dahllaz

Employees and developers working on Magic: The Gathering Arena say they were hired with promises of remote flexibility, so they bought homes and built lives around those assurances. But they say they are now being told they may need to relocate to Washington state — or effectively lose their jobs.

If you want to help out the United Wizards you can sign this petition

cwa.org/uwotcletter

I was a year above most of them at school so they threw a "goodbye" murder mystery for me just before graduation, and about 2/3 of the way through the game we all realized that everyone had at least attempted to kill the victim. The game then shifted from "whodunnit" to "who succeeded in dunninit" which we all felt was not only super fun but above the usual level of narrative complexity for those games.

please watch this

They’ve blown up since then. The promotional video they made at the school has more than 30 million views. They’ve been on tons of TV shows, including performances with Oginome Yoko, the original singer of the song (Dancing Hero (Eat You Up)) that they remixed for their dance. 

This dance routine was riffing off the comedian Hirano Nora and actually includes some of her comedy catch phrases in the remix. (They even got her to join them eventually!) For the uninitiated, one of the most accessible forms of comedy in modern Japanese pop culture are comedians like this who create outlandish SNL type characters and then appear on one or more shows regularly as that character. Hirano Nora’s gimmick is that she’s a woman from the height of Japan’s “bubble economy” era in the 80′s when there were tons of newly wealthy yuppies. This is why the remix is called “Bubbly Dance”. (Compare her to similar comedy character Blouson Chiemi whose gimmick is that she’s a modern, man eating career woman.)

But one of my hats is safety coordinator for industrial research, and something our safety department asks us to remind our researchers regularly is that safety doesn't stop being a thing just because you're DIYing it at home. People very often make very stupid decisions when it comes to projects they are doing in their own home. (And industrial research scientists collect home projects like magpies collect shiny things.)

It would have been easy for this guy to try to climb up there himself or pay some random schmuck to do it or ask some friend whose kid rock climbs to do it. There is an entire category of tragic stories associated with people doing home improvement, realizing they need to get up somewhere high, and they or whoever they ask for help not being safe about it. But that's not what he did. He paid professionals for it, he paid a pair of them so they could be extra safe about it, he paid them rush and hazard pay, and they did navigate what would have been a dangerous task safely.

...

There's one person working at the CDC right now with clinical experience with rabies. One.

This isn't solely down to anti-vaxxer sentiment, though. This is the same type of intentional gutting of public health that this administration is famous for and that does end up endangering human health. Individual states and municipalities still require rabies vaccination for domestic animals and will issue fines if you don't get your pets vaccinated. But a pre-exposure rabies vaccine isn't typically given to human beings unless they are intentionally placing themselves in an environment where the risk of contracting rabies is higher (e.g., a scientist studying bats or a wildlife rehabilitation specialist).

Human rabies vaccination is typically post-exposure prophylaxis (a series of shots after suspected exposure to the virus). What pausing rabies surveillance does is blind us to current and future rabies outbreaks in animal populations, which then raises the likelihood of increased rabies exposure in humans.

It's the rabies vaccine legally required for dogs and cats? Yes.

Are there communities online that make fake rabies certificates that I've seen people admit to using? Yes.

Are some counties/cities so backed up and understaffed that there are people who have never received something telling them to license their dog and people use that as an excuse to not get the rabies vaccine? Yes.

Do people have outdoor cats that they simply never take to the vet? Yes.

Do many breeders tell people to delay or even avoid the rabies vaccine entirely? Yes.