exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Can cartilage be replaced? And if not, Why can't they just inject something like silicone into a joint? 18 hours ago:
There are a few research projects looking to improve treatments.
Knee replacement: Pretty standard at this point, where a surgeon surgically removes the knee joint and replaces it with a mechanical joint made from metal and plastic.
Membrane-induced Autologous Chondrocyte Implantation (MACI): Harvest cartilage-producing cells and let them multiply in a lab, then surgically implant them at high concentrations in joints where there is a need.
Osteochondral Grafting: graft some bone and cartilage from another part of the body, or from a donor.
Osteoarticular Transfer System (OATS) Procedure: Move non-load-bearing cartilage to load-bearing parts of the same joint. Only works with smaller injured sites.
Platelet Rich Plasma/Stem Cell treatments: plasma and other blood products are extracted from blood, with high concentrations of platelets and growth factors, sometimes adult stem cells that can still differentiate into bone or cartilage, and then inserted into areas that can use regeneration. They can use physical scaffolds to help the cells attach to the right places, and the stuff in the plasma ends up helping it regenerate cartilage in the right places. This remains an area of very active research.
There are also some more exotic avenues of active research. One I read about recently was a Columbia University project, funded by ARPA-H, in creating knee replacements made from a patient’s own biological tissue, grown into a load bearing knee joint, to be inserted surgically the same way an artificial knee would be, only made out of cells grown from the patient themself.
It’s an active area of development, and I’m pretty excited about what they might be able to accomplish in our lifetimes.
- Comment on Happy Labor Day! 1 day ago:
Michael Scott: We’ll get someone to clean that up.
Darryl: We’re the ones that gotta clean that up!
- Comment on Not like this 4 days ago:
The most important movie for comparison is Austin Powers, because that’s a movie where a 30-year time shift is relevant to the plot. Going from 1997 to 1967 should be as much of a culture shock as going from 1997 to 2027.
- Comment on Anon questions the epidemic 5 days ago:
Sometimes I lightly punch my friends in the balls to thank them for being vulnerable around me.
- Comment on Rich ppl live longer 1 week ago:
No, it’s causal.
We know the mechanisms by which alcohol causes negative health effects, to basically all the systems in the body.
It’s not a particularly strong effect for the occasional drinker, but the degree of confidence we have in the correlation is very strong, and we have an underlying model of the biological mechanisms that cause poor health outcomes.
- Comment on I'm not doing this right 1 week ago:
After a revival of bean related shitposts, someone suggested Dean related shitposts, which caused people to post a lot of pictures and gifs of the Dean Pelton character from the television show Community.
In season 3 of that show, there’s a whole plot where one of the characters tries to secretly replace the Dean with a lookalike (in the show they alternate between calling it a doppledeaner or deanelganger), who is found through a celebrity impersonator service, as a Moby impersonator. A picture of the fake Dean has been posted here.
So this picture of actual Moby is a continuation of that line, that evolution of these shitposts.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Perhaps not, but you indicated that the “emotionless language of finance and economics” constitues “conceding ground”.
If you’re not making an emotional argument, then why would emotionless language be a problem?
I think it is reductive to ignore/deemphasize the factors that cannot easily be quantified, in favor of only talking about the quantifiable factors. The subjective feeling of the people involved is backed by real factors, albeit factors that are difficult to quantify.
So shifting the discussion towards that rigid quantitative numbers is shifting away from where the conversation should be. That’s been my point this whole thread.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Your mileage may vary, but I do not consider this a concession. Anyone can make an emotional argument.
No, I’m not making an emotional argument. I’m arguing that the subjective feeling of financial security specifically traces to certain hard-to-measure factors that aren’t easily reduced to quantitative metrics.
That’s why many people will look at the argument and say “oh I’m actually not that close to homelessness” or even “I’m basically a millionaire but I don’t feel like one.”
By highlighting the easy-to-measure metrics (net worth of a million dollars, not having a legal right to occupy a residence), it steers the discussion into the quantitatively easy metrics rather than the lived reality of people in the economy, which depends on other less quantitative factors. And then we’re talking about “winning” an argument that no longer cleanly maps onto what actually matters.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Depends on what the purpose is. In this thread we have people who very legitimately feel that despite literally being closer to millionaires than homeless on this “three months” test, they don’t feel financially secure. That feeling matters, and we shouldn’t ignore it.
And my point is that implicitly conceding ground by framing things in the language of emotionless finance and economics may actually be fighting things on less friendly territory to begin with.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
I don’t love how we as a capitalist society have financialized everything into economic terms.
I’m rich now, but I grew up lower middle class (had food security and shelter security, but many aspects of middle class lifestyle were out of my family’s reach, like being able to dine at restaurants or go out of town for vacation or afford most of the things or experiences advertised on tv). I was also fairly financially insecure in college and the few years after (playing games with back dated checks to make rent or pay bills, lots of late fees and overdraft fees).
