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silveradeptGood day - let's start with nature at its finest - Siberian tigers attacking snowmen. And continue with more of nature - pink lakes. And then, a little bit of technology - Shetland ponies with onesies.
Out in the world today, researchers for the IMF conclude that the global rises in inequality are due to the ease in which investors can invest outside of their own markets, and the increases in debt put on average working people. Huh. If you concentrate all the wealth in a few hands, and then make it absurdly easy for them to take that wealth and put it somewhere else, the people who would have had that wealth put back in their community are impoverished. It's like science reflects reality.
The Liberal Party of Ontario selected a lesbian as the provincial premier. Which, in a few years would be totally unremarkable, but in our days, is freaking awesome!
Ethopian women received birth control shots that they were not fully informed about upon immigrating into Israel.
Religion and sports - how the totem of our teams allows us to have all sorts of shared religious experiences.
A Catholic cardinal in LA was relieved of his duties as the archbishop released several thousand pages of information about the Catholic Church's cover-up of sexually abusive priests.
Shopping at Whole Foods means supporting the second-largest actively-hostile to unions food retailer in the world.
Last out, Andre Cassagnes, inventor of the Etch-A-Sketch, joins the Dead Pool Inventor's Hall of Fame at 86 years of age.
Domestically, the conservative movement lacks sufficient empathy and humanity in the way they oppose finding ways to make immigration, including undocumented immigrants, work and integrate immigrants into society.
a state senator in Idaho compared private insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act to persons boarding trains for concentration camps in 1940s Germany. Without a shred of wondering whether such a comparison would be appropriate, as the senator doubled down on the remarks when questioned. This is apparently not a novel or unsupported thought, either, as a columnist for the National Review will use the comparison in trying to draw implications that the current President is using methods much like Adolf Hitler to get the United States to cheer policies anathema to its continued good health. Godwin 1, Argument 0.
So, there's a lot of gun-related stuff going on these days. Task force recommendations and the like. Some would like you to believe there's nothing wrong with a lot of guns being available in the country, despite the likelihood that gun-related deaths will exceed traffic fatalities by the year 02015 in the United States. Many of thsoe people that believe nothing is wrong also believe themselves on the right side of history, even if the concept they're using is a bit... flawed. (And historically sketchy.) And the fortification ideas that come with that time period aren't quite modern enough. Unless they plan on augmenting that with anti-aircraft weaponry and the like.
Others are looking to cast their blame on anything else that they can for the problem of gun violence.
You also end up with news organizations talking about imaginative play resulting in suspensions. Possibly to try and distract from the actual issues.
If you actually looked at the data, though, you'd see that most mass shooters are men seeking revenge on their co-workers with semiautomatic handguns, rather than anything else organizations, talking heads, and the newsmedia woulld have you believe.
Faced with the prospect that federal courts are finding that discrimination is still discrimination, even when applied to QUILTBAG people, the backers of California's ban on marriage equality are arguing that it's totally a states' rights question. Which might still result in the same issue for them, based on the marriage equality measures in the previous election. But they're also claiming that discrimination against marriage equality isn't founded in their personal moral desire to ensure that gays and lesbians stay second class.
Elsewhere, the United States Department of Defense is rescinding their policy that prohibited women from serving in direct combat roles...finally bringing policy in line with the rality that women have been serving in direct combat roles for as long as there have been women in the armed forces.
Speaking of women, did you hear about the radio host that claims women who have used birth control have many tiny fetuses in their wombs? It's...laughable, if it weren't so very sad. And there weren't plenty of people who would take that information and spread it and use it as a justification.
A man who took his wife's name after marrying her was accused of obtaining a driver license by fraud by Florida courts, because he had not gone through the legal name change process. Because, apparently, the process of changing one's name due to marriage only works for women in Florida.
Which could beecome an issue if and when marriage equality takes place everywhere. It would be a very bad idea for, say, Jim Nabors, who married his long time partner in Seattle.
The Applebee's corporation engaged in a Facebook PR nightmare over the firing of an employee that posted a customer receipt declaring that waitstaff should earn no more tips than the tithe they gave to a church. The company claimed that the posting of customer names was against the corporation's policy. What makes this a fiasco is that the corporation itself had posted a receipt complimenting them that clearly showed a name not too long ago. Then there were the deleted posts, the responses as comments, the copypasta, and worse.
In the 02012 Presidential election, this should be a sobering statistic (or a thrilling one, if you believe that low turnout is good for your party - more than 200,000 Floridians didn't vote in the 02012 election because of the lines that would have taken an entire workday to traverse. Those lines were engineered by the Republican Party in charge of the state to suppress the turnout of Democratic-leaning voters. The Sentinel piece talks about how good things went everywhere else, so it's clearly not a systematic campaign to disenfranchise voters, not at all...
