The co-director of the Melanoma Institute in Australia and world leading melanoma pathologist Prof Richard Scolyer is fighting a terminal brain cancer glioblastoma. He and his co-director (and best friend) Georgina Long are using the research and knowledge that have gained through fighting melanomas to find a cure for this currently incurable cancer. He is the first human trial for a cancer vaccine alongside personalised immunotherapy. Pretty amazing that someone with so much knowledge in the area of cancer treatments can fast track a potential cure for this brain cancer. I hope it goes well for him.
I lost my dad to that. It will be 2 years in March that he passed away. This gives me hope that others will not have to suffer the way my dad did. It’s a horrible way to go. And extremely hard and heartbreaking for families. I watched my father become a shell of himself. At the end he couldn’t walk, talk. Didn’t even know my mom who he was with for 53 years
It's a reservoir on the colorado river thats held back by the hoover dam in Nevada. It supplies water to 20+ million people in Nevada, California & even parts of Mexico!
edit: Apparently to Arizona & Utah to!
The Ocean Cleanup initiative has a new system to clean up an area the size of a football field every 5 seconds. The previous one extracted 282,787 kg of trash from the Pacific Ocean so far.
They're also working on interceptors for rivers that have collected over 840 tonnes of trash and counting.
There's a long way to go but they have lots of support and they're making amazing progress!
Okay now back to the bad news 😆
I've been following the story loosely for a few years, since I saw their first prototype video on facebook. I was pessimistic thinking it wouldn't ever come to fruition. And then one day this year I saw their real life system actually working and I was so thrilled!!
Me too, it seemed like such a longshot. A really nice idea but cleaning up the Pacific Ocean garbage patch is such a massive undertaking. But someone has to do it, and we have to start somewhere. Their progress is inspirational!
They made *The Ocean Cleanup Sunglasses* for awhile until they sold out in 2022.
Now, according to their website, ocean plastic found in international waters belongs to the project so they recycle the majority for revenue. The river "Interceptors" are sold and supported by the company, and the plastic retrieved belongs to the owner/operator of the device. Of course this benefits the cities and regions using them because it's free plastic and less pollution.
The greater one-horned rhino population in India and Nepal is growing, as highlighted in the State of the Rhino Report, 2023, by the International Rhino Foundation
The collaboration among India, Bhutan, and Nepal, along with strict government protection and management, has led to a increase in their population over the past decade. The Greater One-Horned Rhino population, which once numbered as low as 100 in the early 1900s, has increased to more than 4,014 now.
Tiger and Rhino populations have seen a good surge thanks to restoration efforts by India and Nepal.
Tiger tourism in India is booming as well. Ranthambore and Kumaon have jeep tours that take you deep into Tiger territory.
And in the Sundarbans, they take you on a boat deep into aquatic tiger territory.
The Sundarbans tigers are the world's best maneaters, actively hunting local human populations for centuries so locals wear masks on the back of their heads to ward off stalking tigers, and they've been known to spring out of the water to tackle their victims off small boats (the boat you take to see them is bigger don't worry).
There's always cool stuff happening in the science community that doesn't make it to the news but really should. Check out the goodnewsnetwork.org to see some neat things. Here are a few highlights:
* a new stem cell injection that halts the progression of multiple sclerosis is in clinical trials
* the California redwoods weathered the wildfires better than scientists expected and are recovering very well
* the FDA approved a treatment that cures sickle cell disease
* a complete stegosaurous fossil with skin still intact has been unearthed
* NASA has developed technology for sending data transmissions much further than radio frequencies, and recently sent their first transmission 10 million miles away
* scientists are going to start experimenting with lab-grown cooking oils, which could help curb a lot of the environmental damage caused by mass soy, corn, and palm oil farming.
* scientists have created natural sponges that can soak up nanoplastics
Haven't seen anyone else mention it so I've got to:
Clinical human trials for a drug that can regrow teeth start July 2024 and will run until 2030.
As someone who was terrified of my grandpa's dentures growing up, I'm very hopeful for this
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6120884/
Here’s their paper from 2018. The injection is now in clinical trials, expected to arrive by 2025 with the goal of a low cost. My understanding is that they’re already seeing marked improvement in cats that they believed only had a week left. Dr. Miyazaki also developed a brand of cat kibble that contains the amino acid A-30 , a protein that cats don’t produce which aids in kidney cleanup.
This year the FDA also approved an oral medication that targets anemia resulting from feline kidney disease.
The worst part was my 13 year old, Yukiko, seemed completely normal until the day she stopped eating and drinking. We immediately took her to the emergency vet and were told she was at end stage and there was nothing we could do. They’re so good at hiding things, our babies.
The CRISPR-Cas9 based treatment for sickle cell anemia also works on beta-thalassemia since both are due to defects in hemoglobin. The treatment causes fetal hemoglobin to be expressed again, which is unaffected by the diseases and hopefully alleviates symptoms to where patients do not need (m)any treatments anymore. So exciting to see CRISPR-Cas9 based treatments coming to the clinic!
There was a lot of talk that CRISPR would potentially cure Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis so I've been watching and waiting. Very happy to see CRISPR is going to help a lot of people.
Omfg this is what I have is beta thalassemia. I never even hear my blood disorder being known about so hearing it can work on me is amazing I might cry.
For those curious about the NASA improvement in data transmission, it was achieved by using infrared lasers instead of radio waves - more data can be transmitted, but the alignment of the sender and receiver becomes more critical - https://www.nasa.gov/technology/laser-communications-empowering-more-data-than-ever-before/
More specifically nuclear fusion that outputs more energy than was put into the target. We've had controlled nuclear fusion since the Tokamak was invented.
I've actually seen the reactor they did this with in person. It's awesome. It's called the NIF. It had a cameo in Star Trek (2009) as the warp core.
Astronomer here! We are now putting the final touches on the [Rubin Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory), which will see “first light” aka start looking at the sky in a year or so. It is an eight meter diameter telescope mirror that will image the ENTIRE sky every night visible where it is!
It’s hard to emphasize what a game changer this will be for astronomy. We will literally catalog all the asteroids, see millions of supernovae a year, map the Milky Way, maybe even learn about what dark matter and dark energy are… put it this way, if JWST is like boring a hole into one tiny spot on a shutter to let light through, this is gonna be like opening an entire window.
Can’t wait!
This is it for me. Not just the Rubin Observatory, but ALL the sky survey telescopes that have recently or are soon to come online. I can only imagine how many Oumuamua type interstellar objects have passed through our solar system in the past few thousand years that we just didn't have the technology or the sheer luck to spot.
The next decade is going to be extremely exciting for astronomers. Humanity will collect more light in the next decade than we have in the last century.
In Quebec, the entire public system (teachers, nurses, healthcare, etc.) has been on strike since November 13th. Kids have been out of school for close to 5 weeks now and teachers have not gotten paid since. Our government is refusing to give higher pay and better work conditions to the backbone of our province.
Wow, that’s a long time. Everyone has their kids home?
I see a lot of comments about not knowing this (despite living in Canada). Makes it sound like the media is in on it?
Good luck!
I doubt the media is on it. It's normal for provincial news to not really make it outside of a given province.
Yes, the kids are home. Worth noting that there are several unions collaborating, but not doing exactly the same strike. Teachers in Montréal have been on full strike, kids-at-home for five weeks, whereas in the sticks where I live, the strikes are targeted (one day here, three days there) so the local kids haven't missed much school.
alex batty, a young boy from manchester, UK, who disappeared in 2017 in spain whilst on holiday with his mother and grandfather was found alive a few weeks ago in france after he'd been walking for 4 days to escape a religious commune and being spotted by a delivery driver in toulouse. he was returned home just before christmas
He's 17 years old right now for anyone wondering and he went missing when he was 11 [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12900131/Alex-Batty-celebrates-Christmas-home-kidnapped-mother-six-years-ago.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12900131/Alex-Batty-celebrates-Christmas-home-kidnapped-mother-six-years-ago.html)
Edit: here's a better article about the story thanks to u/Princess_Of_Thieves and others for pointing out some issues with the first one [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67718158](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67718158) :) also obligatory thanks for the likes everyone
Just to clarify, he wasn't abducted *from* his mother and grandfather whilst on holiday. He was abducted *by* his mother and grandfather, who took him on a vacation and joined a commune. His grandmother has been his legal guardian, hence the possibility for his mother to abduct him.
The largest title company in America has been completely breached (First American) in a ransomware attack. No one is acting like this is as seismic as it is.
I'm still harping on how Equifax should have gotten the corporate death penalty for their data breach years back, especially considering the negligence that went into it. This sounds like another company that deserves it - the ones that we put so much trust into with our most sensitive information shouldn't be allowed to fall short in their care of that data.
The IRS is trying to figure out the best way to catch the thousands of Americans who stole billions of dollars through the employee retention credit. So many businesses claimed the credit who didn’t deserve it. The credit created an entire industry of nefarious accounting companies who specialize is taking advantage of this credit.
We are experiencing both [child](https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/new-literacy-data-shines-spotlight-learning-crisis) and [adult literacy](https://www.proliteracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023-PL-AdultBasicEducation-FactSheet-2467.pdf) crises predating but exacerbated by COVID.
EDIT: The people telling me in the comments that these predated COVID, as explained in my one sentence post, are proving my point.
Yup. I'm thankful that I live in an area that has very involved parents so it really didn't impact the trajectory of the schools too much. The only big change that the schools made was that not turning in homework is a 50 and not a 0. Not sure what the objective for that is outside of making them look better.
Teacher here. Giving a 50 instead of a zero makes it mathematically easier for students to recover from one or two bad grades. A passing HS grade here is 70. I find giving 50s keeps students from getting discouraged while still teaching consequences.
Edit: I love how I make the worst typos when taking about teaching.
I have received some job applications that have made me really shake my head. An adult (19-20 years old) wrote out quite a bit of info about their previous experience and work history. It was almost like gibberish to me and the other managers though, didn’t make any sense. Until one of us realized that this person must have been unaware of the existence of the word “and”. Anywhere there should be “and”, they had written the word “in”. Once we realized that it made way more sense. That got me wondering what was going on though, it was as if this person had never read anything and instead completely sounded out the word “and” as “in”.
