southsamurai
@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on What's the best way to respond to someone who says "transracial is just as valid as transgender"? 49 minutes ago:
Walk away.
People want to troll. Don’t feed trolls.
- Comment on Spicy food never affects my gut and everyone thinks it's really weird. How unusual is this and what could be happening to explain why spicy food doesn't affect me? 2 hours ago:
There’s a few factors.
First is genetics. Not everyone has the same base level reaction to peppers and/or capsaicin. And it can be either of them causing intestinal rebellion. Some people just don’t respond well to even sweet peppers.
Second is habitation. The more spicy stuff you eat in general, the more your body adapts to it.
But, there’s also variances in mucosa. Our guts, the colon in specific, opportunists produce snot. It’s essentially the same as what coats your throat and sinuses. Not exactly the same, but the same basic ingredients and purpose. Separate from how you respond to the food, and how used to it you are, some people produce more than others.
In your case, I suspect that you have a higher resistance genetically, and produce mucous in your gut that protects you from the irritants that spicy foods have.
If you also have a healthy gut biome going, it’ll add a layer of resistance to things being over stimulated.
And that’s what causes the diarrhea and cramping for most people. The chemicals irritate tissues, so your body treats or like an emergency. That means to increase bowel motility and flush the guts with water. Which means squiiirt.
- Comment on It used to be that when most countries were or in trouble or needed help they would go to the US for help. My question is who does the US go to for help if or when needed? 7 hours ago:
Well, you run into the trouble of “help with what”
We do still have plenty of treaties, and the allies that go with them. So long as we don’t break those treaties, those allies are likely to provide the kind of help they cover.
If you mean “help us get rid of the fascists”, nobody yet because the fascists haven’t been stupid enough to try and export it in ways that violate treaties, so it’s an internal matter.
Even if the US devolves into civil war, don’t expect to see external military assistance being provided to any sides involved until and unless there’s no other choice.
However, there’s a good chance that US refugees would be welcomed to some degree in most of our allied nations. If refugees could get there. Canada would only take so many, and would otherwise have to play adoption agency, which they might not be willing to do. Same with Mexico. You might see some people fleeing via water, but where would they go that would either accept them or help them to other nations that would?
So, we aren’t without help. It just might not be the kind of help you want.
With all of that in mind, chances are high that at least some of our allies would try to get assistance into the country to back whatever factions they support. Dunno if that’s help or not, but it is what it is.
- Comment on Am I the only person who notices the Autistic accent? 23 hours ago:
I don’t know I’d call it an accent really, since it isn’t quite the same thing, but I know what you’re talking about.
- Comment on Do people suffering from trichotillomania ever go after the nose or ear hair? 1 day ago:
Yup. It can exhibit anywhere. In general, you’ll see people having a “preference” for specific spots, but it’s fairly rare for it to be exclusive to only one.
After head hair, eyebrows tend to be the most common, followed by arms.
Those that grow facial hair would likely be higher in the list except that not everyone grows enough of it to be able to pull it at all. But you’ll often see folks dealing with the issue try to pull at the sideburn area even if they don’t grow anywhere else, and even if it isn’t long enough.
I’ve heard that it’s largely based on ease of reach rather than anything else. Otherwise you’d see it on the lower extremities more often.
But it is an unconscious thing, so that makes sense. If they could consciously choose where to pluck, everyone dealing with trichotillomania would just hit the easier to hide spots first.
- Comment on How bad is it that Israel has attacked Iran? 2 days ago:
No worries, thank you for responding so quickly :)
- Comment on How bad is it that Israel has attacked Iran? 2 days ago:
That’s true enough, and that’s why I said that if Iran was backed by others and that retaliated in a way that might.
Let’s say Iran blames the UK, so they explode something there. Or one of their allies decides to pull fuckery in Germany.
That’s what I was talking about.
- Comment on How bad is it that Israel has attacked Iran? 2 days ago:
Worst case, world war three. If enough other countries back Iran, they might retaliate in a way that triggers something like the nato treaty and you get some combination of countries compelled to do something, which could set off a series of conflicts that might spread.
More likely, some skirmishes and back and forth attacks happen, but nobody outside the region becomes involved directly.
Or, Iran could just posture and use it as political leverage to strengthen their position with allies and the various blocs around the world.
Obviously, there’s variants of those, and plenty of really unlikely options. But based on how iran has acted in the past and how little anyone is pressuring Israel currently, it doesn’t seem like it will escalate unless something else changes
- Comment on Is it wrong or uncommon to judge people primarily on their worst moments/acts? 3 days ago:
I tend to ask how bad that worst act was. Some shit, ima judge your ass for even if it was only once, no matter how much you say you changed, because you might be faking the change to keep from being noticed.
