I love a good impossible burger over a normal burger for the big reason of how I feel after. Eating a normal burger as I am getting older means that I feel full in a gross way after, like I can feel the fat from the burger slowing me down, and I feel tired both physically and mentally and I sometimes feel borderline sick for an hour or so after. But with the impossible burgers I can just feel full in a healthy way. I love it. I will admit to also getting it with bacon though for that extra flavor.

I an pretty anti factory farm and love the idea of cutting out at least burgers from their industry. I also enjoy their sausages. Highly recommend them if you have not tried them. I try to cut out bulk meat eating for the environment and keep it to occasional, smaller portions, and even then it is normally chicken. Impossible meat helps scratch that itch if I want some meat but don’t want to commit to blowing my personal weekly allotment of red meat.

There are some great lists here. I am just going to add- put a whole home water filter on the cold water line of the kitchen sink. It has changed my life. I only need to replace the filter at most once a year, it is on the cold water line that is almost as good a fridge water dispenser would be, but with more pressure. And now when I make pasta, fill up the coffee pot, make tea, or whatever other random kitchen thing that needed water, it is filtered water. Not to mention the clean taste.

I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months.

Imma pause you right there. I’m in the middle of writing a dissertation and from the bottom of my heart struggling to find the words- fuck you. 175k in 6 months? I have good days writing 175 words. Fuck you. I wrote a scifi book that is around 75k words and it took about a year to get the draft done.

I did human intelligence. It was literally my job to interact with the people. And we did. And not just to hear what they say to our face, but to get sources and find out what people say behind our backs too. I can, with high confidence, say that close to 90% of the population wanted the taliban gone. It was the other 10% that were the issue. And they were the very loud minority that news stations loved to interview just to claim “accurately showing both sides”.

Under taliban rule Afghanistan was economically devastated and the second poorest country in the world. They had one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. And they had no healthcare system to speak of other than what was gifted to them from Iran or Pakistan depending of what half of the country you were in. No to mention their lack of infrastructure with the not even completed one highway ring around the country.

That all changed under ISAF and the people noticed. And now their past is about to become their future.

Lol. I did two tours over there. The people loved us. They loved the government. They loved the schools for women. The problem is culturally, they didn’t see a need to fight for it because of apathy. They figured “ISAF was always going to be here, so why need to fight for ourselves? And is ISAF isn’t here anymore, then we can’t support our selves, so why try?” As far as the schools go, they are voluntary. There are no truancy laws. They don’t even take attendance at most of the schools. It was completely up to the family if they wanted to send their boys OR their girls. Under pre-ISAF taliban the literacy rate was about 15% and at the time of withdrawal it was almost 40%. The people wanted to go to school, the taliban just didn’t let most of them or the schools that they did keep open were so severely limited in what they could teach.

The biggest red flag of this post, to me, is the use of the word Afghani. Any time someone says it with an ‘i’ at the end, you know they don’t know what they are talking about. Afghani is a currency, Afghan is a person.

Look up TASS news. That is all.

While I understand the resentment of saying an institution is a person, and I agree- they still have constitutional rights. To say that private institutions don’t have a right to free speech is the same as saying that the government is allowed to dictate what companies can and can’t say. Authoritarians would love for you to push that idea.

Under your same thinking (Harvard isn’t a person and has no right to a first amendment? OK): Then Harvard resisting against the trump administration is illegal and we find it treasonous to be funneling in possible spies from adversarial countries under the guise of education. We need to lock up anyine who works at any higher ed institution unless they can swear loyalty to America (trump) because they might be complicit in this spy ring. And don’t forget, the universities can be searched at any time for evidence and assumed guilty without trial because they aren’t a person and don’t have constitutional rights! Can we charge the university entity with state laws or federal laws? Both! They don’t have rights to protect against double jeopardy!

I find it funny that the tankies still think Russia can hold their own in a fight against NATO when they let can’t even beat up on their smaller neighbor with NATO hand-me-downs and previous generation surplus gear.

I would also encourage people to go to midnight showings of Tommy Wiseau’s ‘The Room’ and watch as people throw handfuls of plastic spoons at the screen. Also fun.

You either lost money, or you lost time. If you are implying that you lost nothing because you didn’t cash out and therefore can wait for a rebound, then you are going to lose the time you have to wait for the rebound. In economics that is also called an opportunity cost. You have now lost the opportunity to invest that money into something profitable because you have now tied it up in something that is unprofitable. You still lost. You are just too dumb to realize it with this mentality.

Worst case is when people with this mentality ride a stock to the bottom insisting it will just take more time to come back, and it doesn’t. Then forcing the person to lose both the money and the time.

I miss HEB. family owned and private. Thus why they get away with treating their employees so well, paying them well, and supporting their communities all while also being the largest private employer in the state of Texas. That company is a great example of how a company can both grow to a large size and not be evil. If they ever go public you know all of its charm will instantly get cut in the name of shareholder value.

This article is written with some wild speculations by both the author of the article and the source they are quoting. When cell phones are cracked for evidence they have to use write blockers when they copy the phone. They do the analysis on the copy. The original is then re-copied in court to show what was found. This way the original is never tampered with and made inadmissible, and whatever analysis bullshit you did isn’t mixed in with your court room copy. What this also means is that your AI can hallucinate all it wants and make up any evidence you can imagine all day long, but when you get into the court room and have to then point to where the conclusions came from and you can’t-you will be standing there with a dick on your forehead and with a case being tossed out.

