I Lost My Life to Airbnb - "I’m a freelance travel writer, which means I get to visit amazing places and stay in some of the world’s most beautiful hotels. It also means I don’t make very much money, thanks to rapidly decreasing magazine rates; so to afford my apartment in Chicago, I used to rent it on Airbnb while I was gone, which was often. This worked well. Too well, actually. So well that I found it hard to turn down guests even when I was in town. When I got back from Bora Bora, I realized I had messed up my calendar, and my apartment was occupied for one more night... Hotels were weirdly expensive in Chicago that night, and the hostel I sometimes stayed at was completely booked. For some reason, probably because of 24 hours of travel and sleep deprivation, I thought the train made sense... I got off an hour later near a 24-hour Starbucks, where I willed myself to stay awake until I could get into my apartment at 11 a.m. For many, this would have been a turning point, but not for me. I really wanted freelancing to work, and therefore I relied heavily on Airbnb for regular income... There is no way I could have started freelancing without Airbnb. I would have had to take too many low-paying writing gigs and would never have had the time or money to travel and work on the stories I actually wanted to write. This vicious cycle is the bane of freelance writers everywhere, and I feel it more acutely now without the Airbnb deposits than I ever did then."
Why No One Answers Their Phone Anymore - " Before ubiquitous caller ID or even *69 (which allowed you to call back the last person who’d called you), if you didn’t get to the phone in time, that was that. You’d have to wait until they called back. And what if the person calling had something really important to tell you or ask you? Missing a phone call was awful. Hurry!... There are many reasons for the slow erosion of this commons. The most important aspect is structural: There are simply more communication options. Text messaging and its associated multimedia variations are rich and wonderful: words mixed with emoji, Bitmoji, reaction gifs, regular old photos, video, links. Texting is fun, lightly asynchronous, and possible to do with many people simultaneously. It’s almost as immediate as a phone call, but not quite. You’ve got your Twitter, your Facebook, your work Slack, your email, FaceTimes incoming from family members. So many little dings have begun to make the rings obsolete. But in recent years, there is a more specific reason for eyeing my phone’s ring warily. Perhaps 80 or even 90 percent of the calls coming into my phone are spam of one kind or another"
The Decoy Effect: How You Are Influenced to Choose Without Really Knowing It - " There’s one particularly cunning type of pricing strategy that marketers use to get you to switch your choice from one option to a more expensive or profitable one. It’s called the decoy effect... consumers change their preference between two options when presented with a third option – the “decoy” – that is “asymmetrically dominated”. It is also referred to as the “attraction effect” or “asymmetric dominance effect”... These findings were, in marketing terms, revolutionary. They challenged established doctrines – known as the “ similarity heuristic” and the “ regularity condition” – that a new product will take away market share from an existing product and cannot increase the probability of a customer choosing the original product. When consumers are faced with many alternatives, they often experience choice overload – what psychologist Barry Schwartz has termed the tyranny or paradox of choice. Multiple behavioural experiments have consistently demonstrated that greater choice complexity increases anxiety and hinders decision-making. In an attempt to reduce this anxiety, consumers tend to simplify the process by selecting only a couple of criteria (say price and quantity) to determine the best value for money. Through manipulating these key choice attributes, a decoy steers you in a particular direction while giving you the feeling you are making a rational, informed choice. The decoy effect is thus a form of “ nudging”
China Wants to Shut Down Thousands of Dams - Bloomberg - "Ever since Chairman Mao Zedong exhorted workers in the 1950s to "conquer nature,” China has been throwing up dams large and small at a prolific rate to generate power, tame flooding and provide irrigation for fields and drinking water for cities. The long-term effects of that often chaotic policy are now coming home to roost. Many dams in the country are too small to generate meaningful amounts of power. Others have simply become redundant as their rivers ran dry, their reservoirs silted up or they were superseded by dams built upstream. "For a long time, people thought it was a waste to let the river just run away in front of you without doing something,” said Wang Yongchen, founder of Green Earth Volunteers, a Beijing-based non-governmental organization that focuses on river protection... The scale of China’s dam-building frenzy is hard to grasp. By the end of 2017, China’s longest river, the Yangtze, and its tributaries had more than 24,000 hydropower stations spread over 10 provinces. At least 930 of them were constructed without an environmental assessment. Many old dams pose serious safety threats, especially during summer floods... Large dams and their reservoirs are also increasingly criticized for environmental damage. They alter the flow of rivers, submerge habitats and disrupt the migration and spawning of fish. Since the mighty Three Gorges Dam was completed on the Yangtze in 2006 after two decades of construction, several lakes downstream that absorbed the river’s overflow, have shrunk dramatically or disappeared."
