skuhn

The McMaster site doesn't show shipping costs, because they package your items and then get the dimensions and weight. They only ship things very fast, and they charge you what that costs. They are optimizing for fast and correct, not cheap.

If you're concerned, you can call or e-mail them to ask for an estimate. It's worth noting that free shipping is never free -- it's either hidden in the item cost, or some corner is being cut.

Rolling out shared library updates to resolve security vulnerabilities is not without its own issues.

The big one, which surprisingly places still manage to fumble due to poor process controls or simple mistakes, is that you have to restart all running processes that use the library after you update it.

I actually prefer to deploy static builds of critical services for this reason, because you already have to know that you're running version 1 build 5 everywhere -- and if everything is build 5, then they all have the fix. You don't also have to check if the process was started after May 5th.

Economic activity is not the be-all, end-all purpose of human life. But even if it was...

Every business opening tomorrow as if there was no pandemic does not mean the economy will magically return to Nov 2019.

People who do not feel safe do not spend money freely. People without financial security tend to not spend on frivolous things. People with crushing medical debt do not contribute to the economy the same way that they used to.

It's OK to want a return to normalcy, but it will only happen through a careful process (which is already not happening). Getting frustrated and saying to hell with caution has no chance of success now, or ever.

Many states are facing insolvency, because expected revenue has declined by as much as 30% [1]. States have "rainy day funds" to cover unforeseen events, but most have between 5-10% of general fund expenditures set aside [2].

States cannot create new money and they cannot declare bankruptcy. Most states also have balanced budget requirements [3].

If you want government support, the federal government is the only entity uniformly capable of creating money and running deficits.

[1] https://www.ncsl.org/Portals/1/Documents/fiscal/Rev-Projecti...

[2] https://taxfoundation.org/2020-state-rainy-day-funds/

[3] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-state...

I hope that even if this situation doesn't eradicate other diseases, it at least pushes us to take more care with infectious disease in general.

Since I've been exposed over the last few months to roughly a million people claiming that COVID19 is no worse than the flu, it prompted me to look up just how many people die or are hospitalized from the flu every year.

US avg annual deaths (prev 9 years): 37,000

US avg annual hospitalizations (prev 9 years): 446,000

Clearly COVID19 is worse than this already (160k deaths, 317k hospitalizations, and more every day).

But put aside the COVID19 comparison, and that is still a lot of people who suffer or die from something that we have tools to prevent. How much of that could be avoided with better flu vaccine uptake, policies that support staying at home when you're sick, and the normalization of wearing masks in public?

Why weren't we already doing all of those things? I only did one of those things, and that feels kind of dumb now.

I'm referring to disenfranchisement by way of disrupting the operation of the mail, which I don't think has been a major focus for quite that long.

Jim Crow laws were much more effective means of disenfranchisement during Reconstruction.

The underlying motivation here is to accomplish two things:

1. Destroy the viability of the post office as a business (a long running campaign)

2. Disenfranchise voters (a relatively recent campaign)

Tens of thousands of people were disenfranchised during the primaries because their ballots were received too late, even if they were postmarked on time. [1]

Tax returns are considered to be submitted on the date of their postmark, but ballots are not. There seems to be an important disconnect here tied to the different incentives for the state.

Dropping ballots off at dropbox makes a lot of sense, but it won't work for everyone. The rules also vary and availability is often poorly communicated. Plus, most people won't expect to have a problem with their ballot being counted until they find out that it wasn't counted.

But the problem doesn't start with submitting your ballot. First you have to successfully register to vote-by-mail (some states require a form to be mailed in), and most importantly you have to actually receive your ballot in time. This also happened during the primaries, and so people had to go vote in person after all (or be disenfranchised). [2]

Lots of things we take for granted will stop working with a failed postal service, but voting is particularly key right now. It is the only path towards attempting to fix the issue at hand.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/13/889751095/signed-sealed-undel...

[2] https://time.com/5874571/new-york-state-general-election/

Yeah, that's coming from these four Fastly VCL variables:

conn_speed: https://developer.fastly.com/reference/vcl/variables/geoloca...

conn_type: https://developer.fastly.com/reference/vcl/variables/geoloca...

proxy_desc: https://developer.fastly.com/reference/vcl/variables/geoloca...

proxy_type: https://developer.fastly.com/reference/vcl/variables/geoloca...

conn_type is interesting to me, I'm not sure how you would distinguish wifi vs. wired based on HTTP header data.

The VCL for it is available at https://gist.github.com/simonkuhn/a380a6fa205db87a3625f26ad0...

vcl_recv and vcl_error are the important bits, the rest is VCL boilerplate from https://developer.fastly.com/learning/vcl/using/ for unused subroutines.

