> "West Nile [disease] is ruled out. . . Everything has been ruled out. To date, we still do not know," says Monsma, citing tests conducted by Wildlife's clinic director, Cheryl Chooljian.
I’m no expert in this, but I’m going to guess that destroying their habitats may be to blame.
Yes, obviously habitat destruction, chemical exposure, etc. are bad. But the sudden, broad emergence of a new set of symptoms means that something new is happening besides business as usual.
In this scenario, saying "habitat destruction" and leaving it at that is like a coroner saying "cause of death: stopped being alive." It's true, but not useful.
No, this is absolutely business as usual. The “new” thing you’re talking about is a “new” thing during that year, until something new comes out the next, repeating to produce this: https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/
What was that saying about missing the forest for the trees?
Habitat destruction is definitely a problem, but in this case the disease is affecting birds that live well alongside humans like starlings and Jays. I’m pretty sure we aren’t running out of city habitat.
It really doesn't take an expert to recognize the cause on a macro-level - destroying their habitats, an infinite number of chemicals making their way through the food chain, air pollution, climate change, fewer insects.
If anything, this seems like a predictable outcome.
Because it's written by someone who (as they admit) first learned about it recently from a tweet. It appeals to laymen very well, but conflates "Zero knowledge" and "Zero knowledge proofs" throughout the article. Not sure if that's intentional or not.
Edit: Learned it was important from a recent tweet*. it seems the author may have already known what they are.
To be quite honest, most of it is sold by the media, who have mutually beneficial arrangements with the for-profit healthcare/insurance industry. If you’ve ever seen how many advertisements on American TV about prescriptions, health plans, etc, you know what I’m getting at. The debate is kept tightly constrained to make the capitalist system seem more robust and successful than it actually is. So: media propaganda, more or less.
Also want to add: my child’s birth cost $20,000 (with insurance). When I would tell other Americans about this, the response was (usually) “you know you can get on a payment plan, right?”
Having children means sharing your marshmallows. It’s also a lot easier to chase a kid in your 20s than your 30s. It’s also maturing, enjoyable, and spending time with them is the best part of the day.
Not something many people say about work! Maybe when the work is truly meaningful (I wouldn’t know).
The notion that people need to work through their 20s for this unknown future prize is silly and wasteful. Spending the prime years of your life slaving to a computer is something I think a lot of people will regret.
So, no, I won’t listen to PG. My most fulfilling work is being a dad.
I want to make it very clear that I do not expect everyone to want kids, and I'm never ever one to say "oh you'll love kids once you have your own!" to anyone, but...
I cannot understate for me personally how much having my own kids over the past few years has shifted my priorities. The best parts of my weeks are when I'm with my family all doing something fun together. Work is now only a means to provide and is not a source of personal fulfillment anymore (again, YMMV!!!!)
It's hard to stay "extra motivated" at work now, though. I went from being willing to put in the long hours and weekends to barely being able to get 30-40 hours a week.
But you know what? There are plenty of perfectly great jobs that allow for that. The place I'm currently working told me in the interview loop they can't compete with FAANG salary ranges, but they promised me total autonomy on when/where I work as well as great work-life balance, which has proven to be true.
I worked very hard in my 20s and I'm extremely glad I did. The work was interesting, engaging, maturing, and super valuable for society. It also set me up with an extremely valuable skill set, of hard and soft skills, that are useful in both my professional and personal lives.
This trend of saying you enjoyed your life and therefore yours was the only correct choice is extremely closed-minded, and tends to come from parents in particular a lot. What if instead you solicited the opinions of people whose life you clearly don't understand? Are you so scared of the idea that other choices made other people happy?
I also totally understand being single, childless, and driven to a career. I’m happier now. Who is the one not listening to other’s opinions? You sure you understand?
> Not something many people say about work! Maybe when the work is truly meaningful (I wouldn’t know).
The vagueness of "work" in this article is (IMO) a feature, and not a bug. Raising your children can be great work, to your own point. You can't half-ass raising your kids, as you well know, and it sounds like you get the most purpose and fulfillment from doing that. What PG appears to be arguing is that, whether you're doing a "great" job of it depends on: 1) how hard you work on raising your kids, 2) your natural ability, and 3) effort — and I trust that you satisfy all 3 of those preconditions, as a dad.
