True, but how do we manage the harm done in the present. Sure, one day, maybe, we will get to socialism, but until then people suffer today. Should we not look pragmatically at the most effective thing to do now with a mind to future strategy? For example, in the short term better protections for workers does entrench capitalism by helping it limp on for a while longer, but people benefit from that now and restricting companies can create a cultural shift which reduces their ability to impact future elections, say when a vote for a particular socialist idea is being debated. Does that make sense?

All models are approximations of reality, thus they are ideas humans make in the context of their social situation. Norms and attitudes impact what we research, how we interpret data, and what we end up believing.

While the aim of science is to get closer to the truth the end result is going to approach but never reach perfect accuracy. With gender we see the social norms all through the expression of gender in different ages, generations, socioeconomic statuses, cultures, and countries. With sex we see a flattening of what is present into a strict binary with exceptions rather than what is actually present, a range of different karyotypes, sensitivities to hormones, levels of hormone production, interactions in regulatory genes, and differing morphologies. Gender is a diverse spectrum, but so is sex, and the reason we teach the XX XY version is the same as how we teach mathematic ideas. Basic stuff first, then expanding on that idea, then going further until we have the capacity to really understand the basics, like the multiple page proof that 1+1=2. Yes, basic biology says male and female, but intermediate talks about the diverse presentations of sex.

In the USA you have a stark choice to make. If you vote for the Republican party you will likely have a dictator and the end of democracy. If you vote for the Democratic party you will likely have more of the same last few years with some small progress on progressive causes.

But if you vote third party you don’t get the third party. You don’t get what the third party option is offering, you get one of the two main parties instead. What this means is you really do have yo vote both for something and against something else.

If you vote for the Republican you are voting against the Democrat.

If you vote for the Democrat you are voting against the Republican.

If you vote third party you are voting against both of the major parties.

If your candidate has a real chance of reaching the plurarily in the electoral college then yes, you can vote for your third party candidate, but if not then any vote you make third party is actually not going to have any impact at all, being as it will be against both major parties equally.

So really, voting third party at a national level is useless. In a local race the chance of a win is much higher, but at a national level it is worse than meaningless. The effect you could have by voting for the major party which most closely aligns with your views is lost if you vote for a third party who has no chance of winning.

Now moving for ranked choice voting or similar is something you can do locally, voting for local races to have more socialist candidates is something you can do, funding independent journalism is something you can do, and running for local office is something you can do. All of those things as well as many more will take your effort and make actual positive change. Voting third party in a national election at this point in time will not.

What cross are you talking about? Ankhs are the only thing that comes to mind and you buy those at the shops at the start of each 5 level set, so 6,11,16, etc. Ankhs provide a resurrection if you die but you won’t have your gear or any potions etc, so you have to run back to the site at which you died where you will find a backpack with all your stuff.

If someone does not treat you with respect you are not their friend, you are their pet.

It is no reflection on you at all, this is purely on them, but if they don’t respect you they are not treating you as an equal as they should be.

You deserve better.

A healthy relationship can include a difference of experience, knowledge, even power, but not respect. Respect is the bedrock of a good relationship and if you don’t have that you may need to look elsewhere. If you were not modelled self respect or taught it you would benefit from learning about it.

That all said, she sounds like she may just be compensating in some way, putting you down to elevate herself, but seriously you don’t have to take that. She could potentially change and stop this behaviour but she may persist and you may have no option but to get into a new friend ggroup and leave this one.

The question is not about what is possible, it is about what is common. Also, I am not saying the SAD is good or even better than vegan. Anyone trying to eat well is likely to make some of the same good choices, such as reducing refined sugars, dropping a portion of their ultra processed foods, and monitoring and meeting their protein needs. Being unable to hit your protein needs on a vegan diet is something an incautious person may experience, but supplementing protein or increasing protein components in your meals is manageable.

That all said, it takes extra work. Most people don’t have the spare effort to cook at home for every meal, people are time and money poor and stressed beyond all reasonable limits, so we need to try to make some sort of plan that can actually be followed, not just some ideal. Is vegan possible? With effort and education it seems that some people can manage it, so at least some portion of people could do that. On the flip side if someone eats fish and chicken as their meat rather than beef have they not made progress from a bunch of ways? Definitely fewer carbon emissions. I don’t claim to know the answer for what we should do but saying “do this perfect thing” seems counterproductive.

I used heavy trance when I had trouble when I was younger. I used night sounds like rain and thunder for a couple of years. Now my partner watches Minecraft videos while heading off to sleep and I cuddle them and fall asleep with them.

That said, other tools are exercise, less caffeine, Ritalin (so I am not overtired and stressed), less sugar, and better heat management.

If everyone has the same amount of starting capital it is a fair game assuming both can opt out at any time.

That said, the house appears to not be able to opt out (they definitely can, you just don’t think about that part), and the house has more capital. For them each time someone plays a round there are only 3 possible outcomes. Half are the player loses, then a quarter are the player wins and plays another round, and lastly a quarter are the player wins and ends the game. The only case where the player wins is option 3, in all other cases, so 75%, the house wins because the next round has another chance to make the player lose directly at a 50/50 chance or play another round.

I’m reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said “Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it”.

If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don’t axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.

As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don’t have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.

I’ve made it through the final boss and returned to the surface with the amulet as a huntress and mage but never a rogue. That said, yes, it is hard, and yes, it takes a lot of attempts. I would recommend trying to find ways of diverting enemies, tanking a little damage, and making yourself invisible. You can get closer to the boss using blink, haste, and invisibility and you can make the other enemies hit him with stones of aggression. You may also want to consider scrolls of challenge, wand of lightning or corrosion, and using the cloak to go invisible for a turn to let enemies dispirse. That said, good job getting that far, try again with what you learned, you will get there.

