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Undecided voter focus group disappointed in Biden's debate performance
  • Why would we even want that, though? Harris is a cop, and her presidency would likely be just as impotent and mediocre as Biden's. Like Biden, she's going to bend to corporate interests, please no one in the interest of pleasing everyone, not make or advocate for any major protective reforms to the democratic process (ranked choice voting, etc.), and try to take the high road against directly calling out fascism. When will the DNC get it through their heads that their departmental politics and seniority process shouldn't decide the president-- the people should?

    Also, I find it immoral of them to play a horrible game of "switcheroo" with Harris and Biden. It feels like what you're saying is, they know she's unpopular and would lose an election, but if we switch her in for Biden through this presidency then everyone will see how great she is! We don't need an election, we just need the great and powerful DNC to plan our presidents for us!!!

    To clarify in case it isn't obvious, I am a trans, disabled leftist. But this is EXACTLY why Trump is so popular and why everyone hates the DNC.

  • Even wealthy Americans are struggling to make ends meet
  • Is this household or individual income? Either way, whack

  • My attempt to make a photo collage with photos I've taken over the years.
  • I like the composition of yours more than Hyner's tbh!

    He still gets credit for the cool idea though :)

  • Former Official: Biden State Dept. Bending US Law to Send Israel Weapons
  • Why post this summary article from an obscure news group when you could have posted the actual report from the former official?

    It's written in accessible language, so it's not like it's too technical to understand or anything...

  • Stonehenge covered in powder paint by Just Stop Oil protesters - BBC News
  • Contrary to most of the opinions in this thread, I think this (and the van gogh incident) is a great and appropriate protest.

    It causes a knee-jerk reaction to be mad that they are harming a precious piece of history and culture, which is a perfect juxtaposition to how the climate change harms our precious natural resources and will harm ourselves, and

    It achieves this without actually causing permanent damage to the subject artifact, and

    It is incendiary enough to remain in our public consciousness long enough for it to affect the discourse.

    I only wish there was a more direct way to protest the people most responsible for the worst effects (oil executives, politicians, etc.), but the truth is that the "average middle-class Westerner" (most of the people who have access to enjoy these particular cultural relics) is globally "one of the worst offenders". While I firmly believe that individuals have less power to enact change than corporations and policymakers, this protest does achieve the goal of causing reflection within people who have the power to make changes.

  • Name this rule
  • The chemist in me is appalled... But the queer clown in me is delighted đŸłïžâ€đŸŒˆđŸ€Ą

  • Denmark Made Home Buying Easier. America Should Follow Its Lead.
  • It must be different in different places. I went from a renter in one area, to an owner in the same area, to a renter again in a different area in the period of 5ish years (long story).

    Rent in the first area was about the same cost for a two bedroom, two bath, 1000 sq ft apartment as the entire mortgage on a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1200 sq ft house, including principle, interest, and taxes. The only reason people would rent there is because they don't have the money for a down payment.

    When we left that area, we could have become landlords and rented the house out. We could have easily gotten twice the entire mortgage in rental income, but we felt that being a landlord was unethical (especially since we were relatively wealthy for that area, although we made less than the US median family income). We sold the house and broke even.

    Now, we live in a much higher COL area. It's true here that renting is much cheaper than buying, but that's because you can't get a SFH for less than about $1.5 million here. My rent on my 1 bed, 1 bath, 700 sq ft apartment is more than twice my mortgage in my previous area. Our incomes have increased, now we make slightly above the median family income. But our leftover at the end of the month honestly went down a ton. If we weren't here to get an education, we'd be gone by now.

    Just saying.... As someone who has both rented and owned, I definitely feel more like I'm shoveling money into a fire as a renter. Owning was the best financial situation I'd ever been in.

  • In mid-December and early January Quaker oats issued two massive recalls for salmonella risk. Many of their biggest products were involved. Other recalls were issued in February as well.
  • Just curious, when you say "those products are still on the shelves", do you mean they're selling product from the lot numbers that were recalled?

    You should be able to tell the grocery store employees and have them remove it if they're selling recalled products, but also I wouldn't be surprised if they're only selling products that are no longer part of those recalled lots

    Edit: WAIT you said "still not on the shelves", sorry! Ignore my comment lol

  • Total superiority
  • awesome!! I'm psyched you caught it and enjoyed it :-)

  • This is the way
  • I feel like I've seen this take a lot more in the past ~5 years than I did before. Not just that zoos are unethical, but that any animal ownership (or really interaction of any kind) is inherently abusive.

    You're certainly entitled to feel however you want about animal ownership and act accordingly, but personally I feel like it's honestly kind of a weird take?

    Humans are obviously not the only species that develops symbiolotic relationships with other organisms (in a diversity of power dynamics), but we are also not the only species who take on specifcally ownership or shepherd roles for other species (like spiders with frog pets, or fungus farmer ants, among many many other examples). Thus, the ontological position this opinion must operate from is that humans are somehow distinct and superior to nature, such that we have separate and unique responsibilities not to engage in mutualistic ownership with other organisms, on the basis that like, we're somehow "above" that? That we're so enlightened and knowledgeable that we exist in a category of responsibility distinct from all other organisms?

    Of course, a lot of our relationships to animals can be described as harmful in other terms without needing to take this specific stance. Like, our relationship with many agricultural animals can be critiqued through the harm done to their individual well-beings and through the harm their propagation does to the global environment. Or irresponsible pet owners can be critiqued for how their unwillingness to control the reproduction or predatory abilities of their pets can harm local ecosystems, like an introduced invasive species might. Or valid criticisms of many zoos when they prioritize profits over animal welfare, rehabilitation, ecosystem restoration, and education. Or that the general public picking up wild animals is a problem because it disturbs their fragile ecosystems and traumatizes them, especially when done on the large scale of human populations (but distinctly not for ecological study, wild animal healthcare, education, etc., like Steve Irwin et. al) But none of these are specific criques of the mutualistic ownership relationship itself as much as problems with the way we handle that relationship.

    Idk, I'm interested to understand your opinion, especially if it has detail I'm missing beyond "we shouldn't have pets, zoos, or farms because we're better than that"!

  • Shellac then burn or vice versa?
  • it is definitely still a problem, the "naturalness" of the finish is irrelevant

    even burning wood itself releases compounds that can be harmful (hence why we advise against breathing in smoke)

    I second the idea from a separate poster that if you want to burn, seal, and add more burns-- just use a solvent to remove the seal before you do the second set of burns. Or burn it all at once before sealing

  • A biased test kept thousands of Black people from getting a kidney transplant. It's finally changing
  • I will do my best! :)

    There are a couple different concepts at-play here, and finding a single resource that summarizes everything I mentioned would be quite difficult. Moreover, given the information dissemination problem I mentioned, you'd be hard-pressed to find a non-academic description of this stuff (I.e. written for a non-biological or social researcher audience)...

    But, I don't think that should prevent anyone interested in trying to learn more!

    Here's some papers that discuss some of the issues at play here:

    Is the cell really a machine?, discusses some of the issues with relying too much on genetics/molecule scale biology knowledge for determining the emergent nature of traits/phenotypes (with specific respect to the machine model of the cell... This paper is heavy on molecular biology)

    Conceptualizations of Race: Essentialism and Constructivism, a sociological overview informed by clinical and biological research discussing constructivist vs essentialist conceptions of race (heavy on sociology)

    Addressing Racism in Human Genetics and Genomics Education , reviews several papers specifically addressing the information dissemination problem I mentioned, going back to the "source", which is education. This paper focuses on studies in undergraduate biology education but others are looking at education in at the k-12 level, also.

    If you wanted to do a database search yourself, some keywords I'd use would be: race essentialism, genetic essentialism, (really just "essentialism" would get you somewhere), race in biology education, race in medicine

  • A biased test kept thousands of Black people from getting a kidney transplant. It's finally changing
  • I'm copying my comment from elsewhere as a jumping off point:

    Hi hello I am an expert in this

    We do have these studies. We have tons of them. At the research level, the essentialist bias of healthcare is well-documented.

    Basically, not only do we know that there are very, very few (really, none, when you come right down to it) areas where we can accurately predict a person's underlying physiology based on their apparent race-- we also know that it is underlying bias (and not biological evidence) that makes some healthcare workers and researchers think otherwise.

    In fact, these essentialist biases are documented along other dimensions of identity than race, also. These biases are found whenever healthcare workers treat individuals with different sexes, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, and body sizes, too (not an exhaustive list).

    You probably aren't doing it intentionally, but this idea that "we just need more studies" is a common refrain of resistance to change from people who have a vested interest in the biased status quo-- calling for further study is seen as uncontroversial, even if there's a mountain of evidence already (see: climate denial).

    Moreover, it actually misses the point of how epistemologies of biology are constructed. In reality, there are many things we know on the research level that are not efficiently disseminated to the relevant expert populations. The truth is that we don't really need more studies-- we need to figure out how to get the current best information into the hands of doctors, nurses, and clinical researchers.

    To address your comment about red heads, I'd like to point out that it isn't the red-headed-ness of a person that creates the effect you're describing, it is the presence of specific alleles for the creation of pigments that both provide tint to our hair and skin and are also involved in pain/drug metabolic pathways.

    Sure, that means that red-heads almost always have the effect you describe, but people with semi-functional or single recessive copies of alleles of the same genes may not have red hair but might have the same pain-pathway dysfunction. These mutations can pop up in individuals of any ethnic background, meaning that it is impossible to rule out the presence of the pain dysfunction based on race, skin, or hair color.

    Moreover, in red-heads, individuals may possess mutations in other gene pathways (or epigenetic variation in gene expression regulation) that partially or fully eleviate the effect of the pigment allele mutation. In simple terms, all red heads might have the pain mutation associated with red hair, but some of those individuals might have a separate mutation (that doesn't change their appearance) that decreases their pain or anesthesia threshold, making the net effect zero. This again means that we can't be certain of someone's underlying physiology based on their appearance or race.

    source: senior graduate student in epigenetics, gene expression, and with a specific research foci in essentialist beliefs among experts in the biological sciences

  • A biased test kept thousands of Black people from getting a kidney transplant. It's finally changing
  • Hi hello I am an expert in this

    We do have these studies. We have tons of them. At the research level, the essentialist bias of healthcare is well-documented.

    Basically, not only do we know that there are very, very few (really, none, when you come right down to it) areas where we can accurately predict a person's underlying physiology based on their apparent race-- we also know that it is underlying bias (and not biological evidence) that makes some healthcare workers and researchers think otherwise.

    In fact, these essentialist biases are documented along other dimensions of identity than race, also. These biases are found whenever healthcare workers treat individuals with different sexes, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, and body sizes, too (not an exhaustive list).

    You probably aren't doing it intentionally, but this idea that "we just need more studies" is a common refrain of resistance to change from people who have a vested interest in the biased status quo-- calling for further study is seen as uncontroversial, even if there's a mountain of evidence already (see: climate denial).

    Moreover, it actually misses the point of how epistemologies of biology are constructed. In reality, there are many things we know on the research level that are not efficiently disseminated to the relevant expert populations. The truth is that we don't really need more studies-- we need to figure out how to get the current best information into the hands of doctors, nurses, and clinical researchers.

  • Wait, not like that
  • Just because it isn't as bad a joke would imply doesn't mean it still isn't really quite bad

    Base 12 vs base 10 is pretty much the only objective advantage of USC, and it only uniquely occurs in USC for small construction-scale tasks (i.e. the inch-to-foot scale).

    I don't think people critiquing USC are unaware of what this video is saying. We just think it's still worse.

    source: 8th gen American who would rather switch to SI

  • Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
  • I looked for a graph of the nino/a events over the past few decades and literally just grabbed the first result

    It seems like some of what you said doesn't check out with this chart, like there was a four year Nina in '98-'02, and were currently in a very strong Nino.

    Not trying to be contradictory and like maybe this isn't the best source, but can you give context on how what you said meshes with this?

  • Definitely deserves a place in the food pyramid
  • how reliable do you think herbs-info.com is?

    (the answer is probably: not very)

  • gifts rule
    5
    Advice requested: Advisor was transferring universities and taking me with them, but has now backed out

    Sorry if this isn't exactly the right community, I'm just going nuts and need to ask somewhere.

    So I'm a 2nd year PhD student at an R2 institution in a conservative area. My advisor was offered a job at an R1 in a highly desirable, liberal area, and I was planning on going with them. Now, I found out that they're backing out and intend to stay here.

    Some important info:

    • Advisor told everyone in our department they were leaving before backing out. I told everyone I was leaving, too, and lost some committee positions and collaborators in the process.

    • My spouse and I are visibly queer, and have been harassed in our town. My spouse only moved here for me, and was delighted to find out we'd be moving. They're completely destroyed by the bait-and-switch.

    • Advisor was actually only planning on moving because their spouse wanted to live closer to family and was currently unemployed. The reason they have decided not to move is because the new institute gave my advisor's spouse a job in a department they didn't like. The rest of the job offer letter was fine; they described it as good, even.

    • My advisor did not tell me about the job search when they started looking, and confessed they didn't intend for me to come with them originally. It turns out they brought me into their lab knowing they intended on leaving me behind, and they were surprised when I asked about going with them.

    • I rotated into this lab and have funding through an NSF GRFP.

    • I have paid ~$1000 out of pocket for travel expenses and application fees to facilitate my transfer to the new school.

    I feel overwhelmed; when they told me they weren't going I just told them I couldn't talk now and needed time to process and we would talk later. I barely kept myself together long enough to leave, but now I have to talk to them. My take is that I don't feel comfortable trusting this person with my life direction anymore, since they would waste that much time and money and back out over something so stupid. I also think it's insane that their spouse was the reason for the move to begin with, but is also demanding they back out because their spousal hire wasn't good enough. I don't know how I'm going to talk to them professionally because it all seems crazy and I get upset even thinking about it.

    Has anyone been in a similar situation, or know anyone who has? Advice is greatly appreciated

    6
    stoneparchment stoneparchment @possumpat.io

    (biologist - artist - queer)

    • tea
    • anime
    • tabletop

    >You’re the only magician that could make a falling horse turn into thirteen gerbils

    Posts 3
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