> we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects
This reminds me of the French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen". The media (tv, newspapers and internet) were all hyper-focused on the number of deaths (initially) and later number of cases but always failed to take into account secondary consequences like those you mention.
Literally every media outlet I have encountered has published extensive coverage of the wider economic, health, social and political impact of the virus itself and the response to it.
The idea that the media did not focus on the second order effects is so obviously wrong it’s hilarious.
And even if the media didn’t, politicians did. To the point that nearly every country in the world has passed economic and financial aid measures that probably exceed anything they’ve done in the past, certainly during peacetime, and globally the world has put more resources into mitigating the second order effects through all sorts of programs than it almost certainly ever has before.
This whole narrative about how dissenters are not heard, when they are parroted the loudest is ridiculous. Even the Scientific A,Eric an article puts the great barrington declaration, with absolutely no scientific backing, with 0 footnotes and references, and a signee list that is completely unvetted, on equal footing with the John Snow memo which has vetted every signee, has references to actual papers littered through it to the point that the text in footnotes probably exceed the entire scientific content of the GBD, if not the entire GBD itself.
They didn't have scoreboards overlayed on the news displaying number of suicides, number of business closures, number of lost jobs, number of domestic violence incidents. It was Deaths, and Cases. Every hour, on the hour. The other stuff got covered, but not nearly with the same intensity.
I would agree with you that there is some coverage of these issues...lately. Yesterday for instance CNN ran a story about the suicide trend in Japan. However there was very little coverage of the secondary effects until late in the summer.
One does not simply retrieve a record from the database. One must first declare a type to represent the database's view of the record and copy it into a repository layer. Next a type shall be declared to translate the repository's view of the record to a domain layer. Another type shall translate the domain layer's view of the record to the controller layer's view...and so on.
We now use Teams video chat at work. The results have been mixed. When the number of meeting participants is low (<5) the video seems to work well. Anything above that we start seeing random disconnects. We've had better experiences with Zoom for larger meetings (~25).
At my company we were using Teams' "common" conferences with 230 (1st week) and 250 (2nd week) participants without issues. In this case 248 were listening and 1-2 were talking/videocasting.
Due to there being a 250 participant limit we now switched to live events, and there also has been no issue with that.
In the short term it might look bad. But in the long term it would encourage other companies to enter the market and existing players to increase their capacity.
If you like books I recommend Humble and Farley's "Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation". It was written before cloud native practices like containers were mainstream so not all the advice will be relevant but it has good chapters on source code management practices and CI.
I once worked for a company that uses SAP for several important business processes. The software provides great support for well defined areas like payroll, benefits, accounting and so on. It does not work well for things that are unique about the business (i.e. how it sells to- or services customers). For those things custom built software is usually a better choice.
Analogy: "In the past, a well-meaning body of public servants decided there was a need to slow down microprocessors to protect jobs threatened by automation, reduce resource consumption and benefit the climate. CPU frequency was capped at 25MHz and instruction length was limited to 8 bits. The move was hailed as a great victory for humans, nature and the climate"
As a nation, where would we be today (compared to where we are) if a policy like that had actually been adopted?
But off-topic: I wonder what computers would look like if there _were_ arbitrary restrictions like that. What directions would we have pursued in microarchitecture, distributed systems, etc etc if there was a regulation capping clock speed or number of transistors, or a rule that made it illegal to have asymmetric network connections?
A faster computer can shutdown or enter a lower power mode earlier. The base power draw of a computer hardly changes if you replace just the processor with a faster clocked one.
There's no Moore's law for ship speeds. If there were, then in the century since tea clippers we'd have ships somehow zipping across the sea at a decent fraction of the speed of light, somehow using less power than the baseline.
In fact that probably would have already made the case for speed restrictions, as every multi-thousand-knot container ship created its own tsunami. There have long been speed restrictions on canals at a few miles an hour to avoid erosion.
Not the parent, and you might consider me biased/extremist, but it might give you ideas: I've been moving to a self-hosted (yunohost for now) solution on a re-purposed computer. Unfortunately, this isn't for everyone. This covers mail, cloud (with nextcloud: calendar, contacts, pictures), and many others.
On Android, I mostly use F-droid, as I find apps there are of better quality anyways.
The only other apps left on my phone are for banking and transportation, plus maybe a few select services.
I will likely move over to a pinephone when they are available. I can't wait to have a serviceable phone, both hardware and software.
The self-hosted way maybe isn't for everyone, but if every person that does it offers access to family and friends, it wouldn't take that many hosts... and there are commercial/nonprofit orgs that provide some hosting options.
I do not self-host a search engine, though (searx didn't work well, and isn't really a search engine). It took me a few weeks to get used to ddg, but I find it very hard to use Google nowadays, as I got used to bangs, instant answers, the way to enter search terms, etc. I actually use my old (ca. 2010) Google-fu, which works well, but not on Google anymore.
I signed up for a personal domain so I wouldn't have to move addresses ever again and then went with fastmail for email hosting.
Added new email to email clients, set it as the default to send from, then went down my account list in my password manager and swapped the registered email for all of the accounts I care about. Then it was just a year of replying back to people when they emailed me at gmail saying "ps. New email address as you can see"
Nothing complex, just takes time to get the message out there.
Here's a weight loss tip I've used with some degree of success: exercise portion control by using smaller dinner plates at home and chew the food on the plate longer (like 30s). The rationale is that the sensation of feeling full takes about 20 minutes to kick in and so by practicing the above you end up eating less over time and as a result lose weight. There is also a possibility your body will make better use of the food this way as there are enzymes in your mouth that help with digestion.
This reminds me of the French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen". The media (tv, newspapers and internet) were all hyper-focused on the number of deaths (initially) and later number of cases but always failed to take into account secondary consequences like those you mention.
Link to Bastiat's essay: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/T...