learc83

I don’t think it’s most everywhere in Atlanta because I lived there until 2 years ago (I still visit regularly), and it wasn’t the norm anywhere I regularly went. Atlanta is a big place, so I’m sure there’s room for variation.

The only time I’ve seen an armed guard at a retail store in the southeast is when they have off duty cops late night at very high crime locations. It is extremely uncommon here for a Target or Best Buy to regularly employee armed security.

That vast majority of retail chains would fire an employee who stopped a shoplifter with a firearm.

When I worked at Best Buy, loss prevention was very clearly instructed that using force to stop a shoplifter would get you fired.

It's a terrible gotcha. It's only effective on people who already agree with you.

Imagine a town council meeting where someone is proposing a $25 fine for crapping on the sidewalk. And a libertarian pops and screaming "You're saying you want to use violence up to and including murder to keep our sidewalks clean!"

Again technically there is a hypothetical chain of causality from sidewalk crapping fine to bodily harm/murder, but no one other than another hardcore libertarian is going to be convinced by that argument.

Libertarians like to make this argument about any government enforcement action.

If the government tells you that you can't play loud music after 10pm and you do it anyway, eventually someone will issue you a citation. If you refuse to pay that, eventually you'll get a court summons. If you fail to appear, eventually a police officer may arrest you. If you resist, they will use force to make you comply.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but it is a standard libertarian/objectivist "gotcha".

>That may seem obvious to you and I. Hence my question.

I think it seems obvious to everyone, and anyone saying the entire economy was shutdown was just being hyperbolic. Everyone who lived through it knows that they were able to buy groceries and that their power and lights stayed on.

>Would it? What models showed that, and how much higher is massively?

Something like 12 percentage points according to this paper [1].

>There were many companies that that stayed open.

Right. But my point is that unemployment rate isn't everything when discussing what percentage of the economy shutdown. Many people were receiving paychecks despite their company being essentially closed for business.

1. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/226/Job-Preservation-...

Of course the “entire” economy wasn’t shut down. But the unemployment rate would have been massively higher than it was had the government not stepped in with loans (essentially grants) to encourage companies to keep people on the payroll through the lockdowns.

There were also companies that kept workers on the payroll despite being essentially shutdown for weeks even without access to PPP money.

Viruses tend not to work like that because to effectively spread via respiratory droplets and aerosols they require a high viral load in the respiratory system. This generally causes symptoms.

I’m sure it’s not completely impossible, but neither is a massive radiation burst from a nearby supernova.

There is no realistic theoretical mechanism for a delayed attack on the female reproductive system, and billions of mRNA doses have been administered over the last year with no measurable drop in female fertility.

The main point of the person you were replying to was that the finger amputation thing is an urban legend because you can shatter a tungsten ring. And the point of my reply was that an EMT won’t amputate your finger. I just assumed that your reply was refuting that point.

Just confirmed with my wife (ER doctor) that there is no situation where an EMT amputates your finger because they can’t get a ring off.

EMTs aren't amputating your finger either. You'd go to the ER and they'd call the surgeon.

They'd also know that you can crack a tungsten ring, so they wouldn't need to do that in the first place.

I got a tantalum ring. It look a bit like tungsten or titanium but it's much softer.

Hahaha maybe not the best time. Minimum enrollment isn't too bad if you ever do decide to do it. I believe it's just 1 class every other semester as long as you finish within 6 years I (10 classes total).

Bachelor's.

I also have half of a Master's from Georgia Tech, but I was only talking about undergrad above. I've been too busy to finish (married, baby, building a house, and a new job in the same year), but I can definitely recommend the online program.

I was a self-taught programmer for about a decade before I went back for my degree. Mostly to satisfy my own curiosity rather than to help my career.

I was rather shocked by the amount of gaps I uncovered in my understanding. Sure there were some boring classes, but developing an understanding of the whole system from the logic gate up was hugely beneficial. Being forced to work through the details of operating systems, compilers, automata, and algorithms, as well as the history, theory, and formal structures of all the major families of programming languages, gave me very nice framework to build on over the years. Even studying the academic side of software engineering was more useful than I thought it would be.

I also learned a lot more than I would have had I done my degree when I was 18. If it were more practical, I'd recommend everyone take a few years working as an apprentice programmer before immersing yourself in the theory.

There's nothing magical about a degree. You can learn everything I did by reading, watching youtube videos, and practicing. But I never would have, and I clearly didn't in nearly 10 years of working at it. Having access to professors, TAs, and a peer group studying the exact same thing you are is a huge force multiplier. The tight feedback loop kept my understanding from straying off course and let me build accurate mental models much quicker than I could on my own.

I've known many engineers who were smarter and probably better programmers than me who didn't have CS degrees. The best engineer at my current company doesn't have a CS degree, but I'm almost completely certain that if he had a stronger theoretical background, that he'd be even better.

