I have to say that I am enjoying the interaction between us is refreshing. There have been new TS users in the past who possess in-depth knowledge of certain subjects, but to me, their postings dripped with condescension and arrogance. I see you take responsibility for your actions, and, to me, that is indeed refreshing. Like you, I also try to dispel the falsehoods, and make efforts to post items that are referentially sound, although, I don't always achieve that goal.
So, maybe its a bit late, but I'll say "Welcome to Tech Spot". May your journeys here be enlightening.
Apologies accepted and appreciated but unnecessary, the temperature in the theatre of dialogue the last few years has led us all to be more curt both online and in person than we would all usually have been. The number of times I've said or typed something and then thought "wait noooo, come back!" is higher than I'd like to admit. I had the option to move away from the very fast paced transport business I mentioned in July of 2020 and it was very much a situation of not realizing just how fatigued I was and how much it was affecting my interactions. After nearly 2 years of semi retirement and just living I have the time and mellow to try and apply myself to helping bring the temperature down where I can (doesn't always work and there have definitely been occasions where I've made a hash of it).
Its, unfortunately, a sign of the times. For me, I will have to make an effort to be more mindful in my postings.
I hail from Conception bay South on the Avalon peninsula though I grew up on the West coast of NL in Stephenville which was a massive US air force/ Naval base during the cold war. Burnside is pretty out of the way even by NL standards, the whole central section of the province around Terra Nova national park is basically a giant nature preserve so it's quite beautiful there.
I came to NL through Channel-Port aux Basques having opted to take the shorter ferry route even though the drive was longer. I then passed by Stephenville on the way to Corner Brook, stayed the night at the
Glynmill Inn, and the next day drove along highway 1 to the north and eventually to Burnside. Of the biggest things that stood out to me were the Birch forests along the route. At my home latitude, we don't have such large stands of Birch trees; we do have Birch trees, but they tend to be much fewer in number than pines or other, deciduous species. Another thing that struck me was that, in general, the people were very friendly. And indeed, the landscape and geography of the region is, perhaps, among the most beautiful I have experienced among my limited journeys. I tell myself that someday, I'll travel to NL again, and maybe this time, my wife will get to go along with me.
One other thing I will never forget is that I crossed the border from Houlton, ME. I stopped for a break there, and found a rest stop that was part of a scale model of the solar system. Pluto was there.
When I got out of my car, the silence was deafening. Where I live, there is always a drone from the city. There - nothing, no sound to speak of. It makes me wonder what it used to be like back when there was not so many developed areas. I long for that kind of silence in my life.
I was raised atheist as my father is an electrical engineer from an atheist family though my mothers side is Irish catholic but they have all effectively walked away from religion over the last several decades as there have been endless scandals here in the province related to the church (kinda the same everywhere from what I can gather?). Growing up on the west coast a lot of my class mates and one of my life long friends were from the Mi'kmaq first nations group, in my experience the first nations folks I've known were quite welcoming to outsiders taking a genuine interest in their customs and way of life. My friend is a software engineer and unless you knew otherwise you'd presume he is just your average tech focused Caucasian guy, his Father was life long Canadian military as were most of his uncles before retirement. Other than preferring a compound bow for hunting as opposed to a high caliber rifle they were more integrated into Western European traditions than a first nations way of life.
Interesting. My last study in the BS degree that I completed about two years ago was "Native American Myths and Legends". As part of the course, I read
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1571313567/ which was written by a Citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. An interesting thing about the book was what she said about their language. Their words for something, take, for example, the word "Tree," in their language literally means "to be a tree" rather than a word meaning an object that is a tree. To me, there's a profound connection that native cultures have with the earth, and they understand things that should be obvious such as that one cannot take all the fish from a lake as there will be no fish left to find the next time one goes fishing.
The long story short about me is that I was raised Roman Catholic, but I never related well to the teachings. My parents forced me to go to church, and I used to imagine I was elsewhere while I was there. I have managed to find a path that is much more esoteric and arcane.
