Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this and this is just my understanding of how to answer this question

You may or may not realize that most voters don't usually go out well in advance and research all potential candidates, selecting the one they feel represents their values the best. Many of them don't even check in to the conversation until the primaries are over and they can make a simple red vs. blue choice. Among voters that do participate in primaries, they mostly rely on information they learn about those potential candidates by watching advertisements, endorsements from other well known politicians, clips from debates, news and social media coverage, etc.

Creating that information (ads, debates, news coverage, social media, etc.) requires two things: money and momentum. Money comes first, and is disbursed according to the process the other commenter described-- the party talks with its donors and collectively they decide who to fund.

In Bernie's case, he was systematically deprived of money by the DNC as described above, in addition to his moral philosophy of not taking money from big donors. Instead, he funded his campaign through small donations-- which he earned a LOT of-- but he still had fewer funds to generate advertisements, to host events, to "get the word out".

Without this funding and support, Bernie couldn't generate momentum as effectively. The fact that he is as popular as he is despite the lack of support from the party illustrates how popular his platform is, but that isn't enough to get disengaged voters interested. Further, in his case, other party members actively wanted him to NOT be the nominee, so there were fewer endorsements, more intentional maneuvering by the party to convince voters to vote for other candidates, etc.

In essence, the idea that having the purest moral and policy philosophy is the most important element to winning the nomination is naive: it takes money and support from institutions, or else no one will ever even know what that pure philosophy is.

Using Jesus as a reference is unfortunate, yeah, but any other world calendars have to pick a nearly equally arbitrary way to contextualize the start and end year.

Take your pick: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Year_in_various_calendars

I personally use "2024 CE" for "common era", with BCE referring to "before common era". This allows us to communicate relatively clearly with other people who use the Gregorian calendar without explicitly endorsing the birth of Jesus as the important event defining the switch-over between CE and BCE... A bit of a cop out, but

Anyway have fun, there are lots of options

Edit: also the one you're referring to in your post is the Holocene Calendar

I guess this isn't NO context but:

Innkeeper married to a nixie: “The Fey never do anything without a price...”

“... How much did you pay for your wife?”

The fact this has 40 up votes right now makes me feel like lemmy is losing a diverse user base. Like, where are the women to down vote this obviously shitty take?

Let's list some reasons why these women could have done this that aren't "women are sluts for clown daddies":

• he's their boss, and leveraging his insane power over them to make it hard to say no and keep their job
• he's just an extremely powerful man and they're afraid of pissing him off
• they have insecurities, (like the "loser cuck" fallacy!) that they aren't valuable or desirable as partners, and attention from someone as powerful as him feels like affirmation of their value even if they don't like him or he treats them badly
• they understand that, by not resisting his advances, they might be able to provide themselves a link to a financial source that could support them and a child
• he literally sexually harasses, assaults, or rapes them and they don't feel like they can criminally pursue one of the richest men in the world

Like, yeah, some of them might be individuals who have bad taste in men or are shitty people themselves. I'm even certain that some of them are! But damn, can we take the perspective of the woman for one second? It's not a good look to find yourself agreeing with incels on the internet

Contrary to most of the opinions in this thread, I think this (and the van gogh incident) is a great and appropriate protest.

It causes a knee-jerk reaction to be mad that they are harming a precious piece of history and culture, which is a perfect juxtaposition to how the climate change harms our precious natural resources and will harm ourselves, and

It achieves this without actually causing permanent damage to the subject artifact, and

It is incendiary enough to remain in our public consciousness long enough for it to affect the discourse.

I only wish there was a more direct way to protest the people most responsible for the worst effects (oil executives, politicians, etc.), but the truth is that the "average middle-class Westerner" (most of the people who have access to enjoy these particular cultural relics) is globally "one of the worst offenders". While I firmly believe that individuals have less power to enact change than corporations and policymakers, this protest does achieve the goal of causing reflection within people who have the power to make changes.

You say you don't like poetry, yet you write a lovely free-form poem. Suspicious...

Oooh it's even cooler than that!! You're spot on, acid is the problem. And acid from food, candy, coffee, etc. is harmful for enamel for sure.

