Staring at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an entrepreneur thought to themself, “If I could eat all of that garbage … and turn it into a ‘Great Pacific Human Shit Patch’ … problem solved?”¹

Introducing ‘Cupffee’:

The edible cookie cup – tasty, crunchy, and a fully organic alternative to all disposable cups.

This article by Jaime Green on Slate struck a strong chord with me:

It is the awful feeling that the world has moved on. The White House blithely anticipates a “winter of death” and suffering for the unvaccinated, but, well, that’s their own fault, isn’t it! If you’re fully vaxxed, which you of course could be, omicron will be a sniffle and a five-day reality TV binge! The Atlantic writes of reasonable people saying they’re “vaxxed and done,” people who reasonably say “COVID is becoming something like the seasonal flu for most people who keep up with their shots,” as if everyone has the option of shots to keep up with.

I want to scream. If I can scream, for a second? The pandemic is not fucking over, because children under 5 cannot get fucking vaccinated.

In a way it’s even worse for those of us with kids under 2. From an update given last December by Pfizer regarding the status of clinical trials for children:

Compared to the 16- to 25-year-old population in which high efficacy was demonstrated, non-inferiority was met for the 6- to 24-month-old population but not for the 2- to under 5-year-old population in this analysis. No safety concerns were identified and the 3 µg dose demonstrated a favorable [sic] safety profile in children 6 months to under 5 years of age. [Emphasis added]

We have a safe and effective vaccine for the 6-month to 2-year-old population, we’ve had it for over a month now, but we’re not rolling it out because … we simply can’t be bothered? Pardon me while I scream for a second.

What kills me, what makes this such a struggle, what makes this endless waiting such a struggle, is that the question of a vaccine for my kid has left the arena of science and entered the fields of business and politics. Before December, before this Pfizer report, there was a problem being worked by scientists — developing and testing a safe and effective vaccine. A noble effort that you could have some comfort waiting for. It was hard.

Once they solved it though, once they solved that hard problem, a business (Pfizer) decided that separate regulatory filings for two age groups would be too onerous, surely more profitable to wait and group all under 5’s together. Our governments also decided there was no point in applying pressure to get this unimportant age bracket of under-2’s vaccinated. The fact is, kids this age hardly ever hold jobs anyway, so what’s the point? Whether they’re sick or healthy, they’re not generating profit for the the ruling class, so … what’s the point?

We’re just supposed to accept that our kids will inevitably get COVID without being vaccinated because protecting them would simply be too much effort for us to collectively muster. Get back to normal, open the bars, cary on. The economic engine has been sufficiently protected, that’s good enough.

But don’t worry, they probably won’t end up in the hospital, and they probably won’t die — that should be comfort enough, right?

If anyone you know is in need of a pretty sweet bumper sticker design, and has a $92,000 budget, have them reach out to my people.

Good news! With only a few days to spare, I’ve released an update to everyone’s favourite app — Festivus Grievances. Version 2021.2 fixes some bugs just in time for Festivus this year.

Make sure you’re fully up to date, and get ready to have all the anger you’ve built up (and put aside) over the year come flooding back, ready to be aired on the 23rd.

Listening to Vulcan Hello recently, Scott said something that my brain found very sticky while discussing why a ninja-nun character (on Star Trek) went on a murderous robbery spree:

She had to take her excellent but limited skillset and apply it to this problem

I love this — excellent but limited. This character was really good at killing people with swords, and when faced with a problem she needed to solve, this limited skillset was what she had available. No matter how excellent this skillset was, it was never going to solve the problem … cleanly. Had she been a little more skilled at making persuasive phone calls, or something similar, she probably could have handled the situation with less loss of life, but that’s not a choice she was able to make.

We may not all be ninja warrior nuns, but I think this is a (the??) universal life experience — solving problems with our own limited (hopefully excellent, occasionally) skillset. I think you can view anyone’s actions through this lens and gain at least some insight into what is driving their choices.

Here’s the clip from the podcast:

— Vulcan Hello - Episode 34, Discovery S4E3: “Choose to Live”