Mean Spirited Toilet Design Has People Talking Shit About It

There are always ways for bad bosses to make life for employees worse.

There are also always people willing to aid and abet these horrible bosses.

Add toilet designer Mohabir Gill to the list. He's designed and patented a toilet that slopes forward by 13 degrees.  Gill says it's medical a medical device, sort of.

I'd say it's a medical device in that it gives cruel employers peace of mind - mental health of a sort - assuring them that they are being as mean to employees as possible.

The toilet is uncomfortable to sit on, so that would theoretically mean people would spend less time in the loo with this thing.  Gill says spending too much time on the toilet can lead to medical problems, supposedly.

Everybody knows the real reason for this toilet design, though.  Employers don't want their workers being unproductive by sitting on a toilet too long when they should be working, dammit! And why didn't they go to the damn bathroom before work.  They have a job to do!

Here's the BBC's take on it, which I totally agree with:

"If it is real I think it's a perfect representation of the disdain capitaism has for workers and for human beings," Hilary Gardner, who uses the Twitter username @plume_ told the BBC.

The company that would make this thing, inaccurately called StandardToilet, claims the toilets we are used to leads to  this result: "A user may spend longer than necessary sitting on the toilet without short-term discomfort. Sitting on a toilet for longer than is necessary is generally undesirable... The sloping design could save industry billions in wasted hours."

People on social media and elsewhere also suggested that these toilets could hurt people with back and knee problems, or conditions like Irritable Bowl Syndrome or Crohn's Disease.

This toilet is just part of the mindset of many corporate bosses to squeeze

According to HuffPost:

"Employees already feel pressure to take shorter bathroom breaks. Seventy-four percent of Amazon warehouse workers avoid using the toilet out of fear of beingwarned about missing their target numbers."

The toilet could backfire on employers who would install them.  Employees would feel the distain their bosses feel for them and quit.  That would force the employer to hire and train a replacement for what had already been a good reliable employee.

"The toilet seems just as likely to make people quit their jobs as it does to make them leave the bathroom sooner than planned," wrote Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic. 

Other people have already found ways to circumvent the goal of the toilet. @HondaDriver8000 on Twitter suggested, "Just sit on the 13 degree slope toilet backwards for the opposite of the intended effect."

I guess the battle between employee and employer rages on.

Monetary Evil: Curing People Of Deadly Diseases Bad For Revenue, Says Goldman Sachs

An example of how we seem to priortize making money over all else, screw morality, Goldman Sachs is warning companies not to come up with cures for deadly diseases, because that's not a good moneymaking business model.

As CNBC and other news outlets report, Goldman Sachs analysts, in a report called "The Genome Revolution" asked "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"

The answer to Goldman Sachs, apparently, is no.

Here's an excerpt from the report: "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies.......While the proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

In other words, better to let people die slow, painful deaths while draining their bank accounts with expensive treatments, than just partly draining their bank accounts while allowing people to go on living.

Goldman Sachs cites a hepatitis C treatment from Gilean Sciences, which achieves a cure rate of more than 90 percent. The company came out with a handy dandy new Hep C cure whose sales peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015. Those profits have been falling ever since, because so many people have been cured of the disease that there's not as many remaining left to treat.

Also, if you don't have hepatitis C, you're not going to transmit it to other people, which is bad for business. Says the Goldman Sachs report: "In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines"

Moral of the story, in Goldman Sachs world: Make sure Hep C is chronic, so people keep paying for treatments, and make sure it spreads to other people, keeping the revenue stream alive, even as people die and/or go bankrupt.

It also turns out that non-infectious diseases like cancer are a bit more profitable because there's always going to be people coming down with cancer. It's not an infectious disease, so "the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise."

The takeaway here is that since big financial companies like Goldman Sachs seem to be our overlords these days, scientists should stop finding cures for diseases, especially genetic cures that have the potential of stopping a disease via one major innoculation.

Many American businesses depend on millions of people suffering from chronic, incurable, expensive diseases, and you commie scientists and doctors better not interfere with that business model!

Wouldn't It Be Great If There Were Breaking Good News For Once

Bodies in the streets of Nice, France after
the latest in an unending series of terrorist attacks.  

Last night was the same old sad routine.

And to call the deaths of 84 people routine made the evening particularly sad.

As you well know by now, some scumbag drove a truck into a crowd in Nice, France who were out enjoying Bastille Day. 

Cue what happens with such hideous regularity now:

Networks broke in and gave updates. It was all Nice truck attack all the time on outlets like CNN and MSNBC.  It was the sad top topic on social media. Governments vowed vengeance, and we learned the stories of people who died while just living their lives and trying to enjoy the moment.

Mayhem and murder keeps happening  again and again and it's going to happen again and again. It's hard to stay positive in this kind of environment, isn't it?

