Agreed. One day I realized my computer was completely out of space, was barely still running. Turns out Microsoft store had dutifully downloaded many copies of a game until the entire drive was full. Uninstalling got rid of only one copy of the files. Store said it was no longer installed even though all the files of many copies were still there. Deleting them manually was a horrible mess of permissions issues, involving the need to edit the registry and things too. I think I ended up needing to boot into Linux from a usb stick to finally fix everything up. Anyways, steam for me if I have the choice. Let me just delete files if I need to Microsoft, geeze.

Taking these medicines in the forms they are found in nature is a horrible idea. Most of the plants they come from are poisonous because the therapeutic index of most of the drugs here are low, meaning the line between medicine and poison is very fine. Purifying the ingredient and allowing tight control of the dosage is the reason any of these are able to be used safely. Please don’t go around eating bits of foxglove or belladonna.

As you’ve seen, modern medicine is not shy about taking ingredients found in nature when they actually have a useful purpose in medicine, and enabling them to be actually used safely instead of taking some random unknown dosage of a potentially deadly drug and hoping for the best.

Except for fixing vitamin and mineral deficiencies, supplements are ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. They’re in desperate need of better regulation in the United States. They scam tons of people and get away with ridiculous claims like fighting dementia based on no evidence that would be totally illegal for any actual pharmaceutical company to claim, all while selling bottles of stuff with “proprietary formulas” or claiming to have plants that aren’t even in there when independent researchers look at them. All totally legal by the way, no requirement for ingredients listed on a supplement to reflect reality. Stay away if you value your health or your money. Not saying pharmaceutical companies are always shining beacons of beneficence here, obviously I have many problems with them as well, but they at least have some sort of regulated evidence base for the most part.

It’s true, electronic medical records range from garbage to totally broken in terms of usability for healthcare workers. Then you realize the actual customer is the hospital system, and all the design decisions start to make sense. Because the real purpose of the software is efficient billing, not patient care.

The former president? No wait he wanted to inject bleach. Or sunlight or something I dunno.

From the article

Yeah the article is a little rosy and overstating things by using words like carbon free which obviously isn’t the case, but fta:

“Retrofitting a propeller plane with fuel cells and liquid-hydrogen tanks would result in a nearly 90 percent reduction in life-cycle emissions, compared to the original aircraft, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit think tank. That’s assuming the hydrogen is made using only renewable electricity —not with fossil fuels, the way the vast majority of hydrogen is produced today.”

Battery powered commercial airplanes are a pipe dream right now, batteries are just too heavy for anything practical with flight. Solid state batteries might reduce it some but probably not enough. We’ll still need some kind of mass long distance travel in the future. Once they’re able to scale up renewable energy sources even more, hydrogen made with those sources could become an important storage medium for getting that energy to power planes or other things where batteries are impractical. So it makes sense to at least be exploring these technologies.

Even for right now natural gas has a higher energy to co2 ratio than other types of fuels, so it’s possible there may even be a current efficiency boost, though I don’t know that off the top of my head.

If every new technology was attacked saying, well it’s not perfect right now so don’t even bother trying, we wouldn’t have electric cars or all sorts of other innovations. I agree with you on the article though, I hate when they say stuff like “look we have carbon free airplanes now” when obviously we don’t.

The headline left out something important from the article and posed a false dichotomy, a minority of harvested crabs are being used to develop medicines, and most of those are released and survive. The vast majority that are killed are being harvested for use as bait in commercial fishing. Seems like that’s the obvious thing to cut back on to save the humans, the crabs, and the birds.

As much as I hate meta/Facebook, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these laws are right either. I don’t think you should have to pay to simply provide a link to another website. This runs antithetical to the whole idea and structure of the internet. If they’re taking the article or photos and republishing it on their own website that’s different and they obviously should have to pay for that. The linking to news sites is actually good for news sites though and increases profit for publishers by driving traffic to their sites, it doesn’t take profit away. The news publishers are free to have a paywall or put advertisements on the page being linked too and get revenue from that. This feels like publishers wanting to eat their cake and keep it too, they want big search engines and social media to link to their articles so the news sites get traffic and revenue from advertisements/subscriptions, and then they also want the search engines who created that traffic in the first place to pay for linking too? I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run lobbying for these laws all for a pittance of cash.

This idea could also affect things like lemmy too eventually and make them impossible, if you need to pay to simply provide a link to a news story or other website.

Until recently the US preventative services task force had been recommendeding low dose aspirin to petty much everyone over a certain age for prevention of heart disease and ischemic stroke. They recently ended this catch-all recommendation for everyone above a certain age, but there are many situations in which a low dose aspirin is still going to be helpful for certain people. Low dose aspirin has a low risk of major side effects, but if what it’s preventing is also rare then it might not be worth it for everyone. So it’s no longer a catch all recommendation above a certain age, the decision needs to be made in conjunction with a patient’s doctor based on their particular health situation and risk benefit balance. Age is another thing that may affect this balance, for instance this study was specifically looking at older adults where bleeding events are more common than in younger or middle aged adults, and shouldn’t be generalized to all adults.

For secondary prevention (like someone already has evidence of heart disease or a past ischemic stroke), there’s volumes of evidence showing it’s benefit. Sometimes even two different antiplatelet drugs, like aspirin and clopidogrel, are even used together.

Very important stipulation here just so it’s clear before everyone chucks their aspirin in the trash, this is a study on just giving low dose aspirin to people who are totally healthy. We know aspirin is helpful for ischemic stroke prevention for people who are at higher risk for strokes, including people who’ve had an ischemic stroke before. Many people have risk factors for stroke and cardiac disease. People should talk to their doctor about whether or not they should be on a low dose aspirin.

The neurons you’re born with stay with you for the most part. Most of their complex organization is formed through a series of one time events early in development that can’t really be replicated and then stays with you for the rest of your life. You get shingles when you’re older because the same neurons were with you that got infected by chicken pox when you were younger are still there. There’s a few limited areas in the nervous system where new neurons might be formed, but in general neurons are life long cells so be nice to your nervous system. Most other cell types in your body are turning over as you said, including glia and other types of cells in your brain.