347 karma · joined October 16, 2014
The one thing I distinctly remember was two of my GMail accounts starting the recovery process. Thankfully, that process apparently gives either 14 or 30 days to stop the recovery and secure my own account. Had I not been connected, that may have been my only saving grace, as I was able to secure those accounts and subsequently use them to recover other compromised accounts.
The larger lesson for me was to always use TOTP tokens where possible over SMS, and to completely disable SMS recovery for accounts that didn't have a delay on SMS-only recovery.
I'd wager the majority of people wouldn't have a reason to submit a revised return. And if the federal government generated your return, hopefully that would give them reason to automatically exclude you from audit, (ideally) reducing the burden of auditors.
I highly doubt this. We had the same thing happen in 2011; in theory the increased rates should have paid for winterization then, especially given how another similar storm would have put those who had winterized properly at an advantage in providing a limited resource with increased demand. That's especially true given that various figures put the cost of winterizing gas wells or wind turbines at 10% or less of the cost of the system without it [1]. But that didn't happen. It seems to me that gambling that your plant can produce during increased demand with no additional investment has worked out well for many companies [2]. To me that signals an incentive for power produces to actively work _against_ winterization regulation, as you could potentially make record profits on the backs of others' misfortunes, and if no one else winterizes you have less sure competitors to potentially drive the price down during increased demand.
> So enough to cause some people to turn off their electric heat and drain their pipes and take a vacation to Cancun because it's cheaper than staying and paying that electric bill.
This is predicated on the assumption that people were able to leave their houses, don't have pets / elderly family members that can't be moved, that they could all get flight tickets, that airlines were still actively running, that airline tickets wouldn't see surge pricing due to demand, and so many other factors.
I killed everything in my house save for my laptop to work as best as I could, my fridge, and my gas heat turned down to 62. At the highest rate they posted I would have been paying $180/day just for those. I can afford that, being a two person household who both work full time at significantly above average rates for the area. I would wager most people around here would not be able to pay ~$700 over 4 days just for a minimal amount of power on top of other storm damage costs, nor would it be less expensive or even possible to pack up and leave. Then they would be faced with "do we try to go without water for 4+ days" or risk freezing pipes, or paying hundreds of dollars just for the luxury of not freezing.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I believe if the options are "pay an extra-ordinate rate" or "potentially freeze to death" then the system itself is broken.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/20/texas-power-grid-win.... [2] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/jerry-jone...
From what we've seen, yes, the mortality rate of COVID19 is similar to the flu. However, the mortality rate of the flu is without other interventions aside from the flu vaccine. In a regular flu season the public doesn't social distance; they tend to group even closer indoors because of the cold weather. The US has never normalized mask wearing; people in the beginning stages of the flu will go about their lives, and work places actively encourage people to continue to work in-person unless they are too unwell to do so. I would wager most people in the US don't improve their hygiene during a regular flu season either. We've done all that (to an extent) with COVID19 and we've barely managed to make an impact.
Look at some other important data points. Average US flu deaths / year: 36k [1]. COVID19 deaths in the US in only 11 months: 445k. [2] If we assume the first COVID19 death in the US was in early February as some report, that's over 12x the deaths/year than the flu. If current trends hold (~3k deaths/day for the next 27 days) until March 2 (the first officially confirmed COVID19 death in the US), we'd be at 526k deaths, or more than 14x as many deaths/year as the flu. If this ran at this rate for the entirety of the next 365 days, we'd hit nearly 1.1 million deaths, or over 30x as many deaths/year as the flu. That's assuming we don't have any massive improvements with vaccine rollout.
The contagiousness of the two is also orders of magnitude different. Flu is estimated to have an R0 value of ~1.5 [3]. Some estimates put COVID19 at an R0 value of 5.7 [4]. (Remember, R0 is without interventions). The way to estimate "herd immunity" rates is the Critical Vaccination Threshold formula: (1 - (1/R0)) / E, where E is the effectiveness of a vaccine. With an R0 of 1.5 and an efficacy of 67% (from your second link. Remember, this is the effectiveness of the vaccine, not the effectiveness in a real-world population, which factors in vaccine rates), we would need roughly 50% of the population to vaccinated to start preventing illnesses in those that are unvaccinated. With an R0 of 5.7 and an efficacy of 94% (Pfizer vaccine), COVID 19 would require nearly 88% of the population vaccinated to achieve the same rate. Even using the lower-quoted R0 value of 2.5 (R-value _with_ other interventions, such as social distancing, mask wearing, improved hygiene), we'd need nearly 64% of the population vaccinated.