Since most CDNs are already doing GeoIP lookups (for request headers or log entries), you can leverage that to provide the data back in the response body via origin, worker or even CDN edge config.

Programmatically populating the response body, as in the Cloudflare worker example from the post, is better than going to the origin just to echo some headers back in the response. To me, something like Fastly's VCL config language is even simpler. It directly executes on every CDN edge node worldwide upon request.

For example, I just whipped this up on Fastly using VCL. It returns GeoIP as json data for your IP at the root path:

http://geo.zombe.es

Or if you want a particular IP, just append it to the path:

http://geo.zombe.es/2a04:4e42:600::313

You could do the same via query params, headers, etc. Have URL endpoints that only return some of the data, and so forth.

The VCL syntax gets a little gross when you handle quoting strings and assembling json and testing if the string is empty, but it gets the job done.

Of course what you might want from GeoIP data may not be what you get. It's really kind of a useful kludge that gets treated sometimes as a panacea.

This dataset right now thinks that I'm about 5 miles east of my location, but when subnets are repurposed it could be much more significant. And the data sources are always changing, so who knows what it will think tomorrow.

The operative words you seem to be missing are "at the end of this", but fine. Lets look at right now, and put aside notions of "industrialized countries".

1. 538,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths worldwide; 132,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in USA. 24.5% of worldwide deaths in USA.

2. 7.8 billion people worldwide; 328 million people in USA. 4.2% of worldwide population in USA.

Does that ratio seem like cause for concern?

Nice catch. The Iliad doesn't actually concern itself with the end of the Trojan War.

The horse is mentioned briefly in the Odyssey, since it's attributed to Odysseus's cunning wit. Probably the work that describes it most thoroughly is the Aenid, which came hundreds of years after Homer's works or the Little Iliad.

The Honda full-size equivalent is in the Acura lineup in the US. I don't think I have ever seen an Acura at a car rental place though.

One time I had the option in the lot between a Malibu and Impala, and figuring out which one was "better" in person was pretty tough. The overall length difference per Chevy is 7 inches, which seemed largely irrelevant in person. I guess if it all went to the back seat leg room then you have a distinction for a certain market.

For reference, Sonic can be up to 35 inches shorter than a Malibu (depending on style).

No, it isn't easy for me to say this is what needs to be done.

I don't have a job at the moment, I'm trapped in another state, and I started a non profit to distribute hand sanitizer for free in that community -- BECAUSE IT IS STILL NOT AVAILABLE TO EASILY PURCHASE. The Purell factory is literally 10 miles away, and yet we are not where we need to be.

I realize that it totally sucks that we need to do these things in order to safely resume normal society. Wouldn't it be great if we had spent the last 2 months making steady progress on those goals?

http://handsanz.org/

Even worse, rakuten.com is now the former ebates site? And the former buy.com is rakuten.com/shop?

Their branding strategy is garbage.

They should keep factories closed, unless they are engaged in solving one of the four problems that need to be solved in order for things to safely re-open:

1. Producing masks, gloves, face shields

2. Producing tests or test supplies (cotton swabs, reagents, etc.)

3. Things related to contact tracing (not sure what material goods this would need off-hand)

4. Vaccine research (again, nothing they could do)

The choice is not between re-open now or never re-open. If we actually had at least the first 3 things above, re-opening could be done in a controlled and safe manner. We still don't have those things, months later.

All I have to add is this:

If Bernie can't "compromise his values" enough to make political deals to get the nomination, then he would be completely ineffective as president -- where getting your policy enacted requires constant deal making with Congress.

The company may lose money and ultimately fail, but you're still getting paid.

You also get to call yourself an entrepreneur / founder / investor / whatever for your next thing.

The point of these kinds of businesses isn't to build skyscrapers that last 100 years, it's to build a pretty sandcastle, get paid and go do something else when the tide comes in.

It is part of his appeal, and I like a lot of what Bernie has to say. But you can't win if you don't play the game and politics is definitely a game.

Hillary and Biden snaring the nomination ahead of Bernie show how thoroughly the establishment Democrats can school him on politics. His appeal to certain voters is great, but he still has to play the game to some degree.

It's not remotely a coincidence that all of those candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden near-simultaneously -- meanwhile the best Bernie could get was de Blasio and Williamson. Failing to even get Warren to endorse him isn't a failure of his ideology, it's a case of political incompetence.

I hope someone (Warren? others?) echoes a lot of what he has to say and then actually executes within the political system we have today to accomplish those things. Within my lifetime would be nice.

Not exactly to your point, but you raise an excellent reason to never ever use your "personal" account for business things. Google, Amazon, YouTube, it's all the same.

