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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • It’s important to know that both the FDA and the USDA are in charge of inspecting food, and which food is covered by which agency can be complicated.

    FSIS [under the USDA] conducts continuous daily inspections of foods in its domain, whereas FDA inspections have no regular schedule. The FDA is more likely to inspect only after a tip about a possible food safety violation, so random inspections can occur up to 10 years apart or, in rare cases, not at all.

    “It’s not that they don’t want to inspect more, they just don’t have the funding,” Raymond says.

    This inspection imbalance means that pepperoni pizza, because it contains meat, has ingredients that will be inspected three times before the product hits the grocery store freezer: at the slaughterhouse, the packing plant and the pizza factory. A vegetarian pizza produced at the same facility, however, will probably not undergo any inspection.

    And in regard to the FDA being not allowed to regulate:

    [The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994] placed the burden of proof concerning dietary supplement safety on FDA, requiring the agency to show that a dietary supplement ingredient is adulterated rather than requiring the manufacturer to prove a supplement is safe prior to marketing. This is in contrast to new food additives, which require submission of safety information in a food additive petition prior to marketing, or drugs, which generally require submission of safety data as part of a new drug application prior to marketing.

    At least with dietary supplements, they can’t make a new product guarantee it’s safe, the FDA needs to already know something is dangerous before it can force a recall.

    If you’d prefer to learn more through a comedian, John Oliver covered this topic a while back https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg




  • In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They’ll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.

    But some children will skip the sounding out if they’re taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers — until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they’re stuck. They haven’t developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don’t like it, so they don’t do it if they don’t have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind.

    These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Not because they’re incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.

    Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there’s a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they’re taught. According to Kilpatrick, children who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it.

    Maybe your kid is one of the lucky ones that can read fine regardless of how he’s taught. But not everyone will be. That’s the point of changing how reading is taught, to be more effective for the highest number of people.

    But you could also try giving him a reading test like the ones presented at the top of this website https://readingtests.info/ and see for yourself how well he reads an unfamiliar story.


  • He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word “horse” and says “pony” instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

    I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn’t the same thing as a horse. Second, don’t you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says “pony”? And different letters say “horse”?

    He dismissed my question.

    Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn’t like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does. And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

    “My science is different,” Goodman said.

    It really shouldn’t surprise me at this point that people that think like this are in charge of how kids are educated.


  • why do people have this innate ability to underestimate what we might be capable of?

    Because we can see what we’re currently capable of in terms of climate change, and the outlook is pretty bleak

    why do you think its impossible for us to become masters of our own genome?

    Because even in the best case scenario, this is dangerously close to eugenics

    not getting off this rock means our species is doomed regardless of how ‘perfect’ we keep earth.

    If we can’t keep earth livable, an entire self-regulating planet that’s been livable for hundreds of millions or billions of years, what are our chances of keeping anywhere else livable?




  • All I can really say is, if you don’t want your personal image to be commodified, you probably shouldn’t commodify it. The fact that Alex Jones has used his company that’s deeply tied to his personal image to attack and lie about the families of the victims of Sandy Hook make his case particularly unsympathetic, and so now that he owes an absurd amount of money to those families I think he should be forced to give up his social media accounts if it helps give those families what they’re owed.

    It also doesn’t help that he still thinks there are “unanswered questions” about what happened at Sandy Hook and doesn’t feel any remorse for lying and spreading misinformation about the families for years.

    Take his real assets and sell them.

    This is exactly what the lawyers trying to take the account think they’re doing. There’s some real value in having access to his social media followers, especially if that access can be tied to the purchase of the larger operation.

    But I think they’re not ‘his’ assets, they’re the choices of those subscribers. To ‘buy’ them seems like defrauding the people who chose to listen to him.

    And those subscribers can easily unfollow him as soon as they don’t like what they’re hearing. It’s not like once you follow someone on twitter you’re forced to see updates from them for the rest of your life. But since they’re following TheRealAlexJones probably to get updates about his business at InfoWars, it makes sense that the social media account that he uses to promote the business being sold needs to be considered as part of the business.



  • For something like t-shirt likenesses, I suppose I think the line is the person’s consent

    So if he had a warehouse full of tshirts with his name or face on them and decides after filing bankruptcy that he doesn’t want to sell them anymore, should he just get to keep it? Should it all be destroyed?

    If he took a cattle brand and burned his name into everything on set, does that mean he shouldn’t have to sell it any more?

    In the extreme case: a person is legally entitled to sell nude images of themselves, but surely a court would never order it, even if that person had been previously selling nude images.

    If someone was already selling porn before, do you think if they continued to that they shouldn’t have to give any of that money they earned to the people they owe money to? This case isn’t anywhere near that extreme because he’s not the only person in the world named ‘Alex Jones’, so how much of his ‘likeness’ is being sold is debatable to begin with. And also, we aren’t talking about future permission to use his likeness, we’re talking about a social media account used to promote his business.


  • If you had a talk show called the [Your Name] show, should it be immune to bankruptcy courts? Should a the company [Your Name] Inc. not be allowed to be bought and sold? Should we forbid people from selling tshirts or pictures with their names and faces on them? Where do you think we should draw the line?

    The same precedent applies to ordinary people too. Should a debt collector acquire your Facebook page? Because you used Facebook marketplace it’s now a business asset?

    Most people don’t own a business. The occasional use of facebook marketplace doesn’t make a personal account part of a nonexistant business.



  • I think it has more to do with the fact that he uses his twitter account mostly to advertise his business, making it more of a business account than a personal account even though it has his name on it.

    Edit:

    In seeking the rights to the social media accounts, the legal team for the trustee argued in court filings that Jones’ X account, and others on Telegram, Gab, Parler and other platforms, “are frequently used to promote and post Infowars content, and in some cases, have a significant number of followers.” Jones’ X account has nearly 3 million followers.

    The trustee argued that social media accounts of influencers, celebrities and political personalities have become valuable assets, and that Jones’ accounts have drawn particular interest from multiple parties in buying them.

    From the article neither of us bothered to read.