tdfx

If it makes you feel better, Google doesn't have a second gold vein yet, either.

There's tons of qualified people that are unable to find work simply because of their immigration status. Having work permission in the US is a massive economic advantage so it makes the situation of Americans who throw away that gift they were born into that much more jarring and hard to sympathize with.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine has attempted to hire homeless people on multiple occasions to help him in residential demolition projects (no clean clothes, resume, or shower necessary). In one instance, he scheduled work for the following day and zero out of 8 people showed up. I'm sure there's homeless people that would like to work their way of the situation, but I don't think they are in the majority. Any solutions to this problem need to be more realistic about the motivations and intentions of the group they're trying to assist.

Because a certain subset of people loves to advocate for disadvantaged people so long as the personal cost to themselves is zero.

I'm not sure why criticizing politicians who are weaponizing homeless populations against local residents to sway public opinion is lacking empathy. If anything, it's dignifying them as people who should not be used as pawns for a political agenda.

We just started planning our transition, as well. This was handled so poorly I can't imagine anyone would ever plan to start a new project on their platform.

Sorry, looking for numbers in the United States.

There was a "truth world" when interconnectivity between average people was low and narratives were controlled by a select few that dominated or had influence over the media. Now that there's more edges in the graph due to social media and the internet, there's more competition of narratives and we're seeing the social effects of that.

Except no one has been able to come to any consensus on what "disinformation" is and isn't. For most, "disinformation" means "doesn't support my political narrative". Sure, there's extreme cases that are obvious, but the recent big tech censorship scandals have proven that no one has been able to draw the line correctly.

I highly recommend Notion for building a knowledge base at your organization. We have one section dedicated to company-wide knowledge, and another section dedicated to various tasks. Any recurring task should be documented fully, with screenshots or a screen recording. The upfront time investment of doing this allows you to really let go of the burdensome stuff. For any work that isn't creative or specialized, you really shouldn't do it yourself longer than it takes to document and delegate it.

Once you've got the workflow in place, finding an assistant is really just a process of elimination. You can easily find someone with C1 English skills for less than $10/hour on Upwork.

You'll need to filter through a bunch of bad ones to get to a good one, but again, this is an upfront time investment. Establish expectations early and fire quickly at the first sign of issues. Trying to "make it work" is worse than accidentally losing a good candidate.

I would also encourage you to post it as a full-time position, as you don't want to be competing with other clients (you still will, but if you're their primary professional focus that pays the rent, you won't lose out in most deadline situations).

I don't think there's enough investigative power to find all the people who were abusing the system. The level of fraud that I personally witnessed of people filing hundreds of PPP loans for non-existent businesses was in the high 7-figure range, and that was just 2 guys I happened to hear of. There were likely hundreds of scammers doing the same thing in every major city, each stealing millions of dollars each.

I don't think the most perverse behavior we've seen in the CDC has a been a result of political pressure from the executive branch. They seemed to be fairly effective at maneuvering around the Trump administration's attempts to influence their policy. Like most people, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was on the "better safe than sorry" side of things and was generally supportive of their recommendations.

Some of the rules have never made much sense, particularly in regards to masking in restaurants and who was going to have to enforce those rules, but also the insistence on vaccine mandates that filtered down in very logically inconsistent ways to the local level. In an effort to prevent anti-vax conspiracy theorists from having a thread to pull on, they maintained public messaging that was borderline deceitful about the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing reinfection and encouraged ridiculous local regulations like showing vaccine cards to enter establishments. This mirrored the deceitful nature of the "only medical staff need masks" messaging at the beginning of the pandemic to prevent a mask supply shortage.

The turning point for me was Omnicron, as it was very quickly apparent this was a distinct, new disease that had a different risk profile than previous variants. But for what appears to be face-saving measures, no guidance was updated and it took months for them to concede that there were other metrics more important than case counts.

The insistence of continually extending the federal travel mask mandate is a case in point: I don't know of anyone who believes that the loose paper and cloth masks worn by most of the general public (sometimes covering nose and mouth, more often not) are actually producing a substantial effect in reducing transmission in indoor spaces, and AFAIK it's well understood that anyone at high risk of serious infection is well protected with a properly fitted N95 mask, especially in a well ventilated space like an airplane. At no point has there been a focus on educating people on the efficacy of different types of masks, just a continual hammering of the "mask up" narrative, treating people as too stupid to understand the difference.

For what appears to be ass-covering behavior on their part, they have focused on maintaining a consistency of messaging that ignores new data and and discredits any opposing points of view, even from other qualified members of the medical community. They are more focused on projecting authority and consistency than honestly handling nuance and it's become pretty obvious that is not the key to building trusted institutions.

I'm not saying disband the CDC, tear down the building, and exile Fauci. I'm simply saying that we need to recognize that the approach that was taken here did not work correctly and has resulted in less institutional trust than we started with and that we need to learn from our mistakes.

You are absolutely correct from a theoretical standpoint. Completely neutral, independent medical experts should, on average, make better health decisions than an uninformed populace.

The problem is when we transfer those assumptions to the real world, all of the most important adjectives in that prior sentence start to fall apart. The managers in the CDC are not neutral or independent. They are by and large bureaucrats who have professional reputations, career trajectory, office politics, and other competing incentives that compete and often conflict with their stated goal of making the "best health decisions" for everyone.

This has resulted in the absurd patchwork of logically inconsistent mask and vaccine rules that we've all be subjected to for the past 2 years. For me, this has firmly demonstrated that the structure of these institutions and their methods of public communication have lost the public trust and we cannot give them broad, sweeping powers.

I think you're shooting the messenger here. OP was explaining the incentives for the behavior we're seeing, not excusing it.

Sorry if it came off that way, but what was intended is that if boarding school is an option you want for your children then the parents are not tied to any one place geographically.

