#The Dole

[91vaults]

It's pretty funny to me that the justification for people on unemployment doing pointless busy work (such as Work for the Dole) is the Idea that the unemployed just really struggle with basic concepts like getting up before 10 and being in a specific place for a specific amount time (""""regulsr routine""""") I've heard all the pollies say constantly. BITCH WE ALL struggle with this concept. That's why none of us are getting out of bed unless we're getting paid AS IT SHOULD BE.

[thedole]

How to Make Your Farmers' Market Display Stand Out

For years, farmers' markets have been a mainstay of agricultural communities, with the first recorded farmers' markets in Egypt almost 5,000 years ago. The gatherings would, however, start appearing more often in the United States in the 1600s. Today, the primary purpose of farmers' markets is to allow local small farmers to access potential customers at a low cost. They also help test the market for their produce, flowers and seedlings, prepared and packaged foods, and homemade items through displays and samples. The feedback guides the farmers on how to grow the business, depending on the items on display and aspects like demand, variants, and marketing. These events have grown to attract local and nearby attendees, focusing on fresh local produce, items such as honey and preserves, and a warm and inviting social ambiance. This creates a healthy competition base, especially for those offering similar local products. Therefore, to be successful, standing out is crucial.

One of the ways to stand out at a farmers’ market is ample preparation. Remember, since the focus is on locally-made produce, competition will be stiff. Decide what to take to the market, though the primary offering typically remains fruits, vegetables, seeds, and flowers. For common produce in the area, consider value-added offerings like the inclusion of fruits in baked goods like bread and pies. Make sure you have samples on hand, accompanied by their preparation methods. Though most farmers’ markets remain small, the larger events may require a business plan detailing how you plan to display, pitch, package, and sell your offerings. Test your display stand with attention to practicality, ease of assembly, and disassembly. Also, payment systems may vary, though at a typical farmers' market, the systems tend to be similar and compatible.

At the market, the product display is one of the primary determinants of success at the end of the day. Focus on attractive displays highlighting your products with a homey feel. The purpose is to maintain the locally grown, fresh, straight-from-the-farm ambiance, with inclusions like weathered wood, grass, baskets, and burlap material rather than hard materials such as glass or metal. Emphasis should be on the product display. Some tips include placing produce types that complement each other in a recipe in proximity, vertical or slanting displays, colorful traditional fabrics, and some extras like some fresh flowers. Also, if possible, accompany your marketing efforts with a story related to the product but connected to your farm - the story should be fun, inspirational, and positive.

Personal presentations matter in dressing, demeanor, and approach-ability other than the products displayed. Focus on the customer, with personal discussions depending on the customer, and avoid reading anything or looking at the phone, unless you’re taking down contact information.

Relevant printed materials can aid in your presentation and pitching. These include large signs that indicate your farm's name and smaller pieces to label the individual products or recipe ideas. Other ways to increase your visibility include networking with other vendors, both immediate neighbors and a wider circle during breaks. Interacting with vendors who offer similar or complementary items increases the chances of sales after the event.

Finally, try incentives like buy-one-get-one-free offers, discounts, and takeaway samples, especially for small, new, and innovative items. Hand out the incentives to visitors at your stall and passersby, along with clearly labeled contact information.

[living400lbs]

OUR PURITAN ANCESTORS took it as an article of faith that the idle were unworthy of charity, a sentiment famously captured by the Calvinist preacher Cotton Mather: “For those who indulge themselves in idleness, the express command of God unto us is, that we should let them starve.” Long after Mather departed this world, his spirit lived on, embodied in the nation’s poor laws. Statutes that outlined government’s responsibility to the destitute, the poor laws combined guarded concern for needy Americans with suspicions that they were complicit in their own misfortune. Under the poor laws, the chronically jobless were removed from society and dispatched to county poorhouses, catchall institutions that were also home to the old, infirm, and mentally ill. Those who could ordinarily shift for themselves but were temporarily jobless applied to public officials, men with no special welfare training, for what was known as outdoor or home relief, assistance generally given in the form of food and coal. To discourage idlers, the welfare experience was made as unpleasant as possible. Before applying for help, the poor were made to wait until utterly penniless, and then declare it publicly. When granting relief, officers followed the old rule of thumb that families living “on the town” must never reach the comfort level of the poorest independent family. The weekly food allowance was a meager four dollars a week—and less in some areas—regardless of how many people it was supposed to feed. Finally, it was customary to give food and coal on alternate weeks, providing minimal nourishment and warmth, but never both at the same time.

By custom and by law, public relief in the United States had always been a local concern, the responsibility of towns, cities, and counties. By the summer of 1931, however, in communities across the United States the money raised for the jobless had evaporated, while the numbers of people applying for it continued to climb. Still, Hoover remained confident that between private charity and local government, America would find its way out of the job crisis. An announcement from the White House in August made it official: the president was against a federal dole and was not about to support one.