You're also ignoring the fact that, despite our interventions, there are currently 3 other strains of COVID19 spreading, all of which are speculated to be both more contagious _and_ more deadly. [5] While the current vaccines are _effective enough_ against the strains, there's nothing saying a new variant couldn't emerge that is resistant to the current vaccines, starting a new pandemic. And you're also ignoring the long-term cases of COVID19 [6] as well as the long term effects post-infection outside of death [7], including chronic cardiovascular damage, kidney damage, neurological effects, among many others.
So yes, the mortality rates are similar, but literally nothing else is. We don't know enough about this virus to let it run rampant, and the world should have done more from the get-go to keep it contained.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
[2]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
[3]: https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19...
[4]: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID
[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Longe...
I have noticed though that your work space doesn't need to be fully dedicated though, it just needs to not be a leisure room. We adopted a Belgian Mal mix in February that needed supervision throughout the day, so I transitioned from my office to my dining room. We don't use that outside of the occasional game night or other gathering, and the table makes a nice makeshift desk with a laptop. I found working from there comparable to working from my office.
Software is another big thing overlooked by a lot of companies, in my experience. I've bought a Jetbrains account to use for my development because the effective $12.50/month I spend on it is nothing in comparison to the productivity benefit I get from it.
That's counter to our team, where we basically have the "policy" of less disruptions is better. Any discussion item is pushed into an e-mail or chat unless absolutely necessary. If there are items that are deemed to need a voice meeting that are remotely similar then we'll move them up or push them back to combine them to reduce the need to be on a call. 99% of our communication is done via e-mail or a group chat room, and the expectation is that an e-mail can go without a response for 24 hours, and a chat room message can go without a response for at least 1 hour. Anything urgent goes through a direct message, and the expectation is that you check the receivers status to make sure they're aren't in a "do-not-disturb" status before hand. Only time that is ignored is if something mission critical is occurring, like a systems outage. When you can limit 99% of your distractions to something you can check real quick once every hour or so, your productivity goes way up.
I can also say from experience that having your own space, and good equipment, is severely overlooked by people. I used to work entirely in my office, but we rescued a Belgian Malinois a few months before the lockdowns started so I had been working from a chair in my living room since the office is where our cats hang out for most of the day, and I wanted to give them time to adjust to the puppy as well. Even outside of the new puppy distraction, it's really easy to just sink into your "comfort" area and get distracted or stop working. Once she was housebroken, I started working out of our dining room instead so I could keep an eye on her but still not invade the office until she was better trained, and I noticed a significant productivity boost. GCP Grey has a great video on this ("Lockdown Productivity: Spaceship You"), and the idea is that even though the dining room isn't a dedicated office, it's still a place that you don't subconsciously associate with relaxing, so you still treat it like an office.
I don't have kids or a work from home spouse, so I don't have any advice there.
The process described in the article seems a little different than the ones we used in Texas (Dallas County). We have our registration verified and check in, and then are given a paper ballot. You put that into the voting machine, cast your ballot which is recorded electronically on the machine, then printed on the paper ballot and returned to you. You're told to inspect it for accuracy, then deposit it in a _separate_ tabulating machine, which scans it and displays what it recorded when reading your vote, tabulates your vote electronically, and stores the paper backup in a locked deposit box inside the machine. From my understanding, if anything goes wonky during this process and you notice it, you can have the ballot invalidated and receive another to cast. At the end of the day, the counts are printed and stored along with the memory cards on every machine, and those and the secure ballot boxes are all stored with tamper evident seals.
So you have the electronic count on the voting machine from the memory card, the printed count from the voting machine generated at the end of the day, the electronic count on the tabulating machine from its memory card, the printed count from the tabulating machine generated each day, as well as the paper ballots as a backup, which from my understanding are re-tabulated en-masse on larger and faster machines after the election to get a second count as part of the certification process. All data points have to match. None of the machines are connected to the internet, so you'd have to gain physical access to them or the memory cards, and anything done would have to match the counts on all the other associated machines and receipts, plus the paper ballot backups. The Secretary of State also generates a list of voters who cast ballots each day by county and voting location based on when you first check in to vote, so that's another publicly auditable list that would have to match that is not related to the voting machines themselves.
