I believe in free education, one that’s available to everyone; no matter their race, gender, age, wealth, etc… This masterpost was created for every knowledge hungry individual out there. I hope it will serve you well. Enjoy!
FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)
Please feel free to add more learning focused websites.
*There are a lot more learning websites out there, but I picked the ones that are, as far as I’m aware, completely free and in my opinion the best/ most useful.
Maine farmers have blamed recent changes at the U.S. Postal Service after receiving thousands of dead baby chicks due to shipping delays. The state’s postal workers blamed the slowdown on a bill championed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, that “weakened the Postal Service” — and faces a tough re-election battle this fall.
At least 4,800 chicks shipped to Maine farmers through the USPS have arrived dead in recent weeks, the Portland Press Herald reported.
“It’s one more of the consequences of this disorganization, this sort of chaos they’ve created at the post office and nobody thought through when they were thinking of slowing down the mail,” Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, told the newspaper. “This is a system that’s always worked before and it’s worked very well until these changes started being made.”
“Shortly after or right at the same time that [DeJoy] came on board … the company line was that it was a cost-saving measure,” Kimberly Karol, president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union, told Salon. “But the reality is that it impacts service standards and, whether intentionally or not, this changes the time frames that our customers receive the mail.”
Postal workers say the agency would not be in a financial hole if not for the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), a bill co-sponsored by Collins back in 2005. The bill required the agency to pre-fund retirement health benefits 75 years in advance, something not required of any other federal entity.
Collins said on the Senate floor in 2006 that it was “not a perfect bill” but “I am convinced it will put the U.S. Postal Service on a sound financial footing for years to come.”
Instead, the agency’s financial troubles have largely been the result of the mandate in the law, which passed with bipartisan support in 2006 during a lame-duck session before Democrats took over the Senate.
“That kind of put us in a hole on paper and made it look like we were losing money,” Mark Seitz, president of the National Association Letter Carriers, Local 92 union, told the Maine Beacon.
An Israeli COVID-19 breath test has correctly identified all positive patients in a clinical trial in Wuhan, China, according to a newly peer-reviewed study.
The device uses nanotechnology to identify compounds from the lung that are present in the breath of coronavirus patients, Prof. Hossam Haick of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology told The Times of Israel on Friday.
He said that it is fully automatic, eliminating the need for anyone to come in to contact with the patient to handle their sample, which is good for efficiency and for hygiene.
“You just blow into the device, which is the size of a smartphone, for 2 to 3 seconds, from a distance of 2 centimeters away,” he said. “There are no accessories, it requires no lab processing, and it gives results within 30 seconds of blowing.”
The current prototypes of the device are half-held, but Haick said that the final product will require no touch, meaning that the “danger of cross-contamination is very low.”
The technology is being developed for the market by the company Nanose Medical, where Haick serves as chief technology officer, and he predicted tests will cost around $2 to $3 per person.
The clinical trial examined 140 people, 49 of them confirmed coronavirus patients. It identified all carriers as coronavirus positive, but erred with the results of seven healthy people, reporting them to be positive.
Regular swab tests also throw up some false positives, but it’s not known exactly how many, as people often assume their result is correct and they are asymptomatic. Doctors are less concerned about false positives, which can cause inconvenience by needlessly worrying and quarantining people, than false negatives that can lead people to assume wrongly they are virus-free and spread the coronavirus.
Haick said that in his design, he emphasized accurate assessment of people who are sick, but with respiratory conditions other than coronavirus. “Think about winter time, when people will have lots of conditions, such as influenza and colds, that make them feel sick but aren’t COVID-19, and it’s very important we can differentiate between them correctly,” he commented.
While there is a flurry of reports about new fast-testing technologies, Haick said that his has credentials to prove its seriousness.
The trial was approved by authorities in China, and, unlike some other innovations, results have been peer-reviewed and published earlier this week in a scientific journal, ACS Nano. “This was peer-reviewed, which is important, as it indicates we are meeting the standards of the scientific community,” said Haick.
