The Insightful Troll

Rants and ruminations.

Mandate Vacinnations

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Aaron E. Carroll, chief health officer for Indiana University in a guest essay :

Many may read the C.D.C.’s continued focus on masking and distancing as an acknowledgment that the vaccines don’t work well enough. Leaning heavily on masking and distancing is what we did when we didn’t have vaccinations. Today, such recommendations are less likely to succeed because they are more likely to be followed by those already primed to listen — the vaccinated — and to be fought and ignored by those who aren’t.

Hospitalizations and deaths are rising in some areas not because someone didn’t wear a mask at the ballgame. They’re occurring because too many people are not immunized.

This is why I’ve advocated vaccine mandates. I don’t understand how we can mandate wearing masks but not getting vaccinations.

Mandate proof of vaccination for basic access - sports stadiums, restaurants, boarding public transportation and airlines. In addition we should mandate masks and social distancing.

Programming in Your 50s

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Next year will mark my 30th year as a professional developer. Thats nearly three decades in the software industry. When I took my first programming job - cell phones were not common, Apple was about to go bankrupt, the Web wasn’t a thing yet, IBM was the largest computer company, Windows 95 was just about to be released, we watched movies and consumed music on physical media, Google/Facebook/Netflix didn’t exist.

Yea. I am freaking old.

The development industry is more fickle than the fashion industry. I have worked on every shift from desktop command line software to modern SAAS serverless environments. Assembler, C/C++, Java, Delphi, Ruby, NodeJS to Rust. From procedural to object oriented and back to functional. From microcontrollers with 4k firmware to multi gigahertz workstation software to cloud software (I really hate that term.) Been there, done that.

We still deal with the exact same problems I dealt with in the industry from the business and management as I did when I was in my 20s.

I am tired. I need a break. Been thinking about a career change. Just to get the creative juices flowing again.

Then I came across Yossi Kreinin’s excellent article - Do you really want to be making this much money when you’re 50?. And this excerpt really spoke to me:

What else do you want to be doing when you're 50? Give me a profession remotely close to programming in the following ways:

- Little or no required education
- Good compensation, even for mediocre performers
- Millions of jobs
- No physical effort
- No health or legal risks

Programming is money for nothing. Programming is very easy to enter and extremely hard to quit. What would you do instead?

It gave me pause. We, the development community, really do have it good. And the more I think about it the more I realize - I just need to adjust my outlook. Or maybe just develop/concentrate on other hobbies away from coding.

Looking at the alternatives - I truly don’t want to do anything else.

Ted Lasso - the Curious Idiot

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Co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis on where the idea for the show came from:

The thing Bill and I talked about in the pitch was this antithesis of the cocktail of a human man who is both ignorant and arrogant, which lo and behold, a Batman-villain version of it became president of the United States right around the same time. What if you played an ignorant guy who was actually curious? When someone used a big word like “vernacular,” he didn’t act like he knew it, but just stops the meeting like, “Question, what does that mean?”

Covid-19 Is Endemic. What Now?

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Lets face reality. Covid-19 is endemic now — how do we live with that? Susan Matthews has a great write up for those of us who are vaccinated and trying to figure out what their risks are regarding the much more transmissible delta variant of SARS-CoV-2.

All of this is making people — yes, probably mostly vaccinated people — rethink the basic questions they thought their vaccine had answered for them: Can I go to restaurants and bars unmasked? Can I go back to the office? Can I see my grandma? Can I go on vacation? Can I unmask at my people-facing job? Can I have a wedding, or a party? The answer to those questions is not quite as easy as “yes, if you’re vaccinated.” It depends partly on how many in your group are vaccinated, but the actual answer is basically the same as it’s been all pandemic: It depends on your risk tolerance, it depends on what is happening with case counts locally (though, as more people travel, this might become a less reliable tool), and it depends on any unique risk factors in your group. Kass’ perspective felt novel to me: She said she suspects that in the end, a lot of people are going to end up boosting their immunity by suffering through a mild case of COVID. So no one should feel that bad about getting sick after they’re vaxxed. What matters is getting the order right: “If everyone who gets vaccinated still gets COVID but doesn’t die, that’s a success,” she said. The issue is that it doesn’t feel like a success for vaccinated people. Plus, “if you get infected after you’re vaxxed, it’s all you talk about,” she said. And right now, that’s understandably freaking out a lot of vaccinated people who thought they were in the clear.

