Podcasts about Omicron

Bill Handel is joined by Wayne Resnick and Jennifer Jones Lee for the Early Edition of Handel on the News. The three of them discuss news topics that include: A suspect is wanted in the killing of a woman at a furniture store in Hancock Park - a $250k reward is being offered, USPS experienced some tech issues with the soft launch of the website where U.S. residents can order their free at-home COVID tests, and the White House says it will distribute 400 million free N95 masks to protect against COVID-19 and the Omicron variant.

This week, we sat down with destination wedding planner extraordinaire, Alison Laesser-Keck, as she quarantines from Covid in Mexico post-wedding. How can you make your guests feel comfortable? Should you postpone your wedding? What kind of testing requirements should you implement? How do you communicate those requirements? Covid brings up tons of questions—and we're answering them all. Plus: a listener asks how early is too early to start wedding planning.Discussed in This Episode:Alison Bryan Destinations (https://www.alison-bryan.com/)Allianz Travel Insurance (https://www.allianztravelinsurance.com/)Visit Our Website:https://www.WeddedPodcast.comGrab Our Freebies And Planning Tools:www.WeddedShop.comEmail Us All Of Your Questions and Comments:Questions@WeddedPodcast.comFind Us On Social:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weddedpodcastRead About Our Hosts:Tracy Taylor Ward DesignWebsite: https://www.TracyTaylorWard.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/tracytaylorwardShannon Leahy EventsWebsite: https://www.ShannonLeahy.comInstagram: https://instagram.com/shannonleahyevents

Lincoln, Nebraska has fared quite well compared to counties with similar demographics: the county is in the top 10% in terms of lowest mortality rates and hit the President's 70% vaccine uptake target in July 2021. These successes are in no small part due to the leadership of Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird who talks with Josh Sharfstein about difficult decisions and her hope that stories of the community's courage, bravery, and generosity will be legacies of COVID-19.

This is Covid 411, the latest on Omicron and other COVID variants, and new hotspots for January 19th, 2022.The U.S. quietly launched its website for Americans to request free at-home COVID tests a day early. It's COVIDTests.gov and the order form is run by the U.S. Postal Service. You can get four at-home tests per residential address. The White House said, “tests will typically ship within 7- 12 days of ordering” and they are anticipating a “bug or two.”The World Health Organization's chief scientist says there is no evidence that healthy children and adolescents need booster doses of COVID vaccine. But that train has already left the station in many countries. Israel is boosting kids as young as 12, and the U.S. FDA has authorized third doses of Pfizer for kids 12 to 15. Last week Germany became the latest country to recommend that all children 12 to 17 get a booster. Hungary has done the same. If you felt awful after getting vaccinated, a new analysis says you may have been faking it. The study has concluded up to three-fourths of adverse events can be attributed to the opposite of the placebo effect. With placebos, people think they feel better even if they were given a sugar pill instead of a real drug. But this time, people who took a placebo thinking it was the real vaccine reported feeling negative side effects from it. Should you try to catch Omicron to get it over with? The director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia gives us five reasons not to. 1, It's not a bad cold. It's still a potentially life-threatening disease. 2, You could get long Covid. 3, You could stress the healthcare system. 4, the kid population is still fairly vulnerable, and you could infect them. And 5) It's stupid to catch a disease on purpose. And yes, he says, so were chicken pox parties in the old days. Chinese-ruled Hong Kong ordered the killing of 2,000 hamsters yesterday after 11 of them tested positive. There is no evidence domestic animals can infect humans. People who bought hamsters after Dec. 22 are being ordered to hand over their pet for culling.In the United States, taking into account many states did not report statistics Monday, cases were up 62%, deaths are up 54%, and hospitalizations are up 54% over 14 days. The 7-day average of new cases has been trending down since January 14. The five states that had the most daily deaths per 100,000 are New Mexico, Maryland, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. There are now over 24 million active cases in the United States, at 24,488,337.The five areas with the greatest increase in hospitalizations per capita: Puerto Rico 143%. Alabama 134%. The U.S. Virgin Islands 130%. And Louisiana and California 120%. The top 10 areas with the highest number of recent cases per capita according to The New York Times: West Feliciana, LA. Waukesha, WI. Teton, WY. Dane, WI. Covington, MS. Tom Green, TX. Greensville, VA. Milwaukee, WI. Kodiak Island Borough, AK. And Yazoo, MS.There have been at least 853,951 deaths in the U.S. recorded as Covid-related.The top 3 vaccinating states by percentage of population that's been fully vaccinated: Vermont at 78.5%, Rhode Island at 77.8%, and Maine at 76.8%. The bottom 3 vaccinating states are Wyoming at 48.2%, Alabama at 48.4%, and Mississippi at 49.1%. The percentage of the U.S. that's been fully vaccinated is 62.8%.Globally, cases were up 81% and deaths up 18% over 14 days, with the 7-day average trending down since January 16. There are now over 58 million active cases around the world, at 58,938,768.The five countries with the most new cases: The United States 546,714. France 464,769. India 277,740. Italy 228,179. And Brazil 132,254. There have been 5,553,993 deaths reported as... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Ukraine, reiterating American support as fear of a Russian invasion grows. Blinken will also meet with Russian officials Friday in Geneva in hopes of keeping diplomacy alive. Indiana Republican Congresswoman Victoria Spartz is a Ukrainian-American, who was born in the country when it was part of the Soviet Union. Rep. Spartz discusses how the Biden Administration should be addressing Russia as fear of war looms.   Wednesday, January 19th marks just one day prior to President Biden's first full year in office and he is set to hold his first press conference of the new year. The Biden administration has faced many challenges recently with rising inflation, the Omicron variant, and a stalled legislative agenda. Howard Kurtz, host of "MediaBUZZ" on the FOX News Channel and the Media BUZZMeter podcast joins to weigh in on how the President must navigate his press conference and how he must change the current narrative surrounding his administration.   Plus, commentary by Fox News contributor Liz Peek.

Are women 32% more likely to die after operation by a male surgeon? Headlines asserting this were shared across social media recently - but the truth is a bit more complicated. We compare the price and the quality of the UK's Test and Trace system with that of Germany and check on what's happening to the Covid death toll during the Omicron wave. And we investigate the worrying statistic that one in ten people are planning to start a podcast in the coming year.

Dr. Ray Omicron Surge // Steve Gregory – Breanna Kupfer Killer named // Microsoft buys Blizzard for 70 Billion

Dr. Champion discusses how past claims of an "endemic" shift were false, why the current prediction is more likely, and what the practical impact on your life may look like. Dave's books can be purchased at https://drreality.news Dave's presentation on previous "endemic" claims - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ELxVfrX0xo&t=649s

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In this Real Estate News Brief for the week ending January 14th, 2022... what the Fed is saying about tighter monetary policy, the latest rise in consumer prices, and where mortgage rates are right now.Hi, I'm Kathy Fettke and this is Real Estate News for Investors. If you like our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review.Economic NewsWe begin with economic news from this past week, and confirmation hearings for Fed Chief Jerome Powell. President Biden nominated him to continue in his role as the central bank's Chairman. Powell told the Senate Banking Committee that super low interest rates are no longer needed to prop up the economy, and that short-term rates should go higher to control inflation.The Fed has penciled in three rate hikes this year, but Powell says the central bank is prepared to do more, if necessary. It's a balancing act because hiking rates too much and too fast, could lead us into a recession, and job losses. But Powell believes that rates can go higher without hurting the job market. MarketWatch described his characterization of the process as a “soft landing” for the economy, and not a recession.Powell says that “if things develop as expected, we'll be normalizing policy, meaning we're going to end our asset purchases in March, meaning we'll be raising rates over the course of the year.” (1) (2)As it stands, consumer prices rose again in December. The government says they were up .5% in December to a 40-year high of almost 7%. When you strip out food and energy, the inflation rate was up .6% in December to 5.5%. As reported by MarketWatch, that figure is a 31-year high. (3)Those high prices contributed to a drop in consumer spending, along with the spread of the Omicron variant and the supply chain disruptions that are leaving some store shelves bare. The government says that retail sales figures were down 1.9% in December. Internet retailers, like Amazon, experienced the biggest declines. Those figures were down almost 9%. Sales fell about 7% for department stores, 5.5% at furniture stores, and almost 3% at places that sell electronics, like Best Buy. (4)The unemployment report surprised economists with an increase in initial state claims. They were up 23,000 to a total of 230,000. Continuing claims dropped significantly however. Almost 200,000 people stopped collecting checks last week, leaving just 1.56 million people on the unemployment list. (5)Consumers are feeling more pessimistic about the economy because of inflation and Covid. The University of Michigan reports that its consumer sentiment index fell a few points in January, to 68.8. That's the second-lowest reading in a decade. The lowest was a few months ago when it dropped to 67.4 in November. (6)Mortgage RatesMortgage rates rose by almost a quarter point last week. Freddie Mac says the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was up 23 basis points to 3.45%. The 15-year was up 19 points to 2.62%. Freddie Mac says the rate increase was “driven by the prospect of a faster than expected tightening of monetary policy” by the Federal Reserve in response to inflation, supply chain disruptions, and labor shortages. (7)In other news making headlines… Mortgage Delinquency RatesThe mortgage delinquency rate has returned to pre-pandemic levels. CoreLogic's Loan Performance Report shows that 3.8% of mortgages were delinquent by at least 30 days in October. That's only one-tenth of a percent higher than October of 2019. And the trend is expected to continue. (8)The report shows CoreLogic's chief economist, Frank Nothaft, says that loan modifications have helped lower the number of loans that are seriously delinquent. But he says they were still half a million higher in October than they were at the start of the pandemic in March.The drop in mortgage delinquencies has lowered the foreclosure inventory rate to its lowest level since 1999. CoreLogic says foreclosures are down in all 50 states, and expects them to drop further throughout the course of this year.Second-Home Demand Demand for vacation homes continues to rise. Redfin says it was 77% higher in December than it was before the pandemic due to new work flexibility and low mortgage rates. The second-home market is expected to remain strong, although higher interest rates could impact demand along with new second-home fees from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those will take effect on April 1st. (9)That's it for today. Check the show notes for links. And please remember to hit the subscribe button, and leave a review!You can also join RealWealth for free at newsforinvestors.com. As a member, you have access to the Investor Portal where you can view sample property pro-formas and connect with our network of resources, including experienced investment counselors, property teams, lenders, 1031 exchange facilitators, attorneys, CPAs and more.Thanks for listening. I'm Kathy Fettke.Links:1 - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/powell-says-fed-can-cool-inflation-without-damaging-labor-market-11641918399?mod=economy-politics2 - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/11/powell-says-rate-hikes-tighter-policy-will-be-needed-to-control-inflation.html3 - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coming-up-consumer-price-index-11641993303?mod=economy-politics4 - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coming-up-u-s-retail-sales-11642166291?mod=economy-politics5 - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jobless-claims-jump-to-highest-level-since-mid-november-11642081065?mod=economy-politics6 - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/consumer-sentiment-falls-in-january-due-to-omicron-and-inflation-worries-11642172660?mod=economic-report7 - http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/8 - https://www.housingwire.com/articles/mortgage-delinquency-rate-reaches-prepandemic-levels/9 - https://magazine.realtor/daily-news/2022/01/07/second-home-demand-up-77-from-pre-pandemic-levels

Since the beginning of the pandemic, WHOOP has been conducting research to better understand how COVID can affect sleep and recovery, what physiological response vaccines produce, and perhaps most importantly, how COVID affects respiratory rate. Our latest WHOOP research shows that with the Omicron variant, like previous strains of the virus, COVID-19 infections often coincide with an increase in respiratory rate. WHOOP VP of Data Science and Research Emily Capodilupo returns to the podcast to detail our findings (3:34), why respiratory rate is so important to track (5:31), how men and women may see different data with Omicron (8:30), why you could see a respiratory rate dip after a spike (9:13), Omicron and the vaccines (14:23), factors that can increase your respiratory rate (18:34), the latest information on testing (20:07), and an update on WHOOP vaccine research (24:35). Support the show (http://whoop.com)

5G was supposed to roll out across the country but several airlines say 5G interferes with the technology planes use to land in bad weather. Now, Verizon and AT&T are delaying the activation of 5G towers near some airport runways. The White House website to request free at-home Covid-19 tests is live as the Omicron variant continues to blaze across America. COVIDtests.gov will allow Americans to receive four tests per household. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

Good lord. It's only been two weeks and Snowcone is already texting Julia late at night while she's in bed. Time for an intervention and a lesson on manners. *Doomscrolling! Best Korea is testing missiles. Your student loans might get paid off. Omicron might finally be on the decline! It's time to start buying up real estate in the Metaverse. *Nick Wright is on the show and we're talking playoffs! *A woman tells other women how not to annoy men. *Julia has a question about dongs that she's been dying to ask. *Have a great day! Hang out with us after hours on Instagram and Twitter @churchoflazlo   -Everybody Wang Chung!!!! 