Kanye West faced some 5:01 and heartbreak on Thursday.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission tossed out West’s efforts to qualify for the 2020 presidential ballot in the swing state, ruling that because his campaign didn’t submit its ballot signatures until shortly after the state’s 5 p.m. legal deadline on August 4, they weren’t valid to qualify him for the ballot.
The 5-1 ruling by the bipartisan commission is the latest blow to West’s quixotic and shambolic campaign, which has been buoyed by organized Republican efforts to try to help him qualify for the ballot in hopes he’ll siphon young and Black votes away from Joe Biden.
The decision comes after Republicans made a quiet last-minute push to qualify West for the ballot. Signature-gatherers spent the last two days before the state filing deadline trying to qualify the rapper for the ballot.
As VICE News first reported, the signatures were submitted by Lane Ruhland, a well-established Republican attorney who just weeks ago represented President Trump’s campaign in court. But she just missed the legal cutoff to get West on as a spoiler candidate.
Ruhland claimed in an affidavit that she was told she was in the office at 5 p.m. and 14 seconds, and West’s current lawyer, Mike Curran, argued that this counted as by no later than 5 p.m. But according to testimonial from the commission staff, Ruhland entered the building until 5 p.m. and 14 seconds, and didn’t enter the office itself until 5:01 or 5:02. Even after she entered the office she needed “several minutes” to organize and number the papers before she handed them off to the office staff, according to testimony.
Dean Knudson, a Republican member of the commission, pointed out that the law requires the papers “be in the physical possession” of the election officers, and noted that most of Curran’s arguments focused on delays caused at the door of the building.
“Five o’clock is five o’clock. I understand you’re trying to make the argument that five o’clock is 5:01,” said Knudson. “If we had set a timer to go off at 5, would the papers have been in on time or not?”
Ruhland’s failed effort appears to be part of a broader, somewhat coordinated effort by Republicans to get West on the ballot in a number of states. Well-connected Republicans also worked to qualify West for the ballot in a number of other states including Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, and Vermont.
The efforts from West’s quasi-campaign and the GOP mischief-makers trying to help him haven’t gone so well, however. West’s efforts to get on the ballot in Montana, Illinois, and New Jersey were all rejected after staff failed to get enough valid signatures to qualify.
“It goes beyond being disingenuous,” Johnson told The Hill. “When you take sorting machines out of the post office, that were expressly put in to be rapid sorters to ensure mail is timely, and the rationale is making it quicker, that is lying.”
Johnson said the changes, outlined in an NAACP lawsuit filed Thursday against the Postal Service and DeJoy, were electorally motivated.
“It is not only seeking to undermine elections and subvert democracy, it is putting people’s lives at risk,” said Johnson.
In the lawsuit, the NAACP alleges the post office did not follow proper legal procedures before implementing DeJoy’s program, rendering the reforms illegal.
The NAACP further alleges that the changes have resulted “in unreliable service and widespread delays.”
A spokesperson for the Postal Service referred The Hill to a Monday statement by DeJoy, where he said the service “is ready today to handle whatever volume of election mail it receives this fall.”
And DeJoy on Tuesday backed down from his ambitious reform program, as 20 states threatened to sue the Postal Service.
“That’s fine, but the changes already made have created harm, so we’re addressing the harm created,” said Johnson.
Johnson said that harm is twofold: People who depend on the mail for essential items like medicine could suffer from postal delays, and electorally, confidence in the security of voting by mail has been undermined.
“When you cut the hours and ability for overtime for post workers leading into a high-volume season for the election [and] the end result will be mail not delivered in a timely manner, you are seeking to undermine our election,” said Johnson.
Johnson added that voters of color and poor voters, who are less likely to participate in elections, are more likely to be disenfranchised by actions that undermine trust in voting methods.
In a recent poll of Latino and Black voters for Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, both groups were found to have distrust of mail-in voting systems.
Half of Latino voters surveyed said they planned to vote by mail, and half of Black voters said they would prefer to do so.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
