iongoatb

Thanks for letting me know that I should move all of my clients off of Mailchimp. I don't trust Mailchimp's "sole discretion" and interpretation of what is "inaccurate or misleading". What is true and factual is constantly in flux and subject to intepretation and debate. For example, an intelligent Democrat or Republican person, in many cases, have completely different views of what is "true" and "factual". I could apply this to many non-political examples as well.

I'm going to look into moving to one of the many of the cheaper, more trustworthy competitors if what you have commented is true.

Gee, thanks for explaining what government contracting is.

I wasn't aware. /s

Contractors are also protected under existing whistleblower laws. There are clearly codified protocols for reporting and handling instances of governmental abuse. Any contractor that is dealing with sensitive information is working with either a Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret clearance. These projects and clearances are something you are specifically hired for, or voluntarily agree to participate in.

https://www.cncsoig.gov/contractor-whistleblower-protection-...

Again, stop obfuscating.

You're grasping at straws.

This protocol is meant for non-government agencies, i.e. tech companies. Don't obfuscate the intended purpose of this protocol. There are well-defined, existing whistleblower protocols in government for situations that Snowden encountered.

Politics have been destroying Silicon Valley. This restores my faith in tech. I believe that the spirit of innovation and diversity of thought still has a chance to prevail if people embrace the philosophy behind Mission Protocol. If employees want to be activists, then they should either pursue activism in their free-time, change their career to further the cause full-time, or create a company with a mission that furthers their agenda. There's no judgement. However, hijacking the mission of large, powerful companies to serve near-sighted political agendas is socially destructive and morally reprehensible.

The DOJ just released a report that explicitly says that use of privacy coins like Monero is a "high risk activity" and "indicative of possible criminal conduct".

https://cointelegraph.com/news/doj-says-use-of-privacy-coins...

Warmer and drier areas are definitely more likely to start a fire. Climate change causes places to be warmer and drier over the long-term. However, this long-term trend, which is worrisome, does not explain the magnitude of the fires that have been haunting California the past few years.

The Governor was wrong when he said that it is mostly caused by climate change and only partially due to forest management. It's the other way around.

Question everyone should be asking - where are the federal lands versus the state lands, and what is the proportion of state lands that have burned versus federal lands that have burned.

The insinuation of that statistic is that federal land management should be blamed as much or more than the state of California. That may be true. It also may be true that the actual lands that have been burning and been poorly managed are more state lands than federal lands. California is obviously a large state. That's why we need to know what percent of the burnt lands are actually state versus federal before I'd deem the statistic in question to be useful.

Exactly.

Blogging is not the primary use of Wordpress in practice for small to medium sized businesses.

As someone that develops Wordpress and Jamstack sites for a living (among other things like apps / devops), this is silly. Debating Wordpress versus Jamstack is like comparing apples to oranges. I use Gatsby + Contentful (or other APIs, like a Headless Wordpress setup) for some situations, and I use Wordpress for many companies as well. Small businesses are not going to hire a designer for PDF designs and then hire a developer to build a Gatsby site, and relearn using a CMS like Contentful instead of Wordpress. Not going to happen. For more sophisticated clients, or for building static sites myself, I always use Gatsby. These type of clients have a higher budget, and can pay for a designer and developer to build the site properly and deal with a more sophisticated deployment architecture.

Wordpress is not going away. As long as you don't have to code to use Wordpress, it will be easier and far more accessible for people that don't have a lot of money for a website to hire a web designer (lower skill, lower pay than developer).

Gatsby or another Jamstack client could build themes that don't require coding, similar to Wordpress, but I don't see it happening. Webflow is sort of doing that now by allowing designers to build websites without coding.

Ultimately, the debate is silly because Wordpress and Jamstack have two different use cases. Wordpress will probably become less popular for big companies, but it will still be very popular for your average small to mid-sized business.

Unbelievable that people believe that the Nordic model of capitalism is "socialism". Capitalism with social welfare is not socialism.

...

According to ALL the scientists I've come across in my research, including ALL official statements from FEMA, the Cascadia Subduction zone M9+ earthquake would cause the greatest natural disaster and humanitarian crisis in American history. The New Yorker article is sensationalist but that doesn't mean that FEMA is wrong about the catastrophic aftermath of this earthquake - they aren't.

You can certainly prepare your house for the earthquake and shaking. For one, reinforcing the structure, making sure the ground is under the house is attached to stable, hard rock like granite versus sediment, and very importantly, using wood instead of brick or concrete (look at Bill Gates's Xanadu house - it's not a coincidence that it is completely made out of wood, the best house material for withstanding earthquakes). These people are definitely consulting scientists and engineers and preparing themselves and their family for a potential M9+ event.