But the standard is pretty fucking high if it wasn’t personal to me. Like, if I saw you kick a dog that wasn’t even remotely aggressive, ima judge your ass, but be open to you changing. Eventually, if that’s the worst you’ve ever done and you at least pretend to have changed well enough to not repeat it, I’m not going to hold that over your head forever.
But you kick my dog? Assuming I can’t get away with burying your ass, you better hope we never run across each other in the woods when we’re both 100, because it’ll be your last day on earth. No forgiveness, no benefit of the doubt.
But really big shit? No, Hitler never gets to be forgiven, period. Yeah , he’s dead, but ima judge that motherfucker until my last conscious moment
Now you brought up a specific example. It happens to be an example that I would absolutely never, ever trust the person again. Three reasons first, abuse of position. He already proved he will ignore professional ethics as well as general moral ones, as well as laws. That’s hard to change in people. Not impossible, but hard.
Second, he got away with it. That means his regret is dubious. If he truly regretted it, why’s he divulging it that way instead of taking steps to make him less likely to be able to repeat things?
Third, people that diddle kids don’t tend to stop. They just tend to pause. It’s impossible to nail down exact numbers because there’s some that never get caught. But the recidivism rate is high, and it is very rare that someone willing to do that can stop with just one act.
So, no, I couldn’t believe that any good he did balances out there near certain fact of the only reason he didn’t diddle every single kid he could have was because he didn’t think he could get away with those. He absolutely would have fucked every single patient that met his victim profile if he could have.
Also, it’s okay to say pedophile, the word police aren’t going to spank you.
Tbh, I can’t think of any situation where I could weigh any amount of good acts against fucking a single child and that one bad act not taint everything else. And it doesn’t have to be literally fucking, I’m speaking figuratively here. There might be some act that was so irrelevant to the victim that it might not matter if the good was good enough, but I doubt it. I can’t think of anything at least.
- Comment on What are the key things people need to know about islam? 4 days ago:
Well, I’d generally point to Wikipedia and say that’s as much as most people could ever need to know without a specific reason to go deeper.
Really, all it takes to understand what’s being talked about in the news is there, plus details.
For even less stringent uses, you could break it down to being a monotheistic religion that shares roots with judaism and christianty and has wide ranging rules that sometimes conflict with other religions and/or philosophies/moral codes.
Hell, most people, most of the time, all they need to know to get through life is that it’s a religion. Even that’s only necessary for casual conversations so you don’t have to interrupt and ask what that word means.
- Comment on What's going on with moths and lamps in lemmy? 4 days ago:
That’s just what a lamp would ask!
Seriously though, it’s a meme thing. It goes in cycles. Sometimes it’s beans. Sometimes it’s Gowron (glory to the empire!). Sometimes it’s people posting about how southsamurai has the most epic beard on the planet. Sometimes it’s moths.
- Comment on Is anyone else having trouble uploading images? 6 days ago:
I genuinely appreciate that offer. I would accept it, but I’m notoriously unreliable in a lot of ways. Not the kind of guy that does stuff intentionally, but I screw up plenty.
- Comment on Is anyone else having trouble uploading images? 6 days ago:
I think it’s just sjw. I tried uploading stuff on other instances and it worked fine, just not to sjw communities, or from this sjw account
Really weird though, I’ve never had it happen before
- Submitted 6 days ago to main@sh.itjust.works | 4 comments
- Comment on "Can i ask you for a favor?" Is it rude to say no? 6 days ago:
Rudeness is in the presentation, not the fact.
If you say “fuck off”, that’s rude.
If you say “I don’t do favors for people I don’t know” or “I don’t take requests from strangers” those are neutral and acceptable facts.
If you say “you can ask, but it doesn’t mean I’ll do it” that’s another neutral and acceptable way to address it if you’re willing to see what the favor might be, since some favors might me acceptable.
I tend to be willing to hear the request, but only with the caveat that I will most likely not comply. Last time a stranger asked if I could “help them”, my response was “I doubt I can, and I might not, but ask away”. They asked, and all they wanted was a light. I no longer smoke, but I carry a lighter. So I checked the surroundings and lit his cig
Years ago, I had a patient that lived in a really shifty area, and folks would approach me on my way up to their apartment. I’d see them coming and before they could reach me, I’d tell them that if they were wanting something to not waste their time, but if they were looking for trouble, they found it.
Which was rude in other circumstances, but necessary in that place at that time.
Your response was acceptable in that time at that place. Not necessarily the friendliest way of phrasing it, but sometimes being friendly doesn’t go well.
- Comment on How good are amphetamines for brain fog? 6 days ago:
Well, you’ve already been told the important part, that you can’t crowd source this. There’s way too much detail that matters to give a good answer without a shit ton more information.
