secstate

I'm in the same boat as OP. The entire childhood vaccination schedule is insane because it lacks longitudinal studies demonstrating effectiveness and safety.

Why is varicella in the schedule? The plague upon our house that is chicken pox will hopefully be annihilated one day, only to reappear in a much more painful form later in life as shingles because you need a constant re-up of the varicella vaccine to keep it at bay. What the actual fuck is going on here and who controls the schedule?

Thank you for bringing attention this. In a language many software engineers would understand, I would call this an antipattern that encourages non-theological religious belief.

I don't know the best forum for suggesting something like this without sounding like a monster, but to play devil's advocate for a moment:

What do the SE Asian countries that responded well to Covid-19 have in common?

A: They were more severely impacted by outbreaks of other influenza/coronavirus diseases in the last 20 years.

Is there any benefit to a population having had experience responding to outbreak occasionally so they have the ability to respond in situations like we find ourselves now? There are physicians working who've never actually encountered outbreaks of contagions before. There are politicians who have no clue what it means to lead in a time of contagion. Is it possible that in our pursuit of avoiding suffering in the near-term we set ourselves up for more and greater suffering in the future?

Please, for the love of god, vaccinate yourself and encourage your loved ones to be vaccinated.

And now I await the flood of downvotes because I dared to bring up an untouchable discussion point on hacker news.

Best part of the whole story was Piotr Grabowski's comment at the bottom. Seems the most illuminating aspect of this story is how disconnected American's are from European history. I don't mean this in a dismissive way. I mysefl, being American, am hoplessly unaware of large parts of European history. But the origin of the author's last name along is actually really easy to understand if one is actually familiar with the culture of the region (if Piotr is to be believed).

Not sure if you meant this sarcastically, but if that happens, fuck it. This is the world we made. To pretend we have free-market capitalism while propping up shitty business practices with tax-payer sponsored bailouts is not free-market capitalism. Institute laws about foreign governments buying up bankrupt assets or something. But for the love of god don't just bail them out.

This is the same as scolding a child hitting their sibling and then giving them a fucking cookie. Then when they keep hitting people, at least have the sense not to be confused why they don't learn.

For sure!

So if I'm reading an article about the fall of the Roman Empire, and I learn about how modern scholarship does not talk in terms like "fall" much anymore, but rather civilization transformation, I might make a new stub article titled `civilization` and then another one for `civilization transformation`

Now, if I read a story about Asoka's Empire in what is now India, and I read about how it underwent a collapse, I might tag it with `civilization transformation` as well.

Another story about the nature of modern civilization and the travails of people who treat their kids as a personal project to "build" as opposed to a living being to nurture and encourage, I would tag that with `civilization` but not `civilization transformation`

Ripgrep'ing my org files for "civilization" would turn up all three of these backlinks. Grepping does not understand context. But I understand context. While `civilization` is part of `civilization transformation`, I don't want `civilization transformation` surfaced for every search of `civilization`

This is a rather contrived example with some obvious issues, but I suppose a good analogy would be that you can drag fish for scallops and get every other living thing off the bottom in your net, increasing the work to clean it out. Or you can dive for individual scallops and take longer but have less work to do when you surface. Both methods have merit, but one provides a much cleaner signal.

Practically speaking, I USE my Roam note's backlinks. While I could grep my previous notes, in practice I never did because it was too much work.

Bald eagles are everywhere in Maine now. Near a tidal estuary near us we counted 25 sitting in trees watching the smelt run.

I'll say that I've been using org-mode and it's agenda to manage todos and take notes for a long time, and Roam is whole other animal. The problem I've had with Rifle is that words can mean different things in different contexts. Rifle finds every time I used the word "depression" regardless of how I used it. Roam gives you any easy way to add just a little extra symantics to your notes that dramatically increases the signal in the backlinks, and astronomically improves the graph view.

As a public official in a small town, I have thought about doing this before. The legal issues always come up. But I also think that the people upset with the exposure after emailing public officials maybe don't fully understand that anything you communicate to a public official is defacto public and can be requested from anyone at anytime. The alternatives to that default are terrible for public confidence in officials.

Pretty sure the ban on microwaves was an electrical fire risk, not them being predatory about students eating at the dining hall. Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like warming up some soup?

Define "came back from the collapse of the Roman Empire".

We only have a few thousand years of recorded human history as a benchmark, but the "Dark Ages" weren't as dark as people think they were. They simply lacked large central authorities with state-sponsored violence used to maintain control.

I would put forward that the biggest hurdle most humans have to get over, and this goes really for most modern societies, is putting preservation before perseverance.

I don't intend to come off as a nihilist, but I suppose there are also very few new thoughts under the sun. The status quo is an illusion in our minds, and to even begin to place any one part of human history in an objective rank of better or worse misses the trajectory of life as we understand it. Evolution does not promise better, it promises continued existence.

Climate change is a human problem, not an Earth problem. Civilization collapse is a me and you problem, not a human problem. To the extent that we put the burden of preservation on ourselves we risk missing the point of perseverance that all life around us demonstrates every day. The unique gift humans give to that equation, which no one can yet explain why we have this gift, is to bring both logic and compassion to our continued existence. Let's remember to keep logic and compassion in balance and live our lives as though we were not going to live forever.

Except that as my sister discovered after moving to the Loop in Chicago, public transportation is great until you need to depend on it. Work doesn't care if you're chronically late because of chronically late trains. Maybe other cities are better here, but before long she was spending 45 minutes commuting 20 miles in a car because at least then she could choose to give herself more time, and swing by the store on the way home.

