I do this now and didn’t have to as a kid…however, I have a weird kidney problem where my kidneys will just dump water, whether or not I have the water to spare. This means that I have a minimum water requirement of 4 liters a day. It’s not as bad as when I was on a really horrible medication that started the whole issue. When I was on that medication I had to drink about 4 gallons of water a day.

End result: I have a stupid party trick where I can down a liter of fluid in about 10 seconds, and a gallon of fluid in about 5 to 10 minutes depending on how recently I’ve eaten. (I did give myself water poisoning once, but that took 8 gallons over about 14 hours)

Edit: Also, having multiple water bottles means I have somewhere to put all my awesome stickers!

That is astonishingly stupid.

Ft Leavenworth is the military’s prison. They don’t send civilians there.

It is absolutely nonsense. People are subjected to stronger, more direct magnetic fields all the time in MRI’s, and MRI’s are substantially safer than most other imaging modalities in medicine (besides ultrasound). The amount of radiation from non-atmospheric sources vastly outweighs the cosmic (non-UV) radiation humans are subjected to, to the point that it’s not really even worth considering outside of maybe astronauts or people who take long-haul high altitude flights extremely frequently.

The amount of ferrous material in blood is negligible at best, and there’s an estimated 3 to 4 grams of iron in the entire human body. The pressure from your heart pumping and the relatively high percentage of blood’s mass that is not iron (about 5kg) means that the effect of the iron if it was responsive to magnetic fields is slim to none.

I’m in my 30’s and my Dad still refers to me as “kiddo” sometimes.

Yeah, my old desktop computer is getting turned into my first dedicated Linux machine and my current desktop isn’t getting updated to 11 until October 13th.

“Then” means that you will be doing something subsequently. “Than” means that you will be doing something instead of something else. Normally this is a grammatical nitpick, but it actually changes the meaning of your sentence by using the wrong word.

Subaru has great safety ratings and the “used Subaru tax” (as in, a used Subaru tends to be more expensive) is because they are very good cars. They have some of the best safety ratings on the market.

…except that we do know what gets put in every medication. Every ingredient has to be registered and tested, and if they change the formulation at all, they have to test it again to make sure it’s safe.

The problem with that is that there are already too many children in need of good homes and some of these parents are very good in every other respect. The people who push anti-vax stuff need to be made into public examples, but the rank-and-file believers are usually just well-meaning dupes.

They see that rash as not that scary, and the rash is honestly the mildest part of the disease. Measles can cause encephalitis (brain swelling) and kill the child, it can cause pneumonia and kill the child, they can recover from the illness and be completely fine for a few years until the virus reactivates and their entire central nervous system becomes intractably inflamed and they seize until they die. And there’s nothing we can do about any of those complications besides things like IV fluids or ventilatory support because there are no antiviral medications effective against measles, so we just have to hope the child’s immune system wins.

It’s definitely a starfish situation. You won’t be able to save all of them, but you can make a difference to each individual that you help. It’s my guiding principle in medicine for everything from preventative care to resuscitation. I can’t save every patient, but I can do my best to help the one in front of me, and previous failures do not prevent future successes.

I’m pretty sure they did recently develop a vaccine for Ebola that they are trying to distribute in the affected areas of Africa, but I’m afraid that US governmental funding, the WHO, and American-based NGOs were involved, so who knows if the money exists for the manufacturing and distribution anymore.

I spent SO MUCH TIME during my pediatrics clinical rotation explaining vaccines to new parents. In some cases, I sat there for a literal hour and debunked myths and conspiracy theories in order to get the parents to consider maybe doing a delayed vaccination schedule. I’m a medical student, so my time is basically worthless and I viewed this as a good use of it, but it was so incredibly frustrating to have to do over and over.

For other folks who know anti-vax parents (new or not), here’s the best line of argument I came up with:

Vaccines have been around for a very long time now, and the only changes we’ve made to them recently is to make them better and safer. The preservatives in them like the mercury compound are perfectly safe, but we’ve still worked hard to improve the manufacturing process to minimize the need for those preservatives and make the vaccines as pure as possible.

Vaccines are made of little fragments of the virus or bacteria, or a modified, significantly weaker version of the pathogen to give your child’s immune system a chance to see it before the real thing shows up. It’s like giving your child’s immune system a wanted poster or a punching bag to practice on because it has to make special tools to fight each different pathogen.

