One of the cool things Americans would be learning if anyone would explain it to them is we don't have a public health system so much as an elaborate elective procedures system and any actual health benefit you get is pretty much an accident https://t.co/UoA8auatXt
— james 🐎🔫 (@buffalocialism) April 17, 2020
Crises reveal much, to those who bother to look (most don’t).
Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death.
Good visualization. But “the flu is worse!”
If I weren’t so lazy, I’d make a spreadsheet of all the people who said braindead crap like that and then make fun of them any way I could for the next 10 years. But as I said, lazy.
I was going to build out a hilariously over-complicated & fiendishly expensive WordPress architecture as a joke, but unfortunately @awscloud beat me to it. pic.twitter.com/M8kcWwOV8t
— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) April 16, 2020
That architecture is aimed at a WordPress site that serves millions of users and requires four or five nines. It’s reasonable in that context and close to what I’d build.
If you wanted to launch a small-scale WordPress site fairly easily, here’s what you’d do. That’d cost $10-$15 a month wheras the other one would probably be at last $2,000 (haven’t priced it out) and potentially a lot more depending on autoscaling.
For an architecture that’d do just fine in almost all cases, here’s what you’d do. That’d work for 99% of enterprise clients.
There’s just an enormous difference between infrastructure designed for four or five nines that serves millions of users and a WordPress site that sees hundreds of visitors a day.
It’s kind of shocking we haven’t seen more violence and unrest with this sort of thing happening.
I put myself through college, graduating with a reasonable $40,000 in debt and an education degree right into the beginning of the recession. The debt has ballooned, after I’ve gotten halfway through a master’s degree, to about $70,000, despite my paying it back for almost 15 years.
Is there any world where $40K in debt balloons into $70K is just? Fair? Reasonable? If you think so, I don’t want to live in your world.
At this point my payments don’t even cover the interest. It’s so, so far gone. And there’s no getting out of it. It’s like a black cloud over your head.
I’ve met more than one person who just stopped paying their student loans as there was no hope of every amortizing them. Yet another sign of a failed state.
Just realized that the iPhone SE v. 2 does not have a headphone jack. Therefore, it is completely unusable.
I won’t be upgraded to that or any other phone without a headphone jack until the one I have literally falls apart.
A phone without a headphone jack is fucking broken and incapable of being used.
Though I wish the pandemic and the Great Recession a decade ago had never occurred, one feature of crises is that they allow you to see who is all hat, no cattle. It is revelatory. You learn so much, mostly that other people cannot think their way out of a cardboard box with one end open.
I don’t wish these times on anyone. But they are useful to me because I’m not imprisoned by cardboard.
But “expert” epidemiologists said it’d take at leat 10 years to produce a Covid-19 vaccine. How can this be?
Does anyone trust any expert who makes pronouncements in public anymore? If so, why? Nothing but failure. Hope it’s not dangerous like the 1935 polio vaccine attempt was, but what choice is there? Either that or Mad Max.
Coronavirus erases almost all the 23 million new jobs created since the Great Recession.
And this is just the beginning. The greatest erasure of wealth in human history is occurring right now.
Living in historic times kind of sucks.
Funny to see this in the NYT. A few short weeks ago, anyone saying something like this would be RACISTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT! Now, despite neolib protestations, it’s starting to permeate the discourse.
I’m not complaining. Of course I’m not; I’ve been saying this for decades. Any large country that outsources its entire manufacturing and productive capacity to another rival country or set of countries is being imprudent in the extreme. But the right people got rich and that was what mattered at the time.
Of course, the other important component that allowed this to occur is that much of academia was co-opted by neoliberal thought structures and ideology so any objection to this state of affairs became equated with racism, making objecting to the hollowing out of the nation nearly impossible.
That’s all starting to change. How much it will actually shift, I don’t know. I’m only moderately hopeful. But I do know that last year this wouldn’t have been published prominently in the NYT.
Its time for The West to stop funding people and organizations whose prime goal is to take down The West.
— Mom Folding Laundry (@JenandZen) April 14, 2020
That would be a wise thing, yes. Will we do the wise thing? No, of course not. Not doing what’s savvy is just who we are are at this point.
Jobless claims might top 5 million for third straight week, push unemployment to 15%.
Which means unemployment is more like 20% due to an onslaught that has overwhelmed systems, resulting in many not being counted.
Or anything else, because they are fucking idiots who need to be expatriated to fucking Somalia.
Stimulus checks are being spent on dildos, tigers, guns and stripper poles.
Indeed! I bought a stripper pole where one side is a dildo/gun (have to be careful with that one) and the other side is a tiger leash.
By the way, this is neoliberal propaganda for why there should not be a stimulus as “those people” will just buy frivolous items with it. Pure, typical propaganda of the “Welfare Queen” genre.
Apple launches smaller, cheaper iPhone.
Nice. Still too large — would be better with a 4 inch screen instead of a 4.7 inch. But at least it’s not nearly a tablet in size.
It is the only option, though, to not have a gigantic damn phone.
expanding cobra, much like reopening the aca healthcare market is the epitome of a democrat “solution” that they’re mystified no one likes because none of these people have their job because they need the money so they can’t conceptualize a world where people live like that
— ghost wife (@eponawest) April 14, 2020
This is exactly why I will never vote for Joe Biden or any DNC-backed candidate ever again. Pure evil.