Hasnain says:

“With universities offering better compensation either as concession or a preemptive strategy to address graduate student demands, momentum for the unionization of academic workers is almost sure to pick up steam. While the full implications of the University of California strike are still unfolding, we may be seeing the beginning of a new period of campus activism with labor organizing as a prominent feature.”

Hasnain says:

“America has always been that guy.

I’m a professor.

I know most students hate groupwork, especially the high-achievers. They’re the ones who get stuck with all the responsibility.

A lot of us remember how groupwork used to go back in high school and college. One or two of us did everything. On presentation day, the guy who did nothing talked over us and tried to take credit. He was the “facilitator.”

We would wind up getting a B.

He would complain.

That’s how western countries have acted during this pandemic. China, Japan, South Korea, they all stepped up and did the work. Meanwhile, almost half of Americans ignored precautions and then lied about it.

The pandemic is a group project.

America is that guy.”

Hasnain says:

It always disappoints me that white collar crime like this (and wage theft) receives so much less coverage than other types of crime (like say shoplifting) even though the monetary damages are not even within a couple of orders of magnitude. I pray for the day when reporting and consciousness around crime is a little more informed and a little less emotional.

Also why does this make the share price rise?!

“The bank agreed to a consent order with the CFPB without admitting to the agency’s allegations.

Wells Fargo said it expects a pretax operating loss of about $3.5 billion in the fourth quarter, which includes the CFPB civil penalty and remediation, as well as other litigation expenses.

Shares of the company rose 0.7% to $42.11 at 9:57 a.m. in New York.”

Hasnain says:

Perfect example of how to lie with statistics. I made some uncomfortable noises when I got to the part where they just changed the confidence interval cause the one they calculated seemed “too wide”.

“You may have heard the shocking headline this week that 250,000 people die every year in the US due to misdiagnosis in the ER.

You may be even more shocked to know that this statistic is extrapolated from the death of… just one man. In a Canadian ER. Over a decade ago.”

Hasnain says:

This is really scary - I hope the worst predictions don’t come to pass.

“On top of that, the virus appears to be spreading faster in China than omicron spread in surges elsewhere, Cowling adds. Last winter, cases doubled in the U.S. every three days or so. "Now in China, the doubling time is like hours," Cowling says. "Even if you manage to slow it down a bit, it's still going to be doubling very, very quickly. And so the hospitals are going to come under pressure possibly by the end of this month."”

Hasnain says:

Sigh. Predictions are now around 1M deaths in china alone in 2023 😕

“The Omicron variant of the virus has begun to run rampant through several big cities since the sudden U-turn on president Xi Jinping’s former zero-Covid policy of containment earlier this month. The surge in infections is largest in the capital Beijing, where more than half the 22mn population is infected, according to some estimates.

Many office workers have begun to work from home but some factories are becoming thinly staffed as workers call in sick. Business owners and executives said this was causing increasing disruption to production and supply chains.”

Hasnain says:

Great take from a reporter that has been covering Musk critically for a long time. She also got banned in the great journalist purge of twitter; even though she didn’t even do anything remotely close to the doxxing claims. He just hated having critics.

“Selling the dream is what turned Tesla's stock into a superstar since it went public. People bought Tesla to be part of Musk's mission. It didn't matter that the company only became profitable last year, or that it had an unreliable lineup of vehicles, or that more-established automakers were poised to catch up to its technology. Any journalist or investor who questioned Musk or his mission then — just like now — was subject to bullying and harrassment. The evangelists, the faithful, made Tesla the most valuable car company in the world (for now) based on how Musk said it would change the future. Call me cynical, but I don't see that happening for Twitter. Musk may claim he bought the company in the name of free speech all he wants, but unlike with his other ventures, he simply does not have enough people out there — be they the media, his customers, his employees, or his users — who believe.”

Hasnain says:

“The nearly 160,000 square feet that Yelp left empty is about half of the building’s space, and about half of that has been re-leased. The good news for Pembroke seems less good for the city. Some of the new tenants are finance and venture capital firms that have clung to the gravitas of a physical office for client meetings and the occasional conference but are unlikely to contribute regular foot traffic, according to building owners across the city.

In a typical downturn, the turnaround is a fairly simple equation of rents falling far enough to attract new tenants and the economy improving fast enough to stimulate new demand. But now there’s a more existential question of what the point of a city’s downtown even is.”

Hasnain says:

“The idea that a child born today could contract COVID 40 times before college and live a normal, healthy lifespan, is completely unsupported by what we know about this disease. It harms the blood vessels. It harms the immune system. It spikes your risk of diabetes, heart attack, stroke, and blood clots. It can damage your organs, your lungs, your kidneys, your liver, and your brain. It compromises your fertility, ages you biologically, and can lead to hair, bone and tooth loss. There is no long-term immunity and reinfections get more dangerous over time. Viral persistance is seen in at least a signficant minority of patients, which is demonstrated to cause ongoing T-cell activation. This can lead to T-cell exhaustion over time (total destruction of the immune system as is seen in AIDS patients with persistent HIV infection).

It’s time to take post-COVID immune deficiency seriously and in turn, to accept that a “new normal” would mean high-quality ventiliation everywhere, indefinitely working from home, and universal high-quality masking, for starters. This is not a disease we can live with- certainly not the way we are living with it. “Old normal” cosplay will never bring 2019 back, but it will kill and maim many more children before we are done with it. Like the Republicans before us, we deserve better than being told to get back to work and enjoy our twice-annual infections. Following in their footsteps by swallowing every evidence-free half-truth our government throws at us will leave us no better off than the MAGA crowd.”

Hasnain says:

“But she never admitted the truth in public. She died in 1979, of a stroke.

In 1983, her Anglo-Indian heritage was revealed in a biography, Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon. The authors found her birth record in Bombay, her baptismal certificate, and letters and photographs her Indian relatives had.

Through his book, Sen hopes to be able to convey the enormous pressures Oberon faced as a South Asian woman "navigating an industry that wasn't designed to accommodate her and producing such moving work while fighting those battles".

"Dealing with those struggles couldn't have been easy. It feels more productive to extend grace and empathy to her than to judge."”