> The notion that people need to work through their 20s for this unknown future prize is silly and wasteful
First of all, to call it an "unknown future prize" is a bit of a mischaracterization. If someone were to argue that one ought to spill their lives into their career with no well-defined end goal, then I'd agree that it's silly and wasteful. But if you actually have a clear view of what a desired end goal looks like (it could be anything: a house with a yard in the Bay Area, enough money to retire early, etc etc), it can be entirely reasonable to defer gratification. Keep in mind that in the experiment, the child knows that there's a second marshmallow coming if they wait. Adults need to know what their second marshmallow is before delaying the first one.
Second of all, I don't think it's fair to make such a sweeping generalization for how other people ought to live their lives. The neat thing about PG's post is that it's sufficiently abstract that it can apply to anyone, regardless of what they consider "great work".
> But if you actually have a clear view of what a desired end goal looks like (it could be anything: a house with a yard in the Bay Area, enough money to retire early, etc etc), it can be entirely reasonable to defer gratification.
The one thing I often don't find people discussing is that you may actually achieve your goals and find them not at all worth the effort.
I'd put a lower bound of at least 50% likelihood that the goal you seek is not the goal you'll be happy with if you achieve it. Of course, you won't know until you get there.
I have goals - I hope I attain them and I do work towards them. But keeping the above in mind, I will try to ensure that my present life is also on the positive. Even if I attain my goal and find it worthless, my time/life would not have been wasted.
But is _is_ an unknown future prize, and countless stories prove that. Pension funds go belly up, whole industries made obsolete, an accident/injury disrupts everything, etc.
I think your premise of “telling people how to live their life” falls more on the popular notion that investment early in career, rather than family or life experience, is more important. I believe this is wrong and it’s repeated more frequently than my counterpoint!
> But is _is_ an unknown future prize, and countless stories prove that. Pension funds go belly up, whole industries made obsolete, an accident/injury disrupts everything, etc.
This is only an "unknown future prize" if the defined goal is very specifically to have a successful pension fund, or to
thrive in a specific industry.
Using the example of what makes you, personally, feel the most fulfilled: children die prematurely (disrupts everything), or they have developmental challenges that make it difficult to do much else in life. None of that changes the fact that you're probably still better off devoting your life right now to rearing children.
You're absolutely correct that there's uncertainty in the future, but none of that refutes any of what I said in my comments, or PG wrote in his article. It's a "yes, and" addition, rather than a "no, but" refutation.
YES, there's significant entropy in life, AND given that, the most reliable way to do "great work" is still <dot dot dot> (as laid out in PG's blog post).
> I think your premise of “telling people how to live their life” falls more on the popular notion that investment early in career, rather than family or life experience, is more important. I believe this is wrong and it’s repeated more frequently than my counterpoint!
I argued no such thing. It clearly bears repeating that the more abstract notion is that investment in XYZ early in your life, rather than ABC is more important. XYZ and ABC can be the exact same thing, if your circumstances permit; there's no requirement that they be different things. If you find the most fulfillment and joy in life raising children resources notwithstanding, then you can certainly start doing that early in your life. If you think that raising children will only be more fulfilling if you have some baseline threshold of wealth, then you may have to defer that in favor of a career. Again, it all depends on how you, as an individual (or as a family), defines XYZ and ABC.
I have no problem with how people define XYZ and ABC. What I have a problem with is in telling people how they ought to define XYZ and ABC. Neither PG's post nor my comment did the latter.
Is there any meaningful change to curtail the amount of power these companies have? Legislation like this seems like show and does nothing to control the fact that a handful of social media companies can make enormous editorial decisions not just on political candidacy... but basically everything else. Seems like another one of those stories that will likely go nowhere and turned into a partisan divide, but maybe I’m just bitter.
Why wouldn’t the CDC publish guidance once it is ready, which the media can than report on? The mere coordination (and normalcy thereof) is exactly why people view these policies (gatekeeping) as nefarious.
I can give you an example, if you want information to get out and spread quickly, do you 1. put it on your website and wait until people notice it and dissiminate it or 2. Let the main information "spreaders" know in advance so they can prepare articles (possibly do some interviews) etc?
Which do you think reaches more people in a given time?