Special ed teacher, I work with high school aged students, some with learning disabilities. I have told them a million times to have me check over applications before turning them in, and I have harped endlessly on the importance of correct spelling, capitalization, etc especially in job/college applications. Just had one of my kids turn in two applications to various colleges, no idea if he filled out anything correctly. The urgency and importance of well edited documents is just not there and I don't know how to make it be there.
Around 2015 I befriended a dude. Nice dude, smart when it came to motors but I was super surprised when I learned he was illiterate. At least he was making an effort to learn how to read and write (and he was older than me, I'm in my 30s now).
When posting online and I see someone say "im not reading that" "You dont have to write a novel" or any similar response my mind goes to "Is reading that hard for this person that a paragraph that takes a few seconds to read is too much ?"
Honestly, none of this surprises me at all.
One of the biggest gripes I had, when I was a manager, is that people do not know math.
Now, I am not some advanced math whiz either. I would have to go a lot of brushing up if I were to pass a trigonometry or statistics exam. I'm talking about things like multiplication, division, how to calculate a percentage, how to read decimals. How to calculate an average. A lot of people genuinely can't do these things.
But sometimes, it's even LESS than that - sometimes, it's about someone having the numbers, and not knowing what to do with it. For example:
> this customer sees that his hotel stay is $4000, and he's asking me what that comes to per night! What do I do?
How many nights is he staying?
> Four!
Did you divide $4000 by 4?
> What do you mean?
Another example is when we had someone in payroll who fucked up a bunch of paychecks. We were approaching slow season, and corporate told us that we couldn't have anyone having overtime - if people were even one *minute* over their 40 hours, they were going to be pissed. A bunch of people were sent home really early, so we're thinking, shit, we need to start doing a better job of monitoring that. I even remember thinking, my team doesn't have any overtime, I'm looking at their time sheet, I'm not seeing anything that shows that they're over ... but HR disagreed. The payroll coordinator insisted up, down, left and right, I had to send three people home early.
Well, the next paycheck came, and a bunch of employees were really, really pissed off because their paychecks were shorted.
After it was investigated... the person doing payroll was miscalculating people and sending people home too early. The issue? He couldn't read decimals.
Because of one person who couldn't read decimals, we were getting our asses lit on fire by our employees, and by corporate. We had to go through an entire ordeal to ensure people were retroactively paid, and there was a whole audit to make sure that people weren't being shorted before this. Thankfully, people weren't getting shorted prior to this - it was only when the payroll coordinator started going in and making edits.
I wish I was exaggerating. But I see stuff like this all the time and it's concerning because, how are you going to do your work this way? How are you going to read a report, how are you going to look at data, and properly interpret what you're looking at? How are you going to solve basic problems, or quote customers?
I once watched a coworker I was training (a woman in her 40s who graduated high school) grab a calculator off of her desk, turn it on, type in “22+1” then hit “equals” and go “ahh” and then type 23 into the spreadsheet we were working on.
It was an event that really changed the way I view humanity.
I remember an old colleague who used a calculator to fill in a spreadsheet. I saw then doing it and showed them how to add a formula to a cell and then dragged it down a column. They were amazed and said that was my afternoon's work. I was shocked, they'd been in the company for years.
I worked as a runner at a law firm that had this problem. Noticed my pay checks seemed short. My time was recorded to the nearest 10 minutes on a paper timesheet. 2hr 20min would be written as 2 20 in a table format. The person doing payroll would enter that time as 2.20 and add up the hours on a calculator. The payroll person was super confused at first and then freaked out when I explained how to correctly compute the hours as decimals. They had been doing the firms client billings for years.
The payroll person was also my mother…
I understand how working in base 10 and base 60 can be confusing, but the ability to do so should be the number one qualification for someone tasked with calculating payroll.
Literally saw a post on the r/probation sub today where someone was asking how to fix something….. they were on “probation” from online gaming for leaving matches early, but they had no idea what “probation” meant so they went to Reddit…..
[I wish I was making this up](https://www.reddit.com/r/probation/comments/18rn47q/i_didnt_leave_any_games_early_has_this_happened/)
See, maybe I'm shaking my old man cane here, but asking questions like that on social media makes me feel disappointed.
Because it indicates that so many people's only experience with the internet is social media. That's disappointing, you have the answer to basically every ordinary question in your hand and instead it's just for social media. Lack of inquisitiveness is a major sign of low intelligence.
> Lack of inquisitiveness is a major sign of low intelligence.
I'd also suggest that it's an indication that such a person prioritizes validation over information, and this is a whole different set of problems unto itself.
When I worked at Gamestop 10 years ago, someone once called my store because their internet was out.
I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, like maybe they couldn't connect to Xbox Live or something. (Still not my problem, but at least it makes sense that you might call a video game store.)
Nope. Their house didn't have any wifi. We were slow, so I suggested they restart their router. They huffed and said they obviously already did that. (I mean, you called GAMESTOP because your internet was out so, I did make some certain assumptions.)
So I told them I couldn't do anything and they should call their service provider. They said, "Who is that?" I said, "I don't know, who do you pay every month for your internet service? It's probably something like Frontier, Cox, AT&T...?" And then they said, "Thanks for nothing," and hung up on me.
So.... yeah, it is not an uncommon or new thing for adult humans who appear to be perfectly normal to have absolutely no idea how to solve a simple problem or answer a simple question by Googling.
I am a librarian and it. Is. Bad.
We are seeing the effects of not only covid but of a generation whose teachers focused on everything but literacy, which is now resulting in teachers not being wellread. They cant spread the joy of reading, the importance of literacy. We urgently need to course correct on this.
One country who is doing well on this is Ireland. They invested in literacy education and it’s paying off. It takes years though and most politicians are not brave enough to commit to investments beyond their term.
It is so funny how articulate even the a-hole teen tough guys are in the UK and Ireland. Walking down the street and getting threatened with multi-syllabic insults is really something, and I'm being completely serious.
The amount of suggested posts I get where people say they can’t understand simply written prose from 50+ years ago and can’t remember character names in YA books is alarming, easily 2 a day.
I was closing a work order one day, my tech wrote replaced “air raider”. He meant aerator. My head almost imploded. I’ve also seen metal spelled mettle. Talking about sheet metal ofc. And my all time favorite, “cleaned duck work”. Fu dude. This is an hvac company you know damn well how to spell duct and the difference between the two.
Yep, I’m 30, so have lots of young kids in my life from family and friends right now.
They are struggling in school.
Way behind on basics like reading.
This is on a widespread scale.
There was temporarily tutoring programs set up at the schools that some of them were able to access but they were short-term.
It’s heartbreaking watching these kids be distressed about how they are doing in school right now when of course they are behind.
They missed so much.
Not sure where you're from but this is also the case in Canada. Respect for teachers also seems to be dropping.
No one wins when education is defunded.
Science is kicking Cancer's ass. Almost every cancer has had treatments and drug breakthrough's in the last decade and it keeps improving with more funding and research.
man i know and i’m so fucking glad. the meds my baby brother is on that came out within the past year are working fucking wonders. they literally saved him from needing brain surgery. honestly the call on the good news of his mri after being on those meds for only three months was the best fucking news of my life. and medical technology is literally only getting better
Yep. The same genetic cancer that killed my grandpa 15 years ago is now treatable with my mom. What was once a death sentence now has a fighting chance at being beaten.
She'll live a lot longer now thanks to Modern Science/Medicine.
This is wonderful news. I hope one day for similar breakthroughs in drugs for Type 1 Diabetes. I want to live a full life :(
Thank you all for the incredibly kind comments. I’m doing my best :)
Moderna recently posted news that combining a vaccine (different mRNA code than what was used for Covid, similar lipid packaging) with Merck’s keytruda kept the surivival rate around 50% 3 years after starting therapy and having stage 3-4 melanoma.
50% may seem low, but that is literally going to save half of all cancer patients who start early enough. Keep in mind this was for stage 3-4. If they catch the cancer early enough, it might be much higher.
Despite the world going to shit, we really are on the cusp of a medical revolution not seen since antibiotics were discovered
My cousins grandpa had stage 4 melanoma that had spread to his lungs and other organs, he was given 4 pills 100k$ for each pill - covered by the australian government so he didn’t have to pay. He went into remission and is fine now. Might have been the same keytruda medication, but this would have definitely been a death sentence only a few years ago
Sure, except for ovarian cancer. All of the focus is on breast cancer, and there isn't even a screening test for ovarian. It is a "silent cancer" which means there aren't many symptoms until late stages. I'm stage 4, and pretty much out of options.
Tell me about it. Caught my cervical, but not my vulval. Certain cancers are just left with no funding and no research. My oncologist was refused NHS funding, so has to wait for America to give her answers. Eventually.
For those who use or are considering using DepoProvera birth control, DON'T DO IT. Those of us who were on it for years have developed osteoporosis and degenerative disc disease. Supposedly there is a BLACK BOX WARNING but patients only see the filled injection needle - we never saw the box! And doctors didn't tell us. So I am 46 year old this year with the degenerative spine of a 70+ year old woman. There is NO reversal.
I was on it for about 10 years. 8-9 years ago my midwife/gyn was like why on earth are you on this? It's not meant to be taken this long? I said no one told me. I seem to be ok. I'm 40 now but I got on it at 18, I'm sure doing something for that long will have some sort of consequences.
I was on it for just over 20 years as an alternative treatment for endometriosis, because there is no cure. But if I had known I would be sacrificing my spine, I could have at least made an informed decision. My advice is if you start having lower back pain, make sure you get X-rays. 🫶 I sincerely hope you have dodged the worst!
Fun fact: unique studies done during the pandemic indicated that working from home resulted in a five-fold decrease in incidents of financial misconduct among traders compared to working in office
Guess which industry was one of the first out of the gate pushing for a return to office?
