most people use their Canon to shoot, not fire, but I guess that's semantics.

You've pulled some interesting data and constructed your own narrative around it, but it leaves out a lot of the science behind public health.

You come to the conclusion that it's largely a virus that affects people 50 and above. Well, yes, those are the people who died from it. But the rest aren't unaffected: it's still a fucking brutal disease at any age ("discomfited" does *not* describe it); the causes and effects of long COVID are just now being unraveled; they may have been cared for by a person who was taken out by the virus; and by the way, why is it unwarranted panic in your book when it's only 50+ers who are being mowed down by this thing? In 2021, 100,000 people PER WEEK were dying from COVID at one point. That's a lot of parents, grandparents, employees... people.

Further, just being under 50 is no guarantee that you'd survive an infection; it's not even an assurance that you'll get past it without long-term effects. Let's also remember that during the bad years of the pandemic, it wasn't 2025. We didn't have five years of epidemiological data to look back on, and it was anybody's guess where this thing was going; it could have mutated into a form that was more widely deadly. We simply didn't know and the historical models weren't much use against a novel virus like this one. Of course people were panicked.

A big piece of the societal concern for COVID was the inability of the US health care system to respond to a sudden capacity-busting spike in hospitalizations - remember "Bend the Curve"? Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed by COVID cases. With no vaccine and no treatment early in the pandemic, they simply didn't have any way to keep medical service providers safe from also being infected. With the flu, of course, we have vaccines and actual treatments for the disease; none of this was a thing before the COVID vaccines, placing many more people at much more risk.

You make the assertion that the vaccines were rushed into people's arms. I'm going to assume you're referring to the mRNA vaccines here since they were the early heroes of the pandemic. Research on mRNA vaccines had been underway for a long, long time by the time COVID made its appearance. It may have seemed as though this new, untested technology was given a very short test run, but in fact they were the result of 15+ years of research into the underlying technology. It just so happens that the research came to fruition at precisely the right moment. And you'll remember that the other vaccines, based on more traditional methods (inactivated virus, for example) were considerably less effective; some of them were in fact withdrawn due to being ineffective. China's initial vaccine is a particular example of this.

In the testing stages, the mRNA vaccines showed outstanding effectiveness – somewhere between 90-95% effective at preventing serious disease. That is phenomenally successful. Lots of vaccines that we routinely administer don't approach these numbers. If a group of researchers were conducting, say, a cancer trial where they were testing new treatments and *this* kind of result came out halfway through the trial - they'd stop the trial, verify the results, and if they panned out, you had better believe the treatment would be in IV drip bags ASAP. This is breakthrough medical science territory and let's just be grateful that it happened.

I will completely agree with some of your critique and add some of my own. Chaos and intentional malfeasance at the federal level resulted in bungled messaging and outright misinformation, creating a unnecessary societal divide. Strategic mistakes were made at all levels of government, exposing the weakness of our system to deal with such a once-every-century disease event.

Where I disagree with you is what seems to be your conclusion: that COVID wasn't as much of a problem as people made it sound; that if youw ere under 50, you didn't have much to worry about; the insinuation that the vaccines were rushed and may have caused more harm than good. This ventures into the standard antivaxxer arguments, which you helpfully note is not your intent, but nonetheless there is considerable semantic overlap between you and them.

The first mRNA vaccines were something like 95% percent effective against the contemporarily dominant COVID strain (Delta). So there's a big of data for you. Also, just because a virus is fast-mutating doesn't mean a vaccine can't work against it. When a virus mutates, not every section of its genome undergoes change – and vaccines can target the parts that don't change, like the spike protein that COVID uses to enter human cells. Even when the targeted region mutates, vaccines can retain some effectiveness if the mutation isn't too dramatic.

Well, we've dramatically ramped up our mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacity due to COVID - perhaps this time they will be more competitive.

An upstart they never were - they're a spinoff of IBM. The company entered the world with a large blue spoon in its mouth. From IBM, Lexmark inherited a ton of government contracts and did quite nicely, thankyouverymuch.