I am old enough to remember when dams were considered green and environmentalists pushed for them
Iceland tops global pensions league, Britain slips -survey - "Iceland offers the best pension provisions, followed by the Netherlands and Denmark while Britain slipped a spot to 10th place in the world ranking, an annual survey showed on Tuesday. Iceland scored top marks overall for the second year running for the level of private and public sector pension benefits available, the sustainability of the system to last decades into the future and the quality of its governance, according to the survey by pensions consultants Mercer. Britain, which has been in the eye of a pensions storm in recent weeks as a sharp rise in gilts left the sector over-exposed to market moves, came in below a number of European countries as well as below Australia and Singapore. However, the UK scored more highly than 20th-ranked the United States, particularly over the adequacy of retirement provision and the integrity of the system. Britain was also higher than Germany, France and Italy, which scored poorly on the sustainability of their provisions and came in at 17th, 22nd and 32nd place respectively, while Canada slipped to 13th place from 12th last year. Japan was ranked in 35th place, China in 36th and India at 41."
Expensive cities are killing creativity - "musician Patti Smith was asked what advice she had for young people trying to make it in New York City. The long-time New Yorker’s take? Get out. “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling,” she said. “New York City has been taken away from you.”... New York – and San Francisco, London, Paris and other cities where cost of living has skyrocketed – are no longer places where you go to be someone. They are places you live when you are born having arrived. They are, as journalist Simon Kuper puts it, “the vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself”. There are exceptions in these cities, but they tend to survive by serving the rule. The New York Times recently profiled Sitters Studio, a company that sends artists and musicians into the homes of New York’s wealthiest families to babysit their children. “The artist-as-babysitter can be seen as a form of patronage,” suggests the Times, “in which lawyers, doctors and financiers become latter-day Medicis.”... She cites academic studies indicating that people are biased against creative minds. They crave the success of the result, but shun the process that produces it: The experimentation that may yield to failure, the rejection of social norms that breeds rejection of the artist herself. Today, creative industries are structured to minimise the diversity of their participants – economically, racially and ideologically. Credentialism, not creativity, is the passport to entry. Over the past decade, as digital media made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to share their ideas and works, barriers to professional entry tightened and geographical proximity became valued. Fields where advanced degrees were once a rarity – art, creative writing – now view them as a requirement. Unpaid internships and unpaid labour are rampant, blocking off industry access for those who cannot work without pay in the world’s most expensive cities. Yet to discuss it, as artist Molly Crabapple notes in her brilliant essay “Filthy Lucre”, is verboten. Recalling her years as a struggling artist, she remembers being told by a fellow artist – a successful man living off his inherited money – that a “real artist” must live in poverty."