In technology and the sciences, new regulations from the government may prevent debt collectors from finding and harrassing you on your social media profile - some debt collectors used false photos of attractive women to get onto the friend lists of their intended targets.
A website advertises payment for a companionship relationship - young women looking to go through college being matched with older men looking for the companionship of younger women. Chills and shivers are an entirely appropriate response.
New tools being developed are able to utilize biometric information to identify you at a distance (including something that can apparently scan your fingerprints from up to 25 feet away). Little Brother is still not supposed to be a how-to guide for surveillance and identification, even if it seems like we're getting to that being science fact instead of science fiction.
...Anti-science beliefs and actions are not limited to the fringe of the conservative movement - plenty of "liberals" are more than able to put aside science for their religious beliefs.
If you live in a mountainous state, like Washington, you have to worry about rockslides and snowslides. In Washington, there are two large-barrel tanks whose duty is to trigger snowslides when the risk is too great of them triggering naturally.
Amazon has filed a patent for a method of reselling e-books. My question is whether they will retain the original DRM or whether they will have to strip it out to resell the books.
Malware distributable through the Google Play store is a possible attack vector to Microsoft Windows - which just goes to show you that there's always new ways to attack computers and devices.
Explaining the possibility of temperature below absolute zero through the use of money and very famous individuals. Now, the state of being where something can drop below absolute zero takes a lot of trickery to achieve, but it can be done.
Bone marrow cells help someone grow a new nose - presumably, this is the bone structure of the nose, or can it also be used to grow the cartalige and tissue of the nose? Or perhaps the gel that can mimic proteins that build the skeletal structure of cells will be helpful in the other necessary growths.
Scientists may have discovered a clue to finding the cause of brain disorder in athletes in high-impact sports, and military veterans that suffer repeated injuries and traumas. It's a small sample size, though - and I wonder whether this couldn't also be pointing out that brain injury is likely, even with all the protective gear, in the full-contact sports of our era (as well as our military service).
Multitasking is not an effective way of handling concentration-intensive tasks, like driving and talking. Oh, and people who do it fairly frequently are not the people that are best at it.
Accessibility needs work. A lot of work. Because it generally makes an already hard day even worse when the things that should help with accessibility are being used for something else entirely.
The question of whether or not the earth is well and truly frakked at a meeting of climate scientists. The answer? Yeah, probably.
Then again, we're doing all sorts of awful things - have you seen the inside of a poultry farm? Because what happens for cheap chicken...
As a palate-cleanser, take a look at the history of curry.
Last out, the importance of a good bedside manner - good rapport with your medical care providers helps make treatments more effective, even if the treatments are completely ineffective.
Into opinions, where The Weirdo suggests a couple cosmetic changes and one very important one that may help with the more widespread adoption of feminism. That last one, about the need for men to step it up, has a companion piece - the need to stop pretending that being a Nice Guy (TM) is enough to gain meaningful companionship.
A self-proclaimed bioethicist says that fat people need to be shamed and bullied into becoming thin. Tastefully. Except for the part where fat-shaming doesn't work. At all. Ever..
Ever notice how being a mom means a nagging voice telling you to do contradictory things all the time? And that you need to be more of whatever you aren't?
Even when properly done, it is difficult for the privileged to truly appreciate what living a disprivileged life is like, because they don't actually live the life.
firecat has a quick message: Love is not merely "micro-moments of positivity"... and when you write an article about it, make sure that you actually try to solve the problem you invented.
Last for tonight, For being a show about underdogs and creative musical interpretations, Glee is remarkably silent about crediting inspirations (or direct lifts) for their arrangements, a visual timeline of the journey of the One Ring of Power, a study indicating that men and women are not psychologically distinct - men and women don't have distinctive scoring patterns on measures of stereotypical masculinity and femininity.
Also, the pictures of Detroit that show it as a city struggling and trying to keep its beauty.
Out in the world today, researchers for the IMF conclude that the global rises in inequality are due to the ease in which investors can invest outside of their own markets, and the increases in debt put on average working people. Huh. If you concentrate all the wealth in a few hands, and then make it absurdly easy for them to take that wealth and put it somewhere else, the people who would have had that wealth put back in their community are impoverished. It's like science reflects reality.
The Liberal Party of Ontario selected a lesbian as the provincial premier. Which, in a few years would be totally unremarkable, but in our days, is freaking awesome!
Ethopian women received birth control shots that they were not fully informed about upon immigrating into Israel.
