They cut off usda funding from Minnesota, which includes wic and snap. Please consider donating to food banks around the area or food drives. Many immigrants are too scared to leave their homes to shop as well and a community member is doing great work.
is it a hot take to say that i think you need to understand why something is bad, not just that it simply is?
ALT
this is a part of the problem
you need to be able to explain why you shouldnt use ai rather than “oh well its obviously bad and you shouldnt use it or else youre a bad person” because that isn’t logic. “ai generates child porn based off of real children and whether or not it does is entirely up to how it is built and if pedophiles are able to find ways around those safeguards, because ai cannot in itself discern right from wrong” is a genuine criticism. “amazon tried to build a data center the size of tuson outside of tuson just to power their ai that would’ve increased the inability to stay alive outside in parts of arizona” is a genuine criticism. even “using generative ai teaches you not to learn how to do things yourself even when they’re difficult, devaluing necessary skills out of practice” is a genuine criticism when you look at the amount of people who think they are able of doing a difficult major when they couldnt write their own papers in high school.
but “ai is just bad because it’s bad” will convince no one and is a morally lazy position to take. about anything!
you need to know why reading someone’s diary is wrong if you want to learn about privacy and respect. you need to know why child sexual assault is wrong if you want to be able to help children form healthy age appropriate relationships. you need to know why capitalism is bad if you want to replace it with something else. you need actual concrete ideas and ideologies rather than “you should agree with me because i have the right vibe”
Today is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin. Before that, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence.
For perspective, I’ve been diabetic for about 25% of this discovery’s history. When my grandparents were born, this treatment did not exist. If you ask me, “what time period would be fun to go back to?” I can’t even speculate more than one hundred years back, because I know I couldn’t live in that world.
Today, I’m going to pick up four boxes of insulin from my local drug store. My endocrinologist is renewing my prescription, so I’m set for several months to come. I lead a more difficult life than someone without Type 1 diabetes, but I do live, and so do my relatives and friends with the condition. Thank you, Banting, Best, Macleod, and Collip (and all those dogs), for letting me do that.
One hundred years later, after insulin’s discoverer gave his patent away for $1 so as never to profit from the discovery, pharmaceutical companies are forcing people to ration insulin or go without entirely due to unchecked price increases. This is particularly true in the US, and is a major reason why I did not stay there after graduate school. There, and in much of the world where insulin is expensive and scarce, people are dying. Things are starting to change, but not soon enough. It’s been one hundred years, and we need to do better when the alternative is death.
Insulin is worth being grateful about, and its exploitation is worth being angry about. One thing to be aware of is that it is a treatment only, not a cure. Diabetes is still high-maintenance, and I still have a very complicated relationship to it.
Today, though, I’m choosing to focus on my gratitude, and being alive, and being able to go for a walk with my friend in the rain-scented air, do some trivia, see a show.
They say the change in the first child to receive a dose of insulin, 100 years ago, looked like magic.
Today (January 11, 2022) is the 100th anniversary of the first insulin injection being given to a human patient, 14-year old Leonard Thompson.
It wasn’t a perfect solution - Thompson actually had an allergic reaction to the first shot, probably due to an impurity - but, twelve days later, they had refined the dosage enough for a successful, magic-like change. I cannot emphasize how much Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence before this moment, and what an incredible gift, an incredible second chance, insulin was, despite its imperfections.
It’s important to note that Thompson successfully took insulin for 13 years, but still died at the age of 26. This was not directly because of diabetes. Insulin gave him the chance to live. Pneumonia killed him. Diabetic bodies are still more vulnerable to illness and anything else that compromises homeostasis.
It would have been my friend’s 40th birthday yesterday. He also had diabetes, and was in the hospital for related complications, but COVID (which he caught there) is what killed him.
My (out, proud, and brilliant) friend’s motto was from Tony Kushner’s masterwork Angels in America: “More Life.” It’s a play in large part about the AIDS epidemic, which was overlooked or even celebrated by many because the people who died from it were considered undesirable, expendable, broken.
Insulin gives me more life. Its costs still shorten the lives others. We, along with other marginalized groups, are still in many respects considered expendable.
