Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

Indeed, that's why I still use a 25+ year old printer! I run Linux, and it just works. I have the DDR1 SODIMM expansion, and it does full Postscript, duplex, etc... Home Assistant even grabs the drum count and toner level. I'm not a big printer user, I think it's on maybe it's third toner cartridge...

It worked fine thru Windows 10, and I managed to install a driver on Windows 11, but it seems to have been pulled. I can't add it on her new laptop. I should probably poke at it and get it working again. But my wife is one of those corp accounting types, and she just decided to buy herself a HP color laser. The thing was a major PITA to set up correctly. But she's now happy, and I stick with my fully depreciated dinosaur.

T

My 26 year old Brother HL-5370DW isn't on the list! Yay! And it even still works just fine...

Now if I could just find a device driver for my wife's laptop...

T

I have Starlink for my RV, which my wife uses for quarterly audit visits to the corporate mothership. She can stream 1080P with some buffering, once the client figures out what it needs, it settles in pretty well. It massively beats RV campground WiFi, and for my purposes... 60ms ping from Texas to the west coast.

I can't complain too much... Except for losing my astro-photography hobby... Been thinking of taking up ham radio again and doing pen-testing. :D

T

The problem with organic chemistry... That COH group at the end of cinnamaldehyde is everything. It steers the metabolic decomposition into something the body can tolerate. With Styrene, it ends up forming Oxalic acid, which precipitates as calcium oxalate in the kidneys. So it becomes a rate thing. A few micrograms in your coffee might net you having to pass a kidney stone every decade or two. If you get exposed to it every day via inhalation & skin exposure, your kidneys basically turn into kidney stones and go necrotic.

As I said this was several decades ago, before OSHA really got its game together... OSHA was created in 1971, but didn't really start flexing its authority until '78 or so, and this person was already significantly ill at that point.

T

I believe it's one of the lymphoma's, H or non-H, but I don't know which one. And yea the skin cancer rates on transplants are a big deal too.

They're actually one of the original infant dialysis patients, where they installed a shunt, and filled the abdomen with fluid, and then drained it back out. The original root cause was a congenital defect, a blockage that couldn't be imaged at the time. A day or two of dry diapers, and it was too late... I'm under the impression imaging has gotten so much better it would have been caught and a better outcome would likely happen today.

Is there any correlation with family transplants? Someone on my wife's side of the family got a kidney from his Mom, and it was a really good match. He worked in a chemical plant and the stuff he was manufacturing turns out to be one of the worst kidney toxins I've ever researched, styrene. He went back to work and it took the new kidney out too. The settlement on that is apparently still taught in law school... But it led to kidney #2... They died of a heart attack caused by enlargement from cyclosporin dosing unknowns. (this was decades ago...)

Yea, I'm a shoestring relative here on both of them. I think it got conveyed at some point but it skipped my mind.

I appreciate the info, I hope you continue in good health!

T

Let me qualify... I have no experience with Type 1, only Type 2. I appreciate the info.

T

Most diabetics use a base long acting insulin. Insulin Glargine has a 24 hour action time, Insulin Degludec is 42 hours... So it's a once a day thing, and adjustments play out over days...

I have a relative that's been a kidney transplant patient since early childhood. They're in their 30's now, on their 3rd kidney. The suppressants aren't perfect, the match can be close, even familial, and the immune system slowly kills the organ. But here's the real kicker... They're now battling a blood cancer that arises from being immunosuppressed for decades. Supposedly it's a type of cancer that responds well to treatment, but... The battle must be fought.

T

Only thing doggie proved is that Peelon will roll all over the carpet after shitting it.

Like a dog.

I'm still using my 25 year old Brother laser printer.

Now get off my lawn!

T

Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .