direct vs indirect. opposites. so you're wrong, instead of right.

Wow, that actually went far more coherent than I was expecting.

So I'll push your very same argument one step further, which continues to align our two ever-closening (closening?) arguments:

I think we can both agree that allowing a human to pierce skin without permission is, in a lot of ways, significantly scarier than a virus doing so.

No problem. Then you won't charge me taxes to cover your school right? Your school will fall apart quite quickly. It won't be public anymore.

If you want to offer school for all, then that's what it is -- for all. You don't get to force anything more than taxes. You certainly don't get to assault and mutilate everyone as a result.

Your solution to disease is vaccination. It's mine too. It would be wonderful (for us) if it were everyone's solution. We still don't get to force them to take our less-than-perfect solution.

I am vaccinated, and believe it to be the best course of action, but that is hardly the point.

There is no way in hell that any government is going to demand that I stick anything into my body, let alone my child's body. And, if anyone were to try to pierce my skin, or the skin of my loved one, self-defense will cover my tearing them limb from limb.

Make no mistake, these people do not "endanger the lives of everyone else with their views". The virus endangers lives. These people's views merely inhibit everyone else from benefiting from currently-available medical prevention opportunities, which apparently aren't even "100 percent effective".

If you don't support someone else having control over their own blood, and the blood of their children, then you're for slavery, imprisonment, unlawful confinement, the crusade, and forced conversions of all kinds.

If you're upset with the promotion of mis-information, then stop its publication. Let me know how that goes for you.

You don't get to tell me what to put into my blood, and you don't get to tell me what I can say to my friends. Welcome to freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

You want to split public schools into two buildings, that's cool. You want to restrict some children from public school, that's no longer public.

I'm so sorry; but you don't get to solve your problems by piercing someone else's skin. It's just that simple. It doesn't matter if that's what will work. It doesn't matter if that's the only thing that will work. You just don't get to do it. It's physical assault. It's bodily mutilation. You need permission.

compared to something inside the vehicle, locked possibly twice, with no means of digital nor of remote access. oh, and breaking into a car is very illegal. stealing a car even more so.

It isn't.

This sounds like something that evolution would beat-out in two years flat. Visible light harming members of a population differently. . . how many generations do you think it would take?

You might want to go back to grade four, when they taught you (or ought to have) about root words.

You'll find that the root word of happy is shared by happen, happenstance, happening, and haptic. You'll find that to be happy is to be happy with what is happening. Being happy is being satisfied with your current happenstance. It has nothing to do with joy.

You may also want to go back to psych 101, where they taught you (or ought to have) about emotional indices. You'll find that joy is the emotion, and happiness is not.

You may also want to go back to that Latin course you took, or ought to have. You'll find that "joy, joyful" exists, but "happy, happyful" does not. When words are conjugated differently, they are almost always different parts of speech. Happy is an adjective. Joy is a noun. You experience joy. You don't experience happy. You experience happiness.

You can make up your own definitions for words, or you can use the meanings that the general public tends to use. Each is incorrect. Alternatively, you can actually use the meaning of the word, as it is almost always a simple definition from another language. If you do that, not only do things make sense, but foreigners will be capable of learning your language.

late 14c., "lucky, favored by fortune, prosperous;" of events, "turning out well," from hap (n.) "chance, fortune",
"lucky."

You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally!

I was hoping someone would ask!

After encountering it in a local store, already sold, with no replacement for me, I spent a year trying to locate it anywhere near me. Shipping across the border into Canada would have been prohibitively expensive.

Rachlin Classics Dinah Chaise Launger. I got the single, and the chaise-and-a-half double-wide. It's huge!

http://www.olindes.com/Item_Ol...
http://www.bigfurniturewebsite...
http://www.polyvore.com/rachli...

I found it from Stoney Creek Furniture.

If you're in your late 20s, then I'm only a few years ahead of you -- I'm now 34, and that's where I was in my late 20s too.

So for you, here's my real advice.

I own/run my own business, so late 20s meant growing and always-on business. Don't try to fight that, you won't win. Work matters, and it's rewarding, and that's the time in your life when you can really perfect your future because you've got the energy and will to do so -- and not too many hobbies yet.

Instead, focus on being able to run away -- all the way away.

For me, that meant co-ordinating with a fellow business owner, a friend. Now, 6 years later, we still do this. We never take vacations at the same time -- so we basically need to book our vacations with each other's schedules. We set things up like this:

Say I'm going on vacation for two weeks, which I'm doing in January to Disneyworld and the florida keys. Now my business and clients can't possibly have me vanish for two weeks. And any number of things could go horribly wrong leaving me with nothing but law suits if I were truly gone.

Now most people in my position would have a laptop, and check their e-mail, and be available through modern tools, and do about an hour of work each day, and say that they are on vacation when really all of the stress is still there.

Instead, here's what I'll be doing. I'll have the work laptop in a briefcase in the hotel room. But I won't look at it, and I won't touch it, and I won't wonder about it.

My e-mail will have a nice vacation-auto-reply saying that I'm gone, and if it's urgent, they can call be buddy who's covering for me. 90% will wait for my return. 10% will call for my cover.

He can do the very tiny customer service things. Beyond that, he has a way of reaching me, by phone, usually through the hotel or through my cellphone in my pocket that I otherwise won't look at. If something's truly an emergency that can't wait, he'll call, and I'll step aside from my vacation to walk him through whatever needs to be done.

The end result is that I don't spend every second of every day wondering if I've left my oven on. Instead, I've given that very task to someone whose job it is to make that determination -- emergency or not -- and to get in touch with me if it is. He'll be able to reach me at multiple points during my day, usually within an hour

His job is to decide and to reach me. My job is to swim with dolphins.