But sugary stuff that isn't acidic also rots teeth. Why? Because the bacteria in your mouth do what's called lactic acid fermentation. Basically, when they take a sugar molecule and want to make "usable" energy out of it (in the form of something called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate), they end up creating lactic acid as a byproduct. In essence, the stuff living in your mouth makes acid out of sugar.

We also need to break sugar down into ATP, but we do something called cellular respiration instead. It uses oxygen and creates CO2 as a byproduct! That's why we need oxygen to breathe, and why we breathe out carbon dioxide. But, when you work your muscles hard (lifting weights, sprinting), you might use the ATP in your muscles faster than your body can make it with cellular respiration. In that case, your cells will also do lactic acid fermentation! That's what we're feeling when we "feel the burn" (well, that and micro-tears in the muscle, in some cases).

Source: I'm a biologist! And I love sharing weird facts like this! Thank you for the excuse to write this out :-)

Wikipedia link to radium girls

I think you got the right idea but that description is missing the big points.

They were painting watches and their employers told them to use their lips to make fine points on the brushes, meaning they ingested a ton of the paint. The employers told them it was harmless despite evidence to the contrary. They chose not to use other options because wiping the brush on their lips increased productivity and they were paid per watch.

I don't think you meant to imply that they were doing it for trivial reasons, but I do think mentioning that they were doing it for a job and that their employers were intentionally deceiving them is important context!

Huge disclaimer that I'm not a plumber or even close to a plumber, but I did have a house and think about houses:

Isn't the current "standard" plumbing PEX plumbing, which is basically just a bunch of hoses?

Like I think you're on to something but the industry beat you to the punch 😉

I'm not sure about the time scale you're referring to, but I have some expeirence with dog training and I've been interested in dog training history lately, so maybe I have insight for you. Also, I want to qualify this whole tirade by saying this is a USA-centric breakdown; other countries have different cultural histories with their dogs, and while the underlying animal behavior is the same, I can't speak to whether dogs in other countries are "well" or "poorly" trained.

Prior to the 1900s, dogs weren't really thought of as companion animals the way they are now. Dogs were usually from working lines-- hunting dogs, setters, pointers, terriers, ratters, herders, shepherds, guard dogs, sled dogs, etc. They were considered somewhat adjacent to livestock. In these situations, dogs were often "trained" by their breeding. You don't have to tell a working line rat terrier to kill rats, they just do. Sheepdogs will herd children if there aren't sheep around. Just try keeping a working line husky from pulling in a harness... you can do it, but it's working against it's nature. Mostly around this time, a person had multiple dogs of breeds with natural instincts to do the job they wanted them to do, and the dogs did it. The ones that did it best were bred by their owners, and the next generation was better than the last. It's also important to note that the major written documents describing dog training at this time mostly emphasized rewarding the dogs with meat and praise when they are good, and ignoring them when they are bad.

During and around WWII, there was a new interest in training dogs for policing, warfare, and personal protection. It became more common to have one-dog-one-handler arrangements, and since most working lines of guard dogs were more "bark at intruders and bite strangers" kinds of dogs instead of "dutifully and silently stand by until ordered to kill" dogs, there was an interest in developing training methods to achieve the desired result without needing to breed new working lines.

From this desire during WWII, two schools of thought arose. One was the "traditional" method (not very traditional after all...) which arose from trainers like William Koelher. These methods emphasized discipline, "corrections", and punishment. The other school of thought had its roots from behaviorists like Marian Breland Bailey (an advisee of BF Skinner) that illustrated the power of operant conditioning and positive reinforcement. They both started around the same time (1930s-1960s) but for one reason or another the traditional methods were more popular, and the reinforcement methods were seen as lesser "tid-bit training techniques" based in "the prattle of 'dog psychologists'".

It turns out they were both working with a similar framework-- dogs learn by associating an action or stimulus with a positive or negative outcome. The argument was whether positive or negative outcomes were better at inducing learning gains. At this point, mountains of research shows that positive reinforcement wins out every time, meaning that the behaviorists were more correct than the traditionalists.

