Minor things that bother you

[1995hoo]

- Baby bump progression photos
- Baby gender reveal parties

When did people start doing the latter?  I was invited to one not so long ago and it took some explaining since "gender reveal party"  could mean something far more adult oriented. 

I find the conflation of the words "sex"  and "gender"  annoying, but I don't want to pursue the topic because I think it could get ugly and lead to a thread lock. The parents-to-be learned the baby's sex, not its "gender."  I bet some people nowadays would object to the text of the Nineteenth Amendment ("The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." ).

[Max Rockatansky]

Why do you think people who get the flu shot always get the flu?

That is straight up false.

Vaccines are safe for most people, besides those who are allergic to one of the components, or those who are immunocompromised. Anything else is fear-mongering or stupidity. Or both.

Go ahead and name call all you want.  That's always a good way to get your point across.  By the way my friend Tina almost died from being vaccinated but I bet you think she is stupid too.

Ergo aren't you kind of proving the point I was trying to make?  You're basically dismissing all evidence that contradicts what you believe, but you don't present any valid evidence of your own to back your points up.  For all you know your friend had an allergic reaction to whatever the vaccine was made of. 

Hell as skeptical as I am about ghosts and alien visitation I would welcome some compelling evidence that both were true.  In the case of vaccinations it's hard to see how a logical person could draw the conclusion with all the available facts that they somehow cause a blanket level harm.  Allergic reactions don't surprised me in the least, I'm allergic to certain compounds which made it difficult for me to be vaccinated.  None the less, I'm glad some viable solutions were found because Polio really sounds like a shitty disease to catch.

Well, I have a real life friend who came really close to dying after getting vaccinated.  What more proof would one need?  Do I have to have her call you on the phone?  You wouldn't change your mind anyway.  I could also post several articles but what is the point if you have your mind made up?

It could potentially sway people to your argument if you presented your evidence for how you draw your conclusions on vaccine.  That's the main point I'm trying to make, your making your argument without giving any real evidence to support it.  Again, if someone had compelling evidence to support their claims on something I'd give it a listen.  I (or anyone else) might not think it's compelling but it's better than not giving any reason at all if you're looking away opinions. 

And yes, I'll second that all this talk on vaccine probably can be split into a different topic.  I don't think we've reached the point where this hasn't become civil from anyone's end though.

I somewhat disagree.

He had one friend who had an allergic reaction and now thinks vaccines are dangerous despite the millions that take them and don't have such a reaction and are protected (as is his friend, who was treated).

I also find Internet debates where individual articles are thrown back and forth not compelling at all any longer.  One study does not the start of the art make.  Heck, five studies don't either.

This is why I've just started to rely upon the experts (real coalitions of experts, like the CDC) and their conclusions as they have a much broader perspective on the research.  I find attacks on the experts to be quite unpersuasive as they inevitably devolve into conspiracy theories that are quite ridiculous (hundreds of doctors know the truth about the harm but are paid off and none of them blow the whistle kind of nonsense).

Regarding vaccinations the the CDC is the source that I tend to rely on for issues and conjecture in the medical field.  That isn't to say that there might be some instances where someone can't get a vaccination for a medical reason or had some sort of reaction to it.  The main issues, if one is trying to convince others that their belief is correct then why present some evidence to support it?  At minimum the counterpoint could be at least seen and conclusions could be thusly drawn as to it's merit.  But that's the point I was getting at with conspiratorial lines of thinking, that compelling counterpoint and evidence is rarely there.  Personally if my line of thinking is being challenged I would at least be rather have something more weighty than "just because"  as the reasoning.  At the end of the day there are always people who are going to believe in whatever they believe, but that doesn't necessarily work well in swaying others to a like minded opinion. Really the same could be said about almost any sort of conspiracy, aliens, cryptozoology, ghosts or other topics of the like. 

[texaskdog]

Don't forget 911 being an inside job and the JFK assassination

[texaskdog]

I've yet to meet a GMO food that killed me.

I've yet to find a gun that killed me!

