WoodScientist [she/her] @ WoodScientist @hexbear.net Posts 1Comments 46Joined 4 wk. ago
Similar to the Spanish Flu, which every country named after some other country.
In honor of this tradition, when Covid was at its peak, we jokingly referred to it as "the Cordoba virus" instead of "the Coronavirus." Because all flus have to come from Spain, for some reason.
I personally like the term, "pirate hormones."
Yar - har - fiddle-dee-dee! Do what you want cause a pirate is free!
Also we should rename the bird to "türkiye."
I see a major problem with this. Why would we assume dolphins have one single language? I see no reason to assume their languages wouldn't be as diverse as ours.
But worse still, you have to factor in the decline in dolphin populations over time. Maybe at their natural numbers, there would have be many thousands of dolphin languages, each spoken by tens of thousands of dolphins. But we've severely degraded their numbers. Now each dolphin language is the equivalent of one of those dying indigenous languages that now only has a handful of living speakers. Dolphin language might be a collection of such near-extinct languages, each highly distinct from each other. Maybe there's thousands of dolphin languages, each spoken by only a few dozen dolphins.
And unlike human languages, these dolphin languages weren't replaced by some broader hegemonic dolphin language, a dolphin English, Spanish, Mandarin, etc. There is no dolphin lingua franca that we can train the model on. There's just a whole series of dolphin language remnants, mutually incomprehensible to each other.
This is a real problem because LLMs require vast quantities of data to train on. It may simply not be possible to gather enough samples of a single dolphin language sufficient in quantity to train an LLM on.
I don't know if we really want to talk to dolphins. Those things are godless.
Does anyone speak Spanish?"
Fuego en el bano! Fuego en el bano!
The supreme court says that the US government just needs to "facilitate" his return.
Any good-faith reading would interpret "facilitate" as the US needs to do everything in its power to bring him back. Roberts tried to do Trump a solid by using very polite language in the Court's order. You are repeating the administration's bad faith interpretation of the ruling, rather than what any lawyer practicing in good faith would actually interpret the order as.
Roberts tried to hand Trump a way to come down from this gently. This is going to go back to SCOTUS, at which point they will issue a ruling that is completely unambiguous and has no wiggle room for bad faith interpretations.
Jesus. This is the same shit that cost Kamala the election. Idiot libs just kept looking at the median inflation-adjusted income and saying, "look, things are fine, in real dollar terms, people's incomes are up!" Yet they never wanted to hear about the intricacies of how inflation is calculated and how the inflation rate can differ between income levels and life situations. In reality, people in the upper middle class experienced a negative inflation rate, while those in the working class experienced a high positive inflation rate. For those who owned a home and a had nice stock portfolio, their assets increased faster than the rising cost of basic goods. People who owned a home were able to refinance their mortgages to 2% and watched as their 401k balances soared. For them, things were great. For people living paycheck to paycheck with nothing to their name but an overdrawn checking account, they got the increased bills without any corresponding increase in owned assets. And that's before you consider how cooked inflation statistics are, downplaying the impacts of basic necessities, the bullshit goods substitution rules, and how cheaper luxuries can mask the soaring cost of necessities in overall inflation figures.
I remember having many conversations on social media with liberals who kept talking about the vibecession. But they didn't want to hear it. They stuck their fingers in their ears, shook their heads, closed their eyes and said, "median inflation adjusted income is up. Median inflation adjusted income is up. Median inflation adjusted income is up." Not in so many words, but that was the mantra. You could point out the numerous flaws in this, and how the very term 'vibecession' was dismissive and insulting to people's real lived experience, but the bastards didn't want to hear it.
Unfortunately for Kamala and for the rest of us, the voters made her hear it.
That is simply not true.
You know, you joke, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. I'm a post op trans woman, and I've had a pap smear before. The US's NIH website actually used to specifically recommend that for post op trans women every five years or so. The recommendation has since been purged along with all other trans health info, but it used to actually be an official recommendation. Here's a blog post going into more detail on it:
https://drashleynova.medium.com/trans-women-need-pap-smears-too-d461d41818a9
Obviously trans women can't specifically get cervical cancer. But the same test, a pap smear, tests for other vaginal cancers that post-op trans women and nonbinary folks can get. Anyone with a vagina needs a pap smear, regardless of gender assigned at birth or transitioned gender.
I want so hard to believe in the "abundance agenda," but it just doesn't work on its own. Ultimately, an economy only has so much productive capacity. Yes, YIMBY movements have their place; we should remove irrational barriers to new housing construction like wasteful single family zoning. But the real problem is one of income and wealth inequality. There are only so many workers, so much investment capital, so many productive resources in an economy. It costs money and materials to build homes. If all the wealth is piled at the top, those resources will go towards the whims of the wealthy. If wealth is broadly shared, then those resources will go to the needs of the many. Instead of people learning to become carpenters to build homes for regular people, they study to be shipbuilders to build yachts for the ultra rich. Instead of mills churning out wood, concrete, and steel for ten modest family homes, those resources go to build a single large mansion for one wealthy family. With all the wealth piled at the top, the rich can outbid everyone else for any of the resources needed to build homes. You cannot solve the housing crisis without tackling wealth and income inequality first.
He's going to add his political enemies to the Death Master File and invalidate their Social Security Numbers.
