Recovering academic now in public safety. You’ll find me kibitzing on brains (my academic expertise) to critical infrastructure and resilience (current worklife). Also hockey, games, music just because.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I think the larger issue is that the blood supply is for profit in the US. Everyone is getting exploited, including the people that require the transfusion.

    I donate regularly in Canada and give it away for free as does everyone else. I don’t donate plasma because it’s not especially useful with my blood type (AB+ is universal for plasma, O- for other products).









  • The concentration of power in the executive branch has only occurred in the last 40 years or so with the push for “unified executive theory”. It has accelerated with this supreme Court in just the last couple of years. The court has shown themselves ready to ignore their own precedents, pick and choose historical arguments to buttress outcomes, and substitute their own judgement for Congress’s. There is no check on this madness except for court reform.







  • You’re not wrong. But there are counter examples. I was going to use the example of the jet engine in my last answer as a true paradigm shifting development that had immediate impact. And in the mid-century period too! Or the first powered flight occurred in the first decade of the 20th century and had an immediate impact. The transistor and solid state electronics would be another example.

    So let me flip it around and say we’ve had a quarter century without a major technological breakthrough. There’s been progress, but it feels incremental. I spent a night with a physicist a few years ago who was arguing that progress is slowing because we are still relying on the exploitation of Newtonian physics. There are a few technologies that have made the leap to nuclear physics. But we’ve had the basics of quantum physics for a century now and haven’t been able to exploit it in a useful fashion.