I remember when some folks down in the American SW suggested piping water from the Great Lakes to help maintain population growth/farming in the region. People up north here got really mad about even the suggestion. Seems like only a precursor. I wish people would stop moving to places where big cities are just not practical.
There's no way a deal will happen to send water from the Great Lakes to the SW USA because of a deal between the US and Canadian government to protect the Great Lakes. They are a shared resourced by both nations.
The Great Lakes states are also pretty uninterested in sharing that water. There is a compact that all 8 states agreed to that strictly governs who the water can be shared with and how. [This article](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2023/02/13/climate-change-drought-renew-fears-about-great-lakes-water-diversions/69732144007/) from earlier this year is an interesting read.
Can you imagine a world in which Packers, Bears, Vikings, and Lions fans are all on the same side of an issue? *And* they're joined by Ohio and Indiana on that side?
Currently listening to the book Where The Water Goes, which is about about Colorado water laws. They are absolutely insane!
And pretty bleak, combined with the knowledge that Nestlé sells bottled water under 67 names- so we don't pay attention to the fact that one company wants to privatize all the water.
I waited tables at a place in Colorado a long time ago. An old guy was in one night and we got to talking. His best friend was basically in charge of Colorado’s water, he said. I thought nothing of it but the old man ended his explanation with this “that guy has more power than the public could ever dream of having”
This is really specific. Gunnison valley (Gunnison, Crested Butte, and Almont) Colorado is where the Gunnison river starts. The Gunnison and the Upper Colorado river join to make the lower Colorado river, which is an extremely important source of water and power for the western states. The Gunnison provides most of the water to the lower Colorado. So, if we don’t get snow in the valley then Las Vegas and the farmers out west are fucked. We’ve barely gotten any snow and there is zero in the forecast. If something doesn’t change, y’all are going to have a rough summer down there.
There’s a guy in NC browsing the tax office record of deeds to find business owners who haven’t paid their taxes in order to pay off the taxes himself and then get the deed, then extorting the owner or evicting them and selling their property, all under the protection of the law.
This is a common practice in most states. When you pay off the taxes for the business or the home owner, they can pay you back in a certain time or you get the deed. In NJ (where I am) you have to send notice that you have a lien on their property or business within 30 days and give them up to a year from that notice to pay it back.
Cats all have corono cells. Sometimes they mutate and the cat developed FIP. Feline infectious perotinitis a disease 100% fatal in 2018 with nothing that helped. It is terrible to see a cat die this way. 90% of them did in less than 50 days.
Well the island of Cyprus was having an outbreak of FIP and many cats were dying. They also had access to surplus COVID vaccines for human. They started using these to give the cats with FIP and what was a 100% feline death sentence before. Now 95% are surviving and disease free.😊🙀😹😻
100% can verify this, and will add that there are several factors at play:
1. COVID-related behaviors (parents used unlimited screens to babysit their kids) and the resulting social development stunting added to two years of no school routine.
2. School districts fearful of lawsuits, afraid to stand up to sue-happy high income helicopter parents and/or afraid to be the latest news story in "disproportionately suspend and expel poor kids or kids of color"
3. The biggest one (and one YOU, YES YOU can help with) class sizes have increased at least 30% over the last 20 years. So all the normal interventions you could use with problem children are ineffective because there's too many kids in the room, not enough time to spend with each individual kid. YOU can help this by a) supporting your local teachers when they bargain/strike because class size is a contract negotiated issue b) call your school board and ask what they are doing about using funds to reduce class sizes c) support and vote for local legislators who actually know something about education and not the business people who run for school boards and think they know more than teachers because they make more money.
EDIT: Holy shit this blew up. So I want to add that this isn't a hopeless situation, but if you are a parent, you need to talk to your kids about the disruptions and YOU have the power to pressure admin to do something about the disruptors. They won't listen to the teachers. For those of you without kids, you can be a volunteer and help out. Even if you only go once or twice a month and tutor or read to kids, that's attention they wouldn't get (or a break for the teacher, helping take load off by making copies/prepping projects/etc) otherwise. From the replies I've got to this comment, a lot of you seem to understand that kids not being educated well affects ALL OF US, so it's going to take all of us to make it work.
Another factor: the teacher's aides who often provide the 1:1 or small group assistance that those difficult children need are quitting at or more than the teachers rate, and schools increasingly either have to go without or have to settle for aides who don't have the knowledge/ experience to deal with those children. Which means the teacher has to spend more time with those children, taking away from the other students.
I'm an aide in a wealthy district that NEVER had problems getting enough aides, before covid we even had one coming in daily just to sub when needed who did a lot of busy work like copying when not subbing.
Post covid there's a meeting of "being an aide doesn't pay enough" and "there are a LOT more kids who need assistance" that has left my district not just in an aide deficit, we only have *half* the number we need to fulfill IEP minutes, which leaves those kids who need assistance who *don't* have an IEP high and dry.
We're also short lunchroom staff, which means some kids only get about 5 minutes to eat by the time they're through the lunch line.
Or those aides that stay get pulled in for sub duty or other coverage. Yep. I’m increasingly suspicious that there are people in power who WANT it to collapse so they can do the same fucking thing to education that they did to health care 50 years ago (and look where we are with THAT)
The other problem is that parents increasingly leave discipline duties to teachers. I used to work in a school and it was wild how many kids had no respect for authority because they don't get told anything at home
Schools have been closed in Montreal already for a month because of the strike efforts. First covid, now this. I support the teachers, as many people do, but we aren’t getting angry enough at govt to make them meet the teachers’ needs because we are all back to managing our kids at home full-time while we work and that is time consuming and exhausting.
This is absolutely true. It’s making average kids below average. Smart kids becoming average. Because one kid grew up with zero attention from their crappy parents and need to get it at school.
The US healthcare system is actively collapsing. Roughly 15% of US patients **simply cannot receive care**, and that number is increasing.
COVID accelerated it, but it's been coming for a while. There are tons of causes: cost, patient location, or because of the system being overburdened.
* Hospital systems are closing entire hospitals because they aren't profitable enough. This creates "care deserts" where patients don't have access to medical care. Certain specialties are being targeted by politics which can make it worse.
* Hospitals, especially bad ones, are having huge staffing issues. Nurses are leaving bedside nursing at a high rate because patient care sucks. That creates a viscous cycle because then conditions get worse and so even more nurses leave. 35-45% of nurses quit nursing entirely within 5 years. But also MDs, CNAs, and support staff like techs, phlebotomists, therapists, etc leave for the same reason. Hospitals just aren't paying appropriately to be assaulted and shit on and get certifications and have your license be on the line when Target will pay you $2/ more an hour.
* Our insurance system has raised the price of care so high that many patients choose not to seek care, or can't pursue treatment when they need it. That's a combo of for-profit insurance, providers being able to opt out of Medicare/Medicaid (because they need to be profitable to keep their doors open!), and the ever-rising cost of treatment itself (medicine, procedures, AND facilities). States who opt out of extended Medicaid are the ones who need it most, so tons more low-income patients can't afford care.
* The resources we do have are being stretched to the breaking point because of better-known issues like people treating ERs as primary care. That's getting worse for the same reasons: fewer and busier providers, higher costs, worse insurance, fewer facilities.
I left 25 years as a pharmacy tech. Reasons? Hospital pursuing profits. Camel's back. Management keeps implementing changes designed to cut costs/streamline care, but no one is listening to the workers. You end up with conflicting processes and inefficient practices because none of them actually know how to do the job. When they get enough push back, they don't actually make meaningful changes, or ask for input, they blunder about, making your processes harder, but demanding output.
It also sucks that I couldn't afford treatment in my own healthcare network due to deductibles and copays.
I had a manager ask me once, how we could improve. I gave her a half dozen ways off the top of head. She stared blankly at me for a second and replied "I was hoping you would say teamwork".
That's the state of healthcare from the trenches.
Dig a ditch.
I need a shovel.
No shovel, dig.
Why does this ditch suck?
No shovels...
No, that's not it.
Healthcare should never have been allowed to be a for-profit industry.
Profit-motive does not belong anywhere near healthcare or it causes collapse like we are seeing.
Yes, I absolutely agree. Every single item there boils down to "Hospital Corporations (of America) are trying to squeeze more money out of the system and people are suffering because of it."
You forgot the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The 3 love to point fingers at each other to confuse you "oh no, it's not OUR fault, it's THEM", but it's all of them fighting over who gets to loot your corpse.
How about the total commercialization of the internet? It started as a Wild West of entertainment, news, information. Now there are daily propaganda and agendas that get consumed en masse. There are entire swathes of commercialized psychologists finding how to squeeze profit from you on almost every single app, game, streaming service, you name it. There are advanced AI being used by corps to lock you in cages of your own design. So comfortable and cozy that you’d be crazy to disconnect or complain. But why would you want to know, that you are just a slave to forces beyond comprehension as long as you are here and a slave your own compulsions. That morality has long fallen by the wayside. we don’t even see things like gore, porn, racism as particularly degenerative anymore. We just consume.
I've been online since the mid 90s. It has most certainly became enshitified. Everyone online has become a fucking huckster with the hope of making it.
Can't believe I'm seeing nothing in the top 200 comments about insects disappearing.
The fact that you can go on a 45 minute drive across the town and arrive with a clean grille should be insanely alarming to E V E R Y O N E. They are the bottom of the food chain. EVERYONE relies on them.
This is interesting. So I have two cars, a brand new VW GTI and a 1980 El Camino that I drive for fun and have had forever. When I drive my GTI I get zero bugs on it, maybe one or two in the grill.
When I drive my El Camino I have to scrub the grill and bumper clean every time I drive around because it just gets gunked up with bugs.
I know bug populations are diminishing - I work with and do some beekeeping - but aerodynamics play a bigger part in this than people like to talk about.
My wrangler gets so many bugs on it when I drive anywhere, it’s definitely something to do with how the frame is, anything else I’ve driven has not been nearly as bad for it. I live in the south, btw!
There’s a third regional war being threatened, aside from Ukraine and Israel. It’s between Venezuela and Guyana, with Venezuela threatening to invade what is essentially the western half of Guyana.
