(I’m less enthused about the fact that not all the links work. I’m tentatively excited that I think the charts could be better, and maybe the field of visually communicating scientific data for the lay public is one I could look into)
There is one problem. It clearly should read “SCIENCE!”.
It turns out the “pink tax” is also screwing over women at the dry cleaners.
In a segment on CBS This Morning, reporters went undercover to see if women were charged more than men. One female producer and one male producer dropped off nearly identical items and asked for the same service.
What they found is that the female producer was charged more. “She was charged $7.50 while her male counterpart just $2.85?
But to the asshole crackers who cracked my blog: I have to wonder, what was the point? Well woot, you’ve managed to crack the site of a 37 year old woman who’s sometimes a bit sketchy about updates and who, 15 years ago, was pretty good in tech.
Wow, what a super-stellar achievement. Next up, taking candy from a baby.
Yeah, I use reasonably decent passwords, but let’s be fair, my main technical defence against cracking was ‘running updates pretty frequently’. So you googled ‘malware’ and ‘wordpress’ and managed to run the script it said. My amazement at your technical prowess is phenomenal.
And what have you achieved? Well, you’ve taken a site which has maybe double digit unique visitors…over a year… and maybe, possibly, infected one of their computers. Probably not though, because most of my visitors are sensible enough to run virus scanners and such.
Again, amazing.
So potentially pain in the ass for them, and definitely a pain in the arse for me, because I’ve just wasted 2 days trying to clear up the mess you’ve made, and now I get to see if I can salvage the journal entries that went back over a decade.
my professor (lovely man, married to our TA, 5’2", about as intimidating as a muffin) is a dendrologist by trade, so he studies trees. it was about three hours into our social sciences course, last lecture before exams, everyone was frazzled and exhausted, so he told us about his most exciting/in-depth research to date to cheer us up.
(the few of us who actually showed up were like “ok sir im sure its fascinating” but in our minds we were totally like its trees what. is. exciting. about trees. You might be wondering the same thing – the acorns? the leaves? the roots? BUT NO. IMMA FUCKIN TELL YA.)
ANYWAY we settle in, he had a few pictures loaded up from his field work (we were chuckling at this point…. ‘hehehe field work’ i giggled to my frend. its trees.) and began to tell his tale. it’s long, imma warn you, but……. god. just read it.
theres an species of tree called the cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata, if ya wanna get all Latin-y). its super endangered, in our region there’s only ~280 that are registered by the government, yadda yadda yadda. my prof thought that was tragic (i know) but also strange, because when he was writing his thesis about local trees years ago, he kept coming across cucumber trees in really random places. we’re talking like backyards, independently-owned nurseries, etc. WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE because, according to tree law (i know) it is very strictly protected by the government, and thus super “illegal to possess, transport, collect, buy or sell any part of a living or dead member of a listed species if it originates from wild sources.” essentially, the govt takes control over growing the trees and anyone who independently raises them is breaking the law (i know)
so he’d ask people “do you have a permit for these trees?” and they were like “uh no, it’s just a tree someone sold me, i think it looks nice, are you gonna arrest me?” so he’d be like “nah nah nah just tell me who sold it to you”
eventually, months/years later, someone did, and turns out it was like this underground sort-of illegal tree dealing club (i know). so my prof went, got a bit of funding from the government, who were getting pissed at independent cucumber tree numbers, and THIS IS WHERE IT GETS INTO THE GOOD SHIT I STG.
he infiltrates the tree trafficking organization. he buys a cucumber tree from an independent nursery, raises it for months, ensures he gets noticed by the traffickers, and then INFILTRATES it and convinces its leader to LET HIM JOIN. he has to pay like a steep entrance fee, which he does (and it blows my mind that the government of my country paid money to illegal tree dealers), but then he is given full access to records and maps because they think he’s one of them, not a SECRET AGENT.
now this part blows my mind because the tree lords don’t even have to try very hard to find cucumber trees because government agents MARK THE TREES AND DISTINCTLY TAG THEM SAYING THIS IS ENDANGERED DO NOT TOUCH. so, ya know…………. it’s a bit obvious. my prof hangs out with the members so much that he figures out their “hit spots”. these are where the trees are relatively secluded and unguarded. (he writes all this shit and numbers down for his research.)
