#Accessing a Margin Calculator

[stockexperttrading]

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[reasonsforhope]

"At HarperCollins, a lot of attention and thought is given to deciding exactly what combinations of margin measurements, font, and layout feel most appropriate for the genre, and writing style.

But in a case of do-your-part environmentalism, designers at the publishing house have now standardized a series of subtle and imperceptible alterations to normal font style, layouts, and ink that have so far removed the need for 245 million book pages, totaling 5,618 trees.

Telling the story in Fast Company, representatives from HarperCollins, one of the four largest publishing houses in the world, explained that the idea first arose in Zondervan Bibles, HarperCollins’ Christian publishing division. Being that the Bible is 2,500 pages or sometimes more, saving ink and pages was not just an environmental consideration, but one of production costs.

A new typeface called NIV Comfort Print allowed Zondervan to shave 350 pages off of every Bible, which by 2017 had amounted to 100 million pages, and which, as Fast Company points out, would be four times higher than the Empire State Building if stacked.

The production and design teams then wondered how much they could save if they applied the same concepts to other genres like romance and fiction. Aside from the invention of the eBook, publishing hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years, and the challenge was a totally novel one for the teams—to alter all their preconceived ideas and try and find a font and typeface that resulted in fewer pages without being harder to read.

They eventually standardized 14 different combinations their tests determined were the most environmentally friendly, and which delivered an unchanged reading experience.

But the challenge didn’t stop there. Printed books, one might not know, are printed in large sheets which are then folded into sections of sixteen pages, meaning that Leah Carlson-Stanisic, associate director of design at HarperCollins, has to calculate the savings of space, words, and ultimately pages with the help of her team to fall in multiples of sixteen.

Nevertheless, they have been successful with it so far, and in the recent print run of one popular book, 1 million pages (or a number near 1 million that coincides with the 16 times tables) were saved.

“We want to make sure our big titles, by prominent authors, are using these eco-fonts,” Carlson-Stanisic said. “It adds up a little bit at a time, saving more and more trees.”"

-via Good News Network, April 4, 2024

--

Note: Great! Waiting to see this on the rest of their books and at the other big publishers!

Actually, though, it's worth noting that this may not come quickly to the other large publishers, because Harper Collins almost certainly owns that font - meaning that other publishers would have to pay HarperCollins in order to use it, on an ongoing basis.

More on publishing shit and more realistic solutions here below the cut!

What I'm hoping for and think is more likely is that this will inspire the development of open source eco-friendly fonts, which would be free for anyone to use. That would make it far more likely other publishers would adopt eco-friendly fonts.

I'm also hoping it would inspire other publishers to create similar eco-friendly fonts of their own.

Ideally, there would be a whole new landscape of (hopefully mostly open source) eco-friendly fonts. And/or to see calculations of the eco-friendliness of popular existing fonts, compared to each other.

If we could have a publicly accessible list of calculations for different fonts, including fonts designed to maximize eco-friendliness, I really do think that it would affect which fonts publishers choose to use. Here's why:

Most people in publishing are on the left (notoriously, actually) and really do care about the environment

People in publishing are plenty aware of these issues re: paper and trees, I promise

Shorter books means smaller production costs - and possibly smaller shipping costs as well, over time! So it would save them money too.

Eco-friendly fonts could also be combined with other measures for greater effect, such as bamboo paper (already in use for a lot of projects where page color/quality is more flexible) and thinner paper (aka paper with a lower weight) that uses less trees.

Don't expect books to all move to just one or two different fonts, though. Publishers and typesetters and font designers will innovate to create more options instead, though it will take longer. This is because different books really do use different fonts for various different reasons - one new font to rule them all isn't really a solution here.

"Every book is in the same font" may sound like a "whatever" deal to a lot of people, but as someone who works in publishing - trust me, it would actually make your reading experience worse, even if you could never quite put your finger on why.

[goldxnfemme]

ID: Video that is a stitch made by @professorneil on tiktok.

The person in the video stitched says: "which is that it seems like quite a lot of people, particularly white liberals, will very often take on all these different queer and neurodivergent labels and feel as if they have to be oppressed by something because…”

And the person stitching said video continues by saying: “so, yes, this is absolutely a thing and not only is it a documented sociological phenomenon, but sociologists have come up with a name for it and it’s called the race to innocence and sometimes also the race to the margins, it’s the same thing. Now when Mary Louis Fellows and Sherene Razack coined this term back in 1998, they were thinking mostly about white feminists within the multiracial feminist movements, so bear that in mind as I read from their article, it is more broadly applicable, absolutely, yes, but that is their focus here.”

The person in the video proceeds by quoting from the article mentioned: “When a woman fails to pursue how she is implicated in other women’s lives and retreats to the position that the system that oppresses her the most is the only one worth fighting and that the other systems (systems in which she is positioned as dominant) are not of her concern, she will fail to undo her own subordination. Attempts to change one system while leaving the others intact leaves in place the structure of domination that is made up of interlocking hierarchies.”

The person in the video continues: “So, Fellows and Razack are implicating and critiquing here that the very second wave feminist, white feminist idea that all women share a common struggle, which it is only possible to suggest if you are ignoring the unique oppressions of queer women, women of color, women in poverty, etc. When faced with that challenge, the people who occupy a position of privilege, so in this example, the straight, middle and upper-class, white women will say “That’s not the issue that we’re talking about here, we’re talking here about being women, we’re talking about patriarchy, misogyny.” They will race to innocence; they will race to their own marginalized identity categories in order to avoid admitting that they have power and privilege and are also the oppressor. And, sometimes, that race to innocence is very calculated (in this part the screen in the video shows text that reads: *and defensive!), it is deliberate, it is strategic. I might be avoiding talking about my male privilege, my white privilege, when I am also discussing being a wave slave because I want to preserve those privileges, while attacking the oppression I feel, but it’s, at least, as often, if not more often, something that we are doing reflexively, uncritically. It is easier to claim solidarity, it is easier to feel empathy, if we are doing it from our own position of marginality, it’s easier to speak credibly from a position of oppression and to do so with authority, if you also possess privileges that allow you to appear unbiased, neutral and to do so safely, if afterward you can retreat to a place of privilege. So, it is certainly possible that, at least in part, this explosion of straight, white, cis men leftists claiming neurodivergence is explained by some sort of desire to claim oppression, to build those alliances, to feel that empathy and to access that credibility, but even if it is sincere, it is still dangerous. Of course, it could be strategic and insincere. When you race to innocence, race to the margins, be mindful of the privileges you’re leaving at the center.”

END ID

- Here is the article mentioned in the video, if you want to check it out (in PDF):

The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

I waffled a bit about making this but I don't have much else to be doing and it is only 10:30 in the morning and I already feel like I've been up for 22 hours so let's talk about Shu S3 versus Saria S3.

An important note I'm going to bring up here is that while Shu S3 is very good, it does technically lose out on heal coverage to Blemishine S3 under ideal circumstances. A Blemishine who is constantly attacking and taking pressure will cycle through her skill way faster than Shu ever will, even with her talent in play. It is a bit difficult to compare Blemishine's Offensive + Defensive recovery skills to an Automatic Recovery skill on principle though, and IMO the skills are meant to do different things. Blemishine's S3 is meant to turn her into an offensive threat while giving her the stats she needs to tank enemies. Shu is a healer and support unit. They aren't working on the same axis.

