overton

> The submarine's captain, Robert Dunn, feels they have been largely written out of the Libyan campaign and is keen his crew get their due.

Interesting, how did that turn out for Libya and North Africa in general?

Seeing a few canned tuna comments here. I love it as much as the next guy but PSA: it has more mercury than you would imagine -- in the range of ~60mcg per tin in some cases. Nobody needs that, and I've personally banned it from my diet.

Yeah, I doubt it's a viable long term strategy, but I think they're terrified of the crash being on their watch.

The Canadian government knows what they're doing. They're more afraid of a crash than they want to rein in prices.

Modern western society has not built the social capital necessary to cope with its material complexity. It's built on an ethic of grifting, in the large or in the small. See the part of the piece where people think you deserve what's coming to you if you aren't assuming everybody's out to f* you.

Sue me, I have whatever concept of efficiency that means that people eating and having housing and having a habitable environment is more important than NFT's or space tourism or car collections. That's my ladder of importance. So weasely!

Heck, even private businesses often do a kind of ad-hoc rationing for essential goods when there's a rush on them, because they know that the kind of arbitrage free-for-all described in the article has extremely poor social outcomes in a crisis.

The argument starts that people who need gas more are going to buy it in the shortage (suggesting efficient distribution), and then acknowledges that it's just as likely wealthier people or price gougers who don't need it.

In actual shortages where there's a strong political motivation to efficiently distribute goods (e.g. wartime), we switch to central planning (i.e. rations) because we know that's what works, denying price gougers their tax and making sure poor people who need stuff can get it.

Rails is unquestionably better now than when it was new and cool. Before, the ecosystem and core framework were evolving at a rapid pace, leading to some suboptimal patterns and sometimes making maintenance a bit of a nightmare. Now there's a pretty settled solution for most things. If you want to get started building apps without much fuss, there's no better way.

I have to wonder what other unintended side effects of modern tech/modes of behaviour we'll find.

Same story pretty much everywhere -- wealthy property owners can't be bothered to allow the minimum amount of development that would let the workers they depend on find decent housing.

A valuable perspective that alludes to a troubling phenomenon: discourses around disability often cater to the comfort of the abled.

Abled people don't want to accept that disabled people might require care beyond exercise and a change of mindset. It's disturbing to them that somebody (potentially them one day) could be in such a vulnerable position, and it potentially calls for costly support beyond these minimalist interventions.

Why should it take 20 years to own a home?

the OS landscape is pretty grim in 2021 in general:

- Some Linux distros are getting pretty usable, but there are also still plenty of rough edges and limited support for certain apps. It's understandable because the community is under-resourced.

- After having last used Windows XP, I was astounded at the lack of polish and QA on Windows 10. It seems that I encounter some bug or UX mess every time I use it. And this is supposed to be the 'good' iteration in their good/bad release cycle?

- MacOS is tied to expensive hardware which you may or may not want. The new M1 arch also makes it less useful for web dev work.

The first case linked above was in a gym where patrons were supposed to be masked and two meters apart, and the second case had a CDC investigation which would have mentioned that as a factor if it were present.

That's certainly the dominant narrative, but it flies in the face of superspreader events where it appears that one or a few people infected hundreds. Did they directly breathe on everybody they infected?

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/outbreak-at-quebec-city-gym-link...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm

https://elpais.com/especiales/coronavirus-covid-19/a-room-a-...

Early on in the pandemic, the Canadian IPAC (Infection Control and Prevention) establishment came down hard against theories of airborne COVID transmission, at first even going so far as to not recommend masking. Even now that the science of airborne transmission has been established, they're waging a rearguard battle to obfuscate/deny it and airborne protections such as better ventilation and masking. If you go to a Canadian hospital wearing an N95 these days there's a good chance they will insist you to take it off in favour of a "clean" surgical mask with gaps around the sides and nose.

The primary usecase (which happens to me fairly frequently in Javascript) is when you need to operate on a native or library data structure with some function other than its built-in methods.

Some people also find it easier to program in an FP style (separating data and functions) in their app code. It seems to be a matter of neurodiversity.

