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Everyone is responsible for their own stupid decisions and we should laugh and throw rocks at Woke PhDs on welfare.

But let's not forget how the boomers royally fucked over their juniors. Do you know the surest sign of a bubble? FRAUD.


Remember the recession? I do, since it happened right when I was entering college. One of the big things that tipped off Burry and other autistics was fraud in the mortgage market.

The PhD is the same: everyone lied to the recent buy-ins about their likelihood of success.

I interviewed at five different graduate schools when I was looking into PhD programs. 4 out of 5 directly and blatantly lied about their placement rates.

It was hard to figure this out because it wasn't on their website; I had to look up all the school's completed dissertations

Why would they do this? Well, professors want grad students for several reasons: teach more courses, get more students, grow the dept, get more funding, etc.

So many completely hoodwink students into signing into PhD


It keeps getting worse. Two years ago I interviewed for a job at a mediocre university that created a _new_ PhD program. There are already no jobs, and they created a new PhD
When a student's baby started crying in class, she stood up to leave. But the professor stopped her and held her child while he taught so she could focus on the class.


This Turkish bride and groom spent their wedding day (after the ceremony) feeding 4000 refugees


https://t.co/LiUSbGgK4l


An entire neighborhood secretly learned sign language to surprise their deaf neighbor


This security guard at Disneyland would ask every little princess for their autograph. This one reportedly told her parents that she was thrilled he thought she was a "real princess"
I'm going to knock out that white supremacy & abortion discourse thread for you today, but before I can get to that, we've got to talk about the 'religion' issue.

Some people are reacting to the Capitol and Christianity in the worst possible way - ethically and strategically.

Several people responded to Christian Identity / white supremacist theology thread with calls to eradicate religion.

Let's just get one thing out of the way:

1) that won't ever happen
2) you're assuming religion is the problem (spoiler; it's


Not only do non-religious ideologies prove equally lethal, but in many cases, religious observance - like regular attendance of mosques, for example - is inversely correlated with political violence.

Also: generalizations are always a very bad idea; they lack analytic depth.

I also had people read the Christian Identity thread, and then write to me to ask:

"I heard a politician open his/her remarks with the name of God / Jesus, and it worried me. Is he/she a Nazi?"

Okay, let me stop you RIGHT there.

The answer here is not “every Christian politician is a Christian identity Nazi, and every mention of ‘the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘God’ is the ‘Christian Taliban’” (or whatever Islamophobic term is in current use).

That ain't it.

For a couple of reasons.
Very important long-read (only available in Dutch) in yesterday's Volkskrant, revealing the extent to which the Dutch Cabinet and the OMT (Outbreak Management Team), an ostensibly independent scientific advisory body, have grown entangled.
Some key points:


1/ As early as March of last year OMT-members were uncomfortable with the way then PM Rutte blurred the lines between policy steeped in political considerations, and scientific advise in his March 16 speech, discursively rendering the OMT responsible for political decisions.

2/ OMT-member Alex Friedrich, an early advocate for large-scale testing and masks, describes how dissent was not tolerated, especially after the Dutch gov't declared all OMT-advise as "practically holy," and says that politicians were using the OMT as "a heat-shield."

3/ He further tells of how international scientific consensus (masks, the role of children in transmission, presymptomatic infectiousness) was still up for debate in the Netherlands, all through the summer of 2020.

Friedrich: "Positions taken earlier were defended, instead of welcoming new ones [insights]." One of the worst things that can happen to a scientist, he says, "[is] that people start saying you're not a team player if you don't share the same position [on advice/insights etc]."
True story. My first visit to a grocery store in the US 15 years ago, I asked an employee where to find "capsicum". He sent me to the juice aisle. I asked another employee. Also juice aisle. Third person I asked came with me and patiently pointed out the Capri Sun shelf. 😂😂😂


Reminiscing about my grocery store visits when new to the US. Only kind of shopping I do recreationally. First couple of weeks, I spent hours just hitting different grocery shops and checking out all the foods and randomly buying some that I'd read about or seen on TV.

One of my first instinctive purchases was a turkey drumstick. So huge! Reminded me of those big joints of meat eaten by Jughead or Obelix or Flintstones. I bought it and tandoorified it at home right away in my oven debut. I had never seen an oven before that. Was a bit scared.

I remember the time I came home with a can of spam and my roommate (who was in his 5th year in the US) was like why spam? It sucks! I said yeah, but I have to taste the meat so bad that junk mail is called that. I gamely finished the can. Never bought it again. 😂😂

I visited 1st in 05 and moved in 06 so it was the cable TV, blogs, torrents age. Not exactly a time when US culture was largely unknown to us. I knew it's okra not ladyfinger, eggplant not brinjal, 1 oz is ~ 30g, 1 lb ~ half kg etc. But some blind spots remained. Some for years.
Lots of tweets about this today!
Let's see what we can see in the focal S:E484 build!

Phylogenetics (what I do - making 'family trees' from virus genetics) can be very informative to see how different variants are spreading, and how cases

There are two variants circulating predominantly in Brazil:
- 20B/S.484K seems to be older & more widespread. It has (among others) a mutation at position 484
- 20J/501Y.V3 is smaller & detected recently. It has mutations at 501 *and* 484.

2/10

https://t.co/Cw5u2kuATa


The variant predominantly in the UK (501Y.V1 / B.1.1.7) and the variant predominantly in South Africa (501Y.V2) also both have 501. 501Y.V2 *also* has the 484K mutation.

Why are there concerns about these mutations? You can read more at https://t.co/wVE7ubYBoy!

3/10


The view below is from an analysis focusing on sequences with a mutation at 484. It shows all the samples in the 2 variants (20B/S.484K & 20J/501Y.V3) & how they're related. More closely related = closer together (very, very roughly).

4/10


We can colour these samples by region to see where they're from. As we expect - most are in Brazil! A few are in Argentina (also red).

5/10

https://t.co/Cw5u2kuATa