The reason we load kids up with so many vaccines in the first year or two of life is because their immune systems are still growing and it’s an optimal time to introduce things for it to prepare for, and we want to give them some protection of their own before the antibodies from mom run out around 6 to 12 months of life.

We have decades of data showing that vaccines are safe and effective, and the complications and side effects are so minor compared to the problems that can come from the disease. And it’s usually around 1000:1 ratio of complications from the disease versus complications from the vaccine, and the vaccine complications are almost always less severe than the complications from the disease.

If you refuse vaccination for your child for reasons besides an anaphylactic allergy to the ingredients, you are gambling your child’s life with most of these diseases, and it would have been an entirely preventable death. Vaccines are very hard to make and we have prioritized making vaccines for the diseases that kill children. We don’t bother making vaccines for things that are just a nuisance, so the vaccines we have exist for very good reasons. For the most famous example, measles has about 5 different ways it can kill your child that are impossible to treat or prevent once they have it, and many ways to cause permanent damage. The known and most common side effects of the measles vaccine are pretty mild and can be easily treated with medications we have available.

Edit: Fuck it. I’ve decided that I’m going to use some of my copious (/s) free time writing a children’s and parents’ book about vaccine safety with this argument. I will self publish if I have to and give it out in family medicine and pediatric clinics if it kills me.

My apartment at school is a couple blocks from the hospital. I can hear the air ambulance helicopter take off and land. It’s profoundly less annoying than the active railway near the apartment in the other direction.

There is no reasonable way to eliminate all noise and I can guarantee that there are sources of noise that are louder and more pervasive/frequent than aircraft that you could focus this ire on. If someone is really so sensitive as to suffer immense harm from the noise of aircraft in their area, they should not live in that area.

Before you start on some tangent about how small, rural communities have aircraft noise as well as large cities, I would like to inform you that those small airports can be a vital lifeline for the most vulnerable in our communities. I have helped care for a patient that had to be flown to our hospital in a small airplane from a rural community about 500 miles away because an air ambulance helicopter couldn’t make the distance and a ground ambulance would have been too slow. Putting too many restrictions on small airfields, especially in remote communities could very easily cause actual fatalities, not just disruption or distress.

If you’re talking about the constant noise from bit mining operations and the like, I’d agree with you. But having grown up very close to a US military testing airfield, I disagree with the assertion that aircraft noise is anything more than a nuisance. Throughout the first 26 years of my life, I lived in a place where squadrons of C-130’s would do take-off and landing drills over my neighborhood. While it was irksome, like all aircraft, they were limited to flying during certain times of day, excluding emergencies, just like personal or private aircraft are. I suffered no permanent harm from it, and to be honest, our neighbors blasting loud music all the time and late into the night was more of a problem than the aircraft.

I think you are focusing far too much and placing entirely unwarranted importance on this issue, and your efforts would be better spent elsewhere. It will win you no favors to burn any good will you have on this issue when there are others that are much more important problems.

Noise is not violence in the same way that murder is violence. And if your issue is them flying near residential areas, that increases the likelihood of another, uninvolved, innocent person being injured or killed in the crash. As I said in my other comment, violence inflicted on bystanders is abhorrent and not acceptable. Noise is a nuisance, murder is a permanent bad “solution” to a temporary minor problem in this case.

The rich people flying their own aircraft are almost always flying very small prop-planes that make less noise than the average semi-truck. The oligarch-parasites are never flying their own planes, so taking down an aircraft that they are in is going to result in multiple casualties of innocent people just trying to make a living. The only pilots who don’t go into debt to get their license are military veterans who just paid for their training with years of their lives and a decent chance of racking up some not-insignificant PTSD.

I can see where you are coming from on this, but you’re just wrong on this one. Luigi had the right idea by causing zero ancillary casualties and preventing harm from coming to anyone who was not his intended target. Any act of violence that doesn’t take that into account is just expanding on the already pervasive suffering in our society. As an EMT, I helped care for a toddler that had their distal femur obliterated by a stray shot in a drive-by shooting. I was in the ER, so I never found out what ended up happening to them after we stabilized them and sent them off to the trauma and orthopedic surgeons, but with my medical education since then, my best guess is an above-the-knee amputation because the growth plate was destroyed. So I’ve seen innocent bystander casualties before, in person, and there is no excuse for causing that kind of suffering. The impact that can come from inflicting damage on innocent bystanders is profound and no one with remotely decent virtues could inflict that kind of pain intentionally.

Oh goodness, you’re the one folks have been talking about. I am suddenly much less confused.