I see it as a double-edged sword, but one of them is a choice while the other is just a possibility.

I am still waiting until the vaccine is studied more. I think it's fair to say that some of us are here, on BTCTalk, specifically because they don't like having to trust. I'm one of those guys.

At this point, I have a few friends who've received either their first dose or both. While some of them have had a few days of fever and other mild side effects, one thing I know for sure is that they all did need at least a few days free from their work due to how bad the side effects were. I have a few of them who've had quite bad ones though - they were never against the virus/vaccine, yet they said very loud and clear that "they thought they wouldn't be able to go through the side effects and it was just the first dose, so I shouldn't be surprised if they won't be able to go through the second anymore".

On the other hand, one of them was infected with the virus after taking the shot.

Something I don't know is what the longer term side effects are. Right now, we're comparing the chances of having bad adverse effects + the possibility of still being infected with the virus vs not taking the vaccine, which still has the possibility of being infected. But the difference is that the vaccine is a choice, and you're choosing to possibly have adverse effects through a substance that possibly protects you from the virus. Makes sense?

As you said, the virus is mutant. It means that even if I take it and everyone else in .. say Europe does, there will still be someone in India who might get another variant and it's going to still spread across the globe. The fear that, once vaxxed, you are going to receive a new variant from someone non-vaxxed does not make much sense in my opinion specifically due to the fact that this is quite uncontrollable and invisible.

At this point, the only thing I really wish is that the vaccine does not become mandatory because while you fear the long-term virus effects, I fear the long-term effects the vaccine plus the virus might have on my body. I don't trust those corps making vaccines, at least some of them. Especially J&J, which is known for their quite ugly lawsuit.

Right now, it's a complicated scenario where everything is pretty uncertain. We don't know what kind of other variants of the virus will appear, we don't know what the long-term effects are post-infection but we don't know those of the vaccine either.. it's all just an uncertainty and I think the worst thing I can do right now is take rushed choices..

Mmmm..  Would $75k be the RanchMaker?

Yeah, I was discussing this with my gf the other day. She has family members that have told loads of other family members. It’s really irritating, I don’t want to be having to face questions like -

‘So how many bitcoin do you have’
‘What are they all worth’
‘When will you sell’

Mind your own damn business. I don’t ask to see your wages or bank statements, assholes.

Space elevator: the noob Newtonian dabbler in me has a question.

Won't a sufficiently high/massive elevator slow down this mudball's rotation? As in, longer days? Conservation of angular momentum and all that. Please make me feel safe again. Thanks.

I'm not talking about changing the orbit. It's about having control of the space in Earth's orbit. Mainly...if anything flies from Earth to space, they will need approval of whomever has all of their technology up there. Once someone is in a position to shoot down anything coming into space, they have full control over all future access to space. They also likely have the ability to destroy things on Earth from space such that they can now dictate what is done on Earth.

Akin to people living on an island and a single company now owns all of the boats right off of the island. Anyone new creating a boat and putting it in the water will have it sunk immediately. These boats may also have artillery to shell the land. Whomever owns all of those boats now controls the island and any considerations of expanding off of the island.

One possibility is that the Great Filter is ahead of us instead of behind us, the Great Filter is an answer to the Fermi Paradox which roughly states that if life is as common as some estimates indicate then where is the evidence? The Great Filter basically states there is a very difficult step, a filter, between the emergence of life and space colonization.

If the step is behind us then space colonization is a given and we will begin as soon as our technology allows it, but if it is ahead of us then this means that either space colonization is way harder than we thought or there is an unknown step that we still need to overcome, like avoiding self-destructing ourselves with our technological advances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox