Category: Uncategorized

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eric-coldfire:

simon-newman:

bisexual-nightwing:

ionlylooklikeahipster:

king-in-yellow:

official-liberty-prime:

srsfunny:

Hospital T-Rex

Imagine being rushed into the ER and reading this as they push you through though

Lol when my appendix burst, I had initially refused to go to the ER because it was a Saturday night (which are always busy helltimes for ERs of course) – and when I arrived I was told there were eight people ahead of me. I agreed and just asked for something to drink and something for the nausea. They took my vital signs, looked at each other, and then whisked me back immediately to a room and within five minutes the ER attending physician came in (as opposed to a resident physician).

“Hahaha, holy shit, am I dying?” I asked him – because HOSPITAL T-REX IS CORRECT

Okay but the T-Rex has abs drawn onto it in pen.

P90 Rex

Too bad this is apparently not true in my country…

I know I wasn’t in immediate danger and it was like 2am, but sitting in a waiting room for nearly an hour and a half with a dislocated jaw suuuuuuuuuucked.

Hospital T-Rex has it right.

Last time I went to the ER they took my vitals and rushed me to a bed, got me sorted, then kept me for observation for 4 hours.

If I had been forced to wait in the waiting room, I wouldn’t be here today.

Thank you Hospital T-Rex.

Ygxthfyjdrdsdfdggijvffjk

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shatterpath:

teaboot:

Dude: Okay yeah but the woman shouldn’t have 100% of the decision power when it comes to abortion. I mean, it’s the guy’s kid, too.

Me: True, but it’s still the woman’s body. What if I got pregnant and didn’t want it, but the person I banged did? Does my body belong to them, now? Like, I’m not somebody’s incubator, I’m a person

This guy: I get that, I’m just saying that if my girlfriend found out she was pregnant and got an abortion without telling me, I’d be devastated. Like, that’s my kid too, right?

Me: Yeah, and I’m not saying that would’t suck ass for you, but I’m just saying. Like, you’ve got a lot less at stake, here? Like, when a woman gets pregnant, she has nine months of her life with a person growing in her body. There’s foods she can’t eat, she can’t have alcohol or smoke, she might have to kick an addiction, she might lose her job, she could even die, you know? And then if the dude changes his mind and fucks off, or denies that he’s the dad, she’s a single parent for the rest of her life. The guy in this scenario doesn’t have any more at stake than if he’d jerked off into a sock and called it a day, so why is his opinion the deal breaker, here?

Him: Yeah, but she could at least tell him.

Me: Yeah, that would be decent, but really, why does he even need to know? Like, say I went off and had a one night stand with a total stranger, and popped a morning after pill the next day. Do I have to track him down, first? What I lose it before I even notice? It’s just a zygote, like just one cell. I lose a billion cells every day, and I’m supposed to let him know that I’m about to dust a few more that are smaller than a hangnail? If it’s not like a fully formed baby that I intended to keep from the get-go, does he really *need* to know that?

Him: I’m just saying, pregnancy is a possibility every time you have sex. You go into it knowing that it’s a possibility, you should be prepared for that.

Me: Is that how you’d feel if you woke up pregnant one day? Like, if not some bizarre twist of nature and chaos magic you as a dude got out of bed two months along and had to deal with it. Would your first reaction be, “well, I guess this is my life now”, or “Holy fuck, this isn’t supposed to happen, holy shit, holy shit”?

Dude: I just think it needs to be regulated. I agree that abortion is okay as a medical emergency, but what about a lady who goes out and gets knocked up every other week and just figured, ‘oh, no big deal, I’ll just get another abortion’?

Me: So we’re going to say it’s not allowed at all based on the actions of the smallest possible minority?

Him: At that point, it’s murder. People like that would be better off in the ground

Me: Can I ask your opinion on the death penalty?

Guy: I think rapists and murderers should get the death penalty, flat out.

Me: Murder punishable by death- what about self defense?

He: That’s different.

Me: Can you prove that? What if I shot a guy who owed me money point blank in the face and said it was because he said he’d kill me and I feared for my life?

Dudio: That’s obviously bullshit, though.

Me: Can you prove it isn’t? I’m innocent until proven guilty. So long as the story holds up in court, the truth doesn’t matter. And if you’re going to put someone to death, you need to know 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re right. Would you be able to say I’m a liar if you were risking the death of an innocent person? How long do you continue to investigate? How much money do you pour down that hole? How much is a human life worth, at the end of the day? Or would it end up being easier just to keep them incarcerated?