I disagree that it's not dangerous. The initial earthquake may only immediately kill a few thousand but the aftermath would be absolutely devastating. It would be the most catastrophic natural disaster and humanitarian crisis in the history of the United States. We know that it is coming and that it is overdue. It would be greater than 911, Katrina, and all the other crises that have occurred that we are still dealing with the aftermath of.

Yes, it's the aftermath that I would be worried about. That and the well-being of your family. What if the quake happened in the middle of the day when the kids were in different schools, the wife was across the bridge in the city, and I was all the way over in Redmond? The destruction would take down cell service, internet, roads, bridges, water lines, electricity - everything to a screeching stop, potentially for WEEKS. That would be catastrophic.

Agreed. AWS's cloud infrastructure is all about high availability and spreading computing/data resources across regions. The company's operations will be fine. Although, I'm sure the higher ups in Seattle have personally spent enormous resources to get their homes upgraded and have extensively prepared for something like this. The average person can stock up on non-perishable food and water, but besides that they don't have the resources to truly prepare for what is coming.

Btw, from my research, the New Yorker article is a little sensationalized.

These videos are a better source of information IMO: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2CLEFocYVw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzFYO1EU6rs

I work remotely and was planning on moving to Seattle next year. The more I research about the Cascadia Subduction zone and the overdue M9 earthquake, the more I am hesitant to want to live in Seattle. I honestly don't think it's worth moving to somewhere that is anticipating the worst natural disaster in the history of the USA. I think it's beautiful and a great city but it's not a risk I'm willing to take. Especially since it seems the region is extraodonarily underprepared.

I've relied on PIA for years and I'm 100% dropping them for good. They promise to never log, but that's clearly an empty promise. Their TOS says that they can change the terms at any time without notifying anyone. This new partnership with Kape is an intelligence operation with the 14 eyes. A spy never becomes a "former" spy. I love my country, but I love my rights as well, and I refuse to be surveilled illegally.

Describing the current state of CS and comparing it to the current state of biotech/genetic engineering is like comparing apples to oranges. In the beginning of the computer revolution the obstacles were extremely similar to the current obstacles (or opportunities) with biotech. The materials were expensive, documentation wasn't abundant, people didn't think personal computers would ever be a thing or that people would interact on the internet using social networks, and server/computing costs were extremely capital intensive before cloud computing.

There is a great opportunity at this moment, similar to the opportunity that Bill Gates and Paul Allen had. Mainframe computers were expensive, yet they found ways to practice and become highly skilled. There wasn't documentation like there is now, yet hacking culture found ways to build cool and effective stuff. Obviously there wasn't a linear path to success - people thought personal computers would never be necessary, yet Apple and Microsoft were huge successes that no one ever expected. There are people that see opportunity in fields like biotech and bioengineering, and there are people that only see the obstacles. The former create amazing things, while years later the latter are envious that they didn't have similar vision and courage.

You made my point.

There are plenty of ways to get access to and use the advanced equipment that you may need for research after getting past the beginner and intermediate level. This comes to mind: https://www.biolabs.io/

Never recommended just "reading a book" - although books are for knowledge transfer. In fact, I recommended the exact opposite. Creating or joining a lab to do DIY genetic engineering is not pipetting. Anyone can easily obtain the materials to do CRISPR and implement various ideas they get from reading the latest research and literature. It is exactly analogous to the computer and internet revolution. All of those founders learned things from the ground up, often outside of academia, while others were completing academic research. The truth is that the same opportunity is now available to biotech and genetic engineering. The odin project, for example (I am not affiliated in any way whatsoever), offers all the materials to build your own home DIY bio engineering lab. That is certainly enough to do the required research and test / validate various research ideas, and ultimately creating a startup.

I'm curious who all these sarcastic bio "experts" are that are suggesting getting a PhD or hiring one. I'm a former bio major and researcher/scientist that transitioned to software engineering years ago. I've published papers in bio and worked with many PhDs. Many of them were idiots. Being a PhD doesn't mean anything, it's the independent work that you put in yourself (in an academic lab or by yourself) that determines how skilled you become.

If you have strong CS skills then you should:

1) Focus on bioinformatics. You will immediately be of use as far as making your own product/service or working for a startup if you apply your skills there. Most bio specialists are incredibly weak at data analysis and/or any type of computing. Pretty much all the important problems in bio are computational in nature. The "impressive" bio researchers/scientists have the data science skills of a sub-par / average data scientist / CS grad.

2) Create a home lab or find one / start one locally. Look up the odin project. Work on DIY genetic engineering and you can even take classes from that site. If you just get to this point and stop you will literally have more practical skill and knowledge than the vast majority of graduates with bio degrees.

3) Lots of biohackers experiment with themselves for clout/hype/attention. It never ends well. There are plenty of lab organisms that you can easily source and ethically experiment with.

4) Don't listen to anyone that tells you that you can't do something because you don't have a PhD. Those are the same type of people that missed out on the computing and internet revolutions because they were busy doing trivial academic work.