• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • Ultimately this a definition issue, and is philosophical more than scientific. I have no doubt he’s a great neuroscientist, but it’s really not a great take. I think that the whole idea of neurochemistry cascading into the decisions we make doesn’t mean we don’t have the ability to choose within our neurochemical makeup. I think it definitely pushing a good point in that the root causes of our behavior, especially anti-social behavior, is possibly addressable in how we support and raise our kids.




  • I think the core of this is the hurtful aspects of gender roles men and boys face about how to handle and express emotions creates the situation of increased suicidality. Yeah firearms access is going to enable suicidal people to act upon their ideation, but taking it away just leaves you with a depressed/anxious guy, who doesn’t have the knowledge or resources to overcome his negative emotions. I’m not saying this in a “it’s a mental health issue not a gun issue” way, but society really normalizes the ignorance of mens’ emotions and for men to not build support for managing their emotions, be it intimate friendships, healthcare resources, healthy expression of emotions.

    I think it’s good topic to bring up, because there’s a lot of things leading to men not doing too well, and I think it’d be dumb to ignore it, given the rise of acts of violence we’ve seen in the past decade from men who really feel disconnected or disillusioned with society. Finding out what we can do to help men cope with hardship in a more productive way, and ultimately address the root causes of the issues they face can improve things for men, as well as everyone in society.




  • I’m sorry you had to handle that. Though, this is an inevitable problem for a site hosting user-generated content of any sort. I think not hosting your own content is the biggest first step. It might be better to depend on external image/filesharing sites like how things used to work with imgur, photobucket, flickr, etc. (is photobucket around anymore, lol?). This does pose a risk for link rot and what not, but I think given the scale of this operation, there’s no reason to having to be scanning your own servers for illegal content any more than you have to for basic moderation. I’m not sure how this issue works with federation (if another lemmy instance hosted a bad image/thumbnail/message, does that get copied over to beehaw?), but if your risk tolerance doesn’t want to deal with it, a non-federated option would give you more control.

    In general user generated content is always going to pose a risk to the website hosting it. It’s a matter of good risk management, from prevention and mitigation to an effective response, that will best serve both the administration and the users in terms of ensuring a safe service and minimizing legal risk.


  • I think the best protocol is report the bad actor, not engaging with them (especially inserting yourself into a situation you’re not already in), working on personal tolerance for verbal abuse and tactics for healthily managing feelings that come with getting bullied, and ultimately knowing when to remove yourself from a situation when it’s not beneficial for you any longer.

    Remember that online harassment that you speak of generally falls under trolling. Trolls do things “For the lulz”. Their goal is to entertain themselves by getting other people mad, sad, upset, or making a scene. If you don’t take the bait, you can minimize the benefit they get out of trolling.

    Getting familiar with privacy/safety settings on site you frequent is important for addressing targeted harassment.

    To address your question, I don’t know if showing a victim that someone cares is necessarily what ALL victims might want, you are just some random anonymous user to them. They may just want to not talk to people, or to talk to people they trust. Recognizing boundaries is important, especially when someone has been the victim of someone trashing those boundaries through harassment.


  • It’s really another instance of legal gun owners getting shafted because it sounds better to just ban concealed carry than to address the causes of gun violence in the city. That would require more effort and ultimately the political benefit looks better because democrats will die with goal of disarming the citizenry, and the republicans and conservatives don’t care about the suffering and root causes that lead to cultures of violence (gang crime, road rage, shooting people turning around in your driveway or who knock on your door), heck in some cases they benefit from it.

    While I’m not sold on the idea on mandatory training (I don’t trust governments enough make it accessible and useful), i’d be ignorant to think that training shouldn’t be made an expectation of ownership if not legally, than socially. There’s lot’s of people I just dread the fact they carry a gun. Reddit’s CCW subreddit has way too many posts that are essentially “Can I kill this guy?” Luckily there’s people there who do their best to educate and share resources and try to encourage a defensive mindset, away from the aggressive, “if you mess with me i’ll kill you” mindset.


  • The weasel word in all this is “overweight (but not obese)”. This is because obesity is definitely associated with diabetes, heart disease, stroke, sleep apnea and the sequelae of these diseases. Excess fat in our body, glucose in our blood, and weight on our skeleton taxes the body and that will have consequences.

    I think we are in a new era for how we see and treat obesity, with better understanding of how it affects us individually and societally, with more tools to tackle it. As such, we should not downplay the importance of weight in a person’s health.

