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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I’m from Pittsburgh. I think we ran a cross country meet in Hershey once.

    The amusement park and factory tour are all quite charming. It’s hard to recommend one make a dedicated trip, but if anyone is ever on a road trip nearby, it’s worth the detour to stop by for a day.

    Then again, my recommendation is 20 years old. It could be either better or worse now.



  • I had one in my room! Such a good feel to it. Same with picking up and hanging up!

    This was in the early 2000s, btw. They were already relics, but landlines were still commonly used when I was in high school, and it had such a handsome look to it and felt great to use. I have long thought that a product that would do incredibly well would be a cell phone charging dock where you put your phone in and while it’s charging it just acts like a landline rotary phone. The user experience is very, very gratifying, and if you’ve ever tried to hold a call while your phone is plugged into the wall you know how much better a solid headset with a coil wire would feel than that.


  • I’m 38. I remember a few times when I was a kid needed to call a classmate urgently. Like, maybe i needed to know what math problems we were assigned as homework. For folks I knew well, I might have their number written down in a book in a desk drawer, but for anyone else I would have to look up their last name in the white pages and read down a list trying to find the right number.

    Was their dad’s name Prescott? No, that’s not an ethnic match. Here’s a David. That sounds right. Oh! And it’s on Beacon! That’s the right neighborhood! That’s got to be it!

    I think about it all the time. You could find your teacher’s house and just go drop off a fruit basket or something if you wanted. It was crazy! It was just assumed that if someone wanted to find your house it was probably for a sensible reason. Why otherwise? If you’re paranoid or a public figure then maybe you’d choose to be unlisted, but for anyone else there’s no point in it.

    Simpler times, for sure. I’d still like to go back. I think it was worth it. The alternative doesn’t seem to work. We’re all getting constantly harassed with robo calls and stalked on line. At this point, the only people who don’t know where we live are the ones who might drop off a casserole. We’ve gained nothing.



  • This is so exciting. I worked in a lab where we were trying to do this, and so I was very aware what a gold rush we were in. I’m so glad to see that it’s actually happening.

    This is truly a watershed moment in science. This is going to mark a major turning point in cellular medicine from theory to commonplace care. Eventually, this will end the pharma industry’s insulin cash cow.

    But it’s even bigger than that. Because once we can engineer cells that produce a natural product, the next step is to engineer cells that produce synthetic medicines. Antidepressants, birth control, hormones, weight loss drugs, boner pills… The frontier is huge, lucrative, financially disruptive for pharma companies and life changing for patients. This is a big moment in history, and we all need to be fighting harder than ever to end for-profit healthcare. Otherwise we’re going to end up with subscription licenses to our own bodies.




  • I’m sorry, but this narrative so completely exonerates Biden and Harris for their direct responsibility for risking the election over this.

    The notion that Harris is in a bind is an absolute fiction. The overwhelming majority of Americans want an arms embargo with Israel. It has broad bipartisan support, including with an overwhelming majority of Democrats. And in top of that, she chose to not even let a popular Palestinian American lawmaker from Georgia give a vetted speech endorsing her at the DNC.

    She is risking this election. That is a personal choice. I hope she wins, but if she loses because she didn’t have votes she made clear she doesn’t want, that is not on Jill Stein, that’s a Harris decision.



  • I agree with all of that. Except for the part about possibly appealing to the anti-war voter if it would help them win. There are some – Biden for instance – who clearly would rather lose than do that. I don’t know Harris well enough to judge.

    I think it’s sad that people complain when someone says that they won’t vote for the lesser of two evils. It’s sad because it shows a profound misunderstanding about how democracy is supposed to work, and what they’re entitled to demand from their fellow citizens.

    The largest voting block in every election is the depressed voter. And the reason is that our system is constructed to favor a broken two-party system even at the expense of civil participation that can solve our problems. Millions of people don’t vote because they see no benefit in doing so. The problem to be solved is that the political system has failed these people, not that they aren’t showing sufficient enthusiasm to do paperwork to satisfy the demands of people who feel invested in the outcome of elections.

    The media falsely claims that each candidate has 47% support when really they each have about 30% support, and a larger number of people have not felt any interest in supporting either candidate. That’s a massive failing in reporting and political process.