This is a good pun. Except my name isn't Don and it's not actually a pun. So eally I just find it funny for no reason. This blog is dedicated to random crap and mostly rants.
You would if you were tired enough. You would if you were hungry enough. You would if your mind and body had been worn down enough, through pain or disease or toil or violent struggle. You might if you were put on the wrong medicine, or you got the wrong kind of head injury, or you were forced to choose between someone else and yourself. You might if your livelihood was staked on it, or all your hopes and dreams. You might if you didn't know what else to do, if it's what you were taught or if nobody taught you anything else.
I have not been worn down in most of these ways. I have lived a remarkably privileged life. But I have been worn down in some ways. And they were enough to teach me that in the wrong circumstances, any of us can become someone we don't want to be. It's worth keeping that in mind.
Pause this on each screen, because there's stuff in here I wasn't aware of and I'm sure I'm not the only one. This isn't just cinema, this is free education and I'm grateful for it.
So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.
Basically they realized hey no one's cleaning this shit up, it's polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there's a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?
They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it's in a painting, if it's in your home, it's not poisoning wildlife.
anyway its cool as shit, please support tf out of these people https://gamblinstore.com/reclaimed-earth-colors-set/
Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it
Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.
The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.
There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:
And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:
Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:
Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:
But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.
Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?
That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:
Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.
Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:
The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.
To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"
Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Evan Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.
On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:
The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:
https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html
One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:
Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.
This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.
As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):
This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.
The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.
But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
Holy fuck of course the jjba people could do it, the death note functions almost like a Stand. There are bullshit rules, there is a dude who actually does the powers for you
I feel like everyone is against bullying until they actually look at the kids who are being bullied.
The cheesy anti-bullying tapes that they show in schools feature these skinny straight white neurotypical kids who get picked on for no reason. Usually the insults are something along the lines of “You’re a loser!” or “Get lost, freak.” All the kids watching immediately feel bad for the victim, and think “Aw! She didn’t deserve that!”
Then, ten minutes later, they go pick on some marginalized kid without thinking twice. As an autistic person, I was often this kid. The insults I heard growing up were not “You’re a loser!” or “Get lost, freak.” They were “Don’t let the retard work with us” or “Shouldn’t she be going to the special school?”
The problem is we teach kids that bullying occurs for no other reason other than just to be mean. This could not be further from the truth. Bullying occurs because as a society, we condition kids into hating fat, black, neurodivergent, queer, and disabled people. Kids don’t bully each other just to be mean. They do it because if something’s “wrong” with the person, it’s completely justified.
But of course, we can’t tell kids this kind of stuff. We can’t say, “Hey! Making fun of your gay classmate is bad!”
Because when we do, suddenly the phone calls come pouring in, each with a parent on the other end screaming “You can’t be feeding my son that liberal propaganda!”
I'm sorry to let you know that 100,000,001 (one hundred million and one) is divisible by 17 and because of that, so is every 16-digit number that is four digits repeated four times e.g. 1234123412341234
#you don't understand how completely devoted jokic is to racing horses#he's tried to quit basketball several times to commit full time to his horses#he doesn't even like playing basketball i don't think, he's just stupid good at it#he's counting down the days until he can retire to move back to serbia and work with his horses#his post retirement plans are becoming a 'trotting coach' his words @sayheykid
#basketball#I LEARNED THIS LORE I LEARNED THIS LORE#DUE TO OUR STAR WARS CHAT MELTING DOWN INTO ESPN SPORTZONE#so jokic has been giving these vibes for his team's ENTIRE championship run up to and INCLUDING after the win#at the press conference afterwards (bear in mind he has just won the most PRESTIGIOUS PRIZE in all basketball)#he said to the reporter 'the job is done now we can go home 😐'#and then in the morning presser after someone asked if jokic was excited for the parade#he was like 'parade? when is parade? no no - i need to go home' and put his head in his hands#AND THEN THE PARADE HAPPENED AND THE TEAM WAS PLIED WITH COPIOUS CHAMPAGNE AND ADORATION OF DENVER POPULACE#jokic got on the mike after several Champagne (TM) applications#and said 'HELLO DENVER I KNOW I TOLD I DIDN'T WANT TO STAY ON PARADE BUT I FUCKING WANT TO STAY ON PARADE THIS IS THE BEST'#(yes that is a verbatim quote you can CHECK me on it)#that night the entire team went to a club and jokic got a round of this special plum vodka for the table#it apparently DESTROYED them all bc the next morning one of his teammates did an IG live from his hotel bed#it was super dark and you could see like half the poor dude's face smushed against the pillow#and he said in the most Sickly and Hungover Voice Imaginable#'i want you all to know...this is nikola's fault...he did this to me...#i'm never drinking again...it was that serbian shit...nikola did this to me...' (via @takiki16)
this narrative needs to be exposed to the world and not hidden in the tags. long live star wars espn sportzone chat.
“So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in 5th grade or 4th grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?” asked state Rep. Ashley Gantt, a Democrat who taught in public schools and noted that girls as young as 10 can begin having periods.
The first ever suicide prevention hotline was created in 1935 bevause a man conducted a funeral for a 14 year old girl who ended her life because she got her period. She didn't know what it was and assumed it was a STD. Learning about periods and sexual health is life saving. Republicans are unapologetically just evil.
You know, here's a thing: I went to Catholic school from age 5 to age 16. (My family's not Christian, but the local public schools weren't great, so -- )
In 4th grade, girls were given a clear, scientific, extremely bland pamphlet about menstruation. It was Boring and Educational. There wasn't any class about it or anything -- just the pamphlet, provided in a plain manila envelope for you to take home.
Starting in 5th grade, the school provided a small pack of pads to girls. This was probably so that anyone who unexpectedly started her period at school would have an emergency supply, but the thing was: this boring pamphlet, this pack of pads handed to you by a nun, made menstruation...so normal. It's so normal that a nun hands you a pack of pads. It's so normal that there's a boring pamphlet. It's just a thing your body does. (It's so normal that you realize, oh, nuns have periods, huh.)
It kills me, KILLS ME, that this totally boring and bland form of education about human bodies is somehow Too Much, Too Scary, Too Sexy, for some people.
Kids who have been educated about their bodies are harder to take advantage of. It's much easier to confuse or scare or shame a child into concealing when abuse is happening if the child in question has no idea whether or not what is happening to them is "normal".
So I cannot believe that anyone who thinks kids shouldn't be educated about what their bodies are going through has the best interests of those kids in mind.
The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…
My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”
“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.”
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment
The thing about this study is that whether or not it’s generalizable to the public is debatable at best.
But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.
TLDR, the red light cameras actually read license plate numbers. So when they read the code it executed the command which dumped the entire database of saved information.
So depending on how often they back it up, thats a lot of fines the city isn’t going to be able to collect.
i don't mean i was like. telling people i could play guitar, i mean i was sitting in band class holding a french horn to my lips and looking at the music and not understanding any of it or knowing how to play a single note. for 3 years.
the two people who knew were my best friend who knew i was too stupid to play such a complicated instrument and the only other hornist in my section who had to desperately cover for me because he knew i had blackmail material on him. i only came clean this year in my senior speech and to this day people still call me mellophony and the no hit wonder.
i saw the other hornist tonight and asked why he played along with me this whole time and he shrugged and said it was mostly because he thought it was funny. he didn't care about the blackmail
Obscuredon kinda sounds like a dinosaur @hanoverlebanon - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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