I know this is fantasy, but wouldn't it be great if, just for once, some sort of shocking but wonderful breaking news came out of the blue?

Television stations would break into the mid-day game shows to breathlessly announce the news.

Wolf Blitzer and his CNN Situation Room would give us all the up to date news and rumors about how this Great Development just keeps getting better and better.

Rather than having somber and argumentive pundits give their take on what the latest tragedy means, they'd be forecasting the happy effects of this Great Breaking News.

People would be out on the streets celebrating. All you'd see on Facebook and Twitter is ecstatic reaction to the Great Breaking News. Wouldn't this be a great Top Trending Topic.

A smiling President Obama would hold an impromptu news conference, in which he announces this is the best day of his presidency and the United States would do everything in its power to ensure this Great Breaking News just keeps going and going.

Fantasy isn't reality, though.

The even sadder thing is I can't even imagine what my theoretical Great Breaking News would actually entail.

Depressingly, it's easy for me and everyone else to imagine the next terrorist attack. The guns, the bombs, the deaths, the bitter aftermath.

But what would the Great Breaking News look like? I can't even think of too many examples in history. Maybe the end of World War II? The moon landing?

The optimistic side of me wants to think that the reason the bad news dominates the airwaves is because things are basically good, and the bad is the exception. News is defined as something out of the ordinary happening. So a terrorist attack is out of the ordinary and an exception to the goodness maybe?

We also take comfort in the people who rush in to help the victims.

All that is well and good, but it doesn't feel like enough. What else can you do, though?

The darker side of me wants a little bit of torture against people like the idiot who drove the truck into the crowd in Nice, killing all those people.  I know torture is wrong and shouldn't be done.  I'm not talking about physical torture, though.

Most of the time, the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks are killed to stop them from doing further damage.

My idea of torturing the perpetrators is try to take them alive.  Meanwhile, videotape statements from victims and relatives of victims about the impact the attack had on them.  Get as many victims as you can who want to talk.

Then you put the perp in a cell forever. In that cell, 24/7 for years on end until the perp dies, you project the video of the victims' statements on all four walls of the cell, and play their words full volume. And just never stop

If it drives the terrorist in the cell insane, oh well. Let 'em suffer. The dark side of me says they deserve such awful mental pain.

Meanwhile, I keep longing for the Great Breaking Good News. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were some anti-terrorist cell that keeps launching "attacks" of wonderful goodness and kindness on an an unsuspecting population

"Prostitute" Web Site is New Way to Make Internet Evil

You gotta hand it to the large population of creeps on the Internet. They never stop finding ways to be evil.

The latest example is a site called Potential Prostitutes. According to BoingBoing, the site purports to list women who are prostitutes. But any woman can be labeled a "prostitute" on this site. All someone has to do for reasons maybe involving revenge, is submit information about the woman in question, and the site puts them up.

Taking things a step deeper into evil, the site operators will allow people to have their names and information removed from the site, but only if they pay a hefty "removal fee." Judging by how creepy this looks, I'd bet operators of  "Potential Prostitutes" won't scrub information on people who do submit money.

There's really no end to how many sites can pop up. People would just hack into anybody's Facebook, email or anything else, invent a "crime" these innocent people committed, put that information up, and screw up lives of people trying to find jobs, or keep families happy. (We know employers Google all of us when we apply for jobs, certainly these sites would pop up on the HR Department's radar)

The optimist in me says that so many of these awful, accusatory web sites will pop up that nobody will take them seriously, and you'd like to think would be employers, spouses, etc. would want more proof than what's on  a creepy web site.  

Still, people will be fearful enough of these sites to send hard-earned money to these criminals to have themselves removed from the sites.

The pessmist in me is that we will all have to pay some sort of "tax," paying money to shadowy scam artists to scrub a whole bunch of awful lies about us online. Or, we keep the money and hope nobody believes the crap that's out there.

And what of people who appear on these sites who have been convicted of prostitution, sex offenses, or anything else?

You do the crime, you do the time, goes the adage. And that's good. But what if somebody does something stupid when they're 17, get a conviction., but then 10 years later are totally on the straight and narrow?

These web sites would continually punish them, long after the statute of limitations expires, or even long after the criiminal record has been wiped clean by the courts due to continued excellent behavior.

Apparently, it's hard to find the people who would run web sites like "Potential Prostitutes," because they don't exactly advertise who they are, and they operate in countries with weak law enforcement or libel laws.

I generally don't like the idea of vigilantism and on line revenge. But there are plenty of "good guy" hackers out there who are adept at finding people who do things like create "potential prostitute" sites on line.

The "good guys" can probably give the evil web site operators a taste of their own medicine, and put their names, addresses, locations, employers etc. on line for all of us to see.