I used to have so much anxiety about trying to fill 40 hours days. It led to me getting great performance reviews but feeling like shit and burning out at multiple places.
During the pandemic I work maybe 4 hours a day. I wake up late, go for a walk, review some PRs, and then dig into a task. Meetings in the afternoon, another walk, maybe a bike ride. After dinner if I have something on my mind I'll log back on and do an hour or two to get it done. I'm accessible via Slack on my phone almost all of the time, but I take ~20 minutes to respond.
So far nobody cares. I'm hitting my OKRs, I'm helping junior devs, and I get to enjoy the beautiful summer weather.
This is very similar to my schedule right now. Everything gets done. I don't feel burnt out. I'm actually able to feel healthy because I can workout during the day. It's great and no one gives a shit as long as I'm doing well.
In fact, it's much better for the company in the long run because I'm likely to stay for more than a few years because I actually enjoy my wlb.
This happened with me, and I thought to myself "how does this work? How am I still as productive as before?" And I tried to recall what life was like in the office. Turns out a lot of my time was spent trying to look busy, rather than actually being busy. It's not like I was Peter Gibbons from Office Space, I wasn't lazy or jaded. But sometimes my brain just wouldn't do what I needed it to do. And instead of doing the correct thing, which is stepping away from the computer and taking a walk, or doing the dishes or whatever, instead I just sat there and mimicked my working routine. Tons of wasted time, wasted potential, and yet it still drags on your energy just as if you were actually working. All of that was because of the social pressure due to being physically in the office.
As a white woman in the tech industry, the entire pipeline is leaky. You're discouraged from studying engineering before you go into college. You're discouraged once you're in college. You get less money and fewer advancements once you're in industry. Dudes creep on you and condescend to you, assuming you're a diversity hire. Even encouraging people will push you into non-technical roles because you have "soft skills". Eventually you get sick of all the bullshit and you take one of those non-technical roles, or you just leave the industry altogether.
Even if you feed more people into one end of the woodchipper, very few will make it out the other end intact.
Contrast that experience with that of female MDs, where even though there's surely still plenty of bullshit you get to treat a lot of grateful female patients — pretty rewarding in comparison! (And grateful male patients too, but the point is that it's not just male patients.) And now women outnumber men for both applying to med school and graduating.
The same nonsense about aptitudes, interests, whatever was thrown at women about careers in medicine. Eventually, the tech industry will even out too, because today's tech demographics are not the result of some unchangeable destiny. I just wish it would happen in my lifetime.
I would expect a general correction to women being over represented in universities and correction for privilege programs like women-in-STEM before I expect it to “even out” with women dominating every field.
That article is from last year and it just says black canadians are right to be wary because healthcare is racist. It doesn't say most truckers or occupiers are black (or indian?).
The truckers are overwhelming white men. I'm in Ottawa. I was at the protest yesterday that stopped a convoy of trucks, all driven by white men. The people who I see driving around with giant flags, yelling at pedestrians are all white men. The people at the LCBO fighting security without masks on - white men. People at the grocery store harassing actual essential workers - white men.
>That article is from last year and it just says black canadians are right to be wary because healthcare is racist. It doesn't say most truckers or occupiers are black (or indian?).
I was providing a link in corroboration as to why there is a disproportionate amount of not-white people protesting. While some media are covering how this is not white supremacy as claimed by the CBC... https://notthebee.com/article/come-and-laugh-with-me-at-the-...
The point is missed.
>The truckers are overwhelming white men.
So the reason why the convoy exists is antivaxxers. The way averages work, if Black canadians are at 50% vaccinated 'because reasons' and our average is 85%. This means white people are even more vaccinated and not concerned with the change.
>'m in Ottawa. I was at the protest yesterday that stopped a convoy of trucks, all driven by white men.
So you're a counter protester? I support your efforts so long as you also remain peaceful.
>The people who I see driving around with giant flags, yelling at pedestrians are all white men. The people at the LCBO fighting security without masks on - white men. People at the grocery store harassing actual essential workers - white men.
Here's the thing. The narrative that the truckers are a racists, sexist, etc fell apart. You can watch several eloquent Indian truckers explain in depth about how this is not about race.
The Ottawa Police have refused to enforce the law for 3 weeks. They've been letting this go on unchecked. The mayor is a former Conservative MPP who is not running for re-election, so he's completely checked out. The police chief is a retired former deputy who got passed over to lead Toronto's police force and came out of retirement to try and burnish his reputation so he can get into politics.