Going to Space Is Tone Deaf

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Shannon Stirone in writing for The Atlantic:

Could there be a worse time for two über-rich rocket owners to take a quick jaunt toward the dark? Especially in the United States, the climate crisis is now actually starting to feel like a crisis. The western U.S. is in the thick of fire season, experiencing record-breaking drought and temperatures. Last week, Bezos’s hometown of Seattle hit 108 degrees. Hurricane season is starting early, and a once-in-200-years flood just ravaged northern Mississippi. Oh yeah, then there’s the pandemic that is very much still not over. Anyone would want a break from this planet, but the billionaires are virtually the only ones who are able to leave.

Leaving Earth right now isn’t just bad optics; it’s almost a scene out of a twisted B-list thriller: The world is drowning and scorching, and two of the wealthiest men decide to … race in their private rocket ships to see who can get to space a few days before the other. If this were a movie, these men would be Gordon Gekko and Hal 9000—both venerated and hated. Maybe, I don’t know, delay the missions a bit until people around the world are no longer desperately waiting for vaccines to save them from a deadly virus.

Back to Reality

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And while it’s painful to pay subsidy-free prices for our extravagances, there’s also a certain justice to it. Hiring a private driver to shuttle you across Los Angeles during rush hour should cost more than $16, if everyone in that transaction is being fairly compensated. Getting someone to clean your house, do your laundry or deliver your dinner should be a luxury, if there’s no exploitation involved. The fact that some high-end services are no longer easily affordable by the merely semi-affluent may seem like a worrying development, but maybe it’s a sign of progress.

This is a good thing for everyone going forward.

The New Real Estate Normal

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Jared A. Brock makes an interesting point about the new real estate normal:

For years, banks and ultra-elites (bankrolled by years of money-printing, corporate socialism, and bailouts) have been using their wealth to take control of the world and rent it back to us.

Apple did it with music.
Netflix did it with movies.
Nestle did it with water.
Uber did it with cars.
Airbnb hosts and landlords did it with houses.
The lecherous gig economy did it with employment.

Instead of buying and owning products, now we’re all just renting “services.”

After all, why should people like you and me build equity when a multinational corporation can build equity instead?

So long as your monthly housing-as-service payment remains relatively “affordable” (AKA half your income), the ownership class doesn’t care if it’s rent instead of a mortgage. Thus, house prices continue to rise against all reason as private equity and rent-seeking investors outbid families for control of shelter. Sure, there might be more real estate price crashes, but they’ll just be bigger versions of 2008 — buying opportunities for the hyper-elite. Your home is now a future hedge fund investment

So what can you do about it? It’s actually simple. Here are the three simple rules that have worked for me:

  1. Buy a home as soon as possible that is well below your means.
  2. Pay off the mortgage in less then 10 years. Do what ever it takes (within the law and ethical conduct) to do this.
  3. Never upgrade to a larger home unless you are paying for it in cash.

