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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Awesome comment, thanks for the detail.

    To play a bit of Devil’s Advocate (from a bench-top scientific standpoint I come from immunology/microbiology background—so I know enough theory to be dangerous but don’t have your depth of evolutionary understanding) doesn’t a lot of this rely on cosmic timescales? I’m sure I could easily do a web search on this, but I think there are a lot of galaxy clusters that are much older than the Milky Way. That would give the potential for many multitudes of planets that have been around much longer than Earth, which gives a lot of time for intelligence to evolve and sustain. Now, if an intelligent civilization can ever survive for that long is a different question in and of itself.

    I personally have wondered if the natural, sustainable, next step in any intelligent evolution is artificial forms of intelligence. Maybe biological intelligence is just the bootloader for less squishy forms of life? Immortal silicon life sort of renders the biological limits of space travel a lot less problematic. I know that comment exceeds the scientific into the philosophical, but it’s a thought I’ve had a lot lately.







  • Something about the Vegas one (other than total number of fatalities) was so much more sinister. We barely even ever heard about the perpetrator. It’s always seemed bizarre to me.

    Not saying we should be giving any media attention to mass killers, but it definitely breaks with the normal media portrayal.



  • I’ve been saying this for a while, and that’s why I think a complex problem like this needs a more complex solution than UBI.

    Essentially I think successful UBI would need to be something like UBS instead (Universal Basic Support). Instead of only being money it needs to consist of free services. That way it’s harder for third parties to leech it away.

    So instead of “Here’s $1000 a month, do whatever you want” it would need to be more like “You can get free healthcare here, free electricity through this company, free food rations from this grocery store.” Then if you want things above UBS you need to have some source of income.








    1. 8 Sleep Bed—it’s liquid cooled and heated based on your sleep stage. I know it’s expensive, but the sleep it’s given me has been unrivaled by anything else I’ve ever used to regulate my sleep. I work shifts so good sleep is priceless. You spend a third of your life asleep, so it’s worth an investment.
    2. Hue lights for my entire home—privacy issues aside, it’s a game changing investment. We replaced the recessed lighting with recessed hue lighting fixtures as well. It’s insane how having multiple lighting settings and colors for times of the day/moods can change your entire mindset.
    3. Home gym—if I were pressed for one component it would be the power cage and Olympic bar, but investing in a fully functional home gym has given me much more in return than what I’ve put into it (whether that be physical work building equipment or money).



  • Bringing in a medical perspective since there is a lot of subtle misunderstanding in the comments section:

    The source study is not referring to “brain bleeding” or “mini strokes” as a cause of long COVID—the results point more towards a breakdown of the integrity of the blood brain barrier and maybe micro vascular ischemia.

    You can essentially think of your central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) as being surrounded by a very selective security system called the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). The BBB exists to prevent certain chemicals and cell signaling molecules from entering the central nervous system and messing things up. Neurons and many of the cells that support neurons do not regenerate and tolerate stress as well as other parts of the body, which is why the BBB is so important. Through the various assays the primary authors used it seems like in the setting of long COVID there is a breakdown of the BBB—it starts letting things in and out that it shouldn’t be. This leads to inflammation and damage in the brain which likely results in immediate decreased processing ability and also long-term damage (which further leads to decreased processing ability). One of the components which “leaks” in this setting of BBB breakdown are components of the coagulation cascade (the things that make blood clot) which may potentiate small areas of clotting and decreased blood flow (a thing we called micro vascular ischemia—like an ischemic stroke but in very small capillaries). This entire mechanism is similar to (but very different in nuance) “leaky gut syndrome,” where the gut endothelium starts to break down and cause inflammation. I put that out there since leaky gut is gaining more popular understanding these days and may be more familiar for some folks.

    As of now there is no available treatment that restores the endothelial integrity of the BBB. Off of the top of my head this study may suggest that more treatments to modulate the inflammsome (roughly—the amount of inflammation in your body) could be beneficial—which sort of tracks since there is some scattered evidence that high dose Omega-3’s help long COVID.