Paper ballots are definitely more simple and probably just as secure, if not more, if handled properly. However, having multiple points of redundancy is invaluable to help quickly identify issues and ensure everything matches over multiple steps of the process.
One thing on automated tools: getting a good result is decently tied in to the structure of your project in my experience. A common scenario I've seen is projects relying on requiring other files as part of their business logic (IE, parent file A includes file B that processes and renders content vs file B including file A that defines helpers and what not). This is especially common when projects use something like index.php?file=whatever for URLs. Most automated tools and IDEs will struggle with this and false-flag undefined variables, etc, because there is no hard include path. There are a lot of ways to resolve this but it depends on your project.
Also, PHP 7 is much more aggressive about warnings on types and various other things. Unless you adjust your error reporting settings, you'll likely see a ton of these when you finally switch. I personally enable them on dev so I can clean them up, and keep them reporting to Rollbar on production.
I assume you could downscale the display to like a 1080p version to save costs as well.
2) Current studies show roughly somewhere between 10-20% of hospitalized patients ending up with heart damage, increasing their future risks of heart attacks and strokes.[2][3] Up to 36% of hospitalized patients are displaying neurological symptoms, with possible damage.[4] Up to 60% are ending up with ARDS which may be permanent.[5]
Extracting that with current numbers, assuming we had a 50% infection rate, 15% hospitalization rate [6][7], and a 1% death rate, we'd have ~1.5 million dead, ~22.5 million hospitalized, ~3.375 million with heart damage, ~8 million with neurological issues, ~13.5 million with ARDS.
Obviously many of these would overlap, but it sounds pretty devastating to me.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#the-scale-of-...
[2]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
[3]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[4]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...
[5]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
[6]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...
[7]: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Not true, we're squarely between several 2nd and 3rd world countries: https://www.statista.com/chart/21176/covid-19-infection-dens...
> until the recent protests (both left and right) began
Not true, current research does not link any outbreaks to protests (BLM protests at least), mostly due to the fact that protesters were wearing masks and were outside: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/07/01/research-d...
> Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine.
Not true, Sweden is sitting about 150 deaths / million higher than the US right now: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data?country=USA~SWE#...
> What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR?
Largely irrelevant, because nurses and doctors should be wearing PPE, are trained to work in infectious environments, work in buildings designed to prevent disease vectors, and places that are sanitized regularly. You should see significantly less cases in healthcare than you would elsewhere.
And just in general, the economic impact of letting the virus run rampant would be astronomical. Even outside of deaths, those with severe cases are ending up with likely permanent damage to their hearts, lungs, or kidneys, which will require increased medical costs and likely people who can no longer work.
Hospitals are designed to prevent infectious disease spread. They plan for mass sanitation, employees wearing PPE, minimizing disease vectors. My wife's hospital has changed their policy to no outside visitors even on non-COVID floors. You can't do that in a school.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying to downplay the sacrifice essential employees are making right now; they absolutely deserve hazard pay among so much else for putting themselves at risk for the benefit of everyone else. I asked my wife at the beginning of this if she wanted to quit, and we'd find a way to make it work, and she said "I'm a nurse, I signed up for this." That's just her mindset; she's been trained to work in a contagious environment and her hospital has many ways to help keep her safe. Asking teachers to take on that responsibility in addition to what we already ask of them, while being inside a petri dish of disease spreading is 100% irresponsible to everyone involved.
A few other school districts around us have cancelled their in-person plans, at least for a few months, so hopefully her district does the same.
If those companies decided that they were going to stop selling their current stock of masks completely until they sold for a higher price, that would be price gouging.
I received offers from several others, some never called back. Ended up turning all those down though, as I had an interview with someone who helped step through the few mistakes I made as a learning process during the interview. One particular question I remember was basically building front-end components with Javascript, and my example had a loop with a write call in it. He mentioned he would compile the markup in the loop, then write it after it was finished, and asked why that would be better or worse. Had to think on it for a minute, but came up with a trade-off between more memory usage but less DOM writes, resulting in faster rendering. Worked that into the next coding example too, since it was similar but more complex. After the interview, when they called to schedule a follow up interview before I even made it home, I realized he was more concerned about whether I would ask for help, learn, and not make the same mistakes again. Worked there, learned a ton, became a senior dev just few years out of college, now I manage a suite of products for my current company. I don't think I would have gotten that kind of opportunity had I not had that first manager and job, so I strive to emulate that in my interviews.