In looking at Shu's S3 compared to Saria's S3, I'm going to compare them directly. They are built in a lot of ways to do exactly the same things, with Shu being a much newer version of Saria's skill. I'll be comparing them on:

Range of their skills

SP Cost

Healing efficacy

Buffing capabilities

Support capabilities

Crowd Control

Range

If we compare the ranges of Shu's S3 to Saria's S3, Saria's range is bigger, having four more tiles of access than Shu. Shu does get the ability to cover a ton of tiles with her Sowing, however, so the range advantage is pretty marginal for Saria.

SP Costs

The biggest advantage for Shu is the SP costs of their skills. Saria's skill will be faster on deployment, taking only 10 seconds to charge compare to Shu's 15, but Shu's 45 SP cost on her S3 means it will be active a little less than twice as often as Saria's S3. This is huge for Shu, as one of Saria's problem is that she doesn't have great coverage with her S3, and so this skill often takes a back seat to S1 or S2 if you're using Saria for healing reasons.

Healing Efficacy

Shu blows Saria pretty much completely out of the water. She has a HPS of roughly 1,289 with her talent going at max power, and it's even higher if she's healing a target with under 50% HP. Saria's skill will usually only heal roughly 275 HP a second, bumping to 316 with her GUA-X module trait, and 286 HP a second with her GUA-Y module, and this is assuming she's been on the battlefield for the full 90 seconds she needs to reach that juicy passive +40% ATK buff. Shu's passive 85 HP/s regen and 17% Sanctuary really makes the comparison worse. Mitigation is damage you didn't need to heal after all.

Buffing Capabilities

Shu's advantage here is that she will buff operators no matter what damage type they are using: Physical, Arts, True, Elemental, they all benefit from Shu's buffs. Saria, however, provides better numbers for Arts damage, and this might initially seem like it shouldn't be true. For an Arts operator, Shu's buffs would give them an additional 56.25% DPS, which is better than Saria...by a very slight amount. But, this is assuming an operator has no ATK or ASPD buffs active at that time.

Let's take Haze for a minute as a clear example of this. Haze's normal DPS with her S2 active is 1,092.8 damage per second. Haze over the course of her skill deals about 25k damage, which is not too shabby for a 4-star! With Shu's buffs, her DPS will improve to 1,461.0, which is an impressive jump! However, it is only a 33.69% improvement on her damage, because the ATK and ASPD buffs get diluted by diminishing returns. Saria meanwhile always gives a 55% improvement on DPS, because her buff is a damage multiplier, which is applied after the other parts of the damage calculation.

So is Saria better for buffing Arts damage? The answer, genuinely, is that it depends. Saria will often give you the biggest numbers possible, but Shu has better cycle times with her buffs that Saria does. If you need your buffs to align better or you need them more often, Shu is definitely going to be the pick. If you need a big burst damage moment or your DPS points are far enough apart, Saria will be better.

Support Capabilities

Strictly speaking, neither S3 really supports outside of buffs, but the benefit from talents is important here. You need to compare Shu's Sowing with Saria's SP generation talent. Shu's tiles will give an 85 HP regen and 17% Sanctuary buff, while Saria will provide 1-2 SP every time she heals. This is another point where Saria really isn't strictly better or worse than Shu is. Shu's talent remains actively constantly, and provides an ok regen along with some damage mitigation. Saria's talent only applies if the target is healed (if they are at full SP, they do not gain SP) and can be tricky to set-up, but potentially triples the speed in which they will be able to access their skill. A common skill pairing is Saria and Shalem, which have great synergy with each other. Shalem's skill is Defensive Recovery, and burns most of his HP away. Shalem's HP is just high enough that he will recover most if not all of the SP he needs off of Saria's 10 heals, at which point he can activate his skill during the last 20 seconds and take full advantage of Saria's buff. Stages with DoT are great for Saria, who can pump an entire squad full of yummy SP.

Crowd Control Capabilites

Saria and Shu both have access to potent crowd control abilities, with Saria having access to a chunk movement speed reduction while Shu has access to her teleportation gimmick. Shu's teleportation is a bit difficult to understand from her description, but essentially, if an enemy steps onto a sowed tile while Shu has skill active, and then moves 2 tiles away from the original tile, they will be teleported directly back to where they started.

Two tiles seems like a lot, but remember that enemies typically enter a tile from its edge, and suddenly Shu's crowd control aspects become very powerful. If Shu has a sowed tile 2 tiles in front of the objective box, enemies will not be able to enter the objective box for the entire 30 seconds her skill is active. They'll just reach the edge of the box but not enter it before being teleported back. This makes Shu a much better crowd control option than Saria, although Saria is not bad by any means. This skill has a TON of unintended interactions with various boss and enemy gimmicks, on top of clustering enemies very tightly together and making them vulnerable to AoE and splash damage.

It's really good. I initially wrote this off as a funny gimmick ability but it's a great piece of crowd control and makes Shu a much more well rounded operator for having it.

Conclusion

It's often the case in gacha games, and typically in any long running game content, that after four and a half years, game pieces released by this point thoroughly outclass game pieces released at launch. Is Shu better than Saria? Yes, for the most part. But it is worth saying that Shu does not necessarily completely replace Saria. Saria has good niches to fit in as a support operator in her very powerful Arts damage buff and SP charging capabilities, but even more than that there is an entire conversation to be had about Saria's better ability to tank physical damage. Saria can have almost 1000 DEF with her talent at full power and has a 15% damage reduction on top of that.

In addition, Saria is definitely better at using her S1 than Shu is, thanks to her higher ATK and SP charging capabilities. It's not a huge niche but Saria's S1 packs a pretty potent punch that Shu's doesn't.

Shu's S3 is definitely mostly better, but Saria has moments where she shines and Shu does not.

[howtofightwrite]

This might not be in your line, but I was thinking about teleportation magic, and the fact that the earth is moving extremely quickly through the universe, while also rotating at an intense speed. Assuming a teleportation spell has to be cast from a fixed point to a fixed point, what school of math would be required to determine the second point?

Physics. Usually writers think of teleportation as a fixed relationship to a point of reference on the other end.

The earth rotates at about 1.6k km/h. So, that's “relatively,” easy to calculate. The earth orbits the sun at slightly under 30 km/s. The sun (along with the rest of the solar system) is moving at about 720,000 km/h. Oh, and the galaxy itself is moving at about 2.1m km/h.

So, all you need to do is take the trajectory of the galaxy, adjust for the movement of the solar system, then account for the orbital speed of the planet, and finally remember to account for the rotation of the earth. Once you've done all that you're ready to accidentally teleport yourself into hard vacuum because of a rounding error, or because you forgot to account for how velocity results in temporal lensing, and your perception of time is very marginally distorted, which wouldn't be a problem until you're dealing with speeds in excess of two million km/h. (For reference, the closer you get to the speed of light, slightly under 300m km/s, the slower time moves, or the perception of time, anyway. Normally, we're all on the same planet and moving at roughly the same speed, so the distortion is uniform, but when you're talking about calculating exact, non-relative points in space, the movement of the galaxy, and solar system, will throw your numbers off. Not by a large number, but enough to drop you outside of a breathable atmosphere.)

So, yeah, the short answer would be physics, but you'd be plotting a lot of vectors to work it out.

