Therapists used to be the most helpful thing in the world (or so I’ve heard), now they’re so unhelpful they have to rely on the state to get us to use them and have so many different indie-based projects and programs competing with them, like BetterTherapy (which isn’t bad tbh). The old joke is they’re paid friends but now I see they’re just paid, you could be in a genuine situation where something obliterates the quality of your life (e.g. custody battles) and they’ll be like “does lithium sound good” (which by the way, lithium is outdated by two thousand years, so if it’s recommended right away to you, run). The reason they’re not set up like lawyers where you only pay them “if you win” is because they know this would destroy them.
I fear the medical profession is also going down this path.
Government and lawsuits are totally regulating everyone to death. Doctors used to be knowledgeable and creative (and they still are) and had the freedom to prescribe whatever they thought would be the best.
Now, they can only follow conventional wisdom and the exact recommendations of the regulators. If they deviate just a little to find the perfect fit for your case, they risk themselves and their livelihoods.
It’s primarily private insurance (at least in the US) that drives that. The doctor can prescribe something and then a “doctor” who works for the insurance company can take a 10 second look at it and deny it outright in favor of a more profitable treatment.
When it comes to costs, yes, but there is also another angle.
Sometimes doctors will prescribe expensive, patented drugs when cheaper, better, out-of-patent alternatives exist.
This is not to the benefit of the insurance companies.
Rather the pharma industry and regulators act in a concentrated rap battle: the regulator covers their ass by only approving in accordance with the latest, most comprehensive studies (“evidence based practice”) and the pharma industry only bankrolls new studies on their most profitable medications.
If it makes you feel any better OP I worked at Chipotle in a very white part of the US.
When you start out, you heat the Tortillas and the ask about rice and beans before someone else does the hard work.
White or brown?
Black or pinto?
Ok not super racist.
We hire this gay guy and a bunch of kids come in mispronouncing everything. He took major pride in asking them all if they wanted FA JITAS. Very funny.
Debt free, own two paid off cars old enough to be cheap but new enough that the maintenance isn’t too bad, and also they get good milage. We don’t own a truck or an SUV. We rent, cook at home 90% of the time, and we’re only just making it.
The “pretending to be wise” answer is that it’s easier to deal with mass extinction than with individual mortality; that the thought of your own death is weakened by the thought of gigadeaths.
More seriously, though:
Major disasters have always been a large part of human cultural experience. Cities have been destroyed by earthquakes, volcanoes, or hurricanes. Within recorded history, plagues and famines have reduced prosperous civilizations to desperate stragglers living in ruins.
Preventing or surviving disasters is, therefore, one of the most important things humans can work on. Disasters loom large in our cultural consciousness because they really are large and because we can actually do stuff to make these problems less bad.
Disaster preparedness is, in fact, no-kidding, really important for you, your family, your city, your country, and the world as a whole.
Preventing avoidable disasters, including manmade ones such as nuclear war, is a major part of what makes world politics morally significant. Avoiding the devastation of war is a really good reason to get good at politics, diplomacy, peacemaking, mutually beneficial relations among peoples; and the high stakes of “shit, we could actually kill off humanity if we fuck up politics too badly” is a pretty good motivator.
So … we think a lot about bad shit that could happen, because bad shit really can happen, and we can do something about quite a lot of it.
My guess would be that it's simply because we are aware of the concept of extinction and have watched as other species have gone extinct. This causes some existential dread, like learning about death might.
Speaking as an American - an electric kettle. Just a thing that plugs into the wall and boils water.
I use it for tea, of course, but I also use it any time I need boiling water for something, because it’s faster than a kettle sitting on the stove and it doesn’t use gas.
As a Brit, it’s always weird as fuck to see people in American movies boiling an old tin kettle on the stove like they’re stuck in the 1950s.
Even if you’re living in London’s smallest flat, and all you’ve got is a microwave, a mini fridge, a bed and a cupboard with a toilet in it, you’ve still got an electric kettle.
power determines the boil time. power is voltage times current. its usually said current kills and not voltage, which is what you’re thinking. (which is not even entirely correct)
Overall power would determine boil time, but the issue is that at 120V you need twice the current of 240V to deliver the same power. The wiring in American homes isn’t rated to handle the amount of current it would require to deliver the same amount of power as most 240V electric kettles.
There’s a relation between voltage and current you don’t quite understand. They both matter. If you’re interested check out ElectroBoom, learnelectronics, and Great Scott on YouTube. Watch enough and you’ll get it.
Also remember that American homes are quite literally wired different, and kettles aren’t as efficient fast as they are on the UK’s electric grid. They’re still far better than the stovetop, but the combined one-two punch of less need and stoves being “good enough” for most people most of the time just kills the idea in its tracks.