Over the past six years, we've covered for each-other about three dozen times. In those three dozen times, there have been four emergencies, total.

It's the always-on that's the stressful part in like from these devices. It's not the emergencies themselves.

None of that is silly. Here's the thing. This is as much a process as it is a technique.

There's a big part that I didn't explain. It's not about your emotional state. It's about your state of mind. Happiness isn't joy, it's contentment. You can be happy with a sacrifice. You can be happy with pain. You can be happy with a struggle.

The big effort, and this is the skill to be learned, is to ensure that you're assessing your own happiness, and not someone else's.

There's a lot of marketing in this world. A lot of "other peoples' opinions". You'll never be able to satisfy those -- because they are forever conflicting.

So it's about sitting down and deciding is your current opinion is actually yours. If it's not, think harder until you find the one that is.

Your blue cheese is an excellent example, but not for the reasons that you may think. Your blue cheese example is based purely on bio-feedback: taste. It's gross, it's ugly, it's just awful in so many ways -- but you can't fight your sense of taste. No one can convince you that it tastes bad when you think it tastes good. So it's easy to tell everyone else that they are wrong.

The same is true with anything, if only you can get your own opinion to express itself that directly, and unequivically.

So here's the amazing version. Ever stand naked in front of the bathroom mirror, visible head-to-toe, and asked yourself a real-life question? Try it. Ask yourself real quandries like "should I take that job" or "should I move to montreal". Ask it aloud. Talk to yourself aloud. Have an entire conversation with your reflection, but don't listen to what you say. Watch your reflection's body language. Treat your reflection like it's someone else.

Then, when you're done, leave the room then ask yourself (not your reflection) if that guy in the mirror wants to move to montreal. You'll have that same great instinct about your reflection that you have about your friend "Larry's not going to move to montreal! He couldn't even say montreal without fidgeting."

In that case, be on the look-out for the gravy.

A lot of people try to fit the mutation into their current life -- square peg round hole style. The gravy comes when you fit that part of your life to the mutation.

A few examples:

That old 1998 cellphone can be much smaller than modern smartphones. If you're female, try taking a smaller purse, and realize that you can take it more places and wear differently-shaped pants. If you're male, like I am, you can actually lash some smaller phones to your belt. Remember phones on belt clips? Yeah, that's so much way more convenient. So use it the way that it was meant to be used. I can't tell you just how much I prefer the wired earbud/mic over bluetooth. No batteries, no audio compression, no problems.

That piece of furniture I was mentioning, is actually a big giant "scrolled" chaise. I never liked chaises until I found this one. Scrolled means drastically curved, which is awesome, and three inches of tufted fabric, which is even more awesome. The gravy? You can sit/lie at just about any angle imaginable -- it's in the bedroom; it's better than the bed.

So be on the look-out for the gravy. The way that your experiment can do more than whatever it's replacing. Sure there are things that it can't do, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have unique benefits of it's own. Smaller is better than bigger. Bigger is better than smaller.

Enjoy!

Now here's the warning. You'll try something. It'll be way better than your old way of doing things. You'll vow never to go back. Then a friend will look at you and ask why you aren't doing things the "normal" way. You'll explain that you tried it, and just weren't a happier person as a result. They won't understand. They'll list all of the great things that the modern device can do that the old device can't do. You'll repeat: "it doesn't make me happier." You'll add: "and it doesn't look like it makes you happier either".

They won't understand.

Forget about how it affects your academic studies -- the academic world has always been a far stretch from reality, so the older most people get, the less it makes sense to study and learn in heavily structured environments.

Now, regarding the distraction, here's what I do.

Every week, I measure my happiness. There are countless psych-industry surveys, and a few very official ones, but any technique that makes sense for you will work just as well. It can be the number of times you smiled, the ease with which you slept, your willingness to go to work on monday, the number of times you went out with friends, the amount of chocolate you ate, or didn't eat, whatever. Your measure of happiness is all that matters, and any will do, provided that it's the same technique for six months at a time.

So every week, measure your happiness. Again, not your joy (emotion), your happiness (state of mind).

Buy an old "dumb" phone for $10. Basic address book, telephone, crappy texting. The kind of phone that was AMAZING in 1998. The kind of phone that only the very wealthy had in 1996. The kind of phone that only kings had in 1995. The kind of phone that only freakin' astronauts had in 1994.

Use it for two weeks instead of your modern smart phone.

See what happens to your happiness measurements. Maybe they'll go up. Maybe they'll go down.

The point is simply this. Every week, make an arbitrary change from what you're doing today, to something that is or was perfectly amazing to someone else. See if you become a happier person. Forget about measuring by price, or appearance, or opinion, or status. Just look at your own face in the mirror, or feel your own face with your hands, and see what makes you happier.

Do so objectively, and within a year you'll transform so many different parts of your life that you won't even recognize it anymore -- because it'll be a perfect extension of you.

I bought a piece of furniture that most people haven's seen seen the 16th century. It doesn't match any other piece of furniture in the house. But it's super-comfortable, and my favourite place in the house. Sitting in it is an instant-soothe.

1) Experiment. 2) Measure. 3) Adjust. 4) Measure. 5) Iterate.

What is it that you are safe-guarding? I'd bet that it's not something vital enough that it needs anything more than a normal password, but if it is, stop keeping in a place where it's so easily accessible with the password. Door locks are still the safest devices around, and it's not because they can't be picked, it's because they need to be picked -- in person.

That big importal vital data store? Air-gapped, in one room, with an attendant, and a lock on the door will do better than any 2-factor authentication system -- because it's got many more factors, including the biggest one: presence of person.

You aren't going to blend convenience and security and wind up with anything more convenient or more secure than a password. I'd recon that's why we have passwords.