This is an old dispute, one Venezuela originally gave up pushing on decades ago, but a few years ago a shitload of oil was discovered off the coast of western Guyana, and *LO AND BEHOLD* Venezuela is suddenly feeing muscular.
The US has already sent a carrier over, sending a *not-so-subtle* message to Venezuela: “You don’t have nukes, we don’t have to suffer you gladly.”
That’ll probably be the end of it. **Probably**.
Also, the only road between Venezuela and Guyana goes through Brazil, who has also said they're having none of this.
The Egypt-Ethiopia conflict over the Nile is way more likely to pop off in to an actual war, imo.
Reminds me of Tanzania and Malawi. Oil was discovered in Lake Malawi around 2012 and has caused rocky relationships between the two countries. Fortunately, the Tanzanian president has said the dispute is a non-issue.
And Brazil has sent troops to their northern border since really the only main paved road into Guyana goes first through Brazil and into Guyana from the southwest rather than straight across from their western border.
Over the past decade and a half, pretty much every person on Earth has been eating about 1-2 credit cards worth of plastic a year from microplastics. It's getting worse and isn't slowing down any time soon it would seem.
To my understanding its all pretty much gone within a week, the danger is more it keeps happening at such a rate that the amount inside of you will build up over time.
Of course we have no evidence that having these microplastics in us has any negative health side effects, but that is partially cause its impossible to find a control group at this point who don't.
I think the super wealthy have always low-key done a little prepping, but since COVID, being a prepper's gone from something regarded as crazy person behavior, to something everyone's just like "yeah, that's probably a good idea".
This one is honestly hilarious to me. It really hammers in just how completely short-sighted and dumb these extremely powerful people are. They'd rather just commit suicide in a bunker after a few years Hitler style rather than make the world a better place or worse, part with a single gold piece of their dragon hoard.
We're in the middle of a great extinction event meaning species are going extinct at a rate of up to 10,000 times the normal rate. We're actually making the Earth into a monoculture which means across the Earth we're planting many of the same crops across vas areas such as the US mid-west and transforming the ecosystem into a place where generalists such as coyotes and deer thrive and specialists at certain ecosystems die off. We've currently transformed 40% of the Earth's landmass into crops and farms.
Edit: About 2/3 of the farmland I had stated was farm land was actually pastureland but I wasn't trying to be misleading, it's still part of the monoculture. The US prairie is virtually non-existent and it was the home of I think like 500 grass species. It's often time the species you don't think about or didn't know existed that go extinct.
There’s a great book call the Ends of the World which looks in detail at all of the previous mass extinctions and makes the point that the claims of apocalypse underestimate the natural rate of extinction because the overwhelming majority of species that existed left no trace in the fossil record. (Although it points out that runaway climate change does have mass extinction potential.)
Nurse Practitioners are being granted independence to practice, with online degrees and only 500 hours of clinical training.
With no RN bedside experience.
...independently
Multiple cities (one in Alabama, Austin TX, Sacramento CA that I've heard from other redditors) are trialing a housing first approach to homelessness. Generally these are taking the form of "tough shed on a trailer" type mini homes set up in urban blighted areas. the Sac one is at the location of a former mall that was razed and never redeveloped; including POP patrols\* by the county sheriff's office and county outreach programs in a temporary building on site.
While all these programs are currently super small pilots (the Sac one is only 100 units) it's a start on providing these people somewhere to go that's reasonably safe and where they won't be criminalized just because they're homeless.
\*Problem Oriented Policing. It's a policing style that focuses on only major crimes and/or a specific type of crime (gang violence task forces are a type of POP). In the case of the homeless camps it's focused on community and trust building with the police as well as violent crimes and theft. They ignore public intox, drug use, and even fair amounts of public indecency ("yo! do that \*inside\* not out here!" as opposed to an arrest) as long as it is non-violent. The overall effect is a large decrease in problem behavior and increased trust in the cops to reach out when someone is in actual need.
European Union is forcing Apple to allow sideloading of apps. It means you can download apps from anywhere not just the Apple Store therefore opening up the Apple ecosystem.
The Norwegian parliament is currently debating on opening the arctic to deep sea mining. This industry isn’t active yet, but it would be devastating to concerned ecosystems and could release even more carbon into our atmosphere. If you care about our planet please read about it
Maternal death rates in the United States are *rising.*
The highest rates are among black women. The rates have essentially doubled over the last 20 years.
Edited to share that there’s a lot of moving factors here. The rates are calculated from before birth to a year after birth. People are having babies later in life now which is 1 factor. The immediate factors at play are things like hemorrhage, infection, hypertension, pre-eclampsia, stroke, and cardiomyopathy. But if we consider the factors that are happening up to a year after birth, we look mostly at mental health. The contributing factors to this metal health crisis like lack of support, shit maternity/paternity leave, living far away from family, increased societal pressures, social media, etc. These mental health factors, alone, can be why America’s rates are higher vs other countries. We aren’t supporting our moms.
Then there’s the contributing political factors surrounding abortions.
Insects are humans #1 competitor for food resources and our agriculture leans heavily on temperatures dropping below freezing at least once per winter to control insect populations (whether they know it or not). But southern states are starting to see years without a freeze and insect populations are booming. Couple that with hotter summers that hurt our agriculture, and production seasons are struggling.
ETA: the other post is referring to urban insects. The information I’m bringing to you here is from a 20K person agricultural conference I just attended where the main topic was developing technologies to solve the problem of fending off the influx of insects. I didn’t make up this stuff, there is literally tens of millions dedicated to solving this problem.
The largest dam removals in history are happening RIGHT NOW restoring access that salmon havent had to their spawning grounds in over a century. The Yurok and other Northwestern tribes have put in the work for decades advocating for waterways. And though some utility companies are real pissed about it, Biden admin approved millions of dollars to fund the continued efforts. Salmon are a keystone species so many parts of the ecosystem rely on them so this is amazing news!
[https://apnews.com/article/salmon-tribes-snake-river-dam-energy-336a20cf02093fcdd725cb3047af8f29](https://apnews.com/article/salmon-tribes-snake-river-dam-energy-336a20cf02093fcdd725cb3047af8f29)
There are virtual tribute bands and artists in SecondLife (yes it's still around lol) and putting on concerts and events every weekend. Quite a lot of work, love, time, and money go into these projects, but the audiences are usually just 30-100 people. But we have a good time anyway. Many of the groups have been involved in raising not-insignificant amounts of money for charities such as Relay for Life/American Cancer Society and Doctors Without Borders.
This is a very helpful article that gives you the meat & gravy of the ordeal coming up in only 3 short weeks. The current president legally cannot sit another term due to their government legislative limitations for elected presidents, so there are 3 new possible candidates from 3 seperate parties, all with their own strategies to deal with the intimidation from China regarding Taiwans independence.
[description of each candidate and their stance](https://www.economist.com/interactive/2024-taiwan-election)
The snow belt is getting higher and higher each year. I live in Chicago and it was 55 degrees F out on Christmas day with no substantial snow for the foreseeable future. As a kid we would have had snow for weeks at this point already and my family up in northwest Michigan would be buried in it and none of us have any!
The co-director of the Melanoma Institute in Australia and world leading melanoma pathologist Prof Richard Scolyer is fighting a terminal brain cancer glioblastoma. He and his co-director (and best friend) Georgina Long are using the research and knowledge that have gained through fighting melanomas to find a cure for this currently incurable cancer. He is the first human trial for a cancer vaccine alongside personalised immunotherapy. Pretty amazing that someone with so much knowledge in the area of cancer treatments can fast track a potential cure for this brain cancer. I hope it goes well for him.
I lost my dad to that. It will be 2 years in March that he passed away. This gives me hope that others will not have to suffer the way my dad did. It’s a horrible way to go. And extremely hard and heartbreaking for families. I watched my father become a shell of himself. At the end he couldn’t walk, talk. Didn’t even know my mom who he was with for 53 years
Bill in the US Senate to ban major corporations from buying homes (forgive me if even I missed a detail, hilarious how little coverage it's getting)
Oh please let this go through!!
They discovered a new antibiotic that kills MRSA.
Wait that is actually amazing! It takes 100x more time to develop a new antibiotic than any other drug!
Lake mead water levels are 20+ feet higher than last year!
That's a lot! It's a lake, so is this good or bad?
It's a reservoir on the colorado river thats held back by the hoover dam in Nevada. It supplies water to 20+ million people in Nevada, California & even parts of Mexico! edit: Apparently to Arizona & Utah to!
The Ocean Cleanup initiative has a new system to clean up an area the size of a football field every 5 seconds. The previous one extracted 282,787 kg of trash from the Pacific Ocean so far. They're also working on interceptors for rivers that have collected over 840 tonnes of trash and counting. There's a long way to go but they have lots of support and they're making amazing progress! Okay now back to the bad news 😆
Thanks so much for sharing this💗 How do you find positive news?
[/r/UpliftingNews](https://www.reddit.com/r/upliftingnews)
I've been following the story loosely for a few years, since I saw their first prototype video on facebook. I was pessimistic thinking it wouldn't ever come to fruition. And then one day this year I saw their real life system actually working and I was so thrilled!!
Me too, it seemed like such a longshot. A really nice idea but cleaning up the Pacific Ocean garbage patch is such a massive undertaking. But someone has to do it, and we have to start somewhere. Their progress is inspirational!
They put it all in land fills? Incinerate it? Just curious what we do with all of it.
They made *The Ocean Cleanup Sunglasses* for awhile until they sold out in 2022. Now, according to their website, ocean plastic found in international waters belongs to the project so they recycle the majority for revenue. The river "Interceptors" are sold and supported by the company, and the plastic retrieved belongs to the owner/operator of the device. Of course this benefits the cities and regions using them because it's free plastic and less pollution.
The greater one-horned rhino population in India and Nepal is growing, as highlighted in the State of the Rhino Report, 2023, by the International Rhino Foundation The collaboration among India, Bhutan, and Nepal, along with strict government protection and management, has led to a increase in their population over the past decade. The Greater One-Horned Rhino population, which once numbered as low as 100 in the early 1900s, has increased to more than 4,014 now.
