• 1 Post
  • 61 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 13th, 2024

help-circle

  • Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.

    My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that if there were any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it’s a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you’re gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.

    By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.



  • Multiple people have already died in San Francisco due to these trash heaps. I can think of at least 2 confirmed incidents where the robo-taxis and their inability to deal with unusual situations has gotten people killed. One was very direct in which the car ran over a pedestrian, and another was somewhat indirect but still clearly responsible. San Francisco has notoriously narrow streets and 1 or 2 (I can’t remember specifically at the moment) robo-taxis blocked a roadway and prevented an ambulance from getting to a patient that died before they arrived because of the delay.

    In both instances, they didn’t have passengers, so I think that made them a lower priority for the human interventions.

    And California is still dragging its heels on cracking down on this bullshit. Someone rich will have to die first. Poor people don’t count.


  • There was an incident not too long ago where one of these robo-taxis ran a woman over to avoid another car doing something it didn’t expect and then it froze up and wouldn’t move at all with the woman trapped under the car. There wasn’t a driver to get out and help and it took a few minutes for bystanders to get involved to help her, and she ended up dying at the scene.

    If we can’t get rid of these monstrosities, at least having a human monitoring them that can call 911 is important, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of there not being a human present to render aid if something goes wrong. (Not to imply that every human will be willing or able to render aid, but some chance of help is better than no chance of help.)





  • I’m not outright trying to be contrarian, but for some older people or people with things like arthritis, foot injuries, hip injuries, etc. walking or running on a treadmill is vastly less painful than walking or running on concrete.

    There is absolutely a huge commercialization problem with fitness and health in the western world (and in America in particular), but if going to a climate-controlled gym and getting your steps in on a treadmill or elliptical is what it takes to get you to exercise, I’m all for it.

    For the potato chips, that’s really sleazy of the gym, but I do want people to know that even if you don’t/can’t make a bunch of changes to your diet and you don’t lose weight, getting exercise of any kind as often as you are able is still a positive thing for your heart and metabolic health. Please don’t let being fat, or out of shape, or an inability to overhaul your diet prevent you from doing something positive for your health. Losing weight and keeping it off is really only possible through major lifestyle change, and, for a lot of people, the only sustainable way to make the necessary changes is one at a time.












  • medgremlin@midwest.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhat the hell Proton!
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I use Proton when I’m on my university’s campus because they switched to using EDUroam for the campus wifi. I used to be a Sys Admin at a different university a while back, and from what I know, EDUroam allows the IT department to monitor basically all of the traffic over the network. I don’t know exactly how deep that stuff goes, but if I was doing anything personal or sensitive like banking or whatever, I’d flip on the VPN on my personal computer. I also don’t have any personal accounts logged in on the school issued laptop because they have it loaded with institutional spyware. Once I graduate, I’ll blank the drive and reinstall the OS to have a decent Lenovo laptop on hand as a spare.

    Edit to add: I use Proton because it was the least shady service that I could get for a reasonable price as a student. It is also helpful for finding textbooks. :)