vsef's comments

Just because this number sounded low to you as quoted in the headline doesn't mean it's not a big expensive problem for them. They can't ignore 911 calls.

I am active with close friends that I have maintained for even longer! I am lucky enough to continue having close friends of 25 years I still do things with (including skiing).

The idea that my friends and activities mitigates this problem is absurd and I think shows how little you understand.

I was deeply moved by the article thinking about my own relationship of twenty years, and imagining the inevitable death of one of us in the future.

Much of my own pain would involve activities you suggest while giving advice about something you don't understand.

I immediately thought about how my ski routine would be a trigger like this for me. I ski near 100 days a year. My first thought reading the article was how much I would hurt making morning coffee and breakfast without my husband and not talking and making ski plans for the day. And how hard and long it would be for that break in daily routine to no longer be a constant reminder of absence. All the harder by it's very routineness and connection to something that is otherwise very pleasurable to me.

That this type of pain would be mitigated by "getting out there and doing fun stuff and having more friends and not pleasure eating" is a perspective with zero understanding of what the bond in a decades long marriage is like or why meal time is so emotionally salient.

It is safer than alcohol in terms of properly dosed effects, but it has many safety drawbacks in terms of using safely in public social settings the way alcohol is used.

It's not just regulatory difficulties with it as an alcohol substitute.

There was quite a bit of outrage around that case from hearing people, but it seems no different than two parents with genetic deafness choosing each other and then not trying to use genetic testing/embryo selection to have a hearing baby.

I do think when this type of genetic manipulation becomes possible/mainstream there will be many traits chosen by parents that aren't considered universally desirable.

EBV is also known as HSV-4 and gets to 60% plus prevalence in children, 90% in US adults. If there are populations with especially low prevalence I'm not aware of it.

HSV-1 which causes mouth cold sores is present in 50-80% of people, also easily acquired in childhood. Only 20-40% of infected people get cold sores so most infected people don't realize they have it.

Chicken pox/shingles is also a type of herpes virus with well known massive prevalence!

Genital herpes is just one of many types of herpes viruses that affect humans.

I just find it funny how often commenters here assume all broism originates in SV.

ST:TOS I highly recommend because it remains engaging/entertaining and is fascinating to see as a lens into the late 60s, but "good" it is not.

ST:TNG I love and I think is the better show but it shocked me too when I tried to rewatch in order after ST:TOS. The first seasons are not great! I really had erased a lot of it from my memory. I realize now that it's not until a couple seasons in that it became the show I remember, that show was lucky to hang in there long enough to hit its stride.

Watching TOS in full was very eye opening to how much current cultural memory of what that show was doesn't match what was actually in the show.

Controlled burns and other forestry practices need to be back on the table, clear cutting absolutely does not. I live in wildfire country, the scariest, fastest moving fires are in areas without trees, the logging industry would love to confuse/conflate forest and wildfires obviously.

“California’s forests naturally adapted to low-intensity fire, nature’s preferred management tool, but Gold Rush-era clearcutting followed by a wholesale policy of fire suppression resulted in the overly dense, ailing forests that dominate the landscape today.”

It doesn't say 20 million acres need to be removed, it says that's the area that needs burned. Low intensity fire clears fuels without killing mature trees, this is especially true for long lived redwood species that expect fire to clear out smaller vegetation below them. It's not about removal or clear cutting.

This is just not true. Einstein's earliest GR work is a collaboration with Marcel Grossman. Hilbert's work is so close and overlapping that it takes quite a bit of effort even to verify that Einstein's work was genuinely independent.

Of these, only Abacavir and FTC (as part of Truvada) are still used, the others have fallen out of use or are no longer even manufactured due to their bad side effect profiles and propensity for severe adverse reactions. 'Nuke-sparing' regimen planning specifically would combine other classes of drugs to avoid this class due to side effect issues.

I think it's great to have this new treatment option but this class of medications is well known for its side effects. Avoiding vaccines as 'unproven' and then going for this in particular I would consider eye rollingly wrong headed.

So maybe trust your gut more?

I've only ever eaten at one restaurant with one star (Hisop in Barcelona) and it was wonderful, but I don't think there's any reason to think the Michelin ratings are a perfect system.

Gay marriage doesn't fit neatly into left/right ideological politics and the author's core complaint is that the supporters of gay marriage aren't sufficiently leftist.

The claim that the only people benefitting from the overturn of doma were/are the wealthy is patently absurd and factually false. The claim that the push for marriage caused harm by diverting resources from community health causes is also ridiculous. The disregard for gay families with children is palpable.

The core argument is no different than an extreme conservative libertarian argument that gay marriage shouldn't be supported because marriage shouldn't be the concern of the state. The near or medium term possibility of a socialist or libertarian utopia us zero. The harms of lack of access to the social institutions that do exist are real. Describing gaining access to those existing social structures as actively harmful because it doesn't suit your hard left ideology is gross.