You know, I really hope your friend’s mom pulls through and things work out for the best.  I lost someone in my circle to COvID and its tough to see someone go years early.

As for me, I go about my day as normal and do the things I need to do and when I encounter more risk than I want accept, I wear PPE.  Steel-toed boots, gloves, safety glasses or goggles, chemical apron, dust mask or respirator, ear protection - a COvID mask running into the grocery store is nothing.  

Since I live in a high-trust society, I also pay my taxes, generally follow traffic laws, extend and receive credit on the usual terms, and go about my business while taking reasonable precautions during a global pandemic, since I would like to return to normal as quickly as possible and I don’t want endemic variants hanging around more than necessary preying on and mutating in those who don’t have antibodies.  I would like to have lots of customers and demand for my commodity grain products.

The mRNA technology vs conventional vaccine technology is like the Space Shuttle vs a kite, or CRISPR trait insertion vs open pollinated corn.  My policy for the past year was that I was fine before, I’ll be fine during, and when my turn for a vaccine comes, I will casually get it, and I will remain fine after.  That approach was good enough for my grandparents in Greatest Generation for polio, smallpox, etc and its good enough for me.


As for your bottom two topics, if you are getting your news from the media we can’t have a scientific discussion.  If you have some specific knowledge from a technical field, we could discuss it.  For example, we have way more rainfall gage data with much starker trend differences than we do temp data.  Millions of data points.  In general, it rains 20% more and 20% more intensely in Illinois than it did 50 years ago.  There are statistical atlases (atlai?).  This is due to some sort of shift. Reasonably accurate and backtested models (unlike a bunch of the IPCC wildest case scenarios) project that this will continue. Efforts to explain the shift include discussion of CO2 concentration, greenhouse gas effect, and global warning and larger climate change trends.  I think those are important, albeit packed with controversial $10 words that the media has horrifically misused, but today, I have to decide tile spacing and tile main sizing on a new system.  I am going to use science and the current rainfall atlas and trend analysis and recommend my client upsizes his 100+ year investment to a larger tile size to optimize his ROI.  And these are $250K type decisions with the additional costs to upsize in the $50K or more range. So ... if you can contribute meaningfully to a discussion like that, it would be great.  If you have a media-based opinion not based on data or fact or a logical extension of accepted scientific law or theory, I am going to opt not to engage in a debate with you because, respectfully, that opinion is not even worthless, it is of negative value to me.  This is how science works.