"id like a hamburger..........................with cheese" well you're getting staples

conversation with my surgeon after I hit my head on a windowsill

hmmm…pretty sure one of these is not quite like the others

They should invent healthcare that doesn’t involve phone calls

A while back I asked my GP if there was anything that could be investigated regards my seemingly worsening hearing problems (while I've always had auditory processing problems, hyperacusis has grown over time and tinnitus was new to me)

She said she'd arrange a referral, and shortly afterwards I got a text with a link to a document that had a phone number for me to call to make a hearing test appointment. I say again:

a phone number for me to call to make a hearing test appointment

No other options, just the phone number. I tried Googling around it, and no, just the phone number and a street address.

I tried the phone number, and there was a lot of hold music—loud, Vivaldi (a lot of sudden up and down volumes and pitches, a real nightmare for me), interspersed with quiet moments in which in unclear voice would tell me how important it was, before hurting my ears with Vivaldi again. And I don't mean like "haha that music hurts my ears", I mean like, it hurts.

Eventually I gave up and figured I'd go to the physical place.

The receptionist had a mask and a speech impediment and there were fans whirring. Suffice it to say: the conversation was difficult.

Eventually I understood enough to understand: I could not make an appointment there, the only way was to call the phone number. To make a hearing test appointment.

Basically, the HoH equivalent of "if you need the key to the accessible toilet facilities, ask at the café upstairs"

i’m deaf. i’ve seen multiple audiologists in my life. these things have been true for every single one of them:

- either they exclusively communicate via phone or they give you the option for email but when you email them they respond with a phone call and if you insist on email they get Real Weird About It

- they do not know even basic sign language, not even things like “yes” or “no”. your average deaf infant has a better grasp on sign language than any of the audiologists i’ve met

- they refuse to communicate in writing during your appointments and insist on communicating verbally even though they KNOW EXACTLY HOW BAD YOUR HEARING IS BECAUSE THEY TESTED IT

many medical professionals are blatantly ableist and in my experience that extends very very much to audiologists

while tradwife, girlmath & quiet luxury trending we’re all signs we were dangerously dabbling into a more conservative mindset I think somehow (idk how) that comedy films and sitcoms dying out were one of the earliest warnings

something something comedies usually have underlying social commentary and poke fun at everyone/everything something something comedic characters are outliers & outcasts who smoke drink have sex and find companionship in their differences something something (specifically romcoms) women are fleshed out with dreams aspirations and personalities beyond the man something something sitcoms highlight the importance of community

coding got me saying shit like “target the child” “assign its class” “override its inheritance” like the third wife of a dying oil baron discovering his of-age son born out of wedlock

I love you, Mr. Murderbritches.

I would die for Mr. Murderbritches

You will

He’ll do it personally

I love this site.

Character [Mr. Murderbritches] has been unlocked as a Party Member

Special Ability: [Maul U]

Mr. Murderbritches’ claws and teeth deal +5 piercing damage

OMG I REBLOGGED THIS THINKING THAT WAS ITS NAME

The Tech Guild says we can play Wordle again, but I need you all to know I would DIE for Scabby.

I’m still confused by the decision to name a pro-union mascot that.

You know, I thought this too when I first saw it. The association here is scabs being rats, and so it's not like naming the rat this doesn't make sense; selling him as a positive character doesn't make sense. But whether it makes sense or not I simply can't resist the this huggy little rat named Scabby.

A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there's still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the "clean eating" variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.

Not only do we know that weight loss isn't sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about "health" then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.

And this article doesn't even touch on "the obesity paradox"(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially "yo-yo dieting," is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn't work.

encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.

My mother was diabetic, and obsessed with being thin. She'd been teased as a child for being "chubby" (I've seen the pictures, she actually was not), which led to a lifetime of yo-yo dieting. Because she was very smart, and she read a lot, she was great at finding evidence to prop up the disordered thinking she had about food that came from childhood bullying. She was always on my case to lose weight. "I don't want you to get diabetes", she would say.

Two years after she died, I did get diabetes. And I did some research. And I wanted to smash the face in of very diet book writer and so called "scientist" who parrotted this shit and every doctor who told her to lose weight so eventually her metabolism was so slow she couldn't lose weight on 800 calories a day, because I learned the ugly truth.

Insulin, the hormone whose lack or malfunction causes diabetes, gets sugar out of your bloodstream by packing it away as fat. Taking insulin will increase your fat because that is what insulin is for. I never learned this in 22 years of my mother being a diabetic.

Secondly, type 2 diabetes, the kind my mother had and I have, is not caused by a failure to produce insulin. It is caused by a growing insensitivity to insulin, which causes the pancreas to desperately overproduce insulin (producing the counter-intuitive result that many type 2 diabetics start out with hypoglycemia, the disorder where you easily develop low blood sugar), until eventually the pancreas burns itself out.

OVERPRODUCTION OF INSULIN BECAUSE YOUR BODY IS GROWING INSENSITIVE TO IT WILL MAKE YOU FAT.

It isn't being fat that makes people into diabetics. It's an underlying metabolic condition that is both making them fat and making them into diabetics. They are overproducing insulin, which will eventually burn out their ability to make their own, and they are growing insensitive to insulin, which will eventually destroy their natural ability to regulate blood sugar, but in the meantime, the excess of insulin is making them fat.

