I blog about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and particularly about women in STEM career I am learning about intersectional feminism but would not consider myself an expert. My queue runs on the hour from 8 am to 8 pm Central time, when I'm able to keep it full.
I like imagining the policy changes to Nasa after Mark Watney's extended stay on Mars. Used to have 4 independent communication methods? Make it 8. Send enough food for 3 years now. Send so much duct tape. The rover needs to be able to recover from being rolled. The air locks between the rover, HAB and pop tents should all be interchangeable.
Also potatoes. I fully believe that every manned mission after The Martian will include potatoes, for sentimental reasons. I am equally sure that Mark absolutely hates that fact.
#you say 'sentimental reasons' but also they're a GOOD crop#a phenomenal crop even#potatoes are hardy as hell they're a really good bet here!#the martian#man I should actually read that book#whenever my ability to read books returns from the war
tags reinforced my bias towards potatoes
potatoes my beloved
the potatoes would have been the only thing keeping me sane
I once attended a conference where food researchers from, IIRC, Tuskegee, shared their results of research into sweet potatoes as a possible Mars crop.
the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen
there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.
disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.
profit now or profit later
before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.
(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.
(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)
(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.
(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."
companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).
so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...
just not immediately.
startups, VCs, IPOs, and you
here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:
(1) you have a cool idea.
(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.
during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.
it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.
(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.
acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.
IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.
drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"
as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."
if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.
also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.
this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).
what's an API, anyway?
to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.
an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.
APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)
but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.
reddit's financial foundations
okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.
reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.
in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.
APIs and third-party apps
reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.
as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)
(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)
in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).
the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.
unpaid moderators and user-generated content
so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.
the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."
and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators; reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.
oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards
so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.
this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.
from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.
(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)
of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.
pricing shenanigans
under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.
most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)
which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.
so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.
backlash, blackout
plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."
but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:
first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.
then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).
also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.
(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)
"later" is now "now"
TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.
that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.
and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.
I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.” as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.
the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!
...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”
I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.
(an addendum) you're free to take this as an anticapitalist critique, because it is, but I also just realized that I merely gestured at some of my key feelings on this whole thing and want to state them clearly: specifically that while capitalist market forces may be responsible for reddit's possible demise, those capitalist market forces are equally responsible for reddit's creation and continued existence—for better or for worse. and so I don't think it's possible to fix reddit (or really, the internet as we know it) by surgically removing the capitalism from its core; reddit has only been chugging along for as long as it has thanks to a literal billion dollars in VC funding and untold amounts of unpaid moderator labor. what we're seeing now is the most logical way they can close that loop. poorly handled or otherwise, an IPO was always on the horizon.
which is also why I chafe against the "the internet before capitalism tainted it" narrative: it comes packaged with an assumption that that's something we can return to, despite that narrative being largely fantasy (and, even if it wasn't, describes a time when the internet operated on a much different scale). a Better Internet is something new we have to envision and create, not something old we can fall back onto, and I think it would be radically different from the internet we use now. even the free and open-source tools that people herald as our anticapitalist escape hatch really aren't, and can't be, especially considering how many of them rely on serious corporate funding in addition to regular old donations and volunteer work. (super duper kicking myself for not including this as an example of Type One Websites lol.)
let me close with an anecdote: I've seen a lot of comments on hacker news bemoaning the current state of reddit, and rightfully so... but many of those comments also hold up hacker news itself as one of the last bastions of the open net (i.e., free and no ads) and brainstorm aloud about ways to build a reddit alternative that follows the same principles.
except hacker news is only free and ad-less because it's a glorified billboard for y combinator, the very same giant VC firm that gave reddit their first $100k in seed funding (plus quite a bit more down the line). and no one on hacker news ever acknowledges this! which is crazymaking on so many fucking levels! like, reddit's current predicament is ultimately VC firms' investments coming home to roost, and one of the last so-called free and open forums left is just another VC entity that openly states itself as such (its domain is literally news.ycombinator.com), and a bunch of extremely techy people who've been getting in flame wars longer than I've been alive are still scratching their heads wondering why we can't simply figure out how to do Websites, But Free and Good.
Oh my fucking god , do you know how many times am I going to link to this post as the introduction to anything I could talk about the tech bullshit world?
The Magician. Art by Egan, from the Delta Enduring Tarot.
