Seph Warren

Edit: Now that we're talking about it, look. There is all the countries ratification dates, along with considerations for their laws.

And you can check the convention here.

Edit 2: For those in the US who want to check their state's laws compliance to the convention, there is this site.

Edit 3: The map source btw. Its from wikipedia.

guys, look, I'm legitimately sorry that happened to you. that's fucked up. it shouldn't have happened, and it shouldn't be allowed to happen again to you or anyone else. I'm sorry.

public school was hard for me too, at times, and I'm still suffering the consequences for the harsh grading, the arbitrary deadlines, the hours of completely useless-to-me homework. I could name a few teachers who have been pretty fucking terrible. the fact that nobody considered getting me evaluated for ADHD has had an impact on my self image and academic success that I can't erase.

and also.

I grew up in an area where education, in particular, is incredibly progressive-leaning. educators are working really hard to create and try out education philosophies and practices that prioritize kids and their learning, rather than teachers and what they think kids should learn.

My sex ed was comprehensive, and came entirely from school. My gay sixth grade teacher taught me about HIV/AIDs in a useful, accurate way. In high school, I learned about the way orgasms work & I was prepared not to feel shame for normal stuff.

I learned that Communism was not what the USSR actually practiced, and what it really means. I learned about atrocities and, specifically, the genocide of indigenous people committed in/by the US. I learned about the military industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, and I learned about manifestations of racism specific to my local area. I learned about Stonewall, and the intersection of the civil rights movement with gay rights and disability justice.

My creative writing teacher taught us about LSD, and the real reasons we shouldn't do it, after a hilariously ineffective assembly run by some local cops. He spoke gently, carefully, and emphatically about his friends and his own experiences. Later in the semester, he read us a story he wrote about two gay men finding each other in a deeply homophobic environment.

My sci-fi teacher made me feel safe & seen as a kid with "weird" interests. My US History teacher helped me research and put together a 10-page paper on the modern relevance and mission of Feminism. My government teacher made me feel appreciated for the work I put into the class, and the thought I put into what I said in it, even though he disagreed with a lot of it. My sixth grade teacher bought me books to read with his personal money, whichever ones I asked for. My third grade teacher made me feel safe. My science teacher in middle school made me excited for and passionate about science, and saw and nurtured the effort I put into her class.

A lot of stuff sucks, absolutely. But I am seeing new teaching methods being tried out all the time, and I am watching teachers get really excited when I teach their students about the roots of modern graffiti in US black history & to question property laws, and just...

There's hope. there are so many people doing so much work to make things better. so many people agree with you on what education should be, and are trying so fucking hard to put that into action, and so many public schools- not just teachers, but whole schools and even districts- are really doing that work. so much is getting better.

Having all or almost all of your education come from your primary caregiver is often really unhealthy for parent-child relationship. I feel like this aspect is often under-explored or discussed but I really think it's important to consider! It's astounding how common it is for homeschooling parents and children to conflate academic struggles and failures with struggles and failures of the entire parent-child relationship because of the lack of boundaries between schooling and parenting in these families. Or for homeschooled children to struggle to develop an identity and voice of their own outside of the identity/voice of their parent since the vast majority of their learning and development is being dictated by a single person from birth to 18 years old. Obviously, this happens outside of homeschooling too, but I don't think I can begin to explain to you how ubiquitous this is in homeschooling families.

I also don't think that folks always realize how much homeschooling restricts the range of opinions and knowledge that children have access to. A child who attends a public school has an entire team of people and peers automatically at their disposal who can present new ideas in new ways to the child, in addition to their families. The child is basically guaranteed to encounter at least some ideas, information, and opinions (both good and bad) which their family's immediate social sphere would never have shared or thought to bring up. A homeschooled child on the other hand, is entirely reliant on their parent/family to provide them with access to a variety of ideas and ways of thinking. Some parents will use this power to completely cut off their child from any information or access to any person who might contradict their own beliefs. This stunts the child's growth, not only by limiting their access to information and alternative beliefs, but also by limiting their methods of learning (i.e. have you ever had some topic that you just couldn't understand until someone new found just the right way to explain it to you that made it click? Yeah, these kids only get to learn from one person and if their method of teaching doesn't work? Too bad). BUT even well-meaning homeschoolers underestimate how much more limited their children often are. Again, a child in school has their parents/family friends AND an entire community of various other unrelated students, teachers, administrators, etc who can provide information, experiences, opinions, and interactions both formally and informally for 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, without the presence of parents to police, judge, or comment on any of it. A lot of parents think that "I let them check out books at the library" and "they get to socialize with other like-minded homeschooled children a couple of times a week under the supervision of all of the parents" and "they socialize with community members that I personally like and choose to associate with" is a substitute for this. And it's just not.

