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silveradeptGreetings! Let's begin with Good Ol' Charlie B, an imagining of what it would be like for the Peanuts gang to break out from the place they existed in, as well as a commentary on how the world seems to have shifted from wanting sincerity to authenticity, and how that makes Linus feel a bit adrift, because he set his roots down in sincerity and Rerun seems to have gone straight for authenticity, which is far less nice than sincerity might have suggested.
The relentless engine of capitalism demands that even as we watch national tragedies unfold on a daily basis that we can't allow them to affect our productivity , which often leaves people grappling with how to do work that gives them no joy and that they may have the freedom not to spend all of their waking hours upon.
Communities that position themselves as alternatives to the world of doctors and medicine also find themselves at greater risk for their leaders to embrace conspiracy theories as alternative truths to be found...and that bring followers.
A United Kingdom tribunal has ruled against Uber, classifying drivers as employees rather than independent contractors, and while Uber claims this only applies to the group that sued them, I can see a lot of suits in the future to make sure that it applies to all of them. Which might mean that Uber disappears from the UK, considering their entire business model only works if they can exploit all of their workers and not have to provide anything for them.
Novelists continue to struggle to put out material when they are also responsible for schooling and childcare and housework and all sorts of other things that eat time, energy, and creativity. And while those who have studied the novel and how Great Works gets done might respond to this "No shit!", (behind a lot of Great Works is often a partner who handles all of those things like cooking, cleaning, and childcare so that the writer gets focused time) we also note that there's been some commentary about hitting the wall, and it's also possible that there might be people who are doing that, who have burned through their resiliency reserves, and who don't have access to the usual ways of relieving the burden and recharging themselves. So there's pity for the novelists, as well as a wonder about, if they have partners, how much of the work those partners are doing and how much of the work is being thrust upon them by their partners that would have otherwise been handled by in-person schooling.
Changing names because of marriage often results in a woman's career having to start over again, because there's very little work done to connect the names all over time.
A Harvard researcher got a piece published that denied that Korean women were forced into sex slavery, re-sparking an old debate and re-inflaming tensions, and the scholarship was shoddy and unworthy of having made it through peer review.
A proposal by the Conservatives of the UK Parliament to erect statues of wartime heroes has drawn criticism that it would even further imbalance the gender representation of statuary, which is, in itself, already terribly imbalanced, with many of the women present either being allegorical or Queen Victoria. And there are also people more concerned about how they might look in history becoming upset about the National Trust investigating how much colonialism is involved in some of their properties.
A previous minister of the Indian government lost a criminal defamation case against one of his accusers. The original accusation was followed by several related accusations against the minister, but the case itself went on for two years before the ruling was made.
A film that was intended to be two parties in polyamory with each other fell apart...as did the relationship that was supposedly giving birth to the idea, which is what happened when someone in the relationship retreated behind the camera to think of the relationship(s) as a film foremost. Then again, the article itself suggests relationships that are not what they say they are, so…yeah.
While HIV/AIDS is not the death sentence it was, it is not something that has disappeared, and the stories of those it killed are important to remember and repeat. And we still live in a world where people have to challenge (and this case wins, yay) prohibitions against having sex with someone who has the same genital parts you do.
The state of Oregon regularly was the place for attempted women-only spaces, although those spaces were often populated by and specifically for white cis lesbians.
There's still far too many works being put on academic reading lists and coursework that have a specific moral perspective in mind, rather than being joyous literature in multiple forms as a tour of works. Which ends up having quite a contrast with the French government requesting corporate help in acquiring 120 Days of Sodom, the manuscript written by the Marquis de Sade, for the National Library of France.
The tension between "words have meanings" and "experimentation should be encouraged" when it comes to food and fooding. Because at a certain point, something is not the thing it is based on and probably needs a different name, but there's also a certain value to being able to refer to things by a family name of some sort as well.
Conspiracy theorists claiming that connected political figures are stealing children for their own purposes are encouraging their followers to abscond with their own children, rather than face protective services.
A bear in the outhouse attacked a person trying to use the outhouse, trying to preserve gulls from the issues that come with humans finding them unacceptable, and a yellow penguin.
Finding a way through vegan ethics concerns about getting a vaccine based on the use of animals in the testing phases. This article reminds me of something I have seen in the journal of I Heard It Somewhere On The Internet, but I think there's a principle in at least one commentary in Judaism expressed that's similar to the one in this article, that if your options are to act in ways that would break the commandments or to die (or kill a lot of your fellows), then the correct and ethical thing to do is to break the commandments, because preserving life is far more important in that situation. It may sound basely utilitarian, but I think most moral and ethical systems would say that it is a far better thing to inoculate yourself and remove yourself as a vector for a highly infectious, painful, and potentially lethal disease than to stand on a principle that would potentially harm and kill other humans.
