anon9001

At least in the US, children are effectively a tax on the working class. How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college? Why do workplaces have tax-incentivized college savings accounts? Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?

The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids. If you do have them, the trade is that you will always be financially drained. Somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Very few will ever acquire equity in anything.

The American Dream is now working until you're 70, supporting 2 kids through college, building equity in your house, then reverse-mortgaging your property to hopefully cover your final years.

You could argue that it's an organic evolution of our profit-driven system, but that system only exists because it's what the owner-class is pushing.

Either we should accept that having children is a hobby for the rich and find other meaningful ways to live our lives, or we should have radical changes in society to increase family sizes.

> It's not so much a partisan issue as it is absolute shit state government issue. The decision to decimate the elderly was made at the state level, without exception. Governor Cuomo in particular needs to go to jail, in spite of granting himself immunity for this.

This is the spin.

The fact that you're aware of this order being enacted in New York and unaware that the same guidelines existed in 12 other states, including New Jersey, should make it really clear that this is anti-Cuomo spin. Another indication is that searching for "cuomo covid nursing homes" yields almost exclusively right-wing publications of questionable veracity. Also he's a Democrat from New York, and the governor of New York is traditionally a high profile target. Also, at the time the story broke, Cuomo's daily press briefings were seen as competing with Trump's daily briefings. When you add all that together, it's pretty obvious to me that there's going to be some spin here, which doesn't mean the spin isn't true, but it's good to be aware that it's happening.

> 40% of all deaths being in nursing homes? That it's not a good idea to send C19 patients to nursing homes? That NY has three times the death rate of Italy?

I'm not disputing any of that. COVID disproportionately impacts the elderly. Sending patients to any facility not specifically designed for it is a bad idea. I don't know enough about Italy to comment as to why they may have fared better.

> That states which locked down nursing homes have much lower fatalities?

I assume you're talking about places that stood up COVID-only facilities quickly. I think everyone, even Cuomo, knew that this was the best thing to do, but for whatever reasons it couldn't be executed in NY. But as we know, NY wasn't the only state that failed this test. I'm fairly certain Cuomo would have picked separate facilities if that was a possibility and the better option for public health.

> I don't see how you can even begin to argue that Cuomo's handling of the crisis was at least atrocious, if not outright malicious.

Cuomo was a rational actor here, unfortunately.

The problem has at least two significant dimensions:

1) Elder care is for profit, and not having those patients causes a financial loss for the care facilities. This has always been a moral hazard and is why these facilities are known for their poor standards of care. If a facility can figure out a way to cut expense or accept more patients, the facility will make more money. Like many problems, it's always been there, but it's made much worse by the pandemic. I don't know if Cuomo was lobbied to make the decision for care facilities to accept discharged COVID patients, but it is a possibility.

2) There's been a lack of federal leadership on pandemic preparedness. Cuomo's decision was to free up hospital resources by releasing patients back to care facilities. It's hard to fault him for that given the predictions at the time and the very real threat of saturating the entire health care system. Pandemics cross state lines and the federal government should take charge of the situation and ensure a uniform response. The current administration has decided to leave the majority of the response for the states to figure out. Additionally, somewhat famously, the current administration disbanded their pandemic response team: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

I would be super happy if you read this whole comment and think "oh no, maybe i was deceived by disinformation" and take steps to make sure you're less vulnerable in the future. Unfortunately, truth is now partisan, and I don't think you and I will be able to reach a shared truth about what Cuomo did or why. It's particularly disappointing because this is such a clean textbook example of a disinformation campaign.

Also, for what it's worth, I don't even like Cuomo. He just happens to be a legitimate victim of disinformation in this particular instance.

It turns out it's all spin. I'll admit it took quite a bit of digging to get beyond all the nypost/wsj/fox stories spreading misinformation. Yes, Cuomo said a COVID-19 diagnosis was not a reason to exclude patients from returning to a nursing home in March. But also, hospital bed space was absolutely critical during that time. While this was happening, about 25% of the nursing home workforce was infected anyway, and staff seems to have been the primary means of transmission. Also, after a week or so of showing symptoms, it was thought that the patients are no longer infectious to others.

The reason that you, my family, and the right-wing media are going crazy over Cuomo's decision is because Trump is making it a political issue and using this as a talking point. The reality is that Cuomo arguably made the best decision possible at the time, and there wasn't really an alternative. Other states made the same decision at the time, and based on the outbreak numbers we're seeing today, we'll see that decision again in the near future. The only other option was to let hospitals overflow their capacity. Maybe there should have been centers for COVID patients that are released from hospitals, but that's a massive logistical problem to be solved on short notice in the middle of a pandemic.

