This actually gets me thinking… Is anyone actually working on an aids vaccine? Maybe mRNA could do something there, theoretically it should be able to grant pretty much any type of immunity you can have naturally

Have you ever had coca tea? It’s amazing - way better than caffeine. It’s more gentle, but stronger - like it gives you more energy, but you don’t get a hard crash, it’s less likely to make it hard to sleep, plus it has all sorts of health benefits - being able to adjust to high altitude for one

Cocaine probably shouldn’t be sold at the drug stores, but it would be amazing if we treated it like caffeine - you need a license to buy it, but you can get the leaves or products made for it

Plus we could make a path to legitimize cartels and stop getting people killed over the the war on drugs, which would be nice

Not a feat of engineering, a feat of marketing

Oh, the global economy is going to break regardless. China is physically and economically collapsing right now, and it’s going to have huge knock-on effects

Meanwhile, we still don’t even have a consensus that long COVID is a thing. I definitely feel slightly foggier long after the fact, it seems to me that it might be less about COVID doing something special - maybe all illnesses chip away at long-term health, and COVID put a lot of people in a state much worse than the flu and got us thinking about it.

Or maybe COVID has unique mechanisms, but it seems to me there’s an assumption - why do we assume that once we recover, we get all the way better? If anything, I think it might be the opposite - there’s plenty of people in my life who never felt the same after getting an illness, but no one talks about it in a unified enough way to give it a name

Which is really strange to me, I mean we’ve got early adopters and lots of technical people. It seems like science should be big here

I think it’s a combination of less presence/engagement in niche content, sorting methods not quite being there, and not enough discovery without going out of band to find things

One thing I really miss is the science groups, askscience always had great debate that I haven’t yet found here

Because immunity varies by disease.

Chicken pox? Pretty much one and done. COVID? Falls off rapidly after 3 months, whether you catch it or get the vaccine

Plus, every mutation is a dice roll on how much existing immunity will apply. It could be exactly the same as the last strain, or the old immunity might not help at all

Yeah, except they federate. They keep lists about who they federate, defederate, and know of in machine readable format

Huh… I’m a huge proponent of brushing your tongue (it doesn’t take much, just a brush with a scraper on the back makes a big difference). I’ve never really tried washcloths, but now I’m going to give them a shot

On the flip side, my skin is weird. I get hives for literally no reason, I tried one of those plastic poofs and it makes me itch like crazy.

🤞