aphextron

I make low six figures as a single, childless person, and am just barely doing ok. I rent a cheap 1 bedroom apartment, drive a 20 year old Toyota, and end up with just enough for a small amount of savings each month with very little discretionary spending. Buying a home is an impossible fantasy. Being out of work for a couple months would leave me homeless. I literally cannot imagine what it's like trying to support a family on the average salary in this country.

I had the worst cough of my entire life in January 2020. A solid month of being unable to sleep without massive amounts of Nyquil. Never had any of the other weird symptoms I can remember though, so I've always written it off since I live in North Carolina and we didn't have our first recorded cases until February. But in retrospect it seems almost impossible that it wasn't COVID.

Gap year? No! I am merely doing independent consulting. Do I actually have any contracts? So many questions!

People aren't stupid. They'll have questions. And lies are extremely hard to keep straight in the long term. The sad fact of the matter is that you are not a person to them in the initial hiring process. You are a piece of paper. And unless you are some rock star 10x top level candidate with impressive credentials, they'll have a dozen other pieces of paper that look just as appealing and don't have those questions attached.

"Yeah, I was the CTO of a startup. I learned a lot. Call this guy who was the CEO, he'll tell you about it."

Ah yes, an intricate lie. The very foundation of a solid working relationship.

Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year

You're right, it doesn't. But it brings up all sorts of questions in the mind of your interviewer as to the true nature of your departure, and it immediately puts you at a huge disadvantage.

Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too?

Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider. A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers. And that cash goes quick when there's none coming in. Trust me I know. It's alluring to just walk away. But trying to get a job when you're unemployed is literally 10x harder than while employed, regardless of the actual circumstances of your departure.

Just try taking a few weeks off first. And if that's not enough, ask for a sabbatical. At the very least have something lined up for a few months after you leave. Don't fall for the "I can have another job in two weeks" meme. It's rarely true in reality for all but the very top of the market.

Or just take Australia

The storage requirements for the Moderna and Pfizer shots are heavily on the safe side. They went with it for the EUA because there was simply no time to prove that it could be safely stored at normal temps. The overwhelming consensus, however, is that it can be. I suspect the full FDA approval will change the guidelines to allow normal refrigeration up to 30 days.

You are my new hero.

There's a similar number of people crammed into a similar geographical area on the east coast.

The east coast has unlimited supplies of fresh water. California does not. The east coast megalopolis is also situated on a coastal plain, with a deep hinterland unconstrained by any mountainous geography. California crams a similar amount of people into a tiny sliver of coastal land in between the mountains and the sea, surrounded by some of the driest deserts in the world.

What is happening to this paradise state?

Too. Many. People.

Nothing is secure against a determined targeted attack. That's why we have layers of security. SMS 2FA adds a layer of protection against random attacks, and for that it works great. It should never be solely relied upon for high value accounts.

So much of "mental" health is really just physical health. As a young person with mood issues I could never really understand why I felt the way I felt at times, and would always just chalk it up to some vague self diagnosed mental disorder. But the older I get I realize it all comes down to my physical state. Am I tired? Have I slept right? Have I eaten? Too much caffeine? Too much alcohol? Have I exercised? Practically every bad mood can be traced back to these. Yet people will ignore all that and convince themselves they need to take a pill to make themselves feel better.

Por que no los dos?

Yahoo and DDG both use Bing results.

https://www.lingscars.com

"Under fire" from whom? A random twitter user? NYPost is literally a tabloid on the order of National Enquirer.

Consolidation leads to efficiency. Which in the case of commodities, is the only way to ensure low prices. A new slaughter company is not going to innovate a more efficient means of producing a pound of beef. In theory, a perfectly run state monopoly would be the ideal system. But that rarely ends well. In the US we've worked out a sort of half way between the two extremes, where large private corporations are allowed to consolidate in the name of consumer prices, while still maintaining just enough competition for profit motive to keep things well run. It's not perfect but it's the best we've figured out so far.

I really wonder just how much of the perceived "danger" the world was in during the cold war came down to the paranoid delusions of these hot headed, rough and violent men who had just fought the most destructive conflict in world history. It took Kennedy to talk the joint chiefs off the ledge during the Cuban missile crisis, and thankfully for America's hard seperation of military power in the hands of civilians he was there to do so. I'm not sure a more martially led nation would have done so. Looking back and reading the facts, it seems utterly absurd to think that the entire situation wasn't just one big bluff on the part of Fidel. But you had guys like Lemay who missed the action of war, spent all day fantasizing of it, and would take any opportunity given to escalate things.

People with issues need help, not bullying.

Absolutely. True mental health issues need clinical diagnosis and treatment. Things like CBT and antipsychotics have saved the lives of many people with psychological disorders, and modern mental health treatment is as valid as any other area of medical science.

But the type of "therapy culture" the parent describes is absolutely obnoxious, self serving, and all pervading among the upper and middle class. People have been so convinced, jeered on by social media, of this pseudo-Freudian nonsense about deep seated emotional traumas requiring therapy, that the real issue of mental health has been conflated with feeling annoyed about having to respond to work emails or being bummed about a breakup.

I saw some historian last year say, "there will be a world before covid and a world after covid", and I thought that was hyperbolic. But now I see the truth in the matter - it will not be some obvious, monumental, instantaneous change, but rather the slow, creeping change where a few years from now, we'll look back and see that society is just different.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is nothing new. Plague has been with humanity for as long as we have existed. And yet, here we were in 2019 living our lives "normally" after dealing with those in the past. I think there will certainly be a generational cultural divide caused by this which separates us from those who were too young to remember, much like the Depression was for our grandparents. But people will go back to being people regardless.

maybe if you're trying to make money from it. if you're just trying to see if it's possible in a pure research mindset, then seems like success

My point is not about money. Plenty of research groups have achieved sustained fusion without net power generation. But if this is simply a linear scaling of input power based on existing techniques, there's nothing remarkable here.

Pretty meaningless without data on the input power, isn't it?

lol yeah wow, who is this?

So, yes, that seems to have been a good strategy

The point though is that this was a massive gamble on Japan's part in the 1930's. They had no idea if it would actually work.

How's the internet in these towns?

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"

America is a more balanced and equitable society today than it was in 1970.

The inflation adjusted minimum wage peaked in 1968. An American worker in 1970 could graduate high school and get a job that would allow them to support a family of four, buy a home, and take the occasional vacation. To say that we've progressed in terms of equitability since then is a cruel joke. The area under the curve of material wealth may be greater, but we've become a winner-take-all society.

Based on the evidence that they publicly claimed responsibility.

I don’t think that everyone’s using the SPA pattern for no reason. For large corporations, it allows teams to work independently: the “frontend engineers” can “consume” “APIs” from teams that probably work in a different language and can only communicate through the hierarchy

This is really the main reason. Ultimately just a consequence of Conway's Law [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law