I’m still grateful for so many things, and I’m still angry about so many others.
More Life.
It’s the 101st anniversary of the first insulin shot today.
Jon should have turned 41 yesterday.
This week, my diabetes tech failed me twice; first, my continuous glucose monitor went defective and rogue, giving completely incorrect readings which determined my basal insulin dose and thus made me ill, a roller coaster of highs and lows as insulin was cut off and delivered at random, until I stopped the sensor. Why didn’t I cut it off immediately? Because a ten-day sensor costs at least $100, and once you shut it down, it’s done. I was hoping it would fix itself, as sometimes happens.
On Monday, my pump site failed just before I started teaching. I was so busy for the three hours that I didn’t notice, until the alarm sounded that I was out of insulin. My pump had delivered everything it had left, none of which wound up in my body, in a desperate attempt to lower my blood sugar. After only three hours without insulin, my blood sugar, which had been resting comfortably between the “diabetic normal” of 4-8, had risen to 20. All I had consumed that day was water. I was sick for the rest of the day.
For a Type 1 diabetic, and for many Type 2s, a lack of insulin is a death sentence. At the same time, in our current reality, each new advancement, each little bit of magic, comes at a cost.
Despite its imperfections, it’s still an incredible gift.
I just wish the gift were freely available to everyone.
It’s the 104th anniversary (January 11, 1922) of the first insulin injection given to a human. Jon’s 44th birthday would have been yesterday. He was born only 60 years after this medical advance, so close in living memory that it’s a little frightening to think about where I and many others would be without it.
I started the Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitor two weeks ago, after being on the G6 for a few years. Startlingly, my blood sugar has been in range more than 90% of the time for an entire week. Talk about magic.
If the system can be trusted, that is–another company’s CGM has recently been implicated in at least 7 deaths (none in North America, though, chirp the articles–only 57 injuries in the US). When you pair the monitor with an insulin pump, letting it control your baseline insulin delivery, it is an incredible act of trust that you can’t think about too much lest you turn into an anxious mess. Check your sources with another meter if things seem too uncharacteristic. But a rogue sensor can kill in the night.
Gratitude, though. A few nights ago, I came home incredibly tired. I made myself a sandwich, took insulin before eating the sandwich (because you’re supposed to do so at least 15 minutes before you eat for optimum insulin efficiency–yet another consideration), then fell asleep before eating the sandwich. A potentially fatal error that I haven’t made in years and years. When my blood sugar crashes, I almost always wake up. Not this time. The Dexcom worked its magic, stopped my basal insulin, dragged me up from the depths. No medical attention required. Gratitude [it looked like magic].
On the other side of 40, I’ve noticed the first wisps of what might be aging, what might be diabetes complications. Anger: this disease has stolen so much. Gratitude: I’m still here to feel these things.
Getting on the new CGM was an insurance nightmare. Dexcom stopped its delivery service and discount program, cutting us off in its rush to get us all on the most updated version. It is a business, after all! Prescriptions wouldn’t transfer. Discount codes expired. Three different insurance programs had to be notified, begged, at the most hectic time of year. There was a gap and I had to buy emergency supplies out of pocket (hundreds of dollars that I can thankfully currently afford).
I apologized to the trainee pharmacy student behind the counter for all the stress. “No, no,” he said. “This is good, I’m learning a lot.”
Leonard Thompson would have died a skeleton in 1922 at 14 years of age. I just had to call my insurance company a few times. It’s not the same, yet the underlying fear is.
The advances are great; so are the costs. Advances don’t mean anything if they don’t come with access.
If you’re in the US, now is a great time to talk to the young people in your life about the US military:
The recruiter is not your friend. The military employs child psychologists to learn how to make you think the recruiter is your friend.
The recruiter is allowed to lie to you and makes more money if they do.
The recruiter is paid a commission to groom children into cannon fodder.
The recruiter will tell you you’re special and will go into special smart soldier programs instead of combat. They’re lying.
The recruiter may tell you they can tell if someone can get PTSD or not and only recruit people like you, who won’t. They’re lying.
The recruiter may tell you you’ll be too busy attending free college (!!) to go overseas. They’re lying.