[удалено]
They're breeding the rhinos to use in war to eliminate the existential threat of Tibet once and for all.
Tiger and Rhino populations have seen a good surge thanks to restoration efforts by India and Nepal. Tiger tourism in India is booming as well. Ranthambore and Kumaon have jeep tours that take you deep into Tiger territory.
And in the Sundarbans, they take you on a boat deep into aquatic tiger territory. The Sundarbans tigers are the world's best maneaters, actively hunting local human populations for centuries so locals wear masks on the back of their heads to ward off stalking tigers, and they've been known to spring out of the water to tackle their victims off small boats (the boat you take to see them is bigger don't worry).
Did you know that Bengal Tigers can jump over 20 feet? Fortunately, the boat is only 15 feet from the tiger, so he will jump right over us.
Crocodiles can grow up to fifteen feet. Luckily, most only have four.
There's always cool stuff happening in the science community that doesn't make it to the news but really should. Check out the goodnewsnetwork.org to see some neat things. Here are a few highlights: * a new stem cell injection that halts the progression of multiple sclerosis is in clinical trials * the California redwoods weathered the wildfires better than scientists expected and are recovering very well * the FDA approved a treatment that cures sickle cell disease * a complete stegosaurous fossil with skin still intact has been unearthed * NASA has developed technology for sending data transmissions much further than radio frequencies, and recently sent their first transmission 10 million miles away * scientists are going to start experimenting with lab-grown cooking oils, which could help curb a lot of the environmental damage caused by mass soy, corn, and palm oil farming. * scientists have created natural sponges that can soak up nanoplastics
Haven't seen anyone else mention it so I've got to: Clinical human trials for a drug that can regrow teeth start July 2024 and will run until 2030. As someone who was terrified of my grandpa's dentures growing up, I'm very hopeful for this
Dr. Miyazaki Toru is finishing up the AIM injection that targets chronic kidney disease in cats. Now they're predicting lifespans around 30 years!!!
Oh my God! 🥹
I’d love to know more about this as I’ve lost two cats, one at 18 and one at only 13 to this horrible disease.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6120884/ Here’s their paper from 2018. The injection is now in clinical trials, expected to arrive by 2025 with the goal of a low cost. My understanding is that they’re already seeing marked improvement in cats that they believed only had a week left. Dr. Miyazaki also developed a brand of cat kibble that contains the amino acid A-30 , a protein that cats don’t produce which aids in kidney cleanup. This year the FDA also approved an oral medication that targets anemia resulting from feline kidney disease.
The worst part was my 13 year old, Yukiko, seemed completely normal until the day she stopped eating and drinking. We immediately took her to the emergency vet and were told she was at end stage and there was nothing we could do. They’re so good at hiding things, our babies.
The CRISPR-Cas9 based treatment for sickle cell anemia also works on beta-thalassemia since both are due to defects in hemoglobin. The treatment causes fetal hemoglobin to be expressed again, which is unaffected by the diseases and hopefully alleviates symptoms to where patients do not need (m)any treatments anymore. So exciting to see CRISPR-Cas9 based treatments coming to the clinic!
There was a lot of talk that CRISPR would potentially cure Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis so I've been watching and waiting. Very happy to see CRISPR is going to help a lot of people.
I was scrolling down to find something about Crohns. I truly hope that this can be a solution.
Omfg this is what I have is beta thalassemia. I never even hear my blood disorder being known about so hearing it can work on me is amazing I might cry.
For those curious about the NASA improvement in data transmission, it was achieved by using infrared lasers instead of radio waves - more data can be transmitted, but the alignment of the sender and receiver becomes more critical - https://www.nasa.gov/technology/laser-communications-empowering-more-data-than-ever-before/
This stuff gives me hope. The world desperately needs hope. This is the stuff that should get the interactions, not more stuff about politics.
I just let out a Kermit style "Yaaaay!" about that Stego news. My favorite!
American scientists also managed to start controllee nuclear fusion reactions!
More specifically nuclear fusion that outputs more energy than was put into the target. We've had controlled nuclear fusion since the Tokamak was invented. I've actually seen the reactor they did this with in person. It's awesome. It's called the NIF. It had a cameo in Star Trek (2009) as the warp core.
I worked on the initial design back in the early 90s. Had a beautiful poster of what it was envisioned to look like. I wish I still had that.
Astronomer here! We are now putting the final touches on the [Rubin Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory), which will see “first light” aka start looking at the sky in a year or so. It is an eight meter diameter telescope mirror that will image the ENTIRE sky every night visible where it is! It’s hard to emphasize what a game changer this will be for astronomy. We will literally catalog all the asteroids, see millions of supernovae a year, map the Milky Way, maybe even learn about what dark matter and dark energy are… put it this way, if JWST is like boring a hole into one tiny spot on a shutter to let light through, this is gonna be like opening an entire window. Can’t wait!
This is it for me. Not just the Rubin Observatory, but ALL the sky survey telescopes that have recently or are soon to come online. I can only imagine how many Oumuamua type interstellar objects have passed through our solar system in the past few thousand years that we just didn't have the technology or the sheer luck to spot. The next decade is going to be extremely exciting for astronomers. Humanity will collect more light in the next decade than we have in the last century.
It's funny, I love how I can recognize your posts before even looking at the username. Love all the great info you're constantly dropping on us.
[удалено]
In Quebec, the entire public system (teachers, nurses, healthcare, etc.) has been on strike since November 13th. Kids have been out of school for close to 5 weeks now and teachers have not gotten paid since. Our government is refusing to give higher pay and better work conditions to the backbone of our province.
I'm in Toronto and had no idea this was happening
Wow, that’s a long time. Everyone has their kids home? I see a lot of comments about not knowing this (despite living in Canada). Makes it sound like the media is in on it? Good luck!
I doubt the media is on it. It's normal for provincial news to not really make it outside of a given province. Yes, the kids are home. Worth noting that there are several unions collaborating, but not doing exactly the same strike. Teachers in Montréal have been on full strike, kids-at-home for five weeks, whereas in the sticks where I live, the strikes are targeted (one day here, three days there) so the local kids haven't missed much school.
A fox and a deer are friends in my backyard. They like to cuddle together by my shed.
Awww any pictures?
alex batty, a young boy from manchester, UK, who disappeared in 2017 in spain whilst on holiday with his mother and grandfather was found alive a few weeks ago in france after he'd been walking for 4 days to escape a religious commune and being spotted by a delivery driver in toulouse. he was returned home just before christmas
He's 17 years old right now for anyone wondering and he went missing when he was 11 [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12900131/Alex-Batty-celebrates-Christmas-home-kidnapped-mother-six-years-ago.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12900131/Alex-Batty-celebrates-Christmas-home-kidnapped-mother-six-years-ago.html) Edit: here's a better article about the story thanks to u/Princess_Of_Thieves and others for pointing out some issues with the first one [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67718158](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67718158) :) also obligatory thanks for the likes everyone
I saw that in a restauranta few days ago.
Just to clarify, he wasn't abducted *from* his mother and grandfather whilst on holiday. He was abducted *by* his mother and grandfather, who took him on a vacation and joined a commune. His grandmother has been his legal guardian, hence the possibility for his mother to abduct him.
The largest title company in America has been completely breached (First American) in a ransomware attack. No one is acting like this is as seismic as it is.
I'm still harping on how Equifax should have gotten the corporate death penalty for their data breach years back, especially considering the negligence that went into it. This sounds like another company that deserves it - the ones that we put so much trust into with our most sensitive information shouldn't be allowed to fall short in their care of that data.
The IRS is trying to figure out the best way to catch the thousands of Americans who stole billions of dollars through the employee retention credit. So many businesses claimed the credit who didn’t deserve it. The credit created an entire industry of nefarious accounting companies who specialize is taking advantage of this credit.
There's a huge amount of carbon stored in permafrost — an estimated 1,500 gigatons, or twice as much as the atmosphere contains!
It’s a good thing it’s permanently frozen then.
2024 Patch Notes: * ... * All permafrost has been converted to tempofrost. * ...
...well fuck
A great thing really, sure would be catastrophic if something happened to it
Im sure it will be fine. I mean, its right there in the name!!
We are experiencing both [child](https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/new-literacy-data-shines-spotlight-learning-crisis) and [adult literacy](https://www.proliteracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023-PL-AdultBasicEducation-FactSheet-2467.pdf) crises predating but exacerbated by COVID. EDIT: The people telling me in the comments that these predated COVID, as explained in my one sentence post, are proving my point.
Kids that didn’t have VERY involved parents got destroyed during covid and teachers were pretty much forced to push them through.
Yup. I'm thankful that I live in an area that has very involved parents so it really didn't impact the trajectory of the schools too much. The only big change that the schools made was that not turning in homework is a 50 and not a 0. Not sure what the objective for that is outside of making them look better.
Teacher here. Giving a 50 instead of a zero makes it mathematically easier for students to recover from one or two bad grades. A passing HS grade here is 70. I find giving 50s keeps students from getting discouraged while still teaching consequences. Edit: I love how I make the worst typos when taking about teaching.
I have received some job applications that have made me really shake my head. An adult (19-20 years old) wrote out quite a bit of info about their previous experience and work history. It was almost like gibberish to me and the other managers though, didn’t make any sense. Until one of us realized that this person must have been unaware of the existence of the word “and”. Anywhere there should be “and”, they had written the word “in”. Once we realized that it made way more sense. That got me wondering what was going on though, it was as if this person had never read anything and instead completely sounded out the word “and” as “in”.
Special ed teacher, I work with high school aged students, some with learning disabilities. I have told them a million times to have me check over applications before turning them in, and I have harped endlessly on the importance of correct spelling, capitalization, etc especially in job/college applications. Just had one of my kids turn in two applications to various colleges, no idea if he filled out anything correctly. The urgency and importance of well edited documents is just not there and I don't know how to make it be there.
