I have Cystic Fibrosis, with a lot of the same issues as COVID infections (scarred lungs and lost capacity), as well as additional fun things like a scarred pancreas (so I have both diabetes as well as difficulty digesting food without supplements). I could write a book with all of the unsolicited "advice" I've gotten over the years.
I had an X2 (and before that, a couple of Minimed pumps), then I switched to the Omnipod. The Omnipod is a disposable pump you swap out every 3 days, so less of an issue.
However every time I've gotten a new pump, the diabetes educators always instruct you to have a backup plan, whether that's your insulin vial you may have already brought (even non-disposable pumps require you to swap out the reservoir every 3 days, so you should have insulin with you) along with old-school injection needles, or an insulin pen with needle tips.
Omnipod for the win. But, yeah, I have a bunch of disposable needles in my kit as a backup.
Even so, travel is stressful. My carry on is full of backup pods/sensors. But now that my insurance is being annoying and only filling a month at a time, I don't always have an extra...
I'm fortunate to have the income to support buying backups when I had insurance issues. During the Dexcom G6/G7 switchover and the switch to the Omnipod, I had just filled a bunch of G7s but the Omnipod didn't support it yet, so I ended up having to buy G6s out of pocket. Even with coupons from the manufacturer, it was still costing me $200/month.
When I lived there (or visit family), a Costco Gold card and store pharmacy visit can help a lot - it was around $150/mo for G6 last September. I'll switch over to G7 some time this summer. The Costco plan more than pays for itself using the built-in rewards program and rx discounts if you're paying out-of-pocket.
Also on the Omnipod, and I also always travel with both extra pods AND extra insulin pens (basal and bolus insulin). That way I can switch back to MDI if for whatever reason my pods fail or I can't use them.
Or going into the baggage claim area with a bag containing an explosive device, then acting like they grabbed the wrong bag and putting it back on the carousel, and then leaving.
As an aside, this is something I've only seen in the US. At least in my country the domestic baggage claim area is not accessible unless from an arriving aircraft.
I'm guessing that has more to do with theft though than security.
No, that's because in the US they're handling the international flights separately. It's also the reason why even when you have a layover, you need to clear customs.
Domestic flights in the US are like busses/trains elsewhere. Most people fly without a checked bag
Most of the world handles international flights separately without needing to do that unless it is an international-domestic connection.
However I agree that in purely domestic airports I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags. Except India, wherein you need a booked flight to even enter the airport.
> I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags.
People are routinely prevented from being where they are not supposed to be. Whether you put the baggage pick-up point in a publicly accessible area or on a restricted area is a design choice.
Absolutely true and you can tell at least in the old days when you'd fly southwest. Every other airline the overhead bin fills up. It is an inevitable drama when the flight attendants have to say "overheads are full now we are gate checking bags."
Southwest, at least before they changed their bag policy, would let you fly with two free checked bags. Finally everything worked as intended and those overheads were seldom used. Maybe for a jacket or purse or something, but no one was shoving a roller bag up there.
Spirit was another airline with ample overhead space, because they charged you nearly the same rate for overheads as checked bags.
Most domestic flights are short duration trips, a week's worth of clothes fit in carry-on suitcase, and the other stuff (laptop etc) can go in a backpack.
In all my domestic flights in the past year they've had to ask people at the gate to volunteer their carry-on suitcase to be checked into the hold because they didn't expect to have enough room in the overhead bins.
I usually volunteer because: it's free, I don't mind waiting at the pickup, and it's slightly more comfortable when getting off the plane.
I don't know if we are the level of "most people" but I'd say we are defintely at a "signficant percentage of ppl". Due to cost of checked luggage the popularity of one bag carry on flying has exploded.
I don't know if it's always more than 50% but on U.S. domestic flights a lot of people are carry-on only. It's far more than half on the routes and days frequented by business travelers. On routes and days where more consumer, family and vacation travelers fly it may not always be half but if it's not, it's close. Personally, I haven't checked a bag in over ten years. Using packing cubes it's possible to fit a huge amount in a well-designed modern suitcase.
The U.S. is different in this way from many other regions, especially much of the EU. There are specific reasons I've noticed:
- Due to the shorter EU domestic routes, it's more common to see smaller aircraft with much less overhead space for bags.
- For EU domestic routes, limits on carry-on bag size / count tend to be lower, more frequent and enforced more stringently (even when the aircraft in use isn't space-limited).
- In many countries there are different carry-on bag size / count allowances between domestic and long-haul international. In the U.S. almost all domestic flights use the larger international allowances (the rare exceptions usually being 'puddle-jumper' connections).
- In the U.S. checking bag compliance at the gate isn't as frequent or stringent. The nominal limit is a small suitcase + a personal item. On intra-E.U. flights, I see large backpacks rejected as the 'personal item' that are routinely accepted in the U.S. A higher percentage of U.S. passengers have maximum 22-inch roller bags than I see in the E.U. You can fit a lot in a 22" bag + large backpack.