That being said, brain fog tends to be a specific term used by a relatively narrow range of neurological conditions. As it happens, I’ve been around a lot of people in that narrow range.
So, with the initial caveat in place still, the answer is probably not going to help.
Most of what causes brain fog isn’t so much about the things that amphetamines do.
Amphetamines work by boosting dopamine and norepinephrine, basically by increasing the cycle where brain cells pull chemicals into themselves.
Brain fog in most circumstances is caused by damage to the brain cells in one way or another. It isn’t going to be helped by a hit of dopamine and norepinephrine. Otherwise, it would respond to those chemicals when administered directly. There are some cases where brain fog is chemical in origin rather than structural or inflammatory causes. But, again, in those cases, there are better options.
Take MS as an example. The brain fog there is from demyelinization. The outer layer of some nerve cells gets attacked my the immune system. The signals no longer get carried properly, and a side effect of that is decreased responsiveness in the brain. A brain fog. It’s a structural issue where cells are damaged, and there’s an inflammatory response that amplifies the effect.
You can dump all the dopamine and norepinephrine you want into a brain like that and all you’ll get is a jittery, stressed out person with brain fog. Wouldn’t matter if you took those chemicals, or an amphetamine, it just can’t patch over damaged cells. Best case, it slightly decreases the fog by having healthy cells improve function, but it isn’t likely, and there’s no telling if the improved activity of those cells could bypass the damaged ones and do anything useful.
If your friend is dealing with any of the usual suspects, chances are that it would be a waste of time. It’s been tried, and never really does anything useful, or they would get prescribed more often
Now, I have heard that some Parkinson’s patients have had a degree of improvement of the brain fog from amphetamines, but that’s a dopamine based disease to an extent, so not a big surprise there.
If her doctor isn’t willing to prescribe them for her, then there’s essentially zero chance it would do any good because they will and do prescribe them for conditions where it can be helpful.
Tbh, I’m not surprised she had trouble finding anything. Most of the diseases where brain fog is an issue, amphetamines were tried so long ago that the journals and publications the data was in were all in print. A lot of that stuff isn’t digitized, and you won’t find it outside of a medical library. I think the last time I read anything about studies done with them for MS in particular was back in the nineties. And that would have been in back issues of stuff.
It sucks, but she may not ever be back to her old self. She may get better, but never quite back to before. At least, not unless some new stuff comes along. Again, using MS as an example, there’s been some attempts at repairing the damage to the myelin. There’s been some success with it, and it does come with a decrease in disability. Combined with a disease modifier, that can potentially reverse the problems caused, and keep them from coming back. But that’s likely a decade or so away from being ready for patients to have access to. Iirc, it’s still in animal testing.
Other conditions have similar attempts ongoing, so it isn’t hopeless. But amphetamines have been around long enough to have been tested against pretty much every disease out there. They just aren’t viable for brain fog usually
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Well, death from lack of sleep is a damn rare thing. In the cases I’m aware of, there were other factors involved.
Being able to keep someone awake via flexing of muscles only, that gets dubious as hell. At some point, the victim is going to just pass out, and nothing that subtle is going to wake them back up unless there’s something else going on.
Also, the guy using stimulants is more likely to die from lack of sleep plus the drugs than the woman would be just from lack of sleep.
Also, after a week , both would likely have died from dehydration before sleep could be a factor. They’d also be laying in their own urine and feces.
While I don’t doubt there’s people that could lay in their own filth that long, what isn’t going to happen is them laying there unaffected by it.
In other words, as a piece of fiction, it’s a unique idea. But it’s utterly implausible, and impossible in any realistic sense.
- Comment on Why are you here and not on Reddit? 1 week ago:
The second that pig boy said that Reddit’s “corpus of data” was his to sell.
The fuckstain showed that the people that were the corpus of data were irrelevant to him, and every decision they’ve announced since that moment has driven that message home.
The population isn’t really bigger any more. It’s propped up by bots and reposts so much that the actual humans get buried outside of niche subs.
Here, the chances of talking to a bot are lower, and (barring newcomers that haven’t adapted to the culture yet) most of the people range from neutral to genuinely good.
A bigger population doesn’t help anyway. Most people in the world are stupid, or cruel, or just assholes. The bigger a given platform gets, the more you run into those because it’s a numbers game.
A smaller platform can manage to self regulate and, bluntly, drive the serious assholes away. But once things get big enough, the assholes take over because there’s too many of them to drive out.
I’m not saying lemmy doesn’t have assholes. I’m just saying they don’t dominate the discourse, and tend to have a high turnover rate.
That’s why I’m on lemmy.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I have no idea who that is, but since I have zero chance with wonder woman or spider woman, I empathise with you completely
- Comment on Do you care about up/down votes? 1 week ago:
Usually, no. Not for myself or others. Too many people vote emotionally for them to be useful feedback in most situations.
