Ah, I see.

Yeah, that's part of the reason why I just dealt with the pain whenever I was prescribed stuff like Vicodin. I don't want to risk it at all.

We got rid of lead products because governments put out new regulations that prevented companies from making products with lead, not because the population collectively decided not to buy products with lead in them. If companies had been allowed to continue making lead products, they'd have done so, and people would have continued buying them despite the science pointing to them being bad for you.

Companies will do whatever is profitable unless prevented from doing so by regulations, and people will buy what companies sell because most people don't know, and don't have the time to figure out what products they buy are harmful to themselves and others. Even when they do, they often don't have the wealth to make a change to buying safer, more expensive products.

"How society works" is that people have to buy products to survive, and often have little choice among what products they can afford. If we want companies to start lowering their emissions, we need to force them to do so with regulations, just like we had to do with lead.

He was a decent youtuber, but I was always irked by his propagation of the "That's just a theory" phrase. I get that it was just a tagline, but it still inadvertently promotes the downplay of the scientific process.

That's a fair point. You're correct that my point is that the equation should be balanced, but you're understating the reality with the statement "unfortunately it usually isn't."

I put in 4 hours of work last week, though my employer thinks I put in 40. In those 4 hours of work I started and finished a project for the company that will earn over $100k in gross profit. It ended up being almost exactly 1.5x my yearly salary. Just by putting in the absolute minimum effort I'm already earning my company more in a week than they pay me in a year. And I don't even work for a large company. I'd imagine corporate giants have an even greater divide.

I'm not responsible for worrying about whether I benefit the company; most companies have gotten so good at maximizing profits while minimizing costs that even the most layabout worker earns them significantly more money than they cost to employ. My only thought is about how I can do as little as possible while still ensuring management continues to think I'm being productive.

I'm a bit of a noob about privacy, but wouldn't preventing people from knowing you're using Tor be pretty important? I know that, among people who know of Tor, but don't know much about it, the use of Tor alone is generally associated with criminal activity, and often conjures up imagery of worse things than just piracy.

If I were to tell my friends I was thinking of using Tor, and I didn't immediately have a good explanation of what I'd use it for beyond "privacy," then they'd think I was into some nasty shit. I'd imagine the ISPs, and anyone else they might give/sell their info to, would be suspicious of anyone logged to be using Tor.

I never said anything about Elon being directly responsible for this, nor did anyone else within the replies to the conspiracy theory comment that I was referring to. The fact of the matter is that conspiracy theorists touted Elon's acquisition of Twitter as being the return of free speech, but immediately after the death of Putin's largest opposition figure, who's wife said that she would carry his torch, she's removed from the platform. Whether due to Elon or anyone else, Twitter is not a platform of free speech, and that should outrage anyone, whether they Like Elon or not, and whether they agree with Navalny and his wife or not.

Everybody's got a thing, and they're usually happy to talk about it to someone who's genuinely interested. Definitely helpful if you're looking into that exact thing.

Correct. That's why I talked about finding niche communities to help find and parse through options. For example, I didn't just buy an expensive vacuum, I found a few vacuum enthusiast forums and looked through several threads discussing the best products for my budget price.

It's not that they accept that it can exist, it's that they accept that it does exist. We have no reason to believe anything exists after death, or that any particular being created us, and to go even further, we have no reason to believe that one religion's specific version of heaven exists after death, or one specific religion's specific vision of god created us. Maybe something exists after death, but it's just a huge everlasting game of dodge ball. Unlikely, but just as unlikely as heaven existing. Maybe a creature created us, but it's a huge centipede. Again, unlikely, but just as unlikely as a human-shaped god creating us in his image.

There are virtually no universally-held consistencies even among all of the the relatively few currently-practiced religions, because none of them are based on anything but human imagination even if God does exist, since we've likely never had a real interaction with God even in that instance. Religion can exist, but not only is it highly unlikely, even in the event that it's true, the likelihood that we randomly guessed the exact correct circumstances in which it does exist are nearly impossible.

The scientific approach to religion is to make no opinion on its existence, because to make a hypothesis about something that cannot be tested isn't just worthless, it's biased, which is even worse to a scientist.

They weren't these exact models when I was there in 2013-2014, but they're definitely similar. The finger scanner thing was so cool; I was always playing with it when there weren't any packages coming down the conveyor.

Sorry, this will be a bit long-winded. My dream job was to be a genetic counselor. I loved learning about genetics, and people told me I would make a good therapist, so I thought it was a great fit. I got good grades throughout undergrad and grad school, and got decent reviews from my rounds through several hospitals before graduation - the only note was that I wasn't great at building rapport, which is the first part of the session where you make basic small talk with the patient to try to get them to open up to you. All in all, I was confident I'd be fine. At my first job, though, things were a lot more complicated; my workload was way higher than anything I had to deal with during grad school, my supervisor had no idea what my job was actually for, and my rapport building skill ended up being worse than I thought.

Genetic counseling generally consists of talking with patients to get their feelings about whatever genetic condition is potentially affecting them and/or their family, then helping them process those feelings, and ultimately determine if genetic testing is right for them. When it's handled correctly it drastically helps patient outlook and confidence moving forward with their diagnostic odyssey, but it's not often handled correctly in practice. Doctors mostly want to just tell a patient they needed genetic testing, which is mostly what happened in the past couple of decades, since genetic counseling is a relatively new field. But now the hospital requires a genetic counseling visit before a genetic test can be ordered. So, the doctors will tell the patient they were ordering them a test, but that they had one other appointment they needed to attend before it could go through. This caused 2 major issues:

• First, it confused the patients. They often thought they were just there for a blood draw, and were unprepared for a counseling session, which further exacerbated my rapport building issue; I'm a great counselor, but if I can't get the patient to actually open up and start talking to me about their worries, everything falls apart, causing the patient to leave annoyed and feeling like I wasted their time. This happened often enough to make me feel worthless, and like I was causing undue stress for people during an already difficult time in their life.
• Second, it annoyed the doctors, who felt like I was nothing more than an extra step clogging up their workflow. This was more damaging than it seems at face value, because hospitals have an unspoken hierarchy; doctors are the moneymakers for the hospital, so when they're annoyed, the higher-ups are very motivated to address that. As a genetic counselor, whose sessions are complimentary and not billable, I was at the bottom of that hierarchy, so my needs barely mattered. Pair that with the fact that my supervisor had no idea what my role was, and wasn't willing to learn, I had multiple meetings that essentially told me I need to get genetic testing for all patients, which specifically goes against patient autonomy, which is one of the great pillars that genetic counselors are meant to uphold.

Ultimately, I immediately felt burnt out, disrespected, unhelpful, and unwanted. I spoke to many classmates from graduate school, thinking maybe it was just my specific hospital that had these problems, but they all reported the same scenario. Most of them decided to stick it out, but I left. And now, many of them are struggling with mental health issues as a result of trying to preserver in these harsh working conditions. I have a lot of respect for them being able to continue providing this essential service for their patients, but I'm happy I left.