#this didn't have to happen and I did everything I could to prevent and mitigate it.

[kirby-the-gorb]

today was the last day of my antivirals and I don't feel any covid symptoms at all. but I do feel very very very tired much like I did for months after my vaccine last november, so. that's just gonna be a thing again.

if you find yourself struggling to bounce back after the acute infection is over, look up the way cfs/me folks use pacing. in general, only aim to do half as much as you think you can to start with, and take breaks the second you notice something feels even a tiny bit not great. pushing yourself will make it worse and should be avoided as much as possible. absolutely use shortcuts, workarounds, assistive tools, and frequent breaks to make tasks more manageable and less demanding. and whether you bounce back after a week or a month or a year or never, the disabled community is here to help.

[crossguild]

kepler didn't do one good thing at the end that turned out to be useless, he was actively undermining cutter from the moment he got the briefing along with the new hand in episode 56, and caught eiffel un-mind-controlled. he just turned around and closed the door, and even gave eiffel a reminder of where he's supposed to be after he helps Jacobi, which was a crucially important thing to have done that allowed the hephaestus crew to actually succeed

and in a lot of ways, kepler had the exact same arc as hilbert and lovelace, joining the heph crew the moment a bigger and newer threat arrived. he told the crew to stand down, surrender and bide their time against cutter-- he could easily have just let them try to take cutter head-on and get immediately wiped, but he'd gained a level of respect for minkowski & co, and also knows cutter well enough to know that he and jacobi would probably get caught in the crossfire themselves if anything went down

end of 57, he's delaying cutter by saying the crew probably went into the vents and it'll take days or weeks to find them, when he's dealt with them hiding out in the vents before and definitely didn't take days or weeks about it. cutter immediately put pryce on the job instead.

that in mind, i think a major component of Kepler's character is that he's all about contingency and redundancies. he's the guy who intimately understands why and how security protocols are written in blood, he's the guy who got through to lovelace telling her 'live to fight another day', and who understands why competent damage control always seems like an overreaction (think about how y2k ended up NOT crashing vital systems all over the world).

i personally like to think of rerouting power from the pulse beacon as a cosmic safety net, a move that simultaneously routed power to hera (who was fighting pryce and probably could use that juice!) and also prevented 'release of decima on earth' as an additional problem they would have had to deal with otherwise. chekhov's gun, and all that.

it's like when you think 'oh, surely five cupcakes will be enough for five people even though i would normally make seven just in case! i always have extras!' and then someone knocks 2 cupcakes onto the floor the one time you don't have backup. if you're prepared for the worst-case scenario, the scenario becomes less likely to happen and also in case it does, the damage is mitigated.

as a character, kepler's shown to be the guy who has contingencies on contingencies, and he works quietly and efficiently to enable others to do their work to their best potential, even if they don't realize he's doing it. that's what he was doing all throughout the last 5-6 episodes for the hephaestus crew, even if he still has to continue acting in the role of someone under cutter's command-- because that's where he has to be to make the most meaningful difference

anyway that's why it's weird that he went out against rachel young the way he did, dude just straight up forgot everything he knows to be smug at her in her face, knowing full well what she's capable of. imo there were less clumsy and more in-character ways to take him out in the finale, but then again, nothing else would've really gotten him... and writing him into the ending would've made it complicated and we didn't have time to unpack alla THAT

[eishtmo]

Why Your Inventory Sucked Part 4

Sorry this is a bit late, my current job is kicking my butt this week.

It's weird how much my current job is like the old inventory job. Both are done when they're done, both have me driving to various places, both involve going to Dollar General, a lot. But there are some differences, like I can move jobs around, and choose when I start them, and in what order. I have a lot more freedom. And I get a lot more sleep.

Anyway, this is less a part 4 and more a continuation of the last part. Sorry, it was just getting very, very long and this one will be longer.

Here's the thing: Everything I wrote in the previous parts, all the issues that can make an inventory go bad, they can be accounted for. There are solutions, ways to reduce the the effect. It varies, of course, and the inventory won't become GOOD by any stretch, but it can be prevented from being worse.

But there is one thing, one solitary thing, that I can't do anything about. I can't fix it, I can't mitigate it. If it happens, everything gets worse. Minor issues become magnified. Stress goes up, crews get mad, it takes longer, it gets messier, everyone is unhappy. It's all about. . .

PART 4: Bad Prep

Inventory prep is a many nebulous thing. On the surface, it's really just about lining product up on the shelves, but there is more to it. Inventory takes over the store for a day, or two in some cases, and there's a lot more to be ready for, and a lot more that can be failed.

Let's start with the knowledge part. The store staff needs to know what to expect when we come in. Because eventually they will hear the mating call of the inventory counter

"SKU CHECK!"