The province is governed by a right-winger who will not do anything to upset his base. They've been pointing fingers at the municipal police, and vice-versa, and refusing to act.
The truckers are a very small group with no cohesive messaging. It's a bunch of dudes having a party and yelling about how they want to overthrow the government and install JFK Jr or whatever. There is no dialogue that would de-escalate them, it would only legitimize them.
The people of Canada have overwhelmingly stated that they want the occupation to end. They're sick of seeing people desecrate monuments, steal from the homeless, harass vulnerable people, shit in the streets, and make noise 24/7. The truckers have started taking their flags down when they're driving in town because everyone hates them and they don't want to be seen outside the red zone.
Not to nitpick, but Jim Watson was a Liberal MPP, not Conservative.
I know he hasn't been especially effective during all of this but there's also not much he can do since mayors here are pretty much glorified councillors.
On COVID issues the NDP, Bloc and Libs are aligned which is a significant majority. Also we just had an election and nothing changed. The Liberals with a minority is actually an indication that Canada wants to be further left than Trudeau, but we haven't gotten there yet.
The entirety of the Bloc just voted yea on the motion with the conservatives for the government to propose a concrete plan to end covid mandates today, along with 1 Liberal that Joel guy who dissented from his party.
No, I'm pretty sure we got to 90% vaccination because of mandates. People want things to go back to normal, and most people don't care one way or the other about getting a shot. Giving them a little incentive helps.
Mandates make the remaining crazy people look more visibly crazy, but they were going to be there either way.
$100 is "a little incentive". Firing people from their jobs, threatening their livelihood, making them unable to put food on their table or a roof over their heads, and ostracizing them from society is brutal coercion, no matter how nicely you dress it up. Getting people vaccinated that way is not informed consent in any way, shape or form.
> People want things to go back to normal
The biggest problem is that people who defend the coercion believe that a higher vaccination rate will somehow end the pandemic. In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
It's the vaccinated who are driving the pandemic, and have been driving it the past few months. But all the blame is being heaped on the unvaccinated.
The Omicron wave will burn out, as waves do. The pandemic will end, as pandemics do. And the vaccination rate won't make one iota of difference in the long run.
To preface this, I am not bought in on the way the mandates have been done. I think there's huge room for improvement, and it feels a bit ham-fisted rather than well thought through. That said...
> In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
Looking at https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations right now, the population of the ICU is 117 unvaccinated, 15 partially vaccinated, 150 fully vaccinated. Over 90% of Ontarians age 12+ are vaccinated. This says to me that the unvaccinated 10% of the population is making up over 40% of the ICU cases. While what you've said may be technically accurate, I think it's basically saying "most people are vaccinated" and the numbers suggest unvaccinated people are hugely more likely to end up in the ICU.
Am I misunderstanding the numbers? Or are we working off different numbers?
Yes, that's the source I was using as well. And yes, your conclusion is correct, you are more likely to end up in the ICU if you are unvaccinated. Both these things are true at the same time: The vaccines work, and the majority of cases and hospitalizations are among the vaccinated.
But the strain on the healthcare system and the pandemic as a whole is driven by total numbers, not relative numbers. The majority of cases are among the vaccinated, therefore vaccine mandates won't end the pandemic. But people who argue for the mandates argue as if it was a "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and that's simply not true.
Ah - I think I see what you're saying. At the same time, I don't think I agree with your premise. The numbers in front of us seem to indicate it's not just slightly different, it's dramatically more likely to end up in the ICU as an unvaccinated person. With that in mind, one of the cheapest/lowest impact avenues to reduce ICU bed usage is via vaccinations (acknowledging that's brushing aside the issue of forcing vaccines).
Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates? If so, do you think the moment it passed 50/50 in terms of ICU beds (or other similar stat) was the appropriate time to repeal them? Or what should the "trigger" have been?
Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area. This still seems like "too many unvaccinated people in the ICU" to me, even though they're not the majority. I can definitely empathize with it becoming a judgement call now though, and on that I agree. At some point someone is making a decision about the magic number, and I'm not sold on the current government's strategy there.
