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.

I saw patients this past week. Like I do every week. That is my one bullet point. I still need 4 more bullet points??? This is ridiculous. I’m doing my job, that I have been asked to do. He doesn’t know what my job is. The AI they are going to feed my answer through doesn’t know what my job is. The people who do know what my job is know that I am doing it just fine. We already have an evaluation system that I have to sign every 6 months and submit bullet points with.

My supervisor, and their supervisors, are now going to have meetings about us responding. Then we are going to be told in meetings about how to respond. Then I spend some arbitrary amount of time responding. Do you have any idea how much combined time across the entire government is being waisted on this? This is literally millions of dollars in total time waisted just for the whims of a mad man. This is a prime example of wasting tax dollars.

https://youtube.com/shorts/VOys-f1HaIc

https://youtube.com/shorts/f5bftwl0h_I

Here are two quick clips. If you spend any time searching into this you will very quickly find lots more. The original comes from the making of documentary done in the 90’s

George Lucas has talked about this specific line and measurement in interviews. The idea was that if you have a better nav computer you could get places faster by planting the shortest route. One way to think of it with the hyperspace is as if all ships are held at a more-or-less constant speed in hyperspace, and thus to get there faster than someone the only real was was to find a shorter route through hyperspace. Better nav computers and sensors could plot better courses through asteroid fields and closer to sun’s without having issues, whereas poorer computers would plot really safe routes that take longer.

I was already going hard on AI stock, then day of inauguration when he sent the clear message of where tech companies stand in running this country I dumped ALL investment money into AI stock. If I have to live in this hellscape I better at least get to retire in it.

You were so right, let me tell you about it. If you can’t stop the entire genocide, then don’t stop it at all. If you can’t stop all of climate change, then don’t take any steps to stop any of it. If you can’t end poverty or income inequality then you shouldn’t even help the starving.

What a cunt.

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.

It’s worse than you think. Last week we got an email that looked like strait up fishing spam demanding that we were to email back “yes” confirming that we got the email. So many people even reported it as spam that we had supervisors have to directly tell us that it was legit. Then they sent out a second email with a warning that is was in fact legit and to respond to that email with “yes” if we got that one.

On the back end at OPM: Musk forced his way in and demanded to redo the email servers. The IT told him it wasn’t possible for what he was asking. So he brought in his own goons to install a non government server with unknown software and unknown security configurations and they plugged it into the OPM network to spoof it as an official OPM server, then sent out those emails.

And sure enough, the idiot didn’t didn’t configure the security correctly or let official government IT people touch it, it ended up backdooring into the entire government HR system, and it had every active government email that responded “yes” to his stupid email that we were required to. And now we know it was compromised. There is no telling what foreign governments now have all of that info as well as what other backdoors they have installed.

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.

Not a coincidence. If you look at the flash/recoil compensator it looks like a classic 3 way with the tearing starting on the openings.

Seriously. We are talking about tire tread compared to weight. Both use multiple sizes of tire depending on the year/model. There are a few that overlap in diameter to get the closest to comparison but they still have a very different width. We are talking about a 235/35R18 vs a 235/75R18. That is a huge difference in wall height/aspect ratio and changes how the tire gives under power. Those numbers massively change depending on model as well. Something like an f150 raptor could have a 315/70R17, almost a foot wide. So comparing just the weight and saying they are close enough is far from a fair comparison.

And? What were the results?? This man has done science for us, what were the results?!?!?

Alternative headline: US Supreme Court surprised all by agreeing with the bare minimum and not forcing partisan political opinions into laws.

Let me just point this out- this was the exact same argument by many intellectuals back in the 1950’s about segregation/integration and blacks in science. Why should we care about their color? If they are good scientists with great original ideas and experiments, then surely they will get published and get their positions commensurate to their merit. This is also ignoring their segregated schooling being underfunded, not being welcomed into higher ed unless at specific ‘negro’ universities, and the crippled career paths because of it. But sure, even with their second rate primary education due to their skin color, and their second rate secondary education due to their skin color, and then their crippled career prospects due to their skin color- why don’t we then measure them on merit? The black man never amounted to what out nice ivy league educated white man has done, so why take a risk on them? And again, should we not just judge them on merit? Ignore that if a black man has a novel idea then they must then have the idea reviewed into perpetuity while one of the white reviewers just so happens to come up with the same idea then publishes before the black man.

So to sit here and still argue that merit alone while disregarding the person is only progress is actually quite regressive.

Now, beyond that- modern publishing is blind in most every respectable journal because of this issue. It is only after being accepted is the author identity revealed to the reviewers.

Shitty paywall. Even through 12ft.io

But about the content- he isn’t wrong, but people also need to know there is a bit of self interest in there too. France has a huge military industrial complex (outside of the massive one the US has) and is one of Europe’s biggest domestic military suppliers.

I always know someone doesn’t know anything about Afghanistan and its people when they refer to them as Afghani’s.

An Afghan is a person. Afghani is a currency. Anyone who calls them Afghani doesn’t even know the right term to call the people. It is a giveaway to how little you know about them when you don’t even know what to call them.

Meanwhile all the Chineses and Viet Congs are turning in their graves right next to the Afgani.

Evey time I hear about the evil big pharma funding all the studies out there to influence them in they favor, I immediately ask, “where is this funding and how can I get it?”

Because let’s be honest, unless the leg work is already done, they aren’t funding shit.

On the flip side of that, I did do a study for 3M and their hearing protection devices (I am an audiology/PhD student) and the funding was great. There were also basically no strings attached other than “use this product, study workplace noise, be able to publish it”.