I don't think a central government can react fast enough for that.

Her, in our town with ~10.000 people multiple volunteer groups for shopping and other help have sprung up, and the mayor has made some arrangement with local shop owners that those volunteer have some stamped authorization that they are shopping for multiple people, for example for "only one item per person" items, and after a few days everything worked pretty flawlessly. From what I see in the Facebook/WhatApp Co-Ordination groups there are way more volunteers available than there are people who actually request the help.

Well, if the "packaging system" allows the equivalent of a "bash aaa.png", then, no, really.

That's why you usually have NO live produrction systems that pull any fancy "framework of the week" dependencies live from the internet, right? No matter if the run Windows, Linux, or TempleOS.

There's the problem in the logic. Technically it would be easier, and more ethical, to find a solution where "we, and everybody else, is able to produce their own 300+ doses quickly"

Of course, the "Money and intellectual property is more important than lives" mindset seems to be deeply ingrained.

Considering the number of times someone in power has said "We know this is stupid, but we can't do anything about it, because it's a regulation" in the last decades, I would probably assume that we have reached a state of bureaucratic madness where it is impossible to suspend such regulations.

I became a "software together-hacker" late in life, after being an electrical engineer before, and a hands-down electrician before that.

What really get's me is the number of times that my 9 "software only" people I work with are completely stumped by a problem that is glaringly obvious to me. And that 90% of the things I learned fixing over 50 year old electrical stuff in a farmers barn also help me find problems related to software,.

By then Humans will have reached the peak of their existence, by having become pets to the cat people of the planet Stoxx, who watch us playing with our computers as we watch our cats playing with strings.

Nah, if something goes wrong and they file a bug report, Poettering will just answer that it's not a systemd problem that people can't fly by themselves, and they should fix by genetically engineering new humans that are able to fly by themselves.

At least, once it runs over a pedestrian in space, we know it still has some minor flaws to iron out....

Yep. Of course, it gets harder and harder to have "complete" test systems for integration testing. (for example good luck, when you test your Webshop integration into marketplaces, to be given a "Completely functional Test-Amazon" or a "completely functional Test-Paypal".

So we usually go the way to have test Customer accounts, test Credit Cards, and test Products, which we can work with in the Live System, with everybody involved knowing they don't really have to send out the Flux Capacitator Fuse when an Amazon order comes in from Captain Kirk.

So for me it would be pretty obvious that having a "Test Country" in a database that deals with countries would be a good idea. Of course, you have to filter your reports accordingly, before you give them to someone "not in the know", which seems to be the only real mistake they seem to have made.

... you probably hit a scenario:

- Tools Available: Rocks.
- Weapons Available: Rocks.
- Toys Available: Rocks.

Probably some stupid reason like "If I hire two persons, their wage will come out of my budget, but if the one person really steals something it will come out of another persons budget"

Reminds me of the story, where Richard Feynman experimented with how exactly he could measure time while counting.

He found, that he could do it, but it would impair him from doing other "phonetic" tasks. One day he met a colleague who was doing the same experiment, except in his case he was impaired doing "visual" tasks. After comparing notes they found that Feynman was, and has always, counted by silently saying the numbers in his mind, but the colleague was counting by seeing the numbers moving past in his mind.

Funny side note: My first language is German, my second language English, and right now I learn Japanese for fun. In the different alphabets there, Hiragana/Katakan basically only work phonetically, while Kanji only work visually, so Japanese children basically have to use both methods in parallel. I wonder that influences the brain.

Don't say "XXX it Tax Free!!!" to loudly, or politicians will come up with a way to tax it. :-P

"I don't know. Wait, let me Google for it..."

Well, with closed source, once the company decides I'm no longer allowed to use it, i'm fucked. If the Open Source developer decides I'm no longer allowed to use it, if it's really critical to my project, I can at least theoretically always fork it. (As Chef just did here)

The real problem here was that "production systems" relied on something stored externally, which was not under the control of neither the entity running the systems, nor the persons selling those systems. Which is basically the same as starting a business while depending on your neighbours WiFi, and then being shocked when that person moves away one day.