It's easier to work with teleportation when you can start taking some of those values off the table. Either by fixing your teleportation points with a fixed relation to one another (which would still have issues when trying to jump between planets, but should be fine if you're staying on earth), or based on fixed relations to a specific point. Untethered teleportation is a lot of math.

-Starke

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[zyrafowe-sny]

August 21st WIP Wednesday Game Community Answered Asks: Fluff 7 — Hoodie Weather (15/15)

I got the Big Bang lines done, and here are some Hoodie Weather lines:

@kallisto-k Thanks so much!

He shrugged. “I’d give it at least another month.”

This was apparently enough to rouse Nimona-the-lizard, who'd been sunning on the windowsill.

@violet-prism-creatively Thank you! <3

“Seven weeks and” — she flicked out her tongue — “three days.” 

“Wanna bet?” Ambrosius grinned in her direction.

@whimsicalmeerkat here you go!

An arc of pink sparkles shimmered through the air, and Nimona-the-shark appeared before him, fin ready for a handshake.

“Sure thing, Nemesis.”

***

It was seven weeks and two days, actually, but Nimona still won the betting pool by a good margin. (Meredith was next-closest at six weeks and four days.) 

@aparticularbandit Many thanks!

Much depended on the precise definition of hoodie weather, of course. Weather sufficiently cool for Ambrosius to wear a hoodie for a day was deemed insufficient — he spluttered at the implication that he would cheat, but was easily overruled. 

Meredith proposed — soundly, in Ballister's opinion — a wider sample of Kingdom residents with a minimum threshold of 40%. As her personal tastes ran more towards sweaters, she also recommended counting any form of outerwear. 

@somefishycat Thanks so much!

Administering this visual survey could have been another potential headache, but Ballister and Ambrosius conveniently still had connections that could give them access to the (former) Institute’s security camera system. It wasn't typically used to calculate rates of jacket, sweater, and hoodie-wearing, but it could be. Nimona wasn't terribly happy about the existence of the cameras in the first place and was of the opinion that using them for any reason would be supporting the police state — and Ballister did admit that she had a point — but he noted that public surveillance was significantly toned down from what it had been and that he could make certain other “adjustments” to analytics while he was at it.  

[2-dsimp]

Yandere! Student council member! kokomi

Admire profile

🫧 Kokomi is the brains of the student council, always planning out strategies to better improve the quality of the school for the students benefit.

🫧Meaning that she’s in charge of handling the internal afffairs of students and teachers alike. Her main job to mediate conflict between the clubs and stabilize the peace amongst the student public.

🫧 Has the authority to target students and either reward or punish them depending on their behavior. Which can range from granting them an honorary position in the student council to giving them a temporary 1-3 day expulsion from the school.

🫧 Since Kokomi’s very popular amongst the student body she has unlimited access to reliable networking. With just a few phone calls with her people outside of school she’ll be able to use anything to her disposal to make things go smoothly.

🫧 She’s a bit of a control freak despite finding the generous amount responsibility handed to her to be burdensome. So if she feels as if she’s not in control then over time she will start to become more unhinged with trying to balance the scales.

🫧Restless nights of meticulous planning for academic events to promote the school from orchestrating festivals to field trips to calculating budgets will cause her to be exhausted. But on the outside you’ll never know as she’ll just put on a smile, masking what she’s truly feeling inside.

🫧 Which is why She finds you very endearing with how you try so hard to see through what she’s hiding from the others. As She’s the type to always wear a mask in order to hide the turbulence of emotions and secrets she keeps buried deep inside.

🫧 Kokomi is someone who can easily get burnt out from preventing the multiple obstructions derailing the school from perfection and during those times she’d like to recharge by doing fun relaxing activities with her darling.

🫧 She loves having tea with you and finds it so therapeutic serving her special tea recipe she created just for your indulgence, and savoring how adorable you look when you swoon over the peculiar taste in a trance.

🫧 Often times she’d ask for you to help run her daily errands around the city after school leading you by the hand to places where it’s less populated and congested.

🫧 When she’s on her day off she’ll gain the confidence to ask you to have an outing with her on the beach just to casually stroll alongside the coast at night where everything is tranquil and quiet with only her and you in a world of your own.

🫧Other times if you’d ever need to find her just search any nearby libraries as she’s a bookworm in her own right who just loves to have knowledge readily at her fingertips.

🫧She has eyes and ears everywhere around the school, if you ever cross her then you’d be playing a game of chess where you’d always lose with a tiny margin of error.

🫧 She’d be able to foresee your every move and plan your downfall in a hundred different ways. Unless you have established a relationship with info-kun who’s one of the many few that can match her in a battle of wits.

[poppyandzena]

Zena:" The stalkers who claim to be experts on Poppy's story don't even know shit about sexual health. This is just clowning around. I just can't these people seriously. I told Poppy to get testing to protect herself because after someone violates you, they're is zero reason to trust their history."

1.) Literally no one has claimed expertise on Poppy. This is yet another false claim. See, people paid attention to Poppy's behavior and Poppy's words. People are just observing Poppy's publicly abusive meltdown. People are simply tracking a smear campaign. Poppy provides that data. A LOT of data. Poppy continues to incessantly and obsessively make false claims of sexual assault, as if hundreds of people didn't witness Poppy serve us with a linear timeline of rejection. People aren't experts on anyone, that's silly. Poppy put out a fuck ton of information publicly. It's getting difficult for people to silence their own critical thinking. Luckily, there is public access to entire archives documenting Poppy's willfully malicious campaign to destroy another Trans woman. Because of rejection. It's revenge. Thanks to Poppy's unhinged antics across Tumblr and Twitter, people can analyze the data for themselves on their own time. And there-in lies the rub for this sneaky tyrannical goblin -- your arguments are getting more nonsensical. Zena is throwing up diversions. It's getting a bit pitiful.

Zena: "I guess I'm going to be posting sexual health articles to educate these fucks now. Just how much these people know about sex is both astounding and telling. This is a self report on their part."

Zena: "These are just more signs that Poppy's story is actually true AND that she has love and support to help her after this awful shit.

2.) The only link between public discussions on sexual health and Zena's false expertise claims is Poppy's word-vomit. The UTI was splattered all over her TL after having consensual sex & getting rejected. That's it. Zena, this disjointed, bizarre gotchya connection you made with sexual health is not a sign that Poppy's story is true. This deeply goofy statement is almost as bad as me saying, "Oh wow my cat actually has asthma, not a hairball." Then going on to say, "This is a sign why I know my neighbor married a raccoon." Y'all have lost the plot and if all this wasn't so potentially harmful to folks in an already marginalized community, this shit would be funny.

On to the next point the goblin tyrant attempts to slip in subtlety. Folks may have left out the BACTERIAL VAGINOSIS part during sexual health discussions. Hell, some folks might not even know what BV is. NOT knowing what BV is or forgetting to mention BV aren't indicators of a total lack of knowledge on sexual health. Leaving out BV doesn't mean folks need to be educated by this tyrannical goblin Zena. What she's trying to do is divert attention away from Poppy's very transparent attempts to further humiliate Noeh. Everything Poppy puts on her TL centers on smearing Noeh. She literally HAS NOT stopped tweeting @ Noeh since she publicly disclosed her tweets made Noeh uncomfortable when they were partners. It is deeply unsettling that Poppy continues to try to talk to Noeh behind the scenes while routinely @ing Noeh from the YT account. This is all calculated and this community is not dumb. They're catching on. Trust that there are doubts that even her most fervent defenders are experiencing -- OF COURSE they have doubts, but what would happen if they just got brutally honest and disclosed that Poppy is indeed out of control. Poppy has gone against SO many things she advocates in her streams. Rapejacketing and targeting a trans woman is pretty disgusting. Attempting to cut of a homeless trans man's only source of revenue in the middle of winter in MICHIGAN. Shitting all over asexuals because Noeh slipped up and made a controversial statement.

