Aren’t most states ethnically associated…? Like… the US and Canada are anomalous. European countries are particularly accepting of other ethnicities but still have a core ethnicity. Asian countries are usually pretty homogenous. I imagine African countries are, too. Latin America, I’m not as sure.
Or am I misunderstanding the definition of ethno-state?
A country is not land. A country is a human construct. Usually, a country is situated on land. The Soviet Union is no longer a country, but several other countries now occupy its land.
A country is usually seen as its government. If the government ceases to function, the country effectively no longer exists.
Does that make more sense?
It’s all pump and dump. Look at Elon with Doge Coin. Look at Trump with his dumbass NFT “cards.” Most initial coin offerings are just pump and dump schemes, and they’re often based on etherium.
Fuck this fake or normal nonsense.
It’s you. There’s you when you’re relaxed, and there’s you when you turn it up. It’s all you.
Just do whatever you feels most you in the moment. Want to be the hot shit on the block, turn it up. Giving no fucks, grab the T.
I’ll start by saying I’m not a doctor. This is my layman’s understanding.
Historically, vaccines have been samples of either weakened or dead viruses. Through trial and error, we’ve been able to determine how to weaken or kill these viruses, then inject them into ourselves in the hopes that our immune system can learn to recognize and kill the virus. This has worked really well for a long time, but it’s costly and can be difficult to scale. For example, horses have very strong immune systems. It’s quite common to inject a virus that hurts humans into a horse, then harvest the horse’s blood to acquire the material needed to produce a vaccine. The horse’s immune system learns how to kill the virus, and we can use the to teach our immune systems.
mRNA vaccines take a whole different approach. They kind of co-opt the mechanism that viruses use to replicate.
First, let’s tall about what RNA is. You might know that DNA is used to produce proteins, and proteins are the tools that life uses to do… stuff. Almost everything, really. Thing is, DNA is stored safely inside cells’ nuclei, but protein production happens outside the nuclei, in ribosomes. So if DNA is needed to produce proteins, but DNA can’t be moved to the protein production center, how do? Our cells can produce another molecule called RNA. It’s basically half of DNA. Since you can derive one half of DNA from the other, it essentially carries the same information. Inside the nuclei, RNA is produced based on your DNA. That RNA is then moved to the protein production center to be used as the blueprint for protein production. Voila! Your cells have proteins now and can do stuff.
What did that have to do with viruses? But first, how do viruses work? Funny thing: at their core, viruses are kind of like protein missiles with an RNA payload. (This is why people argue that viruses aren’t really alive.) Viruses pierce your cells and inject their RNA into your cells. That RNA provides the blueprints to produce more RNA and the protein module, effectively, a copy of the virus. The viruses uses your cells’ infrastructure to reproduce.
With me so far? Here’s where it gets cool.
What if we could capture a virus’ RNA? What if we could then isolate just enough of the RNA blueprint to get some part of the protein missile, without the payload? And then what if we could get so specific that we could make sure that part of the protein missile is something your immune system could learn to recognize and kill? Lastly, what if we could package this harmless but recognizable part of the virus in a manner that your cells could mass manufacture it?
This is mRNA, the “m” standing for “messenger.” mRNA vaccines basically give your cells the blueprint to produce a recognizable part of a virus that won’t hurt you. Your cells then produce that virus part, and your immune system learns how to recognize and kill the virus based on that part.
The best part? We can do this fast. No need for trial and error on how to weaken viruses. No need to manage livestock like horses specifically to harvest their immune system material. The COVID vaccine was an mRNA vaccine. I haven’t actually checked the numbers, but I’m very confident that the COVID vaccine R&D was the fastest humanity has ever had for any vaccine. We’d been researching and experimenting with mRNA vaccines already, but they weren’t yet approved for medical use. For good reason, medicines go through a huge amount of testing before we start injecting ourselves with magic feel-good juice. Given the emergency that COVID was, most countries fast-tracked their approval process for the COVID mRNA vaccine. In the long run, this may actually have been a benefit, as we’ve learned a lot about how to produce these types of vaccines rapidly, at scale and even update them for new variants of a virus.
So yeah, mRNA vaccines are super fucking cool. They’re also a remarkably clever innovation, copying an idea from viruses and adapting it to a way to kill viruses. Theoretically, future vaccines should be produced faster, be better targeted, and have fewer side effects.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk? 😅
But that’s an arbitrary distinction. You could also argue, “what’s the difference between a vaccine and medicine?” Or “what’s the difference between medicine and physical medical treatment?” mRNA vaccines involve more innovation and impact than bloodletting via leeches.
But I won’t respond to that line of thought anymore because you didn’t answer my question.
You can choose to answer my question or just not reply. Do you know what the differences are between traditional vaccines and mRNA vaccines?
Are you familiar with the differences between traditional vaccines and mRNA vaccines in terms of production?
I live in Korea. How do you define “loyal to workers?”
It makes me so happy that people are offering advice to help. It gives me hope despite all the madness going on in the world. “Look for the helpers,” right?
But yeah, OP. Get some regular exercise, even if it’s not intense. Eat well, avoid processed snacks and soda and such. Drink more water. Spend time on yourself to relax and have fun, even if only a little time. Call an old friend, if you’re lucky enough to have one. Sleep on a regular schedule with at least 7 hours, ideally 8. This stuff should help, at least a little
Most importantly, know that we’re rooting for you <3
Sorry for the delay, busy days.
