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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • Exactly. And that’s what a doctor is supposed to do. That is why certain medications require a prescription. Much in the same way that it’s considered better to let five criminals go free than to unjustly punish one innocent, I think it’s better to let five people who arguably don’t need it get medication than to deny it to one person who truly does need it.

    There is an attitude in this country that if something is being abused, especially medication, that the best and only response of government and society should be to make that thing harder to get. But that doesn’t stop abuse. It has literally never worked in the past, and it does not work now. If someone is addicted to prescription painkillers and you deny them the prescription, they aren’t going to say ‘aw shucks I guess it’s time to clean up my life and get a job’. They’re going to get their fix somewhere else.

    And the result is that real patients get harmed. My partner is lucky to have a good medical team. But you hear lots of stories of people who go for surgery and get literally cut open and are sent home with basically Tylenol because the surgeon is terrified to have too many opiates on his prescription record. That isn’t okay. Our solution to one problem is not only making it worse it is causing another problem.


  • Exactly. My partner has chronic pain from an old car accident. Their neck is full of screws and bolts. Medications like oxycontin are literally the difference between them having a tolerable active life, and being in constant excruciating pain. Yeah I know a lot of people abuse it. But all the regulatory responses are just trying to make it harder to get, it’s like performing brain surgery with a sledgehammer and people like my partner get caught in the crossfire.

    If they want to fix the problem they should address pharmaceutical advertising, both to doctors and patients. Get rid of the kickbacks.



  • And that’s exactly why Ukraine is kicking ass. Paying $20k or $30k for a single enemy casualty is a pretty good deal in warfare. But these drones aren’t going through some huge defense contractor, they’re being 3D printed and assembled from off-the-shelf parts. Basically a little army of logistics people building hobby drones out of consumer level equipment, just with an improvised explosive like a grenade or some similar impact explosive strapped to the bottom.
    They aren’t even paying $20k for a casualty, they are paying $1-2k for a hobby drone and a grenade and many of them create multiple casualties.

    The more expensive ones cost more, but those are the ones you see that are reusable and can drop several grenades in one flight. Those are more like $5k-$20k. Still an insane bargain even if each one only creates one casualty before it is destroyed.







  • I only know some basics of the whole situation, but I really don’t get this attack. Israel is a modern Westernized nation and enjoys STRONG support, financial and military, from many/most other Western developed nations. They have modern weapons of just about all types.
    Israel is accused of some awful shit and stealing peoples homes. From what I can see they’re probably guilty of this.

    But I don’t understand how killing a bunch of civilians at a rave is going to overall help the cause. It seems to me like a. it’d give your better-armed adversary an excuse to smack you down once and for all, and b. a good way to make the rest of the world feel like they shouldn’t be stopped in doing so (and if anything, helped in their efforts).

    So what is the goal? Is this just an expression of pent up anger? Because it seems a poor strategy to me.



  • It’s not. In the view of many, civilian gun ownership is A Problem To Be Solved. Such people do not draw a distinction between law-abiding gun owners who keep their guns secure and threaten nobody, and violent criminals and psychopaths who frequently kill people. Thus, with that view, any law that restricts gun ownership or reduces the number of guns in society is progress.

    In reality, this law will do absolutely nothing for public safety. It will make the lives of gun owners harder, while the criminals and psychos will ignore this law just as they do every other law.


  • I assume by “Raspberry Z-Wave module” you mean the RaZberry z-wave addon board, and I couldn’t agree more. I tried to get that thing going with another home automation package and gave up after a few hours of fucking with it.

    That said, these days I’m using Home Assistant on a RPi with a Nortek z-wave/zigbee combo radio USB interface and I couldn’t be happier. If you’ve never used HA it’s worth trying out; used to require a lot of scripting but now it’s a beautiful and polished system that has all the tweakability a nerd wants with a nice high-WAF GUI. They have a plugin that does exactly what you’re doing and makes a virtual alarm system out of existing sensors.

    I also agree block connections and use a VPN to access it, I do the same thing.



  • Actually it’s pretty well understood.
    The human body reacts to CO2 buildup with a ‘gasping for air’ sensation. Nitrogen however, not at all. The air we breathe is 80% nitrogen 20% oxygen, so we aren’t sensitive to nitrogen at all. Breathing air with little oxygen is something well understood as it can happen to pilots of unpressurized aircraft. Here’s a funny example of what happens when pressurization fails. Once ATC figures out he has hypoxia, they order him to descend to 11,000’ (which is usually the point hypoxia starts to kick in) and he’s fine. But while he’s hypoxic, he happily admits he has no control over his airplane and is totally unbothered by that fact.
    There’s a thing called a hypoxia chamber- the oxygen % of the air is reduced (not eliminated) to simulate what it’s like being at high altitude without pressurization. Always funny videos there, grown men with oxygen-starved brains playing with a children’s puzzle trying to put the square block in the round hole.

    Execution by 100% nitrogen is the most humane death I can think of. The gas is odorless, and as it takes effect the prisoner would experience a euphoric feeling before just falling asleep and dying a few minutes later.

    That said, I’m sure they’ll fuck this up somehow- most civilized people have concluded that execution is barbaric and unnecessary, so whoever builds the nitrogen gadget is probably not going to be the sharpest tool in the shed.

    And that’s what a botched execution would look like- if you shut off the nitrogen too soon or don’t ensure a high enough nitrogen concentration, the prisoner will be left with brain damage but not dead.






  • Personal liability (piercing the corporate shield) is a really tough nut to crack. That’d also do some outsized harm- think kids college fund raided for settlement money.
    That said, I’d be happy to make it a personal crime to, with knowledge of the law, instruct any worker to use a machine without safety equipment and water hookup, or to work without a mask. THAT should be a personal crime, like criminal charges. And you should have to, when hired for any such supervisory position, sign a one-piece thing that has that law laid out so you can’t claim you didn’t know the law.