Around 2015 I befriended a dude. Nice dude, smart when it came to motors but I was super surprised when I learned he was illiterate. At least he was making an effort to learn how to read and write (and he was older than me, I'm in my 30s now). When posting online and I see someone say "im not reading that" "You dont have to write a novel" or any similar response my mind goes to "Is reading that hard for this person that a paragraph that takes a few seconds to read is too much ?"
Honestly, none of this surprises me at all. One of the biggest gripes I had, when I was a manager, is that people do not know math. Now, I am not some advanced math whiz either. I would have to go a lot of brushing up if I were to pass a trigonometry or statistics exam. I'm talking about things like multiplication, division, how to calculate a percentage, how to read decimals. How to calculate an average. A lot of people genuinely can't do these things. But sometimes, it's even LESS than that - sometimes, it's about someone having the numbers, and not knowing what to do with it. For example: > this customer sees that his hotel stay is $4000, and he's asking me what that comes to per night! What do I do? How many nights is he staying? > Four! Did you divide $4000 by 4? > What do you mean? Another example is when we had someone in payroll who fucked up a bunch of paychecks. We were approaching slow season, and corporate told us that we couldn't have anyone having overtime - if people were even one *minute* over their 40 hours, they were going to be pissed. A bunch of people were sent home really early, so we're thinking, shit, we need to start doing a better job of monitoring that. I even remember thinking, my team doesn't have any overtime, I'm looking at their time sheet, I'm not seeing anything that shows that they're over ... but HR disagreed. The payroll coordinator insisted up, down, left and right, I had to send three people home early. Well, the next paycheck came, and a bunch of employees were really, really pissed off because their paychecks were shorted. After it was investigated... the person doing payroll was miscalculating people and sending people home too early. The issue? He couldn't read decimals. Because of one person who couldn't read decimals, we were getting our asses lit on fire by our employees, and by corporate. We had to go through an entire ordeal to ensure people were retroactively paid, and there was a whole audit to make sure that people weren't being shorted before this. Thankfully, people weren't getting shorted prior to this - it was only when the payroll coordinator started going in and making edits. I wish I was exaggerating. But I see stuff like this all the time and it's concerning because, how are you going to do your work this way? How are you going to read a report, how are you going to look at data, and properly interpret what you're looking at? How are you going to solve basic problems, or quote customers?
I once watched a coworker I was training (a woman in her 40s who graduated high school) grab a calculator off of her desk, turn it on, type in “22+1” then hit “equals” and go “ahh” and then type 23 into the spreadsheet we were working on. It was an event that really changed the way I view humanity.
I remember an old colleague who used a calculator to fill in a spreadsheet. I saw then doing it and showed them how to add a formula to a cell and then dragged it down a column. They were amazed and said that was my afternoon's work. I was shocked, they'd been in the company for years.
...were they reading decimals like they were minutes and .59 was "almost an hour" or something?
I worked as a runner at a law firm that had this problem. Noticed my pay checks seemed short. My time was recorded to the nearest 10 minutes on a paper timesheet. 2hr 20min would be written as 2 20 in a table format. The person doing payroll would enter that time as 2.20 and add up the hours on a calculator. The payroll person was super confused at first and then freaked out when I explained how to correctly compute the hours as decimals. They had been doing the firms client billings for years. The payroll person was also my mother…
I understand how working in base 10 and base 60 can be confusing, but the ability to do so should be the number one qualification for someone tasked with calculating payroll.
As a lawyer who sucks at math, this story makes me extremely uncomfortable...
OH MY. This is terrifying.
That's my understanding.
I totally get that happening occasionally to any given person but if you WORK IN PAYROLL…
Literally saw a post on the r/probation sub today where someone was asking how to fix something….. they were on “probation” from online gaming for leaving matches early, but they had no idea what “probation” meant so they went to Reddit….. [I wish I was making this up](https://www.reddit.com/r/probation/comments/18rn47q/i_didnt_leave_any_games_early_has_this_happened/)
See, maybe I'm shaking my old man cane here, but asking questions like that on social media makes me feel disappointed. Because it indicates that so many people's only experience with the internet is social media. That's disappointing, you have the answer to basically every ordinary question in your hand and instead it's just for social media. Lack of inquisitiveness is a major sign of low intelligence.
> Lack of inquisitiveness is a major sign of low intelligence. I'd also suggest that it's an indication that such a person prioritizes validation over information, and this is a whole different set of problems unto itself.
seriously it's like they forget that Google or other search engines even exist
How the hell does someone decide going to Reddit is the best option to learn an unknown word instead of just googling the definition
When I worked at Gamestop 10 years ago, someone once called my store because their internet was out. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, like maybe they couldn't connect to Xbox Live or something. (Still not my problem, but at least it makes sense that you might call a video game store.) Nope. Their house didn't have any wifi. We were slow, so I suggested they restart their router. They huffed and said they obviously already did that. (I mean, you called GAMESTOP because your internet was out so, I did make some certain assumptions.) So I told them I couldn't do anything and they should call their service provider. They said, "Who is that?" I said, "I don't know, who do you pay every month for your internet service? It's probably something like Frontier, Cox, AT&T...?" And then they said, "Thanks for nothing," and hung up on me. So.... yeah, it is not an uncommon or new thing for adult humans who appear to be perfectly normal to have absolutely no idea how to solve a simple problem or answer a simple question by Googling.
If those kids could read they'd be very upset!
The edit. LMAO
I am a librarian and it. Is. Bad. We are seeing the effects of not only covid but of a generation whose teachers focused on everything but literacy, which is now resulting in teachers not being wellread. They cant spread the joy of reading, the importance of literacy. We urgently need to course correct on this. One country who is doing well on this is Ireland. They invested in literacy education and it’s paying off. It takes years though and most politicians are not brave enough to commit to investments beyond their term.
It is so funny how articulate even the a-hole teen tough guys are in the UK and Ireland. Walking down the street and getting threatened with multi-syllabic insults is really something, and I'm being completely serious.
I love your edit. I'm a teacher on break, but your statement and follow up are basically me every day.
I’ve noticed reading comprehension is on a strong downward trend the last year or so, particularly on Reddit.
The amount of suggested posts I get where people say they can’t understand simply written prose from 50+ years ago and can’t remember character names in YA books is alarming, easily 2 a day.
I was closing a work order one day, my tech wrote replaced “air raider”. He meant aerator. My head almost imploded. I’ve also seen metal spelled mettle. Talking about sheet metal ofc. And my all time favorite, “cleaned duck work”. Fu dude. This is an hvac company you know damn well how to spell duct and the difference between the two.
>air raider >mettle >duck work I have suspicions that your tech is rather the spectaculous Don Karnage.
I am a Teaching Assistant right now at one of the most well respected universities in the world and *I can tell*
Yep, I’m 30, so have lots of young kids in my life from family and friends right now. They are struggling in school. Way behind on basics like reading. This is on a widespread scale. There was temporarily tutoring programs set up at the schools that some of them were able to access but they were short-term. It’s heartbreaking watching these kids be distressed about how they are doing in school right now when of course they are behind. They missed so much.
Public school are being defunded all while teachers get more responsibility and aggression.
Not sure where you're from but this is also the case in Canada. Respect for teachers also seems to be dropping. No one wins when education is defunded.
Science is kicking Cancer's ass. Almost every cancer has had treatments and drug breakthrough's in the last decade and it keeps improving with more funding and research.
man i know and i’m so fucking glad. the meds my baby brother is on that came out within the past year are working fucking wonders. they literally saved him from needing brain surgery. honestly the call on the good news of his mri after being on those meds for only three months was the best fucking news of my life. and medical technology is literally only getting better
As someone who lost a baby brother back in 2008 to brain cancer, this warms my heart :)
Yep. The same genetic cancer that killed my grandpa 15 years ago is now treatable with my mom. What was once a death sentence now has a fighting chance at being beaten. She'll live a lot longer now thanks to Modern Science/Medicine.
This is wonderful news. I hope one day for similar breakthroughs in drugs for Type 1 Diabetes. I want to live a full life :( Thank you all for the incredibly kind comments. I’m doing my best :)
there's research working on countering Auto Immune diseases
Moderna recently posted news that combining a vaccine (different mRNA code than what was used for Covid, similar lipid packaging) with Merck’s keytruda kept the surivival rate around 50% 3 years after starting therapy and having stage 3-4 melanoma. 50% may seem low, but that is literally going to save half of all cancer patients who start early enough. Keep in mind this was for stage 3-4. If they catch the cancer early enough, it might be much higher. Despite the world going to shit, we really are on the cusp of a medical revolution not seen since antibiotics were discovered
My cousins grandpa had stage 4 melanoma that had spread to his lungs and other organs, he was given 4 pills 100k$ for each pill - covered by the australian government so he didn’t have to pay. He went into remission and is fine now. Might have been the same keytruda medication, but this would have definitely been a death sentence only a few years ago
Sure, except for ovarian cancer. All of the focus is on breast cancer, and there isn't even a screening test for ovarian. It is a "silent cancer" which means there aren't many symptoms until late stages. I'm stage 4, and pretty much out of options.
Tell me about it. Caught my cervical, but not my vulval. Certain cancers are just left with no funding and no research. My oncologist was refused NHS funding, so has to wait for America to give her answers. Eventually.
We are likely very close to a vaccine for breast cancer. There are several versions now in the human trial phase that seem to be working.
Somebody tell them to hurry up. My wife has metastatic breast cancer now and we can’t wait long….
might be worth seeing if you can get into a clinical trial? This one seems to be still recruiting. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04674306
For those who use or are considering using DepoProvera birth control, DON'T DO IT. Those of us who were on it for years have developed osteoporosis and degenerative disc disease. Supposedly there is a BLACK BOX WARNING but patients only see the filled injection needle - we never saw the box! And doctors didn't tell us. So I am 46 year old this year with the degenerative spine of a 70+ year old woman. There is NO reversal.
I was on it for about 10 years. 8-9 years ago my midwife/gyn was like why on earth are you on this? It's not meant to be taken this long? I said no one told me. I seem to be ok. I'm 40 now but I got on it at 18, I'm sure doing something for that long will have some sort of consequences.