Jackie kicks off 2022 by having a code red emergency clearing customs, shares her battle with that bitch Omicron, recaps Real Housewives reunion looks and gets disinvited from Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly's impending nuptials.   Produced By Dear Media

As the omicron variant continues to spread, children under the age of five are still ineligible for vaccinations -- leaving many families in limbo and wondering how best to navigate everyday life. We hear from some parents across the country about how they are coping nearly two years into the pandemic, and Stephanie Sy tackles some of the burning questions surrounding the subject. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Editor-in-Chief Jeff Dufour is joined by White House correspondent George E. Condon Jr. on President Biden's end to his first year in office and Biden's chances on passing voting rights legislation. Then, Senate races correspondent Matt Holt breaks down the latest in the Senate battleground, including Senators John Thune and Ron Johnson deciding to run for reelection.

Pfizer head sees a return to "normal life" in the spring. Speaking of Pfizer: Israeli study shows 4th shot of COVID-19 vaccine less effective on Omicron.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

COVID test vending machines are popping up at colleges as Omicron spreads. Hammer & Nigel Products are rolling out the Ultimate College Vending Machine.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Buck tests positive for covid, broadcasts from quarantine. He says he's told his friends that Omicron is so mild that it's more like "wimpycron." Clay concurs: "I had Omicron, you have it right now, and so we've experienced what we believe is exactly what this virus does to your body and the answer is for most people it's not very significant." Fourth vaccine dose fails in small Israeli study. Democrats claim racist Republicans stop people from voting: Who are these people who supposedly can't vote? Things you can't say: "owner," "master," "cloth masks don't work" -- even though the "experts" now agree. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

The fast-spreading omicron variant has snarled schools and made this return from the holidays particularly difficult. As record numbers of California children have tested positive for COVID and even been hospitalized, many students and teachers are reluctant to return to the classroom, especially without adequate protection and safety protocols. We'll check in with an Oakland student organizer about a petition that's gained over a thousand signatures to boycott classes until demands over safety are met. And, as omicron looks to be nearing its peak, we talk with experts about what to expect in the next few weeks, and what lies beyond. Given all we know now, given how tired we all are, what would count as “winning” when the next surge hits?

On Fox Across America With Jimmy Failla, Fox News contributor and former Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz reveals his grade for President Biden's first year in office. Later, Founder and Executive Director of Power The Future Daniel Turner tells us why he thinks the Biden administration's policies have failed the energy industry. PLUS, Professor of Business and Economics at The King's College in New York City and Fox News contributor Brian Brenberg reacts to the New York Magazine article which criticizes the Democratic Party for catastrophic school closures. [00:00:00] No one's buying Dems' woke agenda [00:16:00] Dems are losing the room [00:18:21] Dems voter suppressions lies [00:34:01] State of comedy [00:36:43] Fourth COVID shot vs. Omicron [00:53:07] Jimmy on Gutfeld [00:55:05] Jason Chaffetz [01:07:21] Daniel Turner [01:13:25] Dems' school closing realizations [01:29:29] Twitter isn't the real world [01:31:46] Brian Brenberg [01:45:51] No COVID tests around

More than 5.4 million Americans tested positive last week, a new record. As cases spike, there's evidence of light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to Omicron. New details on the end of the synagogue standoff -- from one of the people held hostage. Airlines warn that AT&T and Verizon's latest 5G mobile service could cause airline havoc tomorrow, when it's expected to go live across the U.S. Airline executives claim that hundreds of thousands of flights could be grounded, because the technology can interfere with a plane's landing instruments. In Washington, Senate Democrats plan to start debate on a new voting rights bill -- and will try to change senate rules to get it passed. It is not likely to happen, because of opposition from 50 Republicans and two Democrats. We have a follow-up on the unbelievable video of train tracks in Los Angeles, littered with opened packages. Thieves are stealing and emptying containers filled with consumer goods -- everything from electronics to medications to COVID test kits.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Despite a prior covid infection, a mandated vaccine that was allegedly highly effective at stopping infection, and all the masking and COVID passport requirements in NYC, Buck got Omicron. He's fine, and says it is wimpier covid, but stuck in quarantine for 5 days. But Fauci and the rest have done such a good job with all these rules, haven't they? Plus the Democrats are pushing voting rights legislation that will never pass, based on voter suppression that does not happen. But it lets them call Republicans racist! And the baseless smear is the whole point.  Please subscribe to the podcast! And get more exclusive content from Buck at BuckSexton.com. Find Buck on: Twitter @BuckSexton   Facebook @BuckSexton  Instagram @BuckSexton  Email the Podcast: TeamBuck@IHeartMedia.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

