this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Science Memes

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He did though. (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] seth 186 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

He owns a yacht. I'd be interested to hear of a single yacht owner who is a decent person. I'm not sure one exists.

Edit: Thanks for the cool examples of decent people with yachts!

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago

The one guy who downvoted owns a yacht

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Some people live on yachts and that’s their entire home. So like a 70,000£ yacht, then like 300£ a month in slip (berth) fees, including electric and whatnot. I strongly considered it. It’s roughly the same cost but better than caravan living, IMO.

It’s a decent alternative to a landlocked home.

But yeah, millionaires with yachts are a different thing.

[–] seth 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a good use case. I'd be interested to know more about the idiosyncrasies that come with that lifestyle, like if they go out to sea when a storm is expected, or just weather it out in the harbor.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

They are almost always better in their dock, specifically boats optimised as condos are terrible at sea since open ocean is not in their design brief

Perhaps they might be better up river as far as they can go

[–] chemical_cutthroat 30 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Noah seemed like a chill dude. Man liked his drink, for sure. Loved animals...

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

Noah would've been a genocide-complicit, doomsday cult prepper, similar to those who build private libertarian cities on the ocean or some planet as a climate adaptation strategy.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Noah was the original Joe Exotic, except with every single exotic pet in existence

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Noah brought along mosquitos, the guy is filled with hate

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Not sure he could have kept them off the boat.

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[–] grue 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This person seems decent. Her and her S.O. live on a 50-year-old 36' sailboat that they bought for $7000 and refit themselves.

[–] seth 11 points 1 year ago

That's an excellent exception, and quite interesting. Thanks for the link!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

My cousin did this with her wife and they are very decent.

The thing was a floating money pit though and was usually broken down and was sometimes uninhabitable because of various issues.

Then the hull got damaged in a storm when waves banged it against the dock over and over again.

Now they own a nice little house.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My ex-teamlead owns a yacht (if he didn't sell it). The catch is that yacht is worth about $40 thousands, not $4 millions.

Also there was a person in USSR who built a yacht and circumnavigated the Earth on that, not everyone who do own a yach own that luxury slab of floating gold

[–] AnUnusualRelic 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's awfully cheap for a yacht. Did it float?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

You wouldn't gentrify the oceans 😳

[–] [email protected] 184 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Nestlé has been patenting human milk proteins for decades. To my understanding, this prevents other companies to add such molecules to baby formula, even if somehow methods to synthesize said molecules were developed.

That is a scary notion, a malevolous intent and a gross outcome.

[–] ForgotAboutDre 70 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These shouldn't hold up. Wouldn't the prior work of thousands of generations of mothers invalidate such a patent.

[–] Darkard 111 points 1 year ago (5 children)

"Excuse me madam but do you have a license to use those tits? No? Didn't think so. The content of those bazongas is Nestle property. I'm afraid I'm going to have to clamp those nipples until such time as the proper Bandonkadonk subscriptions are paid"

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i got this new legal drama plot. basically there's this patent infringer except she's got huge boobs. i mean some serious honkers. a real set of badonkers. packin some dobonhonkeros. massive dohoonkabhankoloos. big ol' tonhongerekoogers.

what happens next?!

lawyer shows up with even bigger bonkhonagahoogs. humongous hungolomghononoloughongous

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[–] grue 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you considered a career in avian taxonomy?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Who doesn't like the dickcissel or the tufted tit-mouse?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Something doesn't add up here since you can't patent anything for decades.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I read that as:

For decades, Nestle has been patenting milk proteins.

They've been doing it for a long time, not somehow getting extra-long patents.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Prior work exists, source: all of history lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Imagine Nestle executives finding a time machine and going to all of history's most famous persons' mothers and telling them how they can't breastfeed their kids.

Someone should definitely write a book about that

[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago

"...he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee."

Fuck this guy

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.

If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.

The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.

I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.

What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.

[–] QZM 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish.

What field are you in? In the life sciences, there's normally a fee to publish closed-access and a higher one for open-access. My last paper was open access and costed about 3500, compared to 1500 pay walled.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

no fees in closed access in organic chemistry, as far as i know. some other subfields can be different

open access can be easily two, three grands, and you better have a grant that covers this

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It depends on the journal. I've only published in medical related journals, but some journals don't charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.

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[–] iAvicenna 7 points 1 year ago

This guy probably lives in his own small world. If you want to publish in PLOS as a researcher from say Turkey or Uzbekistan or any other country where the value of your money is nil, you might easily have to pay your yearly salary or half of your funding to get a single paper published.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tbf he evolutionarily developed that genome all by himself. That's how capitalism works

[–] peopleproblems 25 points 1 year ago

He also had a history of being screwed by people. The guy did a lot of good work, and arguably his attempt at patenting it was instrumental in preventing it from being patented. I don't think that was his intention, but good came from it.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

What even is this argument?

"Scientists who say they can't afford to do X should do X"? Does he think this makes him sound smart?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. Or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But it's mostly a scam. The costs don't remotely compare to the revenue. Reviewers time is not paid, and there's a price to both publish and access. It's all about the prestige to publish. If you contact the author directly they'll typically gladly send you the article for free.

[–] AeonFelis 8 points 1 year ago

Not to mention that system started about four centuries ago, long before the Internet was invented. I'd assume that back then, the costs and effort of operating a journal really did justify the prices they charged.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Venter is one of the many quacks who promised that he'd find the "aging gene" and switch it off. People threw a lot of money at him about twenty years ago.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Haven't we known about the aging part of genes (telomeres) for like 80 years

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