BPD will NEVER be an excuse for abuse. An abuser is actively being coddled to the point where her supporters are enabling more abuse. I think it's pretty clear this therapist has not gotten treatment like DBT for her BPD. This person is a public figure. She is lending more stigma to this diagnosis. There are so many folks with BPD in my life who put in the work and are determined to be well. It is unbelievable what they face and I have so much respect for these survivors. I also feel incredibly protective over them. That impact of these far extending stigmas ACTIVELY cause HARM to people with BPD.

Listen, it's very obvious how Poppy is shitting on survivors of rape and havers of BPD. She's not an imperfect victim. She's a spiteful, vengeful, scorned woman. Zena is also shitting on folks with BPD by enabling Poppy's behavior Her supporters are enabling Poppy's behavior. You are lending to stigma and shitting on other BPD survivors. Coddling this woman while she loudly and publicly continues on with her harmful actions is not a loving act. Enabling is not an act of love. If you truly supported her, you would not lend momentum to her smear campaigns. You'd see that, at this point, Poppy is actually a liability. She is causing REAL harm to your community. Adding insult to injury, she really is out here publicly shitting on y'all, underestimating y'alls knowledge base and ability to recognize lies, abuse, danger, and malice. Some of y'all are leaning into that and at some point, you'll have to come to terms with your choices.

Anyway...

I just want to acknowledge the work and time y'all archivists have put into this. I really do appreciate being able to have access to the information I've needed to form my own opinions. Okay. That is all.

Have a beautiful night, beautiful people.

"Whoops lotsa typos there" 🥴💩

^

[elancholia]

@oligopsoriasis I don't know if you're still interested in the farming thing, but, regarding your land efficiency vs. energy-efficiency thing:

My impression is that, when designing an agricultural system, the basic trade-off is labor against land area, i.e. you can reduce labor inputs by using more land and reduce your land footprint by sinking more labor into it.

In this framing, I think industrial row-crop monocultures are extensive rather than intensive, i.e. they sacrifice land to save labor as well as/rather than energy to save land. Sustainability and higher absolute production might well not mean using more land.

A lot of the articles and papers that talk about modern sustainable systems trumpet them as Actually Much More Efficient than “industrial” agriculture, when, really, they’re just opting for the other end of the ancient trade-off -- they lead with productivity statistics calculated entirely on land use, and quietly note somewhere down below that “of course, this takes vastly more work, and is devilishly complicated to maintain...”

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t a better bet! The point is, there are trade-offs to be made other than technology-i.e.-what-we-have-now/primitivism. It means we’d need more greenhouse-minders and algae-scrapers, yes, maybe even more people growing beans in raised beds, but that’s Jobs, not a return to peasant agriculture.

(I’m not really considering the original thing about hunting, meat just doesn’t seem likely to ever be efficient, except on marginal lands, where it couldn’t support modern population densities, alligators or no.)

[some rambling speculation about historical intensive systems:]

Anyway, historically, intensive, labor-heavy, small-land-footprint systems make sense if you have a lot of labor and not a lot of land, and include the various clever Native American polyculture systems (the chinampa, the three sisters), but also potato-farming (Ireland, before the famine, being prototypically labor-rich and area-poor: a densely-populated, highly fertile area in which people had to subsist on glorified garden-plots), modern Dutch-style greenhouse fruit/veg/cash-crop cultivation, maybe what the Cubans do. Wet rice cultivation and terrace-farms are possibly in this category. “Vertical farming”, if it’s not a nothingburger, probably will be too (multistory buildings are capital, capital is dead labor, lotta walking up stairs, etc.).

(Classic Geertzian involution is when you can’t get any more intensive, so you have to sink more people, more bodies, more hours into it, without hope of improving productivity per head.)

My conjecture is that intensive systems make more sense when you don’t have draft animals to give you access to a larger area and incentivize more drivable open layouts and planting/harvesting techniques.

[pretensesoup]

How to Publish a Book, pt 2

Q: I'd like to do a print book too, not just an ebook. A: Do you realize that if you do a print book, your mom is going to read it? And the book has sex in there? Like, explicit gay sex? Like it says the word "cock" right there on the page.

Q: Yeah, she's like 77, she knows that sex exists. I've made my peace with this. A: All right, here we go. Publish on Demand books in some number of easy-ish steps.

There are a bunch of options for POD publishing now. IngramSpark, KDP, Draft2Digital, Lulu, etc. Other websites like Barnes & Noble will let you set up paperback publishing but outsource the actual printing to IngramSpark (IS). I think a bunch of these services do. IS is also slightly better if you want to have bookstores sell your book, have it in libraries, etc., because most bookstores won't order from Amazon, for obvious reasons. For Dionysus in Wisconsin, I've done both IS and Amazon, letting IS distribute to anywhere that isn't the Zon.

OH, IS allows preorders for paperbacks while the Zon doesn't.

First, you're going to need to write and edit the book. We went over this in pt. 1. Please refer there if you have any questions on this step. Okay, here is the exhaustive list of what to do once you're ready.

1. Decide what size the physical book should be. Look around your house at books in your genre and select the size that is most pleasing to you. This is called the trim size.

2. If you uploaded your text into a typesetting program like Atticus, tell it your trim size, preferred typeface size, line spacing, and margins and have it spit out a pdf. Otherwise, set Word up with those specifications. KDP has a helpful site where you can calculate the correct inner margins for your number of pages, while I think somehow IS just requires a .5" or .625" margin for all sizes (this doesn't make sense; I assume you just have to fix it after seeing a proof?). The book's gonna be exactly the same, so just do the same thing in both places.

Okay, one thing I couldn't find any guidance on is what size to make the typeface and line spacing. I wound up going with 11 pt typeface and 1.4 spacing. I figured this out by printing out the first page of my book, cutting it out at the correct size (5"x8") and comparing it to pages in similar books until I found one that looked readable and pretty. Anything from 10-12 is probably fine, also 1.1-1.4 spacing, but keep in mind that small/densely spaced typefaces will make your text look more intimidating. Someone on Mastodon said 1.5 spacing looks like a student paper, which I also agree with.

There are loads of websites that detail what typefaces to use for what types of books. "Look at your genre and try to match" is reasonable advice here too.

3. You need not just a cover, but a spine and a back cover. Books are three dimensional objects!

If you hire an artist, they should just be able to provide a wrap-around cover that is appropriate dimensions (again, KDP and IS both have templates), but if you're doing it yourself, I suggest laying out the entire cover on one large sheet of paper/canvas and doing your art like that rather than trying to photoshop together various pieces, unless you are really, really good at color leveling etc. You're gonna want to make sure that you have at least 300 dpi. Make sure you use open access typefaces or that you have rights to use them, ditto for any images you collage into stuff.

