16 April 2013

#RASP - Rant Around Several Paragraphs #1 - Idiocy

I’m starting a new subsection I’m titling RASP, an inspiration from @mallow610’s YouTube video channel-based RISS (Rant in Sixty Seconds, with its haunting, awesome intro tune), in which I get things off my mind that otherwise would stick there until the end of time.

Speed Limits
The United States has speed limits, and as much as especially these stupid-asses that don’t think there are any, or there is any need for any, there are speed limits. There was this guy who – and I don’t even know how he got a driving license, but he was driving – crossed a double yellow line to pass me.

Driving 101: double yellow lines demarcate a separation of traffic lanes that go in opposite directions that standard and commercial drivers should never cross in order to pass another driver (i.e. the diagram showing "Yes" and "No").

This is different from the diagram with the solid line and the dashed line. These also separate opposite traffic lanes, but one can pass another person with caution if everything is clear on the opposite lane!
So I beeped him. This should be another rant, but the point of this one is simply that speed limits exist. On Cooledge Road between US Road 78 and US Road 29 is 40 MPH. Not 50. Not 55. Forty. One the entire stretch of GA Interstate 285 – until such a time as they decide to enact the proposed digital variable speed limit signs that will change during based on DHSMV’s volition/judgment, the top speed limit is 55 MPH and the bottom speed limit is 40 MPH. Georgia State Road 20 has had a speed limit of 45 MPH since the SPLOST-funded renovation of the Loganville-outer Loganville stretch had completed. It’s no longer 55 MPH, people. They put tax-funded signage saying 45 MPH for a reason!

You – sorry – lazy-ass, law-flouting fuckers that don’t feel there should be a speed limit, move your asses to fucking Deutschland. Get over yourselves. I drive the speed limit, y'all should too.

Patents on Genes
The only reason people seem to want to patent genes is monetary. I keep hearing that not patenting stifles innovation; bull! If you can tell me that the drug companies researching the existence of the gene – and then locating it – created the gene as well as the method to detect it, go ahead and patent it. If you have a means of modifying the gene so it doesn’t cause breast or ovarian cancer, go ahead and patent that technique. If, though, that gene in all ovarian and breast cancer sufferers is exactly the same in all of them, and you didn’t do crap to make it so, you have no right to patent it. Sure, patent to Hell the means of detecting the gene, because The Lord knows there are alternative means of detecting anything, but you have no right to patent the gene.

The only reason they want to patent the gene is because licensing it out will yield more profits that getting a Nobel or some other prize in chemistry or genetics or whatever for discovering the actual gene.

Greed will kill the bearers of these genes faster than the genes will while you all sit on your asses trying to patent something you had no hand in creating, only discovering.



That’s all.



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