The Bishop of Rome said that Catholics should take the vaccine, even though some of it may have been developed from stem cell lines that came from abortion. The Catholic Church and its pontiff feel that practicing Catholics have a moral obligation to protect themselves and others.
xkcd describes how the mRNA vaccination works, with an excellent analogy to the Death Star.
This particular element is part of a greater issue of vaccine hesitancy, an entirely sensible set of concerns about the long-term effects or whether vaccines were sufficiently tested well on different body types to be effective, as well as long-standing legitimate worries about the medical establishment treating them poorly (especially for BIPOC, who are historically treated worse and given treatments that work on white people but haven't been tested appropriately for them. After time and education and information, many of the hesitant will take their vaccine, but it's going to take time and patience and possibly some personal connections to get the hesitant on board. Actually, it seems like the best way of getting people over their hesitancy (or skepticism) is to listen to their concerns and then provide empathy and answers for those things, rather than being confrontational and dismissive. Which seems to be the case for a lot of conspiratorial anti-science thinking. (The tricky part being how you manage to be empathetic and trustworthy without becoming part of the conspiracy yourself.) The need to become a trustworthy doctor might be more important than filling the patient with accurate information when it comes to getting the hesitant and skeptical to take treatments or vaccines. (Some tips on how to do this from one professional to other professionals.) There may also have to be some playing to a person's political ideology to get them to take the vaccine.
Which may include interviews with a Black doctor who worked on the vaccine, as a way of showcasing that it wasn't just white people working on it.
Research is underway to see whether vaccine doses can be mixed and not lose any efficacy, so we'll soon know, hopefully, whether or not there's an issue with combining vaccines. What we are seeming to get, though, is encouraging data about how even one dose of a vaccination can help guard against severe cases of COVID-19 and might be helpful at reducing the chance of infection as well. Data from vaccinated people suggests that the vaccine is working as planned, and additionally, a third vaccine, a single-dose form from Johnson and Johnson, is good enough to be approved and will start filling its own niches. Which could create a very nice snowball effect with some other factors toward getting the number of cases under control by the summer.
There's the possibility that the current ultracold storage requirements for the mRNA vaccines may be eased without efficacy loss, which would make transport much easier.
The story of how we went from SARS-CoV-2's discovery to having excellent vaccine candidates in far shorter of a time than had been thought possible.
Something that's less of an issue than we worried it might have been - the pandemic does not appear to have resulted in an increase of suicides, or at least not in places with sensible health care systems and good social safety nets.
In technology, Perseverance successfully touched down on Mars, so there's a new robot rover looking for signs of life having existed on Mars at some point in its existence. There's nothing quite as satisfying as watching a group of very smart people erupt in cheers and fistbumps at the confirmation of a touchdown. (I heard "tango-delta" on the stream I was watching and thought "that sounds successful" a few seconds before the room erupted in cheers.) This rover carries a plate on it showing the family lineage of the rovers that Perseverance is the latest of.
In retaliation for the Australian government considering legislation that would require Facebook to pay Australian news sources that Facebook users share on the platform, Facebook as banned all links to Australian news content (and several other sites as well.) Facebook's argument is that the exposure the news sites get from people sharing content (including the news sites themselves) is worth far more than whatever payments that Facebook would need to send to those publishers. (And we all know how well arguments about being paid in exposure should go over.) That said, there probably are legitimate questions about what a platform's responsibility is with regard to the content that the users share, because a determinedly malicious group intent on wiping Facebook off the face of the Internet, say, would more than happily spam posts and links that Facebook would have to pay for, and with sufficient amounts of people and malice, and possibly the assistance of robots, they could probably direct Facebook's income and assets to wherever they wanted it to go.
A concise explanation as to why an entirely degreulated energy market is a nightmare, courtesy of Ana Mardoll and the situation in Texas where it was more profitable to deliberately let power generation fail rather than have some standard of weathering or enforcement that would prevent people from receiving bankrupting bills for their energy use while others had no power.
Singapore is developing a significant amount of vending machine capacity, including things that might not normally be thought of as vending machine material.
A 139 year-old house in San Francisco cost about $400,000 USD to move six blocks to its new location. And yes, that's moving the house in its entirety, not moving the people who lived in the house.
