💾 Archived View for stack.tilde.cafe › gemlog › 2022-07-04.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:15:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I am preparing my dog for the inevitable evening of terror as my countrymen prepare to celebrate the secession from the civilized world, due to the 'unfair' British taxes averaging 1.5%.
Today's the fourth of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town
I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky
Aimee Mann, track 3 on album 'Whatever'
Seriously, why blow shit up every year? The pollution from a professional fireworks show is just awful, and you've seen one, you've seen enough.
It seems that everyone I know either has or has had covid in the last couple of weeks. Myself included if I expand the range to a month. Most people get over it within a week (actually a couple of days seems to be the anecdotal average for healthy not-so-young friends). I got mine two weeks after a booster, just before Phizer pretty much admitted that it's not particularly effective for the Omicron strain. As far as I can tell, Omicron is currently close to a mild flu or moderate cold, as corona-viruses go.
I don't mean to minimize risks of what may happen with the next round of mutations, or the damage to those with co-morbidities.
I should add, as someone who enjoys a good conspiracy theory: had I not almost died a year ago from the newly-emerging Delta variant, it would have been hard to resist the 'the governments are lying' line of thinking. I personally know only one person who actually died of possibly Covid, but also possibly of acoholism and a host of other health issues...
And at the risk of sounding like one of those assholes (again, keep in mind that both I and my partner came close to kicking the bucket), it appears that the morbidity of Covid-19 is perhaps 3 times that of the flu; no one even thinks of the flu very much, and many respiratory problems causing death are dismissed, while currently counted as Covid-19.
The state of testing is highly confusing as well. It appears that some percentage of people will test positive for months, even though they are not actively infected. In my case, I knew I had Covid (from experience) a full two days before testing positive; the first time around it took a full 5 days after a definite exposure before testing positive.
Beating a dead horse here, but I now use Tor and LibreWolf (when necessary) with Qwant search engine. I don't know what kind of bullshit Qwant is (some say it's total bullshit), but whatever. And Marginalia when that works.
I am pretty upset about the fact that the internet is such shit. We had such high hopes about how it would change the world! As usual, it did, but in ways completely horrible.
Every so often, I look at what I use every day with the 80's or 90's hat on. How incredible is it that my machine has multiple cores running at billions of instructions per second each. My L1 cache alone is what I had in my Atari when I got started. My air-conditioner remote has more processing power than the Apollo navigation computer that made it to the Moon (if you believe that it really happened :)
I've been blessed with not having a 'real job' in my entire life, with the exception for a 3-month salaried stint which really sucked. I've freelanced and consulted a lot, which made me an 'outsider', largely not subject to corporate whims. And I haven't done that in like a decade, so I am decidedly outdated.
A lot of movies and shows I watch contain pivotal scenes revolving around social media at work. That just makes me laugh and sometimes cry. If I ran a software shop today (my area of expertise), I would flat out prohibit any social media during work hours. If I see your post during work hours, out you go. Swipe another time and you will have lots of time for further swiping.
It appears that the opposite is happening, and things like twitter and crap are almost required! As if constantly showing off how you are so much cooler than you really are somehow helps your work!
We all know that humans cannot multitask! Some of us know it better than others, but if you could grab one of the management consultant types and physically remove their face away from a phone, they would probably agree.
I am amazed that anything is getting done today at all! And I am certainly not amazed that things are rapidly falling apart.
God, I sound like some kind of granpa. And on that note, I will sign off for today.