stoneparchment

awesome!! I'm psyched you caught it and enjoyed it :-)

I feel like I've seen this take a lot more in the past ~5 years than I did before. Not just that zoos are unethical, but that any animal ownership (or really interaction of any kind) is inherently abusive.

You're certainly entitled to feel however you want about animal ownership and act accordingly, but personally I feel like it's honestly kind of a weird take?

Humans are obviously not the only species that develops symbiolotic relationships with other organisms (in a diversity of power dynamics), but we are also not the only species who take on specifcally ownership or shepherd roles for other species (like spiders with frog pets, or fungus farmer ants, among many many other examples). Thus, the ontological position this opinion must operate from is that humans are somehow distinct and superior to nature, such that we have separate and unique responsibilities not to engage in mutualistic ownership with other organisms, on the basis that like, we're somehow "above" that? That we're so enlightened and knowledgeable that we exist in a category of responsibility distinct from all other organisms?

Of course, a lot of our relationships to animals can be described as harmful in other terms without needing to take this specific stance. Like, our relationship with many agricultural animals can be critiqued through the harm done to their individual well-beings and through the harm their propagation does to the global environment. Or irresponsible pet owners can be critiqued for how their unwillingness to control the reproduction or predatory abilities of their pets can harm local ecosystems, like an introduced invasive species might. Or valid criticisms of many zoos when they prioritize profits over animal welfare, rehabilitation, ecosystem restoration, and education. Or that the general public picking up wild animals is a problem because it disturbs their fragile ecosystems and traumatizes them, especially when done on the large scale of human populations (but distinctly not for ecological study, wild animal healthcare, education, etc., like Steve Irwin et. al) But none of these are specific criques of the mutualistic ownership relationship itself as much as problems with the way we handle that relationship.

Idk, I'm interested to understand your opinion, especially if it has detail I'm missing beyond "we shouldn't have pets, zoos, or farms because we're better than that"!

it is definitely still a problem, the "naturalness" of the finish is irrelevant

even burning wood itself releases compounds that can be harmful (hence why we advise against breathing in smoke)

I second the idea from a separate poster that if you want to burn, seal, and add more burns-- just use a solvent to remove the seal before you do the second set of burns. Or burn it all at once before sealing

I will do my best! :)

There are a couple different concepts at-play here, and finding a single resource that summarizes everything I mentioned would be quite difficult. Moreover, given the information dissemination problem I mentioned, you'd be hard-pressed to find a non-academic description of this stuff (I.e. written for a non-biological or social researcher audience)...

But, I don't think that should prevent anyone interested in trying to learn more!

Here's some papers that discuss some of the issues at play here:

Is the cell really a machine?, discusses some of the issues with relying too much on genetics/molecule scale biology knowledge for determining the emergent nature of traits/phenotypes (with specific respect to the machine model of the cell... This paper is heavy on molecular biology)

Conceptualizations of Race: Essentialism and Constructivism, a sociological overview informed by clinical and biological research discussing constructivist vs essentialist conceptions of race (heavy on sociology)

Addressing Racism in Human Genetics and Genomics Education , reviews several papers specifically addressing the information dissemination problem I mentioned, going back to the "source", which is education. This paper focuses on studies in undergraduate biology education but others are looking at education in at the k-12 level, also.

If you wanted to do a database search yourself, some keywords I'd use would be: race essentialism, genetic essentialism, (really just "essentialism" would get you somewhere), race in biology education, race in medicine

I'm copying my comment from elsewhere as a jumping off point:

Hi hello I am an expert in this

We do have these studies. We have tons of them. At the research level, the essentialist bias of healthcare is well-documented.

Basically, not only do we know that there are very, very few (really, none, when you come right down to it) areas where we can accurately predict a person's underlying physiology based on their apparent race-- we also know that it is underlying bias (and not biological evidence) that makes some healthcare workers and researchers think otherwise.

In fact, these essentialist biases are documented along other dimensions of identity than race, also. These biases are found whenever healthcare workers treat individuals with different sexes, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, and body sizes, too (not an exhaustive list).

You probably aren't doing it intentionally, but this idea that "we just need more studies" is a common refrain of resistance to change from people who have a vested interest in the biased status quo-- calling for further study is seen as uncontroversial, even if there's a mountain of evidence already (see: climate denial).

Moreover, it actually misses the point of how epistemologies of biology are constructed. In reality, there are many things we know on the research level that are not efficiently disseminated to the relevant expert populations. The truth is that we don't really need more studies-- we need to figure out how to get the current best information into the hands of doctors, nurses, and clinical researchers.