Remembering Donald Rumsfeld

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George Packer in The Atlantic:

Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction. He was worse than the closest contender, Robert McNamara, and that is not a competition to judge lightly. McNamara’s folly was that of a whole generation of Cold Warriors who believed that Indochina was a vital front in the struggle against communism. His growing realization that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable waste made him more insightful than some of his peers; his decision to keep this realization from the American public made him an unforgivable coward. But Rumsfeld was the chief advocate of every disaster in the years after September 11. Wherever the United States government contemplated a wrong turn, Rumsfeld was there first with his hard smile — squinting, mocking the cautious, shoving his country deeper into a hole. His fatal judgment was equaled only by his absolute self-assurance. He lacked the courage to doubt himself. He lacked the wisdom to change his mind.

mRNA - the Good and the Bad

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Excellent write up by Derek Lowe in Science Translation Medicine on the exciting potential and pitfalls of mRNA technology.

So mRNA-based techniques have a lot of power and a lot of promise. But there’s definitely a low-hanging-fruit area here, and that’s infectious disease vaccines. Beyond that the promise holds up, big-time, but the difficulties mount up as well. It’s going to be a long story with a lot of plot twists, but I’m glad we’re telling it.

S**t Leica Photographers Say…

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The one that makes me laugh every time I hear it:

Leica has a look. There is nothing like the Leica look.

Don’t get me started on S**t Fuji photographers say…

I Am Legend

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So, what differs Apple among many thousands of companies and competitors, allowing it to earn billions of dollars? After all, now Apple is more than new IT technologies and modern Apple products. The company has its own unique reputation, a recognizable Apple design, a successful public image and a whole culture in the industry of consumer electronics. In a nutshell, Apple and the Apple collection of devices are a legend.

I just wish Apple would go back to their 1977 logo.

The Ted Lasso Welcome Wagon

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Can’t wait for Ted Lasso season 2 to be on air. The first season was a very welcome diversion during the height of the pandemic.

I Swallowed My AirPod

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Heather drove me to the endoscopy centre, where the AirPod was got back out via my mouth using a tube with a lasso attachment. It was extremely uncomfortable, but I was sedated and so only half awake. A few minutes later, I was given the AirPod in a neat little bag.

I tried it as soon as I got home. It works fine, although the microphone is less reliable than it was. I’ll never know for certain how I managed to swallow it; my theory is that it dropped on to the pillow, ended up next to my mouth and got sucked in when I yawned. In retrospect, I’m glad the “find my AirPod” attempt didn’t work — I would have freaked out if my throat had beeped.

What is really amazing is the AirPod still worked! Now this would make a great AirPods commercial.

Linus Torvalds to Anti-vaxers

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Please keep your insane and technically incorrect anti-vax comments to yourself.

You don’t know what you are talking about, you don’t know what mRNA is, and you’re spreading idiotic lies. Maybe you do so unwittingly, because of bad education. Maybe you do so because you’ve talked to “experts” or watched youtube videos by charlatans that don’t know what they are talking about.

But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn’t going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me.

Tell us how you really feel.

Sharks From Above

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Carlos Gauna’s amazing footage of sharks from above captured off the coast of California using aerial drones.

Live Like a Dane

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In an excellent article by Anastasia Frugaard:

When adjusting to life in Copenhagen, I noticed that things were very different in Denmark from back home in New York City. Locals seemed more relaxed, less addicted to their phones, more present with one another. Streets were quieter, shops and restaurants played gentle music on low volume. It’s almost as if people there didn’t need distractions from their reality.

Was it just the famous work-life balance and social welfare system or were there other, lesser known, reasons for their contentment?

Its surprisingly simple - get some exercise daily, cook at home, shop less, and eat plenty of candy.

pOrtal

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Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, pOrtal is a new wave community accelerator, aiming to bring people of different cultures together and encouraging them to rethink the feeling and meaning of unity. The pOrtal brings a new approach, especially important in times like these when we are being separated by extremely viral polarizing ideas and narratives.

The pOrtal team will connect the world with dozens of pOrtals in the near future – you, your community, and your city are welcome to join us on this mission! Let's transcend a sense of separation and be the pioneers of unity!

Okay the video and description is a bit over the top - but it is an amazing idea. I am all for anything that brings communities together. I wonder how much of this was inspired by the Star Trek episode of ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’.