The Delta variant, the highly transmissible version of the coronavirus that now makes up almost all new cases in the United States, continues to drive a surge throughout the country, with average new cases topping 100,000 for the past week.
Some of those infections have been reported in fully vaccinated people in so-called breakthrough cases. As the sheer number of those vaccinated increases, so will the raw number of breakthrough cases, especially with the Delta variant circulating. But experts say breakthrough cases do not mean the vaccine is ineffective.
The Delta variant’s dominance is new enough that authoritative data does not yet exist, but the available data shows that unvaccinated people are still much more likely to contract Covid-19 and far more likely to experience symptomatic disease, while vaccines drastically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from the virus.
Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees, and buses — just so I can finish a web search. I also don’t like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems.
But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason:
The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing.
CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they’re blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess positively Soviet anomie.
Even iPhone users with nothing to hide could be forgiven for being a little creeped out that Apple will scan their photos and see if they match existing databases of known illegal pornographic images. Privacy experts called the idea a potential back door for governments to request or demand scans for other images or files. Some of Apple’s own employees are reportedly pushing back on the idea.
It’s a good indication that things are headed in the wrong direction when your company’s anti-child-pornography initiative gets panned.
A major reason for the failure of Apple’s defense is that the photo-scanning program confirms a fear many users already harbor: Personal data, even the most sensitive, is effectively out of users’ control, accessible at the flip of a switch.
Apple says, relentlessly, that privacy is the central feature of its iPhones. But as the photo scanning demonstrates, that’s true only until the company changes its mind about its policies.
For someone who played sports throughout the majority of her life, I admit I was never good at portion control or exercising for weight loss. My teammates were extremely lean while I looked — as my brother would say — chonky.
I didn’t have the best relationship with my body so I wanted to slim down and feel better about it, but I couldn’t find anything in the U.S that I felt like I could realistically accomplish. To be honest, the fitness culture in this country scares me. I knew I didn’t want to drink Kombucha every day or attend expensive SoulCycle classes for the rest of my life.
When I lived in Japan for a couple of years, I was shocked by the not-so-intense fitness culture. None of my peers went to the gym, drank protein smoothies, or ate granola bars for meals. Throughout my time learning about their culture, I realized that the health culture in Japan gravitates towards prevention rather than cure, which is different from the US philosophy. Rather than overworking the body to compensate for the overconsumption of high-calorie food, Japanese people eat balanced meals and walk miles for commute every day. Not many people go to the gym or buy expensive products to sustain their healthy lifestyle because their daily routine is already healthy.
There’s one question I hear as a personal finance writer more than any other. It’s not how to game the stock market, or become a billionaire—it’s simply how to make a budget work while still saving enough to retire comfortably.
And of course, it’s simple: Change your habits so you can put money aside for the things that matter to you. But that’s also really, really hard to do.
That’s because understanding personal finance is an uphill battle for many Americans. We’re not taught about the practicalities of money in school, because the truth is many industries profit from our ignorance. While wages have hardly budged in decades, shareholders and CEOs have never been richer. The cost of living in many major cities is prohibitive to just about anyone but the super privileged, or those willing to take on a lot of debt or make enormous sacrifices. While the stock market soars, just 52% of U.S. adults actually owned stock in 2016, according to Gallup, and the wealthiest 1% of households owned 38% of all stock shares in 2013. The government is actively working against consumers to make it easier for financial institutions to prey on its citizens, and a single medical bill can send a person into debt for the rest of their life.
Your shoulders are some of the most important muscles in your body. They’re involved in every upper body movement, whether you realize it or not. Every pushing and pulling movement you make with your arms uses your shoulder muscles one way or another. That’s why it’s so important to keep them healthy and strong, which you can do with these five shoulder exercises.
Best exercises to build bigger shoulders
The best way to build stronger and healthier shoulders is to incorporate a variety of exercises that target your shoulders from different angles and via different movement patterns. You’ll find that the best shoulder exercises mainly involve pushing in some variation of an up-and-down movement, but other great shoulder exercises involve pulling or rotational motions.
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Strong shoulders are healthy shoulders. Juanmonino/Getty Images
When the federal government enacted the CARES Act in March 2020, it boosted jobless aid and expanded the benefits to include people who weren’t typically covered, like gig workers. The legislation was designed to cushion workers against the massive blow of a partial economic shutdown during the pandemic.
But if you haven’t already buried your memories of last year, you probably remember how difficult it was to get those unemployment benefits.
Horror stories circulated about people waiting on hold for weeks, trying to get the money they needed to stay afloat. Maybe you remember spending long hours on the phone or the computer yourself. Delays in unemployment benefits heightened feelings of uncertainty that characterized much of 2020 and made the experience of losing your job even more frightening. But as Cezary Podkul reported for ProPublica this week, this expansion of benefits also attracted fraudsters from all over the world who sought to cash in on the CARES Act. In hindsight, the millions of phony unemployment insurance claims were a large part of what clogged states’ overtaxed computer systems, delaying payments to unemployed Americans filing legitimate claims.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Source: Diana Polekhina / Unsplash
James' World 2 