To address your comment about red heads, I'd like to point out that it isn't the red-headed-ness of a person that creates the effect you're describing, it is the presence of specific alleles for the creation of pigments that both provide tint to our hair and skin and are also involved in pain/drug metabolic pathways.

Sure, that means that red-heads almost always have the effect you describe, but people with semi-functional or single recessive copies of alleles of the same genes may not have red hair but might have the same pain-pathway dysfunction. These mutations can pop up in individuals of any ethnic background, meaning that it is impossible to rule out the presence of the pain dysfunction based on race, skin, or hair color.

Moreover, in red-heads, individuals may possess mutations in other gene pathways (or epigenetic variation in gene expression regulation) that partially or fully eleviate the effect of the pigment allele mutation. In simple terms, all red heads might have the pain mutation associated with red hair, but some of those individuals might have a separate mutation (that doesn't change their appearance) that decreases their pain or anesthesia threshold, making the net effect zero. This again means that we can't be certain of someone's underlying physiology based on their appearance or race.

source: senior graduate student in epigenetics, gene expression, and with a specific research foci in essentialist beliefs among experts in the biological sciences

Hi hello I am an expert in this

We do have these studies. We have tons of them. At the research level, the essentialist bias of healthcare is well-documented.

Basically, not only do we know that there are very, very few (really, none, when you come right down to it) areas where we can accurately predict a person's underlying physiology based on their apparent race-- we also know that it is underlying bias (and not biological evidence) that makes some healthcare workers and researchers think otherwise.

In fact, these essentialist biases are documented along other dimensions of identity than race, also. These biases are found whenever healthcare workers treat individuals with different sexes, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, and body sizes, too (not an exhaustive list).

You probably aren't doing it intentionally, but this idea that "we just need more studies" is a common refrain of resistance to change from people who have a vested interest in the biased status quo-- calling for further study is seen as uncontroversial, even if there's a mountain of evidence already (see: climate denial).

Moreover, it actually misses the point of how epistemologies of biology are constructed. In reality, there are many things we know on the research level that are not efficiently disseminated to the relevant expert populations. The truth is that we don't really need more studies-- we need to figure out how to get the current best information into the hands of doctors, nurses, and clinical researchers.

Just because it isn't as bad a joke would imply doesn't mean it still isn't really quite bad

Base 12 vs base 10 is pretty much the only objective advantage of USC, and it only uniquely occurs in USC for small construction-scale tasks (i.e. the inch-to-foot scale).

I don't think people critiquing USC are unaware of what this video is saying. We just think it's still worse.

source: 8th gen American who would rather switch to SI

Your starting premise relies on the idea that the costs associated with making drugs are justified. In essence, this implies that the insane rewards are justified because risks associated with not producing a drug are so high.

Most of our science is funded via taxes and controlled by the government, given to researchers through grants that are awarded based on merit as determined by their peers. We've developed an adjacent system where drug discovery is funded by capital and investments from non-scientists based on the idea that "striking gold" in the medical world could make them rich.

Why not just remove the cost-barrier to entry? Require all drug discovery to be funded through grants like other research? Pay people working on drugs whether they discovered a new drug or not, as long as they provided proof of their efforts? Researchers would not need to please those with money (banks, investors) to give them funds for a drug, and so would be free to work on drugs that have a low likelihood of being profitable (such as for forgotten illnesses, or using cheap and widely available medicines in novel ways). And when an amazing drug was discovered, our society would be free to use it efficiently and at-cost, since there wouldn't be stakeholders hungry for their massive payout.

The grant system is a mess, also. And in an ideal world those whose ideas and research led to amazing discoveries would be rewarded extensically somehow, both with appreciation and a reasonable amount of money (the staff of an entire research organization could be set financially for life for a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of money we shovel over to pharmaceutical company stakeholders). And all of this is also tied up in the clinical medical industrial complex, with all its own neuroses.

So there are barriers to implementing something like this... But holy shit do I hear this idea a lot, that high risk justifies the insane rewards. I think it's bogus!

Thanks :)

I looked for a graph of the nino/a events over the past few decades and literally just grabbed the first result

It seems like some of what you said doesn't check out with this chart, like there was a four year Nina in '98-'02, and were currently in a very strong Nino.

Not trying to be contradictory and like maybe this isn't the best source, but can you give context on how what you said meshes with this?

how reliable do you think herbs-info.com is?

(the answer is probably: not very)

that is pretty metal and sick, you're right

the tradeoff is that the ring of fire means you can't look directly at it even at peak totality...

but either is so friggin hype