Eh, unless the sky is green, you’re probably fine.

Given how many Nazis are kicking around these days, I’m starting to think that might have been the case. The 3rd reich just played the long game.

He’s doing what he can in Minnesota. He’s done a hell of a lot more than just talk here and has made meaningful changes for the better for Minnesotans.

Tesla owners usually have to get insurance through Tesla because most insurance companies refuse to underwrite those death traps.

Well, if we’re talking about the Tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell, it wouldn’t be all bad. They were capable of enlightenment and self-sacrifice.

I was looking for someone to mention Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop.

What are your thoughts on Fullmetal Alchemist? I personally adore FMA: Brotherhood and I think it meets these criteria.

I wonder if an alpha blocker or direct vasodilator might work better for you if you haven’t tried them yet. Or an alpha blocker like prazosin on top of a beta blocker.

That is astonishingly stupid.

Ft Leavenworth is the military’s prison. They don’t send civilians there.

The danger with beta blockers is that they can affect a lot more than just your blood pressure. They also slow down your heart and can effect how certain hormones like thyroid hormones work in your body. It isn’t ideal to have someone maxed out on 2 medications from the same class and if that’s where you are up to, that’s kind of an indication that that medication might not be the right solution.

This is correct. Amlodipine is very effective as a blood pressure medication, but it doesn’t get through the blood-brain barrier which is one of the biggest hurdles for any psychiatric or neurologic medication. There’s an entire special sub-type of brain cells that control what actually makes it out of the blood and to the neurons and getting things past that barrier is quite difficult.

*Raise taxes on poor people. The billionaires can easily just fly to Europe for a shopping spree attached to their regular weekend jaunt and bring everything home in their luggage (if they cared about the prices of anything to begin with, that is).

But when they’re really young you can do things like convince them that trees walk and that’s why trees in cities are in those little cages or pens. (They do actually use their roots to pull themselves around a bit, but it takes a very long time for the amount of movement to be noticeable.)

The age group of children that gets put on leashes doesn’t have the brain development to feel shame or humiliation. Their brains have literally not developed the cortex that does that yet.

From the age of about 2 to 4, my Dad made a harness out of climbing webbing for me and clipped the leash to a carabineer on his belt when we were out and about. We were constantly going to places like Haight St in San Francisco and hiking on the sea cliffs in Santa Cruz. I 100% would have gotten myself killed without that leash because I was very curious about the fishies in the ocean at the bottom of that 50-100ft high cliff, and my Dad was wrangling me and my sibling by himself while Mom was at work.

I’m pretty sure there’s a picture somewhere of me leaning over a cliff being held back by the leash because I was a rambunctious little gremlin that was about 20 years off from having a fully developed frontal lobe. And I want to find that picture and share it with my friends because I think it’s hilarious.

You’re right. My brain is absolute pudding because I’m studying for my board exams. Doing a few hundred multiple choice questions about complex medical topics in a row doesn’t leave a whole lot of processing power left for anything else.

Unfortunately, it appears that you are correct. They released a list of qualifying conditions and while COPD and brochiectasis are on the list, asthma is not.

Edit: I’m kinda braindead right now. Asthma is the first thing on the list. whoops.

That will usually qualify, especially since Covid is primarily a respiratory illness.

It’s entirely possible that it just wasn’t diagnosed until very recently. Prostate cancer screening is not a standard recommendation at his age, and there are a lot of cancers that are very insidious. A lot of times, if there wasn’t a screening test done for it, cancer is caught because of the symptoms of metastasis meaning that unless we’re screening for cancer, we don’t catch it until it’s already progressed.

Some people are more attuned to their bodies and might notice the smaller, earlier symptoms, but for prostate cancer, they can be pretty easy to miss and the primary metastasis symptom is usually back pain from the cancer spreading into the lumbar vertebrae. A lot of people will just write that off as regular back pain and not go to the doctor for it.

From the emergency medicine perspective on that last bit…we don’t care if you have a DNR somewhere on file. If you show up in cardiac arrest and someone isn’t shoving an official POLST into our hands, we’re running the code. We’d rather someone try (and fail) to sue for malpractice for saving them than accidentally let someone die that didn’t want to.

These companies investing in nuclear is the only good thing about it. Nuclear power is our best, cleanest option to supplement renewables like solar and wind, and it has the ability to pick up the slack when the variable power generation doesn’t meet the variable demand. If we can trick those mega-companies into lobbying the government to allow nuclear fuel recycling, we’ll be all set to ditch fossil fuels fairly quickly. (provided they also lobby to streamline the permitting process and reverse the DOGE gutting of the government agency that provides all of the startup loans used for nuclear power plants.)