BUT THATS NOT ENOUGH BECAUSE THE GOVT SAYS HES WASTING THEIR FUNDING IF HE DOESNT HAVE PROOF and they are willing to take LEGAL ACTION for misuse of funding (my prof doesn’t have the money nore time nor power to take them to court, which would also blow his cover). so my prof literally STAKES OUT a copse of cucumber trees at a recognized wildlife reserve for. DAYS. he camps there, and watches the trees, is about to give up, he’s going off an unreliable rumor from the traffickers that a harvester would be going there within the next week. finally, this guy comes and takes the cucumber tree seeds from the CLEARLY MARKED trees by the government, and my prof takes pictures (we are shown these pictures, most of us are speechless at this point). dozens of candid shots of a man my grandpa’s age with a grocery store bag, garden shears, and a ladder, clipping away the illegal seeds and then going on his merry fucking way.
so my prof has the proof, he’s been undercover for months now at this point, he writes up his report, gives it to the government who is like…….. “oh shit”, helps them draft up a new LESS COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS way of marking endangered trees (so that way non-tree-lovers wouldn’t damage them further, etc.), and then never returns to the tree traffickers. he’d given them a fake name, address, everything….. he disappears.
…there was a full minute of stunned silence from us students at this point, during which he grew more and more nervous (again, he’s a muffin) and all of us students are just like……. “whoa.” we asked him what happened to the remaining illegal cucumber trees & if he turned the tree dealers in to the government, and that is when he smiles a little bit and shows us the last few pictures. because here’s the kicker… he never turned the smugglers in. he burned all the data he collected, defied the government pressuring him to turn them in, and the only reason he’s not incarcerated is because his work is so prominent in certain circles now & universities love him, that there would be an uproar if he got arrested. he’s like a fucking anti-hero and then he tells us (i’ll never forget, it’s the most inspirational green-thumb thing in the world) “it may be ‘illegal’, but those who risk their liberty to ~save the world~ should never be reprimanded, no matter what those in power say.”
we are all stunned. some of us are considering dendrology as a field we’d now be interested in pursuing. he clicks his slide one final time, before we leave our last lecture and, since he had an asthma attack (lil muffin) he didn’t attend our exam, so i never see him again…………
and there, on the slides, the last picture? THERE HE IS. in his own backyard. with his equally lovely TA wife. both grinning innocently, standing underneath a……. FUCKING. FULL GROWN. ILLEGAL. CUCUMBER TREE.
“It’s hard to recall a revolution that has swept biology more swiftly than CRISPR,” Lander, a biologist at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute, wrote, noting that, although nearly every molecular biologist is familiar with the technology that allows scientists to easily disable or change the function of genes, they are likely unfamiliar with the manpower that went into its discovery.
“Yet, the human stories behind scientific advances can teach us a lot about the miraculous ecosystem that drives biomedical progress,” he continued, “about the roles of serendipity and planning, of pure curiosity and practical application, of hypothesis-free and hypothesis-driven science, of individuals and teams, and of fresh perspectives and deep expertise.”
Indeed.
What Lander failed to recognize in his article—and what many of his colleagues and commenters on the piece have recently condemned him for—is that his institute is currently involved in a billion-dollar patent dispute with the University of California’s Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Germany, which played a vital role in developing CRISPR-Cas9. Not only did the Cell paper fail to disclose the potential conflict of interest, it significantly minimized the role of Doudna’s lab in advancing the technology.
The only important thing that happened during the Dem debate.
He is garbage.
but but but the 1%!!!!!!
Ok hold on, I actually just read the article and it actually seems the people who said “oh he’s garbage” or whatever didn’t actually read what they reblogged.
His plan involves increasing taxes, yes, but he’s also planning to do away with private insurance premiums. You’re actually saving money via that plan, so ultimately better off financially. Put simply, private insurance premium going away means all that money back in your pocket. Then, you pay SOME of that money to taxes. Taxes go up, BUT you’re paying less than you’d have paid the private company. So yes, you’d be paying more taxes, but in total your expenses go down by thousands.
Read the things you reblog, dammit.
Uhhhh
You literally admitted he says he wants to increase taxes.
oh boo hoo, you pay a little bit more in taxes. how else do people expect shit to get done? -_-
… Really?
oh no my taxes are going to be more
and people nationwide will stop suffering from lack of healthcare
and maybe ending poverty will take a step in the right direction
and maybe private insurance companies will stop gouging people
and hey I’ll actually have a net positive after all this since it saves me money in the long run
and hey maybe we’ll be on par with every other 1st world country on the planet
and hey maybe parents will call the hospital when their kids are sick instead of waiting it out because their insurance rates are too much for them to afford
but
oh no my taxes are going to be more
Same rhetoric as obamacare. Premiums are up, coverage is down, but hey. At least everyone….no wait.
Government run healthcare is the biggest croc of idiocy alive today. Medicare, medicaid, obamacare, all failures. All dying. But juuuuuust one more right? This time it will work!
so what r ur opinions on minecraft?
So… The NHS…
Guys, Sanders is asking for a 2.2% health care tax hike to cover health care costs. If your household is earning $70k a year, that’s $1,540 a year in extra taxes.
There will also be a payroll tax levied on employers of 6.7%. Assuming the entire cost is passed on to workers (and I guarantee you it won’t be – customers will also pick up part of the tab), that’s an extra $4,690, bringing the total to $6,230 a year.
