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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It’s possible I missed it, but I didn’t see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.

    Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.

    As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it’s a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn’t gone horribly wrong yet. It’s certainly worth being cautious about, and I’m certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it’s probably a pretty low likelihood.


  • There’s a lot of questions to be answered here but I feel like this could potentially be a pretty cool thing

    He’s created a strain of yeast that seems like it could function as an oral vaccine

    You could just filter off the beer and eat the yeast, or maybe put it into pills or something, or purify it into a normal injectable vaccine

    But there’s a lot of people out there who are skeptical of pills and afraid of needles, or who just won’t want to eat powdered yeast

    But a lot of those same people will happily drink a beer.

    It could also be a way towards sort of decentralizing vaccine production. Imagine he starts selling little packets of dry vaccine yeast for people to brew beer with. Yeast is pretty forgiving in its storage requirements, keep it in its little sealed envelope and keep it reasonably dry, and it should be good for a couple years. You can ship that around the world without much fuss.

    And people all over the world know how to brew beer. Get that packet of yeast into the local hooch-maker’s hands anywhere in the world, and they can turn it into a bunch of 1-pint vaccine doses in a week or two. No particularly special equipment or distribution networks needed, and vaccine distribution becomes as easy as hosting a kegger.

    And if they’re able to reclaim some of that yeast to brew another batch, you’ve potentially even set them up for long-term vaccine beer production.

    You might also be better able to convince people who might otherwise be skeptical about taking a traditional vaccine to just drink a beer. It’s not something scary like a needle, or weird and unnatural like a pill, it’s “just” a beer.

    And you can focus your efforts a bit more on who you need to convince about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. You don’t need to convince a whole village to trust vaccines, you just need to convince the local brewer that the people already trust, and then you can piggyback off that existing trust.

    Hell, I’m pro vaccine, but I know I’d probably be a little more proactive about getting mine if it meant I got to go have a couple beers.

    Again, there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered, not the least of which are the basic safety and effectiveness of this

    There’s also informed consent, making sure that the people drinking the beer understand that the beer is a bit more than just a beer, and the risks of alcohol (although if this is an effective delivery system, I think it’s likely that those risks are well-outweighed by the benefits of vaccines)

    I definitely think it’s something worth exploring.


  • All good, I always feel like it’s 72 hours, and I think the equivalent in most states is only 72 I think we’re the odd one out on that, and I feel like in most cases patients managed to get stabilized enough to be discharged after the 72 hours.

    I kind of feel like the extra two days are mostly so there’s time to get everything set up for a 303 in case the patient tries to fight it and it goes to court. I had to be a witness for that over a call I took once, I only got like a day or two’s notice because it all has to happen on such a condensed timeline



  • It is and it isn’t

    Certain things absolutely need to be standardized

    But in other cases it can just kind of bog things down.

    I remember one training thing we had to do to keep our certifications up to date, part of it had to do with fire dispatch.

    And at the beginning of that, our instructor basically said “Almost nothing in this course is at all relevant to us. But it’s a national standard and we have to teach this to you”

    It had a lot to do with wildland firefighting and some other specific situations that have nothing to do with how things operate in our area or with the kinds of situations we deal with.

    It was interesting, I learned some fun facts, but I haven’t yet had any reason to use any of the knowledge I picked up from that training.

    And that time could have probably been better spent doing something else.


  • Funnily enough, I actually work in an agency that’s very close to Philly and deal with my counterparts in the city fairly regularly.

    I don’t get (or want) to listen to a whole lot of PPD radio chatter, we have plenty in our own county to keep us busy, so I don’t know for certain if they’re actually still using 10-codes or any other similar system or not. I can’t think of any time I’ve heard a Philly officer or dispatcher use one with me, but it’s certainly possible that they’re still in use there internally.

    Also even though we’re using plain language, there’s still some weird miscommunication that happens.

    I remember one time needing to advise Philly of a report of gunshots we received that might have been relevant to them, it was near their border.

    So I called over to their dispatch and advised them that “we received a report of shots fired in the area of…”

    Which kind of sent their dispatcher into a bit of a tizzy because in Philly dispatch lingo “shots fire” basically means an officer has fired their gun, but to us it’s just any report of gunshots (which, more often than not, means fireworks or something that the caller mistook for gunshots)


  • Just as an aside, most police codes aren’t really standardized across different agencies.