Sku's (pronounced skew) are basically the identification number for a product. Usually it's the UPC, but not always. The scanners read the UPC, find a match in the master file the scanner has in memory, and then prompts for a quantity. However, if the UPC doesn't have a match in the master file, it complains, "NOT ON FILE." Thus, "Sku check," is called. "This isn't on our master file, come tell us what to do with this."

It's also the catch all for when we need help with, well, anything. No barcode to scan? Sku Check! Need help moving something big and heavy? Sku Check! Oh dog the shelf is falling, help me! SKU CHECK! This is all fine and good, but it requires the store staff to KNOW why we're calling Sku Check.

Which bring us to Lowes. Yeah, the blue hardware store. They are notorious for not responding to sku checks. I even developed a special "Lowes voice" for them. It was loud, and got louder every time I had to say it. Once it got so loud that I, in one corner of the store, could be heard in the OPPOSITE corner of the store. No one responded to that either.

Why? Because Lowes has a special inventory crew that goes in, and NONE of them tells the regular store staff what's going on. They have no idea that Sku Check means to come as soon as possible. The Lowes inventory crew can't be with us because they have their own tasks, so we have to hope someone responds. Eventually I tried to learn enough about how their item system worked so *I* could respond to Sku Checks.

Which is better than what one counter told me he did. He was a legit bad counter, not just slow (which he was) but also inaccurate and just didn't care. Anyway, he said he would call Sku Check twice, and if no one came, drop the item on the floor and kick it under the shelf. He lost his job not long after.

Lowes also had an annoying habit of opening multiple boxes of the same thing and throwing them on the shelf. STOP THAT! You do not need 6 boxes of outlet covers open on the shelf. For one, it makes loss prevention easier because, guess what, it's easier to steal one item than entire box of items. Two: Sometimes people want to buy a whole box of those things. Three, now I have to count them because a sealed box has a set number of items in it, an open box does NOT. Don't open them until you have to, PLEASE!

Inventories are inherently destructive. We WILL destroy your store. We try not to, and the better prepped for inventory the less destruction we will cause. I used to tell my counters to try not to wreck the store any more than a customer would, and if you know what a customer can do to a store, that should scare you.

When you don't prep the store, the gloves come off. We have work to do, and we aren't going to make your store look nice, we don't get paid for that.

I was in a JC Penny. I had already done a morning job and was asked to help (and deliver some extra tablets, we were always short of them). So there was this table of stacked, long sleeved, Nike shirts. Probably 20 piles of shirts, maybe more. Now in a well prepped store, the store staff will pull the tags out so they're easy to access. I mean, I will still turn the piles over to make sure I got them all, but the pile will stay more or less sorted, you know, how a customer might leave it.

No tags were pulled. I can still do it, just pull the tag out. It's either in the collar or at the end of the sleeve (usually, there are cases). Well, they weren't in the collar, so at the end of the sleeve. So I reach in and, I can't find it. What I mean is I can FEEL it, through the clothing, but I can't get my fingers on the tag itself.

Turns out they were folded so that the tag was IN the sleeve, and that was folded up inside the shirt. In other words, the only way I can get to it, is to undo the fold. On ALL of the shirts (clothing is AQ-1, gotta scan them all). Now I kept the piles together, but that neat table I started on was a wreck when I left, and I apologized to a nearby worker, but I don't get paid to fold, I get paid to count.

Another factor is basically hiding stuff from the inventory crew. Franchise stores are often like this, especially the gas stations. As I said before, whatever they're short, they have to pay the parent company, in cash. So they have a "trick" to minimize that. They bury product, look at the numbers and then go "oh did you count this?" and pull of box of bullshit out of a shed.

This is a bad idea, they shouldn't do that. The parent company tells them not to do it. It can only lead to issues further down the line. But sometimes, they don't do it on purpose. I had one store that was coming up short. The franchisee (or was a store manager for a franchisee, I forget which, doesn't matter) looks at the numbers and we start walking through the store making sure we didn't miss anything.

Now the office area in this store is quite large, big enough to contain the cigarette cage (locked box for cigs and tobacco) and both freezers for their hot wings or whatever. I have a tag just for this room and separate tags for the freezers and cage, so to my knowledge we have counted everything in this room.

Then he opens a drawer in his desk.

Disposable razors. Half a dozen at least. Opens another drawer, more razors, another, more razors. Must have been 20 or 30 of the damn things, and it's a good chunk of money. We counted this room together, and he didn't think to mention these were in the drawers, in fact, he didn't seem to REMEMBER they were there. Now maybe he was hiding them, maybe not, but it made me paranoid at every store from then on, I would pull open drawers looking for more product.

And sometimes, things happen. Dollar Tree is a store that respects our time as counters: It knows it's full of junk and lets us treat it as such. Those giant bins at the bottom of the shelf are scan one, count them all. There were a few exceptions, namely Bibles, and flowers which were to be counted AQ-1.

