Also, we're not a "homogeneous population", you can stop with your pro-racism stereotypes. Immigrants are 20% of our population.

Being big is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It means that the costs to develop a system are spread across a much larger population. Everything we have had to be developed on a comparably minuscule budget.

And I want to be clear in the above: I fully acknowledge the irony, in that the US tech industry has been a powerhouse. There seems to be a massive disconnect in the US between tech innovation and tech infrastructure. The US is a world-leader in the former. It's consistently a deep laggard on the latter. The reasons why the US has so much trouble getting its act together on infrastructure and systems are complex, but it is remarkable to see, as someone who has spent their life in a mix of the US and Iceland. And it's not just Iceland that has it's act together on these sort of things - it's most of the developed world, and even surprising amounts of the developing world.

, with the most sophisticated banking system

Any American who believes this should try living overseas for a year or two. The US banking system is insanely backwards. Numerous aspects of the US medical and government systems as well. It's hard to explain it to you unless you experience it.

Checks are just one symptom (in Iceland, 15 years ago bank tellers would look at you weird and have to get the manager if you had a personal check, and 10 years ago, stopped taking them altogether). For like 15-20 years, we've had free instant bank-to-bank money transfers (no third party involved), everyone on the same service, to the point that if someone is collecting money for a gift for a coworker's birthday, it's always been, they just send an email with their bank details, instead of going around and collecting cash. All your bills - all of them - just show up in your bank's inbox. On and on.

I mentioned the medical system. Let me give a random example. In the US, you go to a doctor and they determine you need a prescription. They or their receptionist have to ask what pharmacy you want it at. It gets routed through SecureScripts (before that, it was all phone based!), and depending, you may also need to also call into the pharmacy before you go there - and if you need it "transferred", it's a multihour process. Here? The doctor just jots it into their computer, that's it. You can literally just walk out of the doctor's office into the pharmacy next door (or any other pharmacy), tell them your name, and they go grab your order.

Everything is connected. Everything is interoperable. All keyed to your kennitala (ID number) . And the kennitala is only a key, not a password. The fact that a SSN in the US is treated as both a key and a password is insane, from a security standpoint; by contrast, you can just post your kennitala online, it's fine. We have multiple actual authentication methods. The most convenient is the Auðkenni system. Our SIM cards store credentials in a separate cryptographic chip. When we need 2FA, for any business or government agency (all on the same system), it sends a special SMS that the phone routes to the SIM card to process, and then (at the OS level) pops up an authentication dialogue, so we have universal 2FA, linked to our kennitala, in all of our phones. It's been this way for like 15+ years.

Or let's talk taxes. You all know what it's like in America, so let's explain what it's like in Iceland. I get an email letting me know it's tax time. I go to the tax office website. I get 2FA login via my phone. My tax forms are right there. They're already filled out, with all of the information already collected. For like 90% of the population, it's just click through, verify it's correct, and submit. Some people may have some things that weren't logged, such as overseas investments or whatnot, but for most people, it's like a five minute process.

On and on. It's been so weird seeing America getting things 1-2 decades after us and acting like, "wow, we're leading in banking technology!", etc. No, you're an aged dinosaur, way behind the rest of the world because none of your systems work together and you're so slow to adapt to change.

Sigh. Ontogeny is NOT evolution. It is not the same thing as having a low MHC diversity due to a genetic bottleneck as well as lacking tens of thousands of years of evolution to a pathogen. Not the same at all. It's silly to even suggest that. Epigenetic shifts in an individual do not create new HLA genes.

Consider COVID. Novel bat coronavirus, nobody had preexisting immunity. Did everybody die? No. Because we had high HLA/MHC diversity, making it easier to target SARS-COV-2 epitopes. Native Americans lacked this diversity. It left them ill prepared for novel pathogens.

Also, you seem to believe that any disease you've never encountered before is fundamentally dangerous to an adult. That's simply not the case. Rhinovirus is intrinsically mild. It's an upper respiratory infection; it's not adapted to lower respiratory or systemic infection. It's not ebola. It's not going to become like ebola just because you've never caught it before. If a rhinovirus strain was reintroduced after 200 years after having been eradicated, we'd all get a cold, but by and large, we'd be fine.

And what would happen if Yamagata reappeared? We'd just add it back to our flu vaccines. Furthermore, the reintroduction of Yamagata wouldn't be catastrophic without that. You do not have to catch every Influenza B lineage at all, let alone every year. If you had been infected with B/Victoria and you were exposed to B/Yamagata, you'd have little sterilizing immunity against it - you'd very likely catch it. But your past exposure to B/Victoria is still greatly protective against hospitalization and death; B and T immunity against NA and the HA stem and stalk are conserved.

