Funny story, instead of referring to groups of adults as " hey guys," I like to refer to them as "hey kids." You know how many grown adults I've had object to this? Zero. Not one. Ever.
I've seen too many should-be-dead bodies dragged through years of medical torture after a crippling incident to be able to agree with that sentiment. There are worse things than death.
You don't attempt CPR until you confirm that the person doesn't have a pulse. The angle up on the edge of the pool and the way the kid was doing compressions were not doing anything. Trust me, I've seen and done effective chest compressions and that shit is HARD. A 12yo tapping on someone's chest might be well-meaning, but it's not CPR
God bless this kid, he deserves all the credit for pulling that guy out of the pool. That's probably what saved the guy's life.
However...
"Patients in previous studies have cited television as a large source of their belief that rates of survival after CPR vary between 19% and 75%, whereas actual rates of survival of CPR range from an average of 12% for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests to 24–40% for in-hospital arrests."
Oh, almost nothing gets pulverized when galaxies collide! Our Milky Way galaxy is currently colliding with a couple of small satellite galaxies. There's so much empty space between stars that almost none of the stars themselves impact.
It's more a matter of the gravitational orbits of the stars inside the galaxies changing dramatically. But those changes caused by a galaxy merger take millions of years. Plenty of time for life to adapt.
The biggest danger to life would be the possibility of getting blasted by radiation, if you ended up too close to a supernova or something like that.
So, the thing is this is based on a particular hypothesis that Long Covid is caused by lingering, chronic, low-level viral infection that results in an overactive immune system. While that may be true in a subset of Long Covid suffers, the long history of post-viral syndromes like ME/CFS make me pretty skeptical that an anti-viral drug is going to have much impact on most of Long Covid.
-60⁰ F windchill. You always want to install the heat pump exchanger where it's not getting battered by wind anyway, so it's probably not feeling temps that low
I put in a dual fuel heat pump in my Massachusetts house a couple years ago. I'd love to have just a heat pump, but those arctic temperature excursions we get - ironically because of climate change destabilizing the jet stream - combined with our ongoing lack of cheap, sustainable electric generation made me want to keep that gas furnace backup for the worst of the season.
Heat pump means in using my gas furnace about 50% less than I was before the switch. And also, new gas furnace is 96% efficient rather than 80%.
I'm deeply skeptical of any and all utopian ideas. They have this mysterious tendency to wander down paths to authoritarianism because we, as a species, are more defined by our ideas of who and what we are than by anything else in our existence.
When an idea becomes an ideal, people become willing to kill or die in attempts to bring that ideal to fruition, no matter how vain.
In fact, this is how I self-edit my own beliefs about the world and myself. "If the cards were all really on the table, would I be willing to proudly die in defense of this idea?" If the answer is yes, then I cling to that as an ideal that I strive toward.
All human lives matter equally.
It is important to lift up those who have less than I do.
Any small effort to alleviate the suffering of my fellow humans is meaningful.
There is always hope.
That is the utopia I choose to live in deliberately every day, and what I appreciate most is that it is resilient to the whims and chaos of this world that I can't control.
I don't know how it works where you are, but in the US, we've always needed to get a written prescription from a doctor to get birth control pills. The prescription gets you permission to obtain the pills from the pharmacist (chemist) "behind the counter." The change here is the pills will be available without seeing a doctor first aka "over the counter" as we call it.
This has its good and bad points. It's better for people to receive teaching from a doctor about the side effects of birth control and how to use it. But also, getting in to see a doctor is a huge hurdle for working class people who need birth control the most. So overall, I support the move to make both control available over the counter.