Cuomo's executive order happened in March. By May, once things were getting under control, Cuomo changed that order, presumably because hospitals now had more capacity to house patients. Take a look at the curve from NY and tell me you could have made a better decision at the time: https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus-ny/

If you want a reason to be outraged at Cuomo, the real scandal here is NY state providing immunity from lawsuits to nursing homes who mishandled the outbreak. The reason you're not hearing outrage about that from right-wing press is that it's also a republican strategy. States across the country are granting lawsuit immunity to protect insurance companies and care facilities.

This is the closest you're going to get to the real story, if you'd like to learn more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nursing-homes-de...

I'm also brand new to cooking and baking, and never really "shopped" at a grocery store in any meaningful sense, so all the things I'm buying from instacart are first-time purchases. I've never made a grocery shopping list. This is all new to me.

I'm having an exact mix of both of your experiences.

I just expect that about 10% of the order will be wrong somehow. I'm sure it's very annoying if you're shopping on a budget, but given that I'm learning to cook and bake and make use of whatever is around, precision isn't super important to me for most items.

I'm also using instacart as my shopping list, which is great, but it's a shopping list tied to one specific store, which is less great.

Here's some free advice for instacart's product team:

* Let me set all items in my order to "no substitutions" and toggle it on for items I absolutely can't be without. Or toggle "all substitutions" and don't nag me to approve each one as they happen. This is the most annoying part of interacting with the app. Just add a "mark all as no substitution" button in your next build, please, I know you can do it quickly.

* Help me shop better. Your "Explore" interface is laughably bad. Cart management is hard. I don't have a solution for you here, other than do it better. Browsing large stores on a mobile device is hard, but this is what you should be working to solve. Improve the UI of shopping as a whole. Spend some innovation tokens here. What you should be trying to do is help me map the universe of products in a way that lets me express my preferences, so you already know which items I consider acceptable substitutes. With enough people doing that, you have seriously valuable ML data. Once you know what I want to buy and what realistic substitution preferences are, you should be shopping for me across every store in my area to find the best overall deal for my cart that fits my requirements.

* Why is the shopper texting me at all? Using the service makes me feel like I'm tethered to my phone or I'm a bad person. If I don't stay connected, your shopper is going to be stressed about my order, and I'm going to end up getting the wrong thing. Your goal should be to remove anxiety from using your service, not increase it by keeping me tethered to my device while I'm visualizing someone else plucking items off the shelves. I've had 1 shopper that didn't text me at all and we communicated entirely through the "approve/deny" substitution buttons, which was still annoying, but less bad than the messages I get from other shoppers.

* WTF is with your fee structure? The app tells me the prices are higher than in-store AND there's a service fee AND there's a tip. This shouldn't be so complicated. I want to see "cost of items in store - cost of items on instacart", "amount paid to shopper", and "amount paid to instacart". The item cost can be savings or marked up due to increase demand or heavy weight or whatever, just be honest about the actual difference between going to the store and ordering on instacart. I know instacart should be paid, just show how many dollars go to paying instacart. I know the shopper is getting paid something already, show me how much, so I can tip accordingly, and you'll probably see a dramatic increase in tips.

Instacart is one of the more broken products that I use because it still delivers value. I get that they'll survive without fixing any of the stuff above, but it's a shame to see the opportunity wasted to build something really great.

I think everyone has the cause and effect backwards. I believe that we're not distracted because we have these magical distraction devices. Rather, we invented the distraction devices because modern life is so devoid of meaning and purpose that distraction is a survival adaptation. The higher quality the distractions, the higher quality of the modern life.

> It quiets the squirrel-in-a-wheel spinning of your thoughts and takes the edge off the need to engage with whatever is distracting you.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but what's wrong with functioning as a squirrel-in-a-wheel with constant distraction? I don't want myself to be calm, and neither do my family, friends, or employers. Everyone wants me to have the appearance of calm, but they actually need the squirrel on the wheel to get the output that everyone expects from me.

Being truly "calm" unleashes a deep existential anxiety about how life is precious and I'm wasting all of it with work and other meaningless obligations. I keep that crisis under control by smothering it with more distractions. I think this is a perfectly valid and sensible response to the modern world.

My plan is to be at peak-distraction until I've made it through the corporate grinder. I hope I'm able to reassemble myself once I can retire.

