Interesting Links for 08-08-2024

[andrewducker]

1. In 1997, the minimum age for women gymnasts was raised to 16. Some thought it would usher in a less competitive era. Instead, athletes of incredible skill and longevity emerged.

(tags:age sports women girls )

2. Republicans are pro-cancer

(tags:cancer republicans USA politics )

3. An injection every 6 months completely prevents HIV

(tags:aids hiv GoodNews )

4. On October 23rd 1911 400 guests sat down to the world's first 'Cold-Storage Banquet'

(tags:food temperature history )

5. What would a move to a Canadian-style pensions model for the UK's local government schemes look like?

(tags:pensions uk canada )

6. Worldcon arrives in Glasgow (I wish I could go. Hopefully next time around!)

(tags:conventions scifi glasgow )

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

1) Now let's do the same for skateboarding competitions, and also let women gymnasts dress as they wish.

[andrewducker]

Totally with you there!

[channelpenguin]

Yes!

[altamira16]

Also, women's figure skating.

Certain sports are child abuse factories that are leading to the "success" of children in a way that will bring them injury over the long run.

[ninetydegrees]

Well said. I also don't believe children and young teens are often fully able to grasp the long-lasting , sometimes lifelong, impact that practising sport at an intensive level will have on their bodies and mental health.

[andrewducker]

See, for example, ballet.

[ninetydegrees]

Great example too. It's odd that we're now able to recognize how damaging some jobs or work in general can be but we don't really do it for sport, art, entertainement, etc. as if they still weren't considered as jobs like any other ones.

[channelpenguin]

1. Wonderful to see. More power and skill on display in the sport is great. Also maybe more attention paid to health, both in diet and in avoiding injury/overtraining.

[armiphlage]

3. An injection every 6 months completely prevents HIV

As this prevents the protein shell of HIV from forming, I wonder if it will also prevent deaths from influenza, dengue fever, and other viruses.

[andrewducker]

Fingers crossed that it's generalisable. An injection every 6 months that wipes out a wide variety of viruses would be amazing.

[mountainkiss]

All Republicans, or Republican legislators?

[andrewducker]

Just the legislators.

Republican voters are just willing to put up with cancer if it means they get to be racist/misogynist/homophobic/transphobic.

[mountainkiss]

Is this truly what you believe? There are about 36m registered Republican voters in the US.

[calimac]

And they pretty much all voted for Trump.

QED.

[mountainkiss]

This seems a somewhat homogeneous and simplistic interpretation of human nature.

[andrewducker]

I think the idea that there are good people who looked at Trump and decided that he was a force for good is, at this point, baffling.

[calimac]

Or at any point, actually. He was just as horrific in 2016.

[andrewducker]

If people vote for a party with an evil policy (for example, burning freckled people at the stake), the options are:
1) They want freckled people to be burnt at the stake.
2) The party does other things that they want and they are willing to allow freckled people to be burnt at the stake in order to get them.
3) They believe that all of the other options are worse than freckled people being burned at the stake.
4) They don't know that the party wants to burn freckled people at the stake.
5) They don't understand what burning freckled people at the stake is.

So, considering that the Republican party have repeatedly, since 2016, shown themselves to consist almost entirely of horrible policies, then anyone voting for them at this point either wants the horrible policies, is willing to let those horrible policies happen in exchange for being (maybe) somewhat better off, doesn't understand the policies, or doesn't know what the policies are. None of those are in any way positive, so far as I can see.

Now, some of them believe these things because they've been lied to a huge amount. Some of them are badly educated because the US education system has very badly let them down. Some of them have been taught that God wants them to support the horrible policies party. But none of that changes the fact that they are choosing to support a party which is, at this point, horrific.

[simont]

1. In 1997, the minimum age for women gymnasts was raised to 16.

My problem with openings like that is that I invariably want to follow them with a parody of the A-Team opening narration.

"These women promptly escaped from a maximum security gymnasium to the Los Angeles underground." Probably by somersaulting gracefully out of a high window.

[andrewducker]

More things should be treated as a parody of the A-Team opening.

[drswirly]

Usually, I would also think of the A-Team. But in this case, I immediately found myself continuing it with

"In Vietnam, it was 19."

[anna_wing]

The HIV news is very good. I intensely dislike the blithe view that "oh, there's no need to worry about getting HIV, because you can just take the drugs and you'll be fine," since it casually assumes that the drugs will always be there - available or affordable. And when they're not...

[magedragonfire]

A few times, different friends groups of mine have discussed what they'd be doing during a sufficiently large apocalypse-like event - zombie, or nuclear fallout, or whatever. And while I have a number of hobbies that would be useful in such an event - sewing, knitting, cooking for large groups of people - my answer generally comes down to "dead, probably not too long after I can't find any more effective insulin and-or sufficient sources of food".

There's not a lot getting around requiring a modern(ish) drug to continue ticking. If anything disrupts that supply chain, then...

[anna_wing]

Yes. Someone I knew casually died in Myanmar after the military coup when supplies of the anti-retrovirals stopped.

[magedragonfire]

I’m sorry to hear that, and what a frustrating and frightening thing that must have been for them. :/

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. Cures are better than long term suppression. Fingers crossed that we get more of them.