Multiple mRNA vaccines have been tested on humans since 2008 and on animals before that. None of them produced any “late-onset” side effects. And there is no sound theoretical mechanism for late-onset mRNA side effects.

No drug approval process works like what you are proposing.

Hundreds of millions of people have had nearly a year to develop side effects—-the safety profile is very well known at this point.

If you steal potatoes, the government considers the value of the potatoes when sentencing you.

That doesn’t mean that when you make a profit selling potatoes that you can pay your taxes in potatoes.

Here's what the bulletin actually says

"Through the remainder of 2021, racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists will remain a national threat priority for the United States. These extremists may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks. Pandemic-related stressors have contributed to increased societal strains and tensions, driving several plots by domestic violent extremists, and they may contribute to more violence this year.

Foreign and domestic threat actors, to include foreign intelligence services, international terrorist groups and domestic violent extremists, continue to introduce, amplify, and disseminate narratives online that promote violence, and have called for violence against elected officials, political representatives, government facilities, law enforcement, religious communities or commercial facilities, and perceived ideologically-opposed individuals. There are also continued, non-specific calls for violence on multiple online platforms associated with DVE ideologies or conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud and alleged reinstatement, and responses to anticipated restrictions relating to the increasing COVID cases."

https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisor...

Doesn't sound Orwellian to me at all.

Look through a list of vaccine safety recalls. Here's a highlight of the big ones--this is the list that most vaccine hesitant people talk about when they discuss their issues with vaccine safety.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....

None of the side effects in that list took more than a few weeks to occur, and the majority them happened within a few days.

>HN is different than the comments section of a news site.

Tell me again how hacker news isn't reddit O user of 3 months.

My wife is a children's ER doctor. They are now seeing all patients up to 25 because the adult ER can't handle the number of COVID patients. The pediatric ICU is also now full (in contrast to the earlier COVID waves were virtually no children required treatment).

She's never had to do that because of a bad flu season. More than 90% of the adults in the hospital for COVID and 100% of the kids are unvaccinated.

People wouldn't even be discussing shutting down schools and businesses to get this under control if we had a 90% vaccination rate.

There has never been a vaccine that was recalled because of side effects that didn't show up until over a year later.

You might want to reevaluate your definition of low risk thanks to the delta variant.

My wife is a pediatric ER doctor (but because the adult ER is so swamped with COVID patients they're now seeing all patients up to 25), during the first few waves of COVID, she saw almost no severe cases in children and young adults. There were plenty of kids who came in with COVID, but she didn't admit a single otherwise healthy kid or young adult because of COVID.

In the last week, she's admitted 3 17 year olds to the PICU, and they've admitted many more than that to the floor for treatment.

>It's stories like this --gov't makes out of court settlements and vaccine retracted-- that give a lot of credibility to those against/ hesitant towards vaccination.

We have now administered billions of doses of MRNA vaccines. The safety profiles are more well known than a large percentage of drugs on the market that most people would take without a moment's hesitation.

Historically vaccines have been taken off the market b/c of issues that were too uncommon to show up in trials, which consist of only a few thousand or tens of thousands of people. The side effects were so rare that they only showed up once millions of people started taking them.

There has never been a vaccine that was pulled off the market for a side effect that took a year to show up.

It's unclear to me that being allowed to work at a specific company without taking a vaccine is an "essential Liberty".

I don't believe that attending public school while unvaccinated is an essential Liberty.

Do you have any specific examples of this?: "weird, Orwellian ways that the government talks about it"

Public schools, colleges, and the military have been requiring vaccines for decades.

>It ends up feeling less like the decisions are guided by science and more like they’re guided by petty tyrants wanting to control what others do.

This sounds like a result of reading about what health care and government officials are saying instead of actually reading what they are saying.

Going well here. Glad to hear that things are picking up!

I think it is completely appropriate for an individual to do this in their own self interest.

I think it’s wildly inappropriate that our industry rewards it though. Someone taking a year off to study the interview process itself shouldn’t be rewarded so much more highly than a year of real experience doing the actual job.

It’s important to note that that is physician and clinical services. That’s very different from doctor’s salaries are 20% of healthcare spending.

Edit: I noticed that you already mentioned this in your other thread.

Also in the US physicians salaries are also directly paying for physician training thanks to large student loans unlike in many other countries.

I have talked to many friends in other industries. Some of them are heavily regulated—my wife’s a doctor and her interviews are basically just people spending a lot of money showing her around and begging her to work there.

Some of them aren’t heavily regulated. I have many friends in engineering disciplines that don’t require FE or PE exams, and they don’t need to deal with any of this nonsense.

I think our industry is just very prone to following trends for whatever reason. I would love it if we grew up a bit and introduced more regulation.

I’m more of a never attribute something to malice when stupidity provides a sufficient explanation type of person.

I tend to the think the whole thing is just a massive example of cargo culting. Like how 10 years ago everyone asked why manhole covers were round.