I just want to put a pitch in here that I am related to several LEOs, and I can assure you that the number of "bad people," are a tiny minority. And I am also STRONGLY opposed to this idea that it's OK to attack government buildings, and I don't think I'm alone. If 2020 riots happen again, I think you can expect all out war.
Yeah, but masks aren't doing much to prevent that. My kids go to an Oregon elementary school that requires full time masking and I can't think of a single kid who hasn't had it. COVID has run rampant through Oregon schools. I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools. The elderly and vulnerable need to get vaccinated, or be handled in a tent in the hospital parking lot. Stop punishing kids. This coming from a very large, male, angry "Karen."
Indeed. My twin brother lives just outside of PDX, and the schools were closed for a full year, then hybrid classes. His son was in kindergarten when it hit, just like my daughter. His son is severely delayed now. On top of all of that, they finally open the schools back up and shove the kids into useless masks. His son (Jack) needs speech therapy. When he goes, the instructor is wearing a mask. He can't see what her lips are doing.
It's an absurd horror show. I live outside of Boulder, and thank God, our schools weren't closed nearly as long, thanks to the culture here being a lot more common sense than the hysterical, politically radical group-think out there. I visited there in the summer of 2020 (drove), and they had the fucking beaches closed to 4x4s. Because God forbid you drive your truck on an empty beach and catch COVID from..... who???
It was a really tense vibe everywhere we went, and when I went to Oceanside and rented a house, everyone was masking outside like idiots. I've never seen such a nutty, poorly governed state in my life, and that foolish governor did everything she could to maximize the fear, when she should have been trying to calm everyone down.
The strange part to me is that usually on policy issues there’s this band of reasonable behavior and people disagree on which end of that band we should fall, but if you’re honest you can understand the other side’s perspective. On COVID in Oregon, it’s the first time in my life I’ve felt like I’m looking at a completely different world than others. I’m just flabbergasted by the policy calls driven by COVID hysteria. I’m not some rabid right winger. (My wife and I are both triple vaccinated, AND we still recently got it!) I just feel totally, totally confused. We vacationed in Idaho over Christmas and it was like reorienting myself to reality. I have no idea what’s going on in Oregon, but I am confident that we have revealed a fundamental split in human psyches that some bad actor will exploit to terrible ends.
So what I'm about to write here is I want to emphasize just groaning and complaining from my brother. He recently moved just over the line to one of those suburbs of Portland in Washington State. He told me he was fed up with Oregon and although he doesn't like the Pacific Northwest in general, he is divorced and needs to be near his ex-wife since she has custody of the kids.
His view of Oregon is that it's filled with people who are really not that bright. Obviously this is a stereotype but I will say that being out there what I kind of sensed was a bunch of people who were descended from pioneers who were very religious and are wired for religion but don't have it. I think COVID helped foster a new form of religion in the population, but perhaps it was always a sort of case where people on the coast were kind of doing that with progressive politics in general.
Human beings really are herd animals, and the vast majority of the population would rather do what is popular than what is right. I think that you have a toxic mix of this ideology combined with the rather unique Pacific Northwest cultural trait of never speaking your mind and primarily using passive aggressive behavior at all times. My brother worked at Nike for a while and was always told by colleagues that he was "too intense". He and I both worked in military intelligence in the past in the DC area and he's a driven worker like I am. He's only intense to people that really want to take it slow all the time. He always told me that the cultural traits in the region were really obnoxious and obstructed. Getting good work done. Nike is after all a shitshow of a company. Highly unproductive, very unefficient, with the dramatically larger workforce then it needs at its campus in Beaverton. We are talking about a state that has made the decision that people can't pump their own gas because it would hurt the economy by robbing people of the job of pumping their gas for them. That's a special kind of stupidity at the government level.