[Beltway]

I find the conflation of the words "sex"  and "gender"  annoying, but I don't want to pursue the topic because I think it could get ugly and lead to a thread lock. The parents-to-be learned the baby's sex, not its "gender."  I bet some people nowadays would object to the text of the Nineteenth Amendment ("The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." ).

The German language has 3 genders for its articles, masculine, feminine and neuter.  None of which has any relation to human sexuality.

[Rothman]

I've yet to meet a GMO food that killed me.

I've yet to find a gun that killed me!

You eat guns?

[DaBigE]

Can we please steer this back on topic? It's an interesting thread I'd hate to see locked due to conspiracy theories and guns.

[texaskdog]

Can we please steer this back on topic? It's an interesting thread I'd hate to see locked due to conspiracy theories and guns.

Stores who play Christmas music.  Gotta be torture for those working there.

[Rothman]

Can we please steer this back on topic? It's an interesting thread I'd hate to see locked due to conspiracy theories and guns.

Ok.

Come to think of it, conspiracy theories bother me.

[kphoger]

4.  Kwanzaa isn't a real holiday.

What makes a holiday real?  People celebrate Kwanzaa.  That's real enough.

It was just straight-up invented for people to celebrate their "blackness".  It didn't develop over time, it has no religious significance, it doesn't honor a specific person, nobody gets time off work.  It isn't.  In fact, the author of Kwanzaa specifically wanted people to not celebrate the actual holiday of Christmas.

~ or ~

We might as well call National Pizza Day a "holiday".  People celebrate it.

[Rothman]

4.  Kwanzaa isn't a real holiday.

What makes a holiday real?  People celebrate Kwanzaa.  That's real enough.

It was just straight-up invented for people to celebrate their "blackness".  It didn't develop over time, it has no religious significance, it doesn't honor a specific person, nobody gets time off work.  It isn't.  In fact, the author of Kwanzaa specifically wanted people to not celebrate the actual holiday of Christmas.

~ or ~

We might as well call National Pizza Day a "holiday".  People celebrate it.

I don't see how its history differs from any other.  All holidays have to start somewhere.

I also don't see a problem with celebrating one's blackness.

[texaskdog]

Mother's Day & Father's Day were started by Hallmark.  Santa in his current form started by Coca Cola

[kphoger]

Mother's Day & Father's Day were started by Hallmark.

No, they weren't started by Hallmark.  But I also consider both of them to be only quasi-holidays.  Mothers Day (the older of the two) was campaigned to get each person to honor his or her own mother.  When it morphed into a day to celebrate motherhood in general, the founder reversed and attempted to stop it catching on, but it had already gained too much traction by that point. 

Santa in his current form started by Coca Cola

This is true, and I just learned that the other day, in fact.  Literally, like yesterday or the day before.  Christmas traditions and icons have come from so many different cultural and historical backgrounds that it really is a huge tangle.  But Christmas as a holiday and Saint Nicholas as a legendary figure of it have existed for much longer than Coca Cola.

I don't see how its history differs from any other.  All holidays have to start somewhere.

True.  But it checks very few of the boxes when it comes to what makes a day a "holiday" in my opinion.  You may be operating under a looser understanding than I do as to what makes a holiday a holiday.

I also don't see a problem with celebrating one's blackness.

I don't either.  I also don't see a problem with eating pizza.  But that does not a holiday make.

[ozarkman417]

Can we please steer this back on topic? It's an interesting thread I'd hate to see locked due to conspiracy theories and guns.

Stores who play Christmas music.  Gotta be torture for those working there.

And the fact Mariah Carey has made sixty MILLION off of All I Want for Christmas is You.



I'm Still in High School, so here are a few things about it that bother me:

- People who act as roadblocks in the halls
- Teachers who hand out useless assignments
- The fact middle schoolers are in some of the same classes as me (some are OK, but all to many just won't shut up)
- The extreme drama associated with high school. I'm definitely more on the quiet side.

[Max Rockatansky]

Mother's Day & Father's Day were started by Hallmark.  Santa in his current form started by Coca Cola

Hell, even Festivus has a minor following these days.  Holidays could spring from anywhere when you think about it. 

