Saw a headline that the MMR vaccine may be reduced in effectiveness after 40-ish years. It’s all breaking news since people being so backwards as to not be vaccinated in numbers to allow this kind of study to even materialize in a world that has a proven cure is certainly recent.
For the same reason housing should be a speculative investment, and healthcare services available only to the highest bidder.
A General ignoramus
Coming from the NYT who prioritizes neutrality over directness and transparency which allows cover for fascism and dishonesty. Biggest mouthpiece in the world but only run opinion pages with real teardowns and only now but for how long?
I miss these links! Loved them so much before coming over from The Borg to Lemmy. Thank you.
Oracle exists solely on inertia and big, dumb, uninformed customers. They were an early mover in the space for erp, and then they tried to develop everything else. I work in HR and filter out jobs where “PeopleSoft” is their product as it’s so monumentally unfit for human and operational use and eats up all technical, financial and employee resources to try to make it do simple, common things. Companies spend far more training, hiring consultants (because the product is unintuitive and limited in functionality) to operate the system and “customizations” that take years to build and a cadre of expensive folks to keep running is not the exception but the standard. If you see “Oracle” or “PeopleSoft” in the URL for a job application, run far, far away.
20 years ago only big companies had a need for the scale of an erp, and unfortunately many of them went with Oracle. SAP was the other dog and while similarly unintuitive at least worked well at what it did, bless the Germans. There are soooo many better, more flexible more intuitive, modern products that users can learn and use to choose from, only the truly hopeless are still using Oracle products for ERP and HRIS.
The most insidious part of Oracle is that because of how difficult it is to use, change, modify and learn, the people responsible for changing these systems experience Stockholm syndrome where they don’t want to change to a better system. All they know is failure, pain, lack of comprehension and lack of understanding of products and the thought of starting over in another system mortifies them, and so they become the barrier to telling Oracle to piss off.
The article refers to “credit card balance”, which aligns to the standard industry statistic of whether a consumer carries a balance (doesn’t pay off their card in full each month, pays interest, gets hosed, is incredibly profitable for banks) or doesn’t (what the credit card companies refer to as a “deadbeat” as they don’t generate much profit and some even are a loss.
That said, who cares about a selection bias volunteer survey with the sample size of an Elememtary school? 1,000 people, seriously? The hell is this 1925? Bullshit non-data and article.
It’s a slippery, accelerative slope. Companies never would have price gouged the way they did during and after COVID 30 years ago; they didn’t have the technology, data and also lack of fear of antitrust. Each new cohort gets worse in company practices and voila!
Everyone always also sees themselves on the lifeboat, not being the one who pays the piper. Just like the 70% of lottery players who think they will win.
It’s a tried and true model. It also has tried and true historic results, for the populace…and eventually the powerful.
Because the problems they raged about are systemic, and the system didn’t change.
There is still no federal vacation required. Many employers offer it but pathetic number don’t. The “good jobs” used to be salaried, but unregulated capitalism has pushed tons more work on them while cutting employee numbers, many of those jobs now work 10-12 hour days–and are then expected to be “always on” from laptop, phone, etc. no mental rest. Add in insanity of commuting and traffic and it’s physically and mentally exhausting. Those are the good jobs. The federal minimum wage hasn’t increased since 2009. It’s currently way below poverty wages, so government approved poverty. As a result, many Americans work for companies who pay them poverty wages, take tax incentives for hiring “the poor”. Government sponsored poverty because government long ago was captured by lobbiests for capitalists. On top of that, medical care is unattainable expensive.
I don’t know if that means it’s “harder” than in other countries, but even in poor countries there is less focus on work, more time off, social healthcare or better mixes of the above options. It’s truly now the most raw, unbridled survival of the vicious countries now. And that was the case before the developments of the last few weeks and the next 4 years, which will exacerbate all of the above items.
Very common to talk about at work now, because everyone is exhausted, burt out or incredibly disengaged, but strangely still not common in social or family circles.
The medical industry aggressively denies, discourages and inhibits ease of care for all services because profit, and mental health care is no different. During the pandemic carriers were required to provide telehealth services for the first time and the carriers and their providers were completely swamped. Americans are overworked to the point of dying from it and don’t have any time to drive to an appointment but video therapy sessions are quite possible for more people. Even getting an appointment, because you have to often go through a carrier network leaves you stuck with therapists who often might not be that compatible. Waitlists can be 3-6 months. So like everything else in america, it’s “dealt with” at the emergency level (suicide hotlines, police 911, prison industry or funeral industry).
Employers are now advertising access to “work life balance apps” /gag like “Calm” as part of their mental health offerings as they know their actual medical care services are unavailable, unaffordable or both.
SMDH at the improved performance Donnie diaper had with Hispanics this cycle, the leopards feasting.