Obamacare average household premiums were about $16,800 in 2015, and are still rising. That’s at least 2.7 times higher than the tax hike (a highly conservative estimate), and will probably be higher as health care costs continue to rise.
You will not need to pay for premiums in a single payer system. You’re literally saving over thousands of dollars a year if you’re a middle class citizen, and even more if you’re a working class citizen.
There are plenty of other examples of nations that have implemented a single payer system, and their citizens are paying significantly less than Americans.
ALSO. The generally used cut-off for ‘middle class’ in political debates is a person making $250,000 a year. Are any of you even fucking CLOSE to that? ‘Cause I kind of doubt it. By that definition someone can ‘raise taxes on the middle class’ and still not raise the taxes of 99% of the people I know. So when someone mentions ‘middle class’, you damn well need to ask what numbers they’re using. It’s totally possible that they’re not talking about and yours at all. The tax code certainly makes a distinction between those of us making under $50k and those making over $200k, and so would Sanders’ plan!
Are you seriously saying people who make 50K won’t be taxed and aren’t middle class?
I said neither of those things. I said that it was wise to use specific numbers when discussing ‘middle class’, as it covers such a broad range as to be functionally meaningless.
Sanders plan includes slight (2.2%) increases on the marginal tax rate in all tax brackets, and larger increases on higher tax brackets. Functionally tax rate includes deductions and credits, giving you the effective tax rate, which means you can’t perfectly predict the outcome for individuals (but you can intelligently estimate that a worker in the lowest bracket will see no rise at all, as earned income credit balances out their taxable income).
The chart I linked also includes payroll taxes (payed by the employer) as if they were payed by the employee. There’s a sound reason for that, but it’s not actually a guarantee – employers who currently pay a portion of health care may instead use those funds against payroll taxes, for instance.
Anyway, with a 2.2% marginal increase but no health insurance premiums, a person making under 50k is going to come out just about even – the big difference being who the money goes to. People who make more will see a bigger dip in their net income. If people who are at the low end of middle class come out even or ahead and those at the top end are paying significantly more, we should be mindful when using this over-broad term.
You know what? Having moved here from the UK and wasted more of my life already than I care to think about on trying to sort out health insurance, my main thought is – the tax increase is worth it.
I think the thing is, you folks in the US don’t seem to realise how much of your life you’re wasting on health insurance. Not money, but life. Until now, the only things I’ve had to worry about in the UK were functional or personal issues… ‘which doctor should I register with’, ‘Is my doctor a nice doctor are are they a bit of a dick’, or ‘Oh, have they lost my referral, let me ring and be hassley’. That kind of functional stuff.
I *knew*, absolutely *knew* that whatever happened, I was ‘covered’. I didn’t have to spend hours debating and trying to work out the cost-benefit analysis of how many appointments I think I might need, versus how many prescriptions I might have, versus the overall cost. Should I go with a higher or a lower deductable?
It is a waste of my life.
In the UK about a decade ago I Fell off my motorcycle on a freeway.
Rushed to the nearest ER? Done. No billing paperwork.
Dressing changes for weeks afterwards? Done. No billing, just saw the doc and the nurse.
Easy.
No bills, no ringing and pissing about with provider stuff, no trying to work out who I needed to ring or being passed from department to department.
All done because healthcare should be about healthcare.
When my liver played up and I needed to see a specialist, I didn’t need to work out who was in or out of network. They said ‘Which hospital would you like’ and that was it. Referral, done. Wait a couple of weeks and appointment, done. Blood tests? done.
And you can tell me I should go back to the UK and stop whining, but actually, there’s a lot of awesome things about the US that I love. That’s why I moved here.
Your healthcare system is not one of the things that made me want to move here.
If you’ve visited my (narcissistic) blog on my vanity domain (pyoor.org) since December, please check your computer. It appears some repugnant little human decided to hack it, and place malware in the wordpress install. Deep in the heart of the thing making it a black-hearted and evil beast.
Having had a chat with the TSO host people, it’s everywhere. The site was a plague-ridden beast which I am currently in the process of pulling down. Similarly, if you had the misfortune of visiting Dead Bug Jumping (the podcast I used to do), or my other half’s personal page, the same is true.
I shall be putting it back up, but I’m not sure I’ll bother putting DBJ back up since I’m not doing it at the moment. And I’m not certain how much content I’ll get back up – other than the journal entries.
Also known as “an exercise in making you hate yourself and the world at large” or “practice by which you can render tasks such as ‘folding clothes’ or ‘four hours straight of computer solitaire’ sound like heaven by comparison”.
Cover letters are very possibly my least favorite part of job hunting, which is, overall, possibly my least favorite thing I’ve ever done :(
They are a vile, vile thing that takes all my insecurities and allows them to dance around the room mocking me, I find.