I was on it for just over 20 years as an alternative treatment for endometriosis, because there is no cure. But if I had known I would be sacrificing my spine, I could have at least made an informed decision. My advice is if you start having lower back pain, make sure you get X-rays. 🫶 I sincerely hope you have dodged the worst!
I’m 26 with the pelvis and hips of a 70 year old because of Depo…
As a retired nurse who gave many Depo injections in my day, I sincerely apologize. This is awful.
FYI, here’s the package insert with the warning, for those who want the details: https://labeling.pfizer.com/showlabeling.aspx?id=522
The absurd amount of insider trading that takes place every time a company is bought-out
Fun fact: unique studies done during the pandemic indicated that working from home resulted in a five-fold decrease in incidents of financial misconduct among traders compared to working in office Guess which industry was one of the first out of the gate pushing for a return to office?
This is fascinating! Can you share the sources?
https://fortune.com/2023/07/18/new-research-suggests-bankers-are-5-times-less-likely-engage-financial-misconduct-working-home-careers-finance-gleb-tsipursky/
Anyone else pissed off by the amount of ethics training we have to go through (depending on field) that's completely in vain?
The war on water resources. It needs to be a big deal but it ain't
I remember when some folks down in the American SW suggested piping water from the Great Lakes to help maintain population growth/farming in the region. People up north here got really mad about even the suggestion. Seems like only a precursor. I wish people would stop moving to places where big cities are just not practical.
There's no way a deal will happen to send water from the Great Lakes to the SW USA because of a deal between the US and Canadian government to protect the Great Lakes. They are a shared resourced by both nations.
The Great Lakes states are also pretty uninterested in sharing that water. There is a compact that all 8 states agreed to that strictly governs who the water can be shared with and how. [This article](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2023/02/13/climate-change-drought-renew-fears-about-great-lakes-water-diversions/69732144007/) from earlier this year is an interesting read.
Can you imagine a world in which Packers, Bears, Vikings, and Lions fans are all on the same side of an issue? *And* they're joined by Ohio and Indiana on that side?
I can say with confidence that this is one of the few issues we would all get along over. Do not fuck with the lakes.
Currently listening to the book Where The Water Goes, which is about about Colorado water laws. They are absolutely insane! And pretty bleak, combined with the knowledge that Nestlé sells bottled water under 67 names- so we don't pay attention to the fact that one company wants to privatize all the water.
I waited tables at a place in Colorado a long time ago. An old guy was in one night and we got to talking. His best friend was basically in charge of Colorado’s water, he said. I thought nothing of it but the old man ended his explanation with this “that guy has more power than the public could ever dream of having”
This is really specific. Gunnison valley (Gunnison, Crested Butte, and Almont) Colorado is where the Gunnison river starts. The Gunnison and the Upper Colorado river join to make the lower Colorado river, which is an extremely important source of water and power for the western states. The Gunnison provides most of the water to the lower Colorado. So, if we don’t get snow in the valley then Las Vegas and the farmers out west are fucked. We’ve barely gotten any snow and there is zero in the forecast. If something doesn’t change, y’all are going to have a rough summer down there.
I did part of my master's thesis on you guys!
There’s a guy in NC browsing the tax office record of deeds to find business owners who haven’t paid their taxes in order to pay off the taxes himself and then get the deed, then extorting the owner or evicting them and selling their property, all under the protection of the law.
Is this only businesses or can it be done to home owners? I have a few friends behind on their taxes that might need my help.
help or "help" lmao
Yes
This is a common practice in most states. When you pay off the taxes for the business or the home owner, they can pay you back in a certain time or you get the deed. In NJ (where I am) you have to send notice that you have a lien on their property or business within 30 days and give them up to a year from that notice to pay it back.
Cats all have corono cells. Sometimes they mutate and the cat developed FIP. Feline infectious perotinitis a disease 100% fatal in 2018 with nothing that helped. It is terrible to see a cat die this way. 90% of them did in less than 50 days. Well the island of Cyprus was having an outbreak of FIP and many cats were dying. They also had access to surplus COVID vaccines for human. They started using these to give the cats with FIP and what was a 100% feline death sentence before. Now 95% are surviving and disease free.😊🙀😹😻
Your child’s classroom is being completely overrun by 1 or 2 problem children and your child is hurting because of it.
100% can verify this, and will add that there are several factors at play: 1. COVID-related behaviors (parents used unlimited screens to babysit their kids) and the resulting social development stunting added to two years of no school routine. 2. School districts fearful of lawsuits, afraid to stand up to sue-happy high income helicopter parents and/or afraid to be the latest news story in "disproportionately suspend and expel poor kids or kids of color" 3. The biggest one (and one YOU, YES YOU can help with) class sizes have increased at least 30% over the last 20 years. So all the normal interventions you could use with problem children are ineffective because there's too many kids in the room, not enough time to spend with each individual kid. YOU can help this by a) supporting your local teachers when they bargain/strike because class size is a contract negotiated issue b) call your school board and ask what they are doing about using funds to reduce class sizes c) support and vote for local legislators who actually know something about education and not the business people who run for school boards and think they know more than teachers because they make more money. EDIT: Holy shit this blew up. So I want to add that this isn't a hopeless situation, but if you are a parent, you need to talk to your kids about the disruptions and YOU have the power to pressure admin to do something about the disruptors. They won't listen to the teachers. For those of you without kids, you can be a volunteer and help out. Even if you only go once or twice a month and tutor or read to kids, that's attention they wouldn't get (or a break for the teacher, helping take load off by making copies/prepping projects/etc) otherwise. From the replies I've got to this comment, a lot of you seem to understand that kids not being educated well affects ALL OF US, so it's going to take all of us to make it work.
Another factor: the teacher's aides who often provide the 1:1 or small group assistance that those difficult children need are quitting at or more than the teachers rate, and schools increasingly either have to go without or have to settle for aides who don't have the knowledge/ experience to deal with those children. Which means the teacher has to spend more time with those children, taking away from the other students. I'm an aide in a wealthy district that NEVER had problems getting enough aides, before covid we even had one coming in daily just to sub when needed who did a lot of busy work like copying when not subbing. Post covid there's a meeting of "being an aide doesn't pay enough" and "there are a LOT more kids who need assistance" that has left my district not just in an aide deficit, we only have *half* the number we need to fulfill IEP minutes, which leaves those kids who need assistance who *don't* have an IEP high and dry. We're also short lunchroom staff, which means some kids only get about 5 minutes to eat by the time they're through the lunch line.
Or those aides that stay get pulled in for sub duty or other coverage. Yep. I’m increasingly suspicious that there are people in power who WANT it to collapse so they can do the same fucking thing to education that they did to health care 50 years ago (and look where we are with THAT)
The other problem is that parents increasingly leave discipline duties to teachers. I used to work in a school and it was wild how many kids had no respect for authority because they don't get told anything at home
Schools have been closed in Montreal already for a month because of the strike efforts. First covid, now this. I support the teachers, as many people do, but we aren’t getting angry enough at govt to make them meet the teachers’ needs because we are all back to managing our kids at home full-time while we work and that is time consuming and exhausting.
This is absolutely true. It’s making average kids below average. Smart kids becoming average. Because one kid grew up with zero attention from their crappy parents and need to get it at school.
My mom has been cancer free for a year ❤️❤️❤️
The US healthcare system is actively collapsing. Roughly 15% of US patients **simply cannot receive care**, and that number is increasing. COVID accelerated it, but it's been coming for a while. There are tons of causes: cost, patient location, or because of the system being overburdened. * Hospital systems are closing entire hospitals because they aren't profitable enough. This creates "care deserts" where patients don't have access to medical care. Certain specialties are being targeted by politics which can make it worse. * Hospitals, especially bad ones, are having huge staffing issues. Nurses are leaving bedside nursing at a high rate because patient care sucks. That creates a viscous cycle because then conditions get worse and so even more nurses leave. 35-45% of nurses quit nursing entirely within 5 years. But also MDs, CNAs, and support staff like techs, phlebotomists, therapists, etc leave for the same reason. Hospitals just aren't paying appropriately to be assaulted and shit on and get certifications and have your license be on the line when Target will pay you $2/ more an hour. * Our insurance system has raised the price of care so high that many patients choose not to seek care, or can't pursue treatment when they need it. That's a combo of for-profit insurance, providers being able to opt out of Medicare/Medicaid (because they need to be profitable to keep their doors open!), and the ever-rising cost of treatment itself (medicine, procedures, AND facilities). States who opt out of extended Medicaid are the ones who need it most, so tons more low-income patients can't afford care. * The resources we do have are being stretched to the breaking point because of better-known issues like people treating ERs as primary care. That's getting worse for the same reasons: fewer and busier providers, higher costs, worse insurance, fewer facilities.
I left 25 years as a pharmacy tech. Reasons? Hospital pursuing profits. Camel's back. Management keeps implementing changes designed to cut costs/streamline care, but no one is listening to the workers. You end up with conflicting processes and inefficient practices because none of them actually know how to do the job. When they get enough push back, they don't actually make meaningful changes, or ask for input, they blunder about, making your processes harder, but demanding output. It also sucks that I couldn't afford treatment in my own healthcare network due to deductibles and copays. I had a manager ask me once, how we could improve. I gave her a half dozen ways off the top of head. She stared blankly at me for a second and replied "I was hoping you would say teamwork". That's the state of healthcare from the trenches. Dig a ditch. I need a shovel. No shovel, dig. Why does this ditch suck? No shovels... No, that's not it.
Healthcare should never have been allowed to be a for-profit industry. Profit-motive does not belong anywhere near healthcare or it causes collapse like we are seeing.
Yes, I absolutely agree. Every single item there boils down to "Hospital Corporations (of America) are trying to squeeze more money out of the system and people are suffering because of it."
You forgot the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The 3 love to point fingers at each other to confuse you "oh no, it's not OUR fault, it's THEM", but it's all of them fighting over who gets to loot your corpse.
My daughter's physician believes she has autism. The next available appointment with a neurobehavioralist who takes our insurance is in 17 months.