I’m here in Australia and now, 4.5 years in, still haven’t had it. I mask whenever outside and use good hand hygiene at a times. I carry alcohol hand sanitiser and have wipes in the car for when I take my mask off in the car to wipe my face. I haven’t had a cold, flu, RSV, or covid since 2019 when I started wearing the mask because of bushfires. I work with vulnerable people who could get very sick from covid and so I don’t want to carry it person to person, and I also have an immune compromised partner who I don’t want to give it to. Honestly it is not a big ask and it is very effective to just mask up.

Seat 8

Eat a kilo of cashews a few hours before boarding, make them really taste the horror, ideal location for diffusion. Maybe add some sorbitol gummy bears and refuse to leave my seat. I reckon I can make at least half vomit.

In Australia we have a single payer with private alongside. It is not good to have the private alongside but it is definitely a good step.

To make it happen in the USA I would hope for a government system to cover people who are currently not or poorly covered, so basically a below bronze tier plan, that is funded through a specific levy on something disconnected from healthcare, say corporate profits or very high income. Cover just the lowest of the low at first, the people who currently get nothing, and then gradually expand it, eating into the low end of the market. Every year bring more people over, eventually bringing everyone over and outlawing private.

As for how to actually manage the healthcare itself, I think it would make sense for government hospitals to be run by the government and for everyone there to be on a salary which is reasonable and provides stability. Maybe have a specific tax incentive for new doctors/nurses/other professionals to do a number of years, say 5-10, for a significant reduction in their university costs. Make sure that the entire system is aimed at long term impacts on health so dentistry should be included, perinatal, early childhood, and so on. Always be looking to prevent health issues rather than treat. Aim for quality of life enhancement as much as possible.

Once you have a base system started you can also branch out a little, adding linkages to schooling for the dietetics and exercise physiology stuff, aged care facilities for geriatric and cognitive health stuff, and so on. Make sure that alongside all of this you properly fund and support the independent operation of Native American healthcare and try as much as possible to have a system meeting people where they are with members of that community, so try to encourage underrepresented people into medicine and support their educational attainment.

As for the state by state thing, ditch it. This is not different based on which side of a line you are, it is different based on the medical needs of every person in every community. Some areas will need more support for drug and alcohol induced issues, but honestly they are needed everywhere so just make that available everywhere. Same with geriatric care, there are old people everywhere. Oklahoma does not have different humans to California, just different laws and different contexts, but making sure that each individual gets the care they need is the central rule.

Lastly, use this as an opportunity to roll out an eHealth record system. Make it national, ideally make it interoperable with Europe, and make it very secure. By secure I don’t mean ask Microsoft for help, I mean have the NSA and so on run red team ops on it, trying to get in, for the life of the system, then fix holes they find. Make sure people own their own data and can access every report and record from their portal. And also do thorough consulting on delegation of access, sometimes your partner having access to your records is a bad idea.

I work in disability support. I leave the house, drive to my client, then don my mask and wear it until I leave the client and get back into my car. If I have a client all day I can just wear the mask all day, eating before and after my shift. I have not gotten a cold, flu, or other disease for the last 4 years and I have worked with people who actively have covid, influenza, RSV, and other illnesses.

My mask is a pm 1.0, so a little better than pm 2.5 which is what n95 is, and it works very well. Honestly I can’t see me changing my behaviour around masking ever. I don’t get sick, I don’t carry illness to vulnerable clients, and I don’t have to change my behaviour day to day so habit is solid and easy to maintain.

While it didn’t help my endocarditis last year it has definitely protected against covid and even now I have not gotten it once. I think it is a good deal overall.

I did a whole stack of servers using SNMP based monitoring years ago and it was amazing. I could see loads, memory stats, NIC utilisation, disk space, and all sorts of other things. I tried Cacti and Icinga and settled on the latter but they are all fairly similar. Once you are generating the data you van do whatever you like with it, so monitoring load attributable to which actual executable is definitely manageable. It is also handy for getting notifications for something being down, losing stability, or just being out if whack.

If you are looking for some less garish designs for cases the Fractal Design North is one great looking option, and also some of the mini-itx form factor cases look really nice too, not too far off from some of the ones you mentioned.

That said, you absolutely can add a graphics card to some of the corporate machines, but some are much harder than others. I have not done one recently but honestly I would look for someone else’s build and replicate it as exactly as possible. I have had weird issues with corporate gear before around connectors, weird pinouts, very limited PSUs, and strange limitations on the PCIe port supporting some cards but not others (HP and a generic network card crashing my system randomly). If you find that someone else has done that specific box with a specific card then you should be ok, but if you have to deviate try to make sure that you match closely what they had, such as whether the graphics card has extra power or is PCIe only or if they have to use one of the corporate style graphics cards because gaming cards won’t work.

A few things to start. We need to know more about how things are currently.

lspci -vv

That will give us what modules are being used by what devices along with a bunch of other information.

lsusb -v

That will give us some info about your USB layout, drivers, and so on.

We also need to know what distro you are using, kernel version, and for the distro what exact version, so if Ubuntu is it LTS, current, 23.04, etc.

That should be a good start, after that we can see where we are at and what next steps are.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/sitzpinkler-german-men-pee-sitting-down/

“62% of German men sit down “every time” or “most times” when they go pee. That’s more than men in 12 other countries surveyed worldwide.”

Or have education about how much piss goes everywhere when you pee. In Germany most men sit to pee most of the time, it is a cultural issue and can be changed. That said, if you do urinals, make them stalls too, I don’t want to chat with my pee neighbour.

OK, so good, a clear starting point.

First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.

The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.

So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.

So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.

Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.

Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.

Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.