Good morning, here is a list of all 277 species known to have gone extinct in North America since the arrival of Europeans. washingtonpost.com/business/2019/…
The list is incomplete but it is growing. This spring, the Fish and Wildlife Service prepared to remove 23 additional species from the Endangered Species Act. The reason? They have gone extinct, and are no longer in need of protection. washingtonpost.com/business/2019/…
This is a map of the United States. The red areas are regions where native species populations have fallen below the "safe" limit for ecological stability. There is a lot of red. washingtonpost.com/business/2019/…
Across the world the species extinction rate is currently tens, perhaps *hundreds* of times greater than the normal rate. It is accelerating. washingtonpost.com/business/2019/…
In the midst of *all of this*, the Trump administration announced new rules weakening some of the fundamental provisions of the endangered species act. Scientists condemned the change. Industry groups cheered. washingtonpost.com/business/2019/…
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The 100 most-performed symphonies at Carnegie Hall since it opened in 1891. It's a decent approximation of what you might call the Western symphonic canon and there's so many fun things to see when you slice the data this way.
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven account for one-third of the 100 works included.
On the other hand, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky account for 43% of the 8,683 total performances of these works.
You see a big gap around 1850, a visual representation of what Schubert said on his deathbed: "Who can ever do anything, after Beethoven?"
Then an explosion of creativity in the 1870s and 1880s.
Pretty clear that regardless of what happens in November we are barreling toward a Dianne Feinstein situation, but in the White House. Going forward we ought to seriously consider age limits (not term limits) for federal electeds and judiciary members.
Like what kind of shape do we expect either of these guys' brains to be in four years from now?
Infuriating datapoint on why American medical care is so expensive: a single New Mexico oncology practice spends $350,000 a year fighting insurance company coverage denials. propublica.org/article/how-to…
When we were on the Washington Post's dogshit insurance plan my wife spent *hours* every week fighting denials. Every single time it was due to fuck-ups on the insurance company's part. Absolutely infuriating.
And this was only possible because she worked in Social Security disability for a decade and had specialized knowledge of medical billing codes and the infrastructure around them. How many millions of people just give up every year because they don't have the same privilege?
Some personal news: got my final scans done yesterday and I officially beat stage 4 cancer!
It's been exactly 8 months since I went to the local ER for obstructive jaundice, and doctors started throwing the c-word around. But it feels like an eternity
Chemo's done and I've finally got all the hardware out of my liver so I'm starting to feel like myself again.
Rogers is definitely a lunatic but I have to wonder about the journalistic practice of showing up at the houses of people who clearly don't want to be interviewed. If you've called them and emailed them and they haven't responded, maybe that's all you need?
The impulse comes from a good place -- wanting to hold power to account and wanting to give all sides a chance to respond. But in this day and age there are so many other available channels of communication, and "stranger shows up at your house" is an extremely fraught situation
To be clear, the restraining order is garbage and the story in question was about whether Rogers actually lives where she says she does. So maybe this wasn't the best example to make my point lol