MY BRAIN BIN

As someone who has recently designed and launched a product on Amazon, I have been shocked to learn how China "owns" Amazon. There is a war on an unfathomable scale from Chinese sellers to destroy US sellers showing slight success. Their weapons are: 1) Copy successful products and sell them at a loss until the US seller is driven out of business. 2) Spend massive amounts of money on advertising to assure that competitive products never appear on the first few pages of search results. 3) Use pictures, titles, and descriptions that optimize search results to assure their products make it on the first page, irrespective of how inaccurately it represents the actual product. 4) Hire armies of fake reviewers to produce 5 star reviews (the recent Chinese seed scandal is part of this). 5) Modify listings of competitors to include trademarked language in product titles so the listing gets inactivated (yes, in most cases one can modify other seller's listings). Have y...

Source: @Publicola17 on Twitter 1/ Woke anti-racism is child abuse. My family is living the antithesis of @thomaschattwill's Self Portrait in Black and White. And I fear it may damage my children irrevocably. Let me explain… 2/ I’m white, my wife’s black. When we met, we “saw each other’s race,” but we didn’t think that was the most interesting thing about us. We foolishly thought our children would be part of a post-racial future, in which all Americans could just be human beings to one another. 3/ Then came Trump. I decided I should try to learn more about my fellow citizens, who I now realized were completely opaque to me. In contrast, my wife decided she was at war with an immutably white supremacist America. 4/ My wife began to read authors like Nikole Hannah Jones and Michael Harriot. She had a "racial awakening," concluding that she'd been "inauthentically black" all her life. 5/ My wife came to think that her mind—trained in exclusive priv...

While a constitutional republic typically exercises government powers to guarantee safe passage through public roadways and pedestrian crossings, some, such as the USA have not. In such a case, US citizens may begin asserting these rights through their own means. It was only a matter of time before we start to see a reclamation of passage through streets and sidewalks despite being impeded by physical obstacles and violence by private citizens attempting to control public space. Pedestrian Declares Fellow Human "Trumper" and Subsequently murders Said Human Successful Passage Through Public Roadway Facilitated By Aerosol Human Deterrent Commute Through Portland Met With Unpleasant Pedestrians and Projectile-Throwing Vehicle Occupants

Today is International Dog Day. Let’s take a moment to recognize the superior accomplishments of Dogs over their human subordinates. Despite great efforts by human scientists of the USA and USSR to enter the frontier of human space flight, the female Dog Laika orbited the earth November 3, 1957, nearly three and a half years before the first male human, Yuri Gagarin and over five years prior to the first female human, Valentina Tereshkova. It was Dogs who, by great sacrifice, paved the way to modern medicine for humans. An unnamed Dog received the first artificial heart in 1937 and first heart transplant in 1951, 17 years before humans could claim such an achievement. After the terrorist attack and collapse of the World Trade Center towers, 300 dogs led their human companions into the wreckage saving many lives and allowing human families to recover their loved ones and put them at rest. While humans have struggled to find the most effective treatment for PTSD, blindness an...

It's nearly impossible to resist, but how about we put the brakes on politicizing COVID-19? Please challenge me if I have something wrong, but my understanding of epidemiology is that once a highly contagious virus spreads through a species and tends towards endemic status the goal of "containment" is unrealistic. Unless some countries attempt permanent isolation, the reality is to expect widespread infection throughout the global population (think of the delay in smallpox reaching Native Americans). So what is the purpose of social distancing, self-quarantine, and border closures? The only purpose is to delay endemic onset. This is important to (1) prevent overwhelming hospital capacity during the pandemic stage and (2) possibly buy time to reach a point of decreased mortality from infection before endemic status is reached. Related to the second point, more time allows a greater possibility for developing a vaccine, more effective treatment plans, and for COVID...