HEALTH NEWS Walking for 150 minutes per week associated with improved wellbeing in over-50  Trinity College Dublin, January 17, 2022  New research using data from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) at Trinity College Dublin shows that being physically active, for example by walking for at least 150 minutes per week, is associated with more social participation and better mental health and wellbeing.  The findings show that: Two-thirds of the Irish population aged 50 years and older report low or moderate levels of physical activity while only one-third report high levels of activity, based on the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Middle-aged and older Irish adults with high levels of physical activity report greater participation in social activities, less anxiety, better quality of life, and less loneliness compared to those with low physical activity levels. Middle-aged and older adults with low levels of physical activity are over twice as likely to have clinically relevant depressive symptoms as those with high levels of physical activity (14% versus 6%). Interventions should specifically target women, older adults, those in employment, those who are not engaged in non-church related social activities and those living in built-up areas such as apartments.     Study finds hydroxychloroquine delays disability for least treatable form of multiple sclerosis University of Calgary (Canada), January 17, 2022 A University of Calgary study has found promising results for the generic drug hydroxychloroquine when used to treat the evolution of disability of primary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS), the least treatable form of the autoimmune disease.  Cumming School of Medicine research teams found hydroxychloroquine helped to slow the worsening of disability during the 18-month study involving participants at the MS clinic in Calgary. The research was published in Annals of Neurology. The experimental study, known as a single-arm phase II futility trial, followed 35 people between November 2016 and June 2021. Researchers expected to see at least 40 percent, or 14 participants, experience a significant worsening of their walking function, but at the end of the trial only eight participants had worsened. Hydroxychloroquine was generally well-tolerated.     Tree nut consumption is associated with better diet Louisiana State University,  January 16, 2022 A new study, published this week in the open access journal Nutrients, compares the nutrient adequacy and diet quality of those who consume tree nuts (almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, hazelnuts, macadamias, pecans, pine nuts, pistachios and walnuts), and non-tree nut consumers in a nationally representative population. Tree nut consumption was associated with better nutrient adequacy for most nutrients that are lacking in the diets of many Americans, and with better diet quality. Researchers looked at 14,386 adults in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES). The data showed that, compared to non-consumers, tree nut consumers had a lower percentage of the population consuming usual intakes of nutrients below the recommended levels of vitamins A, E and C; folate; calcium; iron; magnesium; and zinc. Tree nut consumers had a higher percentage of the population over the recommendation for adequate intake for dietary fiber and potassium    Protein isolated from baker's yeast shows potential against leukemia cells University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), January 16, 2022  An enzyme identified in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as brewer's or baker's yeast, has passed in vitro trials, demonstrating its capacity to kill acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) cells. "In this study, we characterize the enzyme L-asparaginase from S. cerevisiae. The results show this protein can efficiently annihilate leukemia cells with low cytotoxicity to healthy cells," said Gisele Monteiro, a professor at FCF-USP and the principal investigator for the published study. Production of the enzyme asparagine synthetase is deficient in ALL and several other types of cancer cells, which are therefore unable to synthesize the amino acid asparagine. "This type of cell depends on extracellular sources of asparagine, an essential amino acid for the synthesis of proteins and hence of DNA and RNA. So it's required for cell division," Monteiro said. "The enzyme asparaginase depletes this amino acid in the extracellular medium, converting it into aspartate and ammonia. In patients with ALL, this leads to a sharp fall in serum levels of asparagine, hindering protein synthesis in malignant cells and inducing apoptosis, or programmed cell death." The bacterial enzyme killed about 90 percent of the MOLT4 human leukemia cells and displayed low toxicity to the healthy HUVEC cells, killing only 10 percent. "The yeast enzyme killed between 70 percent and 80 percent of the MOLT4 cells and displayed less than 10 percent toxicity for HUVEC cells. Neither was significantly effective against REH cells."   Pakistan says trial of Chinese traditional medicine for Covid-19 successful International Center for Chemical and Biological Science (Pakistan), January 17, 2022 Local health authorities on Monday announced the completion of a successful clinical trial of Chinese traditional herbal medicine for treating Covid-19, as Pakistan enters a fifth wave of the pandemic driven by the Omicron variant. The Chinese medicine, Jinhua Qinggan Granules (JHQG) manufactured by Juxiechang (Beijing) Pharmaceutical Co Ltd, is already being used in the treatment of Covid-19 patients in China. “Since it was tried on patients with different variants of Covid-19, we expect it to be effective on Omicron as on other variants,” Professor Iqbal Chaudhry, director of the International Center for Chemical and Biological Science (ICCBS) in Karachi, where trials were conducted The trials were conducted on 300 patients who were treated at home, and would work on mild to moderate Covid-19 cases, Dr Raza Shah, principal investigator in the trials, told reporters, adding that the efficacy rate was around 82.67 per cent.   Berry compounds' heart health benefits linked to impact on platelets Sun Yat-sen University (Taiwan), January 14, 2022 The new study, published in Nutrition & Metabolism , deepens our understanding of the heart health benefits of anthocyanins, pigments found in many fruit like black raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and blackcurrants. Chinese scientists report that 320 mg per day of purified anthocyanins, equivalent to about 100 g of fresh blueberries and blackcurrants, for 24 weeks were associated with significant reductions in platelet chemokine levels, which correlated to lower levels of inflammatory markers in people with elevated cholesterol levels. “Platelet chemokines are involved in inflammatory reactions, immune responses, and other aspects of the development of atherosclerosis,” explained researchers from Sun Yat-sen University. “These findings indicate a potential mechanism by which anthocyanins exert protective effects on the cardiovascular system, achieved through the comprehensive regulation of platelet chemokines, lipid metabolism and inflammation, in which platelet chemokines may play pivotal roles.”   OTHER NEWS Time to Boycott - Companies Discriminating Against Their Unvaccinated Employees The Naked Emperor, January 17, 2022 Suddenly, employment and discrimination laws don't exist. Here is an ever-growing list of companies that are discriminating against their employees. They need boycotting until they change their policies. ·  Finance o    Citigroup - Employees to lose their jobs by the end of the month if unvaccinated; o    Goldman Sachs - Told employees they will require a booster to work in the office from 1 February; o    JPMorgan Chase - Won't pay unvaccinated employees because they aren't allowed to go to the office; o    OneAmerica - Requiring vaccines for all employees; Healthcare o    National Health Service - Staff with direct contact with patients must have had a 1st dose by 3 February or risk losing their job at the end of March; o    Mayo Clinic - Has fired 700 unvaccinated employees; Retail o    Columbia Sportswear - Will begin firing unvaccinated employees from 1 Feb; o    Ikea - Has cut sick pay for unvaccinated staff forced to self-isolate; o    Kroger - Eliminated paid leave for unvaccinated employees who get COVID-19 and require them to pay monthly health insurance surcharges; o    Next - Sick pay cut for unvaccinated staff forced to self-isolate; o    Nike - If employees remain unvaccinated by 15 January they will be fired; o    Morrisons - Cut sick pay for unvaccinated staff in October 2021; o    Ocado - Unvaccinated isolating staff to have sick pay cut; o    Tyson Foods - Require COVID-19 vaccinations for its U.S workforce and providing $200 to full vaccinated frontline team members; o    Vans, Supreme, Timberland & The North Face (Parent company = VF Corporation) - will start firing unvaccinated employees by 31 January without severance; Services o    Wessex Water - To cut sick pay for unvaccinated staff who need to self-isolate; Tech o    Apple - Starting 24 January, employees will need proof of booster. Unvaccinated will need negative tests to go to work; o    Google - Tells unvaccinated employees they'll lose pay and will eventually be fired; o    Intel - Employees to go on unpaid leave if unvaccinated by 4 January;     The Age of Intolerance: Cancel Culture's War on Free Speech John and Nisha Whitehead, January 11, 2022 Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs. Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint. In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support. This tendency to censor, silence, delete, label as “hateful,” and demonize viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite is being embraced with a near-fanatical zealotry by a cult-like establishment that values conformity and group-think over individuality. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical. J.K. Rowling, author of the popular Harry Potter series, has found herself denounced as transphobic and widely shunned for daring to criticize efforts by transgender activists to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender. Rowling's essay explaining her views is a powerful, articulate, well-researched piece that not only stresses the importance of free speech and women's rights while denouncing efforts by trans activists to demonize those who subscribe to “wrongthink,” but also recognizes that while the struggle over gender dysmorphia is real, concerns about safeguarding natal women and girls from abuse are also legitimate. Ironically enough, Rowling's shunning included literal book burning. Yet as Ray Bradbury once warned, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Indeed, the First Amendment is going up in flames before our eyes, but those first sparks were lit long ago and have been fed by intolerance all along the political spectrum. Consider some of the kinds of speech being targeted for censorship or outright elimination. Offensive, politically incorrect and “unsafe” speech:  Bullying, intimidating speech: Dangerous, anti-government speech:  The problem as I see it is that we've allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we've bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we've stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences. In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears. We have allowed our fears—fear for our safety, fear of each other, fear of being labeled racist or hateful or prejudiced, etc.—to trump our freedom of speech and muzzle us far more effectively than any government edict could. Ultimately the war on free speech—and that's exactly what it is: a war being waged by Americans against other Americans—is a war that is driven by fear. By muzzling free speech, we are contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can't take part in American public life unless they “fit in.” Be warned: whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.   Spain police officers in Valencia: "We are with the people, not with corrupt politicians. We are in contact with Portugal, Italy, France, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands to unite all the police in Europe. Down with the health passport."     There Is Currently No COVID Medical Emergency Only Psychological Engineering Says Senior Israeli Immunologist GREAT GAME INDIA,  January 16, 2022 The attempts of governments across the globe at “psychological engineering” the population on Covid related matters has now been fully exposed after several years. A well respected immunologist in Israel heavily criticized the approach of every administration globally. In a scathing letter addressed to the Israeli Ministry of Health, a renowned immunologist denounced mass vaccination against COVID-19 and chastised officials who've already “branded” the unvaccinated “as spreaders of the disease.” The letter, penned by Professor Ehud Qimron, who is the head of Tel Aviv University's Department of Microbiology and Immunology, rips off vaccine-focused COVID tactics endorsed by authorities across the globe, which Qimron labels “doomed to fail.” “Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail,” he wrote to the Israeli health ministry. “You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.” Qimron reprimanded Israeli authorities for failing to recognize that COVID-19 vaccines will neither eliminate the virus or provide herd immunity, as the government's immunization campaign “failed” to do. “You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge,” he said. “You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people.” “You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.” According to research, immunizations essentially inflict more harm than that of the virus on its own in younger demographics. According to a study released last month by British researchers, the jabs dramatically raise the chance of potentially life-threatening heart inflammation in males under 40 years old compared to COVID-19 and may lead in more lethal types of the heart ailment. “You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times,” Qimron noted in his letter to the health ministry. “You hid data that allows for objective and proper research. Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.” “The truth is that you have brought the public's trust in you to an unprecedented low, and you have eroded your status as a source of authority,” he alleged, citing increased incidences of mental illness and misbehavior among Israeli pupils amid COVID regulations. “You have destroyed the education of our children and their future,” said Qimron. “You made children feel guilty, scared, smoke, drink, get addicted, drop out, and quarrel, as school principals around the country attest. You have harmed livelihoods, the economy, human rights, mental health and physical health.” You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarized the discourse. You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease. You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice. A selection that lacks any epidemiological justification. “There is currently no medical emergency,” the immunologist continued. “The only emergency now is that you still set policies and hold huge budgets for propaganda and psychological engineering instead of directing them to strengthen the health care system.” “This emergency must stop!”   Serious Health Risks of Covid-19 Vaccines: Open Letter to Cornell University Board of Trustees and President Martha Pollack Cornell University Community, January 12, 2022 Dear President Pollack and Cornell Board of Trustees, We are students, parents, alumni, faculty, and staff of Cornell University. We are grateful for Cornell's efforts at keeping students and the Ithaca community safe during this pandemic. As concerned members of the global Big Red family, we write this open letter to express our strong opposition to Cornell's Covid-19 booster mandate. In light of new data available about both the vaccine and the virus, we urge you to change the “mandate” to a “recommendation” based on the factors outlined below.  We appreciate that the booster mandate and new procedures for the spring term stem from the good intention to prevent severe illness. But as with any public health policy, many factors — scientific, ethical, and legal — must be considered and weighed. We are concerned that Cornell, in issuing this booster mandate, has overlooked recent and evolving scientific data regarding the vaccine and the virus that makes a booster mandate inappropriate and unnecessary, raising serious ethical and legal questions. In December 2021, Cornell identified over 1,600 Covid-19 positive cases with “every case of the Omicron variant to date [being] found in fully vaccinated students, a portion of whom had also received a booster shot.” Cornell's own data highlights that vaccination, even with the booster, has very limited capability in stopping virus transmission. A similar conclusion has been reached by CDC's research: vaccinated people seem to transmit Covid-19 similarly to unvaccinated people. The virus will continue to be transmitted among our highly vaccinated campuses. In a recent campus-wide email, Cornell explicitly acknowledged the impossibility of containing or eliminating Omicron, the flu, or other respiratory illnesses, which is why it will “shift from counting positive cases.”  As so many students test positive, they are, in essence, receiving a natural booster based on the very latest variants of the virus. And yet, Cornell is ignoring the natural immunity in these students and mandating a booster injection based on older variants, which Cornell knows is ineffective at stopping the spread of Covid-19 in the Cornell community. This decision is counter to science and seems like it was made less to promote students' health and more to achieve some other unstated goal of the administration. Otherwise, why require a booster injection that is ineffective, and potentially dangerous, for students who are naturally contracting and fighting off a virus that many scientists believe is becoming more endemic than pandemic? Mounting evidence points to serious risks from exposure to the Covid-19 vaccines. The latest scientific research shows that Covid-19 vaccine side effects such as myocarditis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, and pericarditis are more common in young people than we think (see references 1-5 listed below). Recently, an Oxford-conducted study of men under the age of 40 demonstrated that the risk of myocarditis after one dose mRNA exceeds the risk of myocarditis from an actual Covid-19 infection. Even more alarmingly, the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicates that there were over 15,000 Covid-19 vaccine related death cases in 2021, compared with the previous average of 158 vaccine related deaths per year (Pre-Covid-19), in the context of a yearly total of 280 million injections and 70 different vaccines. This data shows that, compared to other vaccines, Covid-19 injections carry around 100 times the risk of death. Considering new data on the virus and the vaccine, the university may very well cause disability or death by imposing further vaccine requirements, and it will have to bear the responsibility. Please do the right thing, and end this unnecessary and unethical mandate. EU Regulators, WHO Call for End to COVID Boosters, Citing Evidence Strategy Is Failing EU drug regulators, World Health Organization experts and the former chairman of the UK's COVID task force all cited mounting evidence mRNA COVID boosters aren't working and the strategy should be dropped. Childrens Health Defense, January 12, 2022   European Union drug regulators warned frequent COVID boosters could adversely affect the immune system and said there are currently no data to support repeated doses. According to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), continued booster doses every four months could pose a risk of overloading people's immune systems and lead to fatigue. Instead, the agency recommended countries space out the intervals between boosters and coordinate their programs with the onset of the cold season in each hemisphere — following blueprints of influenza vaccination strategies. Boosters “can be done once, or maybe twice, but it's not something that we can think should be repeated constantly,” Cavaleri said. “We need to think about how we can transition from the current pandemic setting to a more endemic setting.” The World Health Organization's (WHO) Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Composition (TAG-CO-VAC) on Jan. 11 warned, “a vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable.” The expert group, created by the WHO to assess the performance of COVID vaccines, said providing fresh doses of already existing vaccines as new strains of the virus emerge is not the best way to fight a pandemic. “It's over, people,” Alex Berenson, former New York Times reporter and best-selling author, wrote. “Aside from a few unlucky Israelis, no one is going to receive a fourth dose of the original vaccine.” Berenson wrote: “Everyone with eyes can see it doesn't work against Omicron — and if you haven't gotten a third dose, at this point, why would you? You are getting at most weeks of marginally improved protection for potentially severe side effects. “Instead the WHO is now promising/demanding vaccines based on whatever the dominant Sars-Cov-2 strain is at the moment. That promise is as empty as all the others the health bureaucrats and vaccine companies have made.”   60% Of Omicron Hospitalization Numbers Were Incorrect Admits Canada's Chief Medical Officer GREAT GAME INDIA. January 17, 2022 Shocking statistics regarding Canada's Omicron hospitalizations being incorrect has come to light recently. The Premier of Alberta has claimed a staggering 60% disparity between the actual figures. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Alberta Chief Medical Officer Deena Hinshaw both confirmed that public figures for ICU capacity and COVID admissions were up to 60% incorrect. “Of the 163 omicron patients in hospital, 66 have a primary COVID diagnosis … and of the 14 omicron patients in ICU, 11 have a primary COVID diagnosis,” he stated. As per Kenney, this indicates that 60% of individuals labelled as staying in the hospital for an omicron ailment weren't there because they arrived sick with COVID, and also that the ICU statistics reflect the same rationale, with more than 20% of recorded stays being unintentional. This is consistent with developments found throughout Canada, as provincial medical authorities have shifted their focus and begun to release increasingly specific data on hospitalizations.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash * KITM, satisfying and fresh! David Waldman broadcasts with extra crew at the World Headquarters while his area gets slammed by snow. (If you call that snow.) and is driven insane by catchy jingles. (If you call that a catchy jingle.) Joan McCarter's observance of Martin Luther King Day distracted from her observance of the calendar, and she almost missed calling in, but she did, and they talked, and we had a show: Whatever pauses school attendance might help the Omicron wave to pass through and relieve pressure on school districts, which is good, but isn't just a blue thing, but an everywhere thing, and periodic closures add up to blanket closures when they happen by the thousands. Glenn Youngkin promised to listen to the parents but can't quite make out what the parents who didn't vote for him are saying. His anti-mandate mandate violates the law, and the constitution, but some of his supporters do have a history of that behavior. Meanwhile Youngkin initiates an investigation to come to a conclusion he has already dictated. Neil Gorsuch has only 8 coworkers but is such an entitled prick one of them can't even come into work. The Biden administration forced the resignation of a prominent right-wing activist and conspiracy theorist. Of course, there is a market for that sort of thing elsewhere. You heard it here first, but finally enough other people have heard about forged electoral documents that a second state attorney general is contacting federal prosecutors. Chuck Schumer has postponed the filibuster and voting rights fight to next week, and unless that fight includes a lot of punching, the outcome is pretty much decided. Forcing Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to actually debate would be helpful as well. In fact, anything that makes a Senator's work harder should be pretty effective on motivating the lot of them. Look, I made it through a summary without mentioning the former guy… oop!