The recruiter may ask what countries you want to travel to and promise you bougie placements on military bases in those countries. They’re lying.
Even “It’s just four years!” is a lie - the government is allowed to hold you past your enlistment period with a stop-loss order.
The recruiter actually has zero power to decide anything that happens to you after you enlist and they more importantly don’t care what happens to you.
If you enlist, you will be brainwashed to make you willing to do things to other humans that you would never be willing to do today.
You will be ordered to do things that will kill children. And you’ll do them.
The military is not the only way or even the best way for you to go to college or start a career.
Military brainwashing will actually make you into a terrible university student because it degrades your ability to think critically and question your sources.
Having PTSD and/or a TBI will make it harder to be a student and keep a job.
Veterans’ benefits suck these days.
Being a veteran drastically increases your risk of homelessness, suicide, alcohol and drug dependence, prison time, and becoming an abuser to your loved ones.
The military will expose you to chemicals that will drastically increase your chances of developing cancer.
The military will withhold information about your rights to conscientiously object after enlisting.
It’s kind of telling watching folks try to analyse the police misconduct in the United Healthcare case to support this or that conclusion because, like, you know they do that anyway, right? Cops routinely fabricate evidence even when they genuinely believe they’ve got the right guy because it’s easier than doing their jobs.
“No one is coming to save you.” I disagree ! I believe many people made up of many small moments come to save pieces of you , even if just briefly. The mentor who believed in you . The friend who said they’re proud of you. The family member that makes you laugh . The random person who held the door for you out of nothing but kindness. The teacher who took extra time to help you understand. The person who smiled at you when you walked into a store. The little kid who looks up to you. The person who randomly complimented you. Being “saved” isn’t about being whisked away and all your hardships gone, it’s about the people and things that remind you life is not all hardships, it is kindness, love, gentleness, softness, care, thoughtfulness. It is many moments made up of your lifetime that keeps you going and showing you the world is still beautiful, and will always be. Despite.
academic dishonesty is not something you can spin as moral lol i do not want to share a career field let alone a social sphere with a bunch of chatgpt using ass bitches
“you’re just scared your diploma is going to devalue” i’m afraid you dumb bitches are going to become my colleagues and drag social services to hell
I’m afraid they’ll become scientists and data that lives depend on will turn out to be wrong - and people will die.
I’m afraid they’ll become engineers and sign off on bridge designs that collapse - and people will die.
I’m afraid they’ll become medical professionals who don’t know what they’re doing - and people will die.
The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you’re learning to do doesn’t matter.
“The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you’re learning to do doesn’t matter.”
People dying as a result of academic dishonesty getting people in positions they don’t deserve already happens. This isn’t a hypothetical or future problem, this is an ongoing problem. People lacking both basic knowledge and ethics are directly responsible for medical deaths. I specifically share nursing-related ones when I teach. In just the very small sampling of the recent ones I share…
One large example, 15,000 fake nursing school diplomas at South Florida school which has directly been related to patient deaths.
Which also mentions additional phony diploma cases.
There are plenty of malpractice case studies listed here, many of which are medication errors, such as a notable one i share with students where an elderly lady was given a fatal overdose of morphine by a nurse.
RaDonda Vaught is related to a fatal drug injection (why we teach measurements and basic math!) - which isn’t just a measurement issue, but also a gross negligence error, as the machine had apparently warned that the amount withdrawn was high (look this one up, I am typing these from my ppt list and the link is long)
There was another one that stuck with me that I can’t find the specific link for (internet search is showing malpractice deaths by aspiration are alarmingly high) - where a nurse was trying to force a patient to ingest food while actively in emesis. That is something clearly the nurse should have been trained not to do - but also comes down to common sense! The patient aspirated, obviously.
And I fear this will only get worse as it becomes easier and more accessible to get away with academic dishonesty using GenAI, doing no thinking or learning for yourself.
Things happen in seconds, especially in medicine. Professionals need the entire breadth of information available in their mind to make split second decisions. Looking things up/using a GenAI that is often just WRONG will definitely lead to deaths. This is a new symptom of an ongoing problem.