The Design History of Athens Iconic Apartments - Bloomberg - "On first glance, a typical Athens polikatoikia doesn’t necessarily look like the answer to a host of urban issues. Built quickly and on the cheap — mainly from the 1950s to the 1980s — these modernist apartment buildings (pronounced “Pol-i-kat-i-KEE-A”) line street after street in the Greek capital, their repeated concrete facings and endless lines of unfurled balcony awnings giving the city an appearance of remarkable consistency. They may lack the elegance of Athens’ earlier neo-classical housing, but they have helped to create a city that is vibrant, socially integrated and (until recently) affordable, in which most residents’ housing offers broadly good living conditions... To keep costs down, developers adopted a modernist construction model — the Le Corbusier-developed Dom-Ino system, in which reinforced concrete pillars freed a building of the need for load-bearing interior walls. In Athens, this permitted the creation of a sort of modernist tenement. Industrial in construction, it was still aligned to a traditional street in densely packed urban neighborhoods, with differing building heights and lengths giving a haphazard, un-regimented impression. Despite the fast construction — usually to a civil engineer’s design rather than an architect’s — the generally family-sized apartments (i.e. 2-3 bedrooms) were often pleasant places to live. With deep, often wrap-around balconies that were frequently large enough to fit a full-sized dinner table and a wall of plants, the apartments had communal central heating (still a novelty across Europe in the 1950s), spacious common areas and surprisingly solid construction. The state contributed little or no cash to these buildings, but it did place limits on some aspects of their design. It ensured, for example, that any polikatoikia rising above six floors was set back in tiers from that floor upwards. This created a characteristic Athenian roof-scape, in which little ziggurats of penthouse-style flats, with broad wrap-around terraces, could be found topping many buildings, even in less wealthy areas. The resulting variety of apartments within the same building ensured a good deal of social mixing"
Is There Science Behind Why Teens Wear Hoodies In Summer Heat? - "I am the former president of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and a climate scientist. I know a little bit about heat so this observation has nagged at me for awhile... an essay by Ian Lecklitner in Mel Magazine titled, “Stop Bagging on People Who Wear Hoodies During Summer.” He went on to lay out several reasons including:
Protection from cancer-causing Ultraviolet (UV) radiation
Armor against pesky mosquitoes
More pockets
Body image concerns
Frankly, these all make sense to me. My own son even says it is cold in some of his classrooms. One explanation that really caught my eye was consistent with many of the tweet explanations. Lecklitner writes, “hoodies provide more than just physical comfort; they administer emotional comfort, too, similar to that of a weighted blanket.”... Lecklitner hypothesized in his essay that perhaps hoodies serve a similar function as weighted blankets... A quick search on my favorite shopping app revealed that weighted hoodies are actually a “thing.” Who knew?"
Thread by @mcjude on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Some of you out there may recall that in 2016 I played an excellent Christmas prank on my long-suffering Dad. It worked a treat. *Brussels Sprouts in Ferrero Rocher wrappers*
Last year I decided to play the long game & didn’t tamper with the confectionary: spooked by the year before, he would not touch a single Ferrero Rocher (which was great because he usually inhales them at 750mph) so there were Ferreros aplenty for the rest of us. I bided my time. And so, yesterday, home for Christmas and with the devil at my elbow, I embarked on my most audacious sprout prank yet. While he was out I dipped the sprouts in chocolate, rolled them in chopped hazelnuts, and did all I could to replicate the iconic Ferrerro. I re-wrapped and (this is crucial) re-sealed the box with its original tape and a tiny dab of glue. Then secreted it amongst a bag of tasty gifts from my Aunt and retired to watch from afar... He opened. He EXAMINED. He unwrapped. He examined FURTHER. Fears allayed, he popped the whole thing in his mouth. His face played a symphony of emotions: satisfaction, triumph, smugness, consternation, confusion, realisation, horror, disgust."
Facebook - "Spotify and streaming are not the problem. Too much music is... Streaming has been around for over a decade, plenty of time for musicians to unite and form a union or an advocacy group that could study Spotify’s extremely transparent numbers and come up with a more fair payment plan. But no one has and that’s because the math doesn’t work. Even if Spotify doubled what they paid out, which they can’t afford to do, it would make no significant difference. Streaming isn’t keeping musicians from making a living. The real issue is that music is an over saturated market. There are too many musicians and too much music. Spotify estimates that there are 60k songs uploaded to their platform DAILY. Now think about how much music is uploaded to Soundcloud, Youtube, Tidal, Apple, Amazon, and on and on and on. You know the whole economic theory about the more there is of something, the less it's worth? The barrier to becoming a musician has been lowered to the ground. And that's great in terms of giving everyone equal access, but due to the influx of people participating, well, that's what has devalued the product. If diamonds grew on trees we could get a basket of them at the corner market for $3.99. Plus, the lower bar hasn't created an influx of more musical geniuses, but it has given us an abundance of very good musicians. The downside to so much great music is it’s harder for individual musicians to rise to the top. I listen to and read about music for a living, and I still can’t keep up with all of the good music just in my niche. Every single day I come across new music from new artists. The simple truth is that the market can not supply every good musician with a full time living making music. If NO ONE created another song from this moment on, you would still never get through all of the music that has already been made. As a matter of fact, the popularity of catalogue music, songs more than 18 months old, rose from 60.8% in 2018 to 66.4% in 2021. In sharp contrast, new music listenership is falling. That’s why all of these legacy artists are selling their catalogs right now... There was ONE golden period in the mid to late 20th century when a significant number of musicians and the music business were able to harness the market well enough that it really seemed like being a successful professional musician meant being well paid (even though they were all ripping each other off back then too.) The truth is, there was still always a very limited number, as compared to other professions, of musicians who were able to make a good living from music for an extended period of time. For the majority of musicians, just having a 2 to 3 successful album cycle was an epic win. And most professional musicians still made a low to middle class salary, it was only after the idea of the musical star was born that a limited number started raking in the big bucks. For the majority of human civilization, making a living from being a musician was obtainable by a very small number of people... We as humans have over-glamorized and overvalued music. It’s a natural, abundant resource that the majority of humans can create... I often feel like I am in a giant feedback loop of people saying that Spotify is stealing money from artists without anyone ever acknowledging the massive benefits of streaming... The fact is most bands that have listeners on streaming services, would not sell an equivalent amount of records... The musician is the brand and the music is just one of the products. People will buy stuff from musicians that have value - whether it's tickets to a show or live stream, t-shirts, specialty products, one on ones, VIP packages, music lessons, deluxe editions, demos, books, etc etc. Musicians are only limited by their own creativity when it comes to selling products."