And this is about whether or not to catch every lineage. Well guess what, even with air filtration, that's still going to happen. Air filtration only has a meaningful impact for people at a distance, not people close together. It's about protecting the person across the room, not the person you're standing 50 centimetres away from. What it does change is how often you catch them. And if lineages or whole viruses go extinct, that's great. Worrying about some sort of reintroduction 200 years later is just inventing your own unrealistic misery when we have actual pandemic threats to worry about.

I guess I should be more obvious with the sarcasm in the future ;)

Fact check / Analyze (post is in response to an article about a new program to install better air purification systems):

Sigh, need an edit button. :P (But yes, it would be nice if more people actually cared about ensuring the accuracy of what they write and would do that before spouting off scientifically ignorant statements. I rather wish browsers had a "fact check" text box would flag in red any factually questionable statements the poster is making, with a mouseover note explaining what's wrong, with references)

"âoe" - what are you pasting from? Google Search AI? ;)

Naive vaccine approaches do struggle with long-term sterilizing immunity against fast-mutating viruses like influenza, COVID, rhinoviruses, etc (but non-sterilizing immunity from vaccines is actually quite effective at preventing the worst consequences!). Which is why new techniques are being developed to cause the body to target evolutionary-conserved regions of the pathogens rather than the "immunologically easy" (immunodominant) epitopes like COVID's RBM, influenza's hemagglutinin's globular head, and such. These regions are easy for the immune system to "see" and target, but at the same time, the virus is also evolved to be able to shuffle them easily, so you need vaccines designed to train the immune system to attack the parts that the virus can't readily change without breaking things. Some include things like having the vaccine present a large number of very different RBDs at once (making it easier to develop immunity by attacking the evolutionary-conserved regions instead), glycan masking the variable regions, and so forth.

True. But we were never "meant" to be locked inside with lots of other people, continuously breathing recycled, stale air over and over and over again.

Nonsense - Upper Paleolithic excavations of early-modern human villages show that rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers in loose tribal bands as previously believed, they instead lived densely packed high-rise apartment buildings built of sinew-bound mammoth bone trusses and clad in hides.

In fact, a recent dig in southern France unearthed what researchers believe was a "co-living" mammoth-bone complex, where millennial Cro-Magnons paid a monthly subscription of two reindeer carcasses for a micro-alcove. The site contained numerous preserved slate tablets detailing how the "open-concept communal hearth" was always occupied, the resident shaman's smoke-signal network was frustratingly slow, and the neighbors upstairs kept pacing around in uninsulated, heavy-soled mammoth-skin boots at three in the morning.

The pressures facing the human body in modern society have not changed at all, so we should change nothing in response!

Look at how many Native Americans died from their first exposure to various European diseases.

Yes, they had genetic disadvantages in dealing with European diseases, having had a low MHC diversity due to the Beringian Bottleneck (particularly HLA genes), combined with no evolutionary pressures from European diseases. Is your belief that children evolve in the process of becoming adults?

To be clear, this isn't the only problem that they had. It is also true that many diseases are more severe if first contracted as an adult instead of as a child, Europeans had contracted many of these diseases as children, while the native populations were encountering them at a broad range of ages. But there's a massive difference between "being exposed less often" and "not being exposed at all", as if you're living in a hermetic bubble. We all saw during COVID how hard it is even with extreme precautions to stop airborne virus propagation from person to person. Even if you significantly clean the air, people are still going to get infected with them as children. What you change is how frequently people get reinfected. And it's a myth that you need to keep catching the same disease every time it comes around to maintain immunity. T and B cell immunity against severe outcomes is far more durable than that.

There's also some nice side effects from reducing the rate of infection. During COVID, we literally drove one of the major influenza lineages extinct with our infection control measures. Now flu vaccine makers don't need to try to target it anymore - it simplifies the job of making effective flu vaccines. Having consistently good infection control measures (without inconveniencing people!) will likely heavily genetically bottleneck many airborne diseases, and may outright drive some extinct - which makes the work of targeting the remainder easier.

Air cleaning doesn't stop you from infecting the person you're talking to. What it does do is stop you from infecting a person across the room. And that's a good thing.

Seriously. It will raise a generation who will drop down dead if they catch a cold.

That's not how this works. Common misunderstanding.

yet we're supposed to believe that our immune system is a piece of junk which can't deal with a few viruses by itself.

It's great that you're so proud of your immune system - and you should be, it's amazing! Now, if I handed you a vial of serum from an ebola patient, would you rub it all over yourself, because "You Have An Immune System!"?

Do you understand that the way that the innate immune system attacks pathogens is by attacking / disregulating your body, and that this is harmful? You know how much everyone (rightly) hates "inflammation" and the harm it does? That's what inflammation is, it's the activity of the innate immune system.