We discuss the olympics, omicron, and the corruption of the FBI.  Our guests are: Jason Miller, Julie Kelly, Bo Hines, Royce White, Ben Harnwell, Ben Bergquam, Erik Finman Stay ahead of the censors - Join us warroom.org/join Aired On: 1/18/2022 Watch: On the Web: http://www.warroom.org On Podcast: http://warroom.ctcin.bio On TV: PlutoTV Channel 240, Dish Channel 219, Roku, Apple TV, FireTV or on https://AmericasVoice.news. #news #politics #realnews 

Meats and produce scarce in grocery stores. Volcano explodes in Tonga. Possible 4th booster could be needed to fight Omicron variant. NFL playoffs. Omicron reported in Beijing. Thieves targeting stopped freight trains. Car fees to enter the city of London.

Joe Biden says George Floyd mattered more than Martin Luther King, Israel finds that even a fourth COVID shot does not stop Omicron, and Dr. Fauci's financial disclosures show that the vaunted doctor is loaded. DW members get special product discounts up to 20% off PLUS access to exclusive Daily Wire merch. Grab your Daily Wire merch here: https://utm.io/udZpp  My new book 'Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds,' is now available wherever books are sold. Grab your copy today here: https://utm.io/udtMJ  Andrew Klavan's latest novel When Christmas Comes is now available on Amazon. Order in time for Christmas: https://utm.io/udW6u Matt Walsh is now a self-acclaimed beloved children's author. Reserve your copy of his new book here: https://utm.io/ud1Cb  Subscribe to Morning Wire, Daily Wire's new morning news podcast, and get the facts first on the news you need to know: https://utm.io/udyIF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The surge in the omicron variant has left hospitals across California struggling with staffing and in many cases, a rapid increase in COVID-positive patients. But can the state, and U.S. in general learn from some of the successes other countries are having in managing COVID right now? Guest: Eric Topol, Professor of Molecular Medicine, Scripps Research  For the first time starting this year, agricultural employers in California –- like farmers and farm labor contractors with 26 or more employees -- have to pay their workers overtime after an eight-hour day or 40-hour week. While farmworker advocates are celebrating this change, it's also created some unintended consequences.  Reporter: Madi Bolaños, Valley Public Radio The San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles has one of the highest concentrations of Asian residents in the country. But a new survey indicates a pandemic's worth of racist incidents has many there feeling shaken. Reporter: Josie Huang, KPCC

Science shows that Omicron's end is in sight, but Fauci thinks differently; the battle for Texas begins as the left charges forward to change the governor's seat to blue, and DirectTV is trying to silence a conservative news outlet, and Trump won't have any of it. Join in the conversation today, as Graham shares with you what the media won't! Join Grahams Text List - TEXT: GRAHAM to 866-645-0622 www.GoodRanchers.com/Graham CODE: Graham www.BirchGold.com Text: Graham to 989898 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bill Handel hosts KTLA 5's Tech Reporter Rich DeMuro for this week's edition of Tech Tuesday. Wayne Resnick and Jennifer Jones Lee join Bill for the Late Edition of Handel on the News. The three of them discuss news topics that include: The Omicron surge hasn't peaked yet nationwide, and 'the next few weeks will be tough', the race to cut carbon emissions splits the U.S. states on their use of nuclear power, and the Texas abortion law challenge is heading to the state's Supreme Court and will likely add more delays to the case.

Hosts: TJ & Brett This week on the show: Segment One: Welcome back and welcome to 2022! Brett gets a cannon for Christmas. TJ gets a PS5 and a raging case of Omicron. Plus, a catch up on the beloved Raiders and Bears, Christmas traditions, and Segment Two: FGS returns with a look a degenerate robbing an adult store after putting in a job app. HOT TAKES covers the upcoming Wild Card round of the NFL playoffs. It's time to catch up on celebrities who passed during out time off. And also, a whole mess of reviews including Spider-Man: No Way Home, Hawkeye, and The Matrix. Plus, a look at The Book of Boba Fett. Segment Three: It's quiz time on REDDIT FUN as TJ tests Brett on his knowledge of NFL Wild Card history. Plus, PICKS O' THE WEEK! Thanks for having us back! It's THE QUAD M SHOW!

This week on Here's The Sitch: Mike and Laurens discuss improving yourself regularly and not seasonally. Plus, Omicron hits the Situation home, Romeo's NICU story, and more! Leave a voice message for Mike & Laurens and YOU could be on Here's The Sitch: (732) 898-0414‬ This episode is sponsored by: HelloFresh - Promo code: SITUATION16 Let's Get Checked - PCOS Test - Promo code: SITCH Helix Sleep HydroJug - Promo code: SITUATION

Averyn and I hate to be a tease but factors out of our control have moved us to premiere our much anticipated season 4 by one eensy weensy week. Our engines are running and we are ready to go! Hope you enjoy this fun game show style Q & A. Get excited because we are about to drop some hints for what is to come. We miss you, Rom Criminals! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As critics blast Senators who praise Dr. Martin Luther King while refusing to do anything to pass voting rights legislation, Dr. Kings' family urges the passage of the bill through the Senate and for President Biden to deliver on his key election campaign promise. The FBI says the 11-hour standoff at a Texas synagogue was ‘terrorism-related' and that the hostage taker ‘targeted' the Jewish community. Jeffrey Cohen, one of the hostages in the ordeal, joins to recall his harrowing experience. Plus, Omicron cases rise worldwide, the tug of war in Arizona: protecting voting rights versus pushing the big lie of election fraud, LSU signs a new football coach to contract worth $100 million while students and Baton Rouge residents struggle and U.S. Senators meet Ukraine's President in Kyiv amid fears of a Russian invasion. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

Welcome, to This Is America, January 18th, 2022. On this episode, we speak with a student involved in organizing ongoing strikes in the Oakland Unified School District. We talk about the spread of Omicron throughout schools, the impact of sickout actions by teachers, and how students began to self-organize to issue their own demands and... Read Full Article

Airlines are calling on the White House to stop Wednesday's nationwide rollout of the new 5G cell networks warning of massive disruptions to both passengers and cargo flights. Plus, Pittsburgh schools are closed today due to that massive winter storm — this morning, cities up and down the East Coast are recovering. Also, a look inside the restoration of the Notre Dame Cathedral nearly three years after that fire. 

Nicholas Linke (science teacher and host of The Delta) joins Adam Sommer for a chat about the realities and possibilities of the Omicron variant. NOTE: Contains scientific discussion on some things that CAN occur, but is not meant to be a direct prediction.

Omicron is taking over the nation and we are NOT here for it!  Honestly we'd prefer to just talk about whether or not you'd drink a cocktail in the shower but when one of your Glitter Girls gets the Vid you know it's gonna dominate the conversation.  Don't you worry though, we are definitely revealing the results of the shower/cocktail poll and are reading the funniest comments from both sides.  Support the show and become a Patreon Member:https://www.patreon.com/glitterdisorderpodcast?fan_landing=trueOur website:https://glitterdisorder.comFollow us on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/glitterdisorderpodcast/Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/glitterdisorderpodcast)

