And then, by the time you finally hire a real developer to fix it, he has to throw out 10 years of organically grown spaghetti code full of hacks, kludges, and vestigial code segments and start fresh with a proper design schema, which ends up costing way more than you anticipated because you "only" wanted them to "fix" a "small problem" with your inventory system since your brother-in-law retired to Florida last year, and is serving a 3 year bid for molesting an alligator while drunk.

No Jess, I'm not talking trash about you while waiting for your final check to clear.

Loading "Clippy"...
Hi! I'm Clippy! It looks like you want to write crappy code! Copy/pasting the Windows 3.0 source code into your workspace...

Good lord that should be nominated for an Ig Nobel Prize!

I have a friend with a 25-year old son, no pre-existing health conditions, who came down with COVID and was dead within a week. I agree that prior infected people probably don't need the vaccine (though there's some anecdotal evidence suggesting that getting vaccinated helped some people clear the post-COVID "brain fog" - more studies need to be done), however we really should get everyone who wasn't infected vaccinated, especially with the variants starting to make the rounds.

And if we study the variants and find that vaccines protect better against them than natural immunity, then we'll need to focus on getting previous infected people vaccinated too. Let's just all follow the science is all I'm saying.

And mRNA is "gene-treatment" only in the loosest sense. It's hijacking your cells natural processes to trick them into producing spike proteins for the immune system to practice against. Once they run their script they degrade pretty rapidly. Heck, half the challenge of getting them to work in the first place was figuring out how to encase them in the right lipids to increase bio-availability to the point where the vaccine is feasible. Once they're out of that and running, they get absorbed pretty quick. There are NO changes being done to your genes in the process.

Uh....the studies showed that Moderna and Pfizer were 94% and 95% effective at preventing infection *of any kind* which would prevent being a carrier/transmitter. The ones who did get breakthrough infections tended not to get as sick/not need hospitalization. So...no. Your comment does not hold up to scrutiny.

Personally I find Azure Devops (previously Team Foundation Server) is great either as a personal code repository or for small teams. I don't imagine it would scale well for large teams as it stands right now, but the market for small to medium size shops is enormous and shouldn't be ignored.

It wouldn't have the same meaning in a virtual space. In some sense, programming is manufacturing for a virtual realm. You take raw materials (bits and bytes) and transform them into useful tools that perform specific tasks on the computer. On the computer however the raw material constraints have to do with physical limitations (RAM, CPU) and the capability of programmers to operating within them to accomplish whatever task you need done. But the idea is the same as physical manufacturing, just with different constraint parameters.

In large enough quantities is disrupts cellular function and leads to death. I suspect it's coincidentally sweet like lead acetate or ethylene glycol (that one is a bugger and kills a few kids and pets every year) - but kind of like lead acetate and ethylene glycol you're unlikely to encounter significant sources of it in nature so evolution never filtered it out of our taste buds.

You'd need to be careful. A liter of heavy water a few times a week would probably not cause an issue, but if someone got stupid about it and started drinking *nothing* but heavy water, it would kill them in a few weeks: wiki link - we don't worry about toxicity in humans right now because no one is getting their hands on enough heavy water to significantly displace normal water in their system, but if this caught on as a fad like alkaline water someone will be dumb enough to exclusively drink it and die.

The whoosh is strong with this one.

I can't remember the last time someone massacred a group of school kids with a sword...

Speaking as a layperson with a computer science background, I always assumed a lot of that junk DNA was kind of CRC checking for the genetic code, to help prevent corruption from transcription errors. An actual geneticist would probably rip that to pieces, put from the bits of information I've heard it seemed reasonable-ish.

In some sense, human scientific discoveries follow the same model as evolution. Each generation we come up with 10,000 ideas, 9,900 of them are utter crap, 90 of them are mildly helpful, and 10 of them are solid gold amazing forward progress. For the next generation, the 10 great ideas get incorporated, the 90 either find a niche in the new ecology, get dropped, or dead end into a vestigial side path and 10,000 new ideas come around. Sometimes a great idea isn't useful enough in this generation to be recognized as golden, sometimes there's a massive leap that we wonder how that got there at all, and sometimes a crap idea is elevated to prominence until a future generation finally excises it, but overall we move forward. Rinse. Repeat.

Science is a giant container ship, plunging through the ocean at a steady 20 knots. Scientific discoveries are strewn about the ocean and from time to time Science runs over one and great things happen. Scientists try their best to steer it, but sudden course changes are all but impossible. Some scientists tug at the wheel for years, yearning for a discovery that's *SO CLOSE* and in Dr. Kariko's case, a wave came along (COVID) and pushed the ship just far enough to bump into her mRNA discovery and get it folded in to the cargo. The problem is that not all scientists are actually correct that their discovery is game changing or correct, and so, while the good ship Science definitely has (and will) miss out on some ground breaking work that would make a huge impact, it's also avoiding a bunch of crackpot ideas that would lead nowhere and waste everyone's time.

So bottom line, Scientific Tribalism is kind of like capitalism. It's a terrible system for processing new scientific input, except it's still better than all the other alternatives.

US Attorneys are not elected officials, they are appointed by the executive branch of the Federal Government. That's nationwide. You are correct that most District Attorneys are elected officials though, but they tend not to prosecute banking and financial crimes as those usually fall under federal jurisdiction.

One of the reasons the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York is the main guy for prosecuting many financial crimes is that his/her/their jurisdiction covers Wall Street, so they prosecute the big boys in the financial markets. The TV show 'Billions' is a fictionalization of this office's legal battle with an equally fictional capital investment firm.

However, the US Attorney position is highly political since they can be replaced by the president if desired, so a lot of the effects you listed definitely apply.

I only ever give *actual* personal information to sites where it is legally required (government or financial basically), though I've had to give my real address when I get stuff shipped to me. I've got it so hashed up that I started receiving AARP mailers in my 30's (those are meant for folks 55+). So my "information" is getting passed around, but it's pretty dirty. My birthdate must be somewhere between 1950 and 1985, but good luck divining the real one among all of the fakes.