Yeah, the airlock method seems to be the way to go. For details, here's a description: https://old.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/yv37fy/estradiol_dropped_by_200_pgml_after_switching_to/iweyuva/?context=3
This comic occurs in the Dr. Horrible cinematic universe.
If you can't find a syringe that fits the bill, there's one hack you could use. Let's say you're trying to inject .1 mL of E medicated oil.
First, obtain a vial of sterile oil of some sort. You want a sterile vial with an injection port that contains sterile oil inside. (Ideally, this would be the same oil as whatever is used as the carrier oil for your medication.)
When giving yourself a shot, first draw .5 mL of the plain sterile oil. Next, draw .1 mL of your E medication. You now have a syringe that has .1 mL of E oil sitting on top of .5 mL of sterile filler oil.
Inject yourself with the syringe. The E oil will be entirely injected, and all the dead space inside the syringe and needle will be filled with the dummy oil. You'll inject yourself with the full amount of E oil and a little bit of dummy oil.
I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work. Finding sterile oil vials could be tricky, but it's probably doable. Sterile vials of bacteriostatic water are a lot easier to find, but I'm not sure if that would cause problems with the differential density between the oil and the water. The oil would want to float to the top of the column (though this may not occur in the time it takes to draw and inject.) While this would be fine with drawing (oil on top, water on bottom), when you invert the syringe to inject downwards, the oil and water would want to switch places. You could try to inject yourself with the needle pointed upward, but that would be a bit of a feat of contortion. Though, if you're injecting into the top surface of your thigh, I suppose you could lay stomach side down between two chairs, with your thigh exposed in the gap in between. It would be a minor feat of contortion, but it wouldn't be too hard.
I would suggest trying to find vials of sterile oil. If you can't, sacrifice a syringe to science and experiment. Try drawing some ordinary tap water and some olive or other oil into a syringe. First draw some tap water into the syringe, then draw some olive oil. See if the system is viscous enough that the oil will stay on the needle end of the syringe even if inverted. If this works, then you should be able to do this dual layer technique even with more easily obtainable vials of bacteriostatic water. Obviously don't inject yourself with this experimental syringe.
Some dead space in your needles is inevitable. But there's nothing that says that your actual medication needs to occupy that dead space.
EDIT: disregard this. Try the airlock method instead. https://old.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/yv37fy/estradiol_dropped_by_200_pgml_after_switching_to/iweyuva/?context=3
Yup! And don't get too disheartened by how things look down there. You're just a few days post-op. Everything's swollen and sore. You're recovering from a major surgery. The swelling will end and things will look less and less like a horror show with each passing day. Don't even try to judge things until you're a few months post-op.
Also, if you do get a bit depressed, that's also normal. Post-op depression is extremely common for all forms of surgeries. You're in pain, you're hopped up on painkillers, you're sleep deprived, and your body is freaking out because it has a ton of healing to do. It's natural to feel some level of depression. If anything, maybe your body knows you need to be still and move slowly in order to heal, and what better way to encourage that than to make you a bit depressed?
Anyway, no idea if you'll experience any kind of post-op malaise, some do, some don't. But if you do, just remember it's extremely common. Post-op depression can hit trans people even harder than other surgeries because of all the cultural baggage and judgment that's attached to bottom surgery. If you're not mindful, it's really easy to experience a common surgical after-effect and for your pain-killer addled brain to convince itself that "oh god, this was a mistake, what have I done???!!!" If you experience any depression, just try to keep this in mind, accept it for what it is, and reserve any judgment on the success of the surgery until well after the initial recovery period. If necessary, recognize that in your current state, you simply may not be capable of forming rational opinions on some things. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Not sure if any of this is helpful. Just trying to provide what little advice I can based on my own experience. If it's totally off base, feel free to ignore it.
Regardless, congrats again. I'm so happy for you! Remember, if nothing else, you have now achieved something that no one can ever take from you. No matter what happens going forward, you will never in your life have to deal with that source of dysphoria and pain ever again. It was this thought that really got me through my initial post-op period. If life went really bad, I could end up homeless, living on the street, denied medication, or even in jail. I didn't know what the future would hold; I still don't. But I did know, and I do know, with 100% absolute certainty, that I would NEVER and will NEVER have to face that particular pain ever again. And that is something that no one can ever take from you now. Especially in times as tumultuous as these, as scary as the world now is, I, even now, find some real comfort in that. I'm 12 years post-op, and that still gives me some comfort. I know that no matter what happens, I will never experience bottom dysphoria or face my body remasculinizing ever again. No one can ever take that away from me. They can put me in the ground, but they can never force me back into a masculine box. In this, I am free.
The problem with sanctioning and tariffing everyone around you is that eventually, countries just ignore you all together and start trading with others.
We're speed running the Confederacy here. The Confederacy thought that King Cotton would save the South. They thought that if the British were cut off from their cotton supply, eventually they would be forced to intervene on the side of the South. Instead, the British eventually just found alternative suppliers in Egypt and India. (They weren't exactly angels here, this was still colonialism.)
Sanctions and tariffs can work if they are limited and targeted. Are there two or three countries that you truly feel are doing abominable things? Then cut them off from the trade system, and they will feel pressured to change their ways. If you embargo or tariff half the planet however, all those affected countries can still trade with each other. If you embargo or tariff too many countries, eventually you are embargoing yourself.