[Scott5114]

- People who act as roadblocks in the halls
- Teachers who hand out useless assignments
- The fact middle schoolers are in some of the same classes as me (some are OK, but all to many just won't shut up)
- The extreme drama associated with high school. I'm definitely more on the quiet side.

Unfortunately the first one will never change, even out of school. With the second one it depends on where you end up working. At my job I am supposed to hand count coins before putting it in a coin counting machine, ostensibly to verify that the coin counter counts it correctly. However, if the two counts don't match, the machine count is considered to be the correct one. So why do I have to count the coins by hand?

[Ben114]

- People who act as roadblocks in the halls
- Teachers who hand out useless assignments
- The fact middle schoolers are in some of the same classes as me (some are OK, but all to many just won't shut up)
- The extreme drama associated with high school. I'm definitely more on the quiet side.

First one: The freshmen, we all hate them.

Second one: Christmas break starts Friday afternoon, what will the teachers give me? Last year a teacher gave us a ten page packet to read and write an essay (we had two weeks)

Third one: My school is beginning a two-year transition to a 7-12 model instead of 9-12 starting fall 2020. I'll probably be in lunch with them and be in the same after-school spaces as them. This is gonna be hard.

Fourth one: There are just some people that associate drama with high school. I don't have much of that (as it's an all boys school).

[kphoger]

People who complain about minor things.

[MNHighwayMan]

Why do you think people who get the flu shot always get the flu?

That is straight up false.

Vaccines are safe for most people, besides those who are allergic to one of the components, or those who are immunocompromised. Anything else is fear-mongering or stupidity. Or both.

Go ahead and name call all you want.  That's always a good way to get your point across.  By the way my friend Tina almost died from being vaccinated but I bet you think she is stupid too.

For the record, I didn't call you stupid. I called your perception of vaccines stupid. There is a difference.

And no, I do not think Tina is stupid. She is probably in one of the two categories of people I listed for whom vaccines are not recommended, and she probably did not know it at the time of the vaccination.

[hbelkins]

The one thing I've noticed about anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOers is that they don't tend to fall within one ideological category. You'll hear just as many liberals and conservatives fall into those camps.

And concerning GMO food, if you have ever eaten any sort of hybrid fruit or vegetable; something that was created by grafting or other older technologies, you've eaten GMO food.

For the record, I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but I don't take an annual flu shot, and I have yet to have the flu in my life.

[kphoger]

The one thing I've noticed about anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOers is that they don't tend to fall within one ideological category. You'll hear just as many liberals and conservatives fall into those camps.

It does seem to me that most anti-vaxxers (I hate that term, by the way) are either far left or far right–hardly ever in the middle.  They're either barefoot tree-hugging hippies, or else they're bonnet-wearing fundamentalist libertarians.

For the record, I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but I don't take an annual flu shot, and I have yet to have the flu in my life.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but my wife and I sort of were for several years.  It was never a strong conviction, and we no longer camp out there.  About the most I could say is that we're putting off the HPV vaccine for as long as possible and still be in keeping with state regs.

But I don't get a flu shot either, and neither does anyone else in my household.  I've had influenza twice.  The first time, I went to the doctor right away and got on the meds, but I was still practically wiped out for about two days.  The second time, it was New Year's Eve and the doctor's office was closed the next morning.  By the time I saw the doctor, it was too late to go on the meds.  Our kids (two of them at the time) were prescribed the meds instead, just in case they started showing symptoms, but we never ended up needing it for them.  It's a nasty illness to get, and you feel like total crap for days at a time, but we each decide for ourselves what risks we're willing to take when it comes to our health.

[doorknob60]

For me it's gotta be people with iPhones who hate texting people that don't have iPhones and they see the green bubble

For me, it's the fact the in the US most people don't use WhatsApp or any other similar service instead of SMS. It's an iMessage-like experience, except it works on every smartphone. Luckily, I went to high school and middle school before iMessage took off. And once you're older than that, people stop caring (though, admittedly my college friend group was mostly Computer Science students, and we settled on Slack for communication within the group). Definitely download WhatsApp and give it a shot, and if anyone complains to you about SMS, tell them you have WhatsApp if they want something better. There's other options too like Signal and Telegram, WhatsApp is just the most popular and the one I settled on myself.

