SOUL-SEARCHING TRIP REPORT: HAWAII In 2003, after my wife's last jobbyjob and before she started school, we went to Kauai because it was going to be the last time there would be any time or money for such frivolities. Aside from a lucky week in Alberta (due to the birth center being delayed a year by permitting issues), there have been no vacations of more than a couple days. Last week, after sixteen years, a quarter million dollars worth of education and a half million dollars worth of construction, we returned to Hawaii. I rolled up fifteen years' worth of airline miles, union privilege and friend discounts to punk our way to the East coast of the big island. The flight was interesting; everyone on the plane was part of a "vacationing with grandparents" package. "Here are the old people that bought the tickets. Here are the 30-something parents who agreed to come. Here are their surly children growing up knowing boons come from grampa, not mom'n'dad." I was the only person under 60 waiting for a rental car. The New York Times has been pushing this narrative of late that the rich white 1%ers that they're really writing for are miserable, undeservedly miserable, and that all the money in the world isn't worth it if you've got to make your percentages in order to keep living in the Upper East Side. I mean, I guess. But if you're miserable ten years after Harvard Business School you made some poor choices. If you're miserable while working two jobs and helping pay rent for your extended family you're a bit more deserving of sympathy in my book. I've taken to saying "If you're forced to live in a gilded age, best be a goldsmith" as a way of explaining why I'm pushing real hard into stuff I can't afford but it glosses over the whole "forced" thing. And I'm living the life of Reilly over here, I really am but fuckin' A. I've switched from "I want to make watches" to "I want to found a successful watch brand." That means my reading material has gotten esoteric. Which is not without its problems. mk and I were at dinner and he asked me what I wanted to do with this thing; I mentioned to him that I'd figured out it'd be pretty cool to partner with native american designers and other disadvantaged people outside of the fashion industry to do limited-edition stuff whereby we agree on a design, we agree on a cause or charity and then we divide some of the spoils and pile the rest of it into doing good. It was the first time I'd verbalized it, probably because it was the first time anyone had asked. I mentioned it to my wife last week and asked her why she thought I gave a crap. "Because fairness is important to you and you don't like the idea of only improving the lives of rich people," she said. I made and lost over a million dollars in cryptocurrency last year. All said and done I'm pretty okay; I figured out that I was up four orders of magnitude but now I'm up three and outside of Warren Buffett and his ilk you don't usually get to shoot the moon like that. It had unintended consequences, though; it made me realize that my voracious appetite for history and economics have given me a finely tuned sense of the prevalence of inequality. There's no industry on Hawaii other than tourism, but the natives are vehemently, violently opposed to Yet Another Telescope on top of their sacred mountain (much to the annoyance of a friend who is directly responsible for said Telescope). And you look around and you see why; my wife asked why all the architecture on Hawaii is so ugly and I said "because it's of, for and by rich white people who will never see it." All the world class science up there on the peak and none of it trickles down to the brown people. It's funny - Kauai is chockablock with "come to our timeshare luau" pornslappers but east Hawaii is white burnouts and angry Hawaiians. Historically you had to fly into Honolulu and hop a puddle-jumper. Then they rebuilt the airport at Kona because there aren't any building codes preventing you from building tall buildings on that side so that's where the resorts go so now to get to Hilo you also have to drive two hours. Meanwhile the old Kona airport has been re-tasked into a parking lot for a beach they created by dragging sand from Oahu to cover the rocks almost but not quite to the waterline where the locals can get away from the tourists. Nobody told us this, of course. We were the only white people on the "beach". My daughter found about 100 square feet where she could splash in the water without cutting her feet up. The Four Seasons has a nice pool, I'm sure. That's my buddy Dante's mural. It made waves because he gave Pele an AK-47. The mayor of Hilo freaked out and forced him to paint it over; as soon as the festival was over they put a hurricane fence around the parking lot and invited the homeless to set up camp so that in order to see the "controversial" mural you literally have to be invited in. The center cannot hold on this. Ten years of economics books and the one thing I know for sure is that the center cannot hold. And while my own personal escape strategy is (A) invest in birth, preferably cheap birth because there will always be babies (B) "if you have to live in a gilded age, best be a goldsmith" but there's so.many.people out there who aren't going to make it out of this. And my goal is to make shiny baubles.
