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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • Birds. I guess it doesn’t feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it’s my thing.

    There’s this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it’ll listen to and identify all of the birds you’re hearing.

    And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I’ll be damned if I didn’t eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It’s just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.

    I’ve learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I’ve gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha

    I’m also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the superbowl@lemmy.world community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @anon6789@lemmy.world makes the most amazing educational posts. It’s a lot of fun.



  • Bullshit

    I’m born and raised in Appalachia, my daddy worked in the coal mines and drove an 18 wheeler. Certified redneck enough that I confuse the shit out of my New England neighbors.

    I went out and marched with striking nurses when Bernie put out the call, and I’ve never voted Republican in my entire fucking life.

    OP, you need to learn what a redneck is.




  • As a critical care nurse, the miraculous CPR recoveries are such a horrible disservice to our patients and their families. CPR is not two minutes of some light exercise and then the person wakes up and is ok forever.

    It’s 20-30 mins of intense, brutal, scary, undignified activity followed by best case scenario, we put you in the ICU, deliberately make you hypothermic for a day or two, and hope you wake up. That increases your chances of surviving the incident to a whopping 64%.

    Surviving to discharge and having a meaningful recovery is a whole other ballgame, and depends a lot on the condition you were in when you had cardiac arrest in the first place. Your elderly grandpa with cancer, sepsis, bad kidneys, etc. is probably not going to go home. Your middle-aged wife who came in because she was having a heart attack actually stands a good chance.

    Movies like to show people shocking a flatlined patient who just pops up and walks away when in reality presenting fully flatlined means you’re 2-3 times less likely to be resuscitated at all.

    I’m happy to leave some leeway in fictionalized depictions of medical care for the sake of story progression. But the complete ignorance currently common in fictional resuscitation scenarios feeds a really malignant sort of magical thinking that keeps us torturing elderly people. I’d really appreciate less of that in my job.




  • Injecting medications into necks.

    Medical things are rarely accurate, but Jesus this one is absolutely infuriating. There’s no anatomy in a neck that you could even inject anything INTO. You’re not aiming for a jugular vein on the fly and there’s not enough tissue in a neck to receive an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection. If your needle is too long, you’re definitely hitting something critical. It’s feasible that you could squirt medication into someone’s trachea or esophagus or - god forbid - spine if you actually tried this nonsense.

    Arms, people, ARMS. This is where we inject things into people who are not interested in receiving an injection. Arms or butts, right through the clothes. You’re aiming for the deltoid muscle or the glutes. I’m even willing to concede the inaccuracy of a medication affecting someone instantly (they don’t), if Hollywood would just stop having characters inject things into people’s necks.

    On our next episode of medical things that make me crazy: People getting shot through the shoulder with zero consequences.






  • The rail strike would have had major economy-wide side effects, including people in other industries being laid off and inflation being exacerbated by shortages in basic food, water, gas.

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/looming-rail-strike-would-take-a-major-toll-on-u-s-economy

    After averting the strike, the Biden administration continued to pressure and negotiate with rail companies to get the paid sick days that were the sticking point. But there’s been almost no news coverage about that fact.

    "Negotiations with the other labor coalition unions continued toward a Sept. 15 deadline, but when it became obvious that the bargaining parties would not reach consensus by then, Biden asked then-Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh to assemble the sides and reach an acceptable agreement that would head off a national freight rail strike.

    On deadline day, the parties reached an agreement on an updated contract that included the biggest wage increases in 47 years. Over the next several weeks, while acknowledging that the agreement was less than perfect, the IBEW and several of its fellow coalition unions voted to ratify the agreement. A handful of others, however, did not, instead threatening a December freight rail strike.

    Biden, citing the potential economic impact of a national freight rail strike during the winter holidays, on Nov. 28 called on Congress to impose the emergency board’s agreement.

    Since then, several other railroad-related unions have also seen success in negotiating for similar sick-day benefits. These 12 unions represent more than 105,000 railroad workers. (emphasis mine)

    “Biden deserves a lot of the credit for achieving this goal for us,” Russo said. “He and his team continued to work behind the scenes to get all of rail labor a fair agreement for paid sick leave.”

    https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid

    A much, much larger question is this: If that rail infrastructure is THIS critical to the basic functioning of our economy, why are we allowing it to be held hostage by private for-profit corporations? This shit should be nationalized and those should be government jobs.