The magician stands at her kitchen stove, manifesting the magic of gumbo from the odds and ends in the refrigerator. She creates something from nothing. Her magic feeds her own strength. It warms the bellies of those she loves. She has mastered the skills and recipes of those that have come long before, and wields her power over the kitchen with confidence and grace. The four elements are present, and she commands them all. Her wisdom and talents extend far outside this small domain, but it is sitting at the table while she cooks that her devotees are privy to ask her personal sage advice. Upright, this card speaks to your own inner power, your skills, your ability to manifest your desires. You have the tools, and now is the time to use them. The Magician portends success and fulfillment in your endeavors, but such success will require your focus and ability to bring together everything you need to see your dreams realized. Don’t lose that drive and optimism!
Reversed: Even the best ingredients won’t cover up a burnt roux. Lose your focus for one minute, and that gumbo can turn on you. Reserved, this card suggests that your skills are not being put to their best uses, or that you are not living up to your true potential. Your mastery may not be utilized at all, or worse, may be working toward a negative goal. Beware of manipulation, untrustworthiness, and coercion.
So many of my family members are dealing with this. And they’ve found that the company has made opting out of auto pay damn near impossible. The place where it used to be on the site has changed, calling results in getting disconnected, when they finally found it on the site, it “times out” when they try to cancel….its just a fucking mess.
We got lucky. I’m like 80% sure we have a rate cap because I haven’t seen it spike and I’ve been watching it fairly closely. But I’ve got aunts, geandparents, friends who have had their entire paycheck taken for electric bills when they barely had power for 3 hours over the course of 5 days. Money they needed to replace food gone bad, to fix water damage, to make car repairs, all gone to a bill that shouldn’t even exist because they didn’t even have power for 3 days.
Friendly tip from a long-time bank employee… If your money is on autopay directly from your account# or card, you can put a STOP PAYMENT on that shit! But do it at least 3 days before it is due to be pulled from your account. There may be a $20-30 fee for it, but that is much better than a power company trying to pull hundreds from your account and overdrafting you.
Also, if they already pulled a ridiculous amount of money from you… if you believe that the charges are for power that you did not use you likely can file a dispute with your bank. If you lost power tell them about that and say that services were not received, or if there are sudden new previously not disclosed fees you can state that the price is different than disclosed. Those sorts of reasons should keep banking systems from messing with the account itself, as it would do for a fraud claim. Filing a dispute against your power company might not get you your money back, but it MAY. It may also allow the bank to waive a stop payment fee if you fear a second round of hiked rates. Just ask the banker about that before filing the stop paymen as some systems will ONLY waive the fee if it’s done DURING the dispute process….
But! You have to remember that the stop payment is there until YOU remove it. While some banks may remove them after 6 months, or 1-5 years…. it will be your responsibility to remember to reestablish your payment relationship with the power company, and you’ll also then need to let your bank about it when you want to start allowing payments to process again so they can remove the block.
And for those worried that it might somehow look shady: No, the banker will NOT think you’re trying to pull a fast one. The banker is 10000% likely to be on your side when you explain the situation and ask them questions.
If this information helps even one person then I’ll consider it a wonderful use of my time to type it out and post it.
Y’all stay STRONG!!!
[id= a tweet by @ apexxlexx “Texas friends- take your electric bills off auto-pay. My billing cycle just started this week and it’s already 8 times my normal payment with 25 days left to go. I sat in the dark and barely used my heat. We need to demand relief for these bills. This is so criminal and evil.” with the phrase “take your electric bills off auto-pay” and the word “time” in all caps /end id]
Jessica Meir dreamed of the day she would make it to space since the age of five. That dream became a reality Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, as she left Earth on her first spaceflight – later floating into her new home aboard the International Space Station. Jessica lifted off from Kazakhstan in the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft at 9:57 a.m. EDT (1357 GMT) alongside spaceflight participant Ali Almansoori, the first United Arab Emirates astronaut, and Oleg Skripochka, a Russian cosmonaut.
As an Expedition 61 and 62 crew member, Jessica will spend six months in the vacuum of space – conducting research on a multitude of science investigations and participating in several Human Research Program studies.
While Jessica’s new home is about 200 miles over the Earth, this astronaut is no stranger to extreme environments. She’s studied penguins in Antarctica and mapped caves in Italy, all of which prepared her for the ultimate extreme environment: space. Get to know astronaut and scientist, Jessica Meir.
