Emudev sickos get in here

One key finding of the analysis is stunning: A large swath of the U.S. currently does not have the basic, ground-level immunity medical experts say is necessary to stop the spread of measles, which had once nearly been eliminated. The data further reveals that:

• Since 2019, 77% of counties and jurisdictions in the U.S. have reported notable declines in childhood vaccination rates. The declines span from less than 1 percentage point to more than 40 percentage points.
• Vaccine exemptions for school children are rising nationwide: As many as 53% of counties and jurisdictions saw exemption rates more than double from their first year of collecting data to the most recent.
• Among the states collecting data for the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, 68% of counties and jurisdictions now have immunization rates below 95% — the level of herd immunity doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak.

[...]

Student enrollment in Saint Louis Public Schools has been declining as a growing number of people are moving out of the city or choosing to send their children to charter schools.

That puts tremendous financial strain on the school system. Average daily attendance primarily determines school funding, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. And the board of education is considering a proposal to close half of its schools for the 2026-2027 school year.

Boleyjack blames steep budget cuts for lax vaccination enforcement. She said that some administrators allow noncompliant children to stay in school to keep enrollment up to be eligible for tax money.

"They got to get their dollars. So they're going to let in students who may not be completely compliant," she said. "I don't agree with it, but that's what it is."

Insects are so fuckin' cool. This channel is run by the head of the Evolutionary Biology & Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, and it's got a ton more of these really neat macro + slo mo videos. This one on ant stingers where you can see that the stingers actually have a part that oscillates to pump out the venom was pretty mind-blowing.

Found thanks to a Video Game History Foundation tweet (Xcancel link, Bluesky link); you can browse the magazine (the November 1983 issue of Electronic Games) and do full text searches in their archive.

Interesting quantitative look at web performance and how designs made for people with high-end devices can be practically unusable for people on low-end devices, which disproportionately affects poorer people and people in developing countries. Also discusses how sites game Google's performance metrics—maybe not news to the web devs among ye, but it was new to me. The arrogance of the Discourse founder was astounding.

RETVRN to static web pages.^[Although even static web pages can be fraught—see his other post on speeding up his site 50x by tearing out a bunch of unnecessary crap.]

Also, from one of the appendices:

In principle, HN should be the slowest social media site or link aggregator because it's written in a custom Lisp that isn't highly optimized and the code was originally written with brevity and cleverness in mind, which generally gives you fairly poor performance. However, that's only poor relative to what you'd get if you were writing high-performance code, which is not a relevant point of comparison here.

TL;DR: they were just vibing

There's more where that came from!

Magnemite

Also this super cute lil comic that the artist retweeted:

https://xcancel.com/chocomint_null/status/1886088727027744857

I feel a bit silly posting something this trivial in this comm, but I know I'm not the only one with an absurd number of browser tabs open—in my case, the figure is around 1500 tabs open across all my devices, and it's constantly growing. Every once in a blue moon I'll go and close like 50 of them in one day, but it's not frequent enough to reverse the trend. It's to the point where it's a coin flip whether a new tab in my mobile browser will actually work, and I have genuinely run into out-of-memory issues on my fairly beefy PC where stuff will straight-up crash. Beyond the technical issues, it's overwhelming, especially on the PC where I'm actually confronted with the staggering quantity of the tabs whenever I'm actually using it and I have to sift through them to find the few tabs I use frequently (idk what I'd do without the tab search function on modern browsers).

I thought it might be neat for other people with the same issue to congregate and work together to make incremental net reductions in our tab counts (so you can't just close 10 tabs and then open 15 more!). I was thinking that 10 tabs per day might be a reasonable figure—small enough to be manageable, but big enough that even with a few thousand tabs you could still make significant progress. Everyone is free to set a goal that fits their parameters, although I'd err on the side of caution. If you set a goal that's too ambitious, you could quickly miss your target and get frustrated. Slow and steady wins the race! Of course, with this sort of thing it will tend to get harder as you go along, since you'll go for the low hanging fruit first and then need to either make tougher decisions or have tabs that take longer to resolve (e.g. "am I gonna spend 15 minutes reading this article or just close it?"), so adjustments may be necessary later in the process. And if you do miss a day or a target, don't beat yourself up about it—it's a marathon, not a sprint, and sometimes you need to a take a breather. Just make sure to get back in there.

