CNN 10 8/24/2020 ~ 8/28/2020

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Monday, August 24, 2020

Last week, the Democrats held their National Convention, mostly online of course, and had their chance to promote their agenda. This week, the Republicans will hold their convention Monday through Thursday. Incumbent President and Vice President Donald Trump and Mike Pence will be nominated. In California, hundreds of fires are burning throughout the state after temperatures peaked and lightning hit multiple areas. Thousands of Cal Fire firefighters are attempting to contain the fire, but they need lots of help, more than they're getting. In fact, some residents decided to take matters into their own hands and prevent their homes from catching fire. COVID-19 has put many schools in a dilemma. Many of them are going virtual or hybrid, and colleges are being scrutinized over asking for full tuition fees. There have also been multiple cases of the virus due to sports or off-campus parties. Two asteroids have passed by Earth recently. One passed by at just 2000 miles, the closest ever, but NASA didn't know until it was gone. The most recent one is also pretty close, but the chances of it hitting us are less than a percent, and it won't do much damage.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

    In 1951, and African American woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins hospital to get a pain in her cervix checked out. She apparently had cervical cancer, which was treated by radium at the time. Her tumor faded, and she went home. However, a cell culturist named George Guy had collected her cells without her consent - typical medical procedure at the time. And her cells became HeLa, the first ever immortal human cells. It eventually killed her, but the cells grew and grew - far beyond what her normal cells had ever grown to - and they were used for vaccines and other research, leading to huge advances in science. They were also a problem. They grew so fast and were so hardy that they contaminated many other cell lines, causing a minor medical crisis because that meant some studies were nullified. This all happened without her family knowing.

    After her death, her husband, Day, had signed some form that asked if "John Hopkin" could do an autopsy and collect some cells. He had no idea what that meant, but he signed it. Leading to a generation of hardship. The Lacks family eventually found out about the cells from a scientist friend who had been using them for a long time. They were infuriated that people had made money off the cells and they had never gotten a share. The men in the family tried to get money out of Johns Hopkins, but Deborah, whom the author of this book spoke to, just wanted to know about her mother and sister.

Time: By embroiling the Postal Service in controversy and shaking Americans’ confidence in mail voting, the President wins

Time: By embroiling the Postal Service in controversy and shaking Americans’ confidence in mail voting, the President wins

By Haley Sweetland Edwards and Abby Vesoulis

    President Trump has frequently used his presidential powers to further his own political agenda. The USPS is no exception. After a strike in 1970, Congress decided to remove the Postmaster General from the Cabinet and have the agency pay its own budget. As the Internet began its rise, first class mail, the USPS's biggest money maker, dropped in half, and it began to rack up debt. Making things worse, Louis DeJoy, a Trump supporter, was appointed Postmaster General by the Board of Governors. Normally, this board would be bipartisan, as Governors serve 7 year terms. However, the Republican Senate refused to appoint any of Obama's appointees, leaving it open for Trump to fill with his allies. DeJoy has moved along Trump's path of turning the agency into a privatized company with radical cuts.

    Recently, the USPS sent out letters in 46 states saying that it may not be able to deliver election ballots on time. The White House has repeatedly refused to provide any additional funding during the pandemic and election, although increased pressure has caused DeJoy to halt his reforms. Another problem is that a large number of Democratic voters vote by mail. If on Election Night, the race is in Trump's favor then begins to lean toward Biden, Trump has set the stage to blame the Postal Service.

    "It’s not hard to imagine the damage that a hung election, like the 2000 Bush-Gore debacle, could exact in the era of Trump-fueled disinformation. Democracy, after all, is not unlike flying in Peter Pan’s world; if you stop believing in it, it ceases to work."

TedEd: How to spot a pyramid scheme

A TedEd by Stacie Bosley

In 2004, a start-up called Vemma Nutrition claimed to provide an easy way to earn lots of money for just part-time work. To be eligible, one simply had to buy a $500 nutrition kit and recruit 2 more people for the program. Vemma became a huge company, taking in more than 30,000 people per month at its highest point. The only problem was that most participants were actually losing money. Eventually, the company was charged with a pyramid scheme, which is a common type of fraud where each person gets a share of the money from each new member they recruit, with a part of the money eventually ending up with the founder. This differs from a Ponzi scheme in which the founder uses the money from new members to pay existing members. In a pyramid scheme, it gets increasingly harder for the newest members to make money. This is because the number of employees increases exponentially, because every person recruits the same amount of people. If each person had to recruit six more, then by the 12th round, 13 billion new people would have to be recruited, which is impossible as it is larger than the entire world population. Although this is banned in most countries, they can easily disguise themselves and be hard to spot. In particular, they may be presented as multi-level marketing companies, which are different because people make money from selling a product. Pyramid scheme companies hide by creating a product to make themselves look like multi-level marketing companies. Recruits are also encouraged to report good work experiences before being paid, so that their friends will do it, too. The victims of such schemes are often too embarrassed to speak out, thinking that it's their fault that they didn't work hard enough. There are ways to spot this, however. Time restrictions and huge sums of money are one thing, and a legit company shouldn't require payment to join.