they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.
their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.
longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years
toxic flesh
has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.
lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion
largest genome of any shark
eats everything including moose and polar bears
ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you
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Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
there's just not enough time in the day for video games. even when I want to play them and dont have anything else going on I still don't end up playing them. this is because there's actually only four hours in the day and nobody is talking about this
#public libraries are good because they let people access books they might never otherwise read#private book ownership is good because it's Yours#physical books are good because they last a long time and again it's Yours#ebooks are good because you can fit a whole library into the physical space of a single book and they're cheaper to produce#audiobooks are good because they're accessible to people with eyesight or visual reading issues and leave your hands free#in conclusion: all books are good and people should enjoy them however and whenever they can#(lest it be misunderstood I agree with you completely OP I just also really like books in general and it got away from me)
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Drunk girl at a friend’s bday asked me what I do and I said I teach high school math and she went wait what how old are you? And I said 26 and she said well you look 12
even legitimately useful sex safety advice is always phrased as an imperative to health, never do this always do that you must not blahblahblah. same with drug use harm reduction stuff, they can never just say yknow this substance is associated with these risks and you will increase them if you xyx and can decrease them if you pqr, it's always written under the presumption that the reader's risk tolerance is exactly the same as the author's and so it would be simply unthinkable to aim advice at anyone who is willing to risk something you're personally not, because of course this is not about providing the information for others to rationally adjudicate their own personal priorities and needs but merely a matter of educating the reckless masses so they too may live according to the objective truth of your own personal risk assessment. they tip their hands because it's not like anyone talks about driving a car or getting exposed to respiratory diseases this way, imagine if mainstream sources were constantly written like you're insane and stupid for deciding you're willing to incur a potential crash because you want to go on a trip or like you obviously would never exist in a room unmasked if only you knew what the flu can do -- these activities are invisible, it's the socially stigmatised nature of sex or drugs or whatever that render them specifically problematised in this way. read some samuel delany about it idfk
Results on an international test of adults' math and literacy skills show a growing chasm between the highest and lowest performers.
Also preserved in our archive
By Sarah Schwartz
Test after test of U.S. students’ reading and math abilities have shown scores declining since the pandemic.
Now, new results show that it’s not just children whose skills have fallen over the past few years—American adults are getting worse at reading and math, too.
The connection, if any, between the two patterns isn’t clear—the tests aren’t set up to provide that kind of information. But it does point to a populace that is becoming more stratified by ability at a time when economic inequality continues to widen and debates over opportunity for social mobility are on the rise.
The findings from the 2023 administration of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC, show that 16- to 65-year-olds’ literacy scores declined by 12 points from 2017 to 2023, while their numeracy scores fell by 7 points during the same period.
These trends aren’t unique in the global context: Of the 31 countries and economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that participated in PIAAC, some saw scores drop over the past six years, while others improved or held constant.
Still, as in previous years, the United States doesn’t compare favorably to other countries: The country ranks in the middle of the pack in literacy and below the international average in math. (Literacy and numeracy on the test are scored on a 500-point scale.)
But Americans do stand out in one way: The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing adults is growing wider, as the top scorers hold steady and other test takers see their scores fall.
“There’s a dwindling middle in the United States in terms of skills,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees PIAAC in the country. (The test was developed by the OECD and is administered every three years.)
It’s a phenomenon that distinguishes the United States, she said.
“Some of that is because we’re very diverse and it’s large, in comparison to some of the OECD countries,” Carr said in a call with reporters on Monday. “But that clearly is not the only reason.”
American children, too, are experiencing this widening chasm between high and low performers. National and international tests show the country’s top students holding steady, while students at the bottom of the distribution are falling further behind.
It’s hard to know why U.S. adults’ scores have taken this precipitous dive, Carr said.
About a third of Americans score at lowest levels
PIAAC is different from large-scale assessments for students, which measure kids’ academic abilities.
Instead, this test for adults evaluates their abilities to use math and reading in real-world contexts—to navigate public services in their neighborhood, for example, or complete a task at work. The United States sample is nationally representative random sample, drawn from census data.
American respondents averaged a level 2 of 5 in both subjects.
In practice, that means that they can, for example, use a website to find information about how to order a recycling cart, or read and understand a list of rules for sending their child to preschool. But they would have trouble using a library search engine to find the author of a book.
In math, they could compare a table and a graph of the same information to check for errors. But they wouldn’t be able to calculate average monthly expenses with several months of data.
While the U.S. average is a level 2, more adults now fall at a level 1 or below—28 percent scored at that level in literacy, up from 19 percent in 2017, and 34 percent in numeracy, up from 29 percent in 2017.
Respondents scoring below level 1 couldn’t compare calendar dates printed on grocery tags to determine which food item was packed first. They would also struggle to read several job descriptions and identify which company was looking to hire a night-shift worker.
The findings also show sharp divides by race and national origin, with respondents born in the United States outscoring those born outside of the country, and white respondents outscoring Black and Hispanic test takers. Those trends have persisted over the past decade.
There can be multiple factors, from fewer teachers (who are therefore stretched more thin) to teachers who don't know how to teach with ai so common and easily accessible, to kids using ai instead of learning, to, yes, social media (hasn't it been shown to substantially increase stress and reduce attention span and ability to retain information?) And kids don't exactly have a whole lot of stress outlets these days (not that there were a ton when I was in hs, but there were earlier in my schooling), either.
Not to mention the stress from politics, gun violence, increased police presence in our schools, ICE in general, more severe weather patterns (which stress the body out), and on and on and on.
