Tag: us

US Child Marriage

3499 children were married in New Jersey between 1995 and 2012. Most were age 16 or 17 and married with parental consent, but 178 were between ages 10 and 15, meaning a judge approved their marriages. 91% of the children were married to adults, often at ages or with age differences that could have triggered statutory-rape charges, not a marriage license. A judge in 2006 approved the marriage of a 10-year-old boy to an 18-year-old woman. A judge in 1996 allowed a 12-year-old girl to marry a 25-year-old man.

1B Americans

Interesting speculation:

an open-borders America of a billion people would, in substance, be as different a polity from the polity that the United States of America is today, as the Roman Empire of the 2nd century AD was from the Roman Republic of the 3rd century BC

2020-02-22: It’s disappointing that open borders are outside the Overton window: Restrictions on immigration are the equivalent of leaving “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.”

Built for Eternity

The clock under construction in Texas will be astronomical, mechanical and solar-powered, and will tell time in a similar way to the Hoover Dam’s celestial map, only with moving parts. Those parts will be made from durable but worthless materials (to deter vandals) designed to never corrode or degrade each other in friction. It promises to be in perfect working order some time in the near-ish future. The clock has been in development since 1986. It will be very large, standing over 60m tall. It will be hidden behind 2 heavy metal doors in the side of the mountain and will require the ascension of steep, winding stairwells to navigate its parts and to make it work. There it will be occasionally ticking, like a bomb. The only light will come from a small window at the very top of the clock’s chamber; inside you will not be able to see anything, it will be so dark you will need to have brought your own light source. The chamber will house bells that can play more than 3.5M unique variations of sound, programmed by Brian Eno, when the clock chimes.

Watching Sandra Bland

The Texas state trooper threatening to use his Taser on Sandra Bland (a driver he’d pulled over for the infraction of failing to signal when she changed lanes), shouting “I’m going to light you up!” Without the Garner video, there would have been eyewitnesses but no seemingly incontrovertible testimony. Without the camera on Officer Brian Encinia’s dashboard, most of us might never have heard what happened to Sandra Bland. The existence of such evidence helps in investigations and prosecutions; it’s supposed to be a deterrent to both bad behavior on the part of the cops and false allegations of police abuse. But it does not guarantee either better behavior or justice. A grand jury declined to indict the police officers in the Eric Garner case. More broadly, it puts us in a strange, morally exigent position: we can’t say we didn’t see, we never knew; we have no plausible deniability. The videos keep coming out.

Jamestown

Yesterday, the Jamestown Rediscovery and the Smithsonian Institution announced that they had identified the remains of Capt. Gabriel Archer, Rev. Robert Hunt, Sir Ferdinando Wainman and Capt. William West, 4 of the earliest leaders of the Jamestowne settlement. Among Archer’s remnants was a small silver box that researchers have identified as a Roman Catholic reliquary.

Biosimilars

Unlike the more common small-molecule drugs, biologics generally exhibit high molecular complexity, and may be quite sensitive to changes in manufacturing processes. Follow-on manufacturers do not have access to the originator’s molecular clone and original cell bank, nor to the exact fermentation and purification process, nor to the active drug substance. They do have access to the commercialized innovator product. Various factors, such as safety, pricing, manufacturing, entry barriers, physician acceptance, and marketing, will make the biosimilar market develop different from the generic market. The high cost to enter the market and the size of the biologic drug market make entry attractive but risky.

US Human Rights Record

this is trolling on the level of the putin editorial in the NYT. it’s effective because they have a point:

in 2014, the US, a self-proclaimed human rights defender, saw no improvements in its existent human rights issues, but reported numerous new problems. While its own human rights situation was increasingly grave, the US violated human rights in other countries in a more brazen manner, and was given more “red cards” in the international human rights field.

unsurprising OPM hack

the Unix systems administrator for the project was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the People’s Republic of China. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root

you don’t really need any cloak & dagger theory with rampant incompetence like this