Having literally been an inhabitant of a small island at one point in my life is the exact reason I have no active social media presence that is not pseudonymous. Life is different when you know you might suddenly be recognized by a stranger at the grocery store who saw your public comment on Facebook.
Oh, almost nothing gets pulverized when galaxies collide! Our Milky Way galaxy is currently colliding with a couple of small satellite galaxies. There's so much empty space between stars that almost none of the stars themselves impact.
It's more a matter of the gravitational orbits of the stars inside the galaxies changing dramatically. But those changes caused by a galaxy merger take millions of years. Plenty of time for life to adapt.
The biggest danger to life would be the possibility of getting blasted by radiation, if you ended up too close to a supernova or something like that.
It's the energy of the quantum fields that permeate space. They're less "particles" per se, and more just the random jiggles in the quantum fields that aren't coherent enough to be a full-on normal particle of that field, so the ripple starts and then dies out.
I mean, yes. That's why medical residencies need to be reformed. There's zero reason they should be paid so little and made to work so many hours. None whatsoever.
And, in fact, I often make the argument that the current structure of medical residency actively harms patients because it filters out people with disabilities or even just normal smart people. Because the types of individuals who can tolerate and succeed in long, drawn-our, deeply abusive working environments are very, very, very different from the populations that they are then tasked with serving.
We wonder why physicians are so often out of touch with the struggles of their patients, and I think the structure of their training contributes a lot to that problem
Same here. I worked overtime 45 out of 52 weeks in 2020. Only to come out of the pandemic and still have hospitals trying to push too many patients on us, understaff us, supply chain shortages... And they wonder why so many healthcare professionals have burnt out and quit the field.
Find a country where medical residency doesn't work like this. It's an archaic holdover from the 1800s era when student doctors were trained by apprenticeship
This shit right here. We need to completely overhaul the medical residency system. Corporations are literally killing these workers for profit and the hazing culture of medicine continues to ignore that fact.
Yeah I remember being in the airport in January 2020 a week after starting a new treatment regimen for an autoimmune condition consisting of high dose intravenous steroids, and emailing my doctor that I was masking up, "But I'm sure that thing from China isn't over here yet."
Hindsight: yes it was. It was definitely everywhere already, just most of the people exposed weren't getting deadly ill.
Similarly, I am all over those vaccines. I don't have room for a bad bout of Covid in my life.
The grand irony is that my immune system is actually a giant bag of dicks most of the time. I spent the majority of 2020 receiving a course of high dose intravenous steroids to treat an autoimmune condition. That treatment regimen wrapped in October 2020.
Prior to that, we all - my doctors, my family, my coworkers - thought that if I got Covid, it was gonna be really really bad. Then I actually got it and it was a nothingburger lol
(I actually think I just got a really low infectious dose. I was with a patient who had tested negative the previous day, so I was only wearing a surgical mask. The patient tested positive on a repeat test the day after I was with them. Patient's only symptom was "I really don't feel well" and, you know, kidney failure. But the kidney problems had started for them before getting Covid.)
For me, it's the wholesome bro moments in Lock, Stock like Fat Tom constantly, sincerely falling for his nickname. I also think at least once a day at work, "Can we lock up and get drunk now?"
NLRB and DOL tend not to fuck around