Even in those relatively insecure times, though, I was never anywhere close to 3 (or 6 or 12) months away from homelessness. I had a strong network of friends, family, neighbors, etc., who could keep me on my feet. Some of it was money (where people could chip in to help with an uninsured medical expense or loss to a car or a house), but a lot of it was social, like being able to get a ride from a friend when your car is in the shop, a meal train while someone is sick/hospitalized or bereaving the loss of a family member, etc.
By steering the discussion into purely what can be bought and sold with money in an economy between strangers, I feel like this misses out on what actually makes us secure, and what keeps us from homelessness and food insecurity. Those parts of society should also be protected and bolstered, even if they don’t fit cleanly into financial, economic, political, or policy categories.
It also misses who among us are actually the most vulnerable or the most secure. There may be people who have solid net worths on paper but aren’t actually resilient against bad months, and other people who might not look like they have much property/wealth/income but actually can manage a crisis just fine.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Hobosexual, when you partner up for the housing situation rather than for romance/love.
- Comment on Cannot tell you how many times I have asked this question 1 week ago:
Broccoli stands out a bit. Cabbage and cauliflower and kohlrabi and bok choy don’t have the same protein ratio, because other brassicas are generally higher in carbs, so that their protein per calorie is lower (with more calories from carbs rather than protein).
- Comment on Cannot tell you how many times I have asked this question 1 week ago:
Even though your broader point is correct that our ancestral lines and closest relatives (chimps, gorillas, other great apes) primarily eat plants, I think broccoli is a bad example of what our ancestors are. Broccoli is the result of specialized human-driven artificial breeding after the rise of human agriculture, and has a higher protein ratio than even other brassicas, like the cabbage breeds that broccoli descends from.
- Comment on Cannot tell you how many times I have asked this question 1 week ago:
For broccoli? No, that’s actually a fairly bioavailable protein source, especially when cooked. Even compared to high protein plant sources like beans or lentils, broccoli’s protein is more bioavailable. It’s just there’s not that much of it, and the “protein per calorie” stat is kinda cherry picked from the fact that broccoli is low carb and low fat, rather than being really high in protein.
Either way, though, the gut microbiomes of herbivores are mainly adapted to draw out more useful carbohydrate, not more useful protein. Cellulose is so plentiful in nature that making use of all those glucose molecules is biologically rewarding.
Plant protein bioavailability is affected by a lot of factors, including whether the food has been chopped up, peeled, cooked, etc. Human chewing and guts (especially in modern humans) are pretty inefficient for extracting nutrients from food in the natural state because we have been cooking and processing food for millions of years.
So yeah. Cows have complicated guts for digesting cellulose and extracting amino acids from chloroplasts, and innate chewing behaviors that mechanically process grass into mush, but we have knives and fire to do more of that stuff outside of our bodies. And cattle pick and choose grasses (including high protein leafy legumes like clover or alfalfa) depending on their own needs, as well.
- Comment on Cannot tell you how many times I have asked this question 1 week ago:
Other comments are about how gorillas have guts adapted for digesting lots of vegetation. And that’s true. But at its core, it’s just that gorillas actually do eat a ton of protein.
They eat like 30 kg of food per day for 5000 calories, about 25% of which is from protein. That’s more than 300 grams of protein per day.
Nothing they eat is super calorie dense, but the lack of density also means they need to eat all day. And as it turns out, the leaves they eat tend to be pretty high in protein.
- Comment on Choose a major you love 2 weeks ago:
The overwhelming majority of bachelor degree holders don’t work in a field related to their major. Something like 30% of university graduates are working in a field related to their major.
That’s fine, and it’s always been normal. A university education isn’t purely a vocational school, and generalized education is still very useful for navigating the world, including careers.
Most job fields just don’t have a corresponding major. So much of the economic world is just administrative work, and the skill sets to be able to manage that are both universal across all job fields (using email and calendar software, word processing, the entire spectrum of skillsets for spreadsheets, maybe even basic scripting or programming, generally navigating through UIs of unfamiliar software or websites) or highly specific to one field and not necessarily learned in school (how to use a proprietary software product, or a particular piece of equipment invented long after you graduated from school, etc.).
Most jobs involve the intersection of two or more fields, and very few people will have majored in coursework related to both, and tend to have learned one or more of the intersecting fields well after they graduated, on the job or otherwise. Software sales. Aircraft leasing broker. Solar panel financing. Data journalism. One interesting area is that there are a surprisingly number of people who make the jump from oil and gas distillation/refining to becoming the master distiller for a major spirits producer.
There are really only a few dozen majors, but probably a few thousand career paths from there.
- Comment on Choose a major you love 2 weeks ago:
Realistically, I still mostly love my job, but every job has parts of it that people hate.