I like the idea that fairness is not (only) about bringing everyone to a state of equality, but about giving more people the share of the world that they want. Rich people will want their shiny baubles whether us peons like it or not; might as well put their desire and disposable income to use for those who so clearly need it.
Very thoughtful, and thought-provoking. And I didn't think I could love your wife more, but she Knows You, and is wisewisewise. Making shiny baubles for the rich has always been how the artists have supported themselves. From Michelangelo to Versace, the rich pay handsomely for the limited-edition item, but that item was made by artisans and skilled machinists and operators who have a craft and a skill they have honed over decades of work. You could do as everyone else does: Depress costs as far as possible, by raping the artisans and workers, and pocketing the difference between Retail Price and Cost, but you won't. Because, as your wife said, "fairness is important to you." Sounds to me that your plan now has heart AND traction AND funding. That's one hell of a recipe for awesome, with you at the helm.
Just wrote this for a newsletter, thought others might enjoy (ButterflyEffect izzy417). From my college radio days. My first semester as a DJ, and actually my first semester at college, I had a show Monday nights by myself. It was always pretty quiet, usually nobody else in the station, and I kinda liked it that way. Just me and the groove. But about my 5th week in, it got me into trouble. In the middle of my show, I really needed to use the restroom, so I put on a 6 minute song, set it for "pause pending," and went out to the restrooms, just outside of the station. As soon as the door closed behind me, I realized my mistake—right on the other side of the station window lay my keycard, which I had forgotten in the studio. I now had 5 minutes and 48 seconds to save the world. (from dead air). I called about 6 other DJs before finally a friend of mine picked up, and said sure, I can borrow his key card. He was in his dorm. All the way on the other side of campus. I sprinted out of the co-op, bladder forgotten, and dashed past crowds of gawking freshmen to run up to the 3rd floor of Curtis, where I grabbed a key card, thanked my friend, and immediately sprinted in the other direction. I made it back to the studio just barely in time, with about 20 seconds to spare, and quickly caught my breath and did my break. I haven't felt so cool and so stupid at the same time since.
Aight 'skians, here are some boompoints - since bullet points won't sound like my voice in your head (or your voice in your head - you do you). - BOOM Over all illnesses and subsequent irritable-ness... es... These two popped in time when the weather warmed up. BOOM Friendship with a gal in the States fizzled out coincidentally when she began hanging out with her now boyfriend BOOM Working in a loving family business with a routine work schedule of varying tasks where I can see progress (adds to sense of purpose). bonus boom Every time I'm off the mountain and in the valley, people I bump into talk about how they worked with/sing praises of/buy from the family (ditto re: purpose). BOOM I'm on the other side of the Earth with as much or as little distractions from home - including job/academia hunting. All 4 boons been sloughing off some weighted personality blankets I've been cuddling under for years. Having less and less pulls back to the States (health, girl) plus leveling out my norms here (routine, weather) finally washed away some grime in mah persona-pores. - Take aways: WOW I dig how much I've been putting into relationships - even in the falling face first ones. I don't dig how much I bend my line of mind to others interests in hopes of something working out. Learning about gal back home (AKA lesson #3) taught me I let on I give lotta shits about other people to mask how little shits I give on the whole. WOW I miss my voice. The one that uses vocal chords. I got opinions, needs, and damn fine taste in interests. Silence and waiting is a sweet tactic, but leveraging their use against acting on my wants (via giving it sound) with confidence make 'em more potent. WOW I have options even when I get back home. Job search is only one. The amount of options for heavily subsidized trips back here are boundless... but the option to get a dual citizenship altogether affords hella in the long run (especially mid-run it turns out). WOW I feel great for a 20-something. I'm my own best critic, and yet - giving credit where its due - my internal compass has not led me wrong. I have more wind in my sails than I expected; plus, a good crew at my back. - Non-Sequitur Summary (get pranked, this was a sub-titles rip the whole time) Brooklyn Nine-Nine is on Netflix. Balancing reading, journaling, and drawing is lovely. I have fingernails now that I don't have papers to write!