Last for tonight, well, we've made it back around one loop, but this time, it looks like we're going to have a lot more tools on hand to attack the second loop of dealing with the pandemic. I just hope that this isn't like most games, where the second loop comes with increased difficulty.
The relentless engine of capitalism demands that even as we watch national tragedies unfold on a daily basis that we can't allow them to affect our productivity , which often leaves people grappling with how to do work that gives them no joy and that they may have the freedom not to spend all of their waking hours upon.
Communities that position themselves as alternatives to the world of doctors and medicine also find themselves at greater risk for their leaders to embrace conspiracy theories as alternative truths to be found...and that bring followers.
A United Kingdom tribunal has ruled against Uber, classifying drivers as employees rather than independent contractors, and while Uber claims this only applies to the group that sued them, I can see a lot of suits in the future to make sure that it applies to all of them. Which might mean that Uber disappears from the UK, considering their entire business model only works if they can exploit all of their workers and not have to provide anything for them.
Novelists continue to struggle to put out material when they are also responsible for schooling and childcare and housework and all sorts of other things that eat time, energy, and creativity. And while those who have studied the novel and how Great Works gets done might respond to this "No shit!", (behind a lot of Great Works is often a partner who handles all of those things like cooking, cleaning, and childcare so that the writer gets focused time) we also note that there's been some commentary about hitting the wall, and it's also possible that there might be people who are doing that, who have burned through their resiliency reserves, and who don't have access to the usual ways of relieving the burden and recharging themselves. So there's pity for the novelists, as well as a wonder about, if they have partners, how much of the work those partners are doing and how much of the work is being thrust upon them by their partners that would have otherwise been handled by in-person schooling.
Changing names because of marriage often results in a woman's career having to start over again, because there's very little work done to connect the names all over time.
A Harvard researcher got a piece published that denied that Korean women were forced into sex slavery, re-sparking an old debate and re-inflaming tensions, and the scholarship was shoddy and unworthy of having made it through peer review.
A proposal by the Conservatives of the UK Parliament to erect statues of wartime heroes has drawn criticism that it would even further imbalance the gender representation of statuary, which is, in itself, already terribly imbalanced, with many of the women present either being allegorical or Queen Victoria. And there are also people more concerned about how they might look in history becoming upset about the National Trust investigating how much colonialism is involved in some of their properties.
A previous minister of the Indian government lost a criminal defamation case against one of his accusers. The original accusation was followed by several related accusations against the minister, but the case itself went on for two years before the ruling was made.
A film that was intended to be two parties in polyamory with each other fell apart...as did the relationship that was supposedly giving birth to the idea, which is what happened when someone in the relationship retreated behind the camera to think of the relationship(s) as a film foremost. Then again, the article itself suggests relationships that are not what they say they are, so…yeah.
While HIV/AIDS is not the death sentence it was, it is not something that has disappeared, and the stories of those it killed are important to remember and repeat. And we still live in a world where people have to challenge (and this case wins, yay) prohibitions against having sex with someone who has the same genital parts you do.
The state of Oregon regularly was the place for attempted women-only spaces, although those spaces were often populated by and specifically for white cis lesbians.
There's still far too many works being put on academic reading lists and coursework that have a specific moral perspective in mind, rather than being joyous literature in multiple forms as a tour of works. Which ends up having quite a contrast with the French government requesting corporate help in acquiring 120 Days of Sodom, the manuscript written by the Marquis de Sade, for the National Library of France.
The tension between "words have meanings" and "experimentation should be encouraged" when it comes to food and fooding. Because at a certain point, something is not the thing it is based on and probably needs a different name, but there's also a certain value to being able to refer to things by a family name of some sort as well.
Conspiracy theorists claiming that connected political figures are stealing children for their own purposes are encouraging their followers to abscond with their own children, rather than face protective services.
A bear in the outhouse attacked a person trying to use the outhouse, trying to preserve gulls from the issues that come with humans finding them unacceptable, and a yellow penguin.
Finding a way through vegan ethics concerns about getting a vaccine based on the use of animals in the testing phases. This article reminds me of something I have seen in the journal of I Heard It Somewhere On The Internet, but I think there's a principle in at least one commentary in Judaism expressed that's similar to the one in this article, that if your options are to act in ways that would break the commandments or to die (or kill a lot of your fellows), then the correct and ethical thing to do is to break the commandments, because preserving life is far more important in that situation. It may sound basely utilitarian, but I think most moral and ethical systems would say that it is a far better thing to inoculate yourself and remove yourself as a vector for a highly infectious, painful, and potentially lethal disease than to stand on a principle that would potentially harm and kill other humans.