Pro athletes usually love their own sport, but have grueling travel schedules and mandatory media appearances they don’t like. Some of them seem to like the sport itself just fine, but hate their colleagues or the organization they work in.
Doctors may love saving lives but hate the recordkeeping piece. Or the hours. Or they might actually hate their own patients as people, from the frustrations of trying to help people who won’t help themselves.
Once we understand that every job has different parts we can love and hate, the key is to find a job where the bad parts are worth putting up with so that the good parts make up for it.
- Comment on business is business 3 weeks ago:
Wedding images are challenging because venues, decor, wardrobe, etc., are chosen for real-world regular eyeball beauty. In darker settings (many churches, nighttime), or settings lit by bad lights for photography (fluorescent bulbs, LED bulbs without good wide spectrum light, random dance floor stuff), adds a lot of post processing work, and wedding clients tend to be very demanding clients (for good reason). It’s all real work, well beyond what can be seen in the day-of interaction between photographer and client.
- Comment on business is business 3 weeks ago:
Exactly.
There is real skill involved in photography, and it takes real time even after being skilled. A 1-hour shoot in a new location still requires probably an hour of planning, maybe an hour or two of logistics, and maybe 2-3 hours of work after the fact to get the photos processed and distributed. And it’s basically the opportunity cost that will eat up the entire day, because you can’t double book the same sunset or other lighting conditions or whatever. There’s seasonality, too, if you want specific seasonal conditions in the shot, if you want to book the Saturday that other clients want, etc.
That’s before expenses like insurance, the amortized cost of the software and hardware (including the cameras and lenses and computer), web services for distribution of the files, etc.
It’s fair to charge a full day’s fair pay for a job like that, and that might mean wanting to charge something like $1000 for an experienced photographer, maybe $500 of which actually represents “profit” for the sole proprietor. But that only happens at that price if there are clients willing to pay that price.
For bigger jobs like parties or weddings, it gets a bit more involved, which is why a 2- or 3-shooter wedding job can cost several thousand, or even above $10k.
But for easy jobs like anything in a high volume studio where the lighting is already known, and there aren’t any logistics involved, it should be much cheaper. It just all depends.
- Comment on business is business 3 weeks ago:
But Doctor! I am Nataliacci!
- Comment on Oh how the turn tables 3 weeks ago:
I thought now most became:
- Comment on Chef 3 weeks ago:
Why does this get repeated so much
Because of the longer feedback loops. If you aren’t an experienced baker, you might not notice that the hydration is off, or that you’re not building enough strength in your dough, or that the temperature will cause the dough to rise slower than normal, and then you’re left asking why your loaf didn’t rise as much as you’d like, why the end result is dense, why the dough stuck to the pan instead of cleanly releasing, etc.
Once you’re experienced you’ll know when you need to add more water, when you’ll need to adjust times, whether the dough is too sticky, whether you’re tearing the gluten strands too much, whether your finished loaf is going to be more or less sour than you prefer, what adjustments should be made with the new flour you’re working with, etc.
But until you know how each step feeds into the next, being unable to taste the steps in between makes it a lot harder to learn quickly, and requires a longer working memory to connect how you handled the dough during an autolyse versus how the bread loaf turned out hours later out of the oven, and eventually learn the lessons of smell, touch, feel that aren’t easy to learn from written recipes.
- Comment on Painful to recover from 4 weeks ago:
There’s plenty of people who embrace an absurdist mentality and openly reject anything that requires actively using one’s brain.
I think they’re old, fat, unathletic, and unattractive.
I know Trump voters. For the minority who are actually young, they’re much more likely to be loser incels who are both bad at sports and didn’t get a college degree (much less post graduate educations). It’s aggrieved losers trying to make sense of the world, who are generally unattractive on most metrics: poor, unhealthy, unathletic, not very smart.
It’s like looking at people who work in the trades. Plumbers and welders and carpenters. They tend to be in worse physical shape than, like, lawyers and doctors, who obviously have better intellectual and academic credentials.
So if you’re surrounded by losers, I’m just gonna ask that you stop being impressed with them.
- Comment on Painful to recover from 4 weeks ago:
I’m not aware of any culture in which hiding one’s strengths is a common response to one’s own surroundings. Placing value on a particular characteristic does not imply that a completely unrelated characteristic is undesirable. Plenty of beautiful smart people out there, and even in a society where beauty is prized above all else, why would someone beautiful hide their intelligence?
For whatever it’s worth, in my circles (urban white collar millennial professionals in dense cities), most people are both athletic and intelligent. There are plenty of finance bros and tech bros who have Ivy League degrees (sometimes Ph.D.s, M.D.s, J.D.s) that represent real academic achievement and can also turn around and dominate on a basketball court or in a fighting gym. Lots of smart people like gyms, whether we’re talking resistance training, Olympic lifting, CrossFit/Hyrox, endurance cardio sports like marathon running or biking, winter sports like skiing, etc.
