Chetzemoka

Deep cut Expanse reference. Specifically to an episode that had a lot of personal meaning for me.

From a person with a lot of years of experience fighting mold on wood in a humid climate, what you want is borax:

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/green-home/21331232/killing-mold-on-wood

Borax kills mold and also soaks into wood and stays there to prevent future growth. Bleach does not help on porous surfaces like wood:

"Note that bleach should not be used to kill mold found on wood. While bleach is very effective for killing mold on non-porous surfaces, it doesn’t work well when it comes to wood. This is because the chlorine in bleach can’t penetrate wood, so only the water portion of the bleach gets absorbed.

The mold may appear to be removed from the surface, but it’ll likely continue to grow underneath and return within a few months."

Yeah, I grew up in a small American town and my cousins were more like my siblings than my actual sister because they were the same age as me. We all fled that small town, so the next generation are all growing up not surrounded by extended family.

I think there are good and bad sides to it. It was nice to grow up surrounded by family with a strong sense of belonging. But my cousins’ children are growing up knowing people from far more diverse backgrounds than I ever had access to, which is good for them in a different way.

Overall, I think the effects are probably neutral

You joke, but my dad literally built (most) of his own helicopter. My mom wouldn’t let him fly it because of us kids haha. He sold it still incomplete

Show me your data on that one

This is already a tracked statistic. It’s called the fertility rate. Yes, it’s tracked per uterus, and it’s actually been falling precipitously for decades:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN

Already happening.

The only thing you need to do to accomplish this faster is educate girls (making women valuable for things other than childbearing), provide access to birth control and family planning education, and reduce child mortality (reducing the inclination to have “spare children” to replace all the ones you know will die).

Bangladesh provides a good example of these factors at play:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?locations=BD

“World’s population is projected to nearly stop growing by the end of the century”

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/

And the collective human fertility rate (births per woman) has been falling for decades:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN

Well shit you’re right! I just tend to save things in time order anyway, so I hadn’t noticed. I just deliberately saved something out of time order, and sure enough it sorted itself lower down in my save list. Good to know. My bad

Boost app is the solution to this problem

This Podcast Will Kill You

They did a whole series on Covid including the history of development of vaccines

Yes, Massachusetts. I have a dual fuel heat pump with natural gas backup installed in 2020, so it’s a newer system. And I have one heat pump mini split in the least energy efficient, but most used room in my house (large, high ceilings, exterior walls on three sides, and a skylight).

The first couple of years I noticed when it got just below freezing, the central heat pump seemed to struggle to keep up. Then this year I replaced my windows and got new wall insulation in both of the main bedrooms and bathrooms (previous insulation was original from the 1960s and shredded to bits with huge gaps.)

After those improvements, I’ve been running my heat pump down to 20⁰F/-7⁰C so far without any issues at all. I’m excited to see how cold we can get and this system still keep up. I am still supplementing my one large room with the mini split, but that’s mostly because all my plants are in here, so I keep this room warmer than 68⁰F/20⁰C.

Crock Pot, skinless chicken thighs, bottled sauce of your choice, frozen veggies of your choice, cook until chicken is done.

Chicken thighs are the cheapest chicken meat and changing up the flavor of sauce and blend of veggies makes it feel like completely different meals.

Serve over rice or pasta, depending on which kind of sauce you used.

Pelvises that can accommodate both upright walking AND the size of human brains without, you know, killing the humans during birth.

Harpsichord. Almost forgot about that one. when Tori Amos breaks out the dual piano/harpsichord, great things happen.

Cello. No idea why. Yo-Yo Ma slays me.

I’d miss you guys. I’ve jumped in on conversations on your instance a couple of times and it always seems like a nice place

GOP death cult be like, “Hear me out, do you really NEED to live though?”

To me, it’s all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.

My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.

This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I’ll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.

The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for “society”) naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.

This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.

Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.

I’m fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.

The power of healing could be used to infinitely torture someone without killing them. Definitely has a dark side.

All power must be applied ethically

There’s no scandal. Some people who are leading proponents of MOND theory recently published a new paper using what might be the best scenario we currently have to detect MOND (wide binary stars), and their more precise calculations…are not consistent with MOND. They published evidence against the very theory they were betting on.

https://youtu.be/HlNSvrYygRc?si=otqhH6VINIsCMfiS