866 karma · joined January 16, 2015
I have never paid a cent for it. I still don't understand how they can make money... unless I'm actually the product being sold (which I was always under the impression that they didn't sell or share user data). Who knows.
Of course I could have kept this cash in a bank or under the mattress, but not only would I have missed out on massive gains over the last few years in the stock market, I'd also now be losing 10% per year to inflation.
There is just no refuge in our modern financialized economy - we're all forced into the casino.
When I did quit eventually with nicotine gum, I gradually lowered the dose over the course or a month or two, but it was a very conscious process, and I absolutely had to discipline myself to push through the cravings.
All this will accomplish is forcing mostly poorer people to purchase more cigarettes than they currently do in order to get the same fix they're accustomed to.
That doesn't mean half the homes are now owned by these corps, just half the homes purchased in last year or two were by corps. But in some cases they've bought whole subdivisions in one shot, so it's not too far from reality depending on the area.
Cause the transaction costs alone are about 10% on a home sale, so it's not something you want to treat like switching apartments every year when they jack up the rent 10%.
Cause the transaction costs alone are about 10% on a home sale, so it's not something you want to treat like switching apartments every year when they jack up the rent 10%, even if the general rental market doesn't call for such an increase (they know most people won't want to deal with moving, deposits, etc).
Some people were perfectly able to continue paying their mortgage, but due to life circumstances and / or some sort of psychological refusal to continue to pay for a house hundreds of thousands of dollars worth less than the loan, they simply defaulted.
It was called jingle mail because they just sent the keys back to the bank and walked away (sometimes taking the appliances and copper on their way out the door).
I mentioned Israel because our support of them during various Arab-Israeli conflicts in the 1970s was what led to price hikes, lines at gas stations, etc. This is in direct contradiction to the typical talking point that is currently being trotted out by those wishing to deflect blame on the administration for current price issues, asserting that it's all about "supply and demand."
Which is clearly false - like I mentioned, oil prices are absolutely influenced by international politics, and in fact, it'd be hard to find a product less influenced by politics than crude oil.
More "disinformation" being peddled to excuse this administration of the high prices they've caused. If anything, Putin has probably increased production and been forced to give discounts to entice countries like India to go against the US sanctions, so blaming the Russian conflict is ridiculous.
There is probably no other good or service in the world more sensitive to global politics than petroleum. The whole "gas lines and stagflation from the 70's" that we're reminded of were absolutely due to our political support of Israel and against most of the Arab block - very little was based on supply and demand.
Likewise, other mass price increases were almost entirely due to either military conflicts or currency issues caused by central banks.
If this administration just came out and said, "Listen - we think fossil fuels are a losing bet. We're gonna make it as painful as possible for our citizens to continue to use them. Lube up, but it's for our own good." then I'd at least respect them, even if I don't agree with the policies.
But I'm not even sure that's what's happening. What I think is that it's just massive mismangement, an uncoordinated and ad-hoc set of policies being pushed by dozens of different actors, causing price increases. And the administration is just flailing around throwing out false narratives and talking points that their hacks in the media regurgitate to the public.
I'm afraid there is no competent technocratic "elite" easing us into a sustainable future where we're all driving Teslas with a nuke-powered charging grid as ubiquitous as gas stations are today. Instead, we're gonna end up with rolling brown-outs, $1500 domestic airline tickets, severely reduced mobility, etc. It's a disaster, IMO.
And if that wasn't shady enough, in the days of online content, these outlets often don't even bother with admitting they were wrong. They simply edit the original stories - silently and without public notice - and pretend it was never written in the first place.
The NY Times was caught red-handed doing this with their 1619 content several times already.
What's old is new again!
This immediately brought me back to 2005 and apps like Dreamweaver or Fireworks that'd let you drag and drop your components onto a page, and underneath the covers would create some very complex (but clever) HTML table structure, complete with sliced and diced images and invisible pixels to space things correctly.
The underlying code wasn't pretty, but the sites did tend to render correctly, even in browsers like IE6.
Though back in those days, nobody had to worry about 6" phone screens, so not sure how well it'd scale (down) today.
Every time I got the urge to hit Leetcode and start interviewing for a new gig with a 50% pay increase, I remember 2007-2009 and getting laid off from 3 different companies as the economy imploded. And it's hard to remember now, but things never really felt truly safe, even with in-demand tech skills, until 2016 or so, when suddenly recruiter email started really exploding with competitive offers.
Watching the market cool down leads me to believe we're going into another downturn, and I'm becoming more confident I made a good bet by not jumping ship in the last year or two.