I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of tech workers to workers at large.

We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.

> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.

What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken...

sure I do. as another comment pointed out, the trend roughly tracks the decoupling of wages from productivity in North America. seems as good of a reason for disillusionment as one could find.

Exactly. This article comes with the typical psychiatrist bias that depression is indication of some personal deficit (cognitive distortions or faulty brain chemistry) when in my personal view, given the state of the world there are many good reasons to be depressed.

Chiming to say that I too have burned out as a result of forced pairing. Will never do it again except on an ad-hoc, limited basis.

Did I say for free? No, I didn't. The idea is that you allow anybody to build more supply, and the price comes down.

Did I make any mention of spending to solve the problem? No, I didn't so quit putting words in my mouth.

Making economic migrants of everyone is not a good solution. Believe it or not, some people have roots in their communities. Not to mention cities are where jobs and amenities are. What, is everybody going to move to Barrie all of a sudden? Terrible idea and 100% lacking in empathy or good sense. Oh also I don't know if you noticed but the housing crisis is national now.

Maybe if the city of Toronto isn't happy with tiny shelters, maybe they should allow new 'proper' houses to be built. Toronto is the sixth most expensive housing market (by income) in the world, yet they still mostly use a 1960's era city plan that forbids dense residential development in most areas. People talk a lot about mental illness and drug addiction, which undoubtedly is part of the problem, but when you have such an extreme cost of living burden for living in a basically mediocre city, I'm not sure why anybody is surprised at the social problems that result.

Not sure why this is so controversial. Man got rich off of strong IP protections & market concentration and is now pushing the same in his "philanthropic" work.

The Kaiser piece is pretty clear -- AZ got an exclusive deal.

Here's Bill Gates on his reasoning for pushing the exclusivity deal. Basically he claims to be the authority on which factories/companies are "capable" and which ones are not.

https://youtu.be/Grv1RJkdyqI?t=564

With that in mind, it's sadly ironic that they ended up going with a company that hasn't been able to convince people that their shot is safe and effective.

As I understand it the Serum Institute of India got access through a partnership with AZ, not through a partnership with Oxford directly.

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2021...

This issue is a little touchy for me because lots of vaccine manufacturers passed over our country (Canada) for manufacturing, because the capacity was "too small for them"

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/every-covid-vaccine-m...

Despite the fact that we apparently had a facility to manufacture millions of doses by the end of 2020.

https://theconversation.com/the-roots-of-canadas-covid-19-va...

And now we're doing really poorly in the vaccination effort. So yes, I wonder how it could have gone if AZ didn't gatekeep access (and bungle the public relations/comms front).

Interestingly, the company that apparently could have manufactured vaccines in Canada has a recent legal conflict with Bill Gates.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5035009/gates-foundation-sues-can...

Given that Bill Gates had a confirmed influence on the decision of Oxford to license exclusively to AZ, who's to say he didn't push AZ to not manufacture at this facility? It's not a far-fetched thing to imagine, given the "vetting" role he claimed in the YT clip I linked.

We'll probably never know, because this backroom exercise of power is not accountable to the general public, though it has serious implications for all of us.

(edited to lump together several comments)

Cry me a river. Oxford was going to open-source the vaccine until Bill Gates convinced them to give an exclusive contract to AZ, to lean on their supposed capacity to manage clinical trials and related administrative issues (even though they aren't a vaccine-focused company).

Not a conspiracy theory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/world/bill-gates-vaccine-...

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine...

There's nothing natural about housing markets. Across the developed world bougie homeowners have been using zoning regulations to restrict supply with immensely lucrative results. I would also like to see you tell someone experiencing housing precarity that these conversations are unnecessary, to their face.

Toronto needs to build more housing, period. It doesn't need to be "smart", it doesn't need to be "iconic", there just needs to be a lot of it and it needs to be close to amenities and jobs. As far as I can tell, the reason this is so difficult is a combination of powerful people making boatloads of money off the restricted supply, and inertia in favour of the low-density zoning that covers most of the city.