• Posted 12/19/2024.
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    I am still waiting on my developer to finish up on the Classifieds Control Panel so I can use it to encourage members into becoming paying members. Google Adsense has become a real burden on the viewing of this site, but honestly it is the ONLY source of income now that keeps it afloat. I tried offering disabling the ads being viewed by paying members, but apparently that is not enough incentive. Quite frankly, Google Adsense has dropped down to where it barely brings in enough daily to match even a single paid member per day. But it still gets the bills paid. But at what cost?

    So even without the classifieds control panel being complete, I believe I am going to have to disable those Google ads completely and likely disable some options here that have been free since going to the new platform. Like classified ad bumping, member name changes, and anything else I can use to encourage this site to be supported by the members instead of the Google Adsense ads.

    But there is risk involved. I will not pay out of pocket for very long during this last ditch experimental effort. If I find that the membership does not want to support this site with memberships, then I cannot support your being able to post your classified ads here for free. No, I am not intending to start charging for your posting ads here. I will just shut the site down and that will be it. I will be done with FaunaClassifieds. I certainly don't need this, and can live the rest of my life just fine without it. If I see that no one else really wants it to survive neither, then so be it. It goes away and you all can just go elsewhere to advertise your animals and merchandise.

    Not sure when this will take place, and I don't intend to give any further warning concerning the disabling of the Google Adsense. Just as there probably won't be any warning if I decide to close down this site. You will just come here and there will be some sort of message that the site is gone, and you have a nice day.

    I have been trying to make a go of this site for a very long time. And quite frankly, I am just tired of trying. I had hoped that enough people would be willing to help me help you all have a free outlet to offer your stuff for sale. But every year I see less and less people coming to this site, much less supporting it financially. That is fine. I tried. I retired the SerpenCo business about 14 years ago, so retiring out of this business completely is not that big if a step for me, nor will it be especially painful to do. When I was in Thailand, I did not check in here for three weeks. I didn't miss it even a little bit. So if you all want it to remain, it will be in your hands. I really don't care either way.

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    Some people have indicated that finding the method to contribute is rather difficult. And I have to admit, that it is not all that obvious. So to help, here is a thread to help as a quide. How to become a contributing member of FaunaClassifieds.

    And for the record, I will be shutting down the Google Adsense ads on January 1, 2025.
  • Responding to email notices you receive.
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    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

Scary stuff

There are valid concerns associated with vaccine use. There are also a lot of unsubstantiated claims against their use.
However, basic childhood vaccinations most of us received decades ago were developed in response to the very real dangers of polio, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus.
 
I actually contracted polio as a child. It affected the muscles on the right side of my body. Beforehand I used to throw and bat right handed. Afterwards I now still throw and bat left handed. Even now, I use my left hand when strength is needed, and my right hand when gentler operations with more manual dexterity is needed. Of course, old age has been leveling the playing field with the manual dexterity thing, since I have become much more unsteady with both hands.

So even if the scientists do come up with a vaccine against old age, I guess I missed the boat on that one. :)
 
WebSlave said:
So even if the scientists do come up with a vaccine against old age, I guess I missed the boat on that one. :)
Click to expand...
Honestly, if someone offered me such a vaccine, I would turn them down. I am really appreciating being older. I'm definitely appreciating being retired.
I enjoyed the strength of youth,and the wild oats and all, but there is a pleasure in looking at the world through the eyes of experience and knowledge gained by living.
And of course I have the cutest grand baby in the world :)
 
Lucille said:
Honestly, if someone offered me such a vaccine, I would turn them down. I am really appreciating being older. I'm definitely appreciating being retired.
I enjoyed the strength of youth,and the wild oats and all, but there is a pleasure in looking at the world through the eyes of experience and knowledge gained by living.
And of course I have the cutest grand baby in the world :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, I hear that.

As a friend of mine who recently retired said to me when I asked him how he was adapting to being retired, "I was BORN to be retired." :D

As for Connie and I, if we hadn't retired when we did, I'm not sure what condition (healthwise) we would be in right now. Working with as many animals as we had, it was a crushing burden that because it built up gradually over time, we never realized just how crushing it was till it was lifted from us.
 
I won't claim to truly know about the safety of vaccines, but I am not satisfied with the word of pharmaceutical companies or the FDA on their safety when there does seem to be a pattern of at least a couple major health issues that could be caused by them. Anyone who denies that "big pharma" is in the business of symptom management instead of actually curing diseases, that the FDA is in their pocket, or that there's not even a remote possibility that neither has our best interests and health in mind is almost a lost cause. I mean that ranks right up there with blindly trusting those in positions of authority without question...

On the other hand, I do believe they are effective in most cases against the illnesses that they are intended to immunize against. I'm not willing to trust that these ailments are not present to the point where I'd bet my daughter's health or her life on her simply not coming into contact with them.

The compromise in this situation that my wife and I decided on for her was to follow a schedule that didn't involve her being given as many of the cocktails of multiple vaccines or nearly as many doses at the same time.

I think there is likely some weight to the claimed connection between vaccines and autism, but from what I have read it would seem it's less likely from the vaccines themselves, but the extreme shock to the immune system which could potentially disrupt neurotransmitters during the most crucial period of a child's brain development. Of course none of this has been completely confirmed, but considering how little resistance we got from one of the best pediatricians in our area when we discussed the alternative schedule, we opted to at least try and mitigate the potential side effects based on what logical info we could find.
 
The risks associated with the vaccines are so much lower than the risks of the diseases they prevent, I'm always surprised there's even a debate.
 
Helenthereef said:
The risks associated with the vaccines are so much lower than the risks of the diseases they prevent, I'm always surprised there's even a debate.
Click to expand...