About PetePete does many startup things at Allma. Links: Last Tweet in AWS: https://lasttweetinaws.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/petecheslock LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petecheslock/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined—as is tradition, for a post re:Invent wrap up, a month or so later, once everything is time to settle—by my friend and yours, Pete Cheslock. Pete, how are you?Pete: Hi, I'm doing fantastic. New year; new me. That's what I'm going with.Corey: That's the problem. I keep hoping for that, but every time I turn around, it's still me. And you know, honestly, I wouldn't wish that on anyone.Pete: Exactly. [laugh]. I wouldn't wish you on me either. But somehow I keep coming back for this.Corey: So, in two-thousand twenty—or twenty-twenty, as the children say—re:Invent was fully virtual. And that felt weird. Then re:Invent 2021 was a hybrid event which, let's be serious here, is not really those things. They had a crappy online thing and then a differently crappy thing in person. But it didn't feel real to me because you weren't there.That is part of the re:Invent tradition. There's a midnight madness thing, there's a keynote where they announce a bunch of nonsense, and then Pete and I go and have brunch on the last day of re:Invent and decompress, and more or less talk smack about everything that crosses our minds. And you weren't there this year. I had to backfill you with Tim Banks. You know, the person that I backfield you with here at The Duckbill Group as a principal cloud economist.Pete: You know, you got a great upgrade in hot takes, I feel like, with Tim.Corey: And other ways, too, but it's rude of me to say that to you directly. So yeah, his hot takes are spectacular. He was going to be doing this with me, except you cannot mess with tradition. You really can't.Pete: Yeah. I'm trying to think how many—is this third year? It's at least three.Corey: Third or fourth.Pete: Yeah, it's at least three. Yeah, it was, I don't want to say I was sad to not be there because, with everything going on, it's still weird out there. But I am always—I'm just that weird person who actually likes re:Invent, but not for I feel like the reasons people think. Again, I'm such an extroverted-type person, that it's so great to have this, like, serendipity to re:Invent. The people that you run into and the conversations that you have, and prior—like in 2019, I think was a great example because that was the last one I had gone to—you know, having so many conversations so quickly because everyone is there, right? It's like this magnet that attracts technologists, and venture capital, and product builders, and all this other stuff. And it's all compressed into, like, you know, that five-day span, I think is the biggest part that makes so great.Corey: The fear in people's eyes when they see me. And it was fun; I had a pair of masks with me. One of them was a standard mask, and no one recognizes anyone because, masks, and the other was a printout of my ridiculous face, which was horrifyingly uncanny, but also made it very easy for people to identify me. And depending upon how social I was feeling, I would wear one or the other, and it worked flawlessly. That was worth doing. They really managed to thread the needle, as well, before Omicron hit, but after the horrors of last year. So, [unintelligible 00:03:00]—Pete: It really—Corey: —if it were going on right now, it would not be going on right now.Pete: Yeah. I talk about really—yeah—really just hitting it timing-wise. Like, not that they could have planned for any of this, but like, as things were kind of not too crazy and before they got all crazy again, it feels like wow, like, you know, they really couldn't have done the event at any other time. And it's like, purely due to luck. I mean, absolute one hundred percent.Corey: That's the amazing power of frugality. Because the reason is then is it's the week after Thanksgiving every year when everything is dirt cheap. And, you know, if there's one thing that I one-point-seve—sorry, their stock's in the toilet—a $1.6 trillion company is very concerned about, it is saving money at every opportunity.Pete: Well, the one thing that was most curious about—so I was at the first re:Invent in-what—2012 I think it was, and there was—it was quaint, right?—there was 4000 people there, I want to say. It was in the thousands of people. Now granted, still a big conference, but it was in the Sands Convention Center. It was in that giant room, the same number of people, were you know, people's booths were like tables, like, eight-by-ten tables, right? [laugh].It had almost a DevOpsDays feel to it. And I was kind of curious if this one had any of those feelings. Like, did it evoke it being more quaint and personable, or was it just as soulless as it probably has been in recent years?Corey: This was fairly soulless because they reduced the footprint of the event. They dropped from two expo halls down to one, they cut the number of venues, but they still had what felt like 20,000 people or something there. It was still crowded, it was still packed. And I've done some diligent follow-ups afterwards, and there have been very few cases of Covid that came out of it. I quarantined for a week in a hotel, so I don't come back and kill my young kids for the wrong reasons.And that went—that was sort of like the worst part of it on some level, where it's like great. Now I could sit alone at a hotel and do some catch-up and all the rest, but all right I'd kind of like to go home. I'm not used to being on the road that much.Pete: Yeah, I think we're all a little bit out of practice. You know, I haven't been on a plane in years. I mean, the travel I've done more recently has been in my car from point A to point B. Like, direct, you know, thing. Actually, a good friend of mine who's not in technology at all had to travel for business, and, you know, he also has young kids who are under five, so he when he got back, he actually hid in a room in their house and quarantine himself in the room. But they—I thought, this is kind of funny—they never told the kids he was home. Because they knew that like—Corey: So, they just thought the house was haunted?Pete: [laugh].Corey: Like, “Don't go in the west wing,” sort of level of nonsense. That is kind of amazing.Pete: Honestly, like, we were hanging out with the family because they're our neighbors. And it was like, “Oh, yeah, like, he's in the guest room right now.” Kids have no idea. [laugh]. I'm like, “Oh, my God.” I'm like, I can't even imagine. Yeah.Corey: So, let's talk a little bit about the releases of re:Invent. And I'm going to lead up with something that may seem uncharitable, but I don't think it necessarily is. There weren't the usual torrent of new releases for ridiculous nonsense in the same way that there have been previously. There was no, this service talks to satellites in space. I mean, sure, there was some IoT stuff to manage fleets of cars, and giant piles of robots, and cool, I don't have those particular problems; I'm trying to run a website over here.So okay, great. There were enhancements to a number of different services that were in many cases appreciated, in other cases, irrelevant. Werner said in his keynote, that it was about focusing on primitives this year. And, “Why do we have so many services? It's because you asked for it… as customers.”Pete: [laugh]. Yeah, you asked for it.Corey: What have you been asking for, Pete? Because I know what I've been asking for and it wasn't that. [laugh].Pete: It's amazing to see a company continually say yes to everything, and somehow, despite their best efforts, be successful at doing it. No other company could do that. Imagine any other software technology business out there that just builds everything the customers ask for. Like from a product management business standpoint, that is, like, rule 101 is, “Listen to your customers, but don't say yes to everything.” Like, you can't do everything.Corey: Most companies can't navigate the transition between offering the same software in the Cloud and on a customer facility. So, it's like, “Ooh, an on-prem version, I don't know, that almost broke the company the last time we tried it.” Whereas you have Amazon whose product strategy is, “Yes,” being able to put together a whole bunch of things. I also will challenge the assertion that it's the primitives that customers want. They don't want to build a data center out of popsicle sticks themselves. They want to get something that solves a problem.And this has been a long-term realization for me. I used to work at Media Temple as a senior systems engineer running WordPress at extremely large scale. My websites now run on WordPress, and I have the good sense to pay WP Engine to handle it for me, instead of doing it myself because it's not the most productive use of my time. I want things higher up the stack. I assure you I pay more to WP Engine than it would cost me to run these things myself from an infrastructure point of view, but not in terms of my time.What I see sometimes as the worst of all worlds is that AWS is trying to charge for that value-added pricing without adding the value that goes along with it because you still got to build a lot of this stuff yourself. It's still a very janky experience, you're reduced to googling random blog posts to figure out how this thing is supposed to work, and the best documentation comes from externally. Whereas with a company that's built around offering solutions like this, great. In the fullness of time, I really suspect that if this doesn't change, their customers are going to just be those people who build solutions out of these things. And let those companies capture the up-the-stack margin. Which I have no problem with. But they do because Amazon is a company that lies awake at night actively worrying that someone, somewhere, who isn't them might possibly be making money somehow.Pete: I think MongoDB is a perfect example of—like, look at their stock price over the last whatever, years. Like, they, I feel like everyone called for the death of MongoDB every time Amazon came out with their new things, yet, they're still a multi-billion dollar company because I can just—give me an API endpoint and you scale the database. There's is—Corey: Look at all the high-profile hires that Mongo was making out of AWS, and I can't shake the feeling they're sitting there going, “Yeah, who's losing important things out of production now?” It's, everyone is exodus-ing there. I did one of those ridiculous graphics of the naming all the people that went over there, and in—with the hurricane evacuation traffic picture, and there's one car going the other way that I just labeled with, “Re:Invent sponsorship check,” because yeah, they have a top tier sponsorship and it was great. I've got to say I've been pretty down on MongoDB for a while, for a variety of excellent reasons based upon, more or less, how they treated customers who were in pain. And I'd mostly written it off.I don't do that anymore. Not because I inherently believe the technology has changed, though I'm told it has, but by the number of people who I deeply respect who are going over there and telling me, no, no, this is good. Congratulations. I have often said you cannot buy authenticity, and I don't think that they are, but the people who are working there, I do not believe that these people are, “Yeah, well, you bought my opinion. You can buy their attention, not their opinion.” If someone changes their opinion, based upon where they work, I kind of question everything they're telling me is, like, “Oh, you're just here to sell something you don't believe in? Welcome aboard.”Pete: Right. Yeah, there's an interview question I like to ask, which is, “What's something that you used to believe in very strongly that you've more recently changed your mind on?” And out of politeness because usually throws people back a little bit, and they're like, “Oh, wow. Like, let me think about that.” And I'm like, “Okay, while you think about that I want to give you mine.”Which is in the past, my strongly held belief was we had to run everything ourselves. “You own your availability,” was the line. “No, I'm not buying Datadog. I can build my own metric stack just fine, thank you very much.” Like, “No, I'm not going to use these outsourced load balancers or databases because I need to own my availability.”And what I realized is that all of those decisions lead to actually delivering and focusing on things that were not the core product. And so now, like, I've really flipped 180, that, if any—anything that you're building that does not directly relate to the core product, i.e. How your business makes money, should one hundred percent be outsourced to an expert that is better than you. Mongo knows how to run Mongo better than you.Corey: “What does your company do?” “Oh, we handle expense reports.” “Oh, what are you working on this month?” “I'm building a load balancer.” It's like that doesn't add the value. Don't do that.Pete: Right. Exactly. And so it's so interesting, I think, to hear Werner say that, you know, we're just building primitives, and you asked for this. And I think that concept maybe would work years ago, when you had a lot of builders who needed tools, but I don't think we have any, like, we don't have as many builders as before. Like, I think we have people who need more complete solutions. And that's probably why all these businesses are being super successful against Amazon.Corey: I'm wondering if it comes down to a cloud economic story, specifically that my cloud bill is always going to be variable and it's difficult to predict, whereas if I just use EC2 instances, and I build load balancers or whatnot, myself, well, yeah, it's a lot more work, but I can predict accurately what my staff compensation costs are more effectively, that I can predict what a CapEx charge would be or what the AWS bill is going to be. I'm wondering if that might in some way shape it?Pete: Well, I feel like the how people get better in managing their costs, right, you'll eventually move to a world where, like, “Yep, okay, first, we turned off waste,” right? Like, step one is waste. Step two is, like, understanding your spend better to optimize but, like, step three, like, the galaxy brain meme of Amazon cost stuff is all, like, unit economics stuff, where trying to better understand the actual cost deliver an actual feature. And yeah, I think that actually gets really hard when you give—kind of spread your product across, like, a slew of services that have varying levels of costs, varying levels of tagging, so you can attribute it. Like, it's really hard. Honestly, it's pretty easy if I have 1000 EC2 servers with very specific tags, I can very easily figure out what it costs to deliver product. But if I have—Corey: Yeah, if I have Corey build it, I know what Corey is going to cost, and I know how many servers he's going to use. Great, if I have Pete it, Pete's good at things, it'll cut that server bill in half because he actually knows how to wind up being efficient with things. Okay, great. You can start calculating things out that way. I don't think that's an intentional choice that companies are making, but I feel like that might be a natural outgrowth of it.Pete: Yeah. And there's still I think a lot of the, like, old school mentality of, like, the, “Not invented here,” the, “We have to own our availability.” You can still own your availability by using these other vendors. And honestly, it's really heartening to see so many companies realize that and realize that I don't need to get everything from Amazon. And honestly, like, in some things, like I look at a cloud Amazon bill, and I think to myself, it would be easier if you just did everything from Amazon versus having these ten other vendors, but those ten other vendors are going to be a lot better at running the product that they build, right, that as a service, then you probably will be running it yourself. Or even Amazon's, like, you know, interpretation of that product.Corey: A few other things that came out that I thought were interesting, at least the direction they're going in. The changes to S3 intelligent tiering are great, with instant retrieval on Glacier. I feel like that honestly was—they talk a good story, but I feel like that was competitive response to Google offering the same thing. That smacks of a large company with its use case saying, “You got two choices here.” And they're like, “Well, okay. Crap. We're going to build it then.”Or alternately, they're looking at the changes that they're making to intelligent tiering, they're now shifting that to being the default that as far as recommendations go. There are a couple of drawbacks to it, but not many, and it's getting easier now to not have the mental overhead of trying to figure out exactly what your lifecycle policies are. Yeah, there are some corner cases where, okay, if I adjust this just so, then I could save 10% on that monitoring fee or whatnot. Yeah, but look how much work that's going to take you to curate and make sure that you're not doing something silly. That feels like it is such an in the margins issue. It's like, “How much data you're storing?” “Four exabytes.” Okay, yeah. You probably want some people doing exactly that, but that's not most of us.Pete: Right. Well, there's absolutely savings to be had. Like, if I had an exabyte of data on S3—which there are a lot of people who have that level of data—then it would make sense for me to have an engineering team whose sole purpose is purely an optimizing our data lifecycle for that data. Until a point, right? Until you've optimized the 80%, basically. You optimize the first 80, that's probably, air-quote, “Easy.” The last 20 is going to be incredibly hard, maybe you never even do that.But at lower levels of scale, I don't think the economics actually work out to have a team managing your data lifecycle of S3. But the fact that now AWS can largely do it for you in the background—now, there's so many things you have to think about and, like, you know, understand even what your data is there because, like, not all data is the same. And since S3 is basically like a big giant database you can query, you got to really think about some of that stuff. But honestly, what I—I don't know if—I have no idea if this is even be worked on, but what I would love to see—you know, hashtag #AWSwishlist—is, now we have countless tiers of EBS volumes, EBS volumes that can be dynamically modified without touching, you know, the physical host. Meaning with an API call, you can change from the gp2 to gp3, or io whatever, right?Corey: Or back again if it doesn't pan out.Pete: Or back again, right? And so for companies with large amounts of spend, you know, economics makes sense that you should have a team that is analyzing your volumes usage and modifying that daily, right? Like, you could modify that daily, and I don't know if there's anyone out there that's actually doing it at that level. And they probably should. Like, if you got millions of dollars in EBS, like, there's legit savings that you're probably leaving on the table without doing that. But that's what I'm waiting for Amazon to do for me, right? I want intelligent tiering for EBS because if you're telling me I can API call and you'll move my data and make that better, make that [crosstalk 00:17:46] better [crosstalk 00:17:47]—Corey: Yeah it could be like their auto-scaling for DynamoDB, for example. Gives you the capacity you need 20 minutes after you needed it. But fine, whatever because if I can schedule stuff like that, great, I know what time of day, the runs are going to kick off that beat up the disks. I know when end-of-month reporting fires off. I know what my usage pattern is going to be, by and large.Yeah, part of the problem too, is that I look at this stuff, and I get excited about it with the intelligent tiering… at The Duckbill Group we've got a few hundred S3 buckets lurking around. I'm thinking, “All right, I've got to go through and do some changes on this and implement all of that.” Our S3 bill's something like 50 bucks a month or something ridiculous like that. It's a no, that really isn't a thing. Like, I have a screenshot bucket that I have an app installed—I think called Dropshare—that hooks up to anytime I drag—I hit a shortcut, I drag with the mouse to select whatever I want and boom, it's up there and the URL is not copied to my clipboard, I can paste that wherever I want.And I'm thinking like, yeah, there's no cleanup on that. There's no lifecycle policy that's turning into anything. I should really go back and age some of it out and do the rest and start doing some lifecycle management. It—I've been using this thing for years and I think it's now a whopping, what, 20 cents a month for that bucket. It's—I just don't—Pete: [laugh].Corey: —I just don't care, other than voice in the back of my mind, “That's an unbounded growth problem.” Cool. When it hits 20 bucks a month, then I'll consider it. But until then I just don't. It does not matter.Pete: Yeah, I think yeah, scale changes everything. Start adding some zeros and percentages turned into meaningful numbers. And honestly, back on the EBS thing, the one thing that really changed my perspective of EBS, in general, is—especially coming from the early days, right? One terabyte volume, it was a hard drive in a thing. It was a virtual LUN on a SAN somewhere, probably.Nowadays, and even, like, many years after those original EBS volumes, like all the limits you get in EBS, those are actually artificial limits, right? If you're like, “My EBS volume is too slow,” it's not because, like, the hard drive it's on is too slow. That's an artificial limit that is likely put in place due to your volume choice. And so, like, once you realize that in your head, then your concept of how you store data on EBS should change dramatically.Corey: Oh, AWS had a blog post recently talking about, like, with io2 and the limits and everything, and there was architecture thinking, okay. “So, let's say this is insufficient and the quarter-million IOPS a second that you're able to get is not there.” And I'm sitting there thinking, “That is just ludicrous data volume and data interactivity model.” And it's one of those, like, I'm sitting here trying to think about, like, I haven't had to deal with a problem like that decade, just because it's, “Huh. Turns out getting these one thing that's super fast is kind of expensive.” If you paralyze it out, that's usually the right answer, and that's how the internet is mostly evolved. But there are use cases for which that doesn't work, and I'm excited to see it. I don't want to pay for it in my view, but it's nice to see it.Pete: Yeah, it's kind of fun to go into the Amazon calculator and price out one of the, like, io2 volumes and, like, maxed out. It's like, I don't know, like $50,000 a month or a hun—like, it's some just absolutely absurd number. But the beauty of it is that if you needed that value for an hour to run some intensive data processing task, you can have it for an hour and then just kill it when you're done, right? Like, that is what is most impressive.Corey: I copied 130 gigs of data to an EFS volume, which was—[unintelligible 00:21:05] EFS has gone from “This is a piece of junk,” to one of my favorite services. It really is, just because of its utility and different ways of doing things. I didn't have the foresight, just use a second EFS volume for this. So, I was unzipping a whole bunch of small files onto it. Great.It took a long time for me to go through it. All right, now that I'm done with that I want to clean all this up. My answer was to ultimately spin up a compute node and wind up running a whole bunch of—like, 400, simultaneous rm-rf on that long thing. And it was just, like, this feels foolish and dumb, but here we are. And I'm looking at the stats on it because the instance was—all right, at that point, the load average [on the instance 00:21:41] was like 200, or something like that, and the EFS volume was like, “Ohh, wow, you're really churning on this. I'm now at, like, 5% of the limit.” Like, okay, great. It turns out I'm really bad at computers.Pete: Yeah, well, that's really the trick is, like, yeah, sure, you can have a quarter-million IOPS per second, but, like, what's going to break before you even hit that limit? Probably many other things.Corey: Oh, yeah. Like, feels like on some level if something gets to that point, it a misconfiguration somewhere. But honestly, that's the thing I find weirdest about the world in which we live is that at a small-scale—if I have a bill in my $5 a month shitposting account, great. If I screw something up and cost myself a couple hundred bucks in misconfiguration it's going to stand out. At large scale, it doesn't matter if—you're spending $50 million a year or $500 million a year on AWS and someone leaks your creds, and someone spins up a whole bunch of Bitcoin miners somewhere else, you're going to see that on your bill until they're mining basically all the Bitcoin. It just gets lost in the background.Pete: I'm waiting for those—I'm actually waiting for the next level of them to get smarter because maybe you have, like, an aggressive tagging system and you're monitoring for untagged instances, but the move here would be, first get the creds and query for, like, the most used tags and start applying those tags to your Bitcoin mining instances. My God, it'll take—Corey: Just clone a bunch of tags. Congratulations, you now have a second BI Elasticsearch cluster that you're running yourself. Good work.Pete: Yeah. Yeah, that people won't find that until someone comes along after the fact that. Like, “Why do we have two have these things?” And you're like—[laugh].Corey: “Must be a DR thing.”Pete: It's maxed-out CPU. Yeah, exactly.Corey: [laugh].Pete: Oh, the terrible ideas—please, please, hackers don't take are terrible ideas.Corey: I had a, kind of, whole thing I did on Twitter years ago, talking about how I would wind up using the AWS Marketplace for an embezzlement scheme. Namely, I would just wind up spinning up something that had, like, a five-cent an hour charge or whatnot on just, like, basically rebadge the CentOS Community AMI or whatnot. Great. And then write a blog post, not attached to me, that explains how to do a thing that I'm going to be doing in production in a week or two anyway. Like, “How to build an auto-scaling group,” and reference that AMI.Then if it ever comes out, like, “Wow, why are we having all these marketplace charges on this?” “I just followed the blog post like it said here.” And it's like, “Oh, okay. You're a dumbass. The end.”That's the way to do it. A month goes by and suddenly it came out that someone had done something similarly. They wound up rebadging these community things on the marketplace and charging big money for it, and I'm sitting there going like that was a joke. It wasn't a how-to. But yeah, every time I make these jokes, I worry someone's going to do it.Pete: “Welcome to large-scale fraud with Corey Quinn.”Corey: Oh, yeah, it's fraud at scale is really the important thing here.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I still remember a year ago now at re:Invent 2021 was it, or was it 2020? Whatever they came out with, I want to say it wasn't gp3, or maybe it was, regardless, there was a new EBS volume type that came out that you were playing with to see how it worked and you experimented with it—Pete: Oh, yes.Corey: —and the next morning, you looked at the—I checked Slack and you're like well, my experiments yesterday cost us $5,000. And at first, like, the—my response is instructive on this because, first, it was, “Oh, my God. What's going to happen now?” And it's like, first, hang on a second.First off, that seems suspect but assume it's real. I assumed it was real at the outset. It's “Oh, right. This is not my personal $5-a-month toybox account. We are a company; we can absolutely pay that.” Because it's like, I could absolutely reach out, call it a favor. “I made a mistake, and I need a favor on the bill, please,” to AWS.And I would never live it down, let's be clear. For a $7,000 mistake, I would almost certainly eat it. As opposed to having to prostrate myself like that in front of Amazon. I'm like, no, no, no. I want one of those like—if it's like, “Okay, you're going to, like, set back the company roadmap by six months if you have to pay this. Do you want to do it?” Like, [groans] “Fine, I'll eat some crow.”But okay. And then followed immediately by, wow, if Pete of all people can mess this up, customers are going to be doomed here. We should figure out what happened. And I'm doing the math. Like, Pete, “What did you actually do?” And you're sitting there and you're saying, “Well, I had like a 20 gig volume that I did this.” And I'm doing the numbers, and it's like—Pete: Something's wrong.Corey: “How sure are you when you say ‘gigabyte,' that you were—that actually means what you think it did? Like, were you off by a lot? Like, did you mean exabytes?” Like, what's the deal here?Pete: Like, multiple factors.Corey: Yeah. How much—“How many IOPS did you give that thing, buddy?” And it turned out what happened was that when they launched this, they had mispriced it in the system by a factor of a million. So, it was fun. I think by the end of it, all of your experimentation was somewhere between five to seven cents. Which—Pete: Yeah. It was a—Corey: Which is why you don't work here anymore because no one cost me seven cents of money to give to Amazon—Pete: How dare you?Corey: —on my watch. Get out.Pete: How dare you, sir?Corey: Exactly.Pete: Yeah, that [laugh] was amazing to see, as someone who has done—definitely maid screw-ups that have cost real money—you know, S3 list requests are always a fun one at scale—but that one was supremely fun to see the—Corey: That was a scary one because another one they'd done previously was they had messed up Lightsail pricing, where people would log in, and, like, “Okay, so what is my Lightsail instance going to cost?” And I swear to you, this is true, it was saying—this was back in 2017 or so—the answer was, like, “$4.3 billion.” Because when you see that you just start laughing because you know it's a mistake. You know, that they're not going to actually demand that you spend $4.3 billion for a single instance—unless it's running SAP—and great.It's just, it's a laugh. It's clearly a mispriced, and it's clearly a bug that's going to get—it's going to get fixed. I just spun up this new EBS volume that no one fully understands yet and it cost me thousands of dollars. That's the sort of thing that no, no, I could actually see that happening. There are instances now that cost something like 100 bucks an hour or whatnot to run. I can see spinning up the wrong thing by mistake and getting bitten by it. There's a bunch of fun configuration mistakes you can make that will, “Hee, hee, hee. Why can I see that bill spike from orbit?” And that's the scary thing.Pete: Well, it's the original CI and CD problem of the per-hour billing, right? That was super common of, like, yeah, like, an i3, you know, 16XL server is pretty cheap per hour, but if you're charged per hour and you spin up a bunch for five minutes. Like, it—you will be shocked [laugh] by what you see there. So—Corey: Yeah. Mistakes will show. And I get it. It's also people as individuals are very different psychologically than companies are. With companies it's one of those, “Great we're optimizing to bring in more revenue and we don't really care about saving money at all costs.”Whereas people generally have something that looks a lot like a fixed income in the form of a salary or whatnot, so it's it is easier for us to cut spend than it is for us to go out and make more money. Like, I don't want to get a second job, or pitch my boss on stuff, and yeah. So, all and all, routing out the rest of what happened at re:Invent, they—this is the problem is that they have a bunch of minor things like SageMaker Inference Recommender. Yeah, I don't care. Anything—Pete: [laugh].Corey: —[crosstalk 00:28:47] SageMaker I mostly tend to ignore, for safety. I did like the way they described Amplify Studio because they made it sound like a WYSIWYG drag and drop, build a React app. It's not it. It basically—you can do that in Figma and then it can hook it up to some things in some cases. It's not what I want it to be, which is Honeycode, except good. But we'll get there some year. Maybe.Pete: There's a lot of stuff that was—you know, it's the classic, like, preview, which sure, like, from a product standpoint, it's great. You know, they have a level of scale where they can say, “Here's this thing we're building,” which could be just a twinkle in a product managers, call it preview, and get thousands of people who would be happy to test it out and give you feedback, and it's a, it's great that you have that capability. But I often look at so much stuff and, like, that's really cool, but, like, can I, can I have it now? Right? Like—or you can't even get into the preview plan, even though, like, you have that specific problem. And it's largely just because either, like, your scale isn't big enough, or you don't have a good enough relationship with your account manager, or I don't know, countless other reasons.Corey: The thing that really throws me, too, is the pre-announcements that come a year or so in advance, like, the Outpost smaller ones are finally available, but it feels like when they do too many pre-announcements or no big marquee service announcements, as much as they talk about, “We're getting back to fundamentals,” no, you have a bunch of teams that blew the deadline. That's really what it is; let's not call it anything else. Another one that I think is causing trouble for folks—I'm fortunate in that I don't do much work with Oracle databases, or Microsoft SQL databases—but they extended RDS Custom to Microsoft SQL at the [unintelligible 00:30:27] SQL server at re:Invent this year, which means this comes down to things I actually use, we're going to have a problem because historically, the lesson has always been if I want to run my own databases and tweak everything, I do it on top of an EC2 instance. If I want to managed database, relational database service, great, I use RDS. RDS Custom basically gives you root into the RDS instance. Which means among other things, yes, you can now use RDS to run containers.But it lets you do a lot of things that are right in between. So, how do you position this? When should I use RDS Custom? Can you give me an easy answer to that question? And they used a lot of words to say, no, they cannot. It's basically completely blowing apart the messaging and positioning of both of those services in some unfortunate ways. We'll learn as we go.Pete: Yeah. Honestly, it's like why, like, why would I use this? Or how would I use this? And this is I think, fundamentally, what's hard when you just say yes to everything. It's like, they in many cases, I don't think, like, I don't want to say they don't understand why they're doing this, but if it's not like there's a visionary who's like, this fits into this multi-year roadmap.That roadmap is largely—if that roadmap is largely generated by the customers asking for it, then it's not like, oh, we're building towards this Northstar of RDS being whatever. You might say that, but your roadmap's probably getting moved all over the place because, you know, this company that pays you a billion dollars a year is saying, “I would give you $2 billion a year for all of my Oracle databases, but I need this specific thing.” I can't imagine a scenario that they would say, “Oh, well, we're building towards this Northstar, and that's not on the way there.” Right? They'd be like, “New Northstar. Another billion dollars, please.”Corey: Yep. Probably the worst release of re:Invent, from my perspective, is RUM, Real User Monitoring, for CloudWatch. And I, to be clear, I wrote a shitposting Twitter threading client called Last Tweet in AWS. Go to lasttweetinaws.com. You can all use it. It's free; I just built this for my own purposes. And I've instrumented it with RUM. Now, Real User Monitoring is something that a lot of monitoring vendors use, and also CloudWatch now. And what that is, is it embeds a listener into the JavaScript that runs on client load, and it winds up looking at what's going on loading times, et cetera, so you can see when users are unhappy. I have no problem with this. Other than that, you know, liking users? What's up with that?Pete: Crazy.Corey: But then, okay, now, what this does is unlike every other RUM tool out there, which charges per session, meaning I am going to be… doing a web page load, it charges per data item, which includes HTTP errors, or JavaScript errors, et cetera. Which means that if you have a high transaction volume site and suddenly your CDN takes a nap like Fastly did for an hour last year, suddenly your bill is stratospheric for this because errors abound and cascade, and you can have thousands of errors on a single page load for these things, and it is going to be visible from orbit, at least with a per session basis thing, when you start to go viral, you understand that, “Okay, this is probably going to cost me some more on these things, and oops, I guess I should write less compelling content.” Fine. This is one of those one misconfiguration away and you are wailing and gnashing teeth. Now, this is a new service. I believe that they will waive these surprise bills in the event that things like that happen. But it's going to take a while and you're going to be worrying the whole time if you've rolled this out naively. So it's—Pete: Well and—Corey: —I just don't like the pricing.Pete: —how many people will actively avoid that service, right? And honestly, choose a competitor because the competitor could be—the competitor could be five times more expensive, right, on face value, but it's the certainty of it. It's the uncertainty of what Amazon will charge you. Like, no one wants a surprise bill. “Well, a vendor is saying that they'll give us this contract for $10,000. I'm going to pay $10,000, even though RUM might be a fraction of that price.”It's honestly, a lot of these, like, product analytics tools and monitoring tools, you'll often see they price be a, like, you know, MAU, Monthly Active User, you know, or some sort of user-based pricing, like, the number of people coming to your site. You know, and I feel like at least then, if you are trying to optimize for lots of users on your site, and more users means more revenue, then you know, if your spend is going up, but your revenue is also going up, that's a win-win. But if it's like someone—you know, your third-party vendor dies and you're spewing out errors, or someone, you know, upgraded something and it spews out errors. That no one would normally see; that's the thing. Like, unless you're popping open that JavaScript console, you're not seeing any of those errors, yet somehow it's like directly impacting your bottom line? Like that doesn't feel [crosstalk 00:35:06].Corey: Well, there is something vaguely Machiavellian about that. Like, “How do I get my developers to care about errors on consoles?” Like, how about we make it extortionately expensive for them not to. It's, “Oh, all right, then. Here we go.”Pete: And then talk about now you're in a scenario where you're working on things that don't directly impact the product. You're basically just sweeping up the floor and then trying to remove errors that maybe don't actually affect it and they're not actually an error.Corey: Yeah. I really do wonder what the right answer is going to be. We'll find out. Again, we live, we learn. But it's also, how long does it take a service that has bad pricing at launch, or an unfortunate story around it to outrun that reputation?People are still scared of Glacier because of its original restore pricing, which was non-deterministic for any sensible human being, and in some cases lead to I'm used to spending 20 to 30 bucks a month on this. Why was I just charged two grand?Pete: Right.Corey: Scare people like that, they don't come back.Pete: I'm trying to actually remember which service it is that basically gave you an estimate, right? Like, turn it on for a month, and it would give you an estimate of how much this was going to cost you when billing started.Corey: It was either Detective or GuardDuty.Pete: Yeah, it was—yeah, that's exactly right. It was one of those two. And honestly, that was unbelievably refreshing to see. You know, like, listen, you have the data, Amazon. You know what this is going to cost me, so when I, like, don't make me spend all this time to go and figure out the cost. If you have all this data already, just tell me, right?And if I look at it and go, “Yeah, wow. Like, turning this on in my environment is going to cost me X dollars. Like, yeah, that's a trade-off I want to make, I'll spend that.” But you know, with some of the—and that—a little bit of a worry on some of the intelligent tiering on S3 is that the recommendation is likely going to be everything goes to intelligent tiering first, right? It's the gp3 story. Put everything on gp3, then move it to the proper volume, move it to an sc or an st or an io. Like, gp3 is where you start. And I wonder if that's going to be [crosstalk 00:37:08].Corey: Except I went through a wizard yesterday to launch an EC2 instance and its default on the free tier gp2.Pete: Yeah. Interesting.Corey: Which does not thrill me. I also still don't understand for the life of me why in some regions, the free tier is a t2 instance, when t3 is available.Pete: They're uh… my guess is that they've got some free t—they got a bunch of t2s lying around. [laugh].Corey: Well, one of the most notable announcements at re:Invent that most people didn't pay attention to is their ability now to run legacy instance types on top of Nitro, which really speaks to what's going on behind the scenes of we can get rid of all that old hardware and emulate the old m1 on modern equipment. So, because—you can still have that legacy, ancient instance, but now you're going—now we're able to wind up greening our data centers, which is part of their big sustainability push, with their ‘Sustainability Pillar' for the well-architected framework. They're talking more about what the green choices in cloud are. Which is super handy, not just because of the economic impact because we could use this pretty directly to reverse engineer their various margins on a per-service or per-offering basis. Which I'm not sure they're aware of yet, but oh, they're going to be.And that really winds up being a win for the planet, obviously, but also something that is—that I guess puts a little bit of choice on customers. The challenge I've got is, with my serverless stuff that I build out, if I spend—the Google search I make to figure out what the most economic, most sustainable way to do that is, is going to have a bigger carbon impact on the app itself. That seems to be something that is important at scale, but if you're not at scale, it's one of those, don't worry about it. Because let's face it, the cloud providers—all of them—are going to have a better sustainability story than you are running this in your own data centers, or on a Raspberry Pi that's always plugged into the wall.Pete: Yeah, I mean, you got to remember, Amazon builds their own power plants to power their data centers. Like, that's the level they play, right? There, their economies of scale are so entirely—they're so entirely different than anything that you could possibly even imagine. So, it's something that, like, I'm sure people will want to choose for. But, you know, if I would honestly say, like, if we really cared about our computing costs and the carbon footprint of it, I would love to actually know the carbon footprint of all of the JavaScript trackers that when I go to various news sites, and it loads, you know, the whatever thousands of trackers and tracking the all over, like, what is the carbon impact of some of those choices that I actually could control, like, as a either a consumer or business person?Corey: I really hope that it turns into something that makes a meaningful difference, and it's not just greenwashing. But we'll see. In the fullness of time, we're going to figure that out. Oh, they're also launching some mainframe stuff. They—like that's great.Pete: Yeah, those are still a thing.Corey: I don't deal with a lot of customers that are doing things with that in any meaningful sense. There is no AWS/400, so all right.Pete: [laugh]. Yeah, I think honestly, like, I did talk to a friend of mine who's in a big old enterprise and has a mainframe, and they're actually replacing their mainframe with Lambda. Like they're peeling off—which is, like, a great move—taking the monolith, right, and peeling off the individual components of what it can do into these discrete Lambda functions. Which I thought was really fascinating. Again, it's a five-year-long journey to do something like that. And not everyone wants to wait five years, especially if their support's about to run out for that giant box in the, you know, giant warehouse.Corey: The thing that I also noticed—and this is probably the—I guess, one of the—talk about swing and a miss on pricing—they have a—what is it?—there's a VPC IP Address Manager, which tracks the the IP addresses assigned to your VPCs that are allocated versus not, and it's 20 cents a month per IP address. It's like, “Okay. So, you're competing against a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet”—which is what people are using for these things now—“Only you're making it extortionately expensive?”Pete: What kind of value does that provide for 20—I mean, like, again—Corey: I think Infoblox or someone like that offers it where they become more cost-effective as soon as you hit 500 IP addresses. And it's just—like, this is what I'm talking about. I know it does not cost AWS that kind of money to store an IP address. You can store that in a Route 53 TXT record for less money, for God's sake. And that's one of those, like, “Ah, we could extract some value pricing here.”Like, I don't know if it's a good product or not. Given its pricing, I don't give a shit because it's going to be too expensive for anything beyond trivial usage. So, it's a swing and a miss from that perspective. It's just, looking at that, I laugh, and I don't look at it again.Pete: See I feel—Corey: I'm not usually price sensitive. I want to be clear on that. It's just, that is just Looney Tunes, clown shoes pricing.Pete: Yeah. It's honestly, like, in many cases, I think the thing that I have seen, you know, in the past few years is, in many cases, it can honestly feel like Amazon is nickel-and-diming their customers in so many ways. You know, the explosion of making it easy to create multiple Amazon accounts has a direct impact to waste in the cloud because there's a lot of stuff you have to have her account. And the more accounts you have, those costs grow exponentially as you have these different places. Like, you kind of lose out on the economies of scale when you have a smaller number of accounts.And yeah, it's hard to optimize for that. Like, if you're trying to reduce your spend, it's challenging to say, “Well, by making a change here, we'll save, you know, $10,000 in this account.” “That doesn't seem like a lot when we're spending millions.” “Well, hold on a second. You'll save $10,000 per account, and you have 500 accounts,” or, “You have 1000 accounts,” or something like that.Or almost cost avoidance of this cost is growing unbounded in all of your accounts. It's tiny right now. So, like, now would be the time you want to do something with it. But like, again, for a lot of companies that have adopted the practice of endless Amazon accounts, they've almost gone, like, it's the classic, like, you know, I've got 8000 GitHub repositories for my source code. Like, that feels just as bad as having one GitHub repository for your repo. I don't know what the balance is there, but anytime these different types of services come out, it feels like, “Oh, wow. Like, I'm going to get nickeled and dimed for it.”Corey: This ties into the re:Post launch, which is a rebranding of their forums, where, okay, great, it was a little crufty and it need modernize, but it still ties your identity to an IAM account, or the root email address for an Amazon account, which is great. This is completely worthless because as soon as I change jobs, I lose my identity, my history, the rest, on this forum. I'm not using it. It shows that there's a lack of awareness that everyone is going to have multiple accounts with which they interact, and that people are going to deal with the platform longer than any individual account will. It's just a continual swing and a miss on things like that.And it gets back to the billing question of, “Okay. When I spin up an account, do I want them to just continue billing me—because don't turn this off; this is important—or do I want there to be a hard boundary where if you're about to charge me, turn it off. Turn off the thing that's about to cost me money.” And people hem and haw like this is an insurmountable problem, but I think the way to solve it is, let me specify that intent when I provision the account. Where it's, “This is a production account for a bank. I really don't want you turning it off.” Versus, “I'm a student learner who thinks that a Managed NAT Gateway might be a good thing. Yeah, I want you to turn off my demo Hello World app that will teach me what's going on, rather than surprising me with a five-figure bill at the end of the month.”Pete: Yeah. It shouldn't be that hard. I mean, but again, I guess everything's hard at scale.Corey: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.Pete: But still, I feel like every time I log into Cost Explorer and I look at—and this is years it's still not fixed. Not that it's even possible to fix—but on the first day of the month, you look at Cost Explorer, and look at what Amazon is estimating your monthly bill is going to be. It's like because of your, you know—Corey: Your support fees, and your RI purchases, and savings plans purchases.Pete: [laugh]. All those things happened, right? First of the month, and it's like, yeah, “Your bill's going to be $800,000 this year.” And it's like, “Shouldn't be, like, $1,000?” Like, you know, it's the little things like that, that always—Corey: The one-off charges, like, “Oh, your Route 53 zone,” and all the stuff that gets charged on a monthly cadence, which fine, whatever. I mean, I'm okay with it, but it's also the, like, be careful when that happen—I feel like there's a way to make that user experience less jarring.Pete: Yeah because that problem—I mean, in my scenario, companies that I've worked at, there's been multiple times that a non-technical person will look at that data and go into immediate freakout mode, right? And that's never something that you want to have happen because now that's just adding a lot of stress and anxiety into a company that is—with inaccurate data. Like, the data—like, the answer you're giving someone is just wrong. Perhaps you shouldn't even give it to them if it's that wrong. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens this coming year. We're already seeing promising stuff. They—give people a timeline on how long in advance these things record—late last night, AWS released a new console experience. When you log into the AWS console now, there's a new beta thing. And I gave it some grief on Twitter because I'm still me, but like the direction it's going. It lets you customize your view with widgets and whatnot.And until they start selling widgets on marketplace or having sponsored widgets, you can't remove I like it, which is no guarantee at some point. But it shows things like, I can move the cost stuff, I can move the outage stuff up around, I can have the things that are going on in my account—but who I am means I can shift this around. If I'm a finance manager, cool. I can remove all the stuff that's like, “Hey, you want to get started spinning up an EC2 instance?” “Absolutely not. Do I want to get told, like, how to get certified? Probably not. Do I want to know what the current bill is and whether—and my list of favorites that I've pinned, whatever services there? Yeah, absolutely do.” This is starting to get there.Pete: Yeah, I wonder if it really is a way to start almost hedging on organizations having a wider group of people accessing AWS. I mean, in previous companies, I absolutely gave access to the console for tools like QuickSight, for tools like Athena, for the DataBrew stuff, the Glue DataBrew. Giving, you know, non-technical people access to be able to do these, like, you know, UI ETL tasks, you know, a wider group of a company is getting access into Amazon. So, I think anything that Amazon does to improve that experience for, you know, the non-SREs, like the people who would traditionally log in, like, that is an investment definitely worth making.Corey: “Well, what could non-engineering types possibly be doing in the AWS console?” “I don't know, jackhole, maybe paying the bill? Just a thought here.” It's the, there are people who look at these things from a variety of different places, and you have such sprawl in the AWS world that there are different personas by a landslide. If I'm building Twitter for Pets, you probably don't want to be pitching your mainframe migration services to me the same way that you would if I were a 200-year-old insurance company.Pete: Yeah, exactly. And the number of those products are going to grow, the number of personas are going to grow, and, yeah, they'll have to do something that they want to actually, you know, maintain that experience so that every person can have, kind of, the experience that they want, and not be distracted, you know? “Oh, what's this? Let me go test this out.” And it's like, you know, one-time charge for $10,000 because, like, that's how it's charged. You know, that's not an experience that people like.Corey: No. They really don't. Pete, I want to thank you for spending the time to chat with me again, as is our tradition. I'm hoping we can do it in person this year, when we go at the end of 2022, to re:Invent again. Or that no one goes in person. But this hybrid nonsense is for the birds.Pete: Yeah. I very much would love to get back to another one, and yeah, like, I think there could be an interesting kind of merging here of our annual re:Invent recap slash live brunch, you know, stream you know, hot takes after a long week. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah. The real way that you know that it's a good joke is when one of us says something, the other one sprays scrambled eggs out of their nose. Yeah, that's the way to do it.Pete: Exactly. Exactly.Corey: Pete, thank you so much. If people want to learn more about what you're up to—hopefully, you know, come back. We miss you, but you're unaffiliated, you're a startup advisor. Where can people find you to learn more, if they for some unforgivable reason don't know who or what a Pete Cheslock is?Pete: Yeah. I think the easiest place to find me is always on Twitter. I'm just at @petecheslock. My DMs are always open and I'm always down to expand my network and chat with folks.And yeah, right, now, I'm just, as I jokingly say, professionally unaffiliated. I do some startup advisory work and have been largely just kind of—honestly checking out the state of the economy. Like, there's a lot of really interesting companies out there, and some interesting problems to solve. And, you know, trying to spend some of my time learning more about what companies are up to nowadays. So yeah, if you got some interesting problems, you know, you can follow my Twitter or go to LinkedIn if you want some great, you know, business hot takes about, you know, shitposting basically.Corey: Same thing. Pete, thanks so much for joining me, I appreciate it.Pete: Thanks for having me.Corey: Pete Cheslock, startup advisor, professionally unaffiliated, and recurring re:Invent analyst pal of mine. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment calling me a jackass because do I know how long it took you personally to price CloudWatch RUM?Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Monica Gandhi returns to the podcast to talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about what the COVID pandemic might look like on the other side of omicron peaks. They discuss how to rethink our safety approaches to move towards accepting COVID as endemic, managing other respiratory viruses like flu, and searching for consensus in the path forward. They also discuss an interesting theory about omicron's origins.

