Sorry but Atsushi talking to Vamp!Akutagawa like their deathmatch appointment is still on the table will never not crack me up
Like bro that fight is off. It's been cancelled. He literally died for you and came back as an undead minion of the enemy. And now you're about to die too because you can't bring yourself to hurt him. Like I feel like we're way past whatever emotionally constipated rivalry rituals you guys had going on prior to this arc
Well fucks? Get to it!
He’s So Cute 😍
Anas had been studying medicine in Venezuela when he briefly visited his home in Gaza in 2023. The war broke out, and you know the rest.
A staunch supporter of the LGBTQ+ community himself, he reached out to his friends in Venezuela to thank them for not misportraying Palestinians as a bigoted people, and shared the stories of some of the martyrs with them.
During an event celebrating Trans pride, they decided to speak about Anas, and set up a beautiful memorial for the martyrs Anas spoke about.
There are those who try to break the bonds between the oppressed. I suspect there will be many who will try to respond to this, arguing that these causes are incompatible.
There are others like Anas who recognize the unbreakable strength in unity, compassion and acceptance.
Anas is currently very ill. My heart aches with every update from him. Sometimes he tells me he feels these days are his last.
Please don't give up on Anas.
VETTER HERE AT GAZA-EVACUATION-FUNDS
coz there's no way it just ended here
My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.
I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”
We were deprived of in-story interactions between Tooru Oikawa and Kuroo Tetsurou because Furudate wanted to save us from having not one, but two bi menaces losers embarrassingly pining for their childhood friend for as long as they can remember on screen at the same time.
"The state, which has long ranked worst in the US for child wellbeing, became the first and only in the country to offer free childcare to a majority of families
There was a moment, just before the pandemic, when Lisset Sanchez thought she might have to drop out of college because the cost of keeping her three children in daycare was just too much.
Even with support from the state, she and her husband were paying $800 a month – about half of what Sanchez and her husband paid for their mortgage in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
But during the pandemic, that cost went down to $0. And Sanchez was not only able to finish college, but enroll in nursing school. With a scholarship that covered her tuition and free childcare, Sanchez could afford to commute to school, buy groceries for her growing family – even after she had two more children – and pay down the family’s mortgage and car loan.
“We are a one-income household,” said Sanchez, whose husband works while she is in school. Having free childcare “did help tremendously”.
...Three years ago, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to offer free childcare to a majority of families. The United States has no federal, universal childcare – and ranks 40th on a Unicef ranking of 41 high-income countries’ childcare policies, while maintaining some of the highest childcare costs in the world. Expanding on pandemic-era assistance, New Mexico made childcare free for families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level, or about $124,000 for a family of four. That meant about half of New Mexican children now qualified.
In one of the poorest states in the nation, where the median household income is half that and childcare costs for two children could take up 80% of a family’s income, the impact was powerful. The state, which had long ranked worst in the nation for child wellbeing, saw its poverty rate begin to fall.
As the state simultaneously raised wages for childcare workers, and became the first to base its subsidy reimbursement rates on the actual cost of providing such care, early childhood educators were also raised out of poverty. In 2020, 27.4% of childcare providers – often women of color – were living in poverty. By 2024, that number had fallen to 16%.
During the state’s recent legislative session, lawmakers approved a “historic” increase in funding for education, including early childhood education, that might improve those numbers even further...
When now-governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced her candidacy in late 2016, she emphasized her desire to address the state’s low child wellbeing rating. And when she took office in January 2018, she described her aim to have a “moonshot for education”: major investments in education across the state, from early childhood through college.
That led to her opening the state’s early childhood education and care department in 2019 – and tapping Groginksy, who had overseen efforts to improve early childhood policies in Washington DC, to run it. Then, in 2020, Lujan Grisham threw her support behind a bill in the state legislature that would establish an Early Childhood Trust Fund: by investing $300m – plus budget surpluses each year, largely from oil and gas revenue – the state hoped to distribute a percentage to fund early childhood education each year.
But then, just weeks after the trust fund was established, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
“Covid created a really enormous moment for childcare,” said Heinz. “We had somewhat of a national reckoning about the fact that we don’t have a workforce if we don’t have childcare.”
As federal funding flooded into New Mexico, the state directed millions of dollars toward childcare, including by boosting pay for entry-level childcare providers to $15 an hour, expanding eligibility for free childcare to families making 400% of the poverty level, and becoming the first state in the nation to set childcare subsidy rates at the true cost of delivering care.
As pandemic-era relief funding dried up in 2022, the governor and Democratic lawmakers proposed another way to generate funds for childcare – directing a portion of the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to early childhood education and care. Like the Early Childhood Trust Fund, the permanent fund – which was established when New Mexico became a state – was funded by taxes on fossil fuel revenues. That November, 70% of New Mexican voters approved a constitutional amendment directing 1.25% of the fund to early childhood programs.
By then, the Early Childhood Trust Fund had grown exponentially – due to the boom in oil and gas prices. Beginning with $300m in 2020, the fund had swollen to over $9bn by the end of 2024...
New Mexico has long had one of the highest “official poverty rates” in the nation.
But using a metric that accounts for social safety net programs – like universal childcare – that’s slowly shifting. According to “supplemental poverty” data, 17.1% of New Mexicans fell below the federal “supplemental” poverty line from 2013 to 2015 (a metric that takes into account cost of living and social supports) – making it the fifth poorest state in the nation by that measure. But today, that number has fallen to 10.9%, one of the biggest changes in the country, amounting to 120,000 fewer New Mexicans living in poverty.
