The first patient in this cluster to die should provide confirmation of CJD or other prion disease.
There is a theory that spontaneous CJD can be spread environmentally. Apparently particles of sufficiently small size (10 nm) can pass from the nasal cavity directly into the brain via the olfactory nerve. And there was a cluster of CJD victims who were rose gardeners. Rose gardening commonly use Bone and Blood meal to feed the roses, and is typically made from cattle unfit for consumption-ie downer cows/BSE. I may have read about it in The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance Book by Laurie Garrett.
Medication is the fastest way to make some positive progress before you completely spiral and majorly fuck up your life.
Would you rather take a pill and keep working while you sort things out or would you try to rebuild everything after you burn it all down? Talk therapy and exercise may be just as effective or more so long term, but may not be effective enough in the short term.
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules? We'd appreciate it. You're welcome here as long as you do that, but we really need commenters to stay respectful, avoid posting in the flamewar style, and (above all) use the site primarily for curiosity, not smiting enemies.
The USPS is in year 4 of a 10 year overhaul of its infrastructure. New facilities with new equipment optimized for the current mail mix. Magazines and catalogs used to be huge. Now they are a fraction of their volume. First class letter volume is crashing as everyone goes paperless.
Where there use to be separate facilities for processing first class, bulk mail, and packages; the new facilities deal with everything. And where the old system of 50 NDC (National Distribution Centers) are being consolidated to ~30 RPDC (Regional Processing and Distribution Centers) leading to a whole new strategy of how mail moves East to West and West to East. And mail sorting for delivery used to happen by mail carriers at local Post Offices, is now happening at LSDC (Local Sorting and Delivery Centers) set up service all mail carriers in a 50 - 70 mile radius.
And all of these changes are happening while still having to deliver mail (It never stops Jerry. It just keeps coming and coming)
So if you’re in the Midwest like Chicago, stuff coming from the Midwest or Eastcoast has been getting stuck in Indianapolis-taking 10 to 15 days. Stuff coming from West Coast gets here in 5.
There are 42,000 active zip codes and 640,000 employees. Making changes to that organization is hard and takes time.
What’s really cool is the work going on with Amazon, Walmart, Target and others for them to deliver packages directly to LSDC for same day delivery. Once you get away from the cities, no one can compare with the USPS for last mile delivery.
TLDR USPS is changing. Things may get worse before they get better.
Even simple "changes" (like cutting a single truck) cause massive mayhem in their wake.
The simple "elimination" of nightly mail pickup from rural post offices has resulted in multi-day backlogs just getting anything out of your local Post Office. If I walk into any of my local POs in the county this morning to ship a Priority Mail Express letter overnight, they will not guarantee that it will be received tomorrow. The envelope will sit for nearly 24 hours locally for tomorrow morning's mail truck before it is brought back to a processing center tomorrow night to be introduced into the mailstream and finally processed outbound.
Basically anything being shipped cross-country is going to be snared in Rural Delay Hell and it absolutely sucks. Combine this with the recent postmarking changes and we're in for an absolute fun treat when it comes for mail-in-voting time.
Yes. The only reason bug shippings are getting same day is because they are bypassing most of the postal network and dropping it off in time for the days final sortation for delivery.
The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause.
OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.
I disagree. My toilet was leaking. I diagnosed the issue as a bad tank gasket. Replace said gasket and things are working fine. Could a licensed plumber have done it faster. Possibly. But a $300 service call was avoided.
Now I had my house replumbed to relocate well tank, water softener, water heater, whole house filter, relocated washing machine and slop sink. That I left to the professionals. But I watched to learn more.
If I outsource my thinking and can’t see how the box does it, what is the purpose?
This is being pedantic though. Is there nothing in your life that you outsource because you just don't enjoy doing, or it would take too much time away from what you actually want to do? It's highly unlikely you grind your own flour at home from wheat berries, even if you do make your own bread. Plenty of people enjoy home brewing, and plenty of people would rather buy a good brew from a local brewer and have no interest in brewing. Even if you're into wood working, you're probably not milling your own boards. You might like cooking, but you're probably not mining your own salt. There's a pretty good chance that you don't make your own pasta from scratch. And also a good chance you're not butchering your own meats. Someone I'm sure is finding artistry and fulfillment in doing these things for themselves. And for other people they're distractions that take away from doing what they actually want to do.
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