April A. Eichmeier
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aeich.bsky.social
April A. Eichmeier
@aeich.bsky.social
Assistant Professor, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
Women need access to the public sphere and to remunerative, dignified jobs there in part because we are human beings with a full spectrum of talents, passions, and capacities, but especially because dependence on men in the home makes women even more vulnerable to those men’s violence.
September 8, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
A "direct inverse correlation" between fluoride exposure and low IQ" means the more fluoride you get, the higher your IQ. What he's looking for is a "direct correlation," but he doesn't know what any of these words mean or how science works.
RFK Jr: "We found that there's a direct inverse correlation between fluoride exposure and low IQ in children. So the more you get, the stupider you are."
April 30, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
People don’t need to “learn to use AI”. They need to learn how to think and make connections themselves and thus will facilitate their efficient use of whatever technology comes along. Crafting the right prompt for AI doesn’t take AI training, it takes liberal arts training.
April 25, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
Or, instead of relying on a bullshit machine that will dry up a lake to tell you stupid lies, you could simply read a book, watch a documentary, or see a film.

www.techradar.com/computing/ar...
I tried the new ChatGPT trend that gives you a glimpse into the past - here’s how you can too
Back to the past
www.techradar.com
April 23, 2025 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
The Onion Looks Back On Pope Francis Busting His Holy Ass
April 21, 2025 at 5:00 PM
You know how you went to church weekly as a kid but then you don't go for 20 years and then you go to a wedding and remember the words to the songs and prayers and when to sit and when to kneel and when to stand and when to shake hands? That's repetition. It. Helps. People. Remember.
“You don't have to beat people over the head with the fact that Donald Trump is incompetent and erratic and largely brings chaos to every situation he's in”

YES YOU DO
The exchange
April 11, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
I'm just a small-town professor. I'll never be a provost or chancellor. But here's some free advice: we're about to hold the most watched college sports event in 🇺🇸. Every college president should be all over TV, at every game, explaining why the March Madness of federal budget cuts is a huge crisis.
👇🎯 The public isn't going to understand this, unless the presidents of R1 universities around the country <loudly> & <collectively> get out into the public square & start explaining this & calling out the existential threat to the entire 🇺🇸 university system. The silence is deafening right now.
The public really needs to understand this. Every university system in the world rests on public funding, there has never been an alternative model at any time in history.

We have universities for literally the same reason that we have roads and armies.
March 8, 2025 at 9:20 PM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
Do you use a credit card? Rent or own a home? Use utilities like water and electricity? Send your kids to school? Have a job? Eat? Drink? Deposit money in a bank, or withdraw it? The government provides services and safeguards that enable us to do ALL of this safely. Now Musk is taking it all away.
February 28, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
What @kairyssdal.bsky.social is saying is that BLS produces the official economic statistics that we all rely on and if they start messing with those, no one will no what is really happening -- and whoever is manipulating them can make a killing by knowing the numbers in advance
If this happens - and if Musk et al get control of BLS - then all economic bets are off.

I can’t say it any more plainly than that.
NEWS: Sources tell me that DOGE is setting its sights on the Department of Labor next. DOL workers have been ordered to give DOGE access to whatever they ask for—or risk termination.

“We’re supposed to stop everything we’re doing and do whatever the DOGE kids ask… It feels dirty and illegal.”
February 5, 2025 at 1:46 AM
Who knows what the vote will be, but cutting off federal funding before the nominee for Director of the OMB - who wants to cut off funding - is confirmed gives opponents a lot to work with.
January 28, 2025 at 10:42 PM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
I think some people hear “grants” and think that without them, scientists and government workers just have less stuff to play with at work. But grants fund salaries for students, academics, researchers, and people who work in all areas of public service.

“Pausing” grants means people don’t eat.
White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion
The Trump administration has put a hold on all federal financial grants and loans, affecting tens of billions of dollars in payments.
www.washingtonpost.com
January 28, 2025 at 3:03 AM
Exacerbated by the fact that we - and by "we" I mean whichever political / apolitical group a person happens to be in - cluster together.
By a longshot, the most common mistake people who are into politics make - from seven-figure strategists to randos offering Takes online - is overestimating how much attention normal people pay to politics, how much they know, and how deeply they think about it.

*Vastly* overestimating.
Saw a "Democratic strategist" say "we have to earn people's trust back." Just mind-boggling that so many don't understand how this works.

Did voters in 2024 say "I trust the Republican Party"? No. They were mad at those in power. Democrats have to get them mad at Republicans. It's not complicated.
January 27, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
Why should the public care about the freeze on the NIH? Aside from the need for scientific pursuits to make our society better…
-For every dollar we invest in NIH research, there is a $2.5 return.
-Research dollars help fund universities that employ non-academics. (1/)
January 23, 2025 at 12:46 AM
Reposted by April A. Eichmeier
Health research is one of those functions that if you stop it, people will not notice the impact tomorrow, or next month. This makes it hard to communicate its value, unlike, closed national parks during a shutdown. But it generates big public goods. Once that community is eroded, hard to recover.
January 23, 2025 at 1:55 AM
That grants are ceased at NIH is a tragedy for scientists and universities and other scientific institutions. The bigger tragedy is that people who need breakthroughs now have a longer wait.
January 22, 2025 at 11:50 PM