So the world has around 8.2 Bn people according to a quick search, and the US population is around 340 million. It turns out most people are not US citizens! More than 95% of us, actually. And some of us even have money! Usually not the f*** you money kind of money, but enough to shoulder the cost of vaccine and medicines, either directly or indirectly through public health care or insurance.
If the point of most of these cryptos was for their creators to jump on the hype train and make a quick cash crab, and those creators successfully executed an exit strategy to dump their crypto product somewhere near its peak - then those cryptos were a success; they did not fail in their intended purpose.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Progress in vaccine development is a good thing! But in the end that may not matter, because (a) you are not taking the vaccine because you have become prey to the anti-vaxxer way of thinking, or (b) you are getting medical anti-advice from your own government that tells you not to take vaccines, or (c) you cannot afford the vaccine, or (d) vaccines are otherwise somehow not available to you, or (e) your body does not tolerate the vaccine and there is no herd immunity as enough people around you are not taking a vaccine, and (f) that lack of herd immunity and global responses with vaccines means the need to vaccinate goes on for perpetuity.
For me living in Norway, the primary issue is price. I chose to take the flu vaccine this year and usually do, that's a quick USD 40 or more. Happy I did because the whole family came down with the flu during Christmas, and I got only moderately ill. I did not even consider the covid vaccine, that one is around USD 100 if you are not in a risk group and have to pay the whole thing yourself. We decided a few years ago to get the TBE vaccine because of increase of tick activity in outdoor areas, that's a quick USD 200 for each set of shots for the whole family (four people), which you have to take 3 or so sets in the first year, and then it needs to be renewed every few years. I'm getting middle aged and should start considering some vaccines I have not been thinking about before, e.g. pneumonia (around USD 60) and shingles (in total for the two required doses around US 500).
If there is a vaccine you cannot get, or you somehow find it hard to justify the cost/benefit tradeoff, or you are having a hard time balancing the issue of an immediate cost vs some future uncertain/unlikely potential illness (low likelihood and great consequence, the most difficult type of scenario for our human minds to risk assess), then the existence of vaccines actually only makes you feel worse. Better to not have the option than feeling bad about a desirable option that is not available to you.
The administration being "sceptical" is but a thinly veiled reminder that don trump expects a big fat beautiful golden envelope.
You still pay, by sharing all your data, thus enabling other companies to make possibly even more money off you in the end, e.g. by dynamically altering the price of some completely unrelated product they know you really need. Not judging anyone here, I use Gmail myself.
For us middle aged fathers pondering whether we can get away with spending our linen pressed cotton bills on this set, there is comfort in rule #6: Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity
Not saying opiates are never required. But I was shocked by some documentary I saw on the opioid epidemic, and how the pharma industry has lobbied towards treating pain as an illness rather than a symptom, and something that in and of itself needs to be treated. It's that casual use to "grease your life a bit" which can then lead to abuse, which I am referring to, not wanting to be inconvenienced by a bit of pain. That's something very different from disabilitating pain.
I had frozen shoulder at some point in life; it lasted several months. Forget yourself for a split second and make the wrong rapid movement - like something slips from your hands and you move to catch it - and it's instant overwhelming pain. Physical therapy involves having your joint rotated until it starts really hurting, and then some more, while you have to stay relaxed. Never took a single pill, and I'm glad I didn't.
Twice a year people feel the slight inconvenience of a couple days to adjust their sleep schedule a whole one single hour. Which is something noticeable plus you may actually have to manually adjust some clocks, so that then feels important as something that disrupts the regular routine. Now; you cannot in the same way feel the same pain of being an hour out of sync with the ideal day/light rhythm, because it's a more subtle effect - but it is there
People increasingly seem unable to judge tangible short term gains vs longer term losses. You only have to turn to politics to see that, people electing leaders who dangle some short term prize in front of them, like "I will bring down prices of eggs" or whatever; people elect them because of those short term narrow scope promises, and next thing those politicians start tearing down their world over the long term across the board. And then those voters start complaining about what happened, when what happens was telegraphed years in advance. But those voters seem simply
Or take pain medication with opiates as an example. You are offered addictive pills to get rid of a modest amount of pain that normally you'd be able to grind your teeth a little bit and live through it. But you'd rather have no pain at all, so you take the pills, plus the ads say pain is something which has to be treated, talk to your big pharma sponsored doctor. And you repeat that choice to take the meds, again and again. Wind the clock forward one DST or two, and you are an addict. Turns out taking the meds was a net loss for you.
It's another year of updates if you let yourself be bullied into activating backup features, putting stuff in their cloud, and fighting the OS with probably either silently enabling in the background, or nagging you about, any folders for which you have disabled backup. The offer is only free in terms of giving MS data instead of money. In a market economy, this is the kind of stuff consumers are supposed to consider protesting against by getting a different product.
