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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • In my anecdotal experience, people tend to engage with conspiracies either out of entertainment or a need to project order on a chaotic environment. The former really isn’t applicable to healthcare, but the latter very much is.

    Simply accessing healthcare in the US is stressful and time consuming on top of the prohibitive cost. Additionally, receiving care can be painful, traumatic, and confusing. All of these negative emotions paired with low health literacy creates an environment ripe fabricating easy to comprehend theories about how healthcare works as a way to alleviate the confusion and thus bring comfort.

    I think the current state of US healthcare, insofar as it creates the negative experience for patients, increases the attractiveness of conspiratorial ideas. However, my experience as a provider is that there is plenty of complexity and hardship surrounding providing care even if you remove all of the economic aspects. I’ve had patients who were fabulously wealthy with plenty of relevant education fall victim to fallacies because they are an attractive alternative to an uncomfortable truth.










  • I know this is an unpopular opinion, but several people heavily and repeatedly recommended me the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.


    I had read a few books by King before and really enjoyed some of them. Even the first book in the series (written well before the others) was interesting but the whole series is just unbearable. It’s long and disjointed and while there are some interesting moments, there are three times the amount of adding grotesquerie for no narrative reason, literal self-inserts, or worse, grabbing references to other IPs that get shoehorned into the story.

    I know there are a lot of people that liked the series and I am happy it exists for those people, and I realize not everything is made for my tastes, but the ending was just so irredeemably bad. It makes the ending of GoT look like Breaking Bad.


  • My wife’s family was like that when I met them. Stomping around, chewing loudly, and TV super loud. When we moved in together, we got our hearing checked and it turned out she had a genetic issue that fused her stapen (hammer bone in the ear) into a fixed position which meant severe hearing impairment. Luckily a surgeon can replace the stapen with a titanium micro prosthesis that solves the problem.

    Just after the procedure she called me downstairs because she said she was hearing weird noises and it turned out to be the refrigerator compressor she had never heard before. After both ears were completed, a lot of the loud behavior stopped.


    I really think that some subset of these people just have hearing loss.


  • I had to do a comparative religion project in secondary school. I completely forgot to do it, which was the custom at that time. It was Sunday at 7pm and I resolved to do the whole thing in less than an hour.
    I searched through the garage and found a small compressed cardboard reindeer that was painted gold as a winter decoration. I used tin snips to remove the antlers and wrote a paragraph on the Golden Calf.

    Most efficient B- I have ever received.





  • I was at a bar with a friend years ago and he kept talking about how much he loves limes. He went on and on about it. Finally, I told him I would bet him $50 if he could eat a whole lime, rind and all. He couldn’t refuse after spending 10 minutes talking about his love for them. The bartender was happy to offer a large one for the challenge.

    This kid tried for 45 minutes to consume the lime. The juicy interior was quickly consumed and all that was left was the bitter, leathery peel which had the surface area of a dessert plate. He was chewing on it like he was trying to get someone to guess “chewing” in charades. He, very begrudgingly admitted defeat while me and the bartender were breathlessly laughing.


  • I only offer this as an alternative, minority viewpoint because I struggled with selecting earbuds for bed - try bone conduction ear buds.

    Caveats being, side sleeping can be uncomfortable depending on head shape and pillow stiffness. Also the audio quality is not as good as traditional buds, but not an issue for most audiobooks or podcasts. For me though, it eliminated the uncomfortable pressure against my eardrum and didn’t trap moisture if I chose to take a shower before bed. I also could hear in case there was something I had to respond to.