Links: Hopeful action

[sonia]

Colombia’s Women-Led Electric Bus Fleet Is Reshaping Bogotá’s Public Transit by Jose Orozco. A warm, hopeful article.

In addition to advancing gender equity in the city’s male-dominated public transit field, the company’s focus on electric mobility is also intended to boost the city’s commitment to combat climate change.

Remote Workers of the World, Unite! by Katherine Alejandra Cross.

The managers and bosses who wailed to the high heavens about how remote work would end civilization certainly did nothing to hurt the impression that it could be a mighty strike against capitalist exploitation. If it were making them this mad, surely it was revolutionary. But it's not. Like expectations, capitalism expands to fill all available space, co-opting anything put before it. Remote work is no different, and if we're not careful, the tech that makes it possible will obliterate the already porous wall between home and workplace.

Cats, peanuts, bee stings… the irritating truth about allergies by Rebecca Seal.

“Allergy sufferers are canaries in the coalmine,” says MacPhail, who is no longer quite so cheery. “Allergy rates are just going to keep climbing. We need to start thinking about hard things, and we need to start doing hard things, which maybe means completely reorganising the way we approach everything. We have two options, and one is really, really hard. The other one is really, really hard in a different way. Our bodies are not comfortable. We are irritating ourselves to death.”

Common additive may be why you have food allergies by Sarina Gleason.

Cheryl Rockwell, an assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology in the College of Human Medicine, began studying the possible link between the synthetic food additive tert-butylhydroquinone, or tBHQ, nine years ago.

Allergy articles via oursin.

And, louder for the folks at the back (we went through this already with ME/CFS)
For some long COVID patients, exercise is bad medicine by Kaelyn Lynch.

unlike graded exercise that encourages patients to push through discomfort, the program is scaled back to about 30 percent of the previous effort at the first sign of PEM, and some people won’t progress past a certain level.

Comments

Pentafecta

[jesse_the_k]

in re Remote work:

Sarah Pinsker's 2019 novel, A Song for a New Day, delineated a future where all work is remote in response to a pandemic. There should be an SF prize for prescience -- her work certainly earned its 2019 Nebula Award. Her viewpoint characters are seeking places to play live music; any sort of face to face event has notionally been superseded by virtual venues.

in re: tBHQ

Rockwell has since published some of her research Nrf2-dependent and -independent effects of tBHQ in activated murine B cells in mouse models

in re: PEM

It took me years to get the balance right. I loved this point:

“If exercise is medicine, you should treat it like medicine,” Putrino says. “You should understand what the contraindications are, who might have adverse effects of the medicine, and how to dose the medicine effectively for each person.”

Re: Pentafecta

[sonia]

Thanks for the links! And yeah, exercise as medicine - mind the contraindications!

[silveradept]

It would be fantastic for all of those remote workers to have the benefits and protections of a union, but excepting in very few spaces, remote has already been yanked back because of those forces that were discussed in the article. I still think those people should join unions and form them, so they can bargain back safer and remote work that will ultimately be better for everyone, but most of the things we proved were possible while everyone was taking the pandemic seriously have been yanked back as soon as that seriousness faded and all of the official declarations happened that it was over, regardless of what reality said. (I worry that this same mentality is going to get people going back to their workloads and other such things before they should, as the article about exercise sometimes being bad for someone suffering from COVID pointed out.)

I did like the article about the electric fleet of women-driven buses. Getting people to work who need it and reducing climate emissions, while also providing services to places that haven't had it seems like a large amount of win for everyone.

[sonia]

Unions or something even better. May it be so!