tdfx

If it makes you feel better, Google doesn't have a second gold vein yet, either.

There's tons of qualified people that are unable to find work simply because of their immigration status. Having work permission in the US is a massive economic advantage so it makes the situation of Americans who throw away that gift they were born into that much more jarring and hard to sympathize with.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine has attempted to hire homeless people on multiple occasions to help him in residential demolition projects (no clean clothes, resume, or shower necessary). In one instance, he scheduled work for the following day and zero out of 8 people showed up. I'm sure there's homeless people that would like to work their way of the situation, but I don't think they are in the majority. Any solutions to this problem need to be more realistic about the motivations and intentions of the group they're trying to assist.

Because a certain subset of people loves to advocate for disadvantaged people so long as the personal cost to themselves is zero.

I'm not sure why criticizing politicians who are weaponizing homeless populations against local residents to sway public opinion is lacking empathy. If anything, it's dignifying them as people who should not be used as pawns for a political agenda.

We just started planning our transition, as well. This was handled so poorly I can't imagine anyone would ever plan to start a new project on their platform.

Sorry, looking for numbers in the United States.

There was a "truth world" when interconnectivity between average people was low and narratives were controlled by a select few that dominated or had influence over the media. Now that there's more edges in the graph due to social media and the internet, there's more competition of narratives and we're seeing the social effects of that.

Except no one has been able to come to any consensus on what "disinformation" is and isn't. For most, "disinformation" means "doesn't support my political narrative". Sure, there's extreme cases that are obvious, but the recent big tech censorship scandals have proven that no one has been able to draw the line correctly.

I highly recommend Notion for building a knowledge base at your organization. We have one section dedicated to company-wide knowledge, and another section dedicated to various tasks. Any recurring task should be documented fully, with screenshots or a screen recording. The upfront time investment of doing this allows you to really let go of the burdensome stuff. For any work that isn't creative or specialized, you really shouldn't do it yourself longer than it takes to document and delegate it.

Once you've got the workflow in place, finding an assistant is really just a process of elimination. You can easily find someone with C1 English skills for less than $10/hour on Upwork.

You'll need to filter through a bunch of bad ones to get to a good one, but again, this is an upfront time investment. Establish expectations early and fire quickly at the first sign of issues. Trying to "make it work" is worse than accidentally losing a good candidate.

I would also encourage you to post it as a full-time position, as you don't want to be competing with other clients (you still will, but if you're their primary professional focus that pays the rent, you won't lose out in most deadline situations).

I don't think there's enough investigative power to find all the people who were abusing the system. The level of fraud that I personally witnessed of people filing hundreds of PPP loans for non-existent businesses was in the high 7-figure range, and that was just 2 guys I happened to hear of. There were likely hundreds of scammers doing the same thing in every major city, each stealing millions of dollars each.

I don't think the most perverse behavior we've seen in the CDC has a been a result of political pressure from the executive branch. They seemed to be fairly effective at maneuvering around the Trump administration's attempts to influence their policy. Like most people, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was on the "better safe than sorry" side of things and was generally supportive of their recommendations.

Some of the rules have never made much sense, particularly in regards to masking in restaurants and who was going to have to enforce those rules, but also the insistence on vaccine mandates that filtered down in very logically inconsistent ways to the local level. In an effort to prevent anti-vax conspiracy theorists from having a thread to pull on, they maintained public messaging that was borderline deceitful about the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing reinfection and encouraged ridiculous local regulations like showing vaccine cards to enter establishments. This mirrored the deceitful nature of the "only medical staff need masks" messaging at the beginning of the pandemic to prevent a mask supply shortage.

The turning point for me was Omnicron, as it was very quickly apparent this was a distinct, new disease that had a different risk profile than previous variants. But for what appears to be face-saving measures, no guidance was updated and it took months for them to concede that there were other metrics more important than case counts.

The insistence of continually extending the federal travel mask mandate is a case in point: I don't know of anyone who believes that the loose paper and cloth masks worn by most of the general public (sometimes covering nose and mouth, more often not) are actually producing a substantial effect in reducing transmission in indoor spaces, and AFAIK it's well understood that anyone at high risk of serious infection is well protected with a properly fitted N95 mask, especially in a well ventilated space like an airplane. At no point has there been a focus on educating people on the efficacy of different types of masks, just a continual hammering of the "mask up" narrative, treating people as too stupid to understand the difference.

For what appears to be ass-covering behavior on their part, they have focused on maintaining a consistency of messaging that ignores new data and and discredits any opposing points of view, even from other qualified members of the medical community. They are more focused on projecting authority and consistency than honestly handling nuance and it's become pretty obvious that is not the key to building trusted institutions.

I'm not saying disband the CDC, tear down the building, and exile Fauci. I'm simply saying that we need to recognize that the approach that was taken here did not work correctly and has resulted in less institutional trust than we started with and that we need to learn from our mistakes.

You are absolutely correct from a theoretical standpoint. Completely neutral, independent medical experts should, on average, make better health decisions than an uninformed populace.

The problem is when we transfer those assumptions to the real world, all of the most important adjectives in that prior sentence start to fall apart. The managers in the CDC are not neutral or independent. They are by and large bureaucrats who have professional reputations, career trajectory, office politics, and other competing incentives that compete and often conflict with their stated goal of making the "best health decisions" for everyone.

This has resulted in the absurd patchwork of logically inconsistent mask and vaccine rules that we've all be subjected to for the past 2 years. For me, this has firmly demonstrated that the structure of these institutions and their methods of public communication have lost the public trust and we cannot give them broad, sweeping powers.

I think you're shooting the messenger here. OP was explaining the incentives for the behavior we're seeing, not excusing it.

Sorry if it came off that way, but what was intended is that if boarding school is an option you want for your children then the parents are not tied to any one place geographically.