I thought “on line” was an Eastern US thing; never heard it in the South, Midwest or West Coast.

Corporations don’t willingly give up money. In circumstances like 1 and 3 they’ll more likely just say “thanks for making line go up more” lol. COVID imposed some supply issues that I would assume are mostly mitigated by now, but I haven’t seen costs decrease, only increase–so now we have record profits in many contexts. Subsidies can sometimes help, but it seems to me that the most effective subsidies (in terms of lowering cost) are those with significant, more powerful corporate players downstream (e.g., corn in the US) rather than those purchased by individual consumers who have comparatively little power.

I don’t know that 2 is necessarily quick, but competition can indeed lower prices if a competitor can actually survive against the behemoths in their respective markets. In those instances, corporations can try to shape regulation to squash the upstarts while leaving the big players alone.

I’m not sure that government really has the ability to lower prices in a way that isn’t somehow perverted by large corporate entities given the power they have.

Overall, the big issues I have are that when it breaks it does so unpredictably so I can’t learn how to do things right.

1. It was unclear to me for a long time how to find files correctly (it still kind of is unclear). Our institution uses SharePoint for some things, Teams for other stuff, and some folks use OneDrive. It’s hard to know how these things talk to each other–sometimes this data is actually shared between those ecosystems and sometimes it isn’t. It’s probably how some people are settings things up, but I blame the software for making those relationships somewhat obtuse. My understanding is that everything on the backend is actually SharePoint and Teams and OneDrive are just different front ends with different permissions structures. That has helped somewhat but it’s an imperfect understanding.
2. Joining Teams meeting links from other institutions is fraught with problems. If I have a Zoom link from somewhere else, I click on the link and the meeting starts. That’s it. I click a Teams link on a not-work computer and it can be difficult to open (SSO something something probably). So instead I’ll open in browser, which may result in a “browser not supported error” on every browser (including Edge). Even if I can get in my webcam might not support backgrounds. Or the microphone/camera selection I made in browser permissions is ignored by Teams. Any one of these events occurring appears to be random, so I have to plan on a few extra minutes before Teams meetings to log in.
3. Notifications don’t go always go away when seen. I sometimes have to click out if the window and click back in.
4. Incomplete markdown support (let me copy/paste a table from pandas!)
5. This is dumb, but gif selection sucks. They must do some sort of aggressive filter for work or something, and maybe that’s an enterprise decision. But if I want to communicate exclusively via gifs that is my prerogative, thank you.

National Crab Rangoon Day, February 13.

Is it a made up holiday? Yes. But all holidays are made up. This one gives me crab rangoon. Your move, Flag Day.

Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology. Fantastic.

The big issue is that the individuals who lead these institutions are those who are successful with the status quo; perhaps some recognize the importance of changing it but I perceive that most would be unwilling to dismantle a system that worked well for them.

In part it’s prestige, which for some might matter for promotion purposes, and at least personally I’m more like to cite journals for which I know I trust their judgement in peer review and submission acceptance. There are predatory publishers which abuse the open access concept to make money, and if I’m reviewing literature I don’t want to have to also research if a journal can be trusted (unless of course the publication I want to include is novel or especially worthwhile).

Also, in many contexts open access requires payment by the authors; this may be fine if an author is in a large grant-funded lab or at an institution willing to fund the open access fee but for many of us non-research-track folks it’s kind of a deal breaker.

Yeah there are some openly available datasets on competition sites like Kaggle, and some medical data is available through public institutions like like NIH.

I’m not very interested in cryptocurrency generally but I’m interested in how the tech works–in addition to the aforementioned issues with security if one party controls a significant amount of the lightning network, wouldn’t lightning also be inefficient if a large percentage of transactions are one-offs? It would generate a transaction on the blockchain to open the payment channel between two accounts and a second transaction to close the account, correct? So if the actual number of transactions is two or less it doesn’t offer any actual advantage?

It’s not my area of expertise (oral cancer), but I can guess.

Some authors have proposed that in humans there may be a third set of tooth organs on which this drug could be used. This theory could explain why some people get supernumerary (extra) teeth–in most people these extra organs appear to regress but in some contexts maybe they don’t. From what I can tell (again, not quite my expertise) there is not a scientific consensus on the presence or prevalence of this third set of teeth in humans or specifically human adults, which is why this treatment is primarily focused on those people whose teeth never formed–ostensibly their first or second set of tooth buds may still be present and just need to be triggered to develop.

Even if we assume that adult humans have a third set of tooth buds on which this drug could act (and that’s questionable), giving the drug in IV form would probably just make all of the buds grow, which would be problematic. But that could be reasonable for a person for whom few or no teeth had grown.

Elsevier pays its reviewers very well! In fact, in exchange for my last review, I received a free month of ScienceDirect and Scopus…

… Which my institution already pays for. Honestly it’s almost more insulting than getting nothing.

I try to provide thorough reviews for about twice as many articles as I publish in an effort to sort of repay the scientific community for taking the time to review my own articles, but in academia reviewing is rewarded far less than publishing. Paid reviews sound good but I’d be concerned that some would abuse this system for easy cash and review quality would decrease (not that it helped in this case). If full open access publishing is not available across the board (it should be), I would love it if I could earn open access credits for my publications in exchange for providing reviews.

The predicted outcomes of sinus surgery for chronic rhinosinusitis may use the SNOT scale (sinonasal outcome test)

Sorry! I conflated LogMeIn with a specific LogMeIn product, LastPass (Francisco acquired the whole thing but I’m only familiar with LastPass). To clarify, the free tier of LastPass was made less useful following acquisition, particularly with the limitation to a single device.

Same firm that acquired LogMeIn (LastPass) and MyFitnessPal–and after those acquisitions both MyFitnessPal and LastPass quickly moved to worsen the free tiers of services in favor of their paid subscription models.