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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • People are making fun of the waffling and the apparent indecision and are missing the point. Trump isn’t flailing and trying to figure out how to actually make things work. He’s doing exactly what he intended: he’s holding the US economy for ransom and building a power base among the billionaires.

    He used the poor and ignorant to get control of the public institutions, and now he’s using that power to get control over the private institutions (for-profit companies). He’s building a carbon copy of Russia with himself in the role of Putin. He’s almost there, and it’s taken him 2 months to do it.




  • You’re right on all counts. The last 4 years they’ve finally perfected the propaganda bubble they started after the impeachment of Nixon, so they don’t have to hide anything anymore. They don’t have use loopholes, or hidden time bombs, or anything. They can straight up say the quiet part out loud, and put on paper exactly what they want, and their media will just bald-face lie about it to the public, and there are no consequences.

    Hell, they released their whole plan (Project 2025) with nothing redacted or disguised in euphemism or anything, a full year before the election, so everyone had plenty of time to see the full, real picture, and they still won quite handily. I don’t know how we recover from this.





  • Think of bad sleep or insufficient sleep like an injury. In ideal conditions your body heals it at a certain rate. You can make it take longer, or you can even make the injury worse, by not taking care of it, but you can’t make it heal faster. And at some point, if you’re consistently not taking care of it, you’ll make part of your injury permanent.

    Similarly with sleep, it’s not a bank balance, it’s damage to your body and brain that you need to repair. And you can only repair the damage with good sleep. You have to get good sleep until you feel better, and then you’ll know you have recovered.

    And if you consistently get bad sleep for too long (a week or more), your brain and body will be permanently changed. Like a permanent injury, you’ll never fully recover some of the damage. It’s hard to overemphasize how important good sleep is to your short- and long-term health.



  • Viruses evolve, some quite quickly. The flu isn’t the fastest (looking at you, HIV), but it’s up there. Over time, existing vaccines train your body to fight something that doesn’t quite match what’s in the wild (i.e. efficacy goes down with time). That’s why there’s a different seasonal flu vaccine every year.

    They create flu vaccines on a yearly cycle, and a pandemic can kick off in a matter of weeks and months, so if it doesn’t match the preplanned cycle, they’ll have to invest more resources to creating the most up to date vaccine off-cycle.





  • Yes, I agree with that reading of history, but just because things have been a certain way, doesn’t mean they have to be that way. I concur that the historical precedent for the SCOTUS is to stand in the way of progress, or often to cause regression, but that doesn’t mean we have to quietly accept it. Especially if and when there have been historical departures from that trend that demonstrate things can work differently, and work well.

    (Not trying to be confrontational, just trying to prevent a nihilistic reading of your comment.)



  • I had heard about this case basically removing a powerful tool for the SEC and effectively requiring them to spend way more money trying cases in front of a jury, but I didn’t know there were so many other agencies that aren’t even allowed to bring jury trial cases and are only allowed to bring the type of case that the SCOTUS basically just eliminated. More and more I’m having trouble not seeing the actions of the SCOTUS majority as a deliberate attack on the US government itself rather than “correcting” earlier rulings that have been precedent for decades.



  • Humans getting it? Yes, from farm animals. Humans getting it from other humans? Not yet, but I wouldn’t bet on that staying the case forever.

    There are two aspects that make this different from COVID. One is that the mortality rate is much higher: near 50%, whereas COVID was around 1-3%. That’s the bad difference. The good difference is that it’s a flu variant, and we’ve studied flu variants for a very long time. I’ve heard there’s already a vaccine, but I haven’t verified that claim from any reputable health organization.

    So if people actually follow health advice from officials, this could be handled much better than COVID. But if they don’t and they get it, it’s a coin flip if they die. And people are already doing things like drinking more raw milk because the CDC has identified the virus as being in raw milk from infected farms, so draw your own conclusions.