GIMP is a great free photoshop alternative. ImageMagick is a free image manipulation program that is incredibly powerful. I had to use ImageMagick to flip my cover file into CMYK and create a PDF. The command you want is this:

magick "inputfile.png" -colorspace sRGB -colorspace CMYK "outputfile.pdf"

4. Submitting your file for stuff: copyright here, LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number) here. Neither of these is obligatory, but both are cool in their own way. LCCN is a way for Library of Congress to pre-catalog your data (creating a stub record in OCLC) so that if a library acquires your book, it's easier for them to get it on the shelf. You need to submit your request for this PRIOR TO THE MONTH OF PUBLICATION. However, you don't need a final manuscript to submit, just a summary of the book. Also, note that you can only retroactively submit your MS for copyright registration for THREE MONTHS after publication, so decide now if you want it. And yes, everything you write in the US is automatically copyrighted, but having a certificate to prove it is nice in a court battle. Also also, you WILL want a finished copy of the text to submit when you make this request, or else you will have to submit two printed copies. By MAIL. So you have to GO OUT OF YOUR HOUSE TO THE POST OFFICE. UGH. (Technically, you are requested to send in a print copy for the LCCN program too. I don't think that's obligatory, but am I gonna pass up a chance to have my book fully cataloged by LOC? Fuck no.)

5. OKAY, assuming you got everything done, now you need an ISBN.

Do you really? Kind of. If you're only publishing on KDP, they'll give you a free one. But you can't reuse it if you try to also publish on IS. The reverse is also true. Technically, the entity that assigns the ISBN is the publisher, so this makes Amazon/IS the publisher of your book. Also, it makes editions slightly weird (technically, it's supposed to be one ISBN per edition). ANYWAY, in the US you buy ISBNs through Bowkers. Don't let them sell you barcodes or any of that garbage. Just buy your ISBN(s).

Sometimes, people report putting in information in KDP and then having the ISBN rejected as "in use" when inputting it into IS, so do this next part all at once. First, assign your ISBN to your book in the Bowkers database. Then assign it to your book at IS and save as draft. Then assign it to your book at KDP and save as draft.

One other note. If you have set up a business to be your press name (mine is Winnowing Fan Press, because the main character's name is Ulysses and I am a GIANT NERD), that will be set up as your publishing house in Bowkers. You won't have an imprint unless you specify one. (An imprint is like a special line of books, so Harlequin has a "digital-first" imprint called Carina Press that specializes in LGBT+ romance, because why would you publish LGBT+ romance in paperback first, ugh.) BUT Amazon will ask what the imprint is for your ISBN and it will be THE NAME OF THE PUBLISHING HOUSE. Why is Amazon using the term differently from everyone else? I DON'T KNOW. JUST GO WITH IT.

6. Upload all your files. Look at the previewers/e-proofs to make sure everything looks okay. Panic and reupload them five times with minute changes.

7. Set a price.

For real at this point I hope you're done making changes, because you suddenly have at least three versions across two different sites to update if you suddenly decide to add a credit for your author photo or something. (cough)

How to set a price the easy way: look at other similar books in your genre (your comps) and just set your book to that price (hopefully you aren't losing money that way).

8. You can order a physical proof at this stage. But if you want author copies, you're going to have to publish your book, meaning it becomes publicly available. I think that if you get through the KDP screens and hit "publish book," it goes live. So...save it as a draft; don't hit the go button until you're ready. IS meanwhile lets you make it available for preorder.

Deadlines: Try to get everything done and uploaded by five days before your planned publication date.

@tryxyhijinks I think that's everything. Wow, I'm tired now.

[pcttrailsidereader]

The Ever-Changing Length of the PCT

The most recent edition of the PCT's "Trail Dirt" tackled the mystery of the PCT length . . . it has been a topic that has been a curiosity also explored on this website -- https://pcttrailsidereader.com/post/618834872879939586/it-looks-authoritative-and-permanent-but-the The midpoint looks so official but as this article explains, the length of the trail is constantly changing . . . hence moving the midpoint. However, the marker stays put.

Easy, 2,650 Miles, right? Well… not quite.

By Galen Keily

The question of the PCT’s length comes up often, with guidebooks, phone apps, and other sources across the internet offering varying figures. In recent years, PCTA has come a long way in better tracking and calculating distance. While we regularly reference the rounded figure of 2,650 miles as shorthand for the trail’s length, our current best estimate places it at approximately 2655.8 miles. It’s complicated because the length actually varies year by year, and homing in on highly accurate mileage for a trail that spans thousands of miles can pose significant challenges. We know that trail mileage matters a lot to PCT trail users. Read on to discover some of the complexities involved in determining the true length of the PCT.

Northern Terminus, Photo by: Ryan Weidert

It Moves!

Sometimes, the trail gains a mile or two, or sometimes, the trail shaves off miles (you’re welcome thru-hikers!) You might be thinking… how does this happen, isn’t the trail already on the ground? While true, PCTA, alongside managing agencies and dedicated trail crews, continually refines and optimizes the trail’s route. These efforts range from minor adjustments to larger-scale relocation projects aimed at enhancing the overall trail experience. For instance, routine maintenance often involves realigning sections of the trail to improve sustainability, such as adding switchbacks or adjusting trail tread within the existing corridor. These alterations might end up making the trail a bit longer or shorter, typically on the order of hundreds of feet. Pretty small potatoes when looking at a trail that crosses thousands of miles. Other times, the PCT undergoes bigger relocation projects based on a process called Optimal Location Reviews (OLR). These relocations can be significant and can take years to complete. These projects aim to relocate the PCT to a location better suited to providing a natural setting, scenic beauty, and safe public access, among other things. As a result of these projects, the trail’s length may fluctuate by several miles. But they also end up making the trail safer and more enjoyable for all.

The Sierra Buttes Relocation – Old decommissioned PCT shown in dashed black line, current PCT in maroon.

What’s so hard about miles?

Calculating distance across such a large geographic extent is challenging. Even minor inaccuracies that are repeated hundreds of thousands of times compound errors, resulting in significant discrepancies in overall mileage. For example, if each point in our PCT dataset were off by 1ft, the margin of error would be over 200 miles. Additionally, the translation from a three-dimensional Earth to a two-dimensional map necessitates “projecting” data in GIS (Graphical Informational System) software, which can introduce different types of accuracy loss. However, advancements in technology offer us promising avenues for improvement, such as using LiDAR (laser scans of the earth) to more precisely capture and map changes to the trail.

A little bit about the data

PCTA’s current iteration of PCT mapping data is built upon data that was donated to the organization from the Halfmile Project. You may have heard of Halfmile, he and his team are kind of a big deal. The resulting data from this project’s multi-year effort was the best, most accurate data for the PCT of its time. Volunteers in the project mapped thousands of miles of trail with survey-grade custom and commercial GPS units and spent tremendous amounts of time analyzing, processing, and curating the results.

Halfmile, using his iPhone to control the Long Distance Geo Logger. The blue GPS unit is in the lower black side pocket of his pack. You can see coiled cable right above it.