Do you understand that viruses have evolved specifically to disregulate the body in order to avoid the immune system, that this disregulation is commonly scattershot rather than focused, and its impacts may or may not go away immediately - or in some cases, even ever - after infection? And that some viruses undergo long-term persistent states in the body?

Do you understand how associated viruses are with sequelae (do you understand what sequelae are)? As a random example, read the second paragraph of this article. And that's just the start.

Do you understand how common autoimmune disease is, and that it most commonly develops as a result to antigen exposure, such as during infection? That frequent and severe inflammation encourages autoimmune disease, and can even cause cancer (repairing inflammatory and viral damage requires cell replication, and the replications that occur as part of the immune response itself can specifically lead to lymphoma)?

No, getting sick is not harmless just because you "got better". Sorry.

TL/DR: don't live in a bubble, but do avoid needless infection. So long as you have some exposure - and it's extremely hard to prevent any exposure unless you're a hermit living in a cave, as we all saw during COVID - you're fine.

Fact check / Analyze (post is in response to an article about a new program to install better air purification systems):

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This will just weaken immune systems since people will not be exposed to viruses.

That's not how this works, and is a misunderstanding of the Hygeine Hypothesis. Viruses are not Pokémon - you don't need to catch them all. T and B cell immunity is generally long-lived - many decades, and tolerant of viral evolution in the interim (it varies from pathogen to pathogen, and for some you lose that first-line humoral immunity with time, e.g. you will get infected if exposed, but T and B cell immunity generally remains highly effective at preventing the worst outcomes). There is no need to, say, catch influenza every winter. All you're doing is increasing the risk of sequelae (there are a vast number, and they can be miserable. I had a cold virus progress to pneumonia to pleurisy early this year, spent a month feeling like I was being stabbed every time I coughed, laughed, sneezed, or drove over a bump. My father recently developed Guillain-Barré after a nasal infection and became paralyzed - was doing an 8km walk to prepare for hiking to Everest Base Camp during the day, and by the evening was in the hospital losing control of his body. Sequelae suck, man.

(That's one thing we increasingly learned during COVID. Huge numbers of people were developing COVID sequelae - the rates of bloody everything rise after infection, from heart attack to stroke to kidney disease and on and on - but largely because everyone was getting infected, not necessarily/not exclusively because of unique properties of the virus. Influenza, RSV, colds, etc all cause broad rises in a vast range of conditions post-infection, we've just neglected them. Turns out that having your body attack itself (systemic inflammation and a prothrombotic state) to fight off a virus is inherently actually as bad for you as it sounds, that viral actions taken to deregulate the body are indeed as bad as that sounds, and that some common viruses (Epstein-Barr being a classic example) can cause a staggering number of terrible sequelae)

That's not to say that you should never get infected. First off, children lack most humoral and cell-mediated immunity to common pathogens; to get it they either need vaccination and/or infection (ideally the former if available, and in the latter case, ideally after the former), for the whole range of commonly circulating pathogens. Since children tolerate most infections better than adults, it is best to get them for the first time as a child. And while T and B cell responses are long lived, they do slowly weaken with time. If you're 86 and you haven't caught a certain disease since you were 5 years old, that's probably not good. It probably would have been best if you had caught it again when you were, say, in your 40s or 50s (or better, where available, restored immunity by vaccination instead). But you don't need to catch every variant that goes around every year. All you're doing with that is feeling miserable and accumulating damage / risk of sequelae.

If you feel the need to eat an unidentified mushroom, though, boletes (pore mushrooms) are what you want to pick. Leave anything with gills alone. The family lacks the deadly amatoxins and orellanine. They only have gastrointestinal irritants and potential allergens (and, apparently, novel psychedelics!), and even then, it's only like a dozen species that have them, and nearly all, if not all, are either red and/or stain blue, with the biggest culprits doing both. There's only been one confirmed death from a bolete that I'm aware of (from the red-+pored bolete (red pores, stains blue), an elderly man, and it seems to have been linked to (at least in part) severe dehydration from the mushroom's gastrointestinal effects (dehydration, vomiting). This despite the fact that boletes are among the most popular mushrooms globally to collect.

Don't get me wrong, if you eat the wrong bolete, you're going to have a really miserable time of it. If you're really unlucky you'll need to go to the hospital (among other things, to get an IV to keep you hydrated). But it's exceedingly unlikely that one will kill you. And it's quite unlikely that anything bad at all will happen.

Still, yeah, not worth it for a fancy meal!

Random agarics (gilled mushrooms), though, that can readily kill you. There are certain *subcategories* of agarics with very distinct characteristics that are safe, but if you just go out there and pick some random white mushroom or some LBM (Little Brown Mushroom), well, roll the dice ;)

... two warning signs are red colour and bluing when cut, and this has them both.