They also aren’t useful in short time frames on lemmy. I’ve lost track of how many people get whiny about votes, but they just didn’t wait for things to balance out. It’s lemmy, shit takes hours to spread and get seen, especially since not everyone sorts by new. Chill the fuck out.
But sometimes, they can be a warning sign, or an indicator of a successful comment/post. And other times, they can help realize you posted or commented in the wrong place.
- Comment on Why do so many people delete their posts? 1 week ago:
Deleted by creator
- Comment on New community: Biscuits (cookies if you're American) 1 week ago:
This is unacceptable.
I have now bitten three different devices hard enough to ruin their screen
- Comment on If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better? 1 week ago:
That is an awesome bit of info. I had never even thought about stuff like mirrors interfering in recycling glass
- Comment on If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better? 1 week ago:
Yeah, I meant to put that in my comment and lost track. My brain was so fried, I’m surprised any of it was intelligible.
- Comment on If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better? 1 week ago:
Well, the more I think about it and the more I look into it, “better” is likely not the best term.
What it would achieve is a likely decrease in harms that aren’t controlled.
The stuff that would replace plastics, where it’s possible, all come with their own environmental impacts. But, they’re easier to control, so are also easier to minimize or mitigate.
That comes with a price, though. Monetary mostly, but also in reshaping our expectations of things like food storage. Not that we could entirely do away with even single use plastics, much less longer term uses.
But, as an example of what I’m talking about with different more than better.
We switch everything we can from plastics to glass. Bottles, whatever. So, you’re increasing the costs of transportation, right? It’s heavier, you can’t pack as much in the same space. That increases energy use, no matter if it’s diesel in a truck tank, or via power. But, if we also switch even more to EV trucks and trains, that’s still a net positive because now that energy can be better regulated, reducing pollution alongside the reduction in plastic pollution.
But, now you’re going to need more bottles of glass. That’s more energy to make per bottle (can’t remember the numbers, and I’m too tired to go digging), though not a huge amount. You also can’t perfectly recycle a bottle without some new materials, and you’ve also now got an increased demand in silicates for new and recycled. So now the sand is even more in demand, and there’s a shortage of it. Luckily, the transportation costs of raw materials is roughly the same, on average.
But, again, at least the sand issue is tighter. Easier to control for than random plastic shit blowing everywhere.
So, it’s a net positive in terms of reducing the impact of plastics on the environment because that impact is more dangerous as well as less predictable. But it isn’t necessarily better just because it isn’t plastic. It’s a trade off weighted with that specific goal. If there was a magic wand to guarantee all used plastics be centralized and consolidated, the balance of things isn’t a net positive, it’s just a difference in what problems are occurring.
That ends up applying to pretty much every replacement material for a given use. Swapping out plastic films for waxed paper means you’re now increasing paper production, and that needs more trees. Swapping plastics out for paper in shipping protection is the same. Swapping out to metals brings the same weight issues as glass, and adds mining problems.
There’s always a price to pay. You can’t have the benefits of a modern world without some cost to the environment.
But, yeah, we haven’t started a serious switch because plastics are petroleum and there’s a shit ton of money and power tied up with that. It’s entirely doable, though it would take time and cost a shit ton. Eventually, we would cut plastics in the environment down to a level that’s more acceptable, and maybe even low enough to be unimportant (not that anyone has figured out what that would be yet afaik; we just know the shit is everywhere and causing trouble). But it has to start at the top, not from the bottom. Trillions of dollars are involved, and that kind of money wins, period.
- Comment on Now that PewDiePie is on his Linux/engineering arc, could he help boost the Fediverse? 1 week ago:
Please, no.
He is such a douche bag, and a lot of his fan base is too.
- Comment on Instance freezing as an alternative to full shut down 1 week ago:
It does? I have no clue how I missed that. Thank you very much
- Comment on Instance freezing as an alternative to full shut down 1 week ago:
Exactly.
If you’re making posts or comments that you want preserved, you should be backing them up anyway.
It would be nice if the export function copied saved items as well as subs and blocks though.
- Comment on Is it a big deal if my phone hasn't had a security update in 5 years? 1 week ago:
On a security level, yeah, obviously.
On a day to day level, no
I wouldn’t trust it to handle anything sensitive, but that doesn’t make it useless. If you can unlock the bootloader and swap in a different rom, that usually solves any problems security wise, as long as there’s a recent enough rom available. And even without that, the risks involved aren’t 100%, and can be mitigated to some degree.
- Comment on USB chorded keyset – Adafruit YT (1:52) 1 week ago:
Hey, typo seems to have gotten into your title. I believe you intended that to be corded, not chorded.