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    Originally posted by Run&Gun View Post

    My friend was saying its too much of a hassle to hire his friend if its all contingent on the guy getting tested
    Your friend is being a lazy friend to his other friend.

    Abbott sells the BinaxNOW self-testing kit with a relatively decent shelf life (~1 year). It's incredibly easy to keep a small stock of these, and they take about 20 minutes to run yourself.

    I think the first thing the spike protein attacks is actually brain tissue, because nobody's bothering to think things through any more... or maybe they never did.
    Pudgy bearded camera guy
    http://mcbob.tv

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      Oh, Jesus. Let's hope this one is contained--

      https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nipah-v...-india-kerala/
      "Money doesn't make films...You just do it and take the initiative." - Werner Herzog

      Comment


        Originally posted by Batutta View Post
        Oh, Jesus. Let's hope this one is contained--

        https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nipah-v...-india-kerala/
        Probably unrelated.

        https://www.thesun.ie/news/7228802/w...ntists-canada/
        Pudgy bearded camera guy
        http://mcbob.tv

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          Originally posted by mcbob View Post
          I'm not sure I'd use the reporting in a right-wing tabloid (which falls under the News Corp umbrella) as evidence for any assumptions about anything...

          Comment


            Originally posted by drboffa View Post

            I'm not sure I'd use the reporting in a right-wing tabloid (which falls under the News Corp umbrella) as evidence for any assumptions about anything...
            True… it’s not a paper of note. But then, even the papers of note are no longer papers of note as everyone gets into a competition of who can post the greatest lies for their side… Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty would be proud.

            To the best of my knowledge, Nipah is mainly an ingestion vector vs. airborne like Wuhan, so it should be far, far easier to contain. At least, unless it had some good ol’ fashioned GoF
            Last edited by mcbob; 09-07-2021, 11:04 PM.
            Pudgy bearded camera guy
            http://mcbob.tv

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              Originally posted by mcbob View Post

              True… it’s not a paper of note. But then, even the papers of note are no longer papers of note as everyone gets into a competition of who can post the greatest lies for their side
              Yeah I take everything I read with a grain of salt these days. But that doesn't mean I'm more open to considering what tabloids have to say.

              Personally, I feel like so many institutions have been absolutely gutted by the blind pursuit of profit. Instead of just trying to do the best they can at their job, they try to make as much money as possible even if it means bending their original mission. Like with colleges - they now view their students as "customers"

              And eventually, if you're no longer performing the task you were originally needed for, you may become unnecessary altogether
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              All men are brothers

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                Originally posted by ahalpert View Post

                Yeah I take everything I read with a grain of salt these days. But that doesn't mean I'm more open to considering what tabloids have to say.

                Personally, I feel like so many institutions have been absolutely gutted by the blind pursuit of profit. Instead of just trying to do the best they can at their job, they try to make as much money as possible even if it means bending their original mission. Like with colleges - they now view their students as "customers"

                And eventually, if you're no longer performing the task you were originally needed for, you may become unnecessary altogether
                Trooth
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                http://mcbob.tv

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                  Originally posted by ahalpert View Post

                  Personally, I feel like so many institutions have been absolutely gutted by the blind pursuit of profit. Instead of just trying to do the best they can at their job, they try to make as much money as possible even if it means bending their original mission. Like with colleges - they now view their students as "customers"
                  This is the primary and overriding goal of capitalism, and always has been. It was always about profit, and always will be under capitalism. Everything else is just window dressing or historical revisionism designed to convince us otherwise.

                  Comment


                    Originally posted by drboffa View Post

                    This is the primary and overriding goal of capitalism, and always has been. It was always about profit, and always will be under capitalism. Everything else is just window dressing or historical revisionism designed to convince us otherwise.
                    I don't think so. I think our society really has changed in the last 40 years.

                    I think there used to be way more people with sticks up their asses about adhering to the principles of their field - journalistic integrity, academic rigor etc

                    Nobody expected to make a killing as a reporter or a professor, but you could feel proud of the important work you were doing. And if you served the public well, there was a measure of security in your continued usefulness

                    I don't think that journalism or college are particularly meaningful anymore, except in limited areas (trade journals and trade schools, for example). Both are broadly obsessed with capturing and maintaining a customer base

                    or consider (on a different topic) the changes in company-employee relations. Nobody works at the same company for their whole career anymore. The company doesn't feel that it owes you anything for your loyalty. Definitely a cultural shift there
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                    All men are brothers

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                      I think you're describing differences of degree, not of kind. And if society has changed in the ways you're describing it's in large part because the fields you're talking about—journalism and academia—have explicitly chosen to follow a profit-centered, market-driven (i.e., capitalist) approach.