If you go on a diet to lose weight, and in the process you cut carbs (carbs turn into blood sugar, blood sugar is what insulin regulates), you may lose weight (for a while) and put off diabetes (for a while). You're also going to be sluggish and low energy because blood sugar is actually what fuels your body, and also, you lowered your metabolism by dieting. So when my mom said "Lose weight, honey, I don't want to see you get my disease", she never knew that a. it was too late for me, I already had it, it just wasn't yet manifesting as high blood sugar b. if I'd done what she suggested, and I'd done it by cutting fat (which is what all the doctors told her to do), it would have done nothing to put off diabetes c. if I'd done it by cutting carbs I could have put off diabetes maybe a few years, but at the cost of permanently making myself weaker and slower and reducing my immune response.

They lied to her. They lied. And they ruined her life. She tried so hard to comply with their diets, their food exchanges, their rules that, it turns out, were not backed up by science. She ate low-fat and was hungry all the time because fat is what satiates you. She ate fake sugar and probably contributed to her own sugar fluctuations, because fake sugar can trick the body into expecting sugar and firing up the insulin. She ended up dying of a form of cancer caused by anti-rejection drugs, because she'd had kidney failure and my brother donated her a kidney. So in the end it was diabetes that killed her, after she struggled her whole life to control it, and most of what she did to control it was wrong, and she never knew. And she blamed herself for things she had no control over.

I will never forgive the fatphobes, the diet industry, the doctors who decided things based on vibes rather than science. The many many doctors and scientists who still have not pointed out the obvious -- that fat doesn't cause diabetes and losing weight probably won't save you, but that there's an underlying disorder that first makes you fat and then gives you diabetes. Those fuckers killed my mother.

And, unfriendly reminder: the reason humans crave fat and sugar and salt and other "unhealthy" things is that we need them. Lack of them is far, far more unhealthy than not having them. If you're starving, you don't need a salad, you need food that's loaded with fat and carbs and salt. Yeah, eating a salad is good for you, if you are getting enough calories in general to survive. The balanced approach would be ideal. But when you are hungry, systemically hungry from poverty rather than just having the munchies, fried chicken is good for you. If gives you energy to survive and protein to rebuild damage to your body and fat to make hormones with and keep your skin and hair healthy. If you have a choice between having these things but not vitamins, and having vitamins but not those things... the lack of protein, carbs and fats will kill you faster.

The paternalistic "we can't let the poors get hot food because they'll waste it ordering fried chicken and thus be unhealthy" attitude is not only morally wrong, not only patronizing... it's actually unscientific. People shouldn't eat nothing but fast food, it's true. But people who don't have access to kitchens, and/or time to cook, are better off with a fucking Snickers bar than a giant bag of potatoes they cannot prepare, since raw potatoes are poisonous to humans. Rice is cheap if you get it in bulk and easy to make with a rice cooker, but first, you need to be able to afford a place to keep your bulk rice. It's not just about the cost of the rice cooker -- although you need a place to plug that in, and since it's food, that's harder than finding a place to charge a phone. Eating nothing but fast food will probably eventually give you heart disease, but eating not enough food will kill you or make you sick now.

I made a blank one to use as a reaction image.

People who talk about what population density is necessary to "justify" a rail system are wrong but they're wrong in the opposite way from how they think. Even in Japan which has more than twice the population density of China the rail system is not profitable. JR makes most of its profit by operating malls and collecting rent from vendors. If you blindly follow profit instead of considering the broader social benefits the result will always be putting your rail system into a death spiral of rationalization. Stop expecting public transport to turn a profit that's not what it exists for.

The point of transit is to move people and goods from one place to another. If you expect that to be a profit center, you're expecting a private tax on all commerce as if that were a good thing.

the same people who complain about public transport not turning a profit also expect their government to build and maintain roads for them to "freely" drive on, as if those were not horribly costly. but that's road infrastructure, it justifies itself, it doesn't have to make a profit, what will we do without it, they will clamour, not realising THE SAME APPLIES TO OTHER FORMS OF TRANSPORTATION

The thing is having public transit will cause economic growth, and save people on the whole a bunch of other costs, much the way housing and preventative healthcare does.

You WILL see a payout, but it will be reflected in the GDP or whatever on the whole, while quite potentially looking like a loss when you just look at the transit system itself.

Public transit is a service. Like mail. Like healthcare. Like education. The point isn't to directly profit, it's to support people and other systems. You sink some money into street lights and having paved streets because of all the benefits you get out of that, not because having a street light is directly profitable.

It will enable people to access better work, better housing options, better childcare. It will reduce the costs and time waste associated with over crowded streets and reduce the cost to maintain that infrastructure, reduce pollution. That will have health impacts on everyone. Everyone's physical and mental health will get that little bit better. It will reduce accidents and emergencies and leave more room for emergency services/vehicles.

It's about thousands of little butterfly effects that come from having a population of people that's increasingly enabled to be at their best and to have options open to them.

#russian invasion of ukraine#us politics#volodymyr zelenskyy is the strongest human alive#he spoke to trump and then musk and hasn't killed either of them yet#i couldn't do it#couldn't do what that man does

I thought "my country is under attack - I don't need a ride, I need a gun" was epic, but this is something else again.