Theist Thug Life - Posts | Facebook - "If you havent already heard, the new Barna numbers recently came out with some very concerning numbers. Overall, a large majority of people claiming to be Christian pastors, people charged with leading local bodies of believers, do not possess a biblical worldview. So, how Barna defines a biblical worldview: "For the purposes of the survey, a “biblical worldview” was defined as believing that absolute moral truth exists; the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches; Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic; a person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or do good works; Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today. In the research, anyone who held all of those beliefs was said to have a biblical worldview.""
Elon Musk Says a Tesla Catgirl Robot Is Coming - "Optimus remains a work in progress, said the tycoon. Tesla will work on different use cases, including cooking and gardening. And Tesla plans to build a catgirl, a super-heroin equivalent, sparking the imagination even more."
Exclusive: Surveillance Footage of Tesla Crash on Bay Bridge - "Highway surveillance footage from Thanksgiving Day shows a Tesla Model S vehicle changing lanes and then abruptly braking in the far-left lane of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle crash. The crash injured nine people, including a 2-year-old child, and blocked traffic on the bridge for over an hour... Most Read What Matt Gaetz and AOC Talked About During Kevin McCarthy’s Speaker Vote Ryan Grim House Rules Package Gives Democrats a Path to Averting a Debt Ceiling Crisis Ryan Grim The GOP’s Kevin McCarthy Debacle Is an Insurrection by Other Means James Risen In recent months, a surge of reports have emerged in which Tesla drivers complained of sudden “phantom braking,” causing the vehicle to slam on its brakes at high speeds... Musk said that “Full Self-Driving” was an “essential” feature for Tesla to develop, going as far as saying, “It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”"
Mjarchie on Twitter - "Watched a @Tesla catch on fire this morning. As soon as it started smoking the electrical system locked trapping the guy inside. Luckily construction workers broke the window so he could escape. Neat feature"
Meme - Kids_kubed @Kids_kubed: "Dear students, I too hate group work. I don't assign it bc I think it will teach you how to work together. I assign it to teach you how to deal with incompetent and lazy ppl at work. You're welcome"
Meme - "Todd: Service was awful, food was great. Many items were not available. The service was so bad it was actually entertaining."
"Hey Todd, go kill yourself. Why don't you try opening your own place during covid era. Why don't you come and be a great server? There's plenty of people wanting to work now huh? I hope people like you don't come back to my restaurant because you only care for yourself and not what others are going through. Have nice life."
Proving the point about bad service
Testosterone Administration Induces A Red Shift in Democrats - "We tested the fixity of political preferences of 136 healthy males during the 2011 U.S. presidential election season by administering synthetic testosterone or placebo to participants who had identified the strength of their political affiliation. Before the testosterone treatment, we found that weakly affiliated Democrats had 19% higher basal testosterone than those who identified strongly with the party (p=0.015). When weakly affiliated Democrats received additional testosterone, the strength of their party fell by 12% (p=.01) and they reported 45% warmer feelings towards Republican candidates for president (p < 0.001). Our results demonstrate that testosterone induces a “red shift" among weakly-affiliated Democrats. This effect was associated with improved mood. No effects were found of testosterone administration for strongly affiliated Democrats or strong or weak Republicans. Our findings provide evidence that neuroactive hormones affect political preferences."
