Leaderboard

I remember way back in junior high being taught the Bering Straight Human migration model. It is interesting how biased and thoughtless us human can be. Here is a more recent “scientific” summary https://www.nps.gov/bela/learn/historyculture/other-migration-theories.htm The Atlantic Martime route sounds interesting.

Holy crap, that is excellent news! With around 60% of the state's 8.8million vaccinated, that makes the 'rona death rate of vaccinated NJians to be around 0.0009%. Compared to NJ's unvaccinated 'rona death rate of 0.27%, what more undeniable, clear, transparently glorious and wonderful proof of the vaccine's effectiveness could there possibly be? (I mean, the article doesn't make that clear, but people get it, right?) Wanna reduce your chances of dying of 'rona by two-hundred and eighty times? Get the vaccine. Wanna increase your chances of dying of 'rona by 280X? Don't get the vaccine. Thanks Carb, for posting this wonderful news! I'm seeing similar good reports everywhere. Dang I'm glad we've got effective vaccines against this thing. Now, only the most stubbornly blinder-wearing folks out there are able to cling to a false belief that the vaccine isn't effective. I mean, folks can still say things like "it's not for me" or "I have the right to decide for myself" or "I'm concerned about possible long-term effects", or "0.27%? I'll take my chances, thank you", or some such. There remain several valid principled arguments against the vaccine. But with the entire world's populations showing results similar to New Jersey, nobody can hope to say the vaccine isn't wildly effective against the virus, and hope to maintain a shred of credibility. Denying the vaccine's effectiveness, in the face of several months of relevant data, is now tantamount to denying the earth is a sphere. I always figured these guys knew what they were doing. Especially the superstar combination of medical doctor, former medical researcher, and prophet of the Lord. \

So why is the refusal of the 47% in Hawaii to get vaccinated a BYU-H applicant's problem? (Edit: Because I know I get in trouble for the way I state things a lot, I want to make it clear that I'm not saying you're being convoluted or nonsensical below. I'm saying that (as I'm sure you're well aware, because it was your point) you are reducing my ideas to a sentence that is convoluted and nonsensical. By which you are suggesting that I am expressing a convoluted and nonsensical idea.) I'm not sure how you're getting that convoluted and actually nonsensical idea out of what I'm saying. I don't think anyone ought to be forcing the Covid vaccine for any reason. Incentivizing? That's tougher. It's a bit hard for me to discuss this in that I am not sure how I really feel. I don't trust ANYONE! I don't trust the government. I don't trust the CDC. I don't trust the news media. I don't trust "conservative" sources. Everyone's biased and everyone has an agenda. And I don't trust anything or anyone. So...thanks for that...everybody. I mean the First Presidency (who I do trust) told us to "...counsel with a competent medical professional..." And I find myself, for the first time in my life, thinking, "Who is that?!" What medical professional, in today's world, can I trust to not have political bias, or not be swayed by one vehement side or the other, or not be corrupted by the severe censorship going on, or not be corrupted by rebellion against the severe censorship going on?* I honestly don't know what to think. But I do know that I HATE the idea of being forced into something instead of being able to do my best to weed through it all myself and make a decision on my own behalf and on behalf of my children. In this particular case, I tend to think BYU-H should err on the side of those who don't want the vaccine for whatever reason. And particularly if they've gotten a "doctor's note". I grant BYU-H's right to be snots about this. I just think they're being snots. And I think they're being snots because of an overarching narrative that is EXCEEDINGLY dangerous, that instead of being very wary of (or even noting), they seem to be embracing. That narrative is way more dangerous than the pandemic could even pretend to be. *Edit: Not to mention this idea: If a medical professional told someone to not get vaccinated and then that person or someone they loved died, whoo boy howdy LAWSUIT! But if the Dr. recommend vaccination...everyone's legally immune (pun recognized but not intended). Speaking of incentives and trust.

Hmm. I'm not sure I'm trying to lead you to a conclusion. The point, I suppose, is that to my best (albeit limited) understanding...if there are 100 people in the room and 99 of them are vaccinated and 1 is not then I believe we have herd immunity there. I don't know what the specifics numbers are, but it does seem to strike me that until there are enough individuals not vaccinated to affect herd immunity then being stringent in the issuing of exceptions doesn't make much sense except as some sort of virtue signaling. When they eliminate immunity from previous infection from the definition I'd say it is. But that is probably not relevant to the discussion at hand. Just griping.

