Digby has a post up about lack of herd immunity in Silicon Valley schools. Note from the graph that the biotechs (Gilead, Genentech) are pretty much up-to-date with their vaccines. They’re over 90% vaccinated. It’s the Googles, Ciscos and Pixars that are slacking.
They really haven’t got a clue. Of course, my ability to code is minimal, though I can hold my own in the hardware area.
In the IT world, Moore’s Law is pretty easy to understand. The physics of electricity, magnetism, doping, transistors and the like is fairly well understood. It’s all perfectly straightforward, mostly. There’s very little ambiguity. That’s what science is like for the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Knowing that the physics is understood and no longer very complex makes it sooooo much easier to “innovate”. So, what’s the problem with pharmaceuticals?
It’s little surprise to me that they don’t get their kids vaccinated. For all their bravado about how to innovate in the realm of science, to them the cell is still a “sufficiently advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic”. You put vaccines in your body. You don’t inject chips. (It’s coming) They want to give the illusion that they’re geeky types but just like every other animal on earth, they fear what they don’t completely understand and many of them didn’t study quite enough biology.
I never liked the IT department at work. I had to interact with those guys but it was my group that found it necessary to learn their trade, mostly in order to figure out how to circumvent it. They seemed to be completely clueless when it came to the core science that actually paid their bills. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of power in IT. We all use it and we’re all at their mercy. Resistance is, to some extent, useless. We will be subject to their obtuseness during epidemics as well.
How was everyone’s Thanksgiving? Did everyone get enough to eat? I brought the desserts this year and much to my surprise, no one in my family likes Lemon Meringue but me. I’m not complaining but I did find it weird when my sister told me that it was a summer pie and why didn’t I know that?? Not to fear, we had pumpkin as well. And a custard fruit tart brought by someone else that was also delicious. It went fast.
My sister and her husband are into this foodsaver gadget and they shrinkwrapped the leftovers into neat little packages. I have to get one of those suckers. They gave me a package of turkey (white meat, yummmm) to take home with me. Guess what’s for dinner tonight?
Anyway, I have a lot to do today. I need to finish reading some papers, return a coat I decided I could live without and basically take care of some other stuff that I’ve been putting off. So, I thought I’d let you in on my instapaper queue. For those of you not familiar with instapaper, it’s an app/utility that allows you to save links to interesting webpages so that you end up with something like your own frontpage. It comes with a button that you put on your browser bar and when you see something you want to read later, you just click on “read later” and it saves it to your instapaper account. Later, you can peruse your links at your leisure. Highly recommended. They even have a Browse section of recommended links of things you may be interested in reading based on your current selections.
So, What did Lipitor do for Pfizer? Or its Shareholders?- In the Pipeline (Or, “How the finance MBA executive class screwed the pooch in pharma, destroyed research, set the shareholders up for HUGE losses later and made the entire world hate drug discovery’s guts” It’s hard to believe a group of arrogant, hierarchical Ivy League educated individuals could botch things this badly but it’s become clear to me that the Democrats have been taking lessons from them.)
Finally, here’s a video on Pittsburghese, which is a distinct American dialect. The host of this video is fresh, energetic and cute, but her accent is not anywhere near as heavy as my cousins’. Still, if you ever wondered what it meant to “red up your house”, pay attention.
She forgot to say “keller” when she really means “color”. And is it “UM-brella” or “umBRELLa”?
Finally, “Physician, Heal Thyself”. Digby is absolutely right about dehumanization but it’s really odd that she and the rest of the left had no problem with it when the 2008 elections made old, uneducated, unattractive, working class, racist, latently Republican, menopausal women out of Hillary Clinton voters. I mean, when you think of them *that* way, no wonder the Obama hooligans piled on. Who wants to sit at that lunch table? Dehumanizing those voters made it a lot easier to ignore their votes and violate their delegates with harrassment and threats at the convention. They almost deserved it. Right, Digby? Right, Duncan? Right, Jay? If you don’t take your own side to task for acting like flaming assholes, then others might find your newfound concern with “dehumanization” a bit hypocritical. It was an election with far-reaching consequences not only to the economy but to voting in general. (Didn’t you guys ever figure out why Obama is ignoring his voting base now? The answer is that you let him get away with it in 2008 so he knows he can do it again.) You guys should have been a lot more vigilant.
(No, I am not going to get over it. If it were Howard Dean’s voters who got the Hillary treatment, you’d be all over this for decades to come. “Oh, but they’re different”, you’ll say. Exactly. I rest my case. “An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere”. Also, Karma is a bitch.)
The Confluence 