Thread by @rachmonroe - "This is a thread about what it’s like to be Elon Musk’s neighbor. Briefly, Several years ago SpaceX moved some of its operations to Boca Chica, Texas, a small beach community of fixed-income retirees. They promised to be good neighbors... This quiet community by a wildlife preserve now had 24/7 construction, big trucks at all hours, bright lights at night, awful disruption. What does this mean? A sheriff’s deputy bangs on your door at 10pm and tells you there’s a rocket test that night between 3-4am. Now, this is a mile from your house. And every previous rocket has blown up. So you can either cross your fingers that nothing bad happens, or grab your pets and try to find somewhere safe to hunker down at night in the middle of the pandemic. This has happened nearly every night since May 3. At the same time, the public beach — one of the only free open spaces in the area, which was described to me as “the poor ppl’s beach” (in a good way) is completely shut down while SpaceX is testing -- which has been pretty much constantly this entire month In SpaceX’s original FAA filing, they claimed there would be a handful of tests a year, minimal disruption to local life (human & animal), rarely closing the beach, never on weekends. This was all, frankly, bullshit... It's infuriating. There are SO few places like Boca Chica left. It's beautiful, undeveloped, beloved by locals, part of a key wildlife corridor. A place where ppl w/out a lot of money can live near the beach. And Elon Musk has just taken it over because he wants it. "
Of course, if he had situated his operations elsewhere even more people would be complaining. So the solution is to set up in the middle of nowhere where there are no neighbours? Or move to another country
Would people be complaining as much about NASA?
Sex, Pranks, Awkward, Dad jokes and Intimacy: Dad jokes! - FML - "Today, my boyfriend came over to have dinner with my parents. They got quite drunk, and my mom shouted at him, "Have you had sex with my daughter?" As he was shaking his head, my dad said, "I have" in a really creepy voice, thinking it would be funny. It wasn't. FML"
Can you hear me? NUS associate professor lectures for 2 hours without realising he's on mute - "Associate Professor Wang was seen wrapping up his lecture with a Q&A section. However, he was met with complete silence from the class... "Students tried all sorts of things to get his attention by unmuting and even calling his phone number", the student explained. However, Wang did not seem to notice the phone calls and moved along with the lesson. Many students left the lecture, seeing that there was no end to the technical difficulty."
Meme - Fesshole @fesshole: "After a heavy drinking session, I shat the bed. Told the wife it was the dog to avoid embarrassment. The size and stench was so bad that she took him to the vet, and found out he was showing early signs of stomach cancer. I inadvertently saved my dog but can never take credit"
France, Germany, and Europe Are Thinking Harder About Divorcing America - " If there is something to Westlessness, therefore, it is how quickly some Europeans have forgotten how unattractive the world looked before Pax Americana. Rarely has the West had it as good as it does now. The United States may be demanding a more balanced relationship on everything from trade to security, but that is a small price to pay for what a U.S.-led international system has to offer. The United States may not be a cheap date, but unlike China, its affections for Europe are genuine—and enduring."
From 2020
Meme - Tupac Chopra @N_Kognito: ""When has violence ever solved anything?" The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)
Everyone saying "look at Haiti now" has a small penis"
Google to Face $5B Lawsuit Over Tracking Users in Incognito Mode - "when a user visits a website in Incognito mode their data can still be collected by Google Analytics."
Site-Shot - Capture a Website screenshot - "Site-Shot: Web page screenshot service, that provides rich interface to make any kind of web screenshots online for free with no limits. In add-on it provides powerful API to automate website screenshot generation."
The tiny ‘country’ between England and Scotland - "For 300 years, the Debatable Lands flourished as an anarchic no-man's land; not independent, but too dangerous for either Scotland or England to be able – or want – to take control of."