                      The changing nature of higher ed is a big, thorny, multifaceted issue (I used to work in academia). The idea of academic rigor in some golden age from the past is probably overblown, although students do seem to be coming less and less prepared for college-level work. But having looked through plenty of research from the past I'm pretty comfortable saying that lots of shoddy research has been going on for a long, long time. And this is to say nothing of how exclusionary and discriminatory academia has been and continues to be (on all aspects: race, class, gender, size, etc.).

                      [EDIT: I'd also add that it's a widespread joke among academics that most tenured professors who were hired before about 2000 would never get hired in today's market; most probably wouldn't even get to the interview stage. The standards for academics are vastly different. I knew tenured professors who were hired in the 1970s or earlier who earned tenure without a real book, and unemployed academics from my cohort who had multi-page CVs with articles, book contracts, and talks.]

                      But bringing "free market ideas" into higher ed does seem to have brought about its own special kind of damage. This will vary depending on the institution, but colleges without either huge endowments or name recognition (or both) have to compete for students as "customers" all the time. And this is to say nothing of predatory, for-profit colleges.

                      Company-employee relations of the past were (1) influenced by stronger unions, and (2) primarily a luxury of white, middle-class Americans (as were most of the benefits of the post-WWII "boom" that we tend to think of when we think of American prosperity).

                      Comment


                        To be certain, these institutions always had to worry about their bottom line... But I do think that the social mores of the modern-day USA is to maximize your profit by thinking loosely and flexibly about the services you offer. Sometimes, I think that's sensible (as with Amazon opening up its server and cloud capacity to external customers via Amazon S3. as long as doing so doesn't jeopardize the internal functioning of that infrastructure, then they're in no way harming the core business of Amazon. but Amazon never served a specific cultural purpose anyway)

                        I was thinking about academic rigor on the part of the students. I graduated college in 2009 and it was an open secret/joke that few if any students actually did the reading. Professors spoke openly about Cliffsnotes. Then there's the rampant drug use and the minor alcohol dependency that so many people graduated with. (And this wasn't a party school, it was an ivy league (Brown), although Brown might be considered the party school of the ivy league. But I've heard they drink more heavily at Dartmouth.)

                        My belief is that it's harder to get into these colleges than it is to graduate from them.

                        One aspect of the customer-based approach to students is that you view the relationship as transactional (money exchanged for credentials) and you try to give the students what they want rather than what they need. Consequently, students are learning less. One of my friends took beginning Spanish his senior year even though he had taken Spanish for 4 years in high school just because he didn't want to mess up his GPA.

                        So, I think that the credentials are worth less than they used to be. And there may soon come a reckoning where young people don't see the value of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years to get a degree.

                        And in journalism - it all feels so clickbaity now. There were always elements of yellow journalism, and political motivations for newspapers and articles. But there didn't used to be a 24-hour news cycle. You used to get a finite amount of news. Most of it was probably dull. And, theoretically, it shouldn't all conform to your prior assumptions about the world.

                        I've just seen many examples in recent years of sloppy journalism among the most-respected newspapers, and always in line with the ideology of the customers to whom they pander.

                        You're probably right about unions, etc. (Although I think that car factories have been racially well-integrated for a long time? And perhaps also coal mines, etc?) My impression, based on little more than many Hollywood movie plots and a passing knowledge of history, is that corporate raiders in the 1980s moved (in parallel with a broader "free market" political fervor associated with Reaganism) to buy and reshape companies, making them more profitable by shredding their obligations to their employees. The trend continues, as when Bezos bought Whole Foods and stripped health care coverage from its part-time workers (which had been one of the perks of working there). If there's no social penalty for shameless behavior, then the most shameless among us have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

                        Similarly, I won't be surprised if tenured professors somehow find themselves on the chopping block as overpaid college administrators try to save themselves in the face of a shrinking student body.
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                        All men are brothers

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                          Originally posted by ahalpert View Post

                          My belief is that it's harder to get into these colleges than it is to graduate from them.
                          This is 100% true for many schools, and even more accurate for the Ivies (although if you're a legacy applicant or child of a donor then getting in can also be pretty easy). Anecdotally, the most academically "rigorous" schools (a vague term, admittedly) seem to be top-tier small liberal arts colleges like Haverford and Grinnell.