Him: Some people are better off dead.

Me: I agree, but I don’t want to be the one who decides which ones don’t make the cut. Do you?

Him: So people like Ted Bundy. You don’t think the world would be better off without him?

Me: Not at the expense of innocent people, no. I’d rather have a soulless mass murderer alive behind bars than see one innocent person with a bad case be put in the ground by mistake.

Me: And on that note, if a woman who has multiple abortions is a murderer, then to prevent murder, we should limit the number of abortions a woman is allowed to have. So if her punch card is full and she gets pregnant again, then ‘falls down the stairs’ and loses the kid, is she on death row, now? Is there any way to prove that the loss of pregnancy was on purpose? We’d have to investigate every single miscarriage in the country. Then, inevitably, some poor woman with difficult health who’s been desperately trying for a kid and has just had the worst goddamn luck would end up on death row.

Me: So in the end we have more innocent people dead, less access to a medical procedure people need in order to survive, and even fewer resources in our legal system to handle it all.

Me: Or, maybe the .000005% of people actually abusing the system we have is not an issue worthy of the media shitstorm, and we should untwist our panties over it.

Him: Yeah Idk I still think it’s wrong.

Me: :/

Sigh. Sounds about right!

Amazon’s monopsony power: the other antitrust white meat

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mostlysignssomeportents:

In 2017, law student Lina Khan shifted the debate on Amazon and antitrust with a seminal paper called Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, which used Amazon’s abusive market dominance to criticize the Reagan-era shift in antitrust enforcement,
which rewrote the criteria for antitrust enforcement, so that antitrust
no longer concerned itself with preventing monopoly, and only focused
on “consumer harm” in the form of higher prices.

Khan’s paper jumpstarted an important intellectual shift in the global
perception of antitrust and Big Tech. For one thing, it revealed the
thinness of the argument that Big Tech got big because of “network
effects” or “first mover advantages, arguing instead that Big Tech’s
concentration was the result of utterly mundane monopolistic tactics that would be instantly recognizable to Brandeis, Carnegie and other players from the Gilded Age and the age of trustbusting.

Since then, other scholars have performed similar analysis on Big Tech giants like Facebook.

One important focus of this critique is the idea of “monopsony”, when a single entity is the only buyer in a market, meaning that it can put pressure on suppliers, contractors and other parts of the value chain, distorting markets.

Now, Fordham University law student Shaoul Sussman has connected the idea of monopsony with the idea of “consumer harm” in a new paper for the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement: “Prime Predator: Amazon and the Rationale of Below Average Variable Cost Pricing Strategies Among Negative-Cash Flow Firms.

Sussman’s argument is basically that even if you accept the Reaganist
version of anti-trust where the only thing that matters is "consumer
harm,” then you should still be worried about Amazon’s monopsism,
because when Amazon squeezes profits at the expense of its suppliers,
those suppliers lower the quality of their goods in order to stay
profitable despite Amazon’s profit-taking.

Sussman points out that Amazon has been unprofitable (on paper) since
its inception, but it continues to grow, in defiance of market
orthodoxy, which predicts that companies that pursue predatory pricing
schemes where they subsidize each sale will eventually run out of money
and investors, but that this hasn’t happened to Amazon. Sussman
hypothesizes that this the result of Amazon’s monopsony, and that Amazon
can get a discount on its predatory pricing by forcing suppliers to
foot part of the bill.

Sussman proposes regulatory oversight of big companies that grow while
consistently losing money, in the name of preventing the consumer harm
of lowered quality. It’s a really fascinating argument, because it makes
the case that the ideologues who’ve dismantled antitrust over the past
40 years should, by their own lights, regulate companies even when those
companies aren’t raising prices.

But for my money (so to speak), the more important part of the argument
is how it shows that market concentration is harmful even when prices
aren’t going up. If suppliers are getting squeezed and cutting wages,
reducing quality, and cutting costs (through reduced workplace safety,
reduced employee benefits etc), these social harms that are accruing to
people other than consumers tells you that antitrust needs a focus
beyond mere consumer issues.