We could each make posts in the weekly self-improvement thread^[I'd also encourage you to post any other self-improvement things you're working on while you're at it!] and edit them daily, posting our new totals as we go. For instance:

Monday: 1500 (-10/10, -10 total)
Tuesday: 1490 (-10/10, -20 total)
Wednesday: 1475 (-15/10, -35 total)

and so on. It doesn't have to be in that precise format, but it's important to keep track of your total open tabs to ensure you're really making a net reduction, and I think it would be nice to show your accumulating reduction to show the progress you've made as the weeks go on.

Anyway, I'd love to hear from anyone who's interested in participating and get feedback on how this idea could be improved!

Xcancel link for tweet

(in case there's any doubt that the damage is a result of COVID, here's an older clip where she says that explicitly)

The reason I'm posting this is that it was interesting to see the reaction from fans on reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Hololive/comments/1mlgshl/calli_getting_covid_last_year_has_permanently/

I was actually surprised to see some fairly decent comments right there at the top about how COVID is still an issue, how Long COVID affects a large proportion of people, and various people sharing their struggles with both acute and chronic COVID. Of course, the bar is in hell—there are only two comments encouraging people to mask up—but this is genuinely the best discussion I've seen outside of COVID conscious spaces in ages.

I would love to see this create a shift in attitudes in the VTuber community, but I think that would have to start at the head, and I don't see that happening for two reasons.

First, Calli is known for being an absolute workaholic who grinds and grinds and grinds. It would be awesome if she became a disability advocate, but I just don't see it happening based on her personality. For her sake, I just hope her doctors are properly informed about COVID and that she listens to their advice.

But secondly, I cannot imagine Hololive would want any of their members to even suggest that COVID is still a serious public health threat. Because if that's the case, then every single in-person event that Hololive holds is putting their talents and their fans at risk for the sake of the almighty yen. As I'm sure you all know, the implications of this are far-reaching, which is why the public has not been allowed to consider them. I'm reminded of that one court decision in California a few years back that indemnified employers against liability for "take-home" COVID infections among their employees and the people their employees come in contact with outside the workplace:

"Even limiting a duty of care to employees' household members, the pool of potential plaintiffs would be enormous, numbering not thousands but millions of Californians," Justice Carol Corrigan wrote for the court.

"Hmm, is this an indication that there's something deeply flawed with our public health policy? No, it's the employees who are wrong!"

After every single VTuber event—concert, convention, what-have-you—I inevitably see people contracting COVID, and then some portion of them suffering long term disabilities. Calli is not the first high profile VTuber to talk about her long term issues; her coworker Mumei left the company recently as a result of debilitating long COVID symptoms (unlike most people who leave, she has not started streaming independently, almost certainly due to these health issues), and the two (former) VShojo talents Henya and Haruka have both taken extended hiatuses due to COVID sequelae.

I've said this before, but it makes me feel insane that VTubers have the perfect occupation to allow them to very tightly control their exposure to COVID—something most people could only dream of—and yet they are constantly flinging themselves into extremely high-risk environments. Of course, if they're not masking up anywhere, there's nothing stopping them from catching it outside of work; indeed, Henya and Haruka are both examples of people who acquired long COVID without participating in any of those large events, to my knowledge. That said, VTubers tend to be homebodies, so they'd still have a lower probability than the average person due to fewer exposures.

edit: I wrote "Xcancel" but forgot to actually make it an Xcancel link...fixed.