A summary of the new test (it's so new I haven't yet found good summary news articles)
1. Do you have control over how much money you make, not including taking more jobs/hours? (Ex: being able to charge a higher rate for your work) If not, you're an employee!
2. Can you make investments to grow your business, not merely maintain it? (Ex: a photographer buying a new camera) If not, you're an employee!
3. Is the work indefinite or continuous, i.e. not a specific time based engagement? You're an employee!
4. If someone else has control over your work - sets your schedule, dictates your prices, supervises your work (including through electronic tracking), is able to discipline you - you're an employee!
5. Is the work you do an integral part of your employer's business? You're an employee!
.....UH. This is going.... to be interesting as a postdoc--I'm currently classified as a federal contractor, which means a whole lot of really stupid fucking things like "I can't get my taxes withdrawn from my paycheck like a normal person". I... under the text of this law, are postdoctoral fellows considered employees now?
This would make things so much simpler if I could apply it to my work, not gonna lie...
I'm drafting an email to my local labor office with questions, because this is the second year I've just about had a heart attack trying to file my taxes and frankly I hate everything about the way that postdocs are treated as itinerant workers. Also, I really want to know ahead of time what I'm supposed to do in the event of another federal sequester, because I like getting paid and I also like not getting charged with potential crimes for showing up to work when I'm supposed to.
Here's a helpful little explainer graphic from the Dept of Labor. Let me tell you, my job duties all firmly place me on the blue side of the line, not the yellow one.
This is a rule that pertains to a lot of us out there. It's worth contacting your local state labor department and asking them questions. Remember, government agencies don't get funding unless they can argue that they're being useful: using their services gives them ammunition to do that kind of thing.
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Disclaimer: I am not an immunologist or any kind of expert but I do stay up to date on the science. This is me presenting to you what I understand.
Disclaimer 2: This post assumes that you agree with me that COVID is still a relevant threat to personal & public health, and that measures must be taken. If you disagree with that, I'm not going to try to convince you on this post. I also won't cover vaccines, because I assume you're staying up to date with boosters.
Table of contents:
How to know how prevalent COVID is in your area
How COVID spreads from person to person (in order to better understand what precautions to take and why)
Respirators: what's good and bad with them, and where to find good ones
Air safety: ventilation, filtration, far-UV, and all that good stuff
Helpful pharmacy finds: nasal sprays, mouthwash, rapid antigen tests, Paxlovid, and more
My personal risk assessment guidelines
Okay, with that out of the way, let's begin!
COVID Prevalence
Assume that any official sources are significantly underreporting real case numbers. Governments and organizations want to pretend that COVID is over, so they are not testing for it as much as they should, nor are they reporting every case that they should be. Individuals who believe that COVID is over are also less likely to get tested, even if they are showing symptoms.
What's reliable, then? In short: wastewater data. Even if you're unaware that you're infected, the virus will still be present in your body and thus in your excrement as well. Many cities have wastewater testing programs that help provide a more accurate picture of how much COVID-19 is present in the community. This is a US-based source that allows you to filter for state and/or county.
How COVID spreads
COVID-19 is an airborne virus. It spreads from the nose and mouth of an infected person, and can linger in the air for up to 6 hours. Anything that involves air leaving the infected person's face will cause viral particles to enter the air, including: (in more or less ascending order of how many viral particles the action spreads)
Breathing (least amount of virus put into the air, but still an amount)
Talking
Singing
Sneezing
Coughing (one of the most effective ways to spew viral particles into the air)
Once viral particles are in the air, they will remain there for hours if left undisturbed. During that time, anyone who breathes them in can be infected. Depending on many factors (such as ventilation, the size of the space, the infectiousness of the person, etc.) an uninfected person may become infected after just a few moments of breathing in air that contains the virus.
While the virus can linger on surfaces and be spread by people touching them and then touching their faces, the primary means of transmission is airborne. Hand washing is good, but it is relatively ineffective against COVID-19.
How to prevent airborne transmission
You may think, "This is dire. If the virus is spread this easily, how can we ever avoid getting it?"
And that's where the Swiss cheese model comes in.
Let's talk about some of these layers, in light of the fact that COVID-19 is airborne. I'll talk more about each of them later, but for now, an overview:
Air cleaning: If the virus remains in the air for a shorter length of time, or if its concentration in the air is reduced, then it is less likely to infect someone. Ventilation, filtration, and far-UV are all helpful for cleaning the air.
Masks: If the infected person wears a covering over their nose and mouth, then the viral particles that exit their face will be caught by this covering instead of escaping into the air. This reduces chances of transmission to others.