Antarctic Field Researcher
For her Ph.D. research, Jessoca studied the diving physiology of marine mammals and birds. Her filed research took her all the way to Antarctica, where she focused on oxygen depletion in diving emperor penguins. Jessica is also an Antarctic diver!
Geese Trainer
Image Credit: UBC Media Relations
Jessica investigated the high‐flying bar-headed goose during her post‐doctoral research at the University of British Columbia .She trained geese to fly in a wind tunnel while obtaining various physiological measurements in reduced oxygen conditions.
Wilderness Survival Expert
In 2013, Jessica was selected as an Astronaut Candidate. While training to be a full-fledged astronaut, she participated in three days of wilderness survival training near Rangeley, Maine, the first phase of her intensive astronaut training program.
Mission Control Flight Controller
In the astronaut office, Jessica has extensive mission control experience, including serving as the Lead Capsule Communicator (CapCom) for Expedition 47, the BEAM (Bigelow expandable module on the International Space Station) mission, and an HTV (Japanese Space Agency cargo vehicle) mission. The CapCom is the flight controller that speaks directly to the astronaut crew in space, on behalf of the rest of the Mission Control team.
She’s reconnecting with her best friend… in space!
Following a successful launch and six hour journey to the space station, NASA astronaut Christina Koch tweeted this image of Jessica and the crew arriving to the orbital lab in a Soyuz spacecraft. Excitement was high as Christina tweeted, “What it looks like from @Space_Station when your best friend achieves her lifelong dream to go to space. Caught the second stage in progress! We can’t wait to welcome you onboard, crew of Soyuz 61!”
We know. #FriendshipGoals.
Follow Jessica on Twitter at @Astro_Jessica and follow the International Space Station on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to keep up with all the cool stuff happening on our orbital laboratory.
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An experimental conservation project that was abandoned and almost forgotten about, has ended up producing an amazing ecological win nearly two decades after it was dreamt up.
The plan, which saw a juice company dump 1,000 truckloads of waste orange peel in a barren pasture in Costa Rica back in the mid 1990s, has eventually revitalised the desolate site into a thriving, lush forest.
It’s not so much that they’re SURPRISED about it. That was actually the original plan.
This juice company agreed to donate a few acres of its own land to a bordering national park, and compost orange peels there to help restore the land. They were subsequently sued by a rival juice company for having “defiled a national park.” The law sided with the rival company, and the project was discontinued early.
This isn’t so much a “Wow SO SURPRISE!” as a “FUCKIN’ TOLD YOU SO!”
Plus also, sixteen years ago, we might’ve known the answer to the question “What happens when you compost kitchen waste?” but we DIDN’T know the answer to “What happens when you dump 12,000 tons of orange peel on 7 acres of ecologically depleted wasteland?”
And for the first six months, the answer was, “7 acres of nasty-smelling, fly breeding ex-fruit sludge, and a lawsuit from a rival juice company,” but 16 years LATER we can say, “A 176 percent increase in above-ground biomass, and a study site so transformed we couldn’t tell we had the right place until we dug the sign out of undergrowth consisting mainly of native shrubs and grasses, SUCK IT, TICO FRUIT!!!!”
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
In 2001 and 2002, our Hubble Space Telescope looked at the Helix Nebula and it looked right back! This planetary nebula is right in our cosmic neighborhood, only about 650 light-years away. Gigantic for this type of cosmic object, the Helix Nebula stretches across 2 to 3 light-years.
With no actual connection to planets, planetary nebulas like this one are produced when a medium-mass star dies and sloughs off its outer layers. These gaseous layers are expelled into space at astonishing speeds where they light up like fireworks. The Helix Nebula is one of the closest planetary nebulas to Earth, giving scientists an up-close view of its strange affairs.
Through Hubble’s observations, scientists have learned that the Helix Nebula isn’t doughnut-shaped as it appears. Instead it consists of two disks that are nearly perpendicular to each other — the nebula looks like an eye and bulges out like one too!
Hubble has also imaged comet-like tendrils that form a pattern around the central star like the spokes on a wagon wheel, likely resulting from a collision between gases. The dying star spews hot gas from its surface, which crashes into the cooler gas that it ejected 10,000 years before. Eventually the knots will dissipate into the cold blackness of interstellar space.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Proof you can market anything as a “Superfood” if it says Organic, Raw and Gluten-free.
