turtlesareneat

Needle has barely started to move honestly, each upcoming year will be successively worse until we see a generation of dead kids from preventable illnesses, and even then…

I think a lot about the Sagan quote about how we’ll drift off, our faculties in decline, into an age of crystal-gazing. It’s already happened so bad. I can’t watch reality TV, even like the Rehearsal, because by episode 2 there’s a numerologist who believes in Satanic murders. Too stupid to live, but happily voting. America.

Every time my brain tries to drift to McDonalds, I’m like “I could go get a Digorno which would be 1/3-1/5 the price” and then just sit at my house eating canned soup or something because I am fairly lazy.

I just had my third back surgery at 44. Spinal fusion, should keep for a decade I’m told before they have to add to it. Do core exercises and don’t use nicotine in any form if you have degenerative disc disease, which you won’t know about until your discs start popping like Gushers

A lot of us keep saying this: every time the word “trans” is mentioned in political debate, you just go “what the actual hell are you talking about when none of us can afford food or medical care?”

Trans rights, while morally correct, are a losing issue politically right now but the solution isn’t to hammer on them, it’s to completely ignore the narrative and redirect it to something real, that people actually care about (it’s the economy, stupid!)

I have to go middle-ground because my stomach learned to drive and will happily drag the rest of me to the candy aisle of the grocery store if I don’t have SOMETHING to indulge on, so the indulgence now is often annoyingly healthy like Nutrigrain bars before bed (not actually healthy but compared to a 2lb bag of gummy worms…)

My dad would sometimes loudly comment within earshot of my great-grandmother, “Well, this is a woman who voted for FDR four times” in a derisive fashion, and if she was feeling spicy, she’d yell “I’d have voted for him a fifth time too!”

There are bad therapists. Lots of them. Just like any profession, unfortunately. There’s no way to just make them all be good, despite MSW training programs being fairly good overall, a lot of therapists can take a religious route in without taking past-grad level courses. These are overwhelmingly the “Let’s just talk about your mother for the next 15 years while I bill you” types. Properly trained therapists today are method-driven, using evidence-based modalities to solve specific problems. They can actually fix you. Badly trained therapists can wreak havoc.

We think of children and adolescents as the ones being unable to advocate for ourselves, but a huge proportion of adults can’t advocate for themselves in the mental health arena, meaning they aren’t going to get reliably good outcomes.

AI won’t improve on this problem.

The Angel’s Kiss I think it was known as

Which is why good, decent people struggle in this world.

Air America lasted about 5 years in the 2000s, and it was exactly this. The Republicans would never let their stations die like Air America did.

I was just thinking, my peanut butter doesn’t have nearly enough microplastics and forever chemicals

They want to win a lot more than we do. War is just business to us, no one is hyped up about this. For them tho, this is an opportunity decades in the making.

I doubt Amazon had any liabiliy here - the contract they make you sign probably says “we’ll try really hard but if we lose your data, it’s your fault.” Microsoft does that with Azure.

I do miss my mom, but then I remember her doubling down on being a conservative despite her gay son having nearly been killed in 1999 for coming out in HS. You can’t argue with stupid, and you can’t indulge it either.

The article briefly mentions this, but having lived in states with plastic bag bans, and states without - well drive through the countryside and count all the plastic bags in ditches, trees, streams. Paper might be more intensive to produce, but the lingering effects of plastic bags are being underestimated I think.

CounterpointL people getting their news from social media and memes is 99% of the reason we’re in this hellhole

I had a friend tell me - you don’t get to pick your place in history, but there’s always something worthwhile to observe. Most people don’t live through the end of an empire, social decay, and ultimately… well, we know this won’t end well. But there’s something deeply romantic about being part of the resistance - I mean hell look at how much art is made about that.

Now obviously you have to ignore some things like how you can’t afford groceries and your life expectancy is going down (you’re already unable to afford rich people medical care, which is now diverging from the rest of us). But it’s really nothing compared to any historical turbulence like this. We aren’t in famine. Our life expectancy is way UP since then.

I can’t change any of this (beyond the serious community organizing I’m doing anyway) so looking at different perspectives is the only way to stay sane.

Do you know how credit cards work by chance

Article references his manager

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