Respirators: If an uninfected person wears a sealed covering over their nose and mouth, then the covering will filter viral particles out of the air before it reaches the wearer. This is one of the most effective ways to prevent infection.
Nasal sprays: If an uninfected person uses a nasal spray (not just any nasal spray, but we'll talk about that later) then the viral particles that they breathe in from the air will be less likely to bind to receptors in the nose, making infection less likely.
The takeaway here is that while airborne transmission is daunting to prevent, it is not impossible, and every layer of protection counts. Don't lose hope!
Respirators
A respirator is a covering over the nose & mouth, intended to reduce the likelihood of the wearer breathing in the virus. While some people use "respirator" synonymously with "mask," I am moving away from doing so, for two reasons:
"Mask" has become emotionally and politically charged, making people less likely to engage when they see it recommended
"Mask" evokes a loose blue surgical mask, which is essentially only useful in protecting others from the wearer, not in protecting the wearer
A respirator is intended to protect the wearer. To do this, it must have a proper seal on the face; meaning, if the wearer can breathe in any air that does NOT first pass through the respirator, then the respirator is less effective.
How can you tell if you have a proper seal on your respirator? This resource will help.
Here is a thorough breakdown of the effectiveness of different kinds of respirators.
If you are willing to pay more for a reusable yet effective respirator, I've heard excellent things about the Flomask.
Here is a source for decent quality respirators online.
Here is a source for extra breathable respirators.
Here is yet another source for quality respirators (as well as some other helpful PPE).
Air safety
Essentially, as I understand it, the air in most indoor spaces is stagnant. Whatever people breathe out into stagnant air will stay there for hours. In order to prevent virus transmission, you want to have as much air circulation (movement), air replacement (new air), and air cleaning (rendering the existing air safer) as possible. A common standard is 6 ACH, which means six air changes per hour. Being outdoors (with a breeze) is approximately equivalent to 12 ACH. For more of the science behind this, check out this source.
How to provide circulation:
Fans, especially ceiling fans
Open windows
More sophisticated central air systems
How to provide air replacement:
Open windows (these provide about 1 ACH)
Sophisticated central air systems
How to clean the existing air:
Air filtration. You want HEPA filters, which are designed specifically to trap airborne particles like viruses. When looking at air purifiers, look for the CADR, which stands for "clean air delivery rate." The higher the CADR, the better.
Far-UV. This is a relatively new technology that uses certain wavelengths of UV light to kill viruses in the air. It's highly effective, but also expensive at this stage
In an ideal scenario, you want to have all 3 of these things in your space: circulation, air replacement, and air cleaning/purifying. However, any is better than none - remember the Swiss cheese model.
Some suggestions for how to make your air cleaner to breathe:
If you're handy, try building a Corsi-Rosenthal Box. This is a DIY air purifier that has been proven to be pretty effective at cleaning the air. Here is more information on what it is and how to make one: https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters
Non-DIY air purifiers can be found in stores and online. Again, look for ones with HEPA filtration and high CADR
Open windows whenever possible
Turn on fans whenever possible
Helpful Pharmacy Finds
Nasal sprays: some nasal sprays can help prevent infection with COVID-19. Some are better than others at this. Not all of them can be found in pharmacies or in all parts of the world, but online shopping should help compensate for that. Here is a breakdown of the best active ingredients in nasal sprays and which brands carry them.
Other brands I've heard are good are Covixyl and Enovid.
Rapid antigen tests: Most people know at this point that rapid antigen tests often provide false negatives. However, not everyone knows that there are ways to make them more accurate, and that is to swab the inside of the mouth & throat in addition to the nose. Here are detailed instructions as to how:
Mouthwash: A study has found that mouthwashes containing cetylpyridinium chloride can kill viruses in saliva, which is a main place in the body that viruses congregate. I was easily able to find a mouthwash containing this ingredient at my local pharmacy. Here's the study.
Paxlovid: Paxlovid is an antiviral drug that can help prevent an existing infection from becoming severe. It must be prescribed by a doctor, and must be taken within a few days of symptom onset. I don't have a lot of information on this, but given that you'd need to see your doctor to get it anyway, the doctor can fill you in on more.
My personal precaution philosophy
When I take zero precautions:
Alone with my girlfriend, who lives with me and who is also COVID-conscious
Alone outdoors, such as when hiking
When I take the most precautions (nasal spray beforehand, sealed respirator during, mouthwash afterwards, trying to stay in ventilated & filtered spaces):
Indoor public spaces, such as work, the grocery store, public transit, concerts, and the doctor's office
Air travel
When I take some precautions, and what precautions I take:
Outdoor public spaces. If crowded (i.e. social distancing of 6 ft cannot be achieved) then I use nasal spray, respirator, and mouthwash. If not crowded, I may rely solely on nasal spray and mouthwash.