THERE’S A FREAK’N WARNING ON THE BACK THAT IF EATEN IN EXCESS THEY CAUSE SYMPTOMS OF CYANIDE POISONING!
Their suggestion to eating these is to methodically poison yourself by eating 2-4 every other day. Since when has eating Apricot kernels been a thing in anyone’s diet!?
Alright, folks, time to get Science Side of Tumblr on this. There is SO MUCH BULLSHIT packed into this that I ended up writing an obnoxiously long post, for which I apologize.
Let’s start with the product description page that Nora helpfully linked to. There’s just a ton of bullshit pseudoscience and feel-good woo in here and I’m gonna break it down.
“Apricot Kernels are one of the highest natural sources of a rare phytonutrient called amygdalin, also known as vitamin B17, an important nutrient which has largely disappeared from Western diets.”
Wow. Lots of fail in one sentence. Amygdalin is not, in fact, particularly rare; as the wiki page states, it’s found in “many plants” “particularly the Prunus genus, Poaceae (grasses), Fabaceae (legumes), and in other food plants, including linseed and manioc.” The only people who refer to amygdalin as a vitamin are those trying to make money from it. It is absolutely NOT a vitamin in any way, shape, or form. The definition of the word “vitamin” is “a compound which is required by the body in small amounts, which it cannot make on its own and thus must be obtained from the diet.” Your body does not *require* amygdalin in the least. In fact, if you consume too much of it, you will LITERALLY DIE OF CYANIDE POISONING. It is NOT an “important nutrient.” It has not “disappeared from Western diets” because it was never a part of any culture’s diet. Any group of people who ate too much of it probably died.
Moving on:
“Our raw, certified organic apricot kernels originate from wild apricot trees that have never come into contact with any sort of pesticide, herbicide or synthetic fertilizer. The apricots are harvested gently by hand, then the kernels are removed and slowly sun-dried. Our farmers pride themselves on cultivating the highest quality kernels possible while maintaining eco-friendly and sustainable agricultural practices.”
Wait, there’s a contradiction in there.
“…originate from wild apricot trees…”
“…farmers pride themselves on cultivating…”
Listen, I don’t wanna be a pedantic asshole and debate semantics here, but if farmers are cultivating something, then it’s not wild. Okay? You can certainly have a bunch of people going out into a forest and harvesting things from the wild; for herbs this is called wildcrafting and for fruits/vegetables it is generally called foraging. No part of this involves cultivation or farms, which are about as far removed from wild plants as… well, most varieties of fruits and vegetables that we eat today.
Now we get to the hilarious part:
“WARNING: Sweet apricot kernels contain amygdalin (Vitamin B17) which can cause symptoms of cyanide poisoning when eaten in excess. DO NOT EAT MORE THAN 8 SEEDS PER DAY. See a doctor immediately if you experience symptoms like nausea, fever, headache, or low blood pressure. Do not eat if you are pregnant or nursing. Not intended for children”
THEY LITERALLY FUCKING TELL YOU THAT THESE CAUSE CYANIDE POISONING. Oh wait, no, my mistake, they tell you that they cause “symptoms of cyanide poisoning.” Well, you know what else causes “symptoms” of cyanide poisoning? CYANIDE. If you read the wiki article on amygdalin, you may have noticed this part:
“Amygdalin is hydrolyzed by intestinal β-glucosidase, emulsin, and amygdalase to gentiobiose and L-mandelonitrile. Gentiobiose is further hydrolyzed to glucose, whereas mandelonitrile is hydrolyzed to benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. Hydrogen cyanide in sufficient quantities (allowable daily intake: ~0.6 mg) causes cyanide poisoning (fatal oral dose: 0.6-1.5 mg/kg).”
Also, from the article on apricot kernels that Nora also linked (thank you Nora), there’s this little nugget of info:
“On average, bitter apricot kernels contain about 5% amygdalin and sweet kernels about 0.9% amygdalin. These values correspond to 0.3% and 0.05% of cyanide. Since a typical apricot kernel weighs 600 mg, bitter and sweet varieties contain respectively 1.8 and 0.3 mg of cyanide.”