    Articles like this really don’t give a full picture of clinical decision making and the job of a physician to make high level research accessible to the patient (which involves simplifying things lots of the time). This leaves us with a headline that makes the public think that doctors don’t know about obesity, which simply is not true. It’s just that the nuance isn’t as big of a deal as this author makes it seem.


  • I’m in medicine, and one of the biggest issues I see in my field, as well as science in general, is a lack of ethics and cultural understanding. The humanities give context for scientific findings, and guide us in the research process. Without it, we wind up with the Tuskegee trials or Nazi medicine. The same sort of things can happen in tech (privacy, security, wellbeing) and engineering (safety, integrity).

    Humanities aren’t a waste of money. They broaden your knowledge of our world and the people in it. Maybe you don’t have interest in art or history, but law, ethics (or other areas of philosophy), and sociology all can help a person be more well-rounded.


  • I think a big part of it is the mindset that college education should train you to do a job, rather than provide a knowledge based on which job-specific training can be built upon. I think this is dually precipitated by employers not investing in training/educating their employees anymore, and outsourcing that cost to the employee, but also the issue of students who throw a fit about taking class X because they’re going for a degree in Y (I see this a lot with science/engineering majors when having to take classes in the humanities).


  • While I can’t say much about the specifics of Japanese health and nutrition, I’d argue it confirms the general tenet of dietetics that restrictive dieting is largely not good for you (and isn’t easily maintained either).

    Eating too little (or unbalanced) taxes your metabolism to free up glucose from your organ stores and store what it has, plus running the risk of nutrition deficiencies too. Plus eating too much also has it’s obvious risks.

    I think in regards to keto, the risks of high fat diets are independent from the effects of ketosis. You still run the risk of CAD, obesity, high cholesterol and the issues those bring. (It raises LDLs but lowers triglycerides according to a paper from the ACC, they and the AAND are not convinced one way or another it seems on if keto should be recommended)



  • It sits on the edge of the concept of informed consent in the realm of things like SaaS and copyright. Obviously doctors wouldn’t hold her down and pull it out, but obviously it probably was not useful to leave in. I wonder if there was a contract stating it had to be removed upon demand, like at the end of a trial or the bankruptcy that occurred. It’s something that we’re going to likely see in the future, as medical technology starts using computers to actively treat disorders.


  • Ultimately this feels weak. The prefatory clause is an explanation of why the right to bear arms is to be unrestricted. It isn’t a statement to say “the people should only have guns to serve in defense of the country”, it’s to support a militia should it be necessary. Everything else is just secondary to the “shall not be infringed” portion.

    The Heller decision did enumerate a right to self defense as part of the 2A, with the justification that is was common to own guns to defend one’s person and property. While it can be argued that we shouldn’t base law today on life in 1787(given issues we are seeing in LGBT rights erosion, namely), I don’t think that there’s any reason why right to self defense has diminished in importance since then.

    The Constitution is generally a statement of the limitations of the government, not the citizenry. I think that paints the tone of how the bill of rights should be taken.



  • I mean. yeah single payer is nice, however that’s really not even on the horizon for the US. For most Americans, especially those who actually have to know how to fully utilize their insurance (if lucky enough to have it), there’s no benefit for them to worry too much about a single-payer or socialized system. They have immediate needs and immediate solutions. They need to get their prescriptions, their surgeries, and their doctor’s appointments. It’s not “supporting” it, as so much as it is the devil you know.

    Practically speaking, compared to standard PPO/HMO insurance, HDHPs are pretty good. If you are low-maintenance health-wise, you don’t pay for your physical, are going to spend maybe couple hundred bucks on sick care and maintenance meds. If you have chronic illness, you will only pay the deductible before your care is 100 percent covered, so a hospital stay would be enough to meet your out-of-pocket max, and everything else is covered 100% by your insurer (whereas the traditional plans have 6-10k limits, the HDHPs are much lower at 1-2k for a person and 2-3 for a family). Especially with HSAs, which are savings/retirement accounts for medical expenses, that some employers will pay into, so basically free money to pay copays, prescriptions, even stuff like aspirin and bandages.



  • As I understand the regulations, the FDA did a roundabout way of approving the drug for general use (it was originally approved under a pathway for drugs that were dangerous and had to be closely monitored by a doctor. This really was a weak spot for the FDA’s case. So I think the main critique from the court being that the decision-making of the FDA was abitrary and capricious in relaxing rules to prescribe (if it was dangerous, why did they relax the rules for use during covid? If COVID necessitated an easier way to obtain it, was it dangerous enough to need the Subpart H approval in the first place?). So the way the FDA approved the drug opened them up to administrative challenge.