Rubella mostly went away, though I still feel tired most of the time. Nearly fainted face-first into my soup last Friday. Temperature still goes up and down throughout the day like crazy, which doesn't help my overall wellbeing at all, but at least now it's mostly below 38 °C. "Three-day measles" my ass. My flatmate had to bring some of his extremely buggy deadline work back home to fix it over the weekend, asked me for help "because you notice irregular stuff all the time" and it was nice to feel recognised. We fucking fixed it, even if in a somewhat turd-polishing way, in under nine hours. As far as I understand the industry standards, it's good enough to ship. I also flagged seventeen places ripe for abuse. Maybe I'm mistaken, maybe not. I'm often right about those things, though. The important takeaway is that nobody touched many of those places since very early in development and even my flatmate wasn't initially sure what the hell was their purpose. They also don't look like deliberate attempts at crafting backdoors, more like a series of oversights that had the potential to escalate in the wrong hands. It's worth noting that his workplace didn't even bother to give me an interview despite flatmate's internal recommendation because "non-engineers can't think and interviewing them would waste precious developer time." Only slightly paraphrasing, feeling copious amounts of bitter smugness because of the above situation. Flatmate promised to give me part of his bonus for this job. It is a bit much even though I like the perspective of not having to wash cars after classes. Still gonna do it to save up some money and put them into my arse-shelter fund, but it does wonders for my headspace. I mean, it's not like I still hold any hope for getting hired anywhere, for lack of better word, worthwhile, so every bit helps. I mostly keep trying because there's a chance someone will give me a job by mistake, and they'd be too embarrassed to correct it or come clean. Writing this made me too sleepy to correct anything, so please excuse poorer English than usual. Or maybe I'm simply more boring than usual. Whatever. Hopefully, fellow Hubskier, you have a better day.
Hi, there. I had pertussis in 2015. It sucked. I've never missed a vaccination. Know how I had pertussis in 2015? Because they recommend Tdap every ten years but your insurance probably doesn't cover it because as an adult, pertussis isn't a life-threatening illness. So chances are you don't even have a vaccination. And if you did, it's probably not in your records anyway so the insurance is going to say "prove you needed this" so your clinic isn't even gonna offer it to you because it's a solid money loser. So if you know anyone with a cough, and you spend any time with them, guess what? You've got pertussis. And you don't know it's pertussis until you go "holy shit why have I been coughing uncontrollably for six weeks?" And by the way by the time you've been coughing hard enough to break a rib, you're no longer contagious. The rib-breakers are you hacking up your dead alveoli. That's why it's gonna take you two months to get batter. You're literally regrowing your lungs. But yeah. That cold you had a month ago? It was actually whooping cough and now you've given it to every adult you know who also doesn't know what whooping cough is other than guessing you probably can't get it from eating margarine. The anti-vax folx love pox parties. They think they should have them all the time. They do all sorts of silly shit. Of course what the medical establishment wants you to do is vaccinate against varicella but you gotta dig deep as to why; fundamentally it's because the antibiotic-resistant bacteria we've grown for the past 50 years take pox from "itchy thing" to "MRSA vector" and since you're coming to the hospital with your highly-infectious pox they don't want you leaving with flesh-eating bacteria. Look. I get that everyone with an ounce of science wants to beat somebody up. I get that the IFLS posse hates the anti-vaxers the way 4chan hates furries. But fuckin' slow your roll. Epidemiology and public health aren't as simple as "vaccinate your fucking kids". Yeah. Totes do that. But your own goddamn link says nothing about vaccinating adults because nobody does. And even when you're vaccinated you can still get goddamn whooping cough.Valid vaccination history was available for 1,829 of 2,006 (91.2%) patients aged 3 months–19 years. Overall, 758 of 1,000 (75.8%) patients aged 3 months–10 years were up-to-date with the childhood diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and acellular pertussis (DTaP) doses. Receipt of Tdap was documented in 97 of 225 (43.1%) patients aged 11–12 years and in 466 of 604 (77.2%) patients aged 13–19 years. Estimated DTaP coverage in Washington among children aged 19–35 months was 93.2% for ≥3 doses and 81.9% for ≥4 doses in 2010; Tdap coverage in adolescents aged 13–17 years was estimated at 70.6% (3).