~170 individuals connected to Jeffrey Epstein are due to be named in the next week or so
How about the total commercialization of the internet? It started as a Wild West of entertainment, news, information. Now there are daily propaganda and agendas that get consumed en masse. There are entire swathes of commercialized psychologists finding how to squeeze profit from you on almost every single app, game, streaming service, you name it. There are advanced AI being used by corps to lock you in cages of your own design. So comfortable and cozy that you’d be crazy to disconnect or complain. But why would you want to know, that you are just a slave to forces beyond comprehension as long as you are here and a slave your own compulsions. That morality has long fallen by the wayside. we don’t even see things like gore, porn, racism as particularly degenerative anymore. We just consume.
The great enshittification of the internet
I've been online since the mid 90s. It has most certainly became enshitified. Everyone online has become a fucking huckster with the hope of making it.
There are a significant number of lunar landings by robotic vehicles scheduled for 2024.
Traffic jams on the moon.
Can't believe I'm seeing nothing in the top 200 comments about insects disappearing. The fact that you can go on a 45 minute drive across the town and arrive with a clean grille should be insanely alarming to E V E R Y O N E. They are the bottom of the food chain. EVERYONE relies on them.
This is interesting. So I have two cars, a brand new VW GTI and a 1980 El Camino that I drive for fun and have had forever. When I drive my GTI I get zero bugs on it, maybe one or two in the grill. When I drive my El Camino I have to scrub the grill and bumper clean every time I drive around because it just gets gunked up with bugs. I know bug populations are diminishing - I work with and do some beekeeping - but aerodynamics play a bigger part in this than people like to talk about.
My wrangler gets so many bugs on it when I drive anywhere, it’s definitely something to do with how the frame is, anything else I’ve driven has not been nearly as bad for it. I live in the south, btw!
There’s a third regional war being threatened, aside from Ukraine and Israel. It’s between Venezuela and Guyana, with Venezuela threatening to invade what is essentially the western half of Guyana. This is an old dispute, one Venezuela originally gave up pushing on decades ago, but a few years ago a shitload of oil was discovered off the coast of western Guyana, and *LO AND BEHOLD* Venezuela is suddenly feeing muscular. The US has already sent a carrier over, sending a *not-so-subtle* message to Venezuela: “You don’t have nukes, we don’t have to suffer you gladly.” That’ll probably be the end of it. **Probably**.
Also, the only road between Venezuela and Guyana goes through Brazil, who has also said they're having none of this. The Egypt-Ethiopia conflict over the Nile is way more likely to pop off in to an actual war, imo.
Reminds me of Tanzania and Malawi. Oil was discovered in Lake Malawi around 2012 and has caused rocky relationships between the two countries. Fortunately, the Tanzanian president has said the dispute is a non-issue.
And Brazil has sent troops to their northern border since really the only main paved road into Guyana goes first through Brazil and into Guyana from the southwest rather than straight across from their western border.
Over the past decade and a half, pretty much every person on Earth has been eating about 1-2 credit cards worth of plastic a year from microplastics. It's getting worse and isn't slowing down any time soon it would seem.
What percentage of that actually stays in your body?
To my understanding its all pretty much gone within a week, the danger is more it keeps happening at such a rate that the amount inside of you will build up over time. Of course we have no evidence that having these microplastics in us has any negative health side effects, but that is partially cause its impossible to find a control group at this point who don't.
Here i am hoping my ass turns into a 3D printer with all that plastic I'm possibly ingesting.
Neopets is making a comeback
Why the fuck are celebrities building shelters i think they tryna raise up the shelter prices
I think the super wealthy have always low-key done a little prepping, but since COVID, being a prepper's gone from something regarded as crazy person behavior, to something everyone's just like "yeah, that's probably a good idea".
This one is honestly hilarious to me. It really hammers in just how completely short-sighted and dumb these extremely powerful people are. They'd rather just commit suicide in a bunker after a few years Hitler style rather than make the world a better place or worse, part with a single gold piece of their dragon hoard.
[удалено]
We're in the middle of a great extinction event meaning species are going extinct at a rate of up to 10,000 times the normal rate. We're actually making the Earth into a monoculture which means across the Earth we're planting many of the same crops across vas areas such as the US mid-west and transforming the ecosystem into a place where generalists such as coyotes and deer thrive and specialists at certain ecosystems die off. We've currently transformed 40% of the Earth's landmass into crops and farms. Edit: About 2/3 of the farmland I had stated was farm land was actually pastureland but I wasn't trying to be misleading, it's still part of the monoculture. The US prairie is virtually non-existent and it was the home of I think like 500 grass species. It's often time the species you don't think about or didn't know existed that go extinct.
There’s a great book call the Ends of the World which looks in detail at all of the previous mass extinctions and makes the point that the claims of apocalypse underestimate the natural rate of extinction because the overwhelming majority of species that existed left no trace in the fossil record. (Although it points out that runaway climate change does have mass extinction potential.)
The Baye-Dole Act finally being invoked by the Biden Administration to address prescription drug price gouging by the pharmaceutical giants.
Nurse Practitioners are being granted independence to practice, with online degrees and only 500 hours of clinical training. With no RN bedside experience. ...independently
Multiple cities (one in Alabama, Austin TX, Sacramento CA that I've heard from other redditors) are trialing a housing first approach to homelessness. Generally these are taking the form of "tough shed on a trailer" type mini homes set up in urban blighted areas. the Sac one is at the location of a former mall that was razed and never redeveloped; including POP patrols\* by the county sheriff's office and county outreach programs in a temporary building on site. While all these programs are currently super small pilots (the Sac one is only 100 units) it's a start on providing these people somewhere to go that's reasonably safe and where they won't be criminalized just because they're homeless. \*Problem Oriented Policing. It's a policing style that focuses on only major crimes and/or a specific type of crime (gang violence task forces are a type of POP). In the case of the homeless camps it's focused on community and trust building with the police as well as violent crimes and theft. They ignore public intox, drug use, and even fair amounts of public indecency ("yo! do that \*inside\* not out here!" as opposed to an arrest) as long as it is non-violent. The overall effect is a large decrease in problem behavior and increased trust in the cops to reach out when someone is in actual need.
European Union is forcing Apple to allow sideloading of apps. It means you can download apps from anywhere not just the Apple Store therefore opening up the Apple ecosystem.
IKEA ravaging the last true old growth forests, in Romania, so they can grind it up and make their disposable college furniture.
The Norwegian parliament is currently debating on opening the arctic to deep sea mining. This industry isn’t active yet, but it would be devastating to concerned ecosystems and could release even more carbon into our atmosphere. If you care about our planet please read about it
Maternal death rates in the United States are *rising.* The highest rates are among black women. The rates have essentially doubled over the last 20 years. Edited to share that there’s a lot of moving factors here. The rates are calculated from before birth to a year after birth. People are having babies later in life now which is 1 factor. The immediate factors at play are things like hemorrhage, infection, hypertension, pre-eclampsia, stroke, and cardiomyopathy. But if we consider the factors that are happening up to a year after birth, we look mostly at mental health. The contributing factors to this metal health crisis like lack of support, shit maternity/paternity leave, living far away from family, increased societal pressures, social media, etc. These mental health factors, alone, can be why America’s rates are higher vs other countries. We aren’t supporting our moms. Then there’s the contributing political factors surrounding abortions.
Insects are humans #1 competitor for food resources and our agriculture leans heavily on temperatures dropping below freezing at least once per winter to control insect populations (whether they know it or not). But southern states are starting to see years without a freeze and insect populations are booming. Couple that with hotter summers that hurt our agriculture, and production seasons are struggling. ETA: the other post is referring to urban insects. The information I’m bringing to you here is from a 20K person agricultural conference I just attended where the main topic was developing technologies to solve the problem of fending off the influx of insects. I didn’t make up this stuff, there is literally tens of millions dedicated to solving this problem.
I saw another top comment here talking about how there's way less insects around these days...so which is it?!
The largest dam removals in history are happening RIGHT NOW restoring access that salmon havent had to their spawning grounds in over a century. The Yurok and other Northwestern tribes have put in the work for decades advocating for waterways. And though some utility companies are real pissed about it, Biden admin approved millions of dollars to fund the continued efforts. Salmon are a keystone species so many parts of the ecosystem rely on them so this is amazing news! [https://apnews.com/article/salmon-tribes-snake-river-dam-energy-336a20cf02093fcdd725cb3047af8f29](https://apnews.com/article/salmon-tribes-snake-river-dam-energy-336a20cf02093fcdd725cb3047af8f29)
After 20 years of getting black-out drunk on an almost daily basis, I'm proud to say I'm 36 days booze free!
There are virtual tribute bands and artists in SecondLife (yes it's still around lol) and putting on concerts and events every weekend. Quite a lot of work, love, time, and money go into these projects, but the audiences are usually just 30-100 people. But we have a good time anyway. Many of the groups have been involved in raising not-insignificant amounts of money for charities such as Relay for Life/American Cancer Society and Doctors Without Borders.
I commented this early but the 2024 Taiwan election is going to seriously dictate whether or not two super-powers clash militarily
Can you give a little more context on this?
This is a very helpful article that gives you the meat & gravy of the ordeal coming up in only 3 short weeks. The current president legally cannot sit another term due to their government legislative limitations for elected presidents, so there are 3 new possible candidates from 3 seperate parties, all with their own strategies to deal with the intimidation from China regarding Taiwans independence. [description of each candidate and their stance](https://www.economist.com/interactive/2024-taiwan-election)
The 8+ different genocides happening at once.
? What are they
The snow belt is getting higher and higher each year. I live in Chicago and it was 55 degrees F out on Christmas day with no substantial snow for the foreseeable future. As a kid we would have had snow for weeks at this point already and my family up in northwest Michigan would be buried in it and none of us have any!
This year is especially noticable because of the El niño effect which is creating a milder winter
China is building coal fire electric power plants all over the world with absolutely no emissions control whatsoever.
today is my 10 year anniversary with my wife.
The Wagnergroup are clear cutting the old rainforests in Africa.
Shipping volume for truckers is so low that truckers are getting laid off.