Religion and sports - how the totem of our teams allows us to have all sorts of shared religious experiences.
A Catholic cardinal in LA was relieved of his duties as the archbishop released several thousand pages of information about the Catholic Church's cover-up of sexually abusive priests.
Shopping at Whole Foods means supporting the second-largest actively-hostile to unions food retailer in the world.
Last out, Andre Cassagnes, inventor of the Etch-A-Sketch, joins the Dead Pool Inventor's Hall of Fame at 86 years of age.
Domestically, the conservative movement lacks sufficient empathy and humanity in the way they oppose finding ways to make immigration, including undocumented immigrants, work and integrate immigrants into society.
a state senator in Idaho compared private insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act to persons boarding trains for concentration camps in 1940s Germany. Without a shred of wondering whether such a comparison would be appropriate, as the senator doubled down on the remarks when questioned. This is apparently not a novel or unsupported thought, either, as a columnist for the National Review will use the comparison in trying to draw implications that the current President is using methods much like Adolf Hitler to get the United States to cheer policies anathema to its continued good health. Godwin 1, Argument 0.
So, there's a lot of gun-related stuff going on these days. Task force recommendations and the like. Some would like you to believe there's nothing wrong with a lot of guns being available in the country, despite the likelihood that gun-related deaths will exceed traffic fatalities by the year 02015 in the United States. Many of thsoe people that believe nothing is wrong also believe themselves on the right side of history, even if the concept they're using is a bit... flawed. (And historically sketchy.) And the fortification ideas that come with that time period aren't quite modern enough. Unless they plan on augmenting that with anti-aircraft weaponry and the like.
Others are looking to cast their blame on anything else that they can for the problem of gun violence.
You also end up with news organizations talking about imaginative play resulting in suspensions. Possibly to try and distract from the actual issues.
If you actually looked at the data, though, you'd see that most mass shooters are men seeking revenge on their co-workers with semiautomatic handguns, rather than anything else organizations, talking heads, and the newsmedia woulld have you believe.
Faced with the prospect that federal courts are finding that discrimination is still discrimination, even when applied to QUILTBAG people, the backers of California's ban on marriage equality are arguing that it's totally a states' rights question. Which might still result in the same issue for them, based on the marriage equality measures in the previous election. But they're also claiming that discrimination against marriage equality isn't founded in their personal moral desire to ensure that gays and lesbians stay second class.
Elsewhere, the United States Department of Defense is rescinding their policy that prohibited women from serving in direct combat roles...finally bringing policy in line with the rality that women have been serving in direct combat roles for as long as there have been women in the armed forces.
Speaking of women, did you hear about the radio host that claims women who have used birth control have many tiny fetuses in their wombs? It's...laughable, if it weren't so very sad. And there weren't plenty of people who would take that information and spread it and use it as a justification.
A man who took his wife's name after marrying her was accused of obtaining a driver license by fraud by Florida courts, because he had not gone through the legal name change process. Because, apparently, the process of changing one's name due to marriage only works for women in Florida.
Which could beecome an issue if and when marriage equality takes place everywhere. It would be a very bad idea for, say, Jim Nabors, who married his long time partner in Seattle.
The Applebee's corporation engaged in a Facebook PR nightmare over the firing of an employee that posted a customer receipt declaring that waitstaff should earn no more tips than the tithe they gave to a church. The company claimed that the posting of customer names was against the corporation's policy. What makes this a fiasco is that the corporation itself had posted a receipt complimenting them that clearly showed a name not too long ago. Then there were the deleted posts, the responses as comments, the copypasta, and worse.
In the 02012 Presidential election, this should be a sobering statistic (or a thrilling one, if you believe that low turnout is good for your party - more than 200,000 Floridians didn't vote in the 02012 election because of the lines that would have taken an entire workday to traverse. Those lines were engineered by the Republican Party in charge of the state to suppress the turnout of Democratic-leaning voters. The Sentinel piece talks about how good things went everywhere else, so it's clearly not a systematic campaign to disenfranchise voters, not at all...
In technology and the sciences, new regulations from the government may prevent debt collectors from finding and harrassing you on your social media profile - some debt collectors used false photos of attractive women to get onto the friend lists of their intended targets.
A website advertises payment for a companionship relationship - young women looking to go through college being matched with older men looking for the companionship of younger women. Chills and shivers are an entirely appropriate response.
New tools being developed are able to utilize biometric information to identify you at a distance (including something that can apparently scan your fingerprints from up to 25 feet away). Little Brother is still not supposed to be a how-to guide for surveillance and identification, even if it seems like we're getting to that being science fact instead of science fiction.