New Mexico’s child wellbeing ranking – which is based heavily on “official poverty” rankings – probably won’t budge, says Heinz because “the amount of money coming into households, that they have to run their budget, remains very low.
“However, the thing New Mexico has done that’s fairly tremendous, I think, is around families not having to have as much money going out,” she said.
During the recent legislative session, lawmakers deepened their investments in early childhood education even further, approving a 21.6% increase of $170m for education programs – including early childhood education. However, other legislation that advocates had hoped might pass stalled in the legislature, including a bill to require businesses to offer paid family medical leave...
In her budget recommendations, Lujan Grisham asked the state to up its commitment to early childhood policies, by raising the wage floor for childcare workers to $18 an hour and establishing a career lattice for them. Because of that, Gonzalez has been able to start working on her associate’s in childhood education at Central New Mexico Community College where her tuition is waived. The governor also backed a house bill that will increase the amount of money distributed annually from the Early Childhood Trust Fund – since its dramatic growth due to oil and gas revenues.
Although funding childcare through the Land Grant Permanent Fund is unique to New Mexico – and a handful of other states with permanent funds, like Alaska, Texas and North Dakota – Heinz says the Early Childhood Trust fund “holds interesting lessons for other states” about investing a percentage of revenues into early childhood programs.
In New Mexico, those revenues come largely from oil and gas, but New Mexico Voices for Children has put forth recommendations about how the state can continue funding childcare while transitioning away from fossil fuels, largely by raising taxes on the state’s wealthiest earners. Although other states have not yet followed in New Mexico’s footsteps, a growing number are making strides to offer free pre-K to a majority of their residents.
Heinz cautions that change won’t occur overnight. “What New Mexico is trying to do here is play a very long game. And so I am not without worry that people might give it five years, and it’s been almost five years now, and then say, where are the results? Why is everything not better?” she said. “This is generational change” that New Mexico is only just beginning to witness as the first children who were recipients of universal childcare start school."
-via The Guardian, April 11, 2025
"Calling it “a fridge to bridge the world,” the Thermavault can use different combinations of salts to keep the contents at temperatures just above freezing or below it. Some vaccines require regular kitchen fridge temps, while others, or even transplant organs, need to be kept below freezing, meaning this versatility is a big advantage for the product’s overall market demand.
Dhruv Chaudhary, Mithran Ladhania, and Mridul Jain are all children of physicians or medical field workers in the state of Indore. Seeing how difficult it was to keep COVID-19 vaccines viable en route to countryside villages hours outside city centers in tropical heat, they wanted to create a better, portable solution to keeping medical supplies cool.
Because salt molecules dissolve in water, the charged ions that make up the salt molecules break apart. However, this separation requires energy, which is taken in the form of heat from the water, cooling it down.
Though the teen team knew this, it remained a challenge to find which kind of salt would have the optimal set of characteristics. Though sodium chloride—our refined table salt—is what we think of when we hear the word “salt,” there are well over one-hundred different chemical compounds that classify as salt.
“While we did scour through the entire internet to find the best salt possible, we kind of just ended up back to our ninth-grade science textbook,” Chaudhary told Business Insider.
Indeed, the professors at the lab in the Indian Institutes of Technology where they were testing Thermavault’s prototype were experimenting with two different salts which ended up being the best available options, a discovery made after the three teens tested another 20, none of which proved viable.
These were barium hydroxide octahydrate and ammonium chloride. The ammonium chloride alone, when dissolved, cooled the water to between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius (about 35 to 43 degrees Fahrenheit) perfect for many vaccines, while a dash of barium hydroxide octahydrate dropped that temperature to below freezing.
“We have been able to keep the vaccines inside the Thermavault for almost 10 to 12 hours,” Dr. Pritesh Vyas, an orthopedic surgeon who tested the device at V One hospital in Indore, said in a video on the Thermavault website.
Designing a prototype, the teens have already tested it in local hospitals, and are in the process of assembling another 200 for the purpose of testing them in 120 hospitals around Indore to produce the best possible scope of use and utility data for a product launch.
Their ingenuity and imagination won them the 2025 Earth Prize, which came with a $12,500 reward needed for this mass testing phase."
-via Good News Network, April 22, 2025
akaashi who works very hard to get muscle references for udai’s manga!! ù_ú⭐️ (why does he keep travelling to osaka to get them, tho??)
People on this site cannot or intentionally refuse to distinguish between systemic oppression and lateral mistreatment and it's a massive problem.
Me talking about how other queer people target me for having masculine traits isn't me saying that cisallohet perisex men are oppressed for being men and feminism sucks and lesbians are evil.
Me pointing out how late diagnosed autistic people treat me like an other for getting a diagnosis early isn't me saying late diagnosed people are privileged and have power over me.
Me saying that aroaces have mistreated me and pushed me out of aspec spaces as an alloaro isn't me saying that aroaces are my oppressors and they don't belong in aro spaces.
"Can the people who are in the same community as me but have different experiences please stop treating me like shit" isn't me saying that I'm the most oppressed person on the planet and no one but me suffers. I'm just asking you to stop treating me like shit. That shouldn't be a controversial statement.
Not everything is about privilege and oppression, sometimes people are just dicks and maybe it's you.