And that's why they should have waited to open dine-in restaurants until they could do so without making unreasonable demands.

The thing is, limits on political speech are really problematic in general. Even if they cared, they wouldn't dare say it.

They did not overreact. The problem was that we weren't prepared for the fallout. If it happened today, given how much better delivery services have gotten, it would not have been a big deal for most businesses. Schools would still have been a problem, but not nearly as much as it was five years ago, because technology has gotten better. And so on.

And the other thing about it is that the blue states also tended to be in a better position in terms of the poor having access to usable home Internet service, so the negative impact was way less than it would have been if a red state had done the same thing. That's why the red states were freaking out — not because it wasn't possible to educate under those circumstances, but rather because they viewed it through the lens of their local reality, where doing that would have been an absolute s**tshow.

Most of the red state deaths weren't because of socioeconomic factors. They were because of COVID. While the blue states correctly attributed excess deaths, the red states tried to bury them, and thus in spite of them saying "All these extra deaths are because of lockdowns and socioeconomic damage", the reality was that the excess deaths were way worse in the red states. Their claims just didn't hold up when put under a microscope.

I'm not saying Cuomo didn't make mistakes. He absolutely did, and some of them cost a lot of lives. And yes, that was absolutely part of it.

That said, the fact was that they got hit before we had credible numbers about how bad it was going to be. China wasn't really speaking honestly, and New York was basically #2. New York got hit earlier in the winter, during a period where most people stayed indoors. New York has areas of much higher density than pretty much anywhere else in the U.S., which makes things spread faster. New York has subways, where people get packed in by sardines, and if one person is sick, everybody gets sick. And so on.

Additionally, it wasn't until several weeks into the New York pandemic when they realized that delayed processing of blood tests for blood oxygen were resulting in artificially low blood oxygen numbers because of high WBC, so they unnecessarily put a *lot* of relatively healthy people on ventilators, and that actually killed them because of secondary infections, lung damage from overpressure. etc.

It wasn't until several *months* in that they concluded that large-cannula oxygen was better in a majority of cases, rather than ventilators.

And while Cuomo's bad decisions definitely cost lives, one could argue that they made sense at the time, given the rate at which people were being hospitalized and the lack of beds, and given how little we actually knew about how the pandemic was going to play out. It's easy to second-guess with the benefit of hindsight. It's far harder to make those sorts of decisions with limited information in the heat of the moment.

Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. You're right that it isn't technically healthy in the strictest sense, but it is so prevalent that as soon as you vaccinate everybody who is elderly or has any of the risk factors, you've vaccinated nearly the entire population.

Also a CA resident here, and I was literally watching the numbers, constantly updating a spreadsheet, and doing statistics on the numbers, and calculated exactly when they should have reopened to achieve eradication in Santa Clara County. Cases were in exponential (logarithmic?) decline, but they reopened about one month too soon the first time by my math, and cases immediately began growing exponentially again. Feel free to disagree with me, but be prepared to show your work.

Untrue. If we had kept the spread down enough until everyone was vaccinated, we almost certainly could have achieved eradication. You just have to have low enough spread at the time when you hit full vaccination so that it dies out. We saw it happen with one of the Influenza strains during the pandemic, in fact.

See above.

Again, citation needed.

and slashdot neckbeards

Yes, because Ruby is an uppity cult, and some are addicted to cults.

nor from CFO nor owners.

They are either clueless or spinning or both. Waste of time to read their "predictions".

Bad Slashdot! Spank spank spank!

The dirty little secret is that if you don't let the companies bring them in, they'll just hire them overseas where they can pay them even less, and that erodes rates even more. And the employers might also then apply for an L-1B transfer visa after a year, but transfer them to a new office in some lower-cost state, so that they get the benefits of being in the same time zone or at least a similar time zone without the cost of paying people in an expensive market.

You can't win. Anyone who says otherwise has never had the resources to be able to hire a team of lawyers to figure out how to get around annoying laws.

So if I’m critical of the actions of the government of Israel that equates to me hating jews?

Calm down before your yarmulke falls off.

...two scams in one, clever!

...CaptainObviousGPT told me.

It can probably replace them at the performance level that they exhibit for the first week. The difference is that the interns learn and get better.

ChatGPT is struggling to produce valid SQL even for basic stuff. I use it to produce technical stuff, but everything is checked against at least 2 other AIs and is hand-verified by me, because otherwise there are too many errors.

This is not even close to usable for anything technical.

On one project, after 8 months, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (combined) have managed to produce a technical specification that is as riddled with errors as a draft document produced by an engineer, so one could (I suppose) argue that it's not worse than a human, if given sufficient time. However, the specification has probably cost millions - if not billions - in electricity at this point. If the same amount of money had been spent on human engineers, over the same length of time, my guess is that the document would be of much higher quality and much closer to something that could be implemented.

True, I would never have been given that kind of cash, so it has democratised wasteful spending, but that's not necessarily useful.

When it comes to reducing your ability to spread COVID to others, epidemiologically speaking, he wasn't wrong.

The problem was that he also had a large gathering at his house at the peak of the pandemic. Rules for thee, but not for me.

And yet those groups tended to practice social distancing, wore masks, etc. Some photographers used perspective to make it look like there were dense crowds, but shots taken from other angles revealed that this was not really the case.

For all the stupidity on both sides, red states had much higher case fatality rate despite their very deliberate undercounting of the death toll by limiting testing. Blue states did not overreact. Red states didn't take it seriously, and a lot of people died as a result.

The only place where blue states did badly was New York, and that's because they got hit first, before anybody knew how to deal with it. When you take New York out of the numbers, the difference in fatality rate between red states and blue states is staggering, and blue states had much, MUCH lower fatality rates.

I knew someone personally who died of COVID. He was overweight, but he was not particularly old. What you call unnecessary, I call common f**king sense.

The biggest mistake the blue states made was that they opened too soon. California was within a few weeks of reaching zero cases when they reopened the first time. Had they been going for eradication instead of merely keeping hospitals from collapsing, the death toll would have been massively lower, and the next surge might not have even happened.

The other big mistake was opening up restaurants. As soon as they did that, cases massively surged. Restaurants could have continued to do takeout, but the state decided that profits were more important than people.

With the sole exception of the impact on kids' education, to the best of my knowledge, red states did not do better by ANY objective metric. Feel free to provide citations, though.

The bean counters have determined its cheaper to use AI and hire a janitor compared a team of programmers.

So in other words a bunch of people said shooting yourself in the foot was a bad idea but you knew better and proceeded to shoot yourself in the foot. Now the argument is I made you shoot yourself in the foot?