This store was packed. It was in a shopping center with a K-Mart as an anchor (yeah, this was a while ago now) and so if people went to K-Mart and couldn't find what they wanted at the price they wanted, they'd swing over to the Dollar Tree. Which was fine, until the K-Mart closed. Now fewer people came to the shopping center at all, yet they kept sending the same amount of stuff to the store. So it was packed.

I was set to count the over stuffed stock room, which took a while. They did the best they could, so I don't blame them for bad prep here. Anyway, as I get near the end, the store manager comes up to me. He apologizes and tells me that he only recently took over and has just found something his predecessor had left behind.

The previous manager would get in seasonal flowers that needed to get put out. But the current flowers had packed the sections so what to do? Well they grabbed a box, dumped the old flowers in and threw that box in a closet. And did this SEVERAL times. Something like 20 times.

These are not small boxes, these are big moving boxes. So instead of me finishing the stock room and joining the sales floor crew, the sales floor crew had to come back to help me count the boxes of freaking flowers. Hidden in a closet, GAH!

Now I must rant about Dollar General.

DGs are the quintessential inventory. They have a bit of everything and represent just about everything we do. It's also where I came to loath bad prep, and understand the difference good prep can have on an inventory.

Their stock rooms are usually made of rolltainers. They're cages on wheels. Full boxes of product are placed on it and when prepped right, the specials labels are facing outward so I can scan them. Of course the distribution center doesn't do that, so the store has to. If they don't, I have to remove everything from the rolltainer. Worse, there are certain labels that I cannot scan, which we called "Pack Ones" which had to be opened and counted. Or sometimes they would miss a single box and either put the label somewhere unreachable, like inside of the stack, or behind one of the bars of the cage.

That said often the stock rooms were just full of rolltainers, to the point that we would have to stage some out on the salesfloor just to be able to get the next one out to scan. Pray to dog you sequence it right so the salesfloor crew doesn't run into them while you're working or they'll skip the 2 or 3 tags those rolltainers are blocking.

Then there's the top stock, or as some corpo dipshit called them "sky shelves." The idea is good, instead of keeping stuff in your stock room, you'd stack excess on the top most shelf of the area and restock from there, except DG doesn't stop sending shit to the store so the stock room is still, to this day, full to the brim with crap. Worse, the top stocks are now full of crap too, including bins full of candy (otherwise it falls on the floor). So it takes that much longer to count and, and. . .

Totes.

Dollar General wants many things AQ-1'd. Some of them are silly, at one point they wanted toothbrushes counted this way, for example. Packs of underwear, pillows, towels, nicknacks in their "home" section, picture frames, all books, and of course flowers. It makes SOME sense, so I won't completely knock it, but then there are totes.

Totes are technically gray, plastic shipping boxes with folding tops that the distribution center uses to send items that can't easily be stored on a rolltainer. You've probably seen them sitting on the salesfloor as the staff empties them out onto the shelves. But they can also be any bin, box or container in the store. Everything in them MUST be AQ-1'd. Yes, even that full box of candy bars someone put in there, every bar is supposed to be scanned (this never happens because we have better things to do with our lives).

DG had a problem with them for a log time, still does in some places. I've heard tell of 300 totes in one store, but I don't think I've ever seen more than a couple hundred, and that was enough honestly. One store I did had random boxes of all shapes and sizes in their stock room. One had a label as to what was supposed to be in it, and it simply said "bunch of shit" and it wasn't wrong. It was so bad that at one point the entire crew would descend on these boxes and try to knock them out early, only to be there for a couple hours before even starting the proper salesfloor.

And then there was that one store. The worst store I have ever seen and counted. I shouldn't have counted it, I should have forced a cancellation, but I was a fool, and had a fool for a boss.

Would you like to see pictures of it? Oh yeah, I still have them, it was that legendary. Keep in mind these are small due to me having to use our scanners to take them to send them to corporate, but they're clear enough. Let's start simple shall we?

There's some totes for you. This is down the hallway leading to the bathrooms. The registers are behind me as I take this picture, easily viable by anyone at the registers. That's 23 totes just here, not even in the stock room.

Those boxes are held together with hopes and dreams and stuffed to brim with toys. Random boxes like this were all over store.

Remember how I said full boxes were supposed to be on rolltainers? Well they took them off and put them on the salesfloor, without opening them.

But really, this isn't the true madness. THIS is.

The front door is at the far end of this picture. Look at the boxes. Those aren't just boxes, those are boxes whose flaps have been taped up so they could get more shit into them.

Reverse angle. See that shape in the back? That's a rounder of clothing, there's another box UNDER that we wouldn't find until the end of the count. I look at these pictures and I keep tell myself this was at about 6 am that morning, while my memory is of much later when my counters got through with them and dumped PILES of items that were to be disposed of (penny items) on the floor because where the hell else was it supposed to go?

