Ghoucckyoou [none/use name]

Nobody knows what's going on, the first time I had COVID I had no idea whatsoever and only knew from an antibody test in Jul 2020 during routine blood work when I requested it. Never bothered getting vaccinated since the nucleocapsid antibodies were still detectable at high levels in May 2021.

Then I had it again in Dec 2021 after the holidays, my brother-in-law had a positive test after feeling somewhat bad, I had a stuffy nose the day I was informed of that test and we were right next to each other for a few days during that time so I'm fairly sure it was probably COVID again. Then my fiance had it (confirmed with a PCR test at least) in mid-Feb 2022 and was fairly sick (3rd dose of Pfizer/BioNTech's product taken in early Jan) for about 2 days but I never got anything and we took 0 precautions against me getting it.

There's too many variables and there's definitely some genetic factors/how much viral load you were exposed to coming into play.

FAA sucks in general, I recently was involved in buying a bankrupt airline and launching a new one so I own 2,% of each - they're generally involved in approving the use of any internally developed or commercial-of-the-shelf software that's to be used in critical flight operations.

Somehow they approved for use a terrible piece of software developed by one guy in 2004 in a WYSIWYG/VB-esque language that's so uncommon I don't want this comment appearing at the top of the Google results for its name and doxing me... and getting anything new approved by them is an absolute nightmare so we're probably going to be using this absolute piece of shit to run not only the airline we bought that has a bunch of 10-15 seaters with cargo for short haul flights in a particular geographic area, but also for a fleet of 757s that are going to do trans-Pacific flights daily...

Eh, I saw some photos from my fiances' daughter-in-law in Shanghai recently and there was no distancing in the line to get tested, literally just people getting a test because they had to... But by the time you get your results it's not helpful if you caught it while waiting for the test...

They are pretty heavily locked down right now though so maybe it'll be stymied. The problem with zero-COVID is that none of the vaccines are neutralizing, so the only way to prevent cases from rising is with these restrictive lockdowns, but as long as they can swing it economically and are taking care of people there's not a problem. It's just hard to lock down in a way that preemptively keeps it from spreading to aged populations - which is really the place where measurable fatalities occur. The vast majority of people can catch it and not be severely affected. Most of the rest would survive if vaccinated, which seems to be pretty widespread in PRC.

Some folks looked at Namecoin (one of maybe two blockchains the existence of which is potentially justified by its utility, though the technical implementation could be better since it's literally the 2nd publicly blockchain project after Bitcoin - the other being whatever can be used to buy drugs so long as prohibition exists) and said "what if people could 'own' arbitrary data instead of domain names in a distributed DNS". NFTs were born, they're just digital records in a distributed database called a blockchain, which is a time-series log of cryptographically signed transfers of data, usually integer with decimal values (so-called "cryptocurrency") or now other arbitrary data (like checksums/representations of an image file or something).

Since it all just forms a big public-key cryptosystem, the people who can cryptographically prove ownership of arbitrary data on blockchains can use that proof to authenticate on a website. Basically the same as knowing the password to an account, except the password is a public record and using cryptographic signatures you can prove it's yours. Then you can use that proof of ownership to do anything a password would have done, like log you into a website (eg shitty dating apps or "games").

That's essentially what people are calling Web3 - using records in blockchains to authenticate people.

Kind of barely scratches the surface really, these are just the public scams.

Virtually worthless ERC-20 tokens at least are already infiltrating institutional investor portfolios through a few channels. An ERC-20 issuing company I own 2,02% of sold $33,M USD in totally digital "assets" to a few hedge funds, for instance... I haven't looked at that site for a while so I'm sure there's some crypto scams on the WWW that are bigger by dollar value, but there's literally hundreds of such start-ups doing what we did and I'd imagine the problem only gets worse before the bubble pops.