                          Originally posted by ahalpert View Post

                          One aspect of the customer-based approach to students is that you view the relationship as transactional (money exchanged for credentials) [... ]And there may soon come a reckoning where young people don't see the value of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years to get a degree.
                          I think there is truth to this: BUT, the market has long viewed the college > job pipeline as transactional. I.e., generations of students were told that if they wanted access to white collar, middle-class lives and jobs then they *had* to go to college. And then the backlash against any kind of learning that was anything *but* "job-training" pushed schools further toward the "transactional" approach. So again, capitalism and a religious adherence to "free market" principles helped create the current conditions (although again, it's a complex issue).

                          Originally posted by ahalpert View Post
                          And in journalism - it all feels so clickbaity now. [...]
                          I'm certainly not here to defend the US (or global) media landscape. It's a cesspool. I'd only offer the counterpoints that (1) even if it was less clickbaity in the past it was still rife with bias, incompetence, discrimination, and corruption; and (2) there are lots of really great independent news outlets doing important journalism these days—the issue is they don't reach a wide enough audience.

                          Originally posted by ahalpert View Post
                          You're probably right about unions, etc. (Although I think that car factories have been racially well-integrated for a long time? And perhaps also coal mines, etc?) My impression, based on little more than many Hollywood movie plots and a passing knowledge of history, is that corporate raiders in the 1980s moved (in parallel with a broader "free market" political fervor associated with Reaganism) to buy and reshape companies, making them more profitable by shredding their obligations to their employees. [...]

                          Similarly, I won't be surprised if tenured professors somehow find themselves on the chopping block as overpaid college administrators try to save themselves in the face of a shrinking student body.
                          I just saw a reference to a study suggesting that union membership was one of the few things with a demonstrated ability to reduce racist views/attitudes by white people. Unfortunately anti-union and anti-worker efforts have been fashionable for decades in this country—certainly Reagan was terrible on this front, but I'm pretty sure Jimmy Carter was similarly bad.

                          As for tenured professors: at least in some fields we are starting to see colleges take steps to eliminating tenured faculty (to say nothing of schools shutting down entirely). But most of them have been complicit, to varying degrees, in their own demise for decades. Tenured faculty have long ignored the plight of non-tenture (adjunct / contingent) faculty, thinking they were immune to the problems in higher ed. Of course they were mistaken, as anyone could have predicted.

                          Comment


                            Originally posted by drboffa View Post
                            .

                            I think there is truth to this: BUT, the market has long viewed the college > job pipeline as transactional. I.e., generations of students were told that if they wanted access to white collar, middle-class lives and jobs then they *had* to go to college. And then the backlash against any kind of learning that was anything *but* "job-training" pushed schools further toward the "transactional" approach. So again, capitalism and a religious adherence to "free market" principles helped create the current conditions (although again, it's a complex issue).
                            Gotcha. But with the grade inflation, lack of study, outright cheating... it feels more like all that merits the degree is the exchange of tuition dollars. I hear tell that A's used to be hard to get and a 4.0 GPA was exceedingly rare. now you have students berating their professors over low Marks that will affect their job prospects...which was sort of the point. It's kind of the difference between saying that boot camp is a prerequisite for joining the army and saying that you've paid your boot camp fee, so you should get to join without breaking a sweat.

                            I'm certainly not here to defend the US (or global) media landscape. It's a cesspool. I'd only offer the counterpoints that (1) even if it was less clickbaity in the past it was still rife with bias, incompetence, discrimination, and corruption; and (2) there are lots of really great independent news outlets doing important journalism these days—the issue is they don't reach a wide enough audience.
                            The most interesting journalists I follow now are all independent. Some operating solo. I used to read the NYT religiously. And while they still do a lot of comprehensive work, I've also seen some very shoddy and dishonest reporting from them in recent years. I don't have a super long record to compare it to. (I was reading them for about 15 years.) But it seems like a decline of standards rooted in economic circumstances and fueled by political currents.
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                            All men are brothers

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                              Australia is incredibly involved right now! So sad all of this, what is happening there ;(

                              Comment


                                Originally posted by Visunion View Post
                                Australia is incredibly involved right now!
                                what does this mean? is this a new slang usage of the word involved?
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                                All men are brothers

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