A cranky biologist who means well. My hobbies include long walks off short piers and anything science related.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • They seem to have dropped the ball on floods too.

    I don’t want to be a doomer, but I feel pretty confident predicting some awful influenza, measles, covid and other easily transmitted (and prevented) diseases.

    What will make it worse is that as the news trickles out about outbreaks, those reports will be countered by FUD, misinformation, bullshit and prevarication by the federal government. We won’t even be able to agree there is even a problem.

    This will be compounded by local health infrastructure being at reduced capacity due to the precarious financial status of this infrastructure due to constant federal meddling with grants and funding. For many players in our disease prevention and treatment infrastructure, losing even a few percent of Federal money from their budgets can trigger a cascade of cutbacks and personnel losses.

    Someone please tell I am being paranoid. I have worked in biomedical industries for years and I can’t see how we can avoid these consequences now.










  • meyotch@slrpnk.nettoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon
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    13 days ago

    I remember at my first job in high school in a store on Main Street. We had a sidewalk sale with other business owners.

    My innocence was lost when my boss instructed me to place higher prices using our ordinary white stickers and then cover them with ‘discounted’ orange sales stickers at slightly higher prices than normal.

    These dicks just do it at scale. Amazon is a tawdry crime organization. We all know it.


  • Boo hoo, losers. Your device has a power switch. Influencers have a warped and inflated sense of the value they create. They can stop at any time and use their skills in other ways.

    Making good content is hard, but ‘good’ content doesn’t have an expiration date. Shallow brain-rot content does and that’s what the algorithms reward.

    The entitlement that influencers have is nauseating. There are many creators out there laboring in near obscurity and producing useful content all the time for little or no compensation.

    They are tools for Zuck and fools for propping his platforms up. It sounds like a hard slog, but they can stop any time.


  • It was surely used as an opportunity for conservatives to push their agenda, but I am super sceptical it is a cause in any way.

    First, HIV hasn’t been an automatic death sentence for over 25 years.

    Second, Reagan was elected before AIDS/GRID was even a known thing.

    The rise in conservatism is an engineered backlash that began at the dawn of time. Look up Smedley Butler and the Business plot from the 30’s. Look into Roger Stone and his determination to make sure no president would ever be held accountable as Nixon was for Watergate.

    Conservatism is just a smoke screen for a small, way-too-wealthy cabal to get some popular support for their desire to own every damn thing everywhere. It always has been. This goes back long before the Magna Carta even.






  • I don’t buy it.

    A diversity of regulatory approaches especially in such a complex subject really does need the 50 state laboratory.

    In fact because states are smaller markets, it might encourage the development of more smaller companies. A complex regulatory landscape gives an efficiency edge to players who focus product development in specific states.

    Anything to keep this shitshow happening in a more democratic way is fine by me. Anthropic and that Altman fellow seem so desperately out of touch with humanity, I welcome any disadvantages we can give them.