like, so I stick with small curd.
Cottage cheese is not one of my favorite foods because it is bland. Salt improves the flavor, and it becomes more interesting when you add fruit. I rarely buy it, though.
Most cheeses have flavors that don't appeal to me. However, I do like cheddar cheese. American cheese is essentially cheddar that has been highly diluted with other ingredients, such as oil. I think American cheese is only suitable for sandwiches.
I saw that one pizzeria said they put cheddar on their pizza. That's unusual, since mozzarella is the normal choice. I would like to try that.
Some pizzas are better without cheese. The cheese can hide the flavors of the other toppings. I've noticed that some places put the cheese over the toppings, while a few put the toppings over the cheese. I think the latter makes the pizza more flavorful.
Conservative talk radio thinks that she should be found guilty.
One lady called into the Clay and Buck show and said that they don't understand psychosis. She said that she had wanted to kill her children, but got medical help and now takes antipsychotic medication. The lady said that she is afraid to stop taking her medication.
I find it easy to believe that people can go crazy. I already have that opinion about a few people. It appears that mental illness is fairly common.
I think that for a woman to kill her children is a crazy act by definition. There might be a few rare psychopaths who don't care and think that they can get away with the crime, but I doubt that they would try to kill themselves afterward. However, even psychopathy is a form of mental illness, although it is not the kind of crazy delusion where they don't know what they are doing.
Trying to kill oneself by simply jumping out of a second-story window is illogical, if not crazy, or it could be a carefully planned manipulation.
This says what I have been saying for a long time: most people don't need a tablet. We have phones with 6+ inch displays that can handle most of our portability needs, and we have PCs with large, comfortable displays for when we don't need portability.
I have seen professionals, such as medical personnel and mechanics, carry tablets with them to do whatever work they need to do. In these cases, a larger screen makes sense. Tablets could also be useful for students who need some sort of portable screen to do their schoolwork.
I feel the same way about laptops. For decades, I have known many people who wanted a laptop instead of a desktop computer, but they really didn't need the portability. They just thought laptops were "cool." However, laptops often cost more than desktops and are full of compromises. The components are designed for portability, which means you take a hit in performance, while the keyboard and screen are far worse than what you can get with a desktop.
Portable devices are also almost never upgradeable, even for things like memory and storage.
If I needed a portable screen, then a tablet would make sense, but I don't. I paid around $420 for a 16-year-old 32-bit iPad, and I never got my money's worth out of it. I still have it, but it is so out of date that it won't run anything.
The best tablets, which cost quite a bit of money, can outperform a desktop computer, especially the ones from Apple, which are almost always more powerful than their Android counterparts. However, who needs super-desktop performance in a handheld device? Only people who do high-productivity work, such as video editing, really need that kind of performance. But for this kind of work, why not use a desktop computer?
The low-end iPad (https://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPad-11-inch-Display-All-Day/dp/B0DZ77D5HL) has performance comparable to that of a good-quality laptop and outperforms some older desktops. For the mundane tasks that most people will perform on a tablet, this is more power than they need. In past years, budget iPads have been discounted on Black Friday to around $220, which would be a steal today. I suspect they won't be quite that cheap this Black Friday.
I've seen budget Android tablets that aren't as powerful, but they are less expensive and still perfectly adequate for basic tasks.
When it comes to Apple versus Android, I definitely prefer Apple's operating system. It is more intuitive, far less complicated, and, in my experience, less prone to viruses. I've seen people get viruses on their Android phones. My past experience with tablets is that I also prefer the feel of Apple devices in my hands. They seem to have a better tactile experience.
Amazon makes the Fire line of tablets. Although they retail for $150 or more, they are often half-price on Black Friday, and I paid $80 for mine. The newer models aren't much more powerful than the 2019 model I bought, and their processor performance is poor. However, they were designed for streaming video, listening to audiobooks, and reading books, whether from Amazon or another company such as Netflix. At these tasks, these cheap tablets work amazingly well. They can also play some Android games.
If I needed a portable screen for watching videos, then a Fire tablet would make sense, but I don't. I found mine useful exactly once, when I took it on vacation.
For basic Internet tasks such as web browsing and email, Fire tablets work, but they are slightly slow.
@john2001plus
16 hours ago (edited)
A person's feelings about their body do not make a man a woman or a woman a man, nor is it possible to make the switch. A trans person will never be able to produce children. The changes are cosmetic only and don't change the fundamental reality of a person's biology. It seems to me that people are sold a lie about gender affirming care.
From what I read, some people do benefit psychologically from surgery. However, this is a serious operation that does irreversible damage to the body, with potential complications. Maybe psychological care would be more appropriate?
Some of us didn't exactly win the genetics lottery. We have to deal with the reality of our bodies instead of some fantasy. Surgery only becomes needed when it is medically necessary.
In the Netflix streaming series The Crown, the Queen goes to Ghana to meet Kwame Nkrumah in an effort to keep the country loyal to Britain. In one scene, she dances with him at a party, and this softens his anti-British attitude.
The dance was real...
'According to intelligence documents released by the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian, "Nkrumah was doing more to undermine [U.S. government] interests than any other black African."
Nkrumah generally took a non-aligned Marxist perspective on economics, and believed capitalism had malignant effects that were going to stay with Africa for a long time. Although he was clear on distancing himself from the African socialism of many of his contemporaries, Nkrumah argued that socialism was the system that would best accommodate the changes that capitalism had brought, while still respecting African values. He specifically addresses these issues and his politics in a 1967 essay entitled "African Socialism Revisited"'
@john2001plus
1 minute ago
Salt Lake County consists of many connected cities, making a total of 1.2 million. Indianapolis is roughly 0.9 million, but the connected cities push it up to 2 million.
She was very good in 'Heroes'. The series was great in the first season, but the second season faltered quite a bit. It lost any momentum that it had. The show recovered in later seasons, but was still cancelled.
Cut ... to ... 2001. Those Americans had just watched a Democratic president and a Republican Congress run a budget surplus while expanding trade. Tell them we would arrive here, in just two and a half decades — $40 trillion in debt, in the middle of a global trade war — and they would simply not believe you.
How did we get here? At bottom: incentives.
People respond to them, and our system gives citizens almost none to really understand the issues because understanding does not translate into any real say. We hand our authority to a proxy selected largely on partisan sound bites, then root for our political team the way we root for a ball club.
Wealth and civic health are twin engines. The nations with the strongest safety nets don't have them because their politicians are nicer; they have them because their economies are richer and their systems reward productivity over plunder.
While driving home I saw protestors half a mile from my house on National Road in Columbus, Indiana. They were holding up signs facing the opposite direction from me. I thought that maybe it was a labor strike, but I couldn't contain my curiosity so I drove around the block just so I could read their signs.
“You go to these cities that are taken over by the socialists and the communists, they’re always filthy, dirty. They’re disgusting,” Trump claimed in the interview. He added, “Aside from crime, aside from all of the other problems — no jobs, no anything, no money — they’re always filthy, disgusting, dirty, and that’s what you’ll get.”
El-Sayed has not been endorsed by the DSA, but democratic socialist lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have campaigned for him. El-Sayed has told The Wall Street Journal that he is “not technically or practically DSA.”
Rogers and national Republicans had signaled that they consider El-Sayed an easier opponent than Stevens. The National Republican Senatorial Committee went so far as to produce a digital ad emphasizing El-Sayed’s progressive credentials and endorsement from Sanders
