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blue_dragon

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blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Can you please cite the court case that proves Trump won in 2020? Regardless of how many people believe that the Democrats cheated, asserting that Trump won AND that his alleged victory was proven in court is quite a bold claim. Post proof or gtfo.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I doubt this is true in all cases. I wouldn't recommend trying this and certainly would not trust my life to this advice.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I agree with your sentiment. I tried the app a few years ago and found it offered nothing of value. Most content you can get by supporting an artist is best enjoyed outside the app anyway, like goodies they send in the mail or high-res art that looks better on a bigger screen.

The only use cases I can think of for an app are 1) Socializing with other supporters who support the same artist, and 2) Searching other creators on Patreon and discovering similar artists you could support.

But Patreon's social features were (still are?) terrible, which is why all the creators took their social communities to Discord instead. And ever since the beginning, Patreon has opposed adding search. So their app, to me, is totally worthless. I'm astonished they're still in business.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
It wasn't happenstance, though. There is a specific reason as to why humanity's depictions of demons look the same as those aliens, and it's a critical plot point. (Can't say more or I'll spoil one of the best sci-fi books of all time for those who haven't read it).

Edit: it's also highly debatable whether the Overlords are in fact the good guys.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
[flagged]
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Makes me think the Soviets may have been correct in their obsession over Venus, if only by sheer luck.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
My "pragmatic" analysis:

I once spoke to a primary-care doctor about the risks of getting HIV through sex. The doctor told me that the risk of getting HIV the "typical way" (receiving anal sex) is about 1/72. Thus, for every 72 exposures, the recipient would contract HIV one time. This assumes that condoms are not used, and that the transmitter has an untreated HIV infection, which presumably has a high viral load.

Transmission risk goes down by orders of magnitude for other forms of sex, until we get to receiving blowjobs, where the risk is literally nil. There are zero recorded cases of HIV caused by receiving a blowjob.

In other words, HIV is actually kind of hard to get. You have to be very active, and not using protection, in order to get it. Or just be very, very unlucky. And that's with respect to untreated cases, which likely have high viral loads.

This suggests to me that, for practical purposes, undetectable levels are impossible to transmit. Or as the Prep marketing executives would say, "U means U" - undetectable means untransmittable.

Whether or not you're comfortable having sex with someone who is HIV+ but claims to have an undetectable viral load is a separate question entirely.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Receiving a controlled dose of psilocybin in a supervised medical environment is not the same as tripping balls off shrooms you bought from the guy down the street. I think OP is cautioning vulnerable people against rashly self-administering psychedelics because they think it will solve all their problems. I do not think he believes all research and use of psilocybin should be stopped because of one tragic accident.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Landlords assume the financial responsibility of mortgage payments, property taxes, and maintenance. These are non-trivial costs which the tenant is often not able to pay themselves. It's also far more convenient for transient people to rent a home than to buy.

It's easy to shit on a landlord for collecting rent every month. I've never enjoyed writing that check. But the fact is that many people, likely including yourself, would never be able to acquire housing if you weren't able to rent it from somebody else.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Would you be ok with mandatory draft registration for women if conscription began with only women aged 36 and above? National fertility would be unaffected, since women of that age rarely have children anyways. Then the draft would be gender-balanced and the war hawks would get more bodies for their machine. Everybody wins.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
> it should be straight forward for the president to say that spying on his enemies, that are also the enemies of the state/government, is an official act

This would be challenged in court by the victims of the President's spying, and the court would ultimately decide whether or not the spying constituted an "official act".
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
My naive assumption is that ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival is not an official nor constitutionally authorized power, and thus would be prosecutable.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
To me, Biden comes off as slow because he frequently trails off mid-sentence without finishing his thoughts.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Use the next several years to build as much muscle as you can without damaging your joints. It gets extraordinarily difficult to add new muscle as you enter your mid-30s, but fortunately you still have time. I work out 3-4 days per week for ~90 minutes each.

If you've never done strength training before, you may be pleasantly surprised to learn how much extra mass you can add, while remaining on a typical diet, with zero chemical assistance. Your trainer will be able to help you.
blue_dragon
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
The CIA popularized the "tinfoil hat conspiracy nut" as a reverse-psychology trick back in the '60s as part of Operation Mockingbird.

The government had seen promising results in its experiments to control human emotions via radio-wave emissions, and they wanted to deploy this technology on a national scale. However, one recurring problem was that thin films of conductive material, such as aluminum foil, had a tendency to scramble the control waves and render them useless. In response, the CIA launched a massive press campaign intended to smear and delegitimize the wearing of tinfoil hats, with the ultimate goal of preemptively convincing the public not to wear them via threat of social ostracization.

Considering the widespread mockery levied at the tinfoil community today, I'd say their efforts have worked quite well.

You can read more about Operation Mockingbird here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
blue_dragon
·3 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Thanks for the suggestion. I have an appointment with my GI coming up soon and I'll definitely ask her about those. Dupixent in particular looks very promising!

I'm glad you got your daughter into treatment early. I'm ~30 years old and research and treatments for EoE weren't nearly as good when I was her age, so I wasn't properly diagnosed until my 20s. By that point, just eating normal meals was a struggle and I had to have an esophageal dilation before I finally got onto my current treatment plan. I hope she never has to experience that, it sucks.

Omeprazole and elimination diet work ok for me, but it's not anything close to remission. I can finally eat normally again, but I don't have a comprehensive list of my trigger foods, and I get painful flare-ups if I accidentally eat the wrong thing. I'll gladly give myself injections once per week for the rest of my life if it means no more intermittent chest pain and it lets me eat a normal cake on my birthday again.
blue_dragon
·3 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Hijacking your comment to share my story and ask for advice.

I have diagnosed EoE, I've had it for my whole life. I'm currently on 80mg omeprazole daily and an elimination diet. This helps a lot but is not a cure. I've also experienced benign heart palpitations for my whole life (confirmed by a cardiologist). For a long time, I've had a hunch that the two were connected.

On days when I have EoE flare-ups, I feel some pain and swelling in my esophagus, as though I have a bad chest cold. Food and liquids tend to linger in my esophagus for longer. Another unusual side effect is that, on days when my EoE flares up, I tend to experience frequent heart palpitations, most commonly right after consuming food or water.

Since the vagus nerve travels through the chest, adjacent to both the heart and the esophagus, I think the mechanism of action is this: the inflammation in my esophagus stimulates the vagus nerve, making a palpitation more likely. This inflammation also causes food and liquid to travel through the esophagus more slowly, which stimulates the vagus nerve further. The combined stimulus from inflammation and food or liquid can irritate the vagus nerve enough to cause heart palpitations.

Obviously I would like to cure both my EoE and palpitations, as they're currently the two biggest detriments to my quality of life. And inflammation due to an overactive immune system is the cause of EoE. So the possibility of reducing immune system inflammation just by stimulating the vagus nerve is very appealing to me.

If anyone reading this has an experience, opinion, research, suggestion, or anything they'd like to share, I'd love to hear it. I'm going to experiment with baking soda and famotidine to reduce inflammation, since I read in the above threads that either of those could work. But if there's some simple hack I can employ to reduce my symptoms (meditation/breathing technique, physical exercise, a stimulation device I can buy, some additional OTC medication I can take, etc), I love to hear it.