[J N Winkler]

But I don't get a flu shot either, and neither does anyone else in my household.  I've had influenza twice.  The first time, I went to the doctor right away and got on the meds, but I was still practically wiped out for about two days.  The second time, it was New Year's Eve and the doctor's office was closed the next morning.  By the time I saw the doctor, it was too late to go on the meds.  Our kids (two of them at the time) were prescribed the meds instead, just in case they started showing symptoms, but we never ended up needing it for them.  It's a nasty illness to get, and you feel like total crap for days at a time, but we each decide for ourselves what risks we're willing to take when it comes to our health.

I am a believer in vaccination in general, but I go back and forth on the flu shot--some years I have gotten it, others I have not.  As Rothman has noted upthread, choosing the flu strains to include for the upcoming season is a guessing game, and inevitably some of the guesses have been wrong.

The flu shot, however, is required for health care workers, and if I were sharing a household with someone who was immune-compromised or otherwise really could not afford to catch the flu, I would be more consistent about getting a jab every autumn.

I have had influenza a time or two, but cannot remember when I last fell victim to it other than that it must have been at least a decade ago.  Compared to the common cold it carries more medical risk, but over time the colds I have had have added up to greater detriment to quality of life, since until about ten years ago (when I started irrigating my sinuses on a systematic basis) I was not able to prevent them from progressing to coughing and sinus infections.

The landscape with regard to vaccine recommendations has changed greatly, and I am no longer sure where my own vaccination records are.  I last systematically investigated almost 20 years ago when I was thinking of driving down to Guatemala.  I think I got vaccinated for yellow fever, but hit a cost/availability roadblock for rabies, which was ultimately part of the reason I didn't proceed with that trip idea.

I did not lose my hearing through an infection, but I know several other deaf people--including one not much older than me--who were born unable to hear as a result of their mothers contracting rubella in pregnancy.

[DaBigE]

For me it's gotta be people with iPhones who hate texting people that don't have iPhones and they see the green bubble

For me, it's the fact the in the US most people don't use WhatsApp or any other similar service instead of SMS. It's an iMessage-like experience, except it works on every smartphone. Luckily, I went to high school and middle school before iMessage took off. And once you're older than that, people stop caring (though, admittedly my college friend group was mostly Computer Science students, and we settled on Slack for communication within the group). Definitely download WhatsApp and give it a shot, and if anyone complains to you about SMS, tell them you have WhatsApp if they want something better. There's other options too like Signal and Telegram, WhatsApp is just the most popular and the one I settled on myself.

Never heard of WhatsApp until now, and even now that I know what it is, I care even less. But knowing that my selection in texting apps has the potential to piss-off Apple users makes me 

FWIW, I use Textra. The only reason why I switched from the stock messenger that came with my GS7, was because Textra supports group messages, whereas the stock app did not (maybe it does now, but I've found too much else about Textra to want to switch back).

[ozarkman417]

For me it's gotta be people with iPhones who hate texting people that don't have iPhones and they see the green bubble

For me, it's the fact the in the US most people don't use WhatsApp or any other similar service instead of SMS. It's an iMessage-like experience, except it works on every smartphone. Luckily, I went to high school and middle school before iMessage took off. And once you're older than that, people stop caring (though, admittedly my college friend group was mostly Computer Science students, and we settled on Slack for communication within the group). Definitely download WhatsApp and give it a shot, and if anyone complains to you about SMS, tell them you have WhatsApp if they want something better. There's other options too like Signal and Telegram, WhatsApp is just the most popular and the one I settled on myself.

Never heard of WhatsApp until now, and even now that I know what it is, I care even less. But knowing that my selection in texting apps has the potential to piss-off Apple users makes me 

FWIW, I use Textra. The only reason why I switched from the stock messenger that came with my GS7, was because Textra supports group messages, whereas the stock app did not (maybe it does now, but I've found too much else about Textra to want to switch back).

I don't know anyone who uses WhatsApp, and after it got hacked back in May, I don't plan on ever using it. The only mainstream social network myself or any of my friends have is Instagram (owned by Facebook, but so is WhatsApp), which has a messaging system, though it can be glitchy at times.