It's not even entirely the parent's fault. Even parents genuinely attempting to provide sufficient socializing and interaction with lots of people outside of their close sphere really struggle with this. Classes, co-ops, and activities with other homeschooled children are often only once or twice a week for an hour or two. Making or maintaining friendships with non-homeschooled children is often difficult for homeschoolers since a child in a public school will likely already have a friend group that they see consistently every day, leaving the homeschooled child as a perpetual outsider and tag-along who misses out on the majority of in-jokes, interactions, and bonding time (hearing folks describe this happening to them after they leave school to begin homeschooling is heartbreaking). Most parents also don't have the time and money to endlessly shuttle their kid around to a diverse range of events, activities, and situations that would allow the kid to regularly interact with lots of people outside of their typical social sphere. And even if you do, children in basically all public situations except school are expected to be closely supervised by their parents, which means that they still don't get the opportunity to develop and learn away from the biases, judgments, opinions, and social pressure of their parent looming over them.

Please note: I'm attempting to be extremely charitable here because, in my experience, even most "progressive" homeschooling parents see concerns about homeschooled children lacking socialization as a funny joke or even a badge of pride - like the fact that their child is uncomfortable around their peers and lacks the skills and shared culture that would help them connect makes them quirkier, smarter, and better than the average child.

And none of this is really even getting into the fact that homeschooling has been dominated since the 1980's by white Christian fundamentalists. And that is NOT a coincidence. But maybe I'll add on my rant for that separately or some other time since this is already so long.

This is the process a person near where an old PFA factory has to do (12:22)

According to Scientific American, a new method of breaking down PFAs has just been discovered!

It’s not for every kind of PFA but holy shit it’s a start. Normally these bastards have to be roasted at ~1,000 C/1832 F to even begin to fall apart and even then they leak into the environment, and burying them only - you guessed it! Leaks into the environment.

The new method can break them down at a mere ~100 C/212 F using inexpensive reagents. To quote the article:

“PFASs owe their durability to a series of carbon-fluorine bonds, which are among nature’s strongest chemical bonds. Instead of trying to break this stable bond, Trang and her colleagues targeted a chemical group containing oxygen atoms at one end of the molecule. By heating the compounds in a solvent called DMSO and a common reagent found in cleaners and soaps, the researchers successfully knocked off the oxygen-containing group. This triggered a cascade of reactions that ultimately broke the compounds down into harmless products.”

There are about 12,000 PFAs known to science right now, and the team was able to break down ten of them - including a particularly nasty kind of one called PFOA - and were able to break them down three carbon atoms at a time instead of the presumed one. HOLY SHIT. They recognize using DMSO in wastewater treatment probably isn’t practical on a large scale - right now, anyway - but as John Oliver points out in his video, having a huge filtration system in your home and a guy check it every two weeks sure isn’t going to do much either except mitigate further damage to the owner. The team is also plenty aware this is no final solution, and yet

ALT

see this is exactly what i’m afraid of posting responses like this.

YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED. YOU SHOULD BE MAD. YOU SHOULD BE SO APPALLED BY THIS YOU ARE READY TO KILL AND EAT THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE.

science isn’t some magical benevolant force that will fix the world’s problems. science is not free from capitalism, it’s deeply entangled with it. that’s how we got undrinkable rainwater in the first place. all of the world’s problems are easily fixable. that isn’t the issue. none of them will be so long as capitalism prevails. we can’t sit back and wait for someone else to fix things, we have to force the change we want to see.

RATING: RELIABLE

Source: ’New research shows that rainwater in most locations on Earth contains levels of chemicals that “greatly exceed” safety levels. […] Such is their prevalence now that scientists say there is no safe space on Earth to avoid them.’

