Maybe it's just me as a Filipino who has lived through a murderous dictatorship and oligarchies in a queerphobic country controlled by the rich who brutalize grassroots pro worker movements all under the military abuse of US imperialism but...

You just gotta keep showing up. Support each other. Don't just fight for yourself. The work is hard, but you just gotta keep doing it. You'll always see results, even if they're not always the ones you want, or as big as you want them to be.

All your work always matters. Even if it doesn't feel like it at first. It always matters.

12 years of murderous and plunderous dictators but fuck it we ball

I forgot to update this when it happened but Duterte was arrested by the ICC because people, especially women in the Philippines, never stopped working to bring him to justice. Dr. Raquel Fortun examined the bodies of drug war victims and the evidence she found is being used in the case. Photographers like Raffy Lerma and Ezra Acayan took photos of the many killings by police.

People like Jude Sabio, Antonio Trillanes, members of the Magdalo partylist, and Leila de Lima, submitted the case to the ICC, then activists and family members of the victims led by the National Union of People's Lawyers also submitted documents to the ICC.

People like Patricia Evangelista and Maria Ressa continued to bring his crimes to light internationally.

All this, alongside the continuous work of activists, is what helped us get to this point. Sara Duterte in impeachment proceedings because of her corruption as Vice President. Rodrigo Duterte in the ICC awaiting trial. After 7 years, because they never stopped working towards justice.

The work always matters.

Literally any other colour would’ve been a better choice guys.

I’d like to point out that the colour red has more positive than negative meanings.

im sorry but this reply absolutely killed me

red can mean whatever the heck you want it to mean, that is never going to change that this straight up looks like they DRAGGED A BLOODY BODY ACROSS THE FUCKING FLOOR 😂

Hi fun fact, colors do have meaning and there is a legit thing called color theory. Red does has more positive connotations than negative like the @mintymaiden said. Red is associated with more love, lust, passion than blood and death just like the chart shows you but If you want, here’s a link for you to check it out yourself. Also, check out “The Designer’s Dictionary of Color” by Sean Adams. Have fun learning something

Xoxo

-Designer

I think y’all are missing the point here.

You can theorize to Nebraska and back but that doesn’t change my immediate reaction which is that someone is literally dragging a corpse around

I like that the presumption here is that “No One On Tumblr Has Heard of Color Theory, Let Me Explain in Depth” rather than simply acknowledging that the VISUAL EFFECTS of this particular color choice, applied in the manner it was, can still amount to “this is a hospital and that looks like blood”

like, color theory doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If your design of choice for Blood Red Paint is asymmetric splatters and sploches against the wall, or in this case, a snail trail on the hallway’s floor, an infographic won’t override the viewers’ instinct.

this post is the perfect summation of tumblr’s reading comprehension and critical thought abilities

Reblogging because there’s a lot of new people on here and you need some context for the jokes.

Help a newcomer, reblog Children’s Hospital Colour Theory

singing house of the rising sun at the pub last night and when the song ended the musicians just kept playing while people ad-libbed more verses about various pubs they knew

(with ominous hurdy-gurdy accompaniment): "there is a pub in walthamstow, it's called the fox and mole, but we don't go there (long pause) any more. Because the manager is an arsehole."

growth models

First, considering the growth of bacteria in a infinite well-mixed medium. (How can it be infinite and well-mixed? Don't worry about it.)

B: population size β: birth rate δ: death rate

dB/dt = βB - δB = (β - δ)B

Defining λ, net growth rate

dB/dt = λB

So that's the exponential growth model. Next is the logistic model, and one way to think about it is that the growth rate itself decreases with the population. We're just going to make that dependence linear because whatever

dB/dt = (λ - mB) B

So now there's a maximum population size, when that growth rate becomes zero. It's inversely proportional to m... sorry for using "m" which sounds like it could mean "maximum"

Of course if you expand this you see all we've done is change our linear formula for the derivative into a quadratic one:

dB/dt = λB - mB²

Now I want to bring back our birth rates and death rates:

dB/dt = βB - δB - mB²

Then group the terms like this:

dB/dt = (βB - mB²) - δB

Now, it looks like we have a certain fraction dying at each time unit, plus a growth term. As @urpriest pointed out to me, we can think of this growth term as a second-order expansion of some function f:

dB/dt = f(B) - δB

So the properties it has to have are f(0) = 0, concavity, and being an increasing function at least near zero.

Okay, now I'm going to state Solow's growth model for capital in the special case with no labor productivity growth or population growth, and it's going to look the same. K is stock of das Kapital, s is savings rate, f(K) is a production function, δ depreciation rate:

dK/dt = sf(K) - δK

The production function is increasing (not just near zero, everywhere), concave, and f(0) = 0. So you get a logistic model as a second-order approximation.