I know just how badly you want this to be about vaccine exemption. It's not. Here in Skagit County, about an hour’s drive north of Seattle — the hardest-hit corner of the state, based on pertussis cases per capita — the local Public Health Department has half the staff it did in 2008. Preventive care programs, intended to keep people healthy, are mostly gone. The county’s top medical officer, Dr. Howard Leibrand, who is also a full-time emergency room physician, said that in the crushing triage of a combined health crisis and budget crisis, he had gone so far as to urge local physicians to stop testing patients to confirm a whooping cough diagnosis. If the signs are there, he said — especially a persistent, deep cough and indication of contact with a confirmed victim — doctors should simply treat patients with antibiotics. The pertussis test can cost up to $400 and delay treatment by days. About 14.6 percent of Skagit County residents have no health insurance, according to a state study conducted last year, up from 11.6 percent in 2008. “There has been half a million dollars spent on testing in this county,” Dr. Leibrand said late last week. “Do you know how much vaccination you can buy for half a million dollars?” And testing, he added, benefits only the epidemiologists, not the patients. “It’s an outrageous way to spend your health care dollar.” People wanted to get bent outta shape about the anti-vax crowd in 2012, too. They had a bit more of a leg to stand on. Except Washington actually changed their regulations for the better the year before: “We had the easiest opt-out law in the nation until last year, so what we also had was the highest percent of parents opting out,” Ms. Selecky said. And I know you want this to be "a group of religious people that went to South America." Except it was eighteen different strains. Listen closely to me, atheist, because you're doing that thing everybody hates us for: proclaiming that proper zealous adherence to dogma will protect our virtue. That's like when people would tell me my kid has a life-threatening peanut allergy because my wife didn't eat enough peanut butter sandwiches when she was pregnant, and then blamed us both for not enrolling her in a peanut allergy study. You're whistling in the goddamn graveyard and everybody knows it - but worse than that, you're saying parents are to blame for the random misfortunes of their offspring. You know why there's a pertussis outbreak in Kentucky? So if you're under 50 you thought you were vaccinated against pertussis forever but it turns out you were actually only vaccinated against pertussis until about 2008. Stop trying to blame people for that. No. this isn't about crossing national borders. No. This isn't about whether or not you ride the bus. This is about the fact that people get fucking sick sometimes and it's a drag. Kinda like how the flu vaccine is sometimes like 40% effective because it's for the wrong strain. I dated a girl who worked at a hospital. As part of her HR package she had to be tested for every fuckin' thing under the sun. Turns out she picked up tuberculosis when she was in Spain five years previously. Is there a tuberculosis vaccine? yes. Is it given in the US? no. So are we gonna keep all the brown people out now? or give them all a vaccine scar that never goes away? Or just go ahead and treat everyone? 'cuz that's a six month course with a teratogenic that requires monthly liver function checks and utter abstinence of all alcohol. Or maybe just accept that in a town called Perfect everyone thinks like you, acts like you, behaves like you and vaccines are 100% effective but here in These United States we can't afford to burn people at the stake for getting sick?The response to the epidemic has been hampered by the recession, which has left state and local health departments on the front lines of defense weakened by years of sustained budget cuts.
Last year, the Washington Legislature passed a law requiring parents to prove that they had consulted a physician before declining vaccinations for their children.
Thirty-one PFGE types were found, with the most common types, CDC013 (n = 51), CDC237 (n = 44), and CDC002 (n = 42), accounting for 57% of them. Eleven MLVA types were observed, mainly comprising type 27 (n = 183, 76%). Seven MLST types were identified, with the majority of the isolates typing as prn2-ptxP3-ptxA1-fim3-1 (n = 157, 65%). Four different prn mutations accounted for the 76% of isolates exhibiting pertactin deficiency.
However, Thomas Clark, MD, an epidemiologist with the CDC's meningitis and vaccine-preventable disease branch, told the Times that many people sickened in outbreaks in Washington and other states received their childhood vaccinations, but changes in the vaccine in the early 1990s to reduce side effects may have had an impact on how long immunity lasts.
11 months of work: complete. 10 months of stupid and 4 days of panicked rushing around, should result in about $15m/year for my company for at least the next 5 years; possibly 10. But ya know what? Government contracting is just the stupidest way to solve problems. If I cared at all, it would be rage-inducing that this is how our governmental institutions purchase technology products. As it is, I know I can put up with the bullshit easily, jump through all the moronic and meaningless hoops with ease and agility, let all the stupid roll off my teflon back, and I am safe in the knowledge that NOBODY wants my job. And I get paid WELL for it.