It's all very convenient, until you lose access 10 years of e-mail because of a Chrome extension review.

Your resolver may not always permit this sort of thing, and that would just obfuscate what they're doing a step further which may come across as sneaky.

I doubt it is at all common in end user environments, but unbound for instance can be configured to prevent local IPs from being resolved in other domains. It's a good practice to follow in a datacenter environment if you're connecting out to hostnames you resolve from DNS you don't control.

I do wonder why Bernie didn't vote (and why some people voted against this), but it's also possible that it wouldn't have mattered.

The real voting is often done at the party whip level. If McConnell knew Bernie was going to show up and vote, it's possible that another Republican would have voted nay.

Bernie hasn't voted yet since the senate reconvened May 4th. There has been no explanation that I'm aware of for why he isn't voting.

https://projects.propublica.org/represent/members/S000033/vo...

They tested 7541 people out of 39,082 inmates in quarantine. These numbers aren't inclusive of staff -- 556 tested positive, but how many were tested? Are staff quarantined to prevent spreading the infection out of the prisons?

The most recent information I could find says that Ohio has 48,765 inmates in total. They have quarantined 80% of prisoners and tested 15%. Their infection numbers are likely artificially low due to asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic cases.

Increase production of hand sanitizer, masks, gloves, test kits and other supplies as much as possible. Ensure all medical, food and other essential workers have access now and for the foreseeable future to the supplies they need to perform their jobs safely.

Provide masks and hand sanitizer to every citizen and at a minimum recommend usage at all times outside of the home.

Establish working contract tracing programs, so that spread can be limited.

Once those things have happened (they haven't), re-opening could start to be done safely. Until then, the government's role should be to provide financial, medical and food assistance to the fullest extent possible so that the people and companies who are twiddling their thumbs don't die or go bankrupt while they wait.

The government can literally print money. They could begin distribution tomorrow. They cannot print masks, tests, hand sanitizer, vaccines, gloves, food, etc.

Herd immunity is easier said than done. A portion of the people who become infected require medical intervention, and many parts of the US medical system are inadequate to meet this need. It will take years to get to herd immunity levels through any kind of controlled infection alone, and many will die.

Take a look at the forecasts of hospital bed utilization if 20, 40, 60% of the population were to be infected over a 6, 12, or 18 month period: https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/covid-hospitals

Anywhere on those maps that show red indicates people dying due to hospital resource exhaustion, either from COVID-19 or unrelated health issues. To a lesser degree this is happening in yellow areas as well.

And ProPublica is only considering beds! Medical personnel, supplies and equipment are finite resources as well. Personnel cannot handle 18 months of 200% bed utilization, and they don't have the PPE they need as it is.

There is no easy fix to this situation; we are facing the kind of problem that is best met with thorough preparation, but unfortunately we don't have that.

The government can print money, and implement programs to distribute food and other necessities. They can't print tests or masks or vaccines -- once the resources are put in place, it simply takes time. Realistically, it will be a long time before even one of those three things is in a good place. Probably not this year.

A more achievable goal than herd immunity is to find a workable way to reduce the number of viral carriers and limit transmission while we wait for the tests, masks and vaccines that we need to get society back on track. That requires leadership and coordination, but it especially requires us to accept the seriousness of the situation and behave responsibly.

They build sites, but they also lease space from the same providers as everyone else.

It's also worth noting that sometimes when a company builds a datacenter in a green field situation, it may be working with a datacenter provider on that project. So the company may own it, but they're paying the provider to use their design elements and potentially to operate it.

You're right, AWS does heavily discount at this price point (as do other providers).

Egress fees on the order of 40-50% off list are possible in my experience.

100PB would be $2.1 million per month. You're right that it is a similar order of magnitude of the egress fee.

That still means to exit AWS you have to add 2.5 months of opex to your budget, which will weigh against the perceived benefits of relocating the service out of AWS. That isn't an accident on Amazon's part -- there is a business case why ingress to S3 is free and egress from S3 is not free.

There are also a lot of problems around paying both the old and new provider during the move, so if you aren't very careful you could wind up going from a $2.1 million monthly opex to $9.2 million until the project wraps up. And what projects end on time?

Snowball may speed up your timeframe and reduce costs, but 100PB still costs $3 million to move and you still need to go back and sweep up the data from S3 once you've verified the data is complete.

Imagine migrating 100 PB from S3 to Oracle's object store. First of all, the egress fee will cost you $5,000,000 (no joke). Second, it will take months.

Don't think your early stage startup will ever have that problem?

That's exactly what a lot of other people thought 5-10 years ago, and now they're stuck in S3 which means they need to use EC2 to manipulate that data which means they may as well put it all in AWS because egress fees will eat their lunch.