There are at least a dozen tools and languages and syntaxes that I've used sporadically over the years - awk, sed, bash, Mongo, perl, etc. I don't use them often enough to remember exactly how they work, and so I always have to spend a few hours reviewing manuals or old code repos or an O'Reilly book.
But if I do end up using it for a few days in a row, it starts to make sense, and I improve each time I use it.
But not with jq.
It just does not make sense to my brain, no matter how many times I've had to use it. Every single time I need to use it, it requires finding some Stack Exchange or blog and just copying and pasting. Even after seeing the solution, rarely do I then really understand why or how it works. Nor can I often take that knowledge and apply it to similar problems.
About the only other syntax or language that gives me such problems is Elastic Search DSL.
This is the unfortunate reality with all depression treatments, including SSRIs, Tricyclics, ECT, TMS, and even MAOIs.
Most people who have treatment resistant depression that is "biological" i.e. not situational will end up requiring treatment for the rest of their lives. SSRIs are well known for "pooping-out" after some number of years, and most patients will end up cycling through different treatments, sometimes finding something that works well for a long time, and other times not finding lasting relief for years at a time while experimenting with "cocktails" of meds from different psychiatrists.
The only problem with Ketamine at this time is that it is quite expensive as commonly provided (patented formulations, in-clinic requirements e.g. REMs, fusion providers, etc). If it turns out to be safe to use in lower doses via lozenges or some other compounded route, without the current associated high costs of administration and procurement, then there's no reason Ketamine can't end up being given out as a generic prescription to be used once or twice a week at just a few dollars / month, similar to what generic SSRIs or Tricyclics now cost.
But I imagine the Pharma industry and the increasing number of very profitable infusion providers will do everything they can to ensure this doesn't become mainstream anytime soon.
- older person has some sort of non-covid related serious illness or injury
- can't get ICU bed in the "top" hospital in their area due to ICU overflows.
- Thus, patient sent to less renowned hospital where he eventually succumbs to disease or injury.
- Media blames Covid / unvaxxed for his death.
A couple points that they never mention:
- ICUs, by design, are usually at 90% full, so these scenarios happened before Covid due to just random odds of a few extra people needing ICU beds at some particular hospital in some particular week.
- If the media has to trot out stories of 70 year olds with chronic heart failure who may have been saved had they been able to get a bed in the nation's top cardiology department instead of merely some average hospital, then does it really represent a legitimate issue the rest of us should be concerned about?
It reminds me of how the media kept demanding we accept the narrative that Covid was super deadly to children, when by all accounts it's less dangerous than the flu, swimming pools, etc even BEFORE the CDC quietly revised their own numbers* downward. So they'd push some article about a 22 year old died of Covid. "Look - this virus will kill your kids toooooo."
And you'd actually read the article, and then realize it was some chronically sick kid who weighed 400 lbs and had suffered from severe respiratory and immune issues all their life. And you'd know - if this was the best example they could find to scare us - then you shouldn't really be scared.
* https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
The problem is that even if your own code uses SLF4j correctly as a logging API, and then wires up the correct logging implementation (e.g. Logback, Log4j2, etc), and then finally include the necessary SLF4j "bridge" libraries, you still need to ensure that every 3rd party transitive dependency explicitly excludes Commons Logging, Log4j, etc libraries.
It's a mess, and almost none of projects that I've worked on over the years got it 100% right the first time.
That being said, I see the exact same problem in a lot of the modern Python and Node code that's out there. It just becomes too complicated because there are too many logging options, and when a modern project - in any language - now relies on dozens of 3rd party libraries, then it's likely you're ending up with 5 different incompatible logging implementations in your final runtime, all doing their own thing.
It is a perfect example of the famous XKCD "multiple competing standards."
They've claimed, like you, that the labs were just general biolabs you'd find at any university, and anything related to WMD is just Russian "disinformation."
But they've also claimed that these labs were old Soviet-era weapons research labs the DOD was helping to close down.
So which is it?
If they're closing down old weapons labs, why'd it take 17 years? If they're not weapons labs, why are they so afraid (as Nuland from State Dep't claimed) of the Russians seizing or destroying them?
If they're just research labs for the good of humanity, the gov't needs to explain to us taxpayers why they continue building up infrastructure and subsidizing research and jobs in foreign countries with money borrowed from China and / or printed up, which is now exacerbating inflation. How many underemployed PHDs in the US could be doing some research here at home with the hundreds of millions of dollars we've just handed out to Ukraine?
The promise of the internet allowing the free flow of information and knowledge has been crushed in the last decade as the tech monopolies have consolidated their control and happily work with local governments to ensure their own citizens are monitored and limited to only "approved" content - can't have nasty disinformation spreading, of course.