    There’s a handful of 10-codes that are pretty much universal, like “10-4”

    67 isn’t one of those codes. A lot of departments do use it for a report of a death

    But it’s also commonly used to advise of an important incoming message

    And other agencies may have other uses for it

    And other agencies use other systems besides 10 codes, I believe some departments in CA have been known to use penal code numbers

    But so because of that, there’s been a big movement in emergency service to use plain language over codes for the last decade or two, mostly since Katrina since different agencies using different codes lead to a lot of miscommunication there.

    I work in 911 dispatch, at my agency and pretty much everywhere around me it’s all plain language. One or two 10-codes linger around, more as informal slang than anything that gets official use. 10-4 sometimes gets used, but that’s practically just part of the English language now.

    10-96 also kind of lingers around in my agency, which in the set of 10-codes they used before I started was for a subject with mental health issues. We’re not really supposed to use it but no one has really come up with a better shorthand for it so it still pops up from time to time, mostly from our officers.


  • Not a fan of the bait and switch, and I haven’t really looked into her beyond this article so I can’t say if this is the case

    But I kind of wonder if this isn’t actually a pretty good strategy.

    A whole lot of Texans aren’t going to vote for anyone who doesn’t have an R next to their name, regardless of if they actually like their policies or not.

    So maybe if you just do everything as a Democrat would do but register as a Republican and don’t talk about it too much, you can slip one by them and get the idiots to vote for an actual RINO.

    Of course the trick is getting the word out there to get Dems to vote for someone without a D next to their name as well without clueing in the Republicans that that’s what’s going on. The Republicans are a little more used to listening for dog whistles than Democrats are.


  • There was a thread I saw not too long ago where someone brought up a little conspiracy theory I think I may subscribe to

    There’s a new Alzheimer’s treatment, Lecanemab/Leqembi, that was given accelerated approval in the US by the FDA this year in January, so just as trump took office.

    It’s given by IV every 4 weeks. Trump has been seen with what looks like makeup thats covering up bruising from an IV

    It also seems like he has highs and lows where he declines for a couple weeks then perks back up a bit before declining again, and you can maybe kind of match those up to a similar 4-ish week cycle.

    And it also calls for regular cognitive tests and MRIs to monitor if it’s effective, and, well, trump has been doing that.


  • That is just not the case.

    The case that people tend to cite when this comes up is Burdick vs United States, that determined that people can choose to decline a pardon.

    And one of the reasons they gave for why someone may choose to refuse a pardon is because it can be seen as implying guilt.

    Basically, some people will see you take the pardon and think “if he’s innocent, why is he taking a pardon instead of seeking exoneration?”

    But of course, if you know anything about the US “justice” system, that argument falls apart pretty fast.

    Actually admitting guilt is not part of accepting a pardon, it’s just that a lot of people think that it means you’re guilty, and the pardoned people don’t want to have people think that about them.

    And of course spreading this kind of misinformation only makes that issue worse.






  • I tend to think of and describe myself as a conservative, but don’t align myself with the Republican party at all (I am registered to vote Republican to try to weed out the worst of their lunatics in the primaries, but it’s gonna be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election with the way things are going)

    In my view, which absolutely isn’t the view of the Republicans or conservatives as a whole, the point of conservatism is to just pump the breaks and slow things down to make sure all the "I"s are dotted and "t"s crossed to make sure things are actually going to work as intended.

    Liberals/leftists/progressives should basically be the “idea guys” coming up with big general plans for what they want to happen

    Then the conservatives would be sort of the bean-counters/logistics/nuts-and-bolts sort of guys. They shouldn’t be there to outright oppose the liberal ideas, they’re there to point out the problems with their plans and make sure they’re addressed before we commit to some half-assed plan.


  • I’m certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

    But a couple things jumping out at me

    The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

    They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

    And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn’t exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there’s a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don’t quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it’s not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don’t get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

    So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

    It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

    Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn’t fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

    Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a “haha, how do you like your leader’s name when it’s on a black kid? Suck it Nazis.”

    Or maybe it was something else. That’s just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

    *fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.