I’m excited by all the work that these young legal and economic scholars
are putting into the reframing of pre-Reagan antitrust concerns as
“consumer harms” but ultimately, our future rests in abolishing the
“consumer harm” orthodoxy and returning to the idea that market
concentration is always suspect, even when no one can point to prices going up.


https://boingboing.net/2019/05/13/consumer-harms-everywhere.html

Supreme Court greenlights Apple customers’ lawsuit over App Store price-fixing

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mostlysignssomeportents:

The Supreme Court has ruled on a key question in Apple Inc v Pepper,
a class action suit arguing that the App Store violated antitrust law
by driving up prices through the monopolistic tactic of prohibiting
users from buying apps from third parties, and then taking a 30%
commission on every app sold, which led software companies to raise
prices in order to remain profitable after Apple had taken its cut.

Apple had asked the Supreme Court to prevent the case from moving
forward on the grounds that Apple customers were really buying apps from
the software vendors, and not through the App Store (in Apple’s view,
the App Store isn’t a store, just a commission-collecting system). Not
only is this obviously ridiculous, it’s also an area where there’s good
precedent in the form of the 1977 Illinois Brick Co. v. Illinois Supreme Court case, which SCOTUS cited in their opinion.

The court split 5-4, with Brett Kavanaugh siding against Apple and
writing the opinion. In some ways, this isn’t surprising, for two
reasons: one, Apple had terrible arguments, as it’s obvious
that the App Store is a store, and two, the one form of antitrust
enforcement conservatives are willing to tolerate is preventing “consumer harm” in the form of higher prices.

The ruling means that the lawsuit can proceed and the plaintiffs can try
to show that Apple did indeed violate antitrust law. If they win, it
will have an enormous impact on all the tech platforms that operate
“two-sided marketplaces” from eBay and Etsy to Uber and Lyft to Amazon
and Google Play.

It’s a really significant moment in the advancement of a new, reinvigorated form of antitrust, and while I continue to be skeptical that we can get ‘er done with “consumer harms” as our only viable frame, it’s a great example of just how far that frame can take us.


https://boingboing.net/2019/05/13/scotus-gmafb.html

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azzandra:

azzandra:

azzandra:

Fic idea I was struck with the other day and keep thinking about: a Vulcan adopts a cat.

Still thinking about this, even though I’m not writing the fic!

This Vulcan, I’m calling her T’Pen, goes to a shelter and gets a cat, and the shelter employees are like, a bit weirded out? But obviously they’re going to give her a cat, I mean, she’s a Vulcan, she’s Super Responsible, she takes all the pamphlets and listens attentively to all the advice the shelter employees give her, even though it is obvious she researched a lot on her own.

Then T’Pen asks the shelter folks what she should name the cat and runs into That Thing Humans Do Where They Confound a Vulcan With Their Weird Ways

Shelter Employee 1: oh, you can name a cat anything! That’s what’s great! People names, common nouns, whole phrases.

Shelter Employee 2: yeah, nothing sounds weird on a cat. Everything from Chad to Cupboard is fair game.

SE 1: yeah, I mean, you can’t call a dog Chad, that would be weird

SE 2: I wouldn’t fuckin’ trust anyone who named their dog Chad

SE 1: oh word

T’Pen:….

T’Pen: ….fascinating.

Later, in the interest of furthering her anthropological study of Earth, T’Pen has a houseparty and she invites her coworkers, many of whom are human, but others which are aliens, and are fascinated by T’Pen’s cat

Vulcan Co-worker: T’Pen, what have you named this small Earth feline?

T’Pen: I have named him Marmalade.

Vucan co-worker: Is that not the name of a type of Terran fruit preserve? I do not understand the logic behind this choice.

T’Pen: the logic is self-evident to a human.

Human Co-worker: T’Pen, omg, you have a cat! What’s his name?

T’Pen: thank you for your inquiry. His name is Marmalade

Human Co-worker: oooh! yeah, that makes sense, because he’s orange and sweet! lmao, great name

Vulcan Co-worker: …

Vulcan Co-worker: ….fascinating

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thefrogman:

sirfrogsworth:

I love how the title and thumbnail lure in the anti-vaxxers. 

I wish I could see their reaction when he reveals what the “side effects” are. 

I don’t think you can make risk analysis any simpler than this video.

Vaccinating your kids is like putting a seatbelt on their immune system. 

Not vaccinating them is like saying, “Well, they might get a seatbelt injury if they are in a crash!“ 

Which is true. But a seatbelt injury is better than the death that comes from not wearing one.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)