The Bishop of Rome said that Catholics should take the vaccine, even though some of it may have been developed from stem cell lines that came from abortion. The Catholic Church and its pontiff feel that practicing Catholics have a moral obligation to protect themselves and others.
xkcd describes how the mRNA vaccination works, with an excellent analogy to the Death Star.
This particular element is part of a greater issue of vaccine hesitancy, an entirely sensible set of concerns about the long-term effects or whether vaccines were sufficiently tested well on different body types to be effective, as well as long-standing legitimate worries about the medical establishment treating them poorly (especially for BIPOC, who are historically treated worse and given treatments that work on white people but haven't been tested appropriately for them. After time and education and information, many of the hesitant will take their vaccine, but it's going to take time and patience and possibly some personal connections to get the hesitant on board. Actually, it seems like the best way of getting people over their hesitancy (or skepticism) is to listen to their concerns and then provide empathy and answers for those things, rather than being confrontational and dismissive. Which seems to be the case for a lot of conspiratorial anti-science thinking. (The tricky part being how you manage to be empathetic and trustworthy without becoming part of the conspiracy yourself.) The need to become a trustworthy doctor might be more important than filling the patient with accurate information when it comes to getting the hesitant and skeptical to take treatments or vaccines. (Some tips on how to do this from one professional to other professionals.) There may also have to be some playing to a person's political ideology to get them to take the vaccine.
Which may include interviews with a Black doctor who worked on the vaccine, as a way of showcasing that it wasn't just white people working on it.
Research is underway to see whether vaccine doses can be mixed and not lose any efficacy, so we'll soon know, hopefully, whether or not there's an issue with combining vaccines. What we are seeming to get, though, is encouraging data about how even one dose of a vaccination can help guard against severe cases of COVID-19 and might be helpful at reducing the chance of infection as well. Data from vaccinated people suggests that the vaccine is working as planned, and additionally, a third vaccine, a single-dose form from Johnson and Johnson, is good enough to be approved and will start filling its own niches. Which could create a very nice snowball effect with some other factors toward getting the number of cases under control by the summer.
There's the possibility that the current ultracold storage requirements for the mRNA vaccines may be eased without efficacy loss, which would make transport much easier.
The story of how we went from SARS-CoV-2's discovery to having excellent vaccine candidates in far shorter of a time than had been thought possible.
Something that's less of an issue than we worried it might have been - the pandemic does not appear to have resulted in an increase of suicides, or at least not in places with sensible health care systems and good social safety nets.
In technology, Perseverance successfully touched down on Mars, so there's a new robot rover looking for signs of life having existed on Mars at some point in its existence. There's nothing quite as satisfying as watching a group of very smart people erupt in cheers and fistbumps at the confirmation of a touchdown. (I heard "tango-delta" on the stream I was watching and thought "that sounds successful" a few seconds before the room erupted in cheers.) This rover carries a plate on it showing the family lineage of the rovers that Perseverance is the latest of.
In retaliation for the Australian government considering legislation that would require Facebook to pay Australian news sources that Facebook users share on the platform, Facebook as banned all links to Australian news content (and several other sites as well.) Facebook's argument is that the exposure the news sites get from people sharing content (including the news sites themselves) is worth far more than whatever payments that Facebook would need to send to those publishers. (And we all know how well arguments about being paid in exposure should go over.) That said, there probably are legitimate questions about what a platform's responsibility is with regard to the content that the users share, because a determinedly malicious group intent on wiping Facebook off the face of the Internet, say, would more than happily spam posts and links that Facebook would have to pay for, and with sufficient amounts of people and malice, and possibly the assistance of robots, they could probably direct Facebook's income and assets to wherever they wanted it to go.
A concise explanation as to why an entirely degreulated energy market is a nightmare, courtesy of Ana Mardoll and the situation in Texas where it was more profitable to deliberately let power generation fail rather than have some standard of weathering or enforcement that would prevent people from receiving bankrupting bills for their energy use while others had no power.
Singapore is developing a significant amount of vending machine capacity, including things that might not normally be thought of as vending machine material.
A 139 year-old house in San Francisco cost about $400,000 USD to move six blocks to its new location. And yes, that's moving the house in its entirety, not moving the people who lived in the house.
Last for tonight, well, we've made it back around one loop, but this time, it looks like we're going to have a lot more tools on hand to attack the second loop of dealing with the pandemic. I just hope that this isn't like most games, where the second loop comes with increased difficulty.