Their inkjets may be junque but their big enterprise printers are amazing pieces of engineering. Bulletproof, built to print hundreds of thousands of pages per month without skipping a beat.

Branding means nothing. Most of the FedEx Ground vehicles that you see on the street are contracted out and not owned or operated by FedEx itself.

Who is... living so far in the past that they use the term "Oriental"?

Read the article a little more carefully. The Restore Assistant *can* restore from another device, like an iPad, but it also includes recovery capabilities that don't require another device. Sounds like it can scan the operating system of a malfunctioning device and attempt an in-place repair.

Uh, I don't think he's replacing his HP Officejet Pro with a 3D printer. :)

For your edification: laser printer can't reproduce the same gamut of color as an inkjet, and they are generally lower resolution than a quality color inkjet printer. Laser prints tend to have poorer quality in the darker, more saturated parts of a photo, and this is compounded by a tendency towards slight reflectivity off the surface where the toner has landed.

Furthermore, an inkjet intended for high quality photo reproduction can have extra inks that produce even more colors than your typical inkjet - for example, Light Cyan for better reproduction of blue skies and water, and Light Magenta for better reproduction of skin tones. Home/small office color laser printers are all CMYK.

However, all of these caveats are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people printing in color. Laser printers have so many advantages overall that they are still the go-to option for the scenario posed by the original poster.

The problem with this statement is that it is routinely used by others to delay indefinitely any action whatsoever. Rome was not built in a day, true; but construction did begin on a day. They didn't put it off forever, which is what many entrenched interests in the world would prefer we did relative to addressing the climate crisis.

The other problem with it is that it isn't quite true: we *don't* know what solutions will work, except to radically reduce emissions, starting yesterday. Many/most of the proposed approaches for mitigating the effects of greenhouse gasses are theoretical; untested or unverified; of unknown, or poor scalability; expensive; all or some of these. We've only just started to explore some techniques, such as direct removal of carbon from the atmosphere, and the jury is still out as to which (if any) will be deemed "workable".

For that matter, "workable" is a handy phrase to hide behind, isn't it? The scale of the crisis is literally the entire planet, and one quite likely outcome is that a large swath of the surface of the planet is no longer habitable by human beings. Remind me, then, what defines "workable"? Does it mean economically feasible? Technologically plausible? Non-disruptive to the status and power of elites? Preserves the ludicrously high-energy lifestyles of developed countries?

So – the urgency to act is just as real today as it was last week, last year, last century. The only difference is that we have less runway and less margin for error at this late stage of the game. Eventually; perhaps rather sooner than later; we will have no runway whatsoever and the whole house of cards will come crashing down.

In Washington State, your unemployment insurance rates are set by the state and they are raised in proportion to how many payable claims are made against you – except that there's a cap. Once you've reached a certain number of payable claims and you hit that cap, your rates don't go any higher. A big company like Amazon has probably reached that cap long ago and so this isn't a risk factor in how they treat people.

It isn't covered by the mass media because it's not yet a big enough story, but there are grumblings in the dev community that using the various LLMs to assist in coding using Swift is orders of magnitude less effective than other languages/platforms. As a relatively new language with fewer compilation and application targets, there just isn't the sheer volume of code out there compared to, say, C++ or PHP. Additionally, Swift has gone through several terminology and technique redesigns, rendering chunks of the extant codebase deprecated. These factors lead to LLMs that don't "know" as much as about Swift and just can't be as useful.

Of course, this isn't strictly Apple's fault, but Apple does suffer from its developers being a step behind other platforms in a rapidly evolving development paradigm. They could make major headway by creating a Swift-centric LLM just for dev use by seeding it with what must be the biggest, otherwise publicly-inaccessible repository of Swift code: their own internal codebase.

The M2-4 might be incremental taken on their individual merits. But the M1 was truly revolutionary over the extant Intel Macs in terms of performance per watt, and if you look at the increase in performance from the 1 to the 4, it's really quite impressive. One big leap forward, followed by smaller steps - that's a very typical Apple product pattern.