As someone on the user end of government IT, it's no picnic over here, either.
Yeah, I was a SysAdmin for NASA at Ames Research Center in the 1990's. Fortunately I worked for a contractor (like 90% of NASA workers), so I wasn't in control of the RFP or acquisition process. I just told the NASA guy what we needed to buy, and it magically showed up 6-9 months later. Now I'm on the other end, bidding on government RFPs... which are just the most stupidly written documents in the world. They define the features, buttons, and screens that they think their software should have ... but NEVER TELL ME WHY!! Less than 10% of the RFPs I ever see (>100 in a year) actually state what problem they are trying to solve. "We need a better way to track X." or " We need to reduce the cost of Y." or "We are looking to improve the reporting in Z system, with data collected from P, Q, and R." Instead the RFP says things like, "Must provide functional reporting" or "Battery life of 3 years on a single charge" or "One-click application of user hierarchy" or just a long list of report names with no description of what the contents of those reports should be, or even a glossary of what the terms mean. If they just told me what problem they wanted to solve, rather than trying to be software and hardware designers, I could tell them how our software solves those problems. Instead I have to try to interpret a bunch of half-assed feature requests from people who have never designed a software application in their life, nor know what apps are available in the market to solve those problems today. The stoopid. It hurts.
My favorites are the ones where they really want to go with a particular vendor, but they're required to shop around, so they write the RFP to describe exactly what the vendor they want does and you get requirements like having to store medical histories in an internet-accessible Access database running on Windows ME on a toaster.
My assumption is that someone, somewhere said "this is what RFPs have to look like." One of the things I've noticed is that large organizations, both private and public, are very bad at encouraging the right kind of risk-taking. If you're right, you may get some kind of reward out of it, but if you're wrong, you're pilloried. But no one ever gets canned for following accepted practice, and so many managers are content to coast their way up the seniority ladder while never rocking the boat or deviating from standard practice.
Been watching a few videos here and there on Texas Parks and Wildlife's YouTube channel. I'm a particular fan of this one, about a project in studying urban bobcat activity. There's about a five by ten foot part of the yard that's currently unused that my wife and I want to plant some native pollinators in. We're hoping to use plants that won't grow too tall or spread out like crazy, because we don't want to make a mess of things. Heaven forbid our project spills into our neighbors yard, or even worse, we inadvertently grow some problematic species. I'm currently compiling a list of possible candidates using information from lists provided by our state department of natural resources, a local botanical garden, and the internet in general. When I think I have a good list, I'm gonna reach out to one of the members of the horticultural department at one of our local universities soon, as they came highly recommended and from what I understand they have as lot of papers and studies they can provide. One of our friends and her husband also has a few acres of land, of which they've devoted some to native species and I'm gonna be in constant contact with them for advice as well. We've only ever really grown peppers, tomatoes, and carrots, so this is something new and exciting for us. I'm looking forward to seeing what develops.
Also look for your local Master Gardeners group or club. MG's are normally a group of local, dedicated, wonderful old lady gardeners, who have decades of extensive training and practical experience with the local flora. My Mom is a Master Gardener and designs gardens for a living. Her gardens ALWAYS work beautifully, while gardens that follow local university guidelines often have major issues. I often see my Mom shake her head at planting an X next to a Y and saying things like, "Oh, you can't ever plant those two together, because the blahblah from the X interacts with the whiggywhiggy from the Y, and turns the soil all acidy. Chases the worms right out of the garden, and your soil goes to hell." Or similar things... MG's also have regular plant sales, and are just the sweetest people.
Good advice, thank you. We definitely want to limit ourselves to just one or two flowers, partly because of the whole interaction issue, but mostly because different plants have different properties and since we're new at this, we don't want to overwhelm ourselves maintenance wise.
Me and my girlfriend decided this week to take a trip to Stockholm and Berlin in May. We will be spending a week each at both locations. Any recommendations from those that have been there before?
I am seeking programs to attend when I come back from travelling. I think it is important to acclimate to where you wish to spend your time. I also think there is a standard to be met wherever you go. I just like to make it easier. I am in love and I really want to be okay for it to work. I want to go to any lengths to make sure this is the one.