This is why I wouldn't expect capital to grow exponentially: you get growth up to an equilibrium where investment is perfectly balanced by depreciation. Well, in the absence of labor productivity growth or population growth.

The next step would be to include labor in the production function, then show that capital per unit of "effective labor" satisfies exactly that previous formula. I don't remember how to do this though or what additional assumptions it takes.

how do we know?

i mean, exponential growth is fine, because it’s simple.

but with the logistical model, how do we know the bacteria’s rate of reproduction slows?

how do economists know that you grow up to an equilibrium?

"if i was orpheus i simply wouldn't have turned around" if you didn't love her enough to turn around, you didn't love her enough to crawl through the underworld to save her. if you could prevent yourself from looking back, you wouldn't be trying to bring her back to life. if you were able to look forward, you would be grieving.

"if I was orpheus I simply wouldn't have turned around" if you don't love her enough to turn around, you aren't orpheus.

I think this recent conversation is interesting actually, because it reveals two schools of thought.

The request not to look back at a loved one you’re worried about goes against human nature. When you’re walking with someone you love and they’re out of your sight, the urge to find them and check on them is so strong. So I think whether or not Orpheus turning around is a failing or proof or his love depends a lot on what love means to you.

Are you doing everything you can to save her, even defying your own nature, your good sense, your worry, putting your own feelings and humanity aside in the hopes that at the end she’ll live?

The people who say that they wouldn’t have turned around are saying that her life is worth their discomfort, their stress, and fear on that long walk. But that they could distance themselves from it, even if it meant forcing their own face forward, for the sake of her life.

Or is love best exemplified by human nature itself? That you’re doing everything you can to save her, head straight forward. but then in a moment, on an instinct, you turn to look, because you love her, and you’re worried, and you can’t not.

The people who say turning around is the point say that love is not separate from human instinct, that it can’t be overcome. When we spin around in a second to find our friends and family in the crowd when we realize that they’re no longer at our side? That’s a pure show of love too.

Basically the debate is, ‘is love a thoughtful sacrifice or what we show in the moments where we don’t think at all.’ And think the answer is a combination of both. It’s why Orpheus finds his way to the underworld in the first place. And it’s why, even if you don’t turn around, the instinct is there, and you’re fighting it all the way.

once i had an ipod that got wet. through the washer. they told you “don’t turn it on. put it in rice for a few days first. before you turn it on dry it out. don’t turn it on first.” but i still turned it on first (it died)

i love donna nook seals.

the adults look like dogs that got stung by bees and the babies look like a stuffed toy that got left in a daycare sandbox.

Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

A lawsuit filed in February accuses Tesla of remotely altering odometer values on failure-prone cars, in a bid to push these lemons beyond the 50,000 mile warranty limit:

https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/tesla-accused-of-using-sneaky-tactic-to-dodge-car-repairs

The suit was filed by a California driver who bought a used Tesla with 36,772 miles on it. The car's suspension kept failing, necessitating multiple servicings, and that was when the plaintiff noticed that the odometer readings for his identical daily drive were going up by ever-larger increments. This wasn't exactly subtle: he was driving 20 miles per day, but the odometer was clocking 72.35 miles/day. Still, how many of us monitor our daily odometer readings?

In short order, his car's odometer had rolled over the 50k mark and Tesla informed him that they would no longer perform warranty service on his lemon. Right after this happened, the new mileage clocked by his odometer returned to normal. This isn't the only Tesla owner who's noticed this behavior: Tesla subreddits are full of similar complaints:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/1ca92nk/is_tesla_inflating_odometer_to_show_more_range/

This isn't Tesla's first dieselgate scandal. In the summer of 2023, the company was caught lying to drivers about its cars' range:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Drivers noticed that they were getting far fewer miles out of their batteries than Tesla had advertised. Naturally, they contacted the company for service on their faulty cars. Tesla then set up an entire fake service operation in Nevada that these calls would be diverted to, called the "diversion team." Drivers with range complaints were put through to the "diverters" who would claim to run "remote diagnostics" on their cars and then assure them the cars were fine. They even installed a special xylophone in the diversion team office that diverters would ring every time they successfully deceived a driver.

These customers were then put in an invisible Tesla service jail. Their Tesla apps were silently altered so that they could no longer book service for their cars for any reason – instead, they'd have to leave a message and wait several days for a callback. The diversion center racked up 2,000 calls/week and diverters were under strict instructions to keep calls under five minutes. Eventually, these diverters were told that they should stop actually performing remote diagnostics on the cars of callers – instead, they'd just pretend to have run the diagnostics and claim no problems were found (so if your car had a potentially dangerous fault, they would falsely claim that it was safe to drive).

Most modern cars have some kind of internet connection, but Tesla goes much further. By design, its cars receive "over-the-air" updates, including updates that are adverse to drivers' interests. For example, if you stop paying the monthly subscription fee that entitles you to use your battery's whole charge, Tesla will send a wireless internet command to your car to restrict your driving to only half of your battery's charge.