'World's dirtiest man' dies at 94, months after his first wash - "According to the region’s district head, Haji had for decades avoided fresh food and believed that “if he cleans himself, he will get sick”"
Meme - "Not gonna be active on Discord tonight. I'm meeting a girl (a real one) in half an hour (wouldn't expect a lot of you to understand anyway) so please don't DM me asking me where I am (im with the girl, ok) you'll most likely get aired because ill be with the girl (again I don't expect you to understand) shes actually really interested in me and its not a situation i can pass up for some meaningless Discord degenerates (because ill be meeting a girl, not that you really are going to understand) this is my life now. Meeting women and not wasting my precious time online, I have to move on from such simple things and branch out (you wouldnt understand) @everyone"
"What in the fuck"
Meme - "When everyone thinks you've been launching missiles in the ocean because you're a madman, In reality you've been the only thing holding back Godzilla for years *Kim Jong Un*"
Facebook - "Bubba Wallace tried to kill another driver on the track, intentionally wrecking him going 170MPH, and then got out and tried to fight him. The woke media cares more about the slip knot hoax he decided was a noose (that the FBI actually investigated!) than the murder this dude tried to commit on the race track. Unsurprising, but still disappointing"
Meme - "This is Ralph. Ralph is a concept, created by you while reading this. When you stop, Ralph ceases to exist. Your attention is the thin barrier between Ralph and the void. "I'm scared," says Ralph *frog*"
The Moment a Room Full of John Fetterman Supporters Fell Silent in Pennsylvania Senate Debate With Mehmet Oz - "In his highly anticipated debate against Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman was asked to square two conflicting statements: one saying he’s never supported fracking, and another saying he’s always supported fracking. “Uh, I do support fracking, and, I don’t—I don’t—I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking”... The fracking moment seemed to neatly capture the lieutenant governor’s speaking vulnerabilities after his stroke in May, as well as his difficulty Tuesday night in combating Oz’s attacks while maneuvering his auditory processing issues with closed captioning... Fetterman’s deliberate, sometimes muddled answers struggled to keep up with the ticking clock that dictated the length of his and Oz’s responses... For weeks, the Fetterman campaign has tried to tamp down expectations for the debate, the only one in the hotly contested Senate race scheduled before the November election. Their rollout started with an interview on NBC News, during which Fetterman used closed captioning to communicate with the reporter. The system, he said, allows him to understand questions quicker because he continues to struggle with auditory processing following his stroke in May."
Online, some Democratic shills were claiming that pausing to think before responding was a good thing
Don't bring a stroke victim to a debate with a television star - "After suffering a debilitating stroke, Fetterman has been mostly supplanted on the campaign trail by his wife and substitute Senate candidate Gisele. Lady McFetterman, whom Joe Biden already declared would be a "great lady in the Senate," went apoplectic on an NBC reporter who pointed out that the former mayor of Braddock's speech processing problems render him unable to engage in small talk. As the polls and the pupils of the nation narrowed in Pennsylvania, Fetterman simply had to put up or shut up... Even if the former Columbia professor and Oprah protege weren't sparring with a barely sentient stroke victim, Oz provided close to perfect answers, the sort that should prove textbook for all GOP swing state candidates... The only winner among Democrats tonight? Biden, who, at nearly 80 years old, seems positively poised next to Fetterman's performance tonight."
Harvard studies on infant monkeys draw fire, split scientists - "Hobaiter and her graduate student, Gal Badihi, sent a letter to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) signed by more than 250 animal behavior researchers, grad students, and postdocs, asking it to retract Livingstone’s most recent publication... Such efforts could crush research “critical for human survival and empathy,” says Bertha Madras, a neuroscientist at Harvard who has conducted brain imaging studies of monkeys for decades but doesn’t work directly with Livingstone. “If we’re going to understand how the brain functions, we’re going to have to do experiments that generate visceral reactions,” she says. “We have to be looking at the greater good.”... Harvard says all of Livingstone’s work rigorously follows federal guidelines for animal research, and it has been approved by the university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which is designed to ensure that animals are properly cared for and only necessary experiments take place. That’s a point echoed by Michael Goldberg, a neurologist at Columbia University who treats human patients and studies perception in monkeys. These committees don’t take their jobs lightly, says Goldberg, who was one of the reviewers of this year’s PNAS paper; they only approve experiments if there’s no other way to answer the question. Livingstone’s work is “ethical and justified,” he says. “This isn’t unnecessary cruelty to animals—it’s critical research.”"
If you don't like research, just demand it be retracted, since "unethical" research is clearly erroneous.
Of course, animal research is now going to get even harder.
