gregimba

I think the overall workforce participation rate paints the reality much better than unemployment numbers. The drop was the sharpest in the entire dataset going back to 1950 and while a portion of jobs have returned the possibility we may not see workforce participation return to pre COVID levels within the next 2-3 years is a definite possibility.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

Edit:

St. Louis Fed quote from article on unemployment

> For perspective, in June, we were short by about 7.1 million jobs compared with the pre-pandemic level. This analysis suggests that this gap will only close about half by June 2022.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2021/october/labor...

The reason we got smart meters in Austin, TX is because they weren't even recording readings just guessing what that reading should be based on historical data.

https://texasmonitor.org/settlement-reached-on-austins-made-...

> Minneapolis, which had 912 uniformed officers in May 2019, is now down to 699.

23% of officers leaving in only a year and a half. What kind of impact will this have in 3-5 years as officers who are holding out for pensions also retire?

If AWS has a regional outage this service is so far down the list of services to recover/restore that it probably will be overlooked. Accept the increased risk for the cost savings since it meets the reliability requirements of the service.

As someone who lives in Leander, I would say Westlake is the affluent area of Austin and Leander is the up and coming suburban middle to upper middle class area. Leander ISD has some great schools and some bad schools and historically wasn't great.

During high school we had had an exchange program with a German college track high school. My family hosted a student for a month and then they hosted me in Germany. I was shocked at the difference in expectations and quality of education compared to an average American high school. I really wish we offered something equivalent of their combination Vocational Tech/High school with industry partnership as a viable career path compared to the 4 year high school only option I had.

The reducing cross-AZ data transfer savings on one service resulted in a low 6 figure per year savings. Its something we overlooked during initial setup and now its something I check for when dealing with AWS networking.

I plan to do the same in a couple years, my hometown is unaffordable, with tech like Starlink coming online and the pandemic making remote work more common I can foresee a subset of tech workers choosing this path if they feel alienated in the larger tech cities.

Talking with the person checking me into the hotel he mentioned he had heard to food was good at a restaurant across the street but mentioned he couldn't afford to eat there.

There was a lovely older couple who were running the tourism center and provided a bunch of great information. The person in front of me repeatedly interrupted this nice old woman and talked over her, after she got the info she needed she got into a 4 runner with California plates.

The surrounding OHV and hiking trails are phenomenal but the town is going to be very boring once the locals are forced out.

As someone who recently spent a couple days in Kanab, UT the collision course of rural natives with Californian expats has made me accelerate my plans to buy enough land to escape the cities and further enforced my feeling about the cultural divide in America.

EDIT: I was born in a small western town and find myself missing certain aspects living in a larger city working in Tech.

As an Austin Energy customer a large portion of the blame for this on their poor infrastructure configuration and the number of critical circuits.

Currently running a generator to run the wood stoves fan, its not ideal but not amazing.

This is essentially the crux of the problem, multiple friends/and coworkers are staying in islands of power that have been interrupt free due to proximity to Fire/Police/Hospitals and others have been without power for extended periods of time, if 60% of a grid is essential you can't roll non essential loads because simply maintaining the critical loads takes up 100% of capacity. More granular control could significantly help alleviate this issue which is specific to Austin Energy.

Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of having parts of the city with power and parts without for the entirety of an outage.

Not trying start an off topic thread but game shows seem to push for bizarre. I recall german game shows being on par with the clips I've seen from Japanese game shows.

> 64 are believed to be Dangerous Goods containers

I'm curious what these actually contain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_goods

At what scale is your on premise Splunk? As a member of a team maintaining very large on-prem Splunk service I haven't found maintaining Splunk to be an easy undertaking.

> I'm still not certain about anything.

You captured a facet of climate change I feel few can properly articulate. Modeling and digesting complex systems is incredibly difficult and at this point I share the same position.

It seems to be we have no clue how severe the impacts of climate change will be but based on gut feelings we are in for the same problem as technology development.

> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.[0]

[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara)

That design uses a single gear instead a traditional transmission.

https://www.koenigsegg.com/gemera/tiny-friendly-giant-engine...

Yes, but US didn't sign the portion of the Hague convention that bans the use of hollow point ammunition and the US military adopted hollow point ammunition with the M-17 and M-18 handguns.

Looks like I was incorrect, they were planning to shift production to Mexico in 2017 but didn't.

I'm picturing the new Cybertruck will sport the same sticker the Tundra's did when they were made in Texas.

Born in Texas built by Texans.

Slightly off topic but I always found the fact you are required to add race and ethnicity to the federal firearms transaction record 4473 surprising.

The official reasoning is to aid law enforcement tracing firearms in crimes. https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/why-does-atf-form-4473-ask-r...

I don't think you realize how common drunk driving in in rural areas. 20% of the people on the road after 6-7 pm could be drunk in certain areas.

Edit: Found this as a support source, while not 20% roughly 2x the rate in rural vs urban areas https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30160320

As another person living in Austin, do you see our current pandemic increasing or decreasing immigration in the next couple years? I have a guess it will actually increase as companies shift to lower cost locations.

The people writing posts and the people running production workloads seem to be a non overlapping ven diagram when it comes to a huge portion of kubernetes.

I think this is and underlying feature of replacing DevOps with SRE is they start out as software engineers and move into a more operations focused role removes the whole don't code issue.

I don't want to throw a wrench into your article but have you considered using terraform instead. I've found it allows me to write much more readable code than Cloudformation.

Having spent a lot of time writing terraform tracking updates to dependencies and version pinning have become a constant task. Terraforms "default" behavior of pulling the latest version especially with the 0.11x to 0.12x migration has caused a lot of time spent pinning and checking for changes in modules.

This is specifically in regards to shotgun ammunition as steel shot vs lead shot have large differences due to the density differential.

Source: https://www.hunter-ed.com/alaska/studyGuide/Two-Major-Differ...