This means that your Tesla is designed to follow instructions that you don't want it to follow, and, by design, those instructions can fundamentally alter your car's operating characteristics. For example, if you miss a payment on your Tesla, it can lock its doors and immobilize itself, then, when the repo man arrives, it will honk its horn, flash its lights, back out of its parking spot, and unlock itself so that it can be driven away:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Some of the ways that your Tesla can be wirelessly downgraded (like disabling your battery) are disclosed at the time of purchase. Others (like locking you out and summoning a repo man) are secret. But whether disclosed or secret, both kinds of downgrade depend on the genuinely bizarre idea that a computer that you own, that is in your possession, can be relied upon to follow orders from the internet even when you don't want it to. This is weird enough when we're talking about a set-top box that won't let you record a TV show – but when we're talking about a computer that you put your body into and race down the road at 80mph inside of, it's frankly terrifying.

Obviously, most people would prefer to have the final say over how their computers work. I mean, maybe you trust the manufacturer's instructions and give your computer blanket permission to obey them, but if the manufacturer (or a hacker pretending to be the manufacturer, or a government who is issuing orders to the manufacturer) starts to do things that are harmful to you (or just piss you off), you want to be able to say to your computer, "OK, from now on, you take orders from me, not them."

In a state of nature, this is how computers work. To make a computer ignore its owner in favor of internet randos, the manufacturer has to build in a bunch of software countermeasures to stop you from reconfiguring or installing software of your choosing on it. And sure, that software might be able to withstand the attempts of normies like you and me to bypass it, but given that we'd all rather have the final say over how our computers work, someone is gonna figure out how to get around that software. I mean, show me a 10-foot fence and I'll show you an 11-foot ladder, right?

Fucking with the odometer was literally a villainous plot point in *Matilda*. I'm astonished someone saw a clear scumbag maneuver, as executed by Danny "Professional Scumbag Typecast Champion" DeVito, and thought it would be good to implement in real life.

Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state.

Pleasure affects our metabolic pathways; it’s a facet of the complex gut-brain connection. If you’re eating foods you don’t like because you think it’s healthy, it’s not actually doing your body much good (it’s also unsustainable, we’re pleasure-seeking creatures). Eat food you enjoy, it’s a win-win.

what

no seriously

what?

PLEASURE IS A NECESSARY PART OF HUMAN HEALTH, BOTH PSYCHOLOGICALLY AND PHYSICALLY

this is why you should be eating your chips with salsa and guac instead of beating yourself up for not eating a salad with tomato and avocado (unless you are a salad bitch like me then enjoy both of them!)

here’s a recent systemic review of all the research done on the subject

for those of you wondering if the studies cited above are legit and if so where we can read about them, here’s a link to one of the (more than a dozen!) papers written on the topic of nutrient absorption and how you eat your food:

hey look, additional info!

@tigerpika

Christians keep stealing shit from other esoteric traditions when St Barbara is right there.

Y'all have a PATRON SAINT OF BOMBS AND EXPLOSIONS AND NONE OF Y'ALL EVER MENTION HER

Her symbology is the Chalice and Cannon. Queen.

her Wikipedia page says she's lesbian

*LEBANESE

patron saint of osha

Me: Yes sir I understand that the office door cannot be closed when two colleagues of opposite gender are alone together due to sexual misconduct concerns but as an openly bisexual employee I have to ask if leaving two colleagues of the same gender entirely unsupervised isn't a double standard

Me: Like. I feel I should also have my ass covered if a same-gender colleague accuses me of shit, you know

Bossman: Nahhhhhhh it's good

The morally grey cathedral goblin that lives on my shoulder and judges the value of my kneejerk impulses: If you grabbed his ass right now he would learn such an important lesson forever but we don't roll like that bro

Me: (out loud) Okay

@shit-hdb-would-say

Harry du Bois would say this.

(vote in the gimmick blog bracket!)

the reason "robot racism" is often a really stupid metaphor is the same reason that like. discrimination against demons or vampires or whatever doesn't work, is because there's often a pretty justified reasons humans are scared of vampires or robots or whatever, in a way that doesn't apply to real life minorities, like a fantasy author will be like "the reason vampires are discriminated against is because most of them and kill and eat people for fun and pleasure, and so humans respond by trying to kill them, isn't that so sad" and like no that's a perfectly fine reason to not trust vampires i think.

sci-fi writers will be like "every robot on earth randomly decided to kill all humans for no real reason, and now people don't trust robots, and this is a metaphor for racism" and like no you just wrote a metaphor for white people actually.

this world aint all cookies n cream little fella

Getting rid of billionaires' influence is why we need to abolish Citizens United ruling.