josephorjoe

what’s being banned is systematic destruction of people’s willingness to believe facts in order to support a world view that is inconsistent with facts.

why it is being banned is that it has convinced people to attack the government because they believe the government has done things (for example, “stealing elections”) that it has not done.

big tech has apparently decided that they do not want to be blamed when the government has to shoot a bunch of delusional people to stop them from committing violent crimes based on lies

ads vandalize property by causing unwanted images to appear on and unwanted sounds to emit from personal property

I dream of having a door between me and my family while I'm trying to work...

and one would think even people who live in metros areas would have noticed that you have little or no cell service when you are underground (on trains or vehicles going through tunnels)-- or when you are deep inside some giant old office building or museum -- or in the middle of a nice sized park.

Sadly the moment you let random people upload anything on the internet, you are no longer doing what it was you thought you were doing, and you are now dealing with all of the consequences of letting random people upload images to your application.

Years ago I abandoned a simple recipe creator/organizer side project when I started imagining what photos people would upload and what I would have to do about it.

For profit institutions do not get sympathy for their fixed costs.

Long Term Capital Management

Pets.com

Enron

Bear Sterns

Lehman Brothers

? Hertz

> it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate

it's not reasonable to expect students to pay for the costs of operating a university when all they receive is a glorified khan academy experience.

> I wonder what those officers were thinking, arresting a reporter on live camera.

I'm guessing: "we do not want our actions in the next few minutes to be broadcast on live television"

that is some bizarre and creative whataboutism

In my experience, when a single engineering team owns the entire service, a single web app >>> cluster of microservices.

The advantage to splitting up systems is when multiple teams own part of the service and do not want to be dependent on each other for testing and deploying and signing off on features.

Although given the amount of time I spent this week to be able to send a string from my microservice to a partner teams' microservice and get a different string back, I'm not feeling microservice love today...

Empirically, I'm not wrong.

98% of the population are immigrants or the descendents of immigrants.

The people who wrote the US Constitution were immigrants or the descendents of immigrants.

All the presidents, including the current one, have been the descendents of immigrants.

The US Constitution has survived this reality for 200+ years.

I realize some people, like my aunt (whose grandfather was an italian immigrant), want to pretend there is a difference between immigrants coming to america today and those who came 50, 100, 200, 300 years ago. But the difference is primarily in her mind, and now she treats new immigrants the way her grandfather was treated by people who decided italians should not be welcome in america.

It seems to be a constant tension here that I don't expect to every really go away.

I'm sure in countries without immigration people find other things to use to classify each other into groups that are convenient to dislike and scapegoat.

You may not know this, but the native american population in the US is <2% of the total population. If you are part of that <2%, I understand your bitterness.

The other 98% of americans are immigrants or the children/grandchildren/great grandchildren/etc. of immigrants.

Some of my ancestors immigrated from Ireland and Italy to the US, but despite that, I've decided to work in software engineering instead of the mafia.

America already has an easy, useful, and generally positive solution to a decline in birthrates: immigration.

We'll just need to move beyond the current xenophobia and remember what we use to know.

Entirely depends upon whether or not people feel safe in crowds.

More effective treatments, a vaccine, herd immunity, better testing and tracing, or some combination thereof could make people feel safe in crowds again.

But I do think there will be a large shift toward more "work from home" for office workers with fewer open office cube farms and more contained offices for individuals/small teams, so I would expect the lunch and afterwork crowds in Manhattan to thin out. It's not going to be fun going out to happy hour when you might get sick with a dangerous virus that could kill your parents if you visit them that weekend.

And 1-2 years is more than enough time for all of those bars in Times Square to go out of business. Someone will open new ones when a vaccine comes out, of course, but that could be a long time.

And if the schools do not reopen in the fall in the city but they do in the suburbs, a lot of families will leave. I might :(. Remote schooling has been a disaster.

> The stock market will always recover because people are always going to want to make money.

Maybe.

SPY closed at ~$145 in June 2000

SPY closed at ~$80 in October 2002

SPY closed at ~$145 in July 2007

SPY closed at ~$75 in March 2009

SPY closed at ~$145 in December 2012

Nothing but dividends for a decade or so unless you did some clever selling high and buying low.

It's been mostly up since 2012, but there is no guarantee it is up from here in 2030.

It isn't just houses. It's commercial real estate.

In NYC at least, almost all restaurants, bars, and retail stores absolutely depend on very high volume.

That volume is simply not coming back.

The tourists are not coming back anytime soon.

And the office workers are not all coming back ever. Many will continue to work from home and many more will work only 2-3 days a week in the office rather than 5. And many of those will pack lunch or get lunch delivered rather than go out to restaurants.

And a lot of locals are going to be very reluctant to eat in crowded restaurants where tables are 3-4 feet apart and everyone is constantly bumping into each other.

I believe there are going to be a lot of vacant stores and shops in nyc once the immediate crisis is over.

> That’s fine. But you claimed you couldn’t imagine anyone behaving differently, when (clearly IMO) quite a lot of people will.

That's a fair criticism.