- My perception is that elsewhere in the world, the average person on a domestic flight will be away from home longer than in the U.S. I assume this is due to the other regions often having better inter-city / region train and bus options than the U.S. which take a larger share of shorter duration trips.
- Other less significant factors might include U.S. business and evening attire being a bit more casual on average, making is easier to pack small as well as U.S. airline industry competition making shorter duration (but not necessarily shorter distance) U.S. domestic flights more accessible to more consumers. A lot of U.S. middle-class consumers now frequently use flights for weekend trips over 1,000 mi away. The U.S. has a larger number of smaller commercial airports in second-tier cities that are still fairly easy to get through quickly, even with TSA security. This can make same-day jet trips to cities ~500 to ~1000 mi away not much more involved than a typical EU train trip to a nearby city. For about a year, I did same-day and overnight jet flights from San Diego to Sacramento (~900 mi / 80 mins) about twice a week, often with nothing but a bike messenger bag as carry-on. I know a guy that did San Jose - Burbank as a daily commute for several months. A larger airport like SFO or LAX can add nearly an hour on each end just due to airport logistics and location but 2nd tier airports with longer direct flights make it possible. I think that's more unusual in other countries.
Indeed, although today I got on a plane at LaGuardia and they made me check my carry on at the gate even though there was plenty of space in the overhead bins ( 60% capacity flight, about half of us had to do this) so YMMV.
No idea why they made us do that, but I had to grab my bag at the luggage claim.
By this definition, anyone hired to be a code contributor, and not operating at the architecture level, isn't an engineer.
On the other side of that definition, engineering doesn't even require code, but would be architecture with deep technical understanding that allows you to create the tasks that you hand off to individual coders.
> By this definition, anyone hired to be a code contributor, and not operating at the architecture level, isn't an engineer.
You say that as if it’s not true, but it is. And even then, still not always.
Engineer is a regulated term in Canada. If you’re not licensed, you’re not an engineer. If you say you are and acting as one in a professional capacity you are comitting fraud.
The amount of delulu Americans larping as engineers is always good for a laugh.
We recognized socially that people who engineer things need to have professional ethics and carry liability for their projects.
The whole reason we have engineers is because we used to let anyone call themselves that and lo and behold a bunch of bridges collapsed under load and killed people. Who could’ve thought?!
Almost 2/3rds of the professionals in my family are licensed engineers and we take it extremely seriously.
Canada has only been actually licensing software engineers for a short time compared to other disciplines - but the industry as a whole is due for a reckoning.
Sure, and that's laudable, both for Canada and for your family. But most other countries don't have such a professional certification program, and since a ton of brilliant creators of software never had one, should we declare them fake engineers? People like John Carmack, Fabrice Bellard, Richard Hipp, Linus Torvalds... I think ultimately results speak for themselves. Surely there are plenty of middling licensed Canadian software engineers as well. Let's not police language like this.
It’s not about skill level it’s about accountability and ethics.
If a bug that Linus introduces into the kernel kills someone, is he held accountable? No, of course not the kernel is provided without warranty or any kind of guarantee of fitness.
He’s not an engineer.
He’s a programmer. A very very good one. But he’s not an engineer.
There are many who built careers around being essentially software assembly liners. Glue together framework/library bits, following well-trod paths. Get really good at Googling and grabbing code from Stack Overflow when you have to go off the path or solve problems.
You just described essentially what those coding "boot camps" taught people to do. Something you can learn in 12 weeks always seemed to me to be a job at high risk of automation.
Unfortunately, many "computer science" curricula weren't much better, and so now we have hordes of unemployed people with a skillset about as relevant as being able to hand-assemble ZRA1 code.
Both boot camps and academia do a poor job of preparing developers for a real career, they just started at opposite ends of the problem and never provide enough depth to get to the good part in the middle.
(I'm a very biased self-taught developer from the late 1990s who just happened to hit the industry at the perfect time)
Seeing some of these retirement comments, as a 49 year old developer who has been doing this since the late 1990s, I'll be honest, I can't relate. I have no interest in retiring anytime soon.
I still see a ton of frontier to explore, and personally I love AI. I've always loved writing code, but was always frustrated at how it took at trudge through learning new languages and approaches, and all of the plumbing and boilerplate it took to actually build something. I've always enjoyed having extensive breadth about many languages in addition to the few that I had extreme depth in.
In other words, I don't feel AI has taken something I love away, but has removed barriers to finally build solutions in a way that maps perfectly with my brain.
I think it really does come down to a theory I've seen here a few times: if you were the kind of developer (code artisan) for whom the code was the point, AI sucks. If you were the kind of developer (problem solver), for whom the code was just the tool at hand to solve the problem, AI is awesome.
And if I may cynical for a moment, there's the third category, which is probably a subset of the first: the framework gluers/bunker sitters that really felt no reason to try to expand beyond their reasonably well-paid nest.
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