From A Square Meal by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe

[zillychu]

me? redrawing my old shit?? its more likely than u think

[justloyld]

I'm really contemplating cancelling my YouTube Premium since well fuck YouTube but I also kinda rely on it to watch stuff that entertains me.

Like honestly YouTube would be a heck of a lot better if you saw the newest videos on the platform or if they recommended smaller creators but they fucking don't and Premium is overpriced as heck.

Like $15 a month, I'm on the bloody dole how can I continue to cop that outrageous price.

Idk I may cancel, I may not, but it will all depend on future me and what she says.

Whatever just wanted to vent that out.

[embrace-your-illithid]

heere she is..… my illithid tav creature....… my sunshine goth pink sparkle princess paladin.… naive -2 int will drop a divine smite a-bomb on whoever threatens her lynchpin bf…... loyal lapdog to the very end, won't break her oath so she is the most cringefail starving mindflayer in toril.... Qurrn ✨🦑☀️

[omaano]

Echo with his tooka best buddy (and an extra) for @phantasm-echo 's DTIYS 🩵💙❤️

[bellamysgriffin]

I have no choice in the matter. Why would I? It's only the death of me.

[nyaawn]

FFXVI - Official Promotional Artworks

[geezerwench]

The "billionaire" needs your money, maga.

So he doesn't have to pay his own bills.

[thedole]

The Entrepreneurial Life of Charles Sidney Dole

Remembered for his creation of one of Crystal Lake, Illinois’ most emblematic structures, Charles Sidney Dole was born in 1819 in Bloomfield, which became a suburb of Detroit. His father, Judge Sydney Dole, served as a prominent local community member. As one of the area’s earliest settlers, he issued the first legal document ever produced in Oakland County.

Following a devastating fire, Charles and his younger brother James left for Chicago, then known as Fort Dearborn, where their uncle George W. Dole resided. With an enterprising character, George contributed to the 1838 construction of Chicago’s first grain storage facility. In 1848, the small burgh took a significant step toward becoming a modern city after completing the Illinois and Michigan Canal. In addition, the municipality gained the Chicago and Galena Railroad. It inked the community with lead mines in Galena. The Market Building served as the first city hall on State Street.

When George accepted an appointment as Chicago’s postmaster in 1850, 31-year-old Charles became the Assistant Postmaster. He subsequently established C.S. Dole & Co., a grain commission business, with his brother James. The two purchased and sold wheat and constructed grain storage facilities. Then, Charles became involved in the broader industry as an early Chicago Board of Trade member.

In 1850, the Board tried to establish quality standards for wheat, which the industry lacked. However, it had difficulty enforcing them as Chicago developed a reputation for producing inferior wheat. In 1858, Charles and S.H. Butler led a newly formed committee and created a new set of recommendations. The committee adopted them, bolstering the city’s major grain center position. In 2024, many of these standards remain in place in Chicago.

Then, in 1860, Charles diversified his entrepreneurial footprint, founding Armour, Dole & Co., which maintained a grain elevator at the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad depot. With an initial capacity of 850,000 bushels, they expanded it to 2.1 million bushels within a decade and attained a 6.3 million bushel granary capacity by the early 1880s.

Personally, Charles S. Dole also experienced a transformation. He married his cousin Julia Louise Coffin on October 9, 1858, at St. James Episcopal Church. By the early 1860s, he had purchased a thousand acres in Crystal Lake, 45 miles northwest of Chicago, intending to settle down and start a family. The community established Crystal Lake Depot in 1856 in the downtown area of Dearborn as it continued experiencing growth.

The land Charles acquired had a lake view, and he spent $100,000 on constructing a three-story mansion with adjacent stables and a garden. The property included an extensive stock farm, a half-mile racetrack, and a stable that bred Percheron horses. He resided there with his wife Julia, mother-in-law Mrs. Harriet Coffin, and two daughters and a son until the 1890s.

Moreover, Charles amassed a fortune as the railroad helped transport grain products to market. During his daughter’s wedding in 1883, he notably constructed a spur line that brought guests from the Chicago and Northwestern railway tracks to the mansion doors. Among the venerable guests was Julian Rumsey, Chicago’s mayor, and first cousin Levi Leiter, the initial partner of department store magnate Marshall Field.

[chongoblog]

BTW INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT MONKEY BALL UPDATE

DOLE IS BACK BITCHES

[crunchycrystals]

shout out to vic michaelis for their presentation in the smartypants premiere that made me do so much research about vegetables and hawaiian colonization around 5 minutes after i watched a guy say spiderman should say every racial slur

[smartypantsshow]

The secretly evil history of the Dole Company - and how it ties into the lie that "vegetables exist"

Watch the full episode now on Dropout

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!