You post on your website, somebody notices, 'spreaders' race to get faulty quick copy out (better fast than right), gives the conspiracy theorists a headstart as people start looking for more detail.
Or you issue an embargoed release, allowing responsible 'spreaders' to get their ducks in a row, and then cometh the hour, cometh the copy-edited verbose well referenced pieces.
This model gives government the power of choosing who is and is not a “trusted source” and depends on a relationship where those sources report uncritically about the information they are being given. It is also prioritizing which (for-profit) business gets favorable access.
From a practicality perspective it makes sense. From a propaganda perspective it’s chilling.
There’s nothing in this article indicating the operator has a recovery plan in place involving restoring backups to get these systems online. Seems grossly negligent on their behalf, and made almost satiric by the fact that Fireye can be mentioned without reference to their own massive security lapses.
Too much focus always on the “hackers” and never the obvious security lapses solved by diverting executive pay to more bodies and training to cover them, but oh well right?
You think Fireeye had massive security lapses because they reported they were hacked. Everyone else was also hacked and FireEye was the only one that figured it out and blew the whole thing wide open. Now if the best incident responders in the world can’t always prevent malicious activity on their network, how is an oil company going to do that? Or utilities, transporters, hospitals, defense contractors, or universities? The truth is everything is vulnerable, and what you think is the stability and security of all the other organizations you don’t hear about getting hacked, is just the current set of hackers working hard to be discreet. I think if war was to break out with certain other nations we’d find it in a hurry how much our infrastructure has already been compromised.
IT is typically grossly understaffed and underfunded in these businesses. At the site-level, you'll see some very out of date tech running critical systems. IT is a cost-center to be reduced as much as possible, oversight is non-existent.
Its difficult to chastise a country that misses the forest for the trees, when that country has spent sixty years formenting a culture of blind consumption and wilful ignorance of anything STEM. instead of a flourishing culture of hacking and computing, the united states through DMCA and law relegated the notion to comic books and hollywood fiction. most of the public war drumming for 'hacking' (if it could be said to exist at all in 2021) is a thinly veiled surrogate of consumerism.
What reason would we have to blame the company for poor security hygene? what possible outcome could we hope for when in 2021 nearly every Solarwinds customer renewed their license after the hack.
The reason country is has spent so much time on “STEM” is not that there is a labor shortage but that salaries of “STEM” people are too high and business owners need more people not to fill shortages but to overflow the system such that salaries go down significantly.
There is no shortage of labor for jobs paying high 6-figures … :-)
The problem is our government. There is no shortage of STEM graduates -- we have the best and brightest. Our government has failed to set the right incentives for the private market to innovate on critical infrastructure... so naturally the smartest STEM grads end up building Netflix or Facebook.
I'm here to bring a message from the future: they did have usable backups, according to a news article published just a few days after this one:[0]
> Once they received the payment, the hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said.
It's hard to get the full story from a single article, and larger publications like the Washington Post tend to focus on the most recent statements from federal agencies and corporations rather than details that you and I find more interesting. Sometimes I wish that newspapers would do more of a synopsis of news stories a month or so after the fact to give more context and "lessons learned" or "what impact has this had?". I would prefer that much more to the "breaking news" approach.
Executives are rewarded extremely handsomely for short-term returns. Even if the company goes under, they've long ago accumulated enough wealth to live out their lives fabulously. The incentives to invest in security are weak.
I think you’re talking about Figure 5 which is the ratio of total to reported COVID related deaths. This would mean that CA underreported COVID related deaths compared to Florida.
Figure 7, the cumulative total death rate, is probably more relevant to the point you’re trying to make, in which case FL and CA are in the same bin.
One conclusion you might draw is that the effectiveness of lockdowns cannot be inferred from this single map.
If California did underreport Covid-related deaths compared to Florida, that in itself would be interesting because endless column inches were spent on claims that Florida was underreporting its Covid deaths as part of a cover-up by its evil right-wing leaders and we definitely didn't see nearly so many claims that California was doing this.
What do you stand to gain by spreading political narratives even more? It doesn’t matter what side they say they’re on. Take, for instance, the democratic governor of NY, among the biggest culprits of hiding reporting on deaths. What’s the point?
Maybe your problem is more with the media than any side which they defined.
I’m no expert in this, but I’m going to guess that destroying their habitats may be to blame.