> one of the cheapest/lowest impact avenues to reduce ICU bed usage is via vaccinations
Only if it's targeted. The people ending up at the ICU skew older and many of them are probably retired. But the issue that spawned the trucker protest is vaccine mandates for the truckers, who as a group are probably a lot younger than the people who are currently occupying ICUs in Canada due to covid.
Age is the single most important factor when it comes to determining the personal risk of covid. A healthy unvaccinated child is ~1000x less likely to have a bad outcome compared to a vaccinated 80-year-old. But this is completely ignored when it comes to the mandates, the mandates are the same whether you're a 20-year-old trucker or a 60-year-old trucker, even though forcing 20-year-olds to get vaccinated is completely useless from a public health standpoint.
The second most important factor is natural immunity, because it is stronger and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity. Again, completely ignored. Forcing people with natural immunity to get vaccinated makes zero sense.
> Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates?
No, never.
If the vaccines had been more effective and actually stopped transmission, we wouldn't be having this Omicron wave, so we wouldn't have lots of people in the ICUs in the first place, which is the current reason for the mandates. The main reason so many people are still unvaccinated is because they've made their own risk assessment and decided they're fine with not getting vaccinated.
If the virus had been deadlier, vaccination rates would have been higher anyway, because fewer people would have decided to take the risk to stay unvaccinated. If the virus had been less deadly, we would have had a lower vaccination rate, but also even less people in the ICUs.
No matter which parameter you hypothetically imagine to be different, we would probably have landed in a collective societal risk assessment that would have produced the same results anyway.
> Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area.
Right now that page shows ~78% total utilization, and a ~20% covid utilization. So one in four ICU patients are covid patients, which sounds like a lot. But if you could magically force-vaccinate everyone, and assuming there's a 50/50 split among vaccinated/unvaccinated in the US as well, that means you would reduce total utilization from ~78% to ~68%.
How the hell does it make sense to violate people's bodily autonomy, to force them or coerce them to get vaccinated, to increase people's distrust of government and public health, in order to have ~30% free ICU capacity instead of ~20%?
What the fuck? How about increasing ICU and hospital capacity instead?!? How about looking at the 3/4 of ICU patients that are there for something other than covid and see if there's any low-hanging fruit we can take care of there in order to reduce that number instead? Why would we curb people's freedoms and rights for a slight increase in potential ICU capacity? Why should ICU capacity decide whether or not people can go to a restaurant or not? That's a micro-managed technocratic bio-fascist dystopia! The healthcare system should serve the people, not the other way around!
> You're taking a risk with your own health, I don't care if you take a risk and it kills you.
> If hospitals aren't able to handle the wave of patients, put government weight behind staffing hospitals better and creating temporary hospitals for overflow.
You just immediately contradicted yourself. "It's only a risk to you", but also the government needs to find more hospital staff to take care of you. The fact is, nurses and doctors are burnt out and they're leaving the field because of this bullshit. They don't have enough people to train new health care workers, and even if they did it takes years before they're qualified. You can't just throw money at a staffing issue like this.
Even if you could throw money at a staffing issue, I still would rather mandate vaccines than require the government to vacuum up/print tons of money to treat illness that's trivially preventable. COVID vaccination is leagues cheaper than COVID hospitalization, and that cost affects everyone.
It would be! And if banning cheeseburgers had remotely the same material consequences as vaccination (i.e. virtually none), and would be remotely as effective for preserving public health, we could seriously consider the notion that we should go ahead and do it. But since it would, in fact, not be nearly as effective (because if I stopped eating cheeseburgers alone I wouldn’t be 16x less likely to die of an obesity related condition), and because it would make everyone besides vegans very sad and do terrible harm to lots of industries, whereas vaccination mostly just harms the funeral business and only makes people very very bad at statistics unhappy, it is, in fact - like all comparisons between obesity and vaccination status I’ve seen people who think they’re clever whip out - a completely ridiculous comparison.
Both types of action aren't stupid. One is, because it would have deleterious consequences with little benefit; one isn't, because it has very positive consequences with little cost. I already said that, but maybe if I say it again it'll register?