As a Canadian I now have 2 Electric kettles. Replaced my traditional electric kettle with a Gooseneck kettle for my pour over coffee. Still works great for tea. Also have a stove top gooseneck kettle for the camper when camping.
A pocket knife and a small flashlight. You don’t realize how often you could use either until you have them.
My knife is an Opinel #8 ($20) and my light is an Aurora A33 ($20).
I carry a bag most of the time, so I’ve got a little extra room than most, but I’d probably still carry both if I didn’t. The pocket knife is the size of, well, a pocket knife and the flashlight is only the size of a sharpie.
If you ever have to resort to the knife resist the urge to push it against the toilet. If it cuts through suddenly the sharp impact from the blade could crack the porcelain.
No I agree with you perfectly, but it was a choice between making it semantically correct, and making it more readable / understandable to most readers.
Lol it’s an old story from reddit. Allegedly, this guy was at a friend’s house and he went to the bathroom. But he couldnt find the poopknife and called out for it. He was mortified to learn that the average family did not employ the use of a poopknife.
Piano. I actually can play it a bit but I’d need 10000 more hours and space and time and motivation to do that. I wish I could just sit down and play, without disturbing the neighbors or limiting my living space or cutting down on my other hobbies. But piano is really nice. I guess I’ll stick to listening to it.
You could get a keyboard and use headphones if the noise is the most significant blocker. That can help with the space, too, since you could fold up the stand and put it away when not in use, unlike a piano which is furniture as much as a musical instrument. Unfortunately, there’s no helping with the time part unless you’re lucky enough to be born with talent, though even then it just means less time rather than little time.
I was already considering switching over to kbin fully just because they're set up to interact with both Lemmy instances and Mastodon. Unfortunately the Mastodon side still feels a bit janky, but I'm hoping that'll change as time goes on.
Definitely not going to stay with an instance that pre-emptively bends over for corporate interests. That's one of the biggest reasons why I'm shifting away from Reddit in the first place.
My ex was a chill stoner who got radicalized on the internet and became an abusive alcoholic raging racist, then got sober but is still an angry right wing asshole.
I was selfish/self-centered as fuck as a teenager and gained patience and perspective over time, I think most people do change in that way, become more aware of others, nicer. Not everyone, obviously. But most.
[Shameless comm advertisement: make sure to check !linguistics, this sort of question fits nicely there!]
There are two main points: agreement and derivation.
Agreement: grammatical gender gives you an easy way to keep track of which word refers to which. Consider for example the following sentence:
The clock fell over the glass table, and it broke.
What does “it” refer to? It’s ambiguous, it could be either “the clock” or “the glass table” (both things are breakable). In Portuguese however the sentence is completely unambiguous due to the gender system, as the translations show:
O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ele quebrou. // “ele” he/it = the clock
O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ela quebrou. // “ela” she/it = the table
It’s only one word of difference; however “ele” he/itmust refer to “relógio” clock due to the gender agreement. Same deal with “ela” she/it and “mesa” table.
Latin also shows something similar, due to the syntactically free word order. Like this:
puer bellam puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.F.ACC girl.F.ACC loves) = the boy loves the beautiful girl
puer bellus puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.M.NOM girl.F.ACC loves) = the handsome boy loves the girl
Note how the adjective between “puer” boy and “puella” girl could theoretically refer to any of those nouns; Latin is not picky with adjective placement, as long as it’s near the noun it’s fine. However, because “puer” is a masculine word and “puella” is feminine, we know that the adjective refers to one if masculine, another if feminine. (Note: the case marks reinforce this, but they aren’t fully reliable.)
The second aspect that I mentioned is derivation: gender gives you a quick way to create more words, without needing new roots for that. Italian examples:
“bambino” boy vs. “bambina” girl
"gatto" cat, tomcat vs. “gatta” female cat
"banana" banana (fruit) vs. “banano” banana plant
"mela" apple (fruit) vs. “melo” apple tree
Focus on the last two lines - note how the gender system is reused to things that (from human PoV) have no sex or social gender, like trees and their fruits. This kind of extension of the derivation system is fairly common across gendered languages.
Addressing some comments here: English does not have a grammatical gender system. It has a few words that refer to social gender and sex, but both concepts (grammatical gender and social gender) are completely distinct.
That’s specially evident when triggering agreement in a gendered language, as English doesn’t do anything similar. Portuguese examples, again:
[Sentence] O Ivan é uma pessoa muito alta.
[Gloss, showing word gender] The.M Ivan.M is a.F person.F very tall.F
[Translation] Ivan is a very tall person.
Check the adjective, “alta” tall. Even if “Ivan” refers to a man, you need to use the feminine adjective here, because it needs to agree with “pessoa” person - a feminine word. This kind of stuff happens all the time in gendered languages, but you don’t see it e.g. in English.
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