So Auckland dropped 33 places just because of few Covid cases ? It is true that we had a peak of Covid cases this year, but it was never really massive by international standards.
At the same time, Auckland is pretty dead for a while now, especially the CBD. Traffic is not that bad, but we haven't recovered at all from Covid. We will see in the next few months if cruise ships and tourists are back or not.
NZ is not cheap indeed and Auckland is insanely expensive (managed to buy despite the crazy housing market), but nice beaches and awesome for sailing !
Some of the central beaches are sometimes crowded, but many beaches are just empty. Went for a swim today and water was fresh (16 degrees) but refreshing !
Not only you do not have much time for yourself but it is often not really "quality" time. It rarely comes in uninterrupted blocks of say 90' or 2h. It is going to be 20 minutes there, 40 minutes there, and maybe 30 minutes over there.
I strongly agree with your point about bias. When I was not a father, I spent a lot of time studying (and passing) AWS certs and reached the point I got all of them. Now? I am happy when I read few blog posts each week and, very often, it takes several attempts to be able to fully watch a single re:Invent session.
"Yes, but you are reading and replying to comments on HN!"
Recently applied to a DevOps Engineer position and after multiple interviews (took ages to plan them...), I finally reached the take-home challenge stage. I have been tasked to work on something absolutely not related to the job, with a framework I have never heard of, and which has never been evoked during the interviews... what a trap!
I obviously failed miserably and they did not even follow up on the challenge even if they said they will... nice!
It is not healthy to set up the candidates to fail - at especially such a late stage - because you just waste everyone's time (especially your own employees'!). I do understand that the companies are trying to protect themselves against false positives, but it sometimes reaches some ridiculous proportions!
Since then, I have something else so happy end (at least for me because they still haven't filled their position...).
They took 2 months to write an insanely complcated code to just copy few objects from an S3 bucket to another... And because the Lambda was timing out, they set the timeout to 15 minutes, leading to our Lambda costs skyrocketing because the function was failing/retrying all the time for some objects.
I was allowed to fix the timeout issue to save cost but I was forbidden to fix the code itself because our manager said "Well, it works so let's move on".
6 months later, on a Tuesday morning, bored, I decided it was enough so I rewrote this bloody Lambda in ~90 lines with a proper handler, retries, logging statements, etc ... in a couple of hours.
What did my manager say? "Good work but you should have taught them rather than doing it yourself".
My understanding is that the vaccines are mainly here to avoid you to die or to require severe ventilation and, based on the available studies, they are doing the job.
The hospitalisation rates are way lower than any previous wave but the law of big numbers still apply at some point... And the Delta variant is clearly a game change here.
Finally, Israel is in a peculiar position because they have vaccinated - relatively speaking - quite a while ago so protection migh be indeed waning and the overall % is not that high (pretty surprised tbh).
>Dr Kobi Haviv, medical director of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, stated that the majority of coronavirus patients in an Israeli hospital are fully vaccinated, including those with severe disease.
>Dr Haviv further specified that: “95% of the severe patients are vaccinated,” adding “85-90% of the hospitalizations are in fully vaccinated people” and the hospital is “opening more and more COVID wards.” This has led him to conclude that “the effectiveness of the vaccine is fading out.”
Note that I am not point out the fact that 95% is vaccinated. But that they are still overwhelming the hospitals, so it seems that your point no longer hold.
Also from the same article
> In other words, the TGA never saw or requested the patient data from Pfizer and simply accepted their reporting of their study as true.This means that when the head of the TGA John Skerritt said that “the safety evidence is pretty thorough” on February 6, his words would ring hollow to most Australians who have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the TGA had actually looked at the patient data before granting any such approval. As noted by Doctors for Covid Ethics on its website, it is currently not known whether any of the major government agencies around the globe (FDA, MHRA or EMA) has independently verified, or attempted to verify, Pfizer’s data, before proceeding with provisional/emergency authorisation of Pfizer’s mRNA therapy vaccine.
It is possible indeed that the Pfizer vaccine is not particularly efficient against Delta but, at the same time, Israel is only one country among a growing list of countries facing a new wave of Covid and what we can see over there does not show up (yet?) in other countries such as the UK or France.
Even if Dr Haviv is correct and the protection offered by the Pfizer vaccine is only valid for 7/8 months, many lives have still been saved in the meantime (Israel got almost no cases and deaths in Q2 2021 for example).
I guess more data is required to see how it goes but it is ackowledged that not all the vaccines have lifetime effects and some only work against specific variant (like the flu one).
To finish, I would like to reiterate that the Delta variant is a game changer so a quote from February needs to be taken with a grain of salt because the situation has changed completely since then.
SF is located on fault, with mega wildfires and mega drought for decades to come... At least the photo of the empty reservoir will be taken with a cheap Chinese-made smartphone, good stuff!
Some peoples value other things than money so it is a bit silly to just talk about $$$. What about housing costs, commute, healthcare, quality of life, etc of the _general_ population (and not only developers)?
