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Posts
4
Comments
202
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Let me try to put this in a different perspective. First: Gaza has an average age of about 19 years old, and a bit more than half of the population is under 18. Second: there was a Reuters report and video yesterday about how the cemeteries are full so people are burying their loved ones in donated vacant lots with cinder blocks and bits of rubble as gravestones.

    To emphasize and clarify the point: half the population is children and they've run out of space for more graves.

  • When you're talking about getting food, fuel, and water to more than 2 million people, air drops are not going to be remotely sufficient. Convoys of full size trucks might not be enough. 2 to 3 liters of water per person per day adds up really fast.

    Edit: Just for fun, I looked up the capacity of tanker trucks to see how many they would need to get enough drinking water to the civilians in Gaza at a rate of 3 liters per person per day, assuming a population of 2.3 million and a tanker capacity of 60k liters. (Keep in mind, this does not account for water needed for hygiene or food preparation, etc.) It turns out that they would need to bring in 115 tanker trucks a day to keep the civilian population supplied with adequate drinking water. Or, y'know, Israel could turn the water back on.

  • There aren't any Hamas fighters in those hospitals unless they're among the wounded. MSF put up a report yesterday about hospitals being hit by missiles and there's been a bunch of reports of entire high-rise residences getting bombed today. Hamas is not as ubiquitous as your ilk seem to think and the overwhelming majority of the people in Gaza are civilians with no food, no water, no fuel, no medical supplies, and nowhere to go to escape Israel's genocidal artillery.

  • The music and food you mention specifically are the products of Black culture. They only come from the South because that's where the African people were taken to and enslaved, then left destitute with no means to leave after their liberation. Some artists and luminaries from the South have been white, but many of the best ones have been Black and the most moving and powerful pieces of their work are rooted in the oppression they grew up with.

  • Another option to consider would be the Depo Provera shot. Without insurance, it would be about $60-70 every 3 months, but I don't think there's an insurance plan that doesn't cover it. It doesn't contain estrogen and is a common treatment for dysmenorrhea and endometriosis.

  • Yeah, healthcare in this country is a hot mess in a lot of ways. Something that could help push it in the direction of getting coverage is if you have any family history of things like uterine fibroids, or gynecological cancers. It's a pretty straightforward thing on the paperwork end of things if cancer prophylaxis is on the list of reasons.

    Another thing you could consider in this capitalist hellscape is signing up for a plan off the ACA that has a deductible similar to or less than your savings. That way you would wipe out the deductible immediately, have access to more providers, and have some semblance of coverage for the rest of the year.

  • The medical school I'm currently in is an Osteopathic school that leans pretty hard into the Christian traditions/origins of osteopathy, so it's not terribly uncommon for me to get into philosophical and ethical arguments with my classmates and professors. There are a bunch of them that I know that I'll never change their minds about most things, but the others who listen in to those arguments might be swayed or at least given a seed of doubt to explore further.

  • Unfortunately, the original Hippocratic oath that many doctors swear to includes a line about not performing abortions or prescribing abortifacients.

    It is my understanding that, at the time that version of the oath was written, that was less a prohibition of abortion and more a matter of pregnancy and abortion being under the purview of midwives, not physicians.

    To that point, I wrote my own medical oath that I will hold to because I think that things like autonomy, free choice, and dignity in death are actually important.

  • r/childfree has a list of providers by state that regularly provide hysterectomies. I recommend checking it out, and when you call for an appointment, say that you want a consultation for a hysterectomy and don't say anything else. I saw one of the providers from that list and she agreed that a hysterectomy was appropriate for me (31 years old, no kids) in part because of how horrible my periods are when I'm not on continuous hormonal birth control. The only reason we didn't schedule the surgery right then and there is because the Depo shot is working for the moment and she was concerned about how the recovery from surgery would affect my ability to study for medical school and board exams.

  • A different question I have is whether or not the cars have transponders or other communication devices to automatically call emergency services in case of accidents. I'm assuming not because they would probably have a lot of junk calls and I doubt the company would have spent the time to create an algorithm for when to call 911 if they didn't create an algorithm for what to do if there's a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

    That's one of the big downsides of these driverless cars: if a human accidentally ran over the victim, they have the capability to get out of the car to assess the situation, call 911, and offer aid to the victim. An empty car can only ever just sit there with its hazard lights on and maybe call for emergency services.

  • I was lucky in that I worked in a specialty clinic, then a Peds ER during the pandemic and that I only caught it after getting the vaccination. I still got pyelonephritis as a bonus though. The roughest thing about the specialty clinic was that it was in oncology, so all of our patients were high risk and we still had asshats who whined about having to wear a mask in the clinic. During the worst of it, I was helping our plastic surgeon do in-office excisions of malignant melanomas as a temporizing procedure until the ORs opened up for the lymph node biopsies and radical excisions where needed.

  • I don't know if he's quite that poor yet. Georgia only provides public defenders to defendants with a household income below two times the federal poverty line (or thereabouts, I forget the precise multiplier). That's why one of the other Georgia defendants didn't have a defense lawyer while he was being held pending bail.

  • It is a profoundly complex issue, and that's what makes much of this comment section so frustrating. Many of the arguments here are very reductionist and fail to account for detail or nuance. In this particular case, I have a hard time excusing the behavior of the accused interlopers given that this is a women's conference that has been a recurring event for quite some time and has always been a women's conference.

    Lack of education or not, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask professionals to act professionally and refrain from attending events not intended for them. I think there's a significant amount of leeway being given to the men/foreign workers who showed up at the women's conference as if they cannot be expected to regulate their behavior in a professional context. It's the same kind of hand-waving and excuses that perpetuate the good ol' boys' club that the tech industry already is. It is irksome that people here aren't realizing that the arguments they are making about exclusivity or discrimination are the same arguments frequently used to excuse the misogyny and sexual harassment that is so ubiquitous in the tech industry to begin with.

  • The post-pandemic numbers are bound to be very different. I'm working on a study for medical school right now and it was ever so much fun to have to throw out more than half of my work because the results from pre-pandemic studies are so wildly different from studies after 2020. The pandemic is going to have public health effects that will last generations.