Yes, covid absolutely plays a part. But it's also not the only reason, and if we ignore the other reasons, we can't advocate for improvements to help kids in all the ways they need.
Editing because I forgot half of what I was trying to say: most of this applies to adults. I can't find it in myself to weave it into what I already wrote because it's the middle of the night, but all of these things, on top of covid ofc, fuck with adults too.
Recognising multiple sources of this decline is critical to fixing it.
COVID-19 does not just affect the respiratory system, but also significantly alters the brain in people who have fully recovered from the in
I SURE AM GLAD PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO BACK-SEAT AND FORGET ABOUT COVID AND THE FACT IT'S STILL INFECTING HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS EACH YEAR, ESPECIALLY IN THE CONTEXT OF KIDS LEARNING AND REMEMBERING SHIT.
It’s COVID but not necessarily the long-term effects of the illness itself. The pandemic worsened already-existing trends of increasing teacher shortages; it altered parents’ expectations and habits around sending their kids to school every day, which led to an increase in homeschooling, online schooling, and chronic absenteeism, which in turn decreases school funding, because it’s partially based on average daily attendance; and after coming back from a year or two of online “learning,” schools moved kids along to the next grade and lowered standards instead of addressing the obvious learning loss. Because of NCLB, kids just get passed along to the next grade regardless of whether or not they are academically ready, and the learning loss compounds over time.
As for cognitive/neurological changes in kids post-infection, I imagine that would be difficult and expensive to study directly, but there has been a significant increase in the amount of students in special education since COVID, though I’m sure there are multiple factors at play there. (The shortage of specifically special education teachers doesn’t help with that.) Anecdotally, though I started teaching after the pandemic, I’ve heard many variations of “teaching post-COVID is really different” from older colleagues. I do think some of the student behavior issues we’ve seen in the past 5 years are a result of the impact of online learning on kids’ social development and it’s going to get better every year.
This is fully my opinion now but I actually think what’s having the most impact on student learning in the US right now is the attacks on public education from the right wing, particularly in the South. Yes, American public schools (and also the majority of public education systems worldwide) have been chronically underfunded basically forever, but now there is an active effort to dismantle the public education system. (Sorry to link an insta reel but this video horrified me.) Note that the nationwide downward trend in test scores does not appear in states that fund their public schools semi-decently, like California and New York. It’s true that many students need increased support post-COVID for various reasons, but properly funded schools staffed by qualified and fairly compensated educators can provide that support.
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i genuinely can't fucking deal with the larger internet anymore holy shit what the fuck are you people TALKING about. i am at my limit with this stupid bullshit. who the fuck cares if a man is hired to draw medical diagrams for young girls jesus christ we're pearl clutching about medical illustrations now? next you're gonna tell me male pediatricians shouldn't advise parents on their kids' vulva issues? male surgeons shouldn't be in the room when performing a procedure where a woman's breasts or vulva might be exposed? male researchers shouldn't conduct gynecological medical research? sure. better for men to live in ignorance and NEVER ally themselves with us to expand access to sexual education and reproductive healthcare i fucking guess. Twenty thousand likes. i hate it here KILL ME
THIS is the post that got me my first ever anon hate. i'd like to thank the academy tbh
also not related but can ppl on this post being like "yeah STOP being mean to men!!" pls stop cuz that's not the point of what i was saying 💀 i'm not mad bc someone was mean to a man i'm mad bc feminism is being hijacked by bioessentialist conservative Christian moralist bullshit where the goal seems to be the complete and total segregation of women from men instead of like, the material improvement of women's lives. i don't care if some intsta commenter is mean to men i care that feminism is culturally turning into Nu Conservatism
Y'all if you're American please email your politicians and senators against the parents decide act. I'm fucking begging because we're reaching a tipping point.
Quick and easy link to both find your congressmen/women and giving you a quick and easy way to copy / paste the message into it. You want to oppose. It's an act that will demand that all major OS makers integrate a direct forced age verification control into all OS.
I received a comment on this that I figured would be very helpful- it's a template for communicating with your representatives. Be sure to use it for reference
Dear Representative [Name],
I am writing to express my strong opposition to H.R. 8250 (The "Parents Decide Act"). As your constituent and a concerned citizen, I believe this bill introduces unprecedented risks to digital privacy and security.
Specifically, I am alarmed by:
SEC. 2(a)(1)(B): Requiring age verification to even use an operating system creates a mandatory "hardware lockout" that ends anonymous computing and forces users to hand over sensitive identification data to major corporations just to power on their devices.
SEC. 2(a)(3): Mandating that OS providers create a system for all app developers to access verification data is a massive security vulnerability. This effectively creates a centralized API of user identities accessible to thousands of third-party developers, many of whom may lack adequate data protection.
This bill does not protect children; it creates a centralized surveillance infrastructure at the OS level. I urge you to protect the privacy of your constituents and vote NO on H.R. 8250.
This is a hell that us down under in Australia are already living in, and it’s not even effective at what it claims to do in protecting children.
Given that, in the wake of this mandatory identification policy, my country seems to be moving to hand over its citizens biometric data, like fingerprints, Face ID files, and identification documents, over to the USA and to ICE to maintain the visa free travel (ESTA) we have, I strongly urge any US resident to send these emails, or make calls.
But if you can’t do that, the most powerful thing you can do is spread the word. Tell your friends, family, coworkers, anyone who can help.
My reach will likely be small, and so I don’t know if this will mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot stand to see this tracking happen to another population as it did to mine.
And if you think it won’t affect you, it will. All anonymity goes out the window when your accounts can be linked via your personal ID
I wish you all luck in preventing this act from going through.
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