Mystic Tree Photography

insulin has been mass produced (from animal extracts) since -1923-. slow acting insulin has existed since the ‘50s, and ‘human’ genetically engineered insulin (derived from E. coli bacteria) has existed since 1982.

insulin treatment for diabetes is not some new or ‘unproven’ treatment. according to beyondtype1, “Humalog rapid-acting insulin came on to the market with a list price of $21 a vial in 1997.” adjusting for inflation, a vial these days should cost about $34 at most. instead, it costs over $300. there is NO reason for it to be steadily gaining in price to the point that diabetics are unable to afford their lifesaving medication, other than the sheer inhuman greed of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

“ We’re a team of biohackers with a variety of backgrounds, and skills, and relationships to insulin and diabetes from many cities and countries around the world, including Oakland, California; Baltimore, Maryland; Paraiba, Brazil; Dakar, Senegal; Yaounde, Cameroon; and Puerto Rico. We’re working to develop the first practical, small-scale, community-centered model for insulin production to make insulin accessible to all. We envision a world in which communities in need have local sources of safe, affordable, high-quality insulin, and where people living with diabetes and their communities can own and govern the organizations that produce the medicine they depend on to survive. 

What We Do

We are creating an open-source (freely available) model for insulin production that centers on sustainable, small-scale manufacturing and open-source alternatives to production. We are developing protocols to produce short-acting (lispro) and long-acting (glargine) insulin, working on developing open-hardware equivalents to traditional production equipment, are researching sustainable regulation pathways to bring our insulin to the public, and are building capacities for local, small-scale manufacturing.

How Do I Participate?

Our work would not be possible without the support of volunteers, interns, and community advisors. We welcome people of all backgrounds from all over the world to bring their enthusiasm, time, connections, and experiences, both in life and in work. Our volunteers promote us on social media, build equipment, run experiments, write reports and blog posts, facilitate meetings, connect with other organizations and groups, meet with experts in the field, run virtual events, and contribute in designing tools, resources, and methods of all sorts.

Potential Partners

We welcome collaboration with other groups that share our mission―community labs, academic institutions, patient advocacy groups, and NGOs.

Donate

Your donation will help us get closer to our goal. With a healthy financial situation, we can pay for lab supplies, acquire lab equipment, recruit scientists, and pay for consultation fees for regulation and manufacturing experts.”

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

mormons 18-24 after they go through their endowment ceremony and receive their new name and secret clothing and learn the secret handshakes and passwords and realize everyone around them has been secretly doing this the whole time and now theyre going to be sent away from their family for 2 years where they will literally not be allowed to be alone for 1 second of the day except to go to the bathroom and they have no idea how to get out of what they just got into

then if youre a boy and u turn 18 they’re like wow amazing!!! you get to go on a mission and be like all the great men around you!! and now you get to go through the temple! so #blessed!

and then you go through the temple and all the above mentioned SECRET CULTY SHIT happens (EXPLANATION HERE http://mormoncurtain.infymus.com/topic_templeceremonies.html) and youre shipped off to a strange place where everything you eat, wear, go, listen to and do is controlled, and you’re not allowed to talk to your family or friends (except through a once-a-week email) and you literally are being watched by your companion at all. times. 

Leaving is such an isolating experience. No one inside wants anything to do with you anymore and no one outside understands the scale of messed up that Mormonism is. Like it’s easy to point and laugh at the ridiculousness, but it’s literally a cult. There’s so much trauma involved and there’s trauma in leaving.

People on the outside don’t understand how hard it is to leave. I grew up where all my friends were catholic and are no longer religious and they’re like “well everyone hates church, you just stop going” but Mormonism isn’t like that at all. For starters I had to get a lawyer involved to leave and then the ostracization from the entire community that nurtured me growing up was just the cherry on top. It’s effectively being shunned. Everyone you were forced to call sister and brother growing up no longer wants anything to do with you. And you deserve it, because you shouldn’t have fallen for the anti-Mormon lies.

If you know you’re ready to leave, use quitmormon.com. It’s run by the guy from reddit who is now famous in exmormon circles for offering absolutely free legal services to anybody who needs help leaving. You can give your church id number if you know it, but it’s not required (I never memorized mine, and I sure wasn’t going to ask for it). He takes care of everything. This keeps TSCC (the so-called church) from getting all your latest info and keeps them from hassling you or harassing you. They have to talk to your lawyer instead. Pre 2015, it felt almost impossible to try to leave, but it’s a lot easier now! The years of picketing General Conference to force an excommunication trial are over!

Find a support system. Lean on your friends that have never been mormon, any family members who left, anyone you know who left. I’m an exmormon happy to answer any questions, and I’m sure there are plenty others in the notes who would be super willing to be supportive too. Exmormon groups are many and varied now, and it’s best to find the one that vibes for you. There’s a subreddit that’s popular, but I personally used - and I know this sounds weird, since I don’t have kids - a forum called Mormonism & More on the site babycenter.com. It was started several years ago by some mormons who had questions they weren’t allowed to ask on the normal mormon board (because that board required uplifting, mormon-approved answers at all times). It’s since shifted to ex-mormons or people who want to leave but can’t right now because of family situations. Even though the threads were years old, I spent weeks on that forum, reading about what other people had gone through and how they got through it, and to me, that was super helpful.

Research the culty stuff at your own peril. I liked learning about that stuff for a really long time, because I felt learning about all those secrets (I especially liked learning about the truth of the Book of Abraham) … it helped me feel valid in my choice. It helped me keep in mind that this was something that I had escaped, something that had wanted to hurt me. Missing your abuser doesn’t mean you should go back, it means you should keep moving forward. Missing your cult has the same solution. Lots of people fell for the “we’re totally not a cult!” line by TSCC. Some of them will not offer sympathy. If you want to watch the hidden camera videos of endowments and other temple stuff, I would super super recommend you have a trusted friend watch them with you. And bring comfort food. You’ll probably need it.

TSCC put out a series of essays on controversial (read: faith-killing, eye-opening, omg how could I have ever supported the people who did this) issues in mormon history. They are the Orthodox LDS pre-approved responses to a lot of the more incriminating accusations that have been leveled at TSCC over the years. They should be hosted on TSCC website somewhere, and would have been posted around or after 2015. They may reaffirm your faith now that you know TSCC’s defense, but they may push you right out the door. (Or break the shelf? Do Mormons still use the shelf analogy, or is that retired now?)

Lots of mormons become atheists after leaving. Many join mainstream xian churches. Some become witches, some study every religion they can get their hands on, some try to go back and realize all the magic (or holy spirit, if you prefer) is gone. Don’t think you have to know right away. Some people throw away or burn all their mormon stuff, some people keep it to show their kids, but again, you don’t have to make that decision right away. Some people call TSCC a cult after they leave, myself included, but you don’t have to if it makes you uncomfortable or it it doesn’t feel true to your experience.

Look up religious trauma syndrome. It’s real. The pain you will probably feel is real, the grief you will probably feel is real, and in many ways, you may have to mourn the death of what you were always told Life Will Be For You.

And learn that the world is not half as evil as TSCC told you. Your coworkers who drink a beer at the end of the day are not evil or abusive. Your friends who wear sleeveless shirts are not evil or promiscuous. You’re allowed to wear short shorts! You’re allowed to drink coffee! You’re allowed to ask questions in a faith community without being silenced or condemned! You’re allowed to not want kids! There’s a lot of unlearning here.

Look, I know a good number of you are from the US and things aren't amazing there either, but my country is literally on the brink of collapse. So I'd love it if we could talk about that for a minute.

If you can't do anything else, please just read and reblog.

hungry boy

He Hua at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.