HelixDab2

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?

In my experience--and I'm very solidly middle aged, so take that with a double handful of salt--the young women in the deep south trend fairly centrist/liberal, while the young men trend hard right. The women that tend to be Trump supporters appear to be middle aged and older, and usually don't have any significant college education.

Eh, I dunno, I'm currently really enjoying Ghosts of Tsushima, although strictly in off-line mode. And I enjoyed the first Jedi: Fallen Order, again, solely off-line.

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.

Obama was prevented from closing Gitmo by congress. IIRC, a big part of the problem was how to handle the criminal cases; all of the prisoners ("detainees") in Gitmo have been tortured, the chain of evidence has multiple breaks in it, and it's highly debatable that they can be tried in any kind of court. Yet intelligence agencies remain convinced that the remaining prisoners are guilty of terrorism. Congress didn't want to move any of them to the US, because they didn't want purported terrorists being held on US soil because ???

The president isn't supposed to be able to act unilaterally, but we've allowed that Overton window to shift towards heavily authoritarian.

Depends on the application. A dirt bike? Absolutely not; too much torque and horsepower means that you're going to spin your wheel regularly (and this is why most dirt bikes are thumpers, too). A conventional street bike, touring, or dual sport? You can probably go a little lower, but probably not a lot for a large touring bike like a Gold Wing. A sport bike? That's low, by at least 20bhp; 100-ish bhp is about the lowest you'll see for a 600cc-class sport bike. I can't say for certain what the tops competitive 1000cc supersport bikes are putting out, but it's probably close to 200bhp. And all of that power needs to be in a very light package, because you need the maneuverability to quickly negotiate s-curves. (I live in the mountains; there are a number of s-curves near where I live. I've seen the aftermath of cruisers crashing because they misjudged corner speeds.)

To paraphrase Nietzsche, that which doesn't kill you psychologically scars you and leaves you with a lifetime of therapy bills.

Hey guys, def. do not decorate your firearms with anything. No pro-cop stuff, and def. not anything like "This machine kills fascists" either. If you ever use that firearm in an ostensibly defensive manner, a DA can and will use that decoration as evidence of 'state of mind'.

Also, Trump was in favor of seizing guns without any form of due process; he is not friendly towards the rule of law or rights in general.

According to Mormons, god is literally male, with (perfect) male genitalia. There is also a god--the-mother, who is female, and is both secret and sacred (they really don't like talking about her), and also utterly subservient to god the father, because of course she is. According to Mormon theology, both gods were once mortal, and were raised up to godhood by their godly parents; Mormons--if they're good enough--can go to Mormon super-heaven, where they will also become gods in their own right. Before everyone was born physically, they were born spiritually, in... More or less the same way babies are born now, except in heaven, to a heavenly mom. And there were hundreds of billions of spirit babies, so I guess that god the dad and god the mom really like sex or something? The implications start getting really, really weird, very fast. Which is part of the reason why Mormons don't usually want to talk about stuff like this with people that aren't Mormon.

I believe that the quote is, "As man is, so once was god. As god is, so man can become," or something like that.

Source: was Mormon for >25 years.

It is, honestly, not nearly as bad as you'd think. The weight should be pretty well distributed, armor doesn't have to be all that heavy to stop a sword, and the gambeson is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for piercing weapons. Blunt weapons, well, those are going to be unpleasant pretty much no matter what. You get really hot though; there's a reason that the Saracens did such a number on the crusaders when they were able to get them outside of cities.

Wearing a plate carrier is, IMO, worse than wearing a gambeson and chain maille.

Unfortunately, this one goes both ways. Some women feel like they need to play hard to get, because otherwise they're sluts, and also they want to know that a guy really likes her. It's self defeating of course, on both sides.

What's crazy is that, for all the poundage that a war bow requires to pull, it's still less powerful than a small-caliber bullet. A breastplate will easily stop a clothyard arrow with a hardened bodkin point, and a .38 Spl will blow right through. I tried doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations a while back, and IIRC a .22LR has more energy at the muzzle of a 14" rifle barrel than a 160# bow could put into an arrow. (Someone needs to double check my math on that though.)