On top of this rather insane groupthink that you are referring to west of the Cascades, you have this other weird situation which is the rather extreme government measures at the state level have completely radicalized people on the right side of the political spectrum. When going to a grocery store in Sherwood outside of Portland, I encountered a bunch of boogaloo boys. Half the time I was driving around there I would occasionally see a truck with radical right wing stickers all over it, signifying membership in some group. (3 percenters or something like that?) I almost never see that anywhere in Colorado outside of Denver.
But perhaps the most memorable part of that trip was the interior of the state and the fact that the state government of Oregon clearly has zero authority anywhere east of the Cascades. It's really something to behold. You have this massive land area that is essentially ungovernable by the state government. The local population absolutely hates everything from the capital. They aren't at all subtle about it. It is basically a state of open, proud disobedience. It is the only place I've ever been since the pandemic started where there is a state law requiring wearing a mask indoors, but if I walked into a convenience store wearing one, they would get angry at me including the employees. It's a very good lesson to me about the fact that urban areas should understand that large swaths of this country will become completely ungovernable if they continue to use the government as a cudgel to force their values on a population that doesn't want it.
Another item that was shocking was the fact that we had visited Portland a few times before in previous summers, and the horrific degradation of Portland's downtown was tragic to see. It's really insane. Granted I was there right as the federal courthouse was being besieged, and it was pretty crazy having young men dressed in black threaten me and my brother when we were walking. We are both over 6 ft and over 200 lb and I'm pretty sure that's the only reason we didn't get our asses beat. Complete lawlessness in that city. I just don't know how people who live there aren't completely embarrassed by it.
> I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools.
According to the article, studies have said very little in a way that controls for variables. There haven't been great studies showing their effectiveness. The Bangladesh one said surgical masks were "modestly effective." Not that it matters. Omicron is so contagious masks are well past their usefulness.
> The Bangladesh one said surgical masks were "modestly effective."
And then the raw data came out and there was a difference of maybe 20 cases.
The gold standard is an RCT, and it failed to show any benefit to masks in general.
Masks work great on mannequins or hamsters but they are essentially useless as a public health measure. We learned this in 1912. I am astonished that so many people still cling to them and claim "masks work" when we have overwhelming data that as a non-pharmaceutical intervention, they really don't. unless 100% of the people wear an N95 24/7.
The masks were well past their usefulness in 2019.
Our elementary school in Oregon has required masks. And I can't think of a kid who hasn't got it, including our own. It's run rampant through Oregon schools. By my assessment, masks do very, very little to stop the spread.
Yes, they have been pushing it for a long time. But its a major undertaking, so things take time. I think its just even more impressive that they have managed to push a decade long project steadily forwards. The latest memorandum that I linked even had a short summary of the previous initiatives:
> In August 2005, OMB issued M-05-22, Transition Planning for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), requiring agencies to enable 1Pv6 on their backbone networks by June 30, 2008. This policy outlined deployment and acquisition requirements. In September 2010, OMB issued a memo entitled "Transition to IPv6," requiring Federal agencies to operationa11y deploy native IPv6 for public Internet servers and internal applications that communicate with public servers. Specifically, the 2010 memorandum required agencies to upgrade public/external facing servers and services (e.g., web, email, DNS, ISP services) to operationa11y use native IPv6 by the end of FY 2012; and to and to upgrade internal client applications that communicate with public Internet servers and supporting enterprise networks to operationally use native IPv6 by the end of FY 2014
So that 2005 memorandum laid out groundwork to setup basic ipv6 backbone networks, and mandate purchases to be ipv6 compatible. That has been happening in the past 15 years so that now we are at the point that the latest memorandum is aiming to transitioning to IPv6-only deployments. If they set the requirement to be largely IPv6-only in just couple of years, then they must believe that there is good readiness for that at the moment, and I would like to think they have done their homework here.
I was on the IPv6 transition task force for a large federal agency (well, one of the military services) from 2008-2010. They don't take it seriously, don't fund it, there's no internal mandate or accountability around it, and nobody knows how the hell it works.
If I were a dictator I would just put a deadline on it. January 1 2027: IPv4 forwarding is turned off on all core routers.
You can still use IPv4 internally if you have legacy devices, but anything on the Internet has to use IPv6. You have about 5 years to get it done. There are lots of solutions for specific use cases including stuff like ::ffff:1.2.3.4 and IPv4/IPv6 NAT devices. Most of which won't be as necessary as people think because IPv6 support is already widespread everywhere except ISPs.
Funnily enough, the first attempt at such legislation back when there was much less commercial use of internet kinda failed due to vendor pressure and allowances for continued use of IPv4 (this was specific to DoD/Government networks, and was supposed to migrate to OSI and its up-to 20 bytes addresses)
Exactly. Precaution comes at a price. The question is whether the benefits of the precaution outweigh the costs. And that is an answer science cannot, and should not, answer. These days, it seems, many scientists are desperate to cloak their policy preferences in "science." That is precisely why there is presently so much distrust of scientists.
I never understood distrust, because scientists base their work on research that is extensively cited. Making conclusions that are not supported by evidence, e.g. "desperately cloaking" policy preferences, could jeopardize one's scientific career.
Many people seem to unrealistically demand scientific recommendations to be "guarantees." However, scientific conclusions are very precisely made best guesses, built on humanity's knowledge.
> I never understood distrust, because scientists base their work on research that is extensively cited.
It's good that the supply chain of science is traceable, but it doesn't guarantee truth by any means. Their are many non-scientific human endeavors that have traceability, take software development for instance.
I think the distrust comes from many fields having fairly obvious political trends, in particular social sciences. Another source of distrust is overextrapolation of science by authorities. For instance, science might say that certain drugs are harmful if abused, and politicians may use that to claim the war on drugs is based on science, which obviously is not true. Lastly, some fields struggle producing consistent and falsifiable results, such as economics and psychology.
The replication rate of Economics as a field is higher than replication rates for psychology, cancer research, pharmaceutical research, and many other fields. When was the last time you opened an econ journal?
Agreed. And with Edge/Authenticator, it's cross-platform as well (Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS), and as of recently, it's close to feature parity. We dropped our Lastpass subscription. It's probably families like ours that has 1Password worried.
I don't know if anybody uses Edge like me, but I feel like people should know that Edge with Authenticator works VERY WELL for password management. It is very close to feature parity with Lastpass and 1Password, it's cross platform, and it's free. After something like eight years, we dropped our subscription to LastPass.
How easy is it to use with random notes/apps on mobile? Some reasons I prefer a non-browser manager:
- On Android/iOS, 1P will integrate with the system password manager APIs to sign in to apps
- I can generate/store arbitrary password-like things (SSH key passwords, secret question made up answers, 2FA backup codes) that are not associated with specific domains. At least in Chrome's default password manager there wasn't a way to do something like this.
On iOS, at least, when prompted for auto-fill, you can random search for other passwords. It doesn't really have a "notes" field, but you can definitely save a password without an affiliated website.
A union is recognized by the NLRB and has certain statutory entitlements regarding strikes and the ability for employers to fire striking workers. "Labor movements," writ large, do not require those statutory entitlements. Modern unions can be understood in terms of their ability to collectively bargain without fear of direct reprisal in terms of employment. Otherwise, collective bargaining has always been an option (it's just humans acting in concert), and long predated the concept of "unions."
I feel confident that most people would say a formal organization of workers that engaged in collective bargaining and strikes without legal protections was a union, even if it existed before the NLRB. If what you really want to talk about is "modern legally-recognized unions" then just say that.
Maybe, but when they say union membership is down, they mean NLRB recognized unions. We do not have good stats on labor movements writ large. To the OP’s post, Google’s not tackling a labor movement. They’re tackling “unions” with statutory privileges.
How are you using “conservative” here? The right certainly has no monopoly politicizing science.