But even more insidious is the way that capital is still able to traverse the globe without issue - their corporate headquarters are moved to PO Boxes in tax shelters like the Caymans and Cyprus, they take advantage of wage and currency arbitrage by easily importing endless waves of lower waged workers from the developing world while simultaneously moving their manufacturing and service jobs the other way, while gobbling up resources and real estate at opportune times of currency fluctuations.
Meanwhile, the average pleb can't even take advantage of the same currency and wage arbitrage e.g. buying a digital movie or game or cloud services from another jurisdiction over a VPN. Or living overseas in a country with a lower cost of living (thus being able to purchase a home, start a family, etc) while working remotely for a company at 1st world salary.
Regardless, I think he's been treated poorly by the company as we explicitly denied him the ability to join us at a few on-site meetings and outings. I'm not sure anyone can credibly assert anymore that his un-vaccinated status puts anyone other than himself at increased risk. At this point, it's a form of psychological warfare against him for refusing to conform, and that's WRONG.
I don't know if I would have gotten a vaccination without the threat of termination. I probably would have, but being forced has left me feeling anger towards both my employer and the gov't. And I've been with my employer for 8 years or so - I've enjoyed my time there.
This doesn't sound like something a health society would want to embrace.
This woman publicly went against the establishment narrative, which is a dangerous play in modern America (see Joe Rogan e.g.).
Well, turns out, her views were generally CORRECT. She was right. The mob was wrong.
Or at least, her opinions were as valid as the rest of us, since we're watching in real time as the last two year's of covid hysteria are memory-holed now that they're deemed a political liability in the next election. IOW, "Trust the Science" has, therefore, been shown to have been mostly bullsh*t.
A healthy society would generally reward someone who was proven to be right, especially when they risked so much calling out that the emperor was naked.
But it seems like we've entered a period where, even if you're later proven to have been correct, the mere act of defying the mob, is enough to permanently cancel you. It is an unforgivable sin.
Interesting about the Obamacare funds. Obviously all debt payments to the gov't are subsidies to some other group, but I did not know that these indebted students were literally funding another program that they themselves advocate for (though they assume it can be paid for if they just tax the "billionaires" a bit more). Their heads would explode if someone told them that we could have Medicare for all (another huge line item they want) if we just bumped up the interest rates on their own student debt.
Funny how none of the progressive politicians (e.g. AOC) who claim to want Biden to cancel the debt have not come clean with their Twitter fans - that in order to cancel the debt, it'd come at the expense of Obamacare subsidies for people much poorer than most of the indebted grads who want the debt wiped away.
I enrolled in a masters of CS (online) at a prestigious university and was able to complete the first 3 credit course. I enjoyed it and did well, but ended up dropping the next course. My thoughts were:
* At the pace I was going, it'd take at least 5 years to finish (3 credits / semester). While working full time, it meant that at least half my weekend was spent on course work, and often times the other weekend day and a few evenings within the work-week were also. Looking at the next 5 years of my life being consumed so much seemed daunting.
* Tuition cost is insane these days, even without all the on-campus fees, expensive text books, etc. The masters would have ended up costing about $60K by the time I finished.
* From a career perspective, I'm not sure how much the it is worth. The software industry just does not value higher academic / professional degrees as much as others, where its often times absolutely required (e.g. law, medicine, academia itself, etc).
* From a financial perspective, it seems that grinding Leetcode and "studying" interviewing would be a far better use of time. A masters might end up providing a $10K / year salary bump for the remaining 15-20 years of my career. A FAANG position might provide $100K+ / year increase... or more now that FAANG salaries are hitting $500K+, while typical F500 engineering are still stuck in the $150K range - a true bimodal situation where Leetcode and interviewing skills have a 100X ROI vs a masters.
Though, I wonder if in 10 years the masters would have brought me more personal satisfaction (accomplishment, prestige, etc) than the extra money (assuming I even follow the Leetcode/FAANG path to big bucks).
Yes I know there are a lot of progressives / young people who were hopeful the current administration would "cancel" their student debt. While the idea that the executive can simply erase a few trillion of gov't owned debt with an executive order was and is legally dubious, I think a lot of folks aren't aware that the administration is, in fact, wiping out almost 10% of their existing student loans per year via inflation.
Meanwhile, the admin has continued to extend the moratorium on student loan payments and interest accumulation, so they are, in fact, fulfilling that campaign promise, at least partially. Though I'm not sure they want to advertise that, lol.
Yes, it's quite low. But so is the number of covid fatalities for young people, which is why many healthy young adults aren't enthusiastic about being forced to vaccinate themselves and their kids.
It would not surprise me to learn, once final, honest numbers are tallied up, that the vaccination caused as many negative outcomes as covid itself in the under 30 crowd.
That being said, neither number is probably significant.