My personal life experiences, observations and spiritual insights have led me to the realization of how miserable we are without God as a guiding influence for good. Without God’s influence, we are incapable of progressing. To hear that stated is one thing, but to internalize and see it as reality is another. We are selfish by nature. Our ability to progress beyond our selfish nature hangs in a delicate balance managed and made only possible by God. When it comes to progressing beyond what we are, we are fragile. Push us too much, and we will fall apart. Don’t push us enough, and we will remain incapable of loving others. How did we exist in the premortal life as “intelligences”? The noun would suggest we had intellectual capacity. Maybe we had ability to discern to some degree. But what we didn’t have was the ability to love or at least not to the extent made possible with a mortal, earthly experience. We did not care for our neighbors, we did not understand the importance of empathy, we were not our brother’s keeper, we did not sacrifice anything that wasn’t for our own benefit; we were incapable of understanding or even being motivated in that fashion. We were self-serving. That is our true nature absent of God. We give glory to God because despite us being miserably hopeless on our own, it was His wisdom and intervention that made possible our progression. He is our Eternal Anchor of Hope, our Heavenly North Star, and our only hope for rising above a state of nothingness; that is why we must or eventually be compelled to give glory to God, for anything we become beyond nothing is due to Him. For God to have organized us and created this vacuum where mankind has survived and thrived for as long as it has requires the greatest delicate touch beyond what we could imagine. Left to our own devices, we would have self-imploded and destroyed ourselves long ago. How do I know this? Because mankind has barely been able to survive this long even with God being as present as He is. Our self-sabotaging nature continues to spawn wars, murder, prostitution, sex trafficking, genocide, corruption, and abuse in all forms. These acts are evidence of our self-serving nature, a nature that even the most righteous among us is susceptible to. Our inherent nature of selfishness is just as alive today as it always has been even though the world’s landscape may appear to have changed over time. Selfishness is apparent on many levels even outside the common examples we would think of like theft or greed. Loving only those within your inner circles or those who provide some type of benefit in return for your love is selfish. Primarily focusing your life efforts on building a nest egg for solely you and your family is selfish if not shortsighted at best. Should we feel guilt for not being more advanced in our ability to love? I don’t think so. How developed we are in our ability to love is merely a snapshot of where we are on our individual journeys. Some may arrive to certain levels faster than others, but God didn’t design it to be a race; He designed it as a plan to give us all the best chance at developing love. It’s a monumental task for us to overcome our nature and learn to love, but we have to start somewhere. That is why God designed our learning in baby-step format. God created the format of life involving spouses and families as a step in the right direction for our advancement to learn to love others. Is it wrong to work hard to build a life for you and your family? No. But that alone isn’t the end goal of what God wants us to achieve. The goal is to learn to love, not just yourself, not just those within your inner circles, but to truly love all unconditionally as God loves us. That means putting others’ needs before your own including those who have no direct connection to you other than being a fellow child of God. Ever since Adam and Eve, God has been coaxing us along to learn to love. Through history we’ve seen how progress oftentimes takes multiple generations to build upon, just as chaos can trickle down and negatively affect multiple generations to come. How parents raise their children will influence that generation’s ability to love. How advanced should we become by the end of this life regarding our ability to love? As much as we can. The thing is, God never set a threshold because the purpose of this life never was perfection. The purpose of life is progress towards learning to love. God’s design of this life is what we need for the greatest chance of us succeeding in learning to love. God did not design our nature; He designed this life around our nature to provide us with the best platform possible for our success. If you think about how God designed the world for the benefit of our nature and development to learn to love, it extends itself to many insights of why this world is designed the way it is. For me, the family unit makes much more sense as to why it’s the exclusive unit it is instead of us attempting to love everyone equally. The exclusivity of the family unit concerned me before as it seemed selfish in principle as so many in this world are left unloved by a family of their own. I previously resented the clicks we form, but now I understand them to be necessary steppingstones for our progress in learning to love. We are far too infantile in our current state to attempt loving everyone equally. The fragility of our development of learning to love can also be related to our slow progression towards technological advancements. It’s taken thousands of years just for us to reach this digital age we now find ourselves in. Could the technology we see today have been achieved earlier? Absolutely. But we hindered and destroyed each other’s creations and progress due to our selfish nature. Had mankind not sought chaos and instead always embraced living in harmony with one another, we would be lightyears ahead of where we are today and basic problems like world hunger would not exist. But our nature is not harmonious. With the grace of God, we are swimming upstream trying to overcome our natural tendencies. May we trust in Him and His plan, and that what may seem like an insurmountable task ahead of us may seem possible to achieve with the hope He gives us, remembering that this life is nothing but baby steps in our progression of learning to love, that achieving perfection in this life never was the goal, and that God will guide us by the hand.

@Carborendum good to see you back

The point is that *everyone* doesn't have to be vaccinated to get those results. You could get basically the same result by vaccinating maybe half or less of the population, oldest first.

I was simply extrapolating the data from earlier provided by the article on NJ numbers from Carb. The death rates for vaccinated is 0.0009% and for non-vaccinated is 0.27%. It was more an exercise in demonstrating how an seemingly insignificant change in percentages like that can have large impacts. It wasn't meant to be infallible.

As I understand it, Hawaii is currently a shade over 53% vaccinated, which of course is nowhere near “herd immunity” and I doubt isn’t close even if we count recovered cases. But, the thought process above seems to reduce to “we shouldn’t incentivize people to get vaccinated until almost everyone has already been vaccinated”, which frankly is a little hard for me to follow. Am I misunderstanding?

That is a good question. I don't know. I do know that the numbers (deaths) given are not accurate. They have fudged the numbers. I also have never taken a flu shot. I do not feel the need to start now either.

Do I really need to explain the Covid death rates for 4 and 1 year olds?