Still, as I mentioned, the traditional methods were more popular for a long time. People still think they need to "be an alpha" or leader to their dogs, that they need to discipline the dog so it respects them, that punishing the dog is the way to achieve good behavior. Choke and shock collars, leash corrections, and "alpha rolls" are still common training techniques despite the evidence that they are counterproductive. Additionally, you'll remember what I said about the behaviorist/reinforcement methods being more aligned with training techniques recorded before WWII-- when farmers were training herding dogs, they weren't "alpha roll"ing them, they were giving them meat when they did their job and ignoring them when they didn't.

Anyway that's a whole fucken essay in itself, but the point I'm trying to make is this: prior to WWII, dogs were trained by being paid in daily food and by having the chance to breed. Many working dogs are still trained like this, perhaps giving you the impression that dogs "used to be trained well". Companion dogs are a more modern development and there continues to be two schools of thought about how to train them. People who look deeply into evidence-based dog training methods train their dogs with positive reinforcement-- these dogs are usually what we consider "well trained" dogs, and overwhelmingly these dogs exist in affluent areas where dog owners have the money to pay for expensive trainers, and where they have the free time to train the dog consistently. As class disparity grows, it is becoming more common for people in poorer areas to lack access to the education about the best methods, so they tend to default to "traditional" methods that were more popular in the 20th century. These dogs are... less "well trained". Even if someone wants to put in a lot of effort to learn how to train dogs, they might just not have access to the most up to date knowledge. Additionally, there's evidence that dogs trained with these methods are more susceptible to a lack of generalization than reinforcement trained dogs, which is to say they might act fine in most situations, but they act worse (more fearfully, less predictably) in novel scenarios. That's part of why you might see "well trained" dogs who suddenly and disasterously act out.

One last side note: often dogs who are reactive (the term for dogs who freak out and start screaming when they see a person or a dog or a bike, etc.) are not necessarily untrained. Reactivity is a fear response; you can imagine they might be like a normal human with a spider phobia. They might be 100% perfectly behaved in every situation... except for when a dog walks by. In this situation, the other dog is like a spider.

Traditional training might suggest that you try to order the dog to stop freaking out and punish them if they don't stop when they see another dog, but that's like punishing someone with a spider phobia for freaking out when they see a spider. The reinforcement methods instead try and convince the dog that other dogs (spiders) are actually harmless. This is shown to reduce reactivity much more than punishment. Still, reducing reactivity is like really really hard, just as fixing phobias in humans is. Even if someone is working very hard with training and using the best available techniques, the dog might still freak out when they see another dog (thus looking like they "aren't trained", according to your post).

And LAST last note, maybe the difference you're perceiving is from covid? A lot of people got a lot of dogs but couldn't take them out to socialize and train them due to lockdown. Additionally, during covid a lot of adoption agencies literally ran out of dogs, meaning that dogs that would usually be euthanized because of behavioral issues were instead adopted out to families. Compounded with a lack of socialization, and the fact that many people still use "traditional" training methods, maybe you're just seeing a lot of reactive, fearful dogs? Hopefully that will improve over time!

Anyway thanks for reading my whole fucken essay, lol... I wrote this while on a plane so I guess that's why I was bored enough to write this much. Hope you get something out of it!

This article is garbage but I'm a molecular biologist and the publication they're talking about is really neat.

The "ELI5 to the point of maybe reducing out the truth" way to explain it is that the researchers can add "flags" to proteins associated with immune responses that make cells pick them up and examine them. This is shown to work for allergins (so say, add a flag to peanut protein and the cells can look at it more closely, go "oh nvm this is fine" and stop freaking out about peanuts) as well as autoimmune diseases (where cells mistake other cells from the same body as potential threats).

It's not nearly to a treatment stage, but tbh this is one of the more exciting approaches I've seen, and I do similar research and thus read a lot of papers like this.

There's a lot of evidence that we are entering a biological "golden age" and we will discover a ton of amazing things very soon. It's worrysome that we still have to deal with instability in other parts of life (climate change, wealth inequality, political polarization) that might slow down the process of turning these discoveries into actual treatments we can use to make lives better...

Still, don't doubt everything you read! A lot of cool stuff is coming, the trick is getting it past the red tape