Think of a more direct democracy. I will oversimplify enough to annoy those from Switzerland:

Differing levels of law require differing thresholds. Country votes on a law, the majority above the required threshold vote it in. It becomes a national law. That is easy. What about when it fails? Then look to the state level. Did it pass the threshold for your state? Yes? Then it is a state law. Failed state level? Let’s look at your county/city/local level. Passed threshold? Local law.

Again, over simplified, but general idea.

While I have progressive ideas and believe the Republicans rule with malace, I also strongly believe the democrats rule with incompetence.

I would love to run for president on the party of burn down the two party system and restart from there. Make politics boring again and not some partisan winner take all spectacle. We keep pushing to out ‘wing’ the ‘wing’ and it is driving us to some bad extremes.

So yes, I will vote straight ticket Democrat for 99% of the time, but I am also disgusted by the fact anyone is even allowed to do that and people have little party letters by their name. If you didn’t research your candidate to at least know their name, then you shouldn’t be voting for them.

It is mind-blowing to me that some things are not seen as human rights and are instead seen as political posturing. In Texas we had barbed wire intentionally strung up in the Rio Grande river with the intention to drownd people and it took multiple rounds of court cases to make them take it out. Somehow killing people is acceptable rather than booking, ticketing, and sending back. Politics have now taken a place above literal lives. At the same time, when I express this I have democrats immediately agreeing and adding “just let them in!” Or “just let them stay and we will figure it out” and that is where I stop them and ask, is that what I said? No. Simply that human life is worth more than politics. Again, stringing up barbed wire in a river to intentionally drown people it true malice. But saying let them all in and figure it out later is naive at best, and incompetence at its worst.

The Kirkland brand of hearing aids is the same as phonak. It is the same company. Sonova. The biggest two things are oing to be getting them fit by a good audiologist, and picking out a set that fits the needs of the person.

Totally agree. In the US- Real ear verification is actually required by law in several states. Unfortunately the laws about it are a little gray on details, but they at least require it.

Trial periods are also required by law in every state, but the time period varies. When I was in Texas it was 30 days, which is the minimum several states have. A few state offer longer periods.

Close, but definitely not 30% volume. When we fit hearing aids a good audiologist would have asked you if you already wear hearing aids and other questions to know if we need to enable a very specific feature. Each brand calls it something different, but it is generally called “first time user adaptation.” It let’s us set an initial decrease percentage (normally 60-70% of the prescription volume) and we can then set a ‘target time’ of normally about 2 or 3 weeks, maybe 4 or 5 if they are extra old. Then the hearing aids will slowely turn up on their own over the time set. In the end, the person is as 100% volume and they shouldn’t have noticed. You can still do your own personal temp volume changes in the app and it doesn’t interfere with the progressive steps.

A good audiologist will then typically have you come back in 2 weeks, then a month, then at 6 months, then annually or as needed. Each appointment they should be checking several things and asking about the sound and volume levels and such, but specifically we can see where you are adjusting the volume to on average. Most manufacturers let us then just take your average adjustments and apply them to the prescription. So if you are turning it down 3 db on average every day, or if you just cut a little bass or push a little more treble, we can see that and just apply it to be permanent. This is why we encourage people to use the app as much as possible.

Now, all of this is also dependent on the person wearing the hearing aids all day. We get a lot of old people that insist they only need to wear them in very specific situations and then wonder why they never get used to them. It is always fun the first time the person finds out we can see how long the hearing aids are on every day. So they are like “yeah I totally wear them for a few hours every day. 4 or 5 hours, easy” then we tell them they are actually averaging about an hour.

Am I the only one who read the paper? All the comments are like: it’s only mice.

They did it in 6 different breeds of knockout mice, rats, and beagles -as in the best dog model for cancer translation to humans. They are well passed the threshold needed to show strong potential in people.

Other comments: it’s new and experimental

They have been working with it for years now and have shown efficacy down to a single dose. That is what this paper is about. They had previous tests with the compound, then with decreasing doses, and now this paper will it down to a single dose.

Other comments: there is no way this is real

Of the 9 primary authors, 4 are on NIH grants. I’m taking a wild guess no one here has had to fill one of those out, but they take about a month of solid writing and submitting evidence as to why your thing should get funded due to the shortage of scientific funding, then it gets reviewed by several rounds of blinded experts in the field to evaluate if you have any merit to what you are talking about, then you have to submit regular updates to show that you aren’t just pissing away tax dollars. On top of that, this was done out of a lab at the university of Illinois urbana-champaign, meaning you also have university funds mixed in so you have them checking in on you. Then they also had a state cancer research grant, adding more oversight.

How real is it? If you read the paper you would have seen they were using human tumors grown in the mice. This is a very well established cancer testing method. The downfall in their model, as they pointed out, is using NSG and athymin mice. These are immunocompromised mice. They bring up how with the necrotic cell death in the tumor (from the drug working ironically so well and so fast) that they don’t know how human immune systems will respond to it and that is kind of their next direction of the research.

Read the full abstract, then at least read the discussion section near the end if you want to get a better understanding of what is going on. Then if you are still interested, go back up to the intro and read through from there till you can’t any more.

Fun experiment: take your turntable out, place in a large plate with pieces of the shittiest American cheese slices. We are talking kraft single serves. Splay them out, no deeper than one layer thick is needed, but make a full cover of the microwave bed (on top of the plate though. You will make a mess if not). Then you simply cook the shit out of it. You will see the cheese bubble and burn in the microwave wave peaks and you will see cold cheese in the wave troughs.