Building on this legacy, PCTA now builds upon that same highly accurate data from Halfmile, revised to account for re-routes and trail reconstruction that have happened since PCTA assumed control of the data. We maintain our PCT Centerline (the line data for the trail’s location) and Mile Markers (points every tenth or half mile), with new versions released on an annual basis, usually in January. The data is displayed on our Interactive Map and made available on our PCT Data webpage, freely available for download in a variety of formats. By fostering an environment of transparency and accessibility, we empower trail users, app developers, and agency partners alike to utilize this standardized dataset, facilitating seamless communication and navigation along the trail.

Graceland takes an emotional moment at the Northern Terminus after an adventure of a lifetime. Photo by: James Townsend

Conclusions

As we continue to monitor changes, refine our modeling of the PCT, and offer it to users in new ways, we realize that our data remains imperfect. Digitally representing the complexities of the natural world always is. Despite this, the Association’s renewed prioritization of data management, built upon the invaluable foundation set by the Halfmile project, marks significant progress in this work. We recognize that our path toward data accuracy is ongoing and that we’re by no means at the finish line (approx. 2,655.8 ), but we’re always improving, collaborating, and working to celebrate the intricacies of the PCT in this unique aspect of our work.

Author: Galen Keily

[mariacallous]

This was a big week in American politics. It began with a devastating poll showing that Donald Trump was beating Joe Biden in a presidential match up in five out of six swing states. Then, on Tuesday, the voters spoke for the last time until the Iowa caucuses happen in mid-January and delivered the Democrats a very good night in multiple states that underscored the continuing power of the abortion issue. And on November 8, the five remaining challengers to former President Donald Trump met in their final debate of the year, an event that revealed the continuing struggle of Republicans opposed to renominating Trump to coalesce around an alternative to him.

What have we learned from these events?

1. Biden’s unpopularity does not mean that voters won’t vote for Democrats.

Our political system is obsessively focused on the President of the United States — his prospects, preferences, personnel, and health. During election years, there is considerable attention to his poll numbers and overall political standing. But as the special elections in 2021, the midterm elections in 2022, and now the off-year elections of 2023 have shown, President Biden’s unpopularity has failed to have the devastating effects on Democratic candidates that were widely predicted by pundits. For example, in September, analysts at FiveThirtyEight looked at 30 special elections that took place before the 2023 November elections, mostly state legislative seats. They calculated the seat’s base partisanship — their historical tendency towards one party or another — and then looked at the vote margin for Democrats running in those seats. On average, Democratic candidates in these races did about 11 points better than their historical average.

On election night 2023, Democrats won control of the Virginia legislature following a campaign in which the incumbent Governor Glenn Youngkin spent a lot of money and pulled out all the stops in an attempt to get a legislature which could help him enact a conservative agenda and catapult him into the presidential race. Instead, the opposite happened, and Democrats retained control of the Senate and gained control of the House of Delegates. We looked at the most competitive races (according to ABC News) in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates to see what kind of a swing there was.

Because of redistricting, we can’t compare the 2023 vote precisely to the 2019 vote. But thanks to the Virginia Public Access project, we can compare how Senate and House candidates performed against the vote in their district for governor in 2021. In these 13 close Senate and House districts, the Republican Governor Youngkin won all but one in 2021, but in 2023, Republicans won seven (one remains too close to call), and Democrats won five. Democrats managed to flip a few seats — enough to retain control of the Senate and take control of the House of Delegates.

In the seven districts where Republicans won, their margin shrank compared to Youngkin’s vote in 2021. For instance, in Senate District 27, Republican Tara Durant performed 6.31 percentage points worse than Youngkin did in 2021, winning by only 2.19% of the vote compared to Youngkin’s margin of 8.5%.

A presidential star may have dimmed in Virginia, but one was born in Kentucky, where Democratic Governor Andy Beshear won re-election in a very Republican state, increasing his share of the vote from 49.2% in 2019 to 52.5% and winning several counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2020. But Beshear will remain a lonely man. Every other statewide race in Kentucky went to Republicans. The votes for Attorney General and Agriculture Commissioner were virtually unchanged from four years before. The Republican Secretary of State saw a substantial increase in his vote but the Republican candidate for state treasurer saw a small decrease in his vote. In Mississippi, the statewide races from governor on down saw Republicans winning by almost the exact margins they won in 2019. So don’t put either state in the Democratic column for 2024.

So, why the big difference between polls showing Biden in trouble and elections where Democrats do well? The easiest answer is that there is, perhaps, no relationship between the two; down-ballot Democrats might continue to do well in off-year and midterm elections, and Biden could lose nevertheless. A second possibility is that the polls are just wrong on a systematic basis due to single-digit response rates and their difficulty in measuring voter turnout. A third possibility is that the cost of living is a very powerful motivator and that voters blame the president but not other office holders for this problem. A fourth possibility is that voters just don’t like Biden because of personal characteristics such as his age and the perception that he is not a strong leader.

One thing is clear: The Biden campaign would be ill-advised to over-interpret the significance of these recent Democratic victories for the president’s prospects in 2024.

2. Where the right to choose is in question, the abortion issue is very powerful and helps the Democrats.

In those places where Democrats did well, the explanation was pretty simple: As in previous elections, if voters perceive that a woman’s right to abortion is on the ballot in some fashion, pro-choice candidates do well. In Kentucky, where a six-week ban on abortion and a trigger law was upheld by the State’s Supreme Court, access to abortion is difficult, despite the defeat of a constitutional amendment denying any protections for abortion by a large margin in November 2022.

The abortion issue remains top of mind in Kentucky, and Beshear’s campaign for governor focused heavily on it, hammering his Republican opponent for his opposition to exceptions to an outright ban on the procedure.

In Virginia, abortion is currently legal up until the end of the second trimester. But Gov. Youngkin pushed for an abortion ban after 15 weeks that included exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Democrats ran on this issue in almost all the competitive districts, and voters apparently rejected Youngkin’s proposal, which he termed a sensible compromise around which Republicans and the country could coalesce.

Those who persist in believing that the abortion issue doesn’t have continuing strength should look at another, even more powerful lesson from Tuesday night. The abortion referendum on the Ohio ballot, amending the state’s constitution to establish a right to “carry out one’s own reproductive decisions… including on abortion,” would preserve the right to abortion up to 23 weeks. The Ohio referendum won with 56.6% of the vote, garnering support from one in five Republicans and carrying 18 counties that Trump had won in 2020.

The Ohio referendum was the latest victory of the pro-choice movement in solidly conservative states. In Kansas, the pro-choice referendum garnered 59% of the vote; in Montana and Kentucky, 53%. In Michigan, a swing state, the pro-choice position got 56% of the vote, and in the liberal states of Vermont and California, it got 73% and 68% of the vote.

3. The Republican debate revealed both Republican divisions on abortion and the impact of President Biden’s weak standing in national polls on the Republican race.

Chris Christie argued that abortion should be left to the states while Tim Scott advocated a national ban on the procedure after 15 weeks, a stance that is likely to be more popular in the Republican primary contests than in the general election. Nikki Haley argued that such a ban has no chance of gaining enough support in the Senate and renewed her plea for a consensus-based approach to the issue, a stance that would play better in the general election than among socially conservative Iowa Republicans. For his part, Ron DeSantis ducked, contenting himself with criticizing the weakness of Republican efforts in state referendum contests.