I have it configured so that the touch bar just shows F keys at all times. It's a really technologically advanced row of F keys for me, only difference being this extra advancement has no tactile feedback.

When the kids are younger, they don't really need to stick with a specific curriculum throughout the year. As they get older, I imagine the need to dictate your schedule around school increases. And if they're at a boarding school, that really frees up your planning.

> I’ve generally found it much better to mount these into the filesystem and read from there.

Is there a standardized/best practice way to do this? Some convention for file names or format?

There are companies like TriNet that hire your workers directly on W2 and administer all the payroll and benefits for you. You then just pay TriNet directly instead of doing payroll yourself.

That's just HR being lazy. The process for handling it is an afternoon of filling out some state forms and handing them off to the payroll company.

It's actually pretty economical to have a second home in Latin America, with copies of all your creature comforts there. Kids get multicultural friends, new language, and much wider perspective on the world.

I think it's pretty widely accepted at this point that Hunter Biden repeatedly attempted to peddle the influence of his father for personal profit. Whether he was ever successful at influencing his father or whether his father participated is less clear, but the emails from his laptop don't paint an encouraging picture.

You just put the problem into focus. Trump pushing the lab leak hypothesis and using the term "China virus" is indisputably a xenophobic dog whistle to a racist subset of his base. But that doesn't mean the lab leak hypothesis and any discussion of it is racist, and based on what's been uncovered since, it's certainly not a baseless accusation.

Trump has used this tactic effectively many times in the past: he says something that makes sense ("we need border security") in such a racist and distasteful way that causes the opposition to kneejerk react against whatever policy he's proposing, forcing them to take a position that's at odds with common sense ("border walls are racist!"). It's possible he may have had some classified information about the lab leak being a feasible story, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was just one of the thousands of things he blabbers uncontrollably about and this particular one luckily happened to have some truth to it.

I don't know who Alex Berenson is or what he's said about this topic but another example you could use is "limiting the dissemination" of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which also has now returned to the news as a viable story despite being buried during the election cycle.

I don't really care about the details of these stories, it doesn't affect me if the virus came from a lab or how deep the corruption runs in the Biden family. But any rational person without a political agenda has to agree that the censorship system as it exists is ripe for abuse by bad actors. These two examples in particular completely changed my viewpoint on moderation and I no longer see Facebook or Twitter fighting "misinformation" as a good thing given how easily they can be manipulated into denying valid information. They simply cannot be trusted to identify what is or isn't misinformation.

There was a time when you weren't allowed to say that the SARS-COV-2 might've leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. That's the most prominent, indefensible example of moderation gone awry and proof that the censorship model can be successfully abused by bad actors to suppress potentially valid opposing views. Imagine how many other issues have been suppressed but haven't reached the level of visibility that issue did.

I'm scared to see what your sanitized world would look like. Some of the most interesting art, music, and personal perspective has come from the consumption of the substances you deride as unnecessary and destructive.

> Since then, tdfx and others have been launching a barrage of red herrings to somehow undermine and misdirect away from this correct point

The original point is an interesting example of being correct, but also misleading in that it paints getting the vaccine after natural infection as the best course of action. It has benefits, but probably not as many immune benefits as having a second asymptomatic infection after the original one.

I'm not anti-vaccine at all, but the CDC presents the vaccine to everyone in every circumstance as the optimal course of action and it's very clear the science on that is not settled. Blanket statements and their inability to acknowledge edge cases are the reason their credibility has been so badly eroded in the past few years. In their quest not to give anti-vax people a thread to pull on, they've treated the public as too stupid to understand nuance and created an even larger distrust than they would've had to begin with.

Neither the vaccine or infection will protect against reinfection indefinitely. That much I believe everyone is in agreement with. If you had natural infection or the vaccine a year ago or more, you will likely be reinfected with the most recent strain, typically with mild or no symptoms. My point about the study was that it specifically selecting people who were recently vaccinated vs. people whose natural exposure was the prior year. Of course the vaccinated people whose immune systems were recently exposed to the spike protein had lower reinfection rates.

I think government work culture is handicapping the salaries more than anything else. If a consultant comes in for a year at $200/hour, the government ends their contract when they're finished with them. When the government hires someone at $50k/year, they are stuck with that person pretty much as long as that person wants to continue working there. There's a common joke with civilian defense employees that you can't get fired without committing a felony. Government work culture has this maternal mentality where it feels the need to care for workers from cradle to grave. You can never get rid of low performers, there's no layoffs when priorities change, you just have the same people that need to be shifted around to do a mediocre job elsewhere. It's completely immune to outside market forces and that makes it literally impossible to compete with private sector salaries, who have no problem laying people off if a project doesn't work out.

Each person hired by the government is a massive, open-ended liability that can most likely never be fired, never be demoted or take a pay cut, regardless of changes in circumstances for the employer. I think the USDS was a huge step in the right direction by focusing on having "tours of duty" where the term of employment is fixed. I think the government should adopt that much more broadly if it wants to be competitive with the private sector.

I really wish people would read their sources, and specifically with the CDC, read the sources the CDC is using. The CDC page you referenced uses https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm as its only source for this recommendation.

The study monitors outcomes for a group that were all infected at some point in 2020. The vaccine was released at the end of 2020. The study monitors the infection status of these people in May-June 2021. It's purposefully selecting people who had no recent exposure via natural infection and comparing them to people that recently had the vaccine. I don't know how they can use this to support their recommendation with a straight face.

There's millions of people that have already been infected with COVID and receive no calculable benefit from taking a vaccine. While the vaccine has been proven to be safe and effective, there are rare side effects that some people might not want to expose themselves to for no reason. Springing that blanket requirement on people at the end of the hiring process is a shitty move.