HelixDab2

I love seeing the bats coming out at night in the summer; I can see them in the front clearing, swooping around after moths. I've got a bat house, but I think that it's been vacant for years; I need to find a better way to attract them to my home.

In re: medical -

I'm uninsured because the only insurance I had available to me at the time was about $11,000 annually if anything happened where I needed insurance (that's between the premiums, the annual deductible, and the out of pocket maximum). I have a torn rotator cuff. It was >80% torn when I got an MRI in late August. It might be fully torn now, because it doesn't hurt very much anymore. I tore it in May of this year, and yeah, it took me a few months to be able to get an MRI, and then a few weeks for them to deliver the results (even though that should have been under a week). I need surgery. I got a quote for $16,300 and managed to pony up the cash from long term savings. Then surgery was cancelled by the clinic. I rescheduled and it was sent to a hospital instead of a clinic; the new quote was $49,000. That was three weeks ago. I have another consult next week.

It's been about six months since I tore my rotator cuff. I should have been able to get in to see a doctor and get an MRI immediately, but I couldn't have afforded and ER visit on top of all of the rest of this. I don't even know if it's repairable at this point.

Complaining about long waits, given the alternative, seems really, I dunno, privileged?

On some level it's reasonable to say that you own shares in a mutual fund, not shares in the individual companies.

But the other side of that is that you can fairly easily see what the mutual fund is doing, and copy it, without the problematic companies. Yes, it will be less profitable, but you can do it, and you can do it without too much difficulty when you're talking about millions of dollars in investments. So it seems, I dunno, weak to say that you can't divest your own personal investments from these things. Plus, I'm pretty sure that there are at least a handful of mutual funds that entirely avoid those kind of companies in order to attract ethical investors.

Where o where is UniversalMonk when you want to shove something in his smarmy, trollish face...?

You shouldn't need to. .300 Win mag is long action, so you're going to be using a bolt action rifle. There's not going to be too many contexts where you're going to want to swap out the scope for anything other than fairly long range.

Why would you us a bow? Range is poor, and lethality is also low, esp. with the access the the ultra-wealthy have to medicine. When you hunt deer with a bow, you can usually expect to have to follow a blood trail, as it's rarely an instant drop.

Use a .300 Winchester magnum from 1000 yards; at that distance, you still have about 850 foot-pounds of energy, which is roughly double a 9mm at point black range. With the right ammo, that's more than enough to get the job done. You probably want a combined mechanical and ammunition accuracy of about .5 MOA range though, so that you have deviation of less than 6" at that range. It's a challenging shot, but it's definitely doable if you know your holds and can call the wind.

Yeah, shocking... People will use substances until they want to quit. Unless and until the addict makes that choice for themselves, nothing is going to change. The best you can do is change their circumstances so that they want to change their lives.

Claiming that every victory every marginalized group has ever won

My dude. That's the absolute truth. All the marches and riots in the world don't win minority groups power unless they can get members of the majority group--members that have political power--to agree with them. You can talk about 'human rights' until you're blue in the face, but rights only exist so long as they can be enforced. A powerless minority group can't expect to enforce the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed to them, unless they have people with power that are willing to step up.

But again - by failing to be strategic, you will probably lose, and not just for yourself, but for everyone that's even slightly marginalized.

Oh, I can say it to my own face, I’m trans.

Good luck, because you're going to need it if Trump wins. Being trans is difficult in deep blue areas now, and it's going to be a lot harder if Trump wins. The very few labor protections that you have now are likely to evaporate under a Republican gov't. And perhaps you're okay with this, but how many of your friends are willing to be your sacrifice? I saw exactly what happened to the black transwomen in my area under Trump, and it was... Bad.

An injury to one is an injury to all. If we don’t stand up for Palestinians, if we allow minorities to be picked off one by one, then we are doomed because there will be no one left to stand up for us.

Minorities will be picked off in this election, whether you stand up or not. You can save some--specifically the ones that are in this country--or you can save none. That's the reality we live in. This is the reality unless and until you can build a coalition that can win elections on it's own, because that's politics. This has always been the reality; disadvantaged people need to build political power by courting the people that have political power; women needed to convince men in order to get the right to vote, non-white people needed to convince white people to pass the various civil rights acts. If you take a no-compromises position, you will always lose.

Lets say you see a massive car accident at an intersection that’s known to be dangerous,

The cause was already contained within the exercise.

