by see by chloe
Do you actually need to walk today? Because you could be wearing these shoes if you don’t.
Tuesday Shoesday
Under Washington’s cherry tree
the common soldier, who was not getting paid, who was suffering in the cold, dying of sickness, watching the civilian profiteers get rich. …
a smaller mutiny took place in the New Jersey Line, involving two hundred men who defied their officers and started out for the state capital at Trenton. Now Washington was ready. Six hundred men, who themselves had been well fed and clothed, marched on the mutineers and surrounded and disarmed them. Three ringleaders were put on trial immediately, in the field. One was pardoned, and two were shot by firing squads made up of their friends, who wept as they pulled the triggers. It was “an example,” Washington said.
1781. From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
While you’re waiting for the bus
CRISPR technology leaps from lab to industry
Kind of a big deal
The cost savings of food stamps cuts versus the cost increases of diabetes care
The Rise of the Urban Forest
Trees make your city so much nicer
This is what happiness looks like
How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme—Again
Banks steal your home and rent them back to you while their value appreciates. Also, they are really shitty landlords.
Mushrooms Create Their Own Breeze.
So mushrooms are cooler than you thought
Today I’m thankful for the pope
The Thick Blue Line
Police protection
I got mine
The closing statement in my Republican aunt’s long rant about the evils of Obamacare:
As you know, life is not fair and I am sick and tired of governments trying to make everything equal–I am not interested in a communistic society
Structural problems in academic science
Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University, argues that many of the research community’s problems flow from two big features of how we do research. First, we staff our labs with low-wage, temporary workers—graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who move on after a few years. This means that universities have an incentive to recruit and train more students and postdocs, regardless of their eventual job prospects. The result is unsustainable. As Stephan writes, “the research enterprise itself resembles a pyramid scheme.”
The second structural problem is that career rewards in science are doled out according to a “tournament model,” a situation in which small advantages—in productivity, skill, or network connections—translate into large differences in rewards like faculty jobs, grant funding, and tenure. Tournament models foster intense competition, but they can be incredibly wasteful: the differences between a proposal that is funded and one that is not can be small and arbitrary. These small and arbitrary differences are making and breaking scientific careers in which taxpayers have invested substantial resources.
How We’re Unintentionally Defunding the National Institutes of Health
Tuesday Shoesday
oval by cydwoq
When I imagine myself as a young professor, I imagine myself in shoes like these. With some excellent socks/stockings.
No State shall pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts
To protect everyone’s contracts seems like an act of fairness of equal treatment, until one considers that contracts made between rich and poor, between employer and employee, landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor, generally favor the more powerful of the two parties. Thus to protect these contracts is to put the great power of the government, its laws, courts, sheriffs, police, on the side of the privileged – and to do it not, as in premodern times, as an exercise of brute force against the weak but as a matter of law.
1791. From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States