Source: ‘Chemists have identified how to destroy “forever chemicals” in a low-cost way for the first time, new research says. […] New research, from scientists at Northwestern University, US claims to have done the “seemingly impossible” and destroyed PFAS using low temperature and cheap products. This could be very useful in helping communities suffering from high-level contamination, according to Prof Sunderland, who is not part of the research team.

The team of scientists hope that with further research PFAS could be filtered from drinking water and this new method applied to destroy the contaminants.

However, treatment of high concentrations of PFAS is only one part of the solution.

With PFAS remaining in production it can continue to build up at low levels in fish and other wildlife as it cannot be broken down naturally very easily.

This new method was applied to the 10 most prominent types of PFAS, but the US Environment Protection Agency has identified more than 12,000.’

The first two sources listed are from the BBC, a state-owned yet publicly funded (it’s too complex an issue to go into here) highly reliable source of information. Whilst occasionally they are guilty of jumping on the ‘shiny science’ bandwagon, their editorial guidelines temper it down more than some science infotainment media. They can be biased towards the establishment in more directly political matters (environmental science is indirectly political due to the debate on climate change etc*), but this is not a directly political matter and so their bias is likely to be towards established science rather than alternative theories.

*The debate between anthropogenic climate change, natural climate change, and outright climate change denial is ultimately a political one, even if the vast majority of science agrees with the stance that it is mostly anthropogenic. I must refer to it as a political debate due to its use as a political tool. For me to suggest it should not be so would be to inject my own opinion and would introduce a source of bias.

The second two sources are from the EPA, the US government department for the environment. Whilst any government department is ultimately biased towards justifying its own existence, their requirement to publicly publish research and statistics regardless of whether they support the government’s/department’s agenda means they are at least decently reliable; to accuse government departments of bias is far beyond the scope of this post and can start to lead into governmental mistrust and conspiracy, which I will not cover here.

The final source given is the original paper. The principal author is Shira Joudan PhD, who has been publishing on environmental toxicology/chemistry since 2015 and has attended conferences on environmental toxicology etc since 2012. She has multiple publications which have been cited many times, multiple awards and scholarships, and has worked with multiple universities. As far as I can tell there are no conflicts of interest and I am satisfied that the paper itself is highly reliable.

I am not an environmental scientist nor chemist, and so if you have more experience in the field and can offer further information, please do.

The first thing is, we just plain don't get very much of it. The legally mandated amount of vacation in most European countries is more than I can reasonably expect to have even when I reach the end of my career. A full month off? Months? Plural??? Not gonna happen. And that's been the case for quite a while. It's always in my lifetime been "I'm saving up my vacation to take two weeks off". I recall back in the 80s, about half the time our family vacation was only 10 days because my father couldn't take two entire weeks off.

The second thing I've had to explain to non-Americans is, for most of us our vacation days and our sick days are rolled into one "Paid Time Off" pool. That if I get sick and have to take time to recover, that cuts into my vacation. Which really incentivizes people to go into the office and spread disease. It also means that even if we actually have plenty of PTO, we're reluctant to use it, since we might get sick and then not have enough PTO to use.

Which brings to the 3rd thing - rolling over PTO. Let us suppose I'm very diligent and health; a hard worker. At the end of the year, I can't have more than 400 hours of PTO available to use. Anything past that is going to be gone. They take it away. Oh, wait, isn't that cold and flu season? And when people want to take time off to be with family? For which we're given pretty scant holiday time?

Of course, that almost doesn't matter because my PTO is capped at 480 hours anyway. If I have that much banked, I can't accrue any more than that. No matter what, I can't take that six month sabbatical to learn chado in Japan.

Lastly, we get punished for using our PTO. Not directly. But if I'm out for more than a day or two, even my company is sufficiently understaffed that large amounts of my work will simply build up. If I take two weeks off, I'm going to spend two months digging out from under the backlog. And other places are even worse.

This means we all take our vacation in furtive snippets - a four day weekend here, maybe three days in the middle of the week there - and we're always in a rush to get to our destination, have as much FUN as possible, and then skid back in home at 1am, planning to be in the office at 7:30 am.

You can't relax that way. You can't unwind. You need time to sit and watch the waves, to have the opportunity to just get up when you feel like it, to go to bed when you feel like it, and for a while simply not have any worries.

You can’t protest in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas anymore. And there will be more states to follow in their example.

You know what time it is?

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.