Indoor private spaces with friends & family I don't live with, and/or friends & family who aren't COVID cautious. I do my best to establish clean air & ventilation, and then I use nasal spray & mouthwash. If someone is known to be sick, I avoid contact until they are better.
These are my personal precautions, in case you find them helpful. You may take more or fewer precautions for yourself depending on your own risk assessment.
Thank you for reading to the end of my post! I hope you've gained some helpful knowledge. If you have more information or resources to add, please feel free to reblog with them. Let's stay safe together!
COVID deniers & minimizers who clown on this post will be blocked.
obvious but hard to realize for some reason: pollinator gardens should include inconspicuous and ugly small plants too
like, there are SO MANY plants that are tiny herbs without conspicuous flowers that are really hard to notice. And the most visually dominant/striking plants aren't actually the only ecologically important things, it would be hard to find an ecosystem with ONLY the showy plants that are intentionally planted in pollinator gardens, in fact maybe some random tiny weed is supporting the most insects
In a natural ecosystem spaces between larger plants are filled in by smaller plants all the way down to the tiniest mosses
It makes sense to include small, "uncharismatic plants" in a pollinator garden because it would be a kind of green mulch that lowers maintenance. The classic wood chip mulch doesn't provide the kind of habitat characteristics that are similar to a meadow
There's so many small details that it's like people can't notice because of the level of smallness. But think of how small many of the bugs are. Even the smallest characteristics of the organic matter on the ground could make it a totally different habitat for them, a leaf from one species vs. another could be like the difference between an abandoned parking lot and a luxury hotel
Also what about moss?? there are specific species of mosses for each tiny variation of habitat. Moss that likes growing on rocks won't grow on soil, moss that likes growing under pine trees won't grow under maple trees, moss that likes the branches of a living tree won't grow on a fallen log. Moss that likes to grow near creeks won't like it near ponds. Etc
I technically have a pollinator garden despite working with a plot of land that's still mostly barren because some of the first things to pop up after secondary disturbance in the desert are grey ragwort and popcorn flowers, which are vital to many native pollinators.
These things are ugly. Grey ragwort is a sufficient descriptor and popcorn flowers at their prettiest look like this:
The real experience with a popcorn flower? They look like an offbrand tumbleweed that's starting to die:
You can fit four flowers on your pinky nail and have room left over. They're covered in prickly hairs that make them irritating to touch with anything less than feathertip pressure.
I love them so, so much. <3
Put more ugly plants in your garden, especially if they're native. Nature will thank you for it. I go out and observe the plot and I find springtails and weevils and spiders and mites crawling between the patches of growth on what would otherwise be barren ground. Sometimes a lizard visits, maybe I see the resident digger bee. Truly, you will be shocked at what even doing nothing can do, given how increasingly hostile to life the norm has grown
Wow! Someone said it! I think a fair amount, actually, about how even the most hyperlocal native plant gardens don't have the same diversity of plants the actual forests and plains do, because they exclude the "ugly" (or even just marginally-less-showy) plants!
In my neck of the woods (northern CA - think oak woodlands and the southern reaches of the redwood forest ecosystem) there are a lot of un-showy and rarely-propagated plants that seem to dominate in the forest understory, including:
American Trail Plant
Pacific Sanicle
and Sweet Cicely
These aren't big, showy plants, and but they're important members of the ecosystem. That doesn't even get into the many, many small 'weedy' annuals that are often left out even from restoration plantings, due to how easily they get overrun by invasive species. Popcornflower are some of these (there are over 100 species of popcornflower), but there are many more.
Iāve been poking around to find invasive to pluck but otherwise try and encourage sprawlers and carpeters to infill space better & more cheaply than mulch (I still have mulch of course, but the less I need to replenish the better!
The thing I keep coming back to, with all the *gestures expansively* is that real life doesn't have peaceful epilogues.
Every single win has to be defended. Forever. I'm sorry. It sucks. The Nazis lost until they stopped losing. The US had abortion rights, and then 50 years later it didn't. Empires fall, and then they invade other countries again. Oppressive regimes are overthrown and replaced with other oppressive regimes. You will never finish the work etc etc etc. Which is why it's so fucking important to be able to acknowledge and celebrate progress, when it happens. The people who came before you didn't put in all that work for nothing, and you aren't, either. You can't save it all for the Ultimate Victory because there is never going to be an Ultimate Victory. There's no such thing as a time when everything is good, and ours shall not be the commune of Heaven.
That's why it's so important to carve out periods of rest while the war is still going, too: the war will always be still going. There will never not be a threat to sort out. There will never not need to be people showing up to look after one another.