I should have said "anyone I know" as that was where my thoughts were.

Most of the people I know are over 40 with kids, so that group tends to be a bit more cautious than some. Although I was surprised by how many (over 50%) of my <35 year old co-workers just got out of the city by mid-march.

It’s politics when you are deciding what groups of people should do. When you make personal decisions it is about biology.

I know many people feel like you do. And it may be inevitable that most of us get exposed.

But I’m inclined to postpone my exposure for as long as possible, preferably not until the disease is better understood and there are better treatments available.

I do appreciate that I’m lucky enough to have the financial flexibility to make that decision and not everyone has that luxury.

I miss the restaurants and bars and museums and even the subways too. I’m just not going to be rushing into them after what we’ve witnessed in this city the last ten weeks.

And each county is a borough.

New York = Manhattan

Kings = Brooklyn

Bronx = The Bronx

Queens = Queens

Richmond = Staten Island

Just to keep things extra complicated...

Which is actually quite valuable as transparency from decision makers makes it much easier to evaluate the quality of their decisions and to understand whether they are being foolishly capricious or they are using facts and reasonable judgement about what should be done about an ongoing crisis.

Then if you disagree with the government's position, you can base an objection on facts (e.g., one of these metrics is not set at an appropriate level or is not impactful enough to guide decision making) instead of just yelling that the government is wrong and should change what they are doing.

What percentage of people don't understand that (serious question)?

I'm in nyc so my perspective is likely a little skewed, but I can't see anyone who can avoid doing so rushing back into restaurants, subways, or really any avoidable indoor or crowded activity. :(

But, yeah, I see the protesters desperately wanting to reopen everything in the midwest, so I guess a lot of people must think the problem is politics not biology and physics?

primarily to reduce the likelihood of infectious people infecting other people.

This is not complicated.

Every Single Avoided Infection Reduces The Pandemic.

Whataboutism is irrelevant.

The virus simply does not care about logic.

It only cares about math.

If I'm infectious and wear a mask and avoid infecting you, then you and everyone you would have infected do not get the disease (from me).

If I'm part of 5% of people who are actively trying to avoid spreading the infection, then it probably does not matter much and the virus spreads and spreads and spreads.

If I'm part of 90% of people who are actively trying to avoid spreading the infection, then it matters a great deal and the virus vanishes.

That is why we are doing this.

> Below a certain concentration, your immune system will just handle the few viral cells which landed on you.

We don't know what a "low viral load" means for infectiousness.

Yes, maybe you fight off the virus successfully after being exposed to a low amount of virus. But perhaps you are infectious for 2 days and infect 2 people.

Who each infect 2 people.

Who each infect 2 people.

Who each infect 2 people.

I shouldn't have to explain this here...

2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048 4096 8192 16,384 32,768 65,536 131,072 262,144 524,288 1,048,576

This was my reaction as well and left me wondering if there is missing information here.

NYC has been on lockdown for weeks. A very large percentage of the city is staying home. Some completely isolated, but most are not completely isolated.

People have periodic contact with family, friends, neighbors, pharmacies, grocery stores, and/or delivery people. People who live in buildings with shared common areas (doors, entryways, elevators, mail rooms, laundry rooms, ventilation systems, etc.) cannot help but risk some exposure. Masks and social distancing are not 100% effective.

When I first encountered SQL, my immediate reaction was to start writing my own lightweight ORM (two days later I learned ORMs were a thing that already existed) because I took one look at that syntax and decided it was insane to work with directly.

I definitely don't think in SQL.

That said, I like working w SQL databases -- just please give me a battle tested ORM...

Apparently humans can catch novel Coronavirus . . .

python is supported by easy to learn basic syntax + great math/science libraries.

as i typed that i thought: python is the excel of programming languages.

it also has very solid web frameworks (Django, Flask, etc.).

Seems a bit early for weird dystopian fantasies about populations segregated by covid-19 immunity status. Suggest the author go read Poe's Masque of the Red Death[1].

NYC will change and adapt. But from the perspective of someone living hear stuck in my apartment for the last few weeks, I wouldn't predict a mass exodus of older new yorkers. They are a pretty stubborn lot who live here for a reason. Maybe if we get recurring waves of large scale infections they would leave, but at that point, so would most people who could.

I would predict more wealthy families with school age children who have been considering the suburbs will likely leave, but a percentage of them leave every year.

I think one of the more likely and immediate impacts will be closings (as in going out of business) of many restaurants, delis, and bars and financial hardship for everyone who worked for them.

I got a request from a local restaurant I've been to exactly one time to donate to a GoFundMe to save the restaurant. I'm not sure what to say about that... Doesn't feel like a reasonable 'ask' to me. The place is good, but not sure my current priority for charitable donations should be a 30 seat restaurant with $35 entrees.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1064/1064-h/1064-h.htm

I use a notes directory with multiple flat text files named in some brief but sensible way.

I alias a command ('showNotes') to open the directory in sublime and use sublime's search to search my text files or edit/add files as appropriate.

I use to just stick to plain text and code snippets but have started using markdown for newer notes.