Where school is concerned, things were always mostly beyond easy for me especially if I was interested - mainly mathematics and science stuff. I'm not so well-versed in history or social sciences. I remember I was goofing off in a math class in jr. High School one day, and the teacher gave me extra homework as a punishment. She said, "this ought to take you about an hour to do" and I was literally through with it in 5-minutes.
In my younger years, I never found anything in school that really challenged me. That, along with an intimate relationship in high school, for which I was not ready, where she ended it because her mother wanted her to do so, lead to me losing my way, and not making it at a US top-20 university in my home city. Eventually, I found a non-traditional university in
NY State - Empire State College, where I got to design my own degree program, and completed almost entirely through independent study. I pushed the limits, and, unfortunately, one of the subjects that interested me most was
Clifford's Geometric Algebra the link, if you are interested, only touches on its potential. It has things like "real" imaginary numbers in its "wedge product" that leads to simplification in various areas of science and mathematics. There was no one at the school that was versed in it, however, my primary advisor let me find my own way. I wished that there had been someone who was well-versed in it, as it is, IMO, truly an amazing version of mathematics that, again, IMO, should be what is taught mainstream in University. I tell myself that maybe when I retire, I will get accepted into a "paid" PhD program where can explore its application to physics, chemistry, astrophysics or something similar.
Regarding he Nature article I completely agree that there is definitely a non anecdotal correlation there that more than justifies looking in the direction of cross immunity from other Corona viruses. Cpt. Cranky linked a bunch of referential pieces related to the continuing fleshing out of the research in that direction. Basically it's looking like we all got quite lucky in that regard and certainly it seems that way for folks in developing parts of central and south Africa where Doctors really needed the break that has been provided by Omicrons second variant effectively being no more lethal than the average bad cold when represented across the population at large while leaving behind a seemingly quite solid immunity imprint for future or recurring infection.
I thought the mechanism of immunity was rather interesting in that those found to have some immunity, the immunity was expressed in portions of the spike protein - which, to the best of my understanding, is a characteristic of all coronaviruses. I also thought it interesting that through attacking only part of the spike protein, it sounds like coronaviruses are very susceptible to attack through that avenue.
@captaincranky and I have had our share of disagreements, however, once I came to see more of him through his posts and interactions with him, I have come to consider him a friend who has knowledge, wisdom, and understanding well beyond most. BTW - Captain, the advisor for my myths and legends course said that while referencing wikipedia was not acceptable for an academic paper, referencing what wikipedia references was.
I've got a cousin who I grew up with who is very similar to me in many ways and views though on others we debate tirelessly, her background is Political Science up to the Ph. D level and then she went to law school at the university of Ottawa before going to work on policy within the Canadian government. When I moved to entrepreneurship and built a business I learned a hell of a lot about how our government works/doesn't in Canada that I never would have considered other wise. These days I'm more capitalist than I've probably ever been before and she is somewhere down the middle , one of the few things we both agree upon completely is that most western countries have been shifting more and more power and responsibility further up that chain toward the executive branch for years. Almost without exception this has made reasonable nuanced response to issues nearly impossible because of the financial drag associated with all the bureaucracy that gets in the way. The answer to this hasn't really changed all that much in decades, eventually we are going to have to see government stop pushing huge sums of money into industry to sort out private companies mess. I'm a life long car guy and I have a particular affinity for the Chevrolet Corvette but after the mess that GM's management and the UAW had made of that company they should have gone bankrupt as a required balance point of a failure to manage their company (GM might be the only example of a massive company getting a bailout and then sorting itself out, I still don't think they should have been bailed out but at least it wasn't a waste of tax payer dollars).
I have to say that I was also not in favor of the US Auto bailout - though my reasons were more along the lines of the US auto industry's "tic" of not being able to produce quality vehicles.