...Anti-science beliefs and actions are not limited to the fringe of the conservative movement - plenty of "liberals" are more than able to put aside science for their religious beliefs.
If you live in a mountainous state, like Washington, you have to worry about rockslides and snowslides. In Washington, there are two large-barrel tanks whose duty is to trigger snowslides when the risk is too great of them triggering naturally.
Amazon has filed a patent for a method of reselling e-books. My question is whether they will retain the original DRM or whether they will have to strip it out to resell the books.
Malware distributable through the Google Play store is a possible attack vector to Microsoft Windows - which just goes to show you that there's always new ways to attack computers and devices.
Explaining the possibility of temperature below absolute zero through the use of money and very famous individuals. Now, the state of being where something can drop below absolute zero takes a lot of trickery to achieve, but it can be done.
Bone marrow cells help someone grow a new nose - presumably, this is the bone structure of the nose, or can it also be used to grow the cartalige and tissue of the nose? Or perhaps the gel that can mimic proteins that build the skeletal structure of cells will be helpful in the other necessary growths.
Scientists may have discovered a clue to finding the cause of brain disorder in athletes in high-impact sports, and military veterans that suffer repeated injuries and traumas. It's a small sample size, though - and I wonder whether this couldn't also be pointing out that brain injury is likely, even with all the protective gear, in the full-contact sports of our era (as well as our military service).
Multitasking is not an effective way of handling concentration-intensive tasks, like driving and talking. Oh, and people who do it fairly frequently are not the people that are best at it.
Accessibility needs work. A lot of work. Because it generally makes an already hard day even worse when the things that should help with accessibility are being used for something else entirely.
The question of whether or not the earth is well and truly frakked at a meeting of climate scientists. The answer? Yeah, probably.
Then again, we're doing all sorts of awful things - have you seen the inside of a poultry farm? Because what happens for cheap chicken...
As a palate-cleanser, take a look at the history of curry.
Last out, the importance of a good bedside manner - good rapport with your medical care providers helps make treatments more effective, even if the treatments are completely ineffective.
Into opinions, where The Weirdo suggests a couple cosmetic changes and one very important one that may help with the more widespread adoption of feminism. That last one, about the need for men to step it up, has a companion piece - the need to stop pretending that being a Nice Guy (TM) is enough to gain meaningful companionship.
A self-proclaimed bioethicist says that fat people need to be shamed and bullied into becoming thin. Tastefully. Except for the part where fat-shaming doesn't work. At all. Ever..
Ever notice how being a mom means a nagging voice telling you to do contradictory things all the time? And that you need to be more of whatever you aren't?
Even when properly done, it is difficult for the privileged to truly appreciate what living a disprivileged life is like, because they don't actually live the life.
firecat has a quick message: Love is not merely "micro-moments of positivity"... and when you write an article about it, make sure that you actually try to solve the problem you invented.Last for tonight, For being a show about underdogs and creative musical interpretations, Glee is remarkably silent about crediting inspirations (or direct lifts) for their arrangements, a visual timeline of the journey of the One Ring of Power, a study indicating that men and women are not psychologically distinct - men and women don't have distinctive scoring patterns on measures of stereotypical masculinity and femininity.
Also, the pictures of Detroit that show it as a city struggling and trying to keep its beauty.
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no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 06:19 pm (UTC)I knew that the passes could be dangerous in winter, but I'm with you on the sheer cool factor of being able to say "As part of my job, I get to cause avalanches. With a tank."
no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 06:28 pm (UTC)I believe it falls under First Sale Doctrine, which I'm not remotely an expert on. My understanding is that if you sell something, that's the end of the revenue stream for you. Take a look at photographers. If I sell a photo for $100, I get $100. If that person turns around and re-sells that photo through a gallery for $1000, I don't see anything from it. If I subsequently get in to that gallery and sell my pix for more, that's another matter.
I think this is one of the driving forces for authors to sell their own works through POD or ebooks to try to broaden their revenue stream. Author Jim Hines apparently publishes his income from writing on a regular basis. I'd say he's fairly successful and a very good author, and the amount and variability that he earns from writing falls in to the "Don't quit your day job" category.
If you haven't already friended her, take a look at Moira Moore's blog from my LJ. She linked to Hines' post recently. I also have friended Scalzi.
On a job title note, my wife works with a guy in the Air Force whose business card has the job title Space Battle Commander.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 06:48 pm (UTC)I'll take a look and see what's to like.
...Space Battle Commander. Clearly, I'm in the wrong business for cool titles.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 07:41 pm (UTC)