• 2 Posts
  • 62 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle


  • It’s because of the electoral college. Most states give all their electoral college votes to whomever wins the state rather than dividing the votes equitably. This means Pennsylvania – a swing state – will go either all-red or all-blue. The state has a lot of fracking, and a lot of people making money off it, so Democrats are trying to appease pro-fracking to get votes.

    The people getting harmed by fracking are stuck without anyone on their ‘side’, but will presumably be more likely to vote blue because that side favors more regulation and pro-environment stuff. Note that all Harris said was she wouldn’t ban fracking. She didn’t say she wouldn’t make it difficult to do. My guess is any attempts to make it cleaner will get crushed by Congress and the Corrupted Supreme Court that has sided against Unions, workers, citizens, and the planet – all to favor of their sugar daddies. So even if the next President wants to do something about fracking, it would be a hard to actually do anything.










  • Is the statement at the bottom of the article new or did the earlier posters simply miss it?

    … One of Best Friends’ recommendations for due diligence within the adoption process was to focus on the shelter’s existing system, Chameleon, which pulls information related to animal welfare cases. This includes animal abuse and animal cruelty cases. Checking MyCase was discouraged, as its use was problematic and could lead to biased, inequitable vetting of potential adoptees.

    This story does not have enough detail, so I looked for more.

    First, I looked up Best Friends and they are firmly no-kill to the exclusion of all else. I am guessing the ‘Chameleon’ referenced is this CMS, but I could be wrong. If that is the software, it looks like there is a way for people to add notes about specific animals, but it isn’t clear if you can enter notes about specific people. It certainly doesn’t look like it has a way of automatically checking police records for criminal records. It does suggest you can enter these types of ‘field’ data:

    • Calls for service
    • Citations
    • Bite reporting
    • Field staff dispatching
    • Shift control and tracking
    • Laptop implementation
    • Case photos

    I’m guessing MyCase is this free Indiana-specific portal.

    Now: if they aren’t talking about the free MyCase link I found, then perhaps they are using software that charges the Animal Shelter for each search. I can see getting fired for incurring costs that aren’t in the budget. Alternately, perhaps ‘Best Friends’ is giving them funding based on the shelter NOT rejecting any adopter ever for any reason – or at least thinking that is a condition based on this statement from the Best Friends ‘who we are’ page:

    We’re making sure that everyone has the same access to loving pets and that every adoptable pet has access to the comfort of a foster home instead of a kennel in a shelter.

    – note that the above is meant to foster diversity and its links to their diversity page (which seems focused on income disparity), but that quoted bit COULD be read to mean ‘everyone gets a pet, no matter what’.

    I would think it incumbent on all employees to create notes/warnings about known abusers and have that be a flag if they come back to adopt, but I do see a case for allowing people to re-adopt an animal they voluntarily gave to the shelter because they had gone through a patch where they couldn’t afford to feed it, but now they can. Others might argue that this is abuse or that the owners don’t deserve a pet, but it is clear that Best Friends thinks that refusing such people is discriminatory.

    That doesn’t mean that the particular abuse getting uncovered with MyCase was simply surrendering a pet until people got on their feet. Mostly, it just feels like there’s a bunch of stuff going on that no one reported.


  • We already had the Expanded Access Program (thank you ACT UP) and we don’t want a repeat of thalidomide babies like we had before there were strong protections on how drugs get tested.

    So now we have Expanded Access (EAP) with FDA oversite and Right to Try (RTT) without that oversight. Having both is confusing for everyone and most people don’t know which covers what. From Journal of Law and the Biosciences (they only sampled 17 neuro-oncologists from 15 different academic medical centers):

    Many physicians described having difficulty in distinguishing between RTT and EAP or demonstrated misconceptions in their responses. A physician with knowledge of both pathways spoke about his colleagues generally: ‘I don’t think a lot of people understand the difference between expanded access and Right-To-Try’ [Participant 1]. The confusion resulted in conflation with the different features between EAP and RTT including structure, intent, and processes of these pathways. In response to our question ‘Have you provided a drug through Right-to-Try?’ one clinician erroneously replied, ‘I think most compassionate use is under that category’ [Participant 2]. Another drew a rough equivalence between the two despite the absence of FDA oversight for RTT: ‘I guess the way I try to think about Right-to-Try is like compassionate use.





  • I had never heard the particular sentence, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus” as a phrase, but seeing the video, there did not seem to be any hostility in her voice nor actions. The article says:

    In the church, he said, to rebuke is to cast out a demon, or keep a demon from using a person to do something bad. The phrase can be said casually, though, in response to someone’s misbehavior. When Massey says it, her voice is louder and clearer than it has been before, but she doesn’t sound angry. It’s the tone of voice that you might use while saying: For goodness’ sake, this is really getting ridiculous.

    That fits with her actions: totally non-confrontational, but with the mildest of chastisements.



  • Saved you a click (I added the bold):

    Also, holding a college degree doesn’t necessarily translate to success in the workplace, Nguyen added, particularly in rapidly evolving fields like technology, where information and skills learned in school can quickly become outdated.

    Other industries in which companies are loosening degree requirements for job candidates include finance and insurance, health care and social services, education, and information services and data, according to Intelligent’s report.

    Some states have even passed legislation to open up job opportunities to applicants without a college degree. In January, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed an executive order eliminating college degree requirements for more than 90% of state jobs.

    Nearly 60% of business leaders said they removed degree requirements for entry-level positions, while 54% said they did so for mid-level roles and 18% said they did for senior-level roles, according to the survey.

    Personally, I favor requiring a degree for most education jobs – specifically for teaching k-12. First: teachers need to learn how brains develop over time and what the developmental markers are. Second, teacher should learn different methods of learning and teaching to better reach all students. Third, teachers should learn how to create useful tests and what IS a useful test at different age levels. A 2nd grader is not going to write an essay that displays synergistic understanding of two unrelated fields, but a 2nd grader CAN display synergistic learning in other ways. I’ve gone on too long, but you get the idea.