The worst part is that those gray totes from earlier, there was an entire WALL of them in the stock room which I didn't picture because it was UNREMARKABLE!

But this pile of Christmas stuff is. BTW, if you need Christmas wrapping paper or lights in the middle of summer, ask the local Dollar General. The manager especially, odds are good they've got some in their stock room they'd love to get rid of. But this was just stupid.

The point of all this? We remember the bad stores. We will TALK about the bad stores. We will tell other stores in the same company about the bad stores. It doesn't just effect YOUR inventory, but every inventory. The affected crews will be tired and cranky. We will dread returning to your store, and pass warnings to other offices. It will hang around your next like a stone for a long time.

I think it took them another year after this to put a hard cap on tote count. If it was crossed, the inventory would be canceled, no questions asked. To their credit, most stores managed to cut down on this mess and near the end there were maybe 50 totes in a store, if that.

Good prep, though, is the greatest thing. A very different Dollar General, with the same layout as this one, had what I call "perfect" prep. The stock room was empty, like straight up empty, no totes, no rolltainers. The shelves were heavy but organized. The crew ripped through the store so fast we had to wait for the audits to catch up at the end. A 4 hour day for a store that should take at least 6. Prep the store right, and the inventory goes smooth as butter and fast as lighting. We don't forget those stores either.

There, I think I spent all my ranting energy finally. It's out of my head now. I feel better.

Wait.

No, there's something else. One last thing. See, there is one client, one company, one chain of stores that I hate for all the right, and all the inventory reasons. One store that is basically a living nightmare, and one that I must talk about specially. So next time, that story.

[theculturedmarxist]

Covidhagen

tl;dr: Denmark dropping covid restrictions and mitigations is due to popular sentiment and a lack of understanding of actual risks involved, as well as an ignorance of long covid or its dangers.

2/ This Danish professor said he advised the government on dropping measures and did a pretty thorough explanation for why.

What were the reasons? Let's look.

3/ There's a lot of reasons he gives, but they mainly revolve around the sentiment of the Danish people.

That's inappropriate given how poor people are at judging risk vs reward especially when weighing the short vs long term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting

4/ He also discounts the threat of long covid. His evidence? This Danish study that has been criticized for having flawed methods, that bias towards rosier conclusions than what's really happening.

5/ Heck, only this week CH acknowledged that long covid is a common thing post-infection. I don't know what is going on in Denmark, but they probably haven't had a more advanced long covid campaign.

An under-informed populace can't make informed decisions

6/ His arguments didn't include the increased hosps or deaths associated with higher community spread. They didn't even touch the risk to society w/ much more long covid.

Ignoring these facts will only end in preventable suffering. It's happened multiple times in the past 2 years

7/ TLDR: Denmark's opening-up advisor relied on under-informed population sentiments and not on covid stats to justify ignoring covid.

Covid nums are increasing. These could have been prevented.

You can't ignore your way out of covid. Trying it damages us all more.

8/ Thanks for the DK data heads up. The charts were kind of confusing, so I just got rid of the obsolete “with covid” nums. Here you can see that the hosps and deaths are rising.

>60s cases also rose, so we can expect these numbers to rise further.

9/ "with" and "of" was a common line for deaths in 1st wave of covid. It turns out higher infections still lead to more (excess) deaths. The 💉 lowered the % but still a risk.

It's reasonable to expect hospitalizations w/ covid have worse outcomes on avg than w/o, IMO not ignorable

10/ CH also separates "of" vs "w/| (w/ a higher unknown %). Even assuming all unknowns are "of" in CH, DK does not look great comparatively.

Although it is good to acknowledge diff situations, it's not to assume that they explain everything.

11/ ⬆️ was a digression. My main pts were:

* Decision to open was mainly based on pop sentiment - flawed bc:

* Pop discounts risk of C🏥 or☠️ more than the reward of no mask, etc. due to hyperbolic discounting

* Pop seems largely unaware of long covid risks - not informed decision

12/ *UPDATE* There is a legal requirement mentioned. Must avoid "serious disruption of critical societal functions".

Would 3% of pop w/severe long covid up to 6 months post covid be disruptive?

prob preprint followup of @PuhanMilo https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254523

13/ The stated priority is to not overload hospitals w/acute covid. But, things change, new info comes up. We must adapt.

If the goal is to truly maintain ppl's trust, you owe it to them to investigate long covid risks.

14/ Why investigate long covid risks and respond accordingly?

If many Danes are maimed due to long covid, it will be hard to explain why you dismissed current research.

I can't see a world where this doesn't degrade trust.

15/ FYI for Danes:

🇩🇰 Gov is only trying to avoid hospital overload. That implies:

* Deaths can skyrocket

* High hosps are ok if lower than cap

and there will be no legal need to add in measures to mitigate risk.

Just trying to make the situation clear.