That’s also consistent with what I saw in my high school. Most of the top students headed towards Ivy League or similar caliber schools were also athletes who were very good at a competitive sport for the school. The “nerd”/“jock” dichotomy we expected from John Hughes movies never really materialized, and the popular kids tended to be people who were both good at school and good at sports.
- Comment on So Healthy 4 weeks ago:
It’s not just convenience alone. Plastic over soil reduces the use of water and energy. Plastic in packing and shipping even in-season local produce extends its life and reduces waste, can help keep things sanitary/safer longer.
We use plastic not just because it’s cheap (even though it is), but also because it’s really easy to form impermeable barriers for water/moisture, air, contaminants, microbes (both wanted and unwanted). We can debate whether those uses are worth the ecological or even health cost, but we have to acknowledge that refusing to use plastic also carries a cost, too.
- Comment on Painful to recover from 4 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t put too much stock into the jock versus nerd stereotypes.
Life isn’t an RPG with stats that come at the cost of other stats. Being bad at sports doesn’t make someone more likely to be good at school (if anything, the correlation might run the other way). And charisma, ambition, intelligence, physical appearance, athleticism, work ethic, are all distinct factors that sometimes feedback on each other, and feed into things like wealth, happiness, attractiveness, etc.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 month ago:
Where are you that plumbers don’t get paid well?
I’m in the U.S. Here’s an interactive, searchable table of U.S. stats for all job codes Note that you can dig around the site by state, as well.
It shows the mean, median, 10th percentile, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and 90th percentile wage, plus the number in each job, by both hour and by year.
For 47-2152, “Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters,” we have 465k people making an average of $72k. The 10th/25th/50th/75th/90th percentiles are $44k/$50k/$63k/$85k/$108k. Those numbers are exactly what I’m talking about: a high floor and a very flat trajectory, where the 75th percentile doesn’t even double the 25th percentile.
Compare to something like Human Resources Specialist, one of the more unremarkable college-educated office jobs. They’re averaging $82k, with $47k/$59k/$76k/$99k/$129k on those percentiles. And they have a clear pathway towards Human Resources manager, where the average is $164k and the spread is $88k/$111k/$149k/$199k/$268k.
Note also that the U.S. employs almost twice as many HR specialists (912,000) as plumbers (465,000) in our job market. And HR Managers are over 200,000 people.
Start digging into different jobs and you can see a lot of the same trends. Non-college educated white collar jobs (secretaries, assistants) don’t pay well, and jobs requiring a bit of a certification but not full blown bachelor’s degrees (paralegal) are comparable to plumber incomes.
But my general point is clear: the trades have a high floor, very flat trajectories, and a low ceiling. They deal with higher unemployment rates and the jobs are harder on the bodies. The college educated pathways have a huge up front cost (tuition and late entry into the workforce), and take up to a decade to actually catch up. But most of us work 30-50 year careers, so a 10-year break even point is actually pretty good.
And if you want to work with your hands, the educated blue collar job fields can be super lucrative: field engineers, outdoor researchers, even things like surgeons.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 month ago:
An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor’s degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
Why is it that you think that an electrician certification is less about checkboxes than a 4-year university degree? Or that the checkboxes are somehow more difficult to game? Most trade schools themselves are a joke, so you have to play the meta game of getting the cert and networking your way to a job. You know, same as your university degree.
The fact is, most trades pay shit, and their big advantage is that you get to start earlier in life, and that you have more opportunities to get overtime pay. That can be a good option for your 20’s, especially during a jobs boom (most trades are infamously boom and bust cycles), but by your 30’s you will get passed up by most of your degree holding peers (and you’ll totally get left in the dust in your 40’s and 50’s).
It’s not good advice to young people. Electricians, plumbers, welders, etc. don’t get paid very much on average, and the ones who break out from that low pay are either highly specialized or climb the small business/management ladder (at which point they benefit from concepts taught in school as well).
- Comment on Hell yeah. 1 month ago:
I don’t think we’re talking about love here. We are talking about S-E-X in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N!
Sex Cauldron? I thought they closed that place down!
- Comment on Old but gud 1 month ago:
I wear colorful men’s clothes. Fun designs on things like short sleeve button shirts in the summer (Hawaiian shirts and similar things), fun sweaters in the winter.
Even my office wear usually has a splash of personality, with the amount of subtlety appropriate for the setting: suits or jackets with interesting textures and weave patterns, neckties with interesting designs, a bright color on my socks. Some settings allow for a bit more expression, and other choices can be more adventurous if you prefer, including intentionally contrasting choices in glasses, watches, shoes, other accessories. Even a pair of headphones can be a fashion accessory, although it is true that women seem to be able to pull that off better.