The kernels that these assholes are selling are the sweet variety, so they do have less cyanide than bitter apricot kernels do. However, let’s run the numbers, shall we? One sweet apricot kernel contains approximately 0.3 mg of cyanide, which means that to get to the fatal oral dose of cyanide (0.6-1.6 mg/kg), one would have to eat between 2 and 5 kernels per kilogram of body weight. Now, admittedly, this would take some effort; I weigh about 84 kg, so a fatal dose of these would be between 168 and 420 kernels. These are 8 oz bags, or approximately 226 g, and one kernel weighs about 600 mg, which means there are around 376 kernels in an average bag. This is WELL within the lethal range for me, and I’m a pretty big guy; someone who weighs a lot less than me would have to eat a lot fewer kernels to get a lethal dose.
Let’s not mince words, folks; cyanide poisoning is fucking awful. Cyanide blocks an enzyme that your cells need in order to properly process oxygen. It basically causes you to suffocate on a cellular level. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
And these things are legally for sale? In fucking HEALTH FOOD STORES?!? Can you imagine if a small child got into one of these bags? I can only hope these alternative health wingnuts buying these things are keeping them away from their kids.
Oh, what’s that? You’ll be okay as long as you don’t eat the whole bag? Well, I have unfortunate news for you. Cyanide is not like iocaine powder; you don’t build up an immunity to it by ingesting small amounts daily for years. It can still kill you, although in much more horrible ways than acute cyanide poisoning. From wiki: “Exposure to lower levels of cyanide over a long period results in increased blood cyanide levels, which can result in weakness and a variety of symptoms, including permanent paralysis, nervous lesions, hypothyroidism, and miscarriages. Other effects include mild liver and kidney damage.” Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
Oh, and if you want a real treat, read the reviews on the product page above. Hoooooooly shit, people can fool themselves into thinking ANYTHING is good for them if it has the words “organic” and “natural” on the package, and if the seller hypes it up to be this AMAZING LONG-LOST SUPERFOOD OMG. Here’s some of the highlights, in case you don’t want to read them all for fear of losing too many brain cells (note that all of these quotes are from separate reviews):
“I eat these apricot kernels because of the B17 cancer fighting factor.” No such thing as B17, and amygdalin has been shown to be useless against cancer.
“I noticed that my energy is constant all day and I believe they are actually helping me to lose weight.” Chances are it’s whatever else you’re putting in your smoothie. Keep eating these long enough and I doubt you’ll have energy all day.
“I love them even more after researching all of the health properties!” Clearly you didn’t do any research outside of browsing a couple articles on fucking David Wolfe’s website or some shit.
This next one has three separate hilarious bits so I’ll quote all three parts together:
“I still am not sure what they do for me yet; however they are loaded with B17 which is said to be really good for certain health benefits.” 1/Well, that sounds promising. 2/Loaded with cyanide, yum! 3/“certain health benefits.” Not sure which ones, but a website said it, so it must be true!
“Too bad I can’t eat too many without lowering blood pressure too much.” I can only assume that this person is referring to the fact that your blood pressure drops to 0/0 when you’re dead.
“I like them…not too bitter, but enough so that I know I am getting what I need.” Because something being bitter is a great indication that it’s good for you, amirite? I mean, kale is great for you, and it’s bitter, so that must mean the bitterness is what makes it good for you!
“I have cancer and eat 5 kernels, 3 times a day.. I eat them with some food so I don’t end up with a stomach ache.” I would make a comment about how you should know better than to eat things that give you a stomach ache, but then again, this person could conceivably be on chemo, which also causes awful symptoms, so maybe they’re just conditioned to believe that things that make them feel horrible are actually helping cure them.
“I eat a few a day and I will hopefully see my blood pressure down next dr appt” …folks, please don’t eat poison instead of taking blood pressure medication. I know doctors tend to overprescribe pills, but COME THE FUCK ON.
“I’m trying to get off medication (over 30 years) and want to use natural food to help heal my body!” Which is an admirable goal, and certainly possible. But this is not the way to do it. You need to do your research into the foods you eat to try and heal yourself, and if you did the SLIGHTEST BIT OF RESEARCH you would have found that these things contain CYANIDE. Which absolutely WILL NOT heal your body.
“they are crunchy, aromatic, and slightly bitter, and numb the tip of my tongue when I chew on more than a few at a time.” HOW IS THIS NOT A GIANT RED FLAG HOLY FUCKING SHIT
“It is important to read the information about how many to consume per day as it is a medicinal food with great potential.” Great potential to kill you, yes. Medicinal food, not so much.
tl;dr Apricots are the devil’s nutsack, please don’t eat his testicles.
A few things you need to know about this hot coffee case:
It wasn’t an issue of the coffee being because no fucking shit coffee is hot, but McDonald’s had over heated their water to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 121C. Not just hot, but really FUCKING hot. Your fancy Starbucks lattes are brewed to 150 degrees.
The 79 year old woman had this cup of 250F (121C) coffee between her legs when it spilled so 250F (121C) coffee spilled on her genitals
She got third degree burns…on her genitals. THIRD DEGREE.
She had to have skin grafts to repair the damage
When she sued McDonald’s, it wasn’t for millions of dollars, it was for $20,000 to cover hospital costs and court fees. 20-fucking-thousand.
It was the courts that awarded her the amount of money she got. Again, she only wanted hospital bills and court costs
McDonald’s changed their heating policy, but not before making her sign a gag order keeping her from talking about this case
So she had to live on hearing little shits like you call her stupid and money-grubbing, and other horrendous stuff because she dared ask the company in the wrong to fix what they fucked up.
Additionally, several people had been badly burned by McDonald’s coffee prior to that case, both employees and customers, and McDonald’s had been fined and told to lower the heat of their coffee. They refused to lower the coffee’s heat, continuing to serve a product they KNEW from EXPERIENCE was dangerous, because they could.
When she was burned, she reached out to McDonald’s for them to cover her medical expenses. They sent her a coupon booklet as a big eff yuu.
She required skin grafts not just on her genitals but on her thighs, buttocks, and I think stomach. Like, it was a lot of skin grafts! And did you know that skin grafts don’t always take? She was very severely hurt by a product that McDonald’s knew for a FACT was dangerous.
But nah, go on talking about how she was just foolish and greedy, that’s obviously the case, big corporations have all of our best interest in heart, really they do.
Her name was Stella Liebeck. She has since passed away but I think it’s important to name the victim in this story. Her name was Stella Liebeck and the coffee was so hot that it fused her labia together. It melted her genitals closed. But it’s all just a giant joke, huh?
Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.
At that point, she had medical bills of over $11,000. She was anticipating more. She didn’t have much money.She just wanted McDonald’s to pay for the damage their coffee had done so that she could get medical treatment. Seems reasonable, right?
McDonald’s countered with an offer of $800, then turned down repeated requests to settle.
And there weren’t several people who were burned before Liebeck. It was a LOT worse than that.
During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebeck[’]s. This history documented McDonalds’ knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.
So McDonald’s knew that their coffee was burning people–in some cases, causing third-degree burns. They knew it for TEN YEARS. And they did nothing about it.
Oh, and the jury award?
The jury awarded Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages. This amount was reduced to $160,000 because the jury found Liebeck 20 percent at fault in the spill. The jury also awarded Liebeck $2.7 million in punitive damages, which equals about two days of McDonalds’ coffee sales.
:::
The trial court subsequently reduced the punitive award to $480,000 – or three times compensatory damages – even though the judge called McDonalds’ conduct reckless, callous and willful.
So all of the jokes about how rich Liebeck got off the settlement? Nope. McDonald’s ended up not even haping to pay most of it.
Nancy Tiano says her mother was “never happy about the incident” and that “the burns and court proceedings took their toll.” During her final years, Tiano says, her mother had no quality of life. The good news is that the settlement helped to ease the end of her life by paying for a live-in nurse.
Don’t forget that the REASON that they serve their coffee at DANGEROUSLY high temperatures (Injuring literally thousands of customers) is because coffee brewed and kept at those DANGEROUSLY HIGH temperatures tastes fresher longer, so less undrunk coffee has to be thrown out throughout the day, so McDonalds can MAKE MORE PROFIT on their damn coffee sales.
Every time I see this post it has more information added.
But there’s one thing I’d like to know. Who, specifically, was behind the callous actions? Like I just hear ‘McDonald’s did this, McDonald’s did that,’ but who had that decision making power? The CEO? Someone else?
I find it unnerving how invisible corporate leaders are. They do terrible things but do we even know who they are?
Watch the documentary hot coffee! Its on netflix. It literally covers the whole case as well as everything about tort reform. I can’t remember much but it is the best documentary I have ever watched and it explains the whole thing, it is much, much larger than just mcdonalds.
Stargazer 4-12 @stargazer412 - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