Yeah, fake postings are total bullshit. I still don’t understand the motivation for them.
As for having jobs up for months, I can understand that when a role has very specific needs. But if the roles specific needs haven’t been made clear in the job description, then yeah, that’s total bullshit
My job postings are usually up for two to three months, and the rejection rate is maybe around 80-90% for the resume review stage at the beginning. I’d like to think the job descriptions are clear, but that’s subjective. But do those sound like reasonable numbers to you, though? What do you think is reasonable? (Like I said, I want these opinions for my improvement)
Unfortunately, I haven’t hired for a service job, so I don’t have a complete perspective here. You mention “one of the first to apply.” For an imaginary job that requires no background, what do you think would be good reasons to reject a candidate or choose one over another?
Got it. Okay, that makes much more sense. Nothing new there for me, then.
When you say companies shouldn’t be “this selective,” what are you referencing that they’re being too selective about? If I’m being more picky than I need to be, I should stop, so I’m eager to learn something here
Can you share what kinds of questions you’re asking? Or at least generic versions of them?
100% this
And the same thinking applies to interviews, but that’s very difficult. My leadership sometimes gets surprised about how much I help interviewees, and I have to clarify to them that I don’t care about how good they are at interviewing. I care how good they are at the job.
Unfortunately, this makes my interviews super long, but we have arguably the best engineering team in the company.
Our new CTO was very skeptical of our long interviews and ordered us to shorten them. Fortunately, we had one scheduled already. He sat in on it and is no longer worried about our long interviews. He understood the value once he was able to see where the candidate stumbled and excelled in our … simulations? of the work. We try to simulate certain tasks in the interview, especially collaborative ones, to see how they would actually do the work. It’s really hard for us as interviewers to prepare and run, but it’s proven highly effective so far
All of this. When I tell people I meet that we don’t do coding tests, we instead do tiny assignments, they often get quite excited. It also seems to be way, way more effective
Do you have any qualifiers for that? Like “with sufficient time to learn” or something? Is there some kind of personal development that you think could enable that?
In my understanding, asking a chef to be a doctor or a software engineer to be an artist often doesn’t work great.
How selective do you think is appropriate?
To be clear: I’m a hiring manager for some specialized stuff. I’m genuinely curious about your perspective because I hope it can help how I do that work. I’m not trying to argue with you or prove you wrong or anything.
You assume the actors in the system act in good faith and that the system’s incentives are well designed. It is not.
What kinds of people want to join the organization responsible for keeping foreigners out? How many of those groups are racists that don’t actually care about the citizenship part? How do you measure the success of this organization?
When you start asking these kinds of questions, you start to see the cracks. Additionally, when you look at US immigration policies compared to other developed countries, they’re quite harsh. I emigrated to Korea. It’s quite easy if I have a college education and some work experience. I benefit Korea’s economy. My Korean friends who want to go to the US have a totally different experience.
Additionally, you need to look at the US’s history with regards to race. See the Japanese internment camps of WW2 or the fire bombing of Tulsa, OK. We don’t necessarily distinguish between actual citizens and foreigners.
You can also look at how illegal immigration is managed in the US. Look at Ron DeSantis in Florida. He spooked illegal immigrants in Florida with his crackdown on immigration. The orange farmers started panicking because there were no workers. The oranges were rotting. Did DeSantis prop up the orange industry and encourage them to hire Americans? The good faith act? Fuck no! He rolled back the crackdown, and the illegal immigrants continued to be used for basically slave labor. America doesn’t want legal immigration. They just want a group with no rights to beat the shit out of when they’re feeling bad and to use for labor that citizens don’t want to do.
Your argument of people behaving in good faith with regards to immigration doesn’t have a lot of evidence to support it when looking at history.
The right thing to do would be to pursue immigration reform first, give time for current illegal immigrants to become legal, crackdown on the employers of illegal immigrants, and then start enforcing immigration law more strongly. But surprise! It ain’t happening.
Of course, my comment assumes you’re trying to argue in good faith, which also may be naive. Let’s see
How are you defining “normal?”
I think the main thing is that Korea’s government still has some fear of its people, which is very, very important. Enough stupid moves and millions of citizens can be on your doorstep (see Park Geunhe).
Yes, there’s a bunch of corruption. Yes, working culture blows. Yes, birth rates have been tanking for a reason (but reversed recently?!).
But there’s a reason those soldiers heading to the parliament building had no ammo except one guy in a squad with less lethal rounds. There’s a reason the martial law was ended so quickly. There’s a reason Yoon is actually getting his on a reasonable timescale.
In Korea, once you hit that tipping point of people realizing you’re a dick, you’re gonna have a real bad time.
I might have laughed out loud on a silent bus. But worth it
Not necessarily. You don’t know why they’re making that claim.
I live in Korea, where the letter of the labor laws are quite strong. However, they’re not enforced. Workers don’t sue companies because they’re either afraid to rock the boat due to cultural norms or afraid they will develop a reputation and become unhirable.
Korea and China are very distinct cultures, but there are key facets that are common between them. Confucian (or at least neo-Confucian in Korea) values prioritize maintaining the peace and deferring to authority. This is one of several factors that causes Koreans to endure intense working hours, and I’m more willing to believe Chinese folks overwork a lot due to the few shared values.
I honestly don’t know. If the government declared itself void via some action, then maybe? I really have no idea
People tend to exaggerate in their thoughts anyway, so this is reasonable to imagine someone thinking.