To stop the constant flow of tax payer dollars to who knows what entity we're going to require a system where the finances and holdings of anyone in public office be completely transparent to the general public in real time. Basically it's like urinalysis in sports competition, there is going to have to be some type of required transparency to stop the game from being rigged and to be able to account for every single last dollar of tax payer money that is given to the government. A complete and total representation of taxation if you will. The beginnings of this are starting to be seen with calls to either not allow politicians to own or invest in stock, if handled correctly this can fill the double roles of unrigging the system and also heading off the need for endless regulation of industries where the regulations only hamper the companies that don't have an in with some power broker in Washington, Ottawa etc... The end result of this is that overall taxes come down as we get to watch needless bureaucratic structures in government wither, while at the same time we get a much faster turn around on government funded projects. We will still need regulators such as the FDA and CSA but they already exist, do pretty good work for their budget and make an actual difference to the general public, we really do need to get the dark money the hell out of government though.
Agreed about the FDA and CSA and about dark money - the US, IMO, decisions like Citizen's United are not inspiring that things are moving in the best direction.
I have not read the entire text, but it is available for free here -
https://sacred-economics.com/ What I have read, it sounds like a good idea. I'm no economics expert, for sure.
Trump broke the US system in such a fundamental ways that it'll be generations before it all gets sorted out again.
Yes, I agree.
What has been learned by both parties (hopefully) is that they need to make some type of minimum effort to do their jobs and provide presidential options that are at least minimally acceptable. If for no other reason than to avoid millions of angry, disenfranchised US citizens from deciding F-it I'll just vote for the guy who will make the most mess to teach both parties just how enraged they are.
I am not sure his party has learned anything from it. But, maybe it will take people voting against them - assuming it happens - for them to find a way to reinvent themselves into something that truly cares about the things they do helping their constituents instead of helping them maintain power.
This is true of all G level countries as well, it may have started in the US but just look north of the border right now (my spouse spent 8 hrs. trying to get across Ottawa yesterday to fly home from skiing in Quebec).
Of course, I heard about the protests, and I cannot say that I supported them. 200 people, I understand, were arrested. I don't know whether it was strictly those 200 people who were responsible, but if it was, that 200-people can basically disrupt the lives of so many more is not something in which I take comfort.
When you get irresponsible politicians at the top of any major country it leads to a lot of really angry folks that push further away from the crowd. A lot of Canadians couldn't understand why any citizen would vote for the strongly right wing PPC party in our last federal election (by US standards they're moderately right at best but oddly they're very behind first nation rights and have several first nations MP candidates so they're a bit of an oddity).
My take would be that first nations tend to want to conserve natural resources - though that seems contrary to what conservatives in the US want - conservation of natural resources, to me, is very conservative in nature, IMO, and looking at it from that aspect, there seems to be a certain logic in it.
The answer is that we have had 6 years of Trudeau (who I voted for in 2015) making ever more sloppy and lazy choices while getting embroiled in one scandal after another and shirking his responsibilities. Politicians the world over need to get the hell off social media (should realistically be legislated actually) and do the job they were elected to do, public office needs to be a responsibility and a duty first and never used for red carpet nonsense.
Agreed, and I think it may be one of the best things to happen to social media is Trump being banned from it.
Rogen and his podcast have really evolved over the years and there is a noticeable difference between now and even 3 years ago, he does try to take a second and give little disclaimers that they're joking about stuff and to make it clear what is sarcasm and such (these are regularly the parts that are taken out of context and used as ammo against him with the disclaimer missing). We literally live in a world where kids (and adults!) were recording themselves eating tide pods a couple of years ago to get likes on the internet,
Yes, the tide pod thing. I just don't get what drives people to go to such lengths to get attention. In a vague sort of way, it reminds me of the issues discussed in the Netflix series "Mindhunter".
I am glad that Rogan does include disclaimers. I wonder if it is just from a legal aspect, though. Disclaimers are a legal necessity in this day and age.
Anyway, I though your post had a great deal of thoughtful content. It was a pleasure reading it.
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