Is that actually the assumption? I'm pretty sure everyone already assumes that the government already has all of your messages, browsing history, transactions, etc, and they can come for you if they want.

Between the massive surveillance state that already exists and the judicial miracle of "parallel construction", it's already very much a problem. The only thing left to do is scale up.

Being addicted to discovering new information and sharing with others sounds pretty healthy to me. I think the difference with HN vs FB is that at some level, you are driving your HN interaction, while FB is driving your FB interaction.

I think it only becomes "internet addiction" when you're not the one in control.

Last question: If I wanted to throw a few bucks at it and play in the sandbox, do you think there's any actual legal concerns? Do you use a burner phone number and proxy for dealing with your accounts, or is this all so normalized now that it's fine to tie your real identity to meme accounts? (from ig's point of view, not publicly, of course)

Nope. I don't have any interest at all in YT getting paid. In fact, I think the internet might be a better place if YT is less successful.

> Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private

Is this as crude as looking for large accounts on socialblade and sending them DMs? Or is there some kind of marketplace? Are there popular forums or something I should know about? What kind of pricing are you looking for?

> all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands

Why would people follow a private profile anyway? I don't see what the user gains from that. Maybe this is an instagram culture thing that I'm out of the loop on?

> For myself I have used one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women.

What kind of content would your accounts post? Do you have some kind of feed of popular content (imgur maybe?) where you can copy content and repost? Do you automate that?

I think schools should treat meditation like prayer, because it's essentially the same function, and we should just avoid it in the classroom.

Perhaps the real tragedy here is that many students will learn about mindfulness in schools and dismiss it as useless nonsense, when there actually may be something of value in there somewhere.

The trendy idea is about "being present" in physical form and acknowledge (but not engage) with any random thoughts that might come your way. I don't want that feeling unless I'm very specifically seeking it out.

Whenever I've had to participate in the "group" versions of these things, I try to think of literally anything else to keep myself distracted until it's over, for fear of wandering into unpleasant territory and causing a mood change when I'm actually supposed to be at work.

I wish there was a word for "sitting in silence with others, frantically searching for anything to think about to avoid letting your mind wander into terrifying places". If this mindfulness thing takes off, maybe someone can come up with a clever way to sum that up. It's a very uneasy feeling.

Also, why my employer would want me to take a mid-day break to meditate is beyond me. It's like they're trying to make me rethink my life decisions and quit.

I don't know if there's a name for this phenomenon, but lots of qualified and talented will refrain from showing off their less-than-perfect work, because they know it's not perfect. I understand the impulse, and it's why I haven't published over the years. Only recently have I realized that publishing imperfect things is way better than not publishing anything at all, both for yourself and for the community as a whole.

Even if you can only raise the bar a little bit from what currently exists, that's a worthwhile effort.

Use this to turn your problem around. Try making a video for someone just like you. You already know what a good video looks like because you've watched a ton of them.

If your goal is to make a good tutorial video, you can take those play problems without any real world application and turn them into content. That way your problem becomes "teach xyz in 15 min on youtube" instead of "master xyz by myself".

Teaching others is often said to be the best way to learn something yourself.

As you publish and get feedback, you can lean on your viewers to figure out what to build next. Eventually you'll be an expert in your chosen domain and have a following of people and have great SEO if you want to start looking for work.

Note: I haven't done this myself, but I wish I had, and obviously youtube is filled with people who are doing this about every topic under the sun. This is my plan for when I'm done with "work".

Error! Missing oxford comma! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

In all seriousness, your post reads better than most native speakers.

If you're writing something formal, and you're unsure if something is technically correct, find a style guide you agree with and consult it. The journalistic styles are intended to be clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Stylebook

There are many style guides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide#United_States

When I'm struggling with a sentence, I make sort of a mental graph of the sentence and apply rules (usually around commas, and mostly without thinking, it just happens). I think it's because I was trained as a kid with these diagrams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_usage_controversies is a useful list. Most speakers are bad at one or more of these. I was never able to train myself to pick out a split infinitve, for example, but I would be able to if I were better educated.

Also, Grammarly is an AI thing that's supposed to detect and correct, but I haven't used it. It's quite popular with the kids these days, so they'll probably be dictating what "english" is if they get big enough: https://www.grammarly.com/

You might also not want to speak perfect English. Most Americans certainly don't. What I mean is, is that a "double copula" is technically "wrong", but it does convey extra information and give a cadence and a degree of informality. English has lots of little choices like that.

