All my drawers broke too, as well as the jazz board, twice. Pieces of shit.

I had to have my jazz board replaced twice on a very expensive Amana fridge. I don’t know the answer.

Ugh all appliances are such crap now. I want an old vacuum that lasts a lifetime from the 80s. They were much better.

All the plastic shelves they all have now break anyway, as well as the shitty plastic drawers. The drawers on mine all broke, and the jazz board died twice. Waste of money. I’d rather buy an old one on Marketplace.

I did focus groups and surveys for money. I often would just stock up on toiletries from Amazon when I had gift cards. That shit is expensive so it lets my grocery budget breathe.

I think if people knew a lot more about how children are exploited online they would understand more. It does seem extreme, but also it’s scary what happens.

There was a good interview in Rolling Stone with Carl Newman of the band The New Pornographers. Last year the band’s drummer was arrested and later convicted of sexually pestering children and CSAM possession. (Yes the name is an unfortunate coincidence but was their name for many years before this drummer was a member, and it refers to something else).

Carl talked about how devastated the band is by all of this, and a family member who works in the court system gave him some advice, talking about how pedophiles are always looking for an opportunity, and how you really should not have anything about your children online because they WILL use it no matter how innocent, and how you should watch your kids incredibly carefully online, that it’s not just kids from vulnerable families getting trafficked.

I see that it feels intrusive, but I myself read a lot of judicial decisions online, and the pedophile ones are always HORRIFIC. Just because there isn’t a physical victim doesn’t make it better. One case the police were notified by an ISP about a guy and they went to his house and found a child sized sex doll in his home. One thing leads to another. A lot of the testimony by men who have not committed physical crimes talk about how they were depressed and just began going into more extremes of porn, and just ended up beginning to watch CSAM as an extension of this. They would get phallometric testing which would show they are sexually oriented to children so this isn’t always true, but the easy access to literally anything via the Internet sure isn’t helping anything.

Registered midwives here have university degrees and a professional college to answer to. The US seems to have “lay midwives” which is pretty much nothing more than a doula, and certified nurse midwives. The level of education is very different.

There have been midwives in Australia prosecuted for not transferring to hospital, and this lunatic woman in Canada who was dismissed from practice but still attends births, and recently a baby she attended died. I kind of get it in the US simply because of lack of public health care probably driving this due to cost, but in countries with public health care and so many midwife options it’s insane. I’m glad finally someone is shining a light on this, perhaps it’ll save some babies. A nurse on the medicine subreddit once said she had seen complications and deaths from home birth and freebirth that are in the triple digits.

Even when they do successfully get baby out, there’s SO much they don’t know, and when they take them to ER because baby is breathing funny (because their lungs are wet) or came out stunned or they didn’t wrap them up warmly and now they’re cold, or they turn blue because mom has untreated gestational diabetes and their sugar has crashed or whatever. It can be temporary but it’s just so not necessary.

Common, but if your placenta stops working baby is gone.

I think part of the culprit for this trend is the fact that Americans have to pay for maternity care, which is stupid (paying privately for any health care is also stupid). This makes them shop around and get sucked into this.

That’s actually a great idea. Why should any asshole just get to make shit up and influence people to make bad decisions?

Although those fuckers at Facebook and the like could do their jobs and actually moderate too.

And it goes wrong SO FAST. You couldn’t convince me to birth anywhere but a large tertiary care hospital with the stories I’ve read and heard and seen. Wouldn’t even get an ultrasound at a smaller hospital. I’ve seen a couple of things missed that ended up with difficult consequences, and I think it was the quality of the ultrasound.

Also, listen to your care providers. If they say you need the glucose challenge do it, if you have gestational diabetes listen carefully to the advice, if they say you need to be induced they aren’t saying that lightly, a placenta ages like milk and your baby WILL die if you go overdue. Don’t listen to people on the Internet about vitamin K and vaccines and all that crap, they are recommended with good reason, and you don’t want a baby with a bleed with permanent consequences.

I want everyone to have a peaceful successful uncomplicated birth, but be prepared for anything to happen. Don’t gamble with your baby’s life for what some jackass on Facebook says. They’re idiots.

I think some of it is access to care too; some women in the US do this simply because of the cost of a midwife or doctor, it seems.

But also in Canada we have WAY higher standards for who can call themselves a midwife than they do in the US, and the midwives here have university degrees. Also, I think people here and other countries who have public health care seek help faster than Americans simply because cost isn’t a barrier, even if they do get sucked into this nonsense.

Oh, this drug company is absolutely not like that at all. They are super ethical and invest every dollar of their profits into research. The dinner was to present a new treatment which has become super standard for the clinic, which involved one of our doctors presenting, I promise it was not like that at all. They are truly generous to us. There are not many treatments for this disease and this is one of the best. It was purely educational.

I worked with a doctor whose in-laws were Saudi royalty. He didn’t need to work at all he was so wealthy.

I heard about him doing an incredibly greedy thing that blew my mind one day; he showed up at a dinner that a drug company was hosting for another adjacent program he had nothing to do with and did not practice in at all. He didn’t even tell them he was coming, they had to find him a seat, and then he sat down, ordered not one but TWO whole lobsters, and when they came he asked for them to be wrapped to go, and he left. Even acknowledging drug companies have large budgets for these kinds of things, to come to an event that has nothing to do with you and do that is insanely rude when you don’t want for a thing in the world.

I know someone else who is very wealthy, and he’s pretty generous and passionate about creating things, he’s far from perfect, but truly wants to make good things and runs a business that gives him zero profit, so the contrast was pretty stark. The doctor also stiffed his professional college for a very large membership bill.

I’m glad!

I always say that if people like Peterson can’t deal with someone’s pronouns, they can misgender me if it makes them feel better, I don’t give a shit what you call me.

If there was one thing on Reddit that was educational, it was Foreign Body Friday on the radiology subreddit.

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