You can either do what you can to help people now--knowing that there's nothing you can say or do at this moment that will help the people of Gaza--or you can insist that you can help them and, in so doing, fail to save anyone at all. It's your choice.

That is what triage is.

I'm going to be okay either way. I'm white, male, middle-aged, cis-, het-, and can pass as Christian and conservative if necessary. I own a home outright, have no significant debts other than student loans, and have sufficient savings and investments that I can survive the next four years regardless of who wins the election. Your choice to fuck everyone else over in this election won't directly hurt me. It will hurt a lot of my friends, and I'm certain that at least a percentage of the LGBTQ+ people I know will die or be killed, I have no doubt that some of the undocumented people I know will be deported to countries they haven't lived in for 30+ years, and I'm sure that my non-white friends will see a sharp uptick in violence directed at them. Meanwhile, the people in Gaza will still be murdered by Israel, because Trump and Netanyahu are both fascists.

You will accomplish nothing except causing more harm.

Tell your non-white friends, your LGBTQ+ friends, you female friends, that you didn't care enough about their rights and their safety to help them. Say it to their faces. Tell them that it was more important for you to send a message than it was to prevent them from being harmed.

Good luck. You'll need it. Hopefully we still get to vote in two years, and in four years.

Democrats aren’t attacking Jill Stein because they think she is taking votes from Kamala Harris.

This is an incredibly dumb take.

This election is about triage. If you want elections to not be triage, you need to fix the conditions that make it triage before the elections ever happen.

What triage means:

Lets say you see a massive car accident at an intersection that's known to be dangerous, and you have a medical kit in your car. (You have a medical kit in your car, right?) You have some basic trauma first aid experience. You have two tourniquets, two chest seals, a few packs of QuikClot z-fold gauze, and a combat bandage, along with EMS shears and a rescue hook. There are four people that have serious injuries. The first is conscious, has had both legs severed above the knees, and is blood is spurting from the severed limbs. The second is also conscious, and has a massive laceration on their left arm; a fractured bone is protruding from the laceration, and they are bleeding profusely. The third is not conscious; they have lost an arm and blood is spurting from the severed limb, have a penetrating chest wound, have a massive and profusely bleeding laceration on a leg, and significant head trauma. They are breathing in short, erratic breaths. The fourth person is conscious, and has a clearly broken lower leg with a laceration; they're holding on to the laceration, and blood is seeping out between their fingers.

What do you do? Who do you help, in what order?

The person with the severed legs gets the tourniquets; they will bleed to death in less than two minutes without them. The person with the compound fracture gets the z-fold gauze and the combat bandage; unless the brachial artery is severed, they don't need a tourniquet. You ignore the person with the head injury; you can't treat the head injury, and the erratic breathing is likely agonal breathing from the head trauma. Using a tourniquet on them means that you won't be able to use a tourniquet on the first person, which--in turn--means the first person dies from blood loss. Regardless of anything you do or don't do, the third person will likely die. The fourth person does not need immediate care; their blood loss is not significant enough to kill them before paramedics arrive.

Triage is recognizing that you can't help the third person--even though they will very likely die before paramedics arrive--and that the fourth person can wait until you've helped the first and second people.

The best you can do is help two people while a third dies. If you walk away, three people die. If you treat the person with the head wound, three people die. If you worry about the broken leg first, then three people die while you're trying to help the one person that didn't need emergency trauma care. Maybe you've been advocating for years to fix the intersection, while the city council has ignored you; that does nothing to address the immediate needs of the people in front of you.

This is where we are. There is no vote you can cast that is going to save everyone. No matter who you vote for, the genocide in Gaza isn't going to stop. Stein won't win, so she can't stop it. Trump will accelerate it. Harris appears to mostly take the side of Israel. But by focusing on that, you fail to act in a way that can prevent other harms.

Most people don't like how we've gotten to where we are now. But this is where we are, and railing against the system now doesn't do anything to help the people that need help.

"The most educated presidential candidate in history"...? Really? Are you forgetting Ben Carson then? Or is she the 'most educated' because of her undergrad work? (Oh, wait, almost everyone does undergrad work before they go to medical school.) Did you forget that Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar? Or that Barack Obama was a law professor as well as being a civil rights attorney and specializing in constitutional law?

Given that Stein's own campaign has said they can't win, but that they can prevent Harris from winning, it's pretty clear that she knows exactly what she's doing. The only 3rd party candidate that has had a snowball's chance in hell of winning in the last 75 years has been H. Ross Perot.