I remember thinking, as Covid ravaged the country in December 2020, that at least the holidays the next year would be better. There would be more vaccines, more treatments, more immunity. Instead, we got Omicron and a confusing new phase of the pandemic. What do you do with a variant that is both monstrously more infectious and somewhat milder? What do you say about another year when we didn't have enough tests, enough ventilation or the best guidance on masks? And how do you handle the fracturing politics of a changing pandemic in an exhausted country?Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist and New York Times Opinion columnist who does a better job than almost anyone at assessing the pandemic at a systems level. To solve a public-health crisis, it's not enough to get the science right. There are also challenges with supply chains, infrastructure, research production, mass communication, political trust and institutional inertia. I've found Tufekci's ability to balance the epidemiological data and the sociological realities uniquely helpful across the pandemic, and you can hear why in this conversation.We discuss how the Covid crisis has changed, as well as Tufekci's sobering conclusion: that the virus, at this point, is feeding on our dysfunction. We look at what Omicron is and isn't, where the Biden administration has succeeded and failed, the debate over closing schools, why so many Asian countries have so powerfully outperformed the West, how the role of vaccines has changed, what a pandemic-prepared society would actually look like, and what should be true of our pandemic policy in a year that isn't now.Book recommendations:The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn LeszczChaos by James GleickThe Dead Hand by David HoffmanThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