Thus my reasoning in having our daughter vaccinated, but have you ever seen what the normal vaccine schedule is for a child born in the US these days? Considering how vaccines work, can you deny that injecting a child of 15 months with upwards of thirteen live and/or dead inactivated viruses at one time (this doesn't include other the other vaccination appointments) could cause serious unintended consequences?

There is little to no actual clinical testing on the safety and side effects of most vaccines, let alone the safety of giving so many at once to a child during that developmental stage.

Basically, while there is not much in the way of hard data on the risks of vaccines, there is not much hard data on the lack thereof either. Then again, why would there be any published papers on potential long term heath issues caused by them. It wouldn't be the first time such info was suppressed by the ones who financially benefit from it remaining hidden (and that's not even touching on the subject of the profit those same entities stand to make on treatment of any ailment that could be caused by their products). The FDA can't exactly be trusted to have our best interests in mind either. There has been a rotating door between pharmaceutical companies, agrochemical companies, and the FDA at executive levels for a long time...

None of this is to say that vaccines don't work (why else would we make sure our daughter still got hers?), but I don't trust that they are totally void of major risk. At least when administered so heavily.
 
wvaherp said:
Thus my reasoning in having our daughter vaccinated, but have you ever seen what the normal vaccine schedule is for a child born in the US these days? Considering how vaccines work, can you deny that injecting a child of 15 months with upwards of thirteen live and/or dead inactivated viruses
Click to expand...

You make a good point here. As a non-parent I had no idea they were giving so many all at once. I am firmly in favour of vaccinating in principle, but I think you are probably quite correct in presuming that there is likely to be a greater stress by giving a lot at one time. In my (long gone) childhood, we had them spaced out over months and years.
 
Every time I go in for my yearly physical and blood work, my doctor is ALWAYS pushing a bunch of vaccines he suggests I take. Sorry, but I just decline. I just have this aversion to injecting foreign substances into my body unless it is ABSOLUTELY necessary. Yeah, maybe I COULD come down with something that a vaccine might prevent or mitigate, but perhaps the odds are greater that because of my chosen lifestyle, I will not.

Of course, along these lines of thinking, I can't help but think that perhaps the pharmaceutical companies are actually using doctors and staff as their front line marketing staff. Who else would be in a better position to market their products? Certainly my doctor does act like just about every salesperson I have encountered trying to push one product or another on me. And I guess that puts an uncomfortable spin on the thoughts of how much of our best interests do doctors really have at heart. So the question is, do doctors actually get kickbacks or other incentives from the prescriptions they write? What is their actual incentive for aggressively recommending vaccines?
 
I have to agree about doctors seeming to push not only vaccines, but prescriptions. Funny to think about the nber of people who wonder why we have antibiotic resistant bacteria and opioid addiction running rampant...

Interestingly, I've seen the same thing with vets and those expensive (somtimes prescription) dog foods. Though I will say I've had a vet get a lot more pushy about things with one of my dogs. Especially when I asked their opinion of feeding raw (which I had already researched and started supplementing with) because of her extremely sensitive gut. Funny thing in that case was instead of buying the ridiculously priced dog food they pushed, I have been able to keep her from having issues by simply switching to a much more reasonably priced grain-free dog food instead of the prescription diet that was not free of corn, which turns out to be the ingredient that causes her the most problems.

But I digress... When it comes to the actual vaccines for myself I tend not to take them. I also don't take antibiotics unless I feel it's actually necessary. In many ways, I actually think that some of the rampant health problems we have these days can be attributed to not simply letting our bodies handle smaller ailments on their own.
 
Perhaps thoughts that there may be some who would love to make billions by creating new needs for vaccines is too science fiction-y. Perhaps not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/..._th_20171220&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57474085

WebSlave said:
So the question is, do doctors actually get kickbacks or other incentives from the prescriptions they write? What is their actual incentive for aggressively recommending vaccines?
Click to expand...
Well, one 'actual' incentive for chronic prescriptions is the paid visit one needs to make to the doctor periodically to get him/her to renew those prescriptions.
Another incentive is the legal concept of minimal standard of care required from doctors. While they are given a wide latitude of judgment, and are not necessarily liable for poor outcomes, if they do not provide even a minimum attempt of care, they can be in some cases held responsible for such an omission.
To me, a documented offer of a prescription or vaccine offers some protection for very little cost.
 
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Lucille said:
Perhaps thoughts that there may be some who would love to make billions by creating new needs for vaccines is too science fiction-y. Perhaps not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/..._th_20171220&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57474085
Click to expand...

I saw that article as well. Didn't think of it the way you did there, but there are those in this world I wouldn't put it past.

Engineering viruses like that is yet another one of those things that I really don't think we should tempt fate with. AI is another one. I mean, yes, there were those that had similar feelings about any number of previous scientific advances that could have wiped us out, but many of those still could as well. It seems to me we should try and temper our arrogance about "playing god," lest we end up going to meet him en-masse... Though there is no doubt in my mind that there are those who would prefer we do just that.
 
Lucille said:
Perhaps thoughts that there may be some who would love to make billions by creating new needs for vaccines is too science fiction-y. Perhaps not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/..._th_20171220&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57474085
Click to expand...

Well, yeah, THAT certainly gives me a nice warm and fuzzy feeling! Of course, government panels NEVER make mistakes, now do they? And it's not like things haven't already happened that have negatively altered the world we live in, have they? :rolleyes:

Shouldn't the research be targeting how to make such pathogens LESS dangerous instead of MORE dangerous?

On a more mundane note, I have often thought what a boon it would be for the Kleenex company if their products were infused with some sort of pathogen that promotes a runny nose....... :rofl:
 
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