I love that there’s a large overlap between raw milk drinkers and antivaxxers. Because one of the primary arguments for raw milk is along the lines of “if you drink raw milk and expose your immune system to small amounts of the pathogens, you won’t get sick in the future!”

Gee, almost as if the medical community already figured that out decades ago, and has been systematically exposing people to safe versions of pathogens so the general public is able to build an immunity to them. If only there were a word for such a practice.

Also, raw milk was supposedly one of the primary reasons that a vaccine for smallpox was developed; It’s a likely apocryphal story, but someone apparently noticed that milkmaids never got smallpox. And after some research, they discovered it was because those milkmaids all had cowpox previously. And apparently cowpox is similar enough to smallpox that the body develops antibodies for both. So catching cowpox inoculated the milkmaids against smallpox.

Nah, my family’s just from Wisconsin.

That last part is particularly noteworthy. If I’m in the UK, I can make it to London in 8 hours pretty much regardless of where I am. That’s less than a full work day of driving. Many Americans have done that to visit family.

If I’m in France, I’m never more than 9 hours away from Paris. Again, many Americans have done a drive like that just to go on holiday.

If I’m in Newport Oregon, it’ll take 43 hours of driving (and crossing two full mountain ranges) to reach Washington DC. That’s a full work week of driving, just to reach the capitol.

So most Americans protest locally if they’re able. But that’s far less effective, because it splits the protests apart and makes them easier to ignore or break. Americans can’t go full “light Paris on fire for a full month because the retirement age is getting raised” because there aren’t enough protestors near the capitol to do that. The small protests that do start almost unanimously get broken up by cops as quickly as they started.

Yeah, it’s so commonly misused that I tend to just equate it to some sort of machine learning algorithm. Which is really just some complicated statistics and a database in a trenchcoat.

This is sort of a southerner thing. Up north, many gas stations actually ask you to keep your engine running while you pump. Because when it’s -20 degrees outside, turning your engine off is just asking to get stranded. And if you get stranded at a gas station overnight, (like when the lobby has closed but the pumps are still active for card transactions,) there’s a good chance you’ll be dead in the parking lot by the time the morning crew shows up to open.

The Claws bonus is 12 extra points of damage in Skyrim. That’s better than a glass sword, and you’re able to attack much faster. You just completely mop the floor with early enemies.

And by the time you have a good enough weapon to potentially outpace the Claws bonus, you also likely have the Fists of Steel perk (because it only requires 30 Heavy Armor). So you’re better off just improving your gauntlets’ armor rating to boost your unarmed damage, instead of using a weapon.

Yup. Combine it with the heavy armor perk which adds your gauntlets’ armor rating to your unarmed attack damage, and you can one-punch dragons.

Ding ding ding. Whether or not it’s real is entirely irrelevant, because the damage is already done; Half of the voters will believe it regardless, even if it is later debunked as 100% fake.

Nah, there has been a widespread extinction or endangerment of flying insects in the past few decades. Something like 5% of the previous year’s population per year, which has totaled up to ~80% loss over the last 30 years. It’s also why there are fewer birds, as flying insects make up a large part of their diet.

I actually wrote a quick poem about it a little while ago. The first verse isn’t mine; It was from a coworker of mine, (apparently her dad used to say it a lot when she was a kid) and it gave me the idea for the rest. It needs some work, but it’s relevant so I’ll go ahead and post it anyways:

Spring has sprung,
The grass is riz.
I wonder where
The birdies is?

The bees all buzz,
Or so we thought.
The birds have starved,
Their food chain fraught.

Spring has sprung,
In lands of ice.
Where frost once ruled,
Now blooms entice.

Glaciers melt,
Their waters rise.
Oceans swell,
Beneath warm skies.

Spring has sprung,
In forests deep.
Where shadows dance,
And rivers weep.

The frogs once sang,
Their chorus clear.
Now silence reigns,
As they disappear.

Spring has sprung,
But at what cost?
Wall Street soars,
While earth is lost.

Nah, true wet bulb events are pretty rare. With a wet bulb event, you overheat even while sitting still in the shade with a breeze. Because again, you’ve reached the point where a breeze is actually warming you up instead of cooling you down. They’re becoming more common nowadays due to global warming, but they still only happen occasionally. Again, a wet bulb thermometer will typically read significantly lower than the ambient temperature, because it’s being cooled by evaporation.

At wet bulb temps in the 90’s, construction crews start delaying, school athletics aren’t allowed to practice outdoors, cities start setting up pop-up cooling centers for the homeless, etc… Even the army limits outdoor work to 10 minutes per hour, because the risk of heat stroke is too high. Wet bulb temps above ~87 are rare, so when it reaches the 90’s emergency management crews go into full blown crisis mode as people start getting heat exhaustion just from walking around the block.

The real question is why a debt collector had patient medical information to begin with. That sounds like a massive HIPAA violation; Under HIPAA, debt collectors are only supposed to be given the bare minimum info to be able to collect the debt. Typically, that consists of the patient’s contact info, and how much is owed. They very rarely get any kind of supporting documents, because that would divulge too much info.

One of the fastest ways to get a medical debt collector to delete your debt entirely is to get them to slip up and mention that they have info regarding your diagnoses or treatments. As soon as they mention that they know what the bill is for, (for instance, saying it’s a bill for a heart surgery instead of simply saying it’s a bill from a heart surgeon’s office,) you can start threatening to sue and file HIPAA complaints. They’ll almost always agree to delete the debt if you agree not to sue. And even then, you should still make the HIPAA report regardless, because they can’t legally stop you from doing it and it’s one of the few ways to hold scummy debt collectors accountable.

Change my fuckin opinion about religion. Go ahead.

I mean, given that we’re on [email protected], I doubt you’ll have many takers.