One of my favorite questions is something like "describe a crisis that occurred and the steps you took to resolve it," and give an example of one of my many stories of pushing bad code to production, having a server crash, etc, etc. I love the question because it involves no coding, no memorization, no regurgitating of info. Instead, it resolves around the person being a hero, which in my experience usually gets them relaxed, comfortable, and talking. You also learn a lot about their thought process: How did they first notice the issue? What was their process for triaging it? How did they debug it? If something involved in it was out of their wheelhouse did they go to someone else more experienced for help, or did they search for similar problems online to try and narrow it down? Did they delegate tasks if the workload was too high for them? Once it was fixed what was the procedure it went through for testing / verification? Did you monitor the issue afterwards to make sure it didn't come back? Once it was deployed, did you search for similar issues affecting your other systems? Did it ever come up again in new code and you were able to identify it before it was deployed?
Obviously not all of these will apply to everyone, but the open-endedness of the question means you can probe a bit here and there throughout their story and gain a ton of relevant insight. And most importantly, it answers the question of "when things get tough, can you keep a cool head and think critically?" I can teach code, data structures, algorithms, whatever, to anyone. But the difference between someone who is always trying to learn and grow, takes initiative, asks for help, etc, and someone who just wants to do the bare minimum is night and day.
Side benefit is this usually takes up several minutes of an interview so they can't be used on BS questions like the one you mentioned.
That being said, I'd also like to point out that "abolish the police" isn't saying "remove police entirely." It is saying that police, in their current state, should not exist. It's saying that police not be the ones who handle someone having a psychotic episode, and that part of the money going towards police should fund trained healthcare professionals instead. That police shouldn't be handling the homelessness problem, and we could redirect some of their funding to create public housing instead of throwing them in jail over and over. We shouldn't have police handle truant students, and arresting them certainly shouldn't be the only option available if they continue to do so.
It comes down to the fact that police forces and unions have too much power. And of course that leads into the larger discussion of the fact that police can say "we thought this person was committing a crime" and steal everything in your car with almost no recourse to get it back. That police have incentives to make any given arrest at the end of their shift to accrue overtime, and that most police organizations have no limits on the amount they can accrue. That police forces are getting increasingly militarized even as violent crime is going down worldwide. Or that they can shoot and kill almost anyone and say "well I felt that my life was in danger" and that's the end of the discussion. And that if in the unlikely event they are fired, they still keep their pension and can be hired a precinct over with no repercussion. That there are no means for reasonable oversight of these organization to make sure they are acting in the public's best interest. That police unions actively fight to keep all of these policies in place instead of working to build trust in their organizations so that we don't have these problems in the first place.
It's not a discussion of "I only want the parts of the government that I like to have funding," it's an objective look at an arm of the government that has far more power than it should by pushing every existing law and statute to the limit while everyone looks the other way, and an objective view at what society-benefiting services we could fund (that would reduce the need for police in the first place) if we chose to fund them instead of massive police forces. If we had an education system where you had one teacher the entirety of your career, who had no oversight on the curriculum they taught, could assign grades at random based on how they liked each student, that was unable to be terminated, and if they did lost absolutely nothing, you can bet that we'd be here protesting that as well.
Meanwhile, I setup composer in a docker file in 4 lines (download, run, move to bin, cleanup), and it works everywhere for any user, respects permissions, etc. I don't think I've run into a single error on composer that wasn't something like a mis-typed command, package, or a host being down.
I distinctly remember writing a project in PHP that allowed users to create custom reports and flows based on values returned from the data models, and for whatever reason we decided to use PHPDoc tags to determine what routines would be exposed to the public for use in these tools. We of course eventually updated this to use DB definitions instead because it was an asinine idea to need to parse a bundle of models and other files every time you needed to pull in definitions.
It's basically a "there could potentially be a causal link here; needs way more research" type of study.
https://twitter.com/GaetanBurgio/status/1241201751916568576
https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/12414295448478638...