Frankly, I'd be more than happy forcing everyone to inject saline once if it saved everyone $10...but I do well, I'm not especially concerned about "a few tax dollars" and I'm happy to pay my taxes. But inflation from printing money hurts everyone, as do cuts from other government programs meant to help those in need, and both are likely. Maybe over-taxing the rich would too, but that'll never happen, so I'm not sweating that. Still, I think it's disgusting that you'd rather let people be homeless, starve to death, or die from lack of access to medical care than that we just demand that the members of society stop being anti-social. Alternatively, I think it's disgusting that you think you're entitled to everyone's money for treatment that a simple 15 minute trip to the pharmacy could have prevented, which you avoided just to spite all of those people who now have to pay the tab. If we could exclude the voluntarily unvaccinated from COVID-related medical treatment, that'd be a good and fair compromise, but for some reason anti-vaxxers throw a tantrum when that's suggested too.
> Frankly, I'd be more than happy forcing everyone to inject saline once if it saved everyone $10
Twice right? And then a saline booster every 6 months too right?
> I'm not especially concerned about "a few tax dollars" and I'm happy to pay my taxes.
Your lead argument for mandating vaccination was the potential cost of care.
> But inflation from printing money hurts everyone, as do cuts from other government programs meant to help those in need, and both are likely. Maybe over-taxing the rich would too, but that'll never happen, so I'm not sweating that.
I have no clue what you’re talking about here.
> Still, I think it's disgusting that you'd rather let people be homeless, starve to death, or die from lack of access to medical care than that we just demand that the members of society stop being anti-social.
I said no such thing.
There’s a world of difference between opposing a mandate that everybody take a vaccine and opposing vaccines.
Everybody who wants one should get one. They’re free, available on just about every corner, and I’m not aware of anyone right now who wants one who can’t get one.
I’m also not aware of anyone except the most paranoid triple vaxed that still wear a mask outdoors. Now thats anti-social. Not “following the science” either.
> Alternatively, I think it's disgusting that you think you're entitled to everyone's money for treatment that a simple 15 minute trip to the pharmacy could have prevented, which you avoided just to spite all of those people who now have to pay the tab. If we could exclude the voluntarily unvaccinated from COVID-related medical treatment, that'd be a good and fair compromise, but for some reason anti-vaxxers throw a tantrum when that's suggested too.
We do it for smoking. For obesity. For just about every other choice a person can make. There’s nothing special about covid that you should give up dominion over your own body. Hell, for the vast majority of non-obese under 50, it’s barely a flu.
> We do it for smoking. For obesity. For just about every other choice a person can make. There’s nothing special about covid that you should give up dominion over your own body. Hell, for the vast majority of non-obese under 50, it’s barely a flu.
For posterity, for the third time: obesity is not comparable to COVID, because obesity is not a problem which is instantly resolvable for almost no cost and no effort.
Smoking is also not comparable to COVID, because nicotine addiction is also not a problem that is instantly resolvable, for almost no cost. We also tax the hell out of nicotine, which helps offset the burden smokers place on society. If you're content with how we treat smokers, is there some way we could analogously tax the voluntarily unvaccinated to help offset the burden they're placing on the rest of us that you'd be happy with?
Anyway, that's what's special about COVID and vaccination: it is a problem that is almost instantly resolvable for almost no cost.
I understand you're arguing from a principle: you think that, no matter how costly it is for society for someone to be unvaccinated, no matter how ridiculous their reasons are for being unvaccinated, we still cannot punish anyone for it any way. There's literally no practical fact that could change your mind on that - it could be the case that unless everyone got vaccinated the Earth would explode and all our souls would be subject to infinite torment, and you'd still insist Trucker Joe has the right not to get vaccinated and cast all of humanity into eternal damnation. You can argue from that, if you want; but if you're going to try arguing from specifics, by analogy to specific things, you need to actually think those specifics out.
For posterity, I'll also try to clarify what I meant about taxes, and why what you're advocating for precisely leads to the consequences you claim not to support:
A COVID hospitalization costs the government something like 1000x more than a round of COVID vaccinations. There's no real economic benefit to spending that extra money, and that money needs to come from somewhere. It could come from debt or printing money, but that leads to inflation. Inflation makes everyone poorer; it makes it harder to afford basic necessities like housing and food, almost inevitably leading to some degree of starvation and homelessness. It could come from reallocating money that the government spends on programs elsewhere - but those programs generally exist for a reason, usually to help the people in the most dire of straits, and cutting funding to those programs is going to hurt those people - often leading to, you guessed it, consequences like starvation and homelessness. Or it could come from raising taxes - on the poor and middle class, which is awful, because generally speaking those people need that money (and guess what happens when people don't have money they need); or on the rich, which is probably the least awful option, Laffer curve be damned, but is also the least likely to happen, and is still wholly unnecessary. And of course: this ignores what was mentioned above, which is that there's no amount of money the government could throw at hospitals to let them instantaneously increase their capacity 50x over, because the staff literally doesn't exist. So it's an inevitability that the unvaccinated are clogging our hospitals, leading people to die due to treatable conditions.