> JavaScript classes, introduced in ECMAScript 2015, are primarily syntactical sugar over JavaScript's existing prototype-based inheritance. The class syntax does not introduce a new object-oriented inheritance model to JavaScript.

You've been tricked into thinking you're using a class, but you're really not. I understand it's a useful trick, but hooks are more idiomatic for JS as a language.

As a side note, one of the problems with JS is that the community often disagrees about what JS is: https://babeljs.io/blog/2018/07/27/removing-babels-stage-pre...

Just to nitpick a little here, it's more like "flatten the curve - stretch the time while everyone gets it, so we don't overwhelm hospitals". Even with exponential growth, you would rather deal with it over a longer period than have a massive spike where all services are overwhelmed.

May I ask which country?

If the CDC, WHO, and PhD's of Public Health are all saying the same thing, it's probably true.

My boss's goal is to try and get everyone to work every waking hour so we can deliver faster. My job is primarily to keep the peace between the executives and the workers. When I fail the workers, it looks like unpaid overtime. When I fail the executives, it looks like undelivered features.

I think the actual purpose of agile, from a developer's perspective, is to create more time to deliver quality engineering work product. From an executive's perspective, agile exists to squeeze developers into completing tickets faster. As a manager, it's my job to keep both parties as satisfied as possible. If engineers have enough time to build and executives get enough deliverables, then the company succeeds.

What's your strategy?

Here's how you can solve your problem: Make as many tickets as you can think of, it doesn't really matter if they contain the essence of the problem or not, it just matters that there are many tickets associated with the task. Once you have your tickets, estimate them with as much padding as possible. If the manager complains that you're padding a ticket too much, make two tickets and split the estimate.

Once you have a big pile of tickets and estimates, you've bought yourself enough time to do the work. Go do the work, then mark all the tickets as complete. You'll figure out the edge cases as you go, as long as you've made enough tickets and time to do the job at a reasonable pace.

If you have extra time left over, get started on the next thing, improve your tooling, or try to help someone else with their tasks. If you don't have extra time left over, make more tickets next time.

It's just a personal anecodte, but whenever I get sick, I take amphetamine salts. It absolutely lets me power through the day and relieves symptoms (mostly stuffy nose), but I don't know if it's sustainable for something as long lasting as c19.

Trolling AA isn't criminal, it's just stupid. The only impact it's going to have is that AA organizers will learn how to run an online meeting with a little more security.

As far as I can tell, somewhere over the last 15 years, people began to confuse "the internet" with "real life". It's important to know that hosting a public space on the internet is not the same as hosting a public space in real life.

I don't think this is even a so terrible example of trolling. A well run AA group could use it as a teachable moment to reinforce their message. It's certainly memorable.

And the people trolling are probably all hanging out on discord, making friends, having the modern equivalent of old-fashioned fun. Just a bunch of bored people seeing what they can get away with to entertain themselves on the internet.

When I was a kid, the neighborhood boys got caught throwing rocks at cars just because they wanted to see what would happen. They also stuck firecrackers in things. Once some teenagers took a baseball bat to every mailbox on the street while hanging out of a car window. Trolling an AA zoom meeting is significantly less bad than any of that.

I would argue that trolling is actually a bit higher-minded than previous generations of trouble-making. When you're restricted to operating only online, outside of physical space, you have to be a bit more clever in your trouble-making. Clever probing of the world to see how it responds is fun, especially with the constraint of "must be done entirely online". It's also largely harmless, because nobody can get physically hurt, and it leads to better safeguards in our online systems.

If you view trolling in that way, I think it's really a sign that our culture is advancing. If a successful troll is possible, it indicates some kind of weakness that needs to be patched. You can't stop the trolls, so you might as well extract what value you can from their work. Also what and how they troll is a sign of the times. The Trump presidency was fairly predictable if you watched the steady increase in what we'd now call "alt-right" ideology on 4chan. As goes /b/, so goes mainstream culture. I guess, in a way, you could say that trolling is a art.

Question you might know the answer to: I've noticed it's a pretty common practice to get appointment reminders with caller ID from the doctor's office. I like that feature. I'd imagine there are plenty of other legitimate use cases for caller ID spoofing as well. Do you have any idea how that's going to work with STIR/SHAKEN?

I'd guess it's going to be some kind of oauth for your phone number, where you own it and can grant spoofing access to other entities?

Google seems to be supporting it: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1119583115056/2018-11-19%20Goog... (via https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication)