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.

Is this household or individual income? Either way, whack

That’s a good (and reassuring) observation!

Still, even if it’s a bot/troll/etc. post, if we don’t call it out when we see it, the culture of the community slowly shifts towards “bigotry is acceptable here”…

I’m gonna keep pointing this stuff out when I see it whether the user is acting in good faith or not :)

Aight you got me there

I, too, am down to clown tbh

Sure, notice that I included this possibility in the last paragraph.

Also notice that that possibility doesn’t reinforce the perspective that “women are sluts for clown daddies”

The fact this has 40 up votes right now makes me feel like lemmy is losing a diverse user base. Like, where are the women to down vote this obviously shitty take?

Let’s list some reasons why these women could have done this that aren’t “women are sluts for clown daddies”:

• he’s their boss, and leveraging his insane power over them to make it hard to say no and keep their job
• he’s just an extremely powerful man and they’re afraid of pissing him off
• they have insecurities, (like the “loser cuck” fallacy!) that they aren’t valuable or desirable as partners, and attention from someone as powerful as him feels like affirmation of their value even if they don’t like him or he treats them badly
• they understand that, by not resisting his advances, they might be able to provide themselves a link to a financial source that could support them and a child
• he literally sexually harasses, assaults, or rapes them and they don’t feel like they can criminally pursue one of the richest men in the world

Like, yeah, some of them might be individuals who have bad taste in men or are shitty people themselves. I’m even certain that some of them are! But damn, can we take the perspective of the woman for one second? It’s not a good look to find yourself agreeing with incels on the internet

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.

The chemist in me is appalled… But the queer clown in me is delighted 🏳️‍🌈🤡

I LOVE this

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.

I feel like this is true if the reader is meant to have the perspective of the person who feels that something is magic (the Hobbits, in the example from your video). However, not all magic in fiction is like this, and sometimes the reader is supposed to mostly have the perspective of Galadriel, or to gain her perspective over time.

An example is Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. The reader has the perspective of the Hobbits at first, because that is the perspective of the main character. But the story has themes of “lifting the veil” of magic, and by the end both the main character and the reader have a more similar perspective to Galadriel.

I guess what I mean is, I agree with you and the video’s author in large part… but like… to broadly say that magic “should” be used in literature in a certain way ignores how it can be used in different ways to great effect!

shoulda said “yarrr, ye dumb bastard!”

awesome!! I’m psyched you caught it and enjoyed it :-)

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

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

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.

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

Your starting premise relies on the idea that the costs associated with making drugs are justified. In essence, this implies that the insane rewards are justified because risks associated with not producing a drug are so high.

Most of our science is funded via taxes and controlled by the government, given to researchers through grants that are awarded based on merit as determined by their peers. We’ve developed an adjacent system where drug discovery is funded by capital and investments from non-scientists based on the idea that “striking gold” in the medical world could make them rich.

Why not just remove the cost-barrier to entry? Require all drug discovery to be funded through grants like other research? Pay people working on drugs whether they discovered a new drug or not, as long as they provided proof of their efforts? Researchers would not need to please those with money (banks, investors) to give them funds for a drug, and so would be free to work on drugs that have a low likelihood of being profitable (such as for forgotten illnesses, or using cheap and widely available medicines in novel ways). And when an amazing drug was discovered, our society would be free to use it efficiently and at-cost, since there wouldn’t be stakeholders hungry for their massive payout.

The grant system is a mess, also. And in an ideal world those whose ideas and research led to amazing discoveries would be rewarded extensically somehow, both with appreciation and a reasonable amount of money (the staff of an entire research organization could be set financially for life for a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of money we shovel over to pharmaceutical company stakeholders). And all of this is also tied up in the clinical medical industrial complex, with all its own neuroses.

So there are barriers to implementing something like this… But holy shit do I hear this idea a lot, that high risk justifies the insane rewards. I think it’s bogus!

Thanks :)

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?