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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Yes, but to clarify: the time constraints are imposed by for-profit healthcare businesses trying to optimize billable time because insurance will only reimburse for so much time, rather than being imposed by the insurance companies directly. (It’s generally not quite as silly in the non-profit sector.) I work in healthcare in the US: we all hate how it works. The system sucks and it interferes with the quality of care that can be provided, leaving patients worse off just so that greedy can be fed. It’s just asinine that anyone who has no medical knowledge/training is making decisions about how patient care can be implemented, especially where there’s a profit motive involved. We really need to pivot to single-payer or national healthcare system, and abolish for-profit ownership of hospitals.



  • In my hyper religious, Southern Baptist upbringing, I often heard Christians say that Christianity is not a religion. The mental gymnastics employed to explain this position were varied. Most often it was “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship [with God]”, or something along the lines of “Christianity isn’t a religion because it’s true”.

    “Religion” in general was thus deemed a bad thing, because it was a term used to encapsulate all the other (and thus false) faith-belief-philosophy systems that were used by Satan to lead the world away from God. It bears noting that Catholicism and other major denominations always all fell under that umbrella of “other”.



  • The people who are that severely damaged by drugs* are a small percentage. I’ve only seen a handful who got that bad because of drugs (I’m a professional in the field). Most addicts can benefit from appropriate care and could become functional members of society again if they had proper support - which our system grossly lacks.

    *Most cases of persistent psychosis aren’t drug-induced; most of those throwing feces have psychosis from some other cause, which can also be treated with varying levels of success. Drug-induced psychosis is most of the time transient, and subsides as the drug wears off.





  • Private browser mode in many browsers disables plugins by default, and also doesn’t do anything to stop trackers or data collection. All private mode does is keep your activity private from others who also have access to your device (e.g. family members, roommates), by not saving browser history/cookies/etc.

    Also, VPN’s can be helpful, but there are ways to “fingerprint” individual users behind VPN’s by how they move their mouse and click speed and what websites they visit etc… I imagine plugins like AdNauseum could help with that. It’s a clever idea, I’ll have to check it out - thanks!



  • I hear what you’re saying, and were it a college or professional team I probably would agree, but for high schoolers that’s harder. At that age, their very identity and self-worth are dependent on peer acceptance. Not to mention any shy kids who might have felt powerless to speak up. We also don’t know that they didn’t try; one or some may have tried and been shut down by peer pressure. My guess is one idiot thought it’d be funny, convinced a few more, and pressured the rest. “It’s just a prank bro” or somesuch.

    That the coach didn’t put an immediate stop to it is definitely an issue.


  • Per the article, the workers didn’t know. The employers didn’t tell them of the dangers or provide the necessary safety training/equipment. From the article:

    “Dust was everywhere, he said, and he was given only a dust mask — one he said was inadequate for the job — to protect himself. Sometimes he brought a hose and tried to attach it to the machine to reduce dust, but there were no machines dispensing water as they were cutting, he said.”

    “Segura Meza had never heard of silicosis before he was diagnosed.”



  • Eh… I see where you’re coming from, and I’m generally against homeschooling as well. For various reasons, I wish I hadn’t been and wouldn’t do so for my child.

    That said, I’m inclined to disagree. It only promotes what the parents put into it - which, yes, often is a lot of religion, but it isn’t intrinsic to the practice. The religious component I suspect is where you get the stunting of open-mindedness and critical thinking ideas, but fwiw I and several of my siblings have since left the faith for atheism, and even those who still participate in religion are mostly rather progressive. I do fully recognize that I and my siblings are probably the exception in this regard, so in those aspects I think your opinion generally represents the actual outcomes of homeschooling as it exists in the US, and probably is not that unpopular outside of homeschooling circles - but I would reiterate that I don’t think it’s intrinsic to homeschooling; rather, I think it’s a result of who in the US tends to choose to homeschool.

    As for the idea that it stunts communal empathy, I’m a little bit baffled. I work in a mental hospital, one of my sisters has spent a year volunteering at orphanages in Ghana, one of my cousins (who was also homeschooled) runs a rural mission hospital in Bangladesh, etc… My observation is that most homeschooling families are rather pro-social and fully embrace the concepts of community and communal support of one another (even if they have eaten the socialism-is-bad propaganda; their rationale then is just that charity should come from the community itself rather than being subject to government mandate and bureaucratic inefficiency), so I’m curious what gives you that idea.


  • As someone who was homeschooled and now holds a master’s degree, I will proudly own the ‘weirdo’ title and make no claims to normalcy. And I suspect most of my 7 siblings would do the same.

    But saying we’re all ‘likely retarded’ is a bit peculiar to me. Most homeschoolers I’ve met (which I suspect is more than most folks, being from inside the community) come from high-functioning or highly-religious families, with very few notably ‘retarded’. How many homeschool kids have you actually known?


  • Most of the followers can’t see past “we’re going to save America from the evil Democrats”. It’s not as if Fox News or OAN put the fascist behaviors on display. They genuinely believe Trump when he says the Democrats are persecuting him, rather than that the justice system is prosecuting him for crimes - his only “crime” was trying to save America from those evil commie Democrats, after all. They take all the BS at face value because … tribalism and fear or something?

    The only people in the Republican party who actually understand what’s happening are the rich and the powerful. Everyone else, the voters especially, are just useful idiots.