> Anyway, that's what's special about COVID and vaccination: it is a problem that is almost instantly resolvable for almost no cost.
That you consider giving up body autonomy "almost no cost" is what's simply insane.
It's not a sliding scale where $X of savings for Y% of personal choice. It's a black and white line that involves someone else, whether elected or appointed, deciding that you must inject this into your body for the good of society.
> I understand you're arguing from a principle: you think that, no matter how costly it is for society for someone to be unvaccinated, no matter how ridiculous their reasons are for being unvaccinated, we still cannot punish anyone for it any way.
Damn right.
> There's literally no practical fact that could change your mind on that - it could be the case that unless everyone got vaccinated the Earth would explode and all our souls would be subject to infinite torment, and you'd still insist Trucker Joe has the right not to get vaccinated and cast all of humanity into eternal damnation.
The only people that think the world is going to end if Trucker Joe does not get vaccinated are the same triple vaxed ones that are still wearing masks outdoors.
> A COVID hospitalization costs the government something like 1000x more than a round of COVID vaccinations...
That doesn't matter and claiming that you could use the same money for $PULL_HEARTSTRINGS does not make the argument any more valid.
People who give up individual freedoms to save a buck will end both enslaved and penniless.
This is hilariously backwards. Black protestors in Ottawa are arrested all the time. These people have been paralyzing a massive part of downtown and violating the law for 3 weeks and they're finally now seeing some consequences.
Also, yes, some protests are moral and some aren't. If there's a Nazi march shutting down main street I have no objections to shutting it down. It's not logically inconsistent to say that people shitting in the streets, having drunken discos and harassing people day and night aren't really "protesting" at this point.
>This is hilariously backwards. Black protestors in Ottawa are arrested all the time.
I was making fun of the parent poster's normative theories, not describing how police in ottawa actually behave.
>These people have been paralyzing a massive part of downtown and violating the law for 3 weeks and they're finally now seeing some consequences.
I'm sure you could say the same for hong kong protesters. I'm going to go on a limb that flooding the entire island with millions of protesters is pretty "paralyzing", if not more.
>Also, yes, some protests are moral and some aren't. If there's a Nazi march shutting down main street I have no objections to shutting it down.
Sounds like you're agreeing with my previous comment?
>It's not logically inconsistent to say that people shitting in the streets, having drunken discos and harassing people day and night aren't really "protesting" at this point.
I have family who live in an authoritarian dictatorship and there is a lot of news coverage of Trudeau's decision - why? Because they parade it around as "evidence that allowing protest is dangerous to a countries stability" and "see what hypocrites the so-called democracies are?"
And the next time farmers protest because their land is being taken away and given to multinational corporations, they crackdown and say "see? we're just like Canada, these people are criminals and we need to restore order".
Being admired by thuggish dictatorships doesn't exactly reflect well on Canada.
I mean, Trudeau's father called in the military because a terrorist group kidnapped a government minister and set off multiple bombs. This is pretty small potatoes compared to the FLQ.
We don't have the concept of co-equal branches of government, but the judiciary can declare acts of parliament to violate the charter of rights and freedoms. The Emergencies Act explicitly says it does not supercede any constitutional rights.
There was concern of over-reach when Pierre invoke the War Measures Act also. The War Measures Act included all of Canada, not just the geography the FLQ was operating in. I was fairly young at the time but I still have a recollection of the bombing, kidnapping and murder. I can't reconcile the current protest demands with say the FLQ manifesto[0]
During the pandemic I work maybe 4 hours a day. I wake up late, go for a walk, review some PRs, and then dig into a task. Meetings in the afternoon, another walk, maybe a bike ride. After dinner if I have something on my mind I'll log back on and do an hour or two to get it done. I'm accessible via Slack on my phone almost all of the time, but I take ~20 minutes to respond.
So far nobody cares. I'm hitting my OKRs, I'm helping junior devs, and I get to enjoy the beautiful summer weather.