For me it was a hard no thank you as I considered a couple weeks ago getting those additional two weeks for my TPM non-compliant weeks, neither being willing to go down the "let us back up your data" or getting into the community's solution that "you just have to use Rufus to install Win11" route. Switched to Linux Mint LMDE, and I've been super happy with that decision, wondering why I didn't do it already. I was prepared to give up most of my Steam gaming; turns out most of my non-Linux Steam collection seems to run nicely with Steam/Proton. Was planning on running Spotify in a browser; realized LM comes with an app. User experience is super smooth, and much prefer it to Win10 and Win11, with no nagging from the OS.
As long as the phone is sufficiently thin, I don't really care about additional thinness. I'd much rather optimize the other two spatial dimensions.
The phablet trend is annoying. Most options are oversized. For me, the phone needs to fit comfortably in my left front pocket in a way such that (after getting used to it) I don't really notice it's there, and I must be able to grab it and hold it comfortably with my left hand plus use my left thumb to unlock it while holding. It needs to work in rain and snow conditions, and it should be durable enough it doesn't crack or otherwise break from minor accidents. Battery capacity should allow for 1.5-2 days regular use and should not detoriorate too much over the years. There should be 8-10 years or so of OS and security updates, and the OS should be as stock as possible without the provider loading it up with their custom stuff and added bloatware you can't remove.
When I had to replace my phone around a year ago, I ended up with a (at the time) previous generation Google Pixel model. Was a bit larger than my preference, but size still works for me after getting used to it. If size was the only criterium, I would have gotten an iPhone (which is not my thing, but for all of you who prefer it, good for you). Could have gotten a free phone from my workplace, problem was the only two options was an iPhone (as mentioned) or a Samsung phone (which around 15 years ago after experiencing the Samsung ecosystem on my at the time phone, I promised myself I would never ever buy a phone from them again). So for me, the value of form factor, function, support and no bloat, exceeds the value of getting the phone for free. But if thinness was the only difference, with the free one being slightly thicker, I would have taken the free one in a heartbeat.
Bonus of keeping your mobile phone in the front pocket rather than on tables etc wherever you are; you get to focus on the stuff around you rather than your phone, you don't keep forgetting it, and as you're not constantly putting it out on display it doesn't matter that it's not the latest most expensive model (if the people around care about that sort of thing, in which case I'd say surround yourself with different people) because it's in your pocket and most of the time not visible.
My going on 10-ish years old TPM-less PC, which was decently specced at the time with a then fast Intel processor, 16 GB RAM and a GTX 1070, runs pretty much everything ok. Probably because I don't care about the latest AAA games, and I'm not into 4K monitors, a bazillion fps, etc. The only reason I was even considering replacing it, was the end of support (no security updates is a deal breaker). Solution was to install Linux Mint. I mentally prepared myself for not being able to play any of my non-Linux Steam games, which I was ok with as I don't have too much time for gaming these days anyways. Turns out that with Steam+Proton, such games still seem to be running fine. And general use of the PC is snappier than before reinstalling without any of the incurred Windows rot. I even got my disk space back! I realized what I've been missing since I used to be running mostly Linux back in the days, it's just more
Upgraded my decade old TPM non-compliant but still going strong stationary to Linux Mint LMDE, and it's been great. I was preferred to sacrifice PC gaming alltogether in the process. Turns out Steam runs Windows games in my library using Proton quite nicely (have only tested a few though). Really happy with ditching Win 10, rather than resorting to shenanigans like logging in with the M$ account, enabling OneDrive backup to get one additional year of free support, and probably having to deal with a lot more M$ nagging and "helpful reminders" to back up more folders. Plus upgrading got rid of a lof of the disk, registry and performance rot of an older Windows installation. I now have disk space again.
They should throw in extra features, like sensors to determine whether heliospheres cause autism and maybe a gaydar. A broadcast feature to relay the words of supreme leader in real non-relativistic time as He thumbs them. There is stuff to be avoided. Don't put any CO2 or CH4 detection in there (even better: stay away from carbon entirely, unless it is big beautiful coal). On the EM front, anything visible or IR should be considered risky. Most importantly: do not put solar panels on the thing.
Taking a trip down this particular memory lane always makes me happy. Started university science/tech studies in 94. The diverse types of networked Unix machines on campus was a whole new world opening up. Spent many nights on campus in front of an SGI Indy computer. Joined the nerdiest student organization. Not a lot of love for Microsoft in that group. Interesting group of people who would help rookies get going in the right direction - but get to the point where you should get self going, and answers to questions turned into the simple phrase "man man".
Installed Slackware from floppies in late 94 or early 95 on my 486DX 33MHz. Had to get a new compatible video card. Remember my fear during installation of setting the infamous dot clock frequency, with the supposed risk of frying your monitor.
The next year moved into campus organized housing with 10 Mbps Ethernet. Such happy times! At some point after Linux got SMP support, I got myself a Tyan Tomcat dual processor motherboard with two pentium processors. You could compile the experimental 1.3.x linux kernels - and encode MP3 files - twice as fast! Nice for experimenting with parallell algorithms and related programming frameworks.
Very interesting, thank you for the going into such detail about this!
If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