So you'd better stop thinking about activism as Crunch Time where if you can just work a little harder until $X point, you can pause and rest. There will always be another $X point. You need to build a way of volunteering and speaking and stepping up that incorporates rest and joy into your life: bread, so you have the strength to continue stepping up, and roses, so you remember why you did it in the first place.
You cannot do it all. You need to cherish your own ability to do the work you can, and you need to rest and take care of yourself--body and mind--if you want to be able to continue doing what you can over the long run.
In Judaism (the folks who brought you āyou are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from doing it ā) the importance of the Sabbath comes from this exact thing.
The idea is to take a break from carefully rebuilding the broken world, and instead to live, one day a week, as if the world is already whole. This is what sustains a community over the long, frustrating, blessed, utterly necessary work of sustaining love and fostering justice.
That we have so many narratives with the peaceful epilogue and not enough that show peace must be fought for consistently likely contributes to the problem OP outlined.
Or, conversely, engaging with narratives with peaceful epilogues forms an essential part of the practice of occasionally stepping away from work, and that's why there's such a demand for them.
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so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.
however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:
it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).
it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!
here are my policy focuses:
upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.
enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.
enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.
accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.
the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).
masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.
If you're waiting for public officials to tell you that covid is in fact still here and that you should in fact still be masking & regularly getting tested, it would already be too late by then. I need more people to let it sink in that the US government's first and (probably only) priority is the economy, as opposed to being honest about covid.
Rich people and government officials like the PotUS are still making it mandatory to mask when interacting with them.
Rich people and government officials like the PotUS get PCR tested and make it mandatory for everyone to do the same before interacting with them.
Rich people and government officials like the PotUS are making it mandatory to make sure everywhere they go has filtered, clean air.
They are protecting themselves and still taking precautions during this on-going pandemic while lying to our faces that the pandemic is over. They may be maskless on camera, but they're sure as fuck rushing to get tested after the fact.
If you're waiting for these people to be honest with you about covid & to tell you how to protect yourself, it would already be too late by then.
From Men at Arms: The Play, 15th book of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.
āThe reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example.
āHe earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.
āThose were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
āBut the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years.
āA man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.ā
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This person writes fanfic about real life musicians from the 60s, including mpreg. Theyāre also openly homophobic. Someone made a post joking about Davy Jones from the band The Monkees being gay and OP went off on them about how disrespectful it is to headcanon real life people who are still alive as being gay. OPās inbox got flooded by people pointing out that they themselves write fic about actual real life people who are still alive being mpregād but they insist itās totally different you guys I swear and had a meltdown.
Also, the fic isnāt actually about Paul McCartney, itās about Paul Simon from Simon & Garfunkel being impregnated by Lily Tomlin.
Today in TikTok trying to Tumblr but not quite getting it:
On a post about an American in London discovering English sandwich spread similar to tuna salad but with only meat and may, with much finer cut of tuna and 4 times as much mayonnaise
In the comments people asked why do Americans call so many ānon saladā things salad
I then info-dumped that the origin of salad is simply any small and/or shredded/chopped bits of food loosely held together with a dressing that contains salt. The root of the word salad is sal, Latin for salt (also the root of salary), and the Romanās has a spectrum of salads including leafy greens mixed with olives and diced veg tossed with salty oily dressing, to cooked veg and meat stirred with eggy sauce. Neither macaroni salad or garden salad would be out of place or seen as odd (ok, MAYBE the tube noodlesā¦). Then as they spread across Europe and the food even further, regions made it their own. Many āMidwestā salads we know today (potato salad and friends) have their roots in what is now Germany, Austria, Hungary, etc.
So THEN, days later a porn account replied to me and asked āDo you think American āSaladsā are healthy?ā
Like? Maāam, I missed a few steps and Tumblr got you beat by way over a decade for a porn blog to food shame chicken salad on a post about foreign sammiches š
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I am really mourning my access to third places (not school/work or a businesses, places to exist and not be expected to work or pay). People canāt take a pandemic seriously. Even self-proclaimed āleftistsā are ignoring the toll they are causing disabled folks and other marginalized communities.
I have a very small circle, and we lean on each other heavily, but Iām an extrovert at heart and this is killing me. Stressed me out to the point my epilepsy reared itās head in 2021 for the first time since 1996, and now I have to be medicated to keep it in check.
Having People Pleasing as a trauma response to decades of abuse means I have to go above and beyond at every job, and fill in for coworkers that are unqualified, incapable, simply take advantage⦠until I completely burn out and it is exhausting.
Also add on to this Iām apparently AuDHD and no wonder I need a cave and hibernation.