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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • “These findings are now final…,” Penn said in a statement, noting the five-member hearing board’s determination that Wax “violated the university’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”

    Wax’s conduct, according to Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.”

    So years of breaking the rules and already having received a caution from the dean and effectively all she gets a slap on the wrist - a year off at half pay. She should have been fired.






  • Unfortunately most of the world isn’t even taking it seriously anymore. People treat it like it’s a mild flu or common cold.

    The virus is still producing waves of infection consistent with the pandemic phase of spread rather than the endemic phase and has not moved into a seasonal pattern like the flu or colds. It’s just not publicised in the media. Scientific studies show that Omicron was just as lethal as the original Wuhan strain and the current Omicron subvariants are similar - the virus has not actually gotten less severe as hoped (and in the case of Delta, it actually got more severe; thankfully that lineage did not give rise to the variants we now face).

    The only difference between 2020 and now is that we have vaccines, but people need to keep up to date with the boosters. The efficacy of vaccines to prevent severe illness and hospitalisation wanes quickly, with a recent study showing it can be as low as 50% after four months.

    We also know that the risk of long COVID is cumulative - i.e. it goes up with each infection and the increase in likelihood depends on whether you’re up-to-date with the vaccine (having the most recent booster roughly halves the increase in risk from an infection). A recent study estimated that 400 million people now suffer from long COVID at an annual cost of $1 trillion to the global economy. This will only continue to get worse if people continue to catch COVID every year or two.




  • If you’re happy with OpenDNS logging your traffic, you could set the router to use them as the DNS server (assuming your network is DHCP and your father-in-law’s devices just use whatever DNS server your router says). As long as one of your devices keeps OpenDNS updated with your IP (the one provided by your ISP), then you can look through the traffic to see what is being accessed (and even enabling category content blocking if you wish). Of course, if your father-in-law is IT savvy, he’ll just manually set the DNS server on his devices.