This seems like a seriously flawed conclusion when "everyone" includes my 4 year old daughter and my 1 year old son.

Why aren't those people vaccinated?

Well again, and in Mirk's favor, and dprh's point, one hundred fifty one thousand people die, every day on earth. That's normal, I guess you'd have to call it "Godly tragic"? Context is important, context is hard. This guy gets it:

Marx was correct about one thing. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Grim? Yup, but like @dprh said our minds can’t comprehend stats like that. For perspective, Utah has about 3 million people. So, the entire state would be abolished and we’d still be short about a million deaths. Ungodly tragic.

Exactly! Or, in other words: 4.1 million global deaths related to coronoavirus. We all guess at how many in that number were actually caused by 'rona, but it's impossible to claim that 'rona isn't killing a crapton of people who would otherwise be alive. Someone looks at that and says "4.1 million? Holy crap, gimme the vaccine." Someone else says "99.5% survival? Not convincing enough for me to get jabbed." Here's a good question: How many millions dead would it take, before you figure it's serious enough to get the vaccine? And here's the same question put differently: How low does the % survivability need to drop, before it's low enough to change your mind? Other new news: Our global life expectancy has gone down a little because of 'rona and it's imact: They're guessing maybe 3/4ths of that drop is due to 'rona deaths, and the rest is impacts of quarantines/shutdowns/disruption in people's lives. A 1 year drop or so, isn't the end of the world. We're still living longer than we did in the '90's. But we also haven't felt the full long-term effects of shutdown in terms of skipped cancer screenings, increased diabetes, and whatnot. But still, it's hard to just explain away the results as "aw, that's nothing"

I've seen a lot of members against the vaxx quote this. But not many who do say that they've actually consulted with a competent medical professional. Edit: All 8 members of the FP and the 12 got it as soon as it was available to people over 70 years old. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/church-leaders-covid-19-vaccine

Carb's article and Neurotypical's post indicates NJ's unvaccinated survival rate would be 1-0.0027, so 99.73%. Survival rate of vaccinated people is 99.9991%. Yes, it seems like a small difference but like I said before, it's degrees of magnitude in difference. Edit: Just a little more maths. I took the difference of the rates. It's 0.26911%. Multiply that by the estimated world population of 7.5 Billion and it's 20,182,500. If everyone on the planet got the virus (which seems inevitable) , the difference if everyone were vaccinated or unvaccinated would be over 20 million deaths.

99-99.5% survival rate worldwide.

I heard recently (I wish I could remember where) that generally humans have a hard time comparing very large numbers and very small numbers. Up front, most people don't see much difference between 10,000 and 10,000,000 or 1/10,000 and 1/10,000,000. Even though they are degrees of magnitude separated.

Okay. Stop playing the victim. I said twice that I’m honestly curious. Not asking to insult you. So there’s that. Which you ignored. Because you want to pretend I’m picking on you. Which I’m not. And I said it twice. Perhaps you are judging my intentions on what you would do in my place. Next, if I misunderstood your choice on vaccines and why you don’t take them, I’m truly sorry. And maybe, just maybe, if I was confused by your stance it’s because you weren’t clear. Just maybe. But you know me @Carborendum, I’m really stupid. And finally, yes, I do think most people who claim “medical exceptions” aren’t telling us the entire truth. Reality is that less than 1% have a legit claim to that. If you are that one percent, I truly feel bad for you because it’s a dangerous life. However, I’ve met so many people who claim that that yes, I’m cynical about it. It’s like meeting people who claim to be Navy SEALS or at a famous football game where their team won the championship.

Depends on the vaccine. If they came out with an AIDS vaccine tomorrow, I'd be kinda skeptical.

Who said I was anti-vaxx? I was just sharing an article that had some interesting information on the topic.

What a piece of work is man.

https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2021/07/49-people-who-were-fully-vaccinated-have-died-of-covid-in-nj-heres-what-we-know.html

I would laugh, except it's true rather than funny.

When nothing of stellar intellectual wonderment is available, resort to a bear meme:

I'm an introvert, and yes introverts need to get to know everyone around them -- and they can. The Atonement can make weaknesses strong. 😀 I'm not sure, if a person doesn't have charity he is nothing. That makes "love" the top of the line attribute of Christ.

I’m as pro vaxx as they come, but I will fight for your right to 1) party and 2) not be forced by the government to take the vaccine

Dude is so old he could have been a waiter at the last supper.

Frankly, if you aren’t trying to suggest that the vaccine *should be* 100% effective and that vaccinated folks are (or ought to be) unaffected by an individual’s failure to become vaccinated, then I don’t see how your question is relevant. Are you trying to lead me to a certain conclusion? If you’ll just tell me the point you’re trying to make, I’ll try to engage with it. And I’m not sure it’s really fair or accurate to say that concepts like “herd immunity” or new or are being substantially redefined. I learned about it in high school, which (as @LDSGator will happily tell you) was kind of a long time ago.

“What a piece of man is Carborendum”, said Mrs. Carborendum 😁

lol what do you mean, watching a YouTube video doesn't qualify as counsel with competent medical professionals? Ya crackpot.