Full caveat, I live on a homestead much like this story (except we still haven't gotten around to taking down the two dilapidated structures on our property). I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth. This is especially true when I think about the number of SUVs and trucks I see when I go to Boston, sigh.

Oh my. This does appear to be a path towards Marxism. You also missed the call for 10-page "solutions" to municipal and regional government problems.

Docsy doesn't break keyboard scrolling in Qutebrowser. Tract does not work for me at all. Also, while I'm sure it's configurable, the neon pink is burning my eyes in a dark room and constrasts terribly with bright white.

Good luck getting most of the crowd here to understand this perspective. I applaud your attempt at encouraging people to stop and think about things, but most people here seem to have grown up well protected from difficult things and think that if they try hard enough all pain and struggle can be removed from the path of humans through time.

I just finished my chicken slaughter for the season; it being fall up in the Northern Hemisphere. I did my best to make sure the chickens didn't suffer too much, but killing is not a perfect science. I do know that they were really well taken care of compared to the wild birds around us for the last three months.

I would never wish Guinea worm on anyone. I have first-hand experience with worm-based parisites and the pain/suffering they bring. It's awful. But life is a cycle, and belief in eradication of anything as a solution to suffering is, I believe, evil in it's truest sense.

That's fair. But, they also haven't said anything publicly about the keyboard being shit, despite two attempts now to make it not (with middling results). All this means is that the Mac Pro was a complete failure, while the MBP keyboard is only a train wreck with no casualties. And don't even get me started on the touchbar, which you may have noticed, no one has bothered to copy yet :)

I think I might just be done with Apple. That culture of saying nothing and the surprising customers with things is like betting in Vegas. And unfortunately for Apple, the house always wins. They can repair the damage of the Mac Pro debacle with a new Mac Pro, but they haven't owned the train wreck of a keyboard on the Macbook Pro. Sure, they might be ready to hit it big on a double down on black, but in the meantime, my Lenovo keyboard is a delight.

These are too funny: https://www.empr.com/home/features/the-strangest-and-most-ob...

Choice selection:

V91.07X - Burn Due to Water Skis on Fire(?!)

W61.42XA. Struck By Turkey, initial encounter. If a duck is involved, there's a code for that too. (W61.62X)

R46.1. Bizarre Personal Appearance.

I love historical pieces about technology. There's so much new and shiny all the time in tech, it's nice to reflect on where we've been.

Makes me want to re-watch Bryan's talk at Monktoberfest a few years ago on oral tradition in tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw

The point isn't that Chrome doesn't do things to help privacy. But having a monoculture web built around Blink is terrible. We know this from experience with IE. Brave uses Blink. Chromium uses Blink. IE now uses Blink.

I've been working remotely in various forms for nearly a decade, while also living in a rural area.

Organizing coder groups is hard, but one of the most interesting things I've discovered is that you don't get to be as picky about the specifics of technology. A hacker group (which is in a bit of down period right now), had a bunch of hardware guys, an active member of the clang community, a few Haskell/FP curious guys and someone who mostly worked in network device manufacturing. Really, really neat group of people, with even a few women. What you don't get are your hyper-focused Python groups or groups dedicated to frameworks like Rails, which I always thought was probably a net-gain.

Again, pitchforks down -- devil's advocate, but why is the topic not open for any discussion at all? Isn't that what defines a religion?

I dunno. Stuxnet and the general use of networked computers to manage things like nuclear reactors or power distribution networks would beg to differ.

I understand the serious issue of ensuring immunization. But you do realize how your comment might come off on the fascist side of liberty, right?

I don't think OP is referring to a touch keyboard, but rather that the keycaps of each key would be one part of a larger multi-touch surface. As your finger left one key you could sort of "guess" the direction it was going and have something close to one big multi-touch panel that was composed of smaller surfaces. But I could be wrong as well.

While I generally prefer optimism to pessimism, this comment seems horrifyingly accurate. We may escape to new planets, we may learn to live under the sea. Humans will likely persist for a longer time than you suggest here because we're feisty motherfuckers who are programmed to survive.

BUT when you consider how long the lizard kings owned the planet, we are but a drop in the bucket now. The thin veil of oxygen on this planet will shake us like a cold when we use it up. And like an abusive husband, we'll be stuck holding a sad empty hull of defensive behavior and anger that wont bring back ecological balance.

> I and society are not compelling you to do anything, but I and also society at large can certainly comment on it.

I think this is the root issue here. We have freedom of association, but there should be no expectation that there will be no social commentary when you exercise that freedom.

For my part, I have a theory that polyamory has historically been marginalized except for in fairly small, homogenous cultures, might be due to the fact that when a polyamorus relationship fails there are many more people intimitaly tied to the fall out. In a monogamous relationships there's generally only two people so emotionally invested as to be damaging. Thus, in a community there are more emotionally detatched people available to help move on. All just a theory though.

You can try: pip install worldcup

And then: watch -n 60 worldcup today

And just make the font in the terminal window huge :)

Um, regarding GitLab or BitBucket, I'm pretty sure Atlassian owns BitBucket, and the idea of them being acquired seems hilariously low given they've almost always been profitable and never relied on the pump-and-dump-err-acquired method of Bay Area startups.

See, but with Disney, at least there's an outside chance they try an Old Republic movie. So long as Lucas held the keys, nothing at all was going to be made except for cartoons mistakingly marketed at children. And books that had a limited audience.

My question to you: Have they thrown it away by making Solo? It all still exists, and they're apparently full-steam ahead making new products with that IP.