Among other reasons (good citizen, not getting permabanned…), chargebacks aren't really a thing in Europe — they often require a police report, etc. Amex being the exception, but this wasn't.
Kind of unrelated but: my father tried gifting my brother a subscription but entered the wrong email. Money and subscription are both gone — UI just doesn't have the option of amending, cancelling or resending it.
For the last couple weeks, dad's gone into a rabbit hole of trying to reach support——any kind of (useful) support. No dice. Thankfully it's just a few dollars gone into the void.
If only they had the tools to build a better experience... :-)
got-your-back uses Gmail's API instead of IMAP with an insecure app password, which is a discouraged way of accessing Gmail and will eventually be phased out in favor of OAuth access tokens over IMAP (in fact, I thought it already had been).
As for other services beyond Gmail, there's not a great ecosystem for exporting.
For one-off exports, Google Takeout is decent enough, although there's a lacking ecosystem to import the big .mbox files back to an email provider.
I have a colleague based in the UK who got infected with COVID in the early days of the pandemic, before any measures were taken. He still has important health issues - and he's young (under 30).
Similarly, I have a friend who got infected over the 2020 summer (even though he was taking precautions), and again, he's still seeing doctors, taking medical trials, etc. because of his long COVID symptoms.
I know it's n=2, but I would not dare being so fast to say "it's about 6 months on the longer term, and very rare". I didn't take this very seriously as I'm young, but these two cases shifted my perception on the issue and made me adjust my routines just to err on the side of caution.
> "Then later on it was discovered that a lot of positive tests are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people don't transmit the disease, so this just hurt healthcare capacity for no reason"
I think it makes sense to isolate anyone who tests PCR positive for coronavirus, right?
Also, is it 100% sure that asymptomatic people will not transmit the disease? What if they are just pre-symptomatic? Where do you establish the cut-off?
Maybe it was based on seeing what happened in other countries, ie. Spain and Italy? I can say for sure that the impact in the health care system here in Spain was very significant.
> "it is nonsensical to compare covid to other major pandemics […] Covid will never even come close to those numbers. And yet many countries have shut down their entire economies"
> "That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality."
This sounds wrong to me for several reasons. First of all, it's silly assuming that other countries are shutting down their economies without a very good reason for doing so. As I understood it, the "good reason" for doing so was that the infection & death rate was growing so fast, that it was putting hospitals & morgues way beyond their capacity. At the same time, the situation was keeping non-COVID, hospital-worthy visits out of the healthcare system, thus creating a massive public health problem.
(Let's not forget the improvised hospitals, improvised morgues, etc. These were very real.)
It'd be interesting knowing why somehow the COVID cases 'vanished' from this doctor's hospital. But instead of looking into why this happened, this doctor is just saying "turns out that the problem went away, so in the end it was good that we didn't bother too much about it".
And the thing is - we're not through it yet. Thankfully the death rate seems not being as bad as we thought it could be, but this could very well be down to current measures such as isolating elder people, testing at-risk populations, higher awareness levels, and the fact that the average infection age is now much lower than it was in March. So, now, healthcare systems are not collapsing.
There's a myriad of variables that likely affect the virus spread and outcome. For example, the age and characteristics of the populations where the virus is spreading, how population is distributed around the territory (and its density), how frequently this population "comes together" (social behavior - ever seen a swede profusely hugging and kissing?, public transportation, remote working…), and so on.
And when it comes to the healthcare system capacity debate: Sweden frequently put elder, infected people straight in palliative care (http://archive.is/VC5vb), bypassing hospitals. Other countries did admit elder people into hospitals, thus putting more strain into the healthcare system, which later on prompted a lockdown to prevent said system from collapsing.
I started out with PHP at a very very young age and eventually moved on to other platforms (mainly Python). Not looking to question your experience - but actually recalling my own. Making a chat app was one of the first things I did. It was a super basic CRUD app mixing HTML and some code, refreshing the page every few secs, thanks to some meta tags.
Of course, it used frames, so that the "send message" part didn't clear every time it refreshed… those were the days! Eventually, my fancy chat app delivered a much better user experience, thanks to an amazing (back then!) JS library — jQuery. I built my first "API" that way! (It didn't use XML or JSON - it just returned chunks of HTML that were appended to a div).
Pure PHP gets annoying when you're dealing with complex data models, or when you're building a combination of frontend plus backend batch processing. Frameworks such as Laravel make this much much nicer to deal with IMHO. Of course, PHP is far from perfect, and its quirks can cause OCD and frustration to some people… :-)
But thanks to PHP (and also thanks to how lenient and chaotic it was), I was able to create very early on without needing to worry about software patterns (I had no clue what MVC was back then!), strict code formatting, learning how to deploy an app (just upload the code and off you go), and so on. PHP got me into programming — and it's also propelled some big-name sites and apps, so I guess it deserves some credit there as well.
The post clearly states that users can install extensions through the developer's website. The main difference here is that extensions cannot be silently installed — users have to explicitly install them.
Sounds good to me. No more annoying adware extensions.
National politics (Catalonia, etc). But there's also an endemic issue with spending on unnecessary infrastructure while underfunding heavily used infrastructure (such as public transportation in large cities); our budgets never seem to be able to reduce debt, and our pension system is doomed to explode, because eventually there will be more retired than working people.