This is another major reason I have not stayed current with my boosters. What is the point of using something based on a strain that has not been seen for 9 months, and is in fact 2 years old? It doesn't make a great deal of sense to me.
Sure it will offer SOME ability to improve the immune response to a CV19 variant given how short-lived the protection from natural infection and vaccination seems to be, but it certainly isn't going to be anywhere near as good as it could be. I'm still going to get horrifically sick again.
That's pretty much the gist of it. We also had a huge in-fighting between state governments and a stubborn refusal to work together or coordinate properly that led to some really bad outcomes.
Almost the entire time this was compounded by flight after flight of VIPs arriving in Australia for 'diplomatic' purposes, or of course to play sportsball. We barely even stopped normal tourist flights either, yet our own expats were not allowed to fly home until months later. None of it made any sense.
This incident in itself made me highly suspicious of our governments competence and motivations. This was one of our major seeding incident here. Under no circumstances should this have been allowed to happen, yet this is just one of a long string of borderline malicious decisions by those in charge. We all forget too quickly.
I'm going to play devil's advocate to explore my own anxiety about this situation.
My fears are exactly the same as yours.
The part that I cannot reconcile is this: I took my initial doses of vaccine, I had a booster. I did all the right things in terms of minimising exposure and the risk to myself and my family.
I still caught CV19 twice. Maybe it didn't affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows, but it fucked me up badly each time.
My entire family have lived the same experience.
Most people's thinking in my circle now seems to be: why would I expose myself to the risk of cardiovascular complications by being continuously vaccinated, when I am still going to get infected and face those same cumulative cardiovascular risks again.
From a risk management perspective if I am not in a disease cohort likely to face mortality from infection, am I not reducing my total risk by simply reducing my exposure to the spike protein overall and electing to skip vaccine boosters altogether? I am going to get infected either way, that much is clear.
I am massively concerned about the long term consequences of repeated infection with this pathogen but it seems the world has moved on from giving a fuck.
I don't know a single person who has received a booster in the last 12 months and given the shift in media narrative here it is not hard to see why.
From an overseas perspective I can tell you that practically nobody in Australia is taking any form of booster. Elderly populations are, particularly those in a care setting but the general population are completely uninterested.
This is a combination of most people having been infected with CV19 at least once and not being particularly badly affected, and most people having had either direct or indirect experience of negative side effects from vaccination, and the now predominantly negative media coverage of the vaccination campaign.
If there is a marked shift towards increased mortality in any given strain, Australia is fucked. Thankfully that does not seem to be the trajectory of the virus at this time.
I would very much like to own one because of the form factor and the ironic fact that they're one of the few phones that you can still run a proper custom rom and de-google.
Unfortunately the specs and battery life are not even in the ballpark of what I find to be acceptable. Pixels are a giant compromise.
After you deep-throat the Dev and swear financial allegiance for all eternity, it's important you justify your bad decision to the world without providing any metrics whatsoever whilst comparing it side by side with shitty web apps that constantly auto update for no reason.
Infinity APK is free, already available and as it stands right now, far more feature complete than sync.
These people are the worst byproducts of capitalism gone wrong. They're actually proud of being dommed.
I was so angry when Battlefield 2042 came out in 2021. SO MAD. I'd waited years for that game, and the state it was released in was downright embarrassing. Just not even in the universe of finished or playable - it was a joke.
I was so furious because I'd convinced my friends that it was going to be amazing. Thankfully we all signed up for EA Play for a month rather than buying a copy for $90AUD.
We all went and played call of duty for 2 years instead, but it fractured the group.
Recently BF2042 went back on sale for $20. A friend sent us all some youtube videos and convinced the whole squad to give it another run as they had been actively working on the game for the entire two years. I'm so glad he did!
We have had some absolutely epic 128 player matches the last 4 months. So much fun, it has felt like the old days.
One friend has put in the hours and learned to be a pretty competent chopper pilot. We have had a couple of games with a full squad in the chopper repairing and gunning and managed to stay alive the entire match without a single death. Absolutely legendary.
We've had others jumping between vehicle and ground play and basically turned the tide of battle just with our little squad. Man we've had some fun! It's the first time in years that I've regularly managed to field a full squad all on voice comms and it's just been so great.
AGM G2 Guardian. It's a pretty exclusive club mate. AGM gambled big and I don't think it's really payed off for them - they haven't shifted enough units and their profit margin was super small.
I work outdoors and live a pretty weird life, I was super super excited to find a decent snapdragon in a ruggedized device like this. The long-range thermal is legit, battery life is insane and it feels like a super high quality thing to hold. They've had a few little teething problems - some issues with fingerprint sensor for a few people, some screen flickering issues for others. I've been pretty lucky so far and I believe they are switching things up in manufacturing now.
I am presently using a super niche device. SUPER niche. So niche that I have been dealing really closely with the manufacturer, who worked with Qualcomm and made a specific firmware just to get wifi calling working for me in Australia.
I have quizzed them so many times on why they won't support rom development. You can unlock the bootloader, but the rom files are heavily encrypted. There's no way to extract the boot IMG so we're dead in our tracks.
The manufacturer basically say that they have to fight so hard to gain google certification that they won't do a single thing to risk losing it.
They've been pretty generous with their warranty policies so probably another reason is they don't want to risk anyone doing overclocking etc and then having to cover device repairs or replacement.
Have you come to offer me a brain-vat and regular doses of glucose? If not, BE GONE.