This is Covid 411, the latest on Omicron and other COVID variants, and new hotspots for January 18th, 2022. Brace yourself, here's a story about how more vaccine shots may not always be the answer. An Israeli hospital's preliminary research suggests a fourth dose of vaccine adds only limited defense against Omicron. That makes things a little tricky politically because Israel just started giving people over age 60 fourth shots. The US Surgeon General says don't get too enamored of the good news you've been hearing. He says the Omicron wave started later in some parts of the country, so we shouldn't be looking for a peak in those places, and the next few weeks will be tough. He says the problem is we're running out of healthcare workforce and the crush of COVID patients is still expected to get substantially higher. Even where there are still doctors on the job, the stress on the system means those doctors are starting to get worn out and make mistakes. That's what's happening in England. A survey shows 25% of doctors in the NHS are so tired that their ability to treat patients has become impaired. In at least seven cases, patients were actually harmed. Brace yourself again, an honest admission from a government bureaucrat. The Director of the CDC told the Wall Street Journal the messaging and communication around the pandemic should have been clearer. She said, "I think what I have not conveyed is the uncertainty in a lot of these situations." Going to the Winter Olympics in Beijing? No you're not. Tickets won't be sold to the general public in response to the pandemic. However, if you're a friend of Communist Chinese authorities, you might still have tickets distributed to you. But even then, you have to be a resident of China's mainland and in compliance with COVID countermeasures. In the United States, cases were up 98%, deaths are up 57%, and hospitalizations are up 61% over 14 days. The 7-day average of new cases has been trending down since January 14. The five states that had the most daily deaths per 100,000 are Indiana, New Mexico, Michigan, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. There are 23,591,203 active cases in the United States. The five areas with the greatest increase in hospitalizations per capita: Puerto Rico 159%. The U.S. Virgin Islands 151%. Alabama 144%. Louisiana 141%. And Florida 129%. The top 10 areas with the highest number of recent cases per capita according to The New York Times: West Feliciana, LA. Pitkin, CO. Teton, WY. Greensville, VA. Covington, MS. Tom Green, TX. Uvalde, TX. Kodiak Island Borough, AK. Rolette, ND. And Yazoo, MS. There have been at least 851,449 deaths in the U.S. recorded as Covid-related. The top 3 vaccinating states by percentage of population that's been fully vaccinated: Vermont at 78.5%, Rhode Island at 77.8%, and Maine at 76.8%. The bottom 3 vaccinating states are Wyoming at 48.2%, Alabama at 48.4%, and Mississippi at 49.1%. The percentage of the U.S. that's been fully vaccinated is 62.8%. Globally, cases were up 102% and deaths up 17% over 14 days, with the 7-day average trending up since October 15. There are now over 56 million active cases around the world, at 56,773,810. The five countries with the most new cases: The United States 389,553. India 222,579. Spain 110,489. Argentina 102,458. And France 102,144. There have been 5,544,691 deaths reported as Covid-related worldwide. For the latest updates, subscribe for free to Covid 411 on your podcast app or ask your smart speaker to play the Covid 411 podcast. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How do diseases and information spread? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice discover the history of pandemics, how social networks impact spread, and the hidden math behind it with sociologist Nicholas Christakis.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/social-networks-and-ending-the-pandemic-with-nicholas-christakis/Thanks to our Patrons Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, bj Avent-Farmer, Bryce Irving, Heavily Sedated, Aaron Moss, Rudy Amaya, and Jan Erik Bergli for supporting us this week.

