I didn’t pretend to be an epidemiologist. I recorded data produced by our government health authorities, and was super clear that C19 vaccination did nothing for those under 50. /.’s are acting like religious nutters on this topic.

Correct, as everyone was going to be infected and masking was kubuki theatre.

That’s a false premise. While the C19 vax did some immune training, it didn’t prevent you getting infected and passing it on. In fact in some cases vaccination had negative effectivity where people were getting reinfected more often than those not vaccinated. The vaccine did provide some effectiveness with those with high comorobidity, which were primarily age and obesity.
In the traditional sense of a vaccine preventing infection, mRNA vaccination was an abject failure and ended up causing harm especially to young men’s hearts from the auto immune response the body had to the spike antigen produced in a small percentage of people where the mRNA escaped the injection site, sometime because a vein was hit during injection.
So while agree if it was measles you would be right but not for COVID.
Btw, I’ve had lots of other vaccines, esp the ones for overseas travel, but I thought the risk/benefit wasn’t there for C19.

Queensland Australia, had a unique experiment. Our borders were locked and we had no C19, until the govt thought enough of us were vaxxed and opened the borders. The govt published daily deaths, was COVID present at time of death(not cause just active) , how many C19 vaccinations they had and their decile age range. I recorded the data for about 8 weeks as I was interested as an engineer if I could see efficacy.
The data clearly showed if you were under 50 vaccination status made no difference to mortality. Above 50 the effect was only just above the statistical noise.
On the other hand data from places like Japan, were showing the injected RNA was not staying put, and some people was ending up all over the body, ie heart, ovaries for women, and in some cases kept producing spike protein for 6 months. It was a mistake choosing to express the spike as the antigen as it turned out to be inflammatory including the production coagulants responses from the body. There were many morticians pulling out foot long clots.
Dr Bruce Campbel, the UK nurse educator was 100% pro vax, but as more papers were coming in, the evidence turned against the efficacy of the vaccine and he became an advocate against vaccination, esp for the under 50. Many European countries eventually went that way as well.
Our family chose on the evidence the risk/reward was not there to be vaccinated. By that time it was Omricon variant. It was certainly unpleasant, but we only got it once where it seemed our friends who were vaccinated got it multiple times.

The Samsung software is pretty useless.
You get flush but thick TV and then a huge box you have to hide somewhere with a fragile snake cable.
Want to connect it to your cloud photos to display them. nope.
Want rotate photos faster than 10 minutes nope.
Apps like TV are slow to load.
We ended up connecting a google tv to it to replace the functionality missing from the horrible Samsung software.

This seems to happen in all orgs.
The creative producers are 10% who trail blaze.
Then the usually well intended bureaucrats arrive with their clip boards to keep the order ultimately destroying the thing they think they are helping.

Be thankful with tech another alternative can spring up with not so much friction, unlike government where the rot hangs around until it metastasises the institution.

I'm typing this on a recent XPS i9-13900H
I've used XPS's for the 10 years and they have been mostly fine except for sleep issues.
They were one of the first wintels with 4k screens which is what drew me too them.

My 3 now adult kids devour novels.
We read them books every night from very young, so they picked up reading themselves by about 5.
Yes, sample size of one family, but I think parents are important to help establish reading.

Was thinking the same thing.
Whenever I visit California from Aus, I think I've entered a 2nd world country with the state of public infrastructure.

I live in Aus and haven’t seen it. Restaurants will usually have a tip option on the eftpos machine but it is very optional and if it was mandatory, they would loose repeat business.
And there is nowhere else I’ve seen tipping.

Minimum casual wage is now almost $32/hr ($21USD)
Since COVID though cost of living has skyrocketed, so I do feel for the restaurants.

I'm still writing new software in .Net8 Winforms.
Now get off my lawn!

18% of Black 12th graders read at a "Proficient" level. It’s about the same for mathematics.
That’s shocking. What’s going on USA?

It’s like seeing service dogs in the USA, which aren’t service dogs, just rich people who want to take their dogs on holidays.

We run a medium size business and I’ve not seen a cheque in the last 5 years and prob 2 in the last 10.
Australia has a national system called BPAY and now PayID and will formally end the use of cheques by 2030.
USA has a much more fragmented financial system making change much slower and more painful.

Yeah, I'm always surprised at the amount of TDS on /.
It certainly felt more conservative 20 years ago.