Meanwhile, the man who wasn’t on the stage — former president Trump — has made it clear that he regards abortion as a political loser for Republicans and will do his best to deemphasize it as a national issue in 2024. If he is the Republican nominee, Democrats are unlikely to let him off the hook and will remind voters of his central role in selecting three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

No matter whom the Republicans select as their standard-bearer, the issue will remain important in the national debate, although probably not as central as it has been in the states since the Court ended the Roe era. The presidency is a distinctive office whose occupants are held responsible for the economy and national security, not just their stance on social issues. Reflecting this reality, the moderators of the debate led with the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, waiting to raise abortion until close to the end of the event. No doubt President Biden’s campaign will try to capitalize on the pro-Democratic tilt of this issue, but he will be judged by his performance in other areas as well. Abortion will be helpful to him in 2024, but it is not the silver bullet that will help him defeat his Republican opponent.

As the debate moderators indicated with their opening question, there is a central question that each of the candidates on stage needed to answer: Why would I be a better nominee than the man who isn’t here tonight? President Biden’s current weak standing in the polls is limiting their responses. Back in the spring, they hoped to be able to argue that while Donald Trump was a fine president, he was likely to lose to Biden in 2024 as he did in 2020. But now, with recent polls indicating that Trump leads Biden nationally and in key swing states, his Republican challengers are forced to offer more substantive answers that risk antagonizing Trump’s supporters.

Nikki Haley went the farthest down this road, criticizing him for allowing the national debt to rise by $8 billion during his presidency and for being “weak in the knees” on Ukraine and other foreign policy issues. Ron DeSantis said that Trump is “a lot different guy than he was in 2016” and held him responsible for a string of Republican losses since then. Chris Christie focused on Trump’s legal difficulties, arguing that “anybody who’s going to be spending the next year and a half of their life focusing on keeping themselves out of jail . . . cannot lead this party or this country.” It remains to be seen whether any of these arguments will gain traction with a Republican electorate that seems inclined to give Trump a pass on all of them.

Indeed, the big winner of last night’s debate may well have been the man who boycotted it. DeSantis performed better than he had in the two previous debates, and Haley — though strong — was less dominant. If DeSantis’s improved showing slows her effort to emerge in Iowa as the principal alternative to Trump, she may not gain the momentum she would need to defeat Trump in New Hampshire, an outcome that would destroy his aura of invincibility and transform the contest for the Republican presidential nomination. The political landscape has been frozen in time for some months now, with an incumbent president and a former president at the top and everyone else vying for attention.

As international events unfold, the question is: Will anyone or anything change this equation, or will we be looking at the widely anticipated rematch?

[nolanhattrick]

im going to say this as gently as i can but it probably won't be very because i don't have the energy to elaborate as fully as i need to and this cannot continue to take up space in my head. this is coming from the perspective of someone living in the US partaking in the US (mental) healthcare system

the internet's fascination with (incorrect) self diagnosis (re: if you move your hips to the side when walking around a desk you're autistic!) paired with an aging traumatized population and skewed resource distribution has done a lot more damage to the greater mental health scene in the last four years than i think any of us want to admit

if you have been diagnosed with something between now and march 13, 2020 - ESPECIALLY if it was before march of 2022 - you need to get reevaluated from scratch in person (if you are able to) by someone that will develop an actual relationship with you. not by a telehealth ghost psychiatric service and joint pharmacy that will throw adderall or zoloft at you for $15 a month (!!!)

trauma acts like 90% of the mental health issues 15-35 year olds are posting about. PTSD presents with nearly every symptom known to man. treating it improperly will kill you. i'm really really tired of listening to people on tiktok give mental health advice that's being parroted by actual LCSWs and LMHCs/CCMHCs and PMNHPs when it's just... flat out incorrect at best and actually life threatening and dangerous at worst.

is there a very real issue with supply and demand of controlled substances in this country? yes. is there a very real issue with accessibility of therapeutic and diagnostic appointment setting for disabled clients? yes. the answer to both of these is not creating ghost pharmacies and practices that do not follow up with patients and commonly commit patient abandonment. it is much more involved than that and it cannot be solved through services like hims and hers and donefirst and helloklarity and fucking onlinepsychiatrists dot com are you serious

i understand that the mental health space in this country is difficult and dangerous and hostile to navigate. especially in a small town it is inhospitable for marginalized people. you are preaching to the choir when you're saying that to someone like me. but i'm just very frustrated when people immediately turn to "just get your drugs online, obviously your problem is X"

there is no obviously in mental health. there is NEVER an obviously in mental health. i hallucinate. i hear voices. i see things. i have manic and psychotic episodes. i experience intense waves of suicidal ideation and depression. i dissociate, often. i have impulse spending issues. i have problems with obsessive thoughts and compulsive movements. i have severe offset sleep issues. i have anger issues. i have attention issues. i have some pretty insane intrusive thoughts. do you want to know my current diagnosis?

ptsd (and technically adult gender dysphoria, but.)

i have had a laundry list of others come and go. bipolar 2, MDD, GAD, schizoaffective disorder, insomnia, BPD, OCD, ADHD, autism, intermittent psychosis - just to name a few.

four psychiatrists and 12 years to get to the root of the problem. 60+ years of experience could not give me a straight answer. i really don't want to be that asshole but i don't think some googling and perusing social media and one (1) visit with someone that's not intimately aware of you and your history is going to make safe and calculated decisions wrt your health.

establishing a relationship with one person (after doing some shopping!! look around!! get a sense of the vibes!!) is so so so necessary.

as always - this does not apply to the people it... does not apply to. if you cannot afford appointments, don't have insurance, etc. this is primarily targeting the people that have simply decided that using these services is more convenient than calling someone - even though it is available to, and within reach for, them.

we cannot improve a fundamentally broken system by continuing to break it. it frustrates me that that's what we're doing. making and buying teslas won't save the planet, seeing a therapist from betterhelp will not fix your childhood trauma.

[thoughtlessarse]

Governments across Europe – including Ireland – are being charged up to 20 times what it costs to produce a ‘miracle’ drug for cystic fibrosis. The production cost of the drug Kaftrio could be as low as just €5,200 per patient per year and be profitable, a team of British scientists has calculated; yet governments are being charged an estimated €70,000 to over €100,000 for these and similar medicines by the US biotech firm Vertex Pharmaceuticals. That is according to a new analysis by Investigate Europe who examined Vertex’s accounts to discover its revenues in a number of European countries as well as costs to governments. Game-changing medicines to treat cystic fibrosis (CF) known as CFTR modulators have been approved in the EU since 2012. Four are now on the market, including the more recent ‘miracle’ Kaftrio and Kalydeco therapies. Ireland was among the first in Europe to get access to Kaftrio in 2020 due to a drug pipeline deal agreed with Vertex in 2017. Benefits can reportedly include a 10% to 14% rise in lung function as well as reduced need for hospitalisation due to chest infections. Dr Andrew Hill, a British researcher and adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO), monitors shipments of Vertex’s raw ingredients on import-export databases. Tracking their value, his team calculated that Kaftrio could be produced for just $5,600 (€5,200) per patient per year and would still be profitable. The team of scientists estimated the generic cost of producing Kaftrio in India, where active ingredients of the drug are already produced. A profit margin of 10% and an average Indian tax of 27% were built into the calculations. Hill told Investigate Europe: “But Vertex has a monopoly so the choice for a country is either you buy this drug at the Vertex price, or you get nothing.” Vertex, however, challenged the methodology used, saying that the production costs quoted in this article are inaccurate. In addition they claim that “the price of these medicines is not determined by the production costs, but by the investment made in their development, the risk undertaken, and their value to patients and the health care system”, a spokesperson said. They added:

continue reading

US drug pricing coming to an EU member near you. Oops, sorry, it's already here.

[mtlibrary]

Rohl v Parr: A blog post by Middle Temple Library Intern Natasha Southall.

For the past few months I have been transcribing and cataloguing MS17, ‘Cases at Nisi Prius’, containing nominate reports of cases at Nisi Prius. The manuscript belonged to Sir Vicary Gibbs (1751-1820), and may have been written by him. The cases date from the 1760s to 1810s and vary in nature, from libel charges and indictments of fraud, to actions of trover and bills of exchange. I came across several insurance claims for ships that had been damaged at sea. In most of these cases, the contents of the cargo were not specified. One which caught my attention was a case brought by the slaver named Rohl in 1796, where two significant details of the circumstances of the claim are provided: at one point during the voyage there was a slave insurrection, resulting in the death of eight enslaved Africans, and the ship was “destroyed by destructive worms that infest the River of Africa” (folios 128-129). Both factors were integral in determining the success of the insurance claim in court.

1. Rohl’s voyage from Saint Barthélemy to Cape Coast (original map from www.freeworldmaps.net)

On 1st September 1792, the Zumbee sailed from St Bartholomew (Saint Barthélemy) to the River Gombroon on the coast of Africa [1]. Here, it was reported, a slave insurrection resulted in the loss of eight slaves (seven were killed and one died from falling) out of a total of forty-nine. The report claimed that the ship then struggled to get to Cape Coast because the bottom had been “taken by the worm”, likely to be toredo worms/shipworms, which were a common cause of damage to wooden ships in this period. At Cape Coast, the ship was “condemned as irreparable” and sold.

2. Rohl v Parr, folio 128 with ‘worms’ in the margin

The insurance claim was predicated on the policy of damage due to ‘peril at sea’. However, Lord Kenyon and the special jury agreed that the destruction by shipworms, being “an animated substance moving to destroy [the ship]” rather than “an inanimate substance striking against the ship’s bottom”, did not meet the terms of the ‘peril at sea’ policy. Consequently, the counsel for the plaintiff tried instead to recover the partial loss of the enslaved cargo resulting from the slave insurrection. Luckily for Rohl this was granted, as the loss was calculated as more than 5% at the time when the slaves were killed.

3. Figure 2 Rohl v Parr, folio 129

The transatlantic slave trade witnessed the forced transportation of over twelve million enslaved African men, women and children from Africa across the Atlantic to the Americas. Portugal, Brazil, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Uruguay, the United States of America and Denmark were all involved. One way we are able to catch a glimpse of the mechanisms underpinning the transatlantic slave trade is through legal records like those in the Gibbs manuscript. The records documenting these horrific and treacherous voyages have been made accessible to the public by the SlaveVoyages initiative [2].

This case of Rohl and Parr does not shed much light on the lives of the individuals who were enslaved and travelled on board the Zumbee; the horrors they must have experienced can only be imagined. The case does make clear, however, the financial risks involved for slavers who embarked on the voyage across the Atlantic to Africa. The underlying threat of insurrection was always on the horizon. Yet it would be the workings of the ‘destructive worms’ that rendered slavers like Rohl defenceless both at sea and in the English courtroom.

Citations

[1] Rohl v Parr, Saturday, Feb. 27th 1796, 1ESP.444., Reports of Cases Argued and Ruled at Nisi Prius.

[2] Slave Voyages, https://www.slavevoyages.org/ (last accessed 26/03/2024).

Natasha Southall,

King’s College London

[thekillingvote]

🦞SAVE LARRY, KILL LARRY🦞

The 1988 poll to kill Batman's child sidekick, Robin, was inspired by an early example of interactive television: a 1982 Saturday Night Live stunt starring Eddie Murphy and a live lobster.

The April 10, 1982 Saturday Night Live show opened with a chef grabbing a live lobster from its tank, making it dance while humming the Star Wars theme, and then laughing while lowering it into a pot of boiling water. Just before the lobster was placed into the pot, Eddie Murphy appeared, grabbed the lobster out from the way of certain death, and turned to address the audience.

Rather than being boiled alive without protest, Larry the Lobster's fate was submitted to the arena of popular opinion and disposable money. The show's audience was presented with two premium-rate "900" phone numbers"—one for those who wanted to spare Larry, and another for those who wanted to see it boiled alive. Each call cost $0.50, and each caller could call multiple times.

The lobster's televised ordeal can be seen below in a compilation video. (Warning for human cruelty toward an animal.)

Updates on the vote count were given by other cast members throughout the live broadcast; by the end of the show, viewers had made over 400,000 calls. Ultimately the "Save Larry" supporters managed a narrow win against the "Kill Larry" supporters.

To kill a Robin

The SNL stunt stuck with DC Comics editor Denny O'Neil, and he proposed to fellow editor Jenette Kahn that they could reserve a similar stunt for killing off a high-profile DC Comics character. By the time of 1988, Batman's colorful child sidekick Robin had been considered a divisive character among the creative forces behind Batman and among Batman fans. After Batman writer Jim Starlin's unsuccessful campaign to kill off Robin in a HIV/AIDS storyline, O'Neil decided the problematic Robin was the perfect candidate for a "Larry the Lobster" stunt. Sales manager John Pope began calling AT&T to secure the two 900 numbers on October 1, 1987; it took him until March 1988 to reserve them.

Like in Larry's case, the voting results were extremely close. Unlike Larry, the outcome supported Robin's death over his survival.

Fun facts!

Larry the Lobster predates Jason Todd's existence. "Larry the Lobster" aired on 10 April 1982. Jason Todd first appeared in the Batman comic in 1983, and he made his first appearance as Robin several months later. This might add credence to the idea that the idea for a DC Comics death poll wasn't specifically conceived with Robin in mind.

Within a span of a single SNL show, a total of 466,548 premium-rate calls were made to decide Larry's fate.

Within a span of 35 hours, a total of

At a cost of $0.50 per call, callers spent a total of $233,274.00 on Larry's poll. (After adjusting for inflation since 1982, this amount would be about $751,420.05 in 2023 dollars.)

At a cost of $0.50 per call, callers spent a total of $5,307 on Robin's poll. (After adjusting for inflation since 1988, this amount would be about $13,541.75 in 2023 dollars.)

Larry was spared by a margin of 11,644 votes. These votes cost a total of $5,822.00.

Robin was condemned to death by a margin of 72 votes. These votes cost a total of $36.00.

Both polls were decided by a margin of less than 1%.

A lobster's probable end

In the aftermath of the sketch, Murphy received letters protesting Larry's treatment. One letter made a racist jab at Murphy: "that man is sick, and I thought those people didn't like seafood."

To spite this racist comment, Murphy ensured that Larry's stay of execution was only temporary.

Credits

Thanks to the Internet Archive @internetarchive for access to old SNL episodes. https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-07-e-16-daniel-j-travanti-john-cougar-mellencamp

"Larry the Lobster" on Wikipedia

"A Death in the Family" (comics) on Wikipedia

CPI Inflation Calculator https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl