https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-ri...

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/09/covid-va...

Additionally, the Delta variant (currently the most prevalent by far) hits young people and children hard.

Even if you consider the elderly, the obese and the chronically sick to be "expendable" (which is an absolutely abhorrent worldview), your claims simply are not correct.

Such a severe lack of empathy is disturbing.

> the vast majority of the dead will be the very old, and people who took extraordinarily poor care of their health.

This is incorrect, the Delta variant is hitting young people hard, including children.

https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/how-covid-19-d...

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/young-people-make-up-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/young-unvaccinate...

The ego-driven vaccine denial and lack of respect for distancing and mask requirements is killing people.

1% dead means around 3.5 million dead, in the US alone. Do you consider that acceptable?

Great upheaval brings great opportunity, if you are ruthless enough to exploit it.

There are unfortunately many actors around the world who - for various reasons - desire to create instability, because they see it as a way to profit or to gain political power.

It's the history of international politics.

I tend to baby new things until the feeling of novelty wear off, then I just use them. I don't abuse them, but I stop trying to avoid normal wear and tear. Repairing things is also something I find relaxing and interesting.

As a consequence, I tend to stick to things that are durable and can be repaired, designs and materials that have stood the test of time, and I keep them for as long as I can.

A well-worn patina on an obviously beloved object is hard to fake.

I just got my recommended booster shot of Moderna yesterday, now I'm waiting to see how hard that will hit me.

There are no certainties, but I know that here you would also been considered immune if you had previously been infected, but not yet vaccinated.

Bad public policy unfortunately exists, same with the thing about not accepting the J&J vaccine as valid. It works about as well as the mRNA vaccines against hospitalizations and death, but with somewhat less efficacy against base infection, and of course a slightly larger risk of complications. That doesn't make it a bad vaccine, so countries not accepting it is completely insane.

Climate change is going to cause droughts and starvation for millions and millions of people, who are either going to die or desperately seek to migrate to the parts of the world that are less inhospitable.

An increase in potential global trade is a drop in the ocean against the instability that large scale climate migrations are going to cause, especially considering how hostile our governments and media have acted against immigrants for decades.

But electronics, cars, machinery, the kinds of things that are produced more centrally in just one part of the world are facing shortages. It's a small thing, but there was a 3 week wait on the access point I bought recently, where in normal times that would have been a day-to-day delivery. The mechanical keyboard I was looking to buy took a full year to get back in stock before I could order it.

These are of course small things, luxuries in the grand scope of life. But industries are facing component shortages that are going to last for years.

With how the climate is changing, we are only going to see more and more instability and disturbances to production and shipping in the future, due to climate refugees and unrest.

We've played a dangerous game of brinkmanship and now we're paying the price.

Reduce your consumption and lifestyle. Buy as little as possible, preferably second-hand. Maintain and repair what you already own. Become politically active or at least vote for people who are not in the pockets of big business.

    The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

    There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

I think that sums it up better than I could ever do.

The rise in property values alone over the last 10+ years should have been more than plenty to cover any landlord's expenses due to the moratorium. They did not plan for the bad times, too bad for them. They had the means to mitigate by preparing, renters living paycheck to paycheck have no such possibility, so the government did its job for once and helped out the under-privileged.

So the landlords can just sell some of their properties, downsize and scale back until better times. They gambled on stability and lost.

I don't live in the city center, it's a 25 minute bus ride there if there's no traffic, but even here I have local shops everywhere, since we don't have zoning laws that restrict shops in residential areas. Shops are generally open until 21 or 22, some until midnight.

My point is that the dependency on malls is not inevitable, it can be prevented and/or remedied, and changing zoning laws is one of the ways to do it.

My girlfriend lives in a town of 1500 people, and there are 3 grocery stores, several pizzarias and bakeries, as well as other local amenities. Everything is walkable and they have both train and bus connections to the nearest cities. That's how to do it, not the like similarly sized village in Germany she came from, where there are literally no stores, no restaurants, no nothing, and the only transit they have is a bus that runs every hour between 8 and 17 on weekdays. No wonder that town is dead.

I do all my daily shopping in local shops, I have 5 or 6 in walking distance, 20+ in bicycle distance. The last time I went to a mall was for a specific offer in a specific specialty store, which is certainly not a daily activity.

It's a matter of will and not killing off in-town shopping.

Then they assumed wrong. National emergencies happen, in this instance a pandemic (that is still very much ongoing) meant that potentially millions of people stood to lose their livelihoods and their place to live. Millions of people with no jobs and no homes, a catastrophe, to put it mildly. Ordinary rules do not apply the same way in extraordinary situations.

How many landlords lost their homes due to this? How many could sell one of their properties and weather the storm with the profits?

>This was effectively the state seizing property, forcing the landlord to maintain the property and providing it to someone else.

No property was seized. The government did its most important job, namely supporting citizens who are unable to support themselves, those who do not have enough capital to weather a storm.

Someone who rents out a room is not going to lose their home from such a moratorium. It is a deliberately misleading argument to frame it like that, and it is not a common situation.

But the GTK filepicker is simply an embarrassment, there's no other word for it. For all of the effort that has been spent on everything else Gnome-related, adding thumbnails to the filepicker would have been an extremely easy win.

The current implentation is at Win 3.x levels of design and experience.

Gear-wise, denim doesn't really do much of anything, aside from providing a marginally useful millimeter of additional abrasion. From having crashed my bicycle often (never had a moto crash, thankfully), I've had severe scrapes underneath denim that looked just mildly scuffed on top. With pressure applied, it can act like sandpaper on your skin. Gear up in proper gear, modern cordura/kevlar gear is comfortable and not that expensive, plus the hip/knee/elbow pads make a big difference in a crash.

I also got the "you're invisible" part drilled into me by every instructor I've had, and it's probably the most important lesson.

On top of that, always look ahead! On a bike you sit at roughly SUV head height, plus you can stand up on the pegs if you need to. Always look ahead, not just at the 2-3 cars in front of you, but as far ahead as you can, scanning for brake lights, traffic clumping together, anything that looks like it could be an issue. I do this when driving a car as well, if people start braking way up ahead, let off the gas and keep an eye on it. I see so many people just charge right into traffic jams and stomp on the brakes, probably because they didn't notice or maybe just didn't care.

Always be smooth on your inputs, but try to also be smooth in traffic.

For DoH, you either have to block port 443 (bad idea), or block the IPs of all known DoH providers.

Then you can run for example a Pi-Hole and add a firewall rule to allow outgoing DNS traffic only for that.

And of course that will not stop device/app makers from using nonstandard ports or even tunnelling their DNS traffic through other protocols.