The coronavirus variant has spread across the UK at incredible speed – but there are signs that the wave may have reached its peak. Madeleine Finlay talks to the Guardian science correspondent Nicola Davis about what we can expect in the weeks and months to come, and whether a second ‘exit wave' could be here in the summer. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

America's Heroes Group Roundtable with Partner National Nurses United Partner: Adelena Marshall - VA Mental Health RN

All three of my kids have missed a significant number days because of the need to quarantine. The Omicron variant is sweeping through our neighborhoods and our local school district recently created a no-contact day this last Friday. Many caregivers and community members are concerned... The post Why I’m Not Too Worried About Learning Loss appeared first on John Spencer.

Much of the Northeast and Mid Atlantic cleaning up after a winter storm made its way through the regions dropping snow, freezing rain and bitter cold temperatures. With 5G cell service set to be implemented Wednesday, the FAA warns it could cause "catastrophic disruption" to passenger flights and the supply chain. States first hit with the Omicron surge say they are turning the corner, as Doctor Anthony Fauci weighs in on whether this could be the final wave in the pandemic. New details on the intense hostage standoff synagogue in Texas and the FBI's new warning to faith-based communities nationwide of potential threats of violence. The family of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior pushing for the Senate to take up voting rights legislation, as the nation celebrates Dr. King's legacy. Growing concern over a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. And celebrating Betty White on what would have been her 100th birthday.

With the Omicron wave still on the rise in the U.S., experts warn the surge won't peak any time soon. That, as the CDC struggles to give Americans clear Covid guidance, with Dr. Walensky admitting to the Wall Street Journal that she hasn't conveyed the “uncertainty” around the pandemic. Plus, new details are emerging about the hostage stand-off inside a Texas synagogue that terrorized worshipers for nearly 11 hours. And, on this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the late civil rights leader's family is urging Congress to pass President Biden's voting rights bill. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

With the U.S. averaging over 776,00 new Covid cases per day, the Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy warns the Omicron wave has not yet peaked. Dr. Peter Hotez, from the Texas Children's Hospital, joins to discuss early results from an Israeli study that shows a fourth dose of the Covid vaccine can increase antibodies. The FBI confirms it is investigating the hostage stand-off in which a 44-year-old British national took a rabbi and three others hostage at a Dallas area synagogue on Saturday as a terrorism related incident. Plus, Virginia Governor Youngkin's first actions in office include repealing the school mask mandate, but several large school districts are already pushing back on his executive order. Hosted by Poppy Harlow in for Jake Tapper. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy