Spyke

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#1 Rule of USA Healthcare: discriminate against poor people.

In the mental health field in particular, it's not unusual to list various not-a-diagnosis problems, stress factors, life circumstances type things, in the diagnosis list (see also: social determinants of health). E.g., a lot of my patients are homeless, and I also work with a lot of forensic patients, so their diagnosis lists often includes "homeless" or "legal problem". Which, obviously, aren't actual diagnoses, but it's often the best way to communicate to other members of the care team or future caregivers what the major factors are influencing a patient's health. For many people, "low income" is a major source of stress which drives or exacerbates their mental health problems, so it does make sense to include if the therapist thinks it's a factor.

Now, why it's the only item listed is another question entirely. It could be a quirk of whatever system they use for patients to view their records; with the electronic medical record system my employer uses, on some screens it only shows the first item in the diagnosis list, so if I put in "homeless" first then that's all I would see on some pages. The system isn't smart enough to know what's an actual diagnosis or not, so it relies on humans to put in the data correctly.

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I find it funny that American republicans seem to want a king, when the definition of republicanism is a government without a king.

They also call themselves "the party of law and order", but made a convicted felon their king. They also say they favor "small government", but try to use the government to dictate what people can do with their own bodies. They also say they're defenders of free speech, but then call the news media "the enemy of the people". They also portray themselves as the party of Christianity, but actively try to do everything the opposite of what Jesus Christ taught.

The Republican party isn't known for being honest.

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RFK Jr. attacked the CDC’s ‘fascism’ and likened vaccinating children to abuse by the Catholic Church

Can you imagine what it'd be like if mandatory childhood vaccines are eliminated? Can you imagine what a resurgence of measles or even polio would be like?!

No, you probably can't, because vaccines made them non-issues before most of us were even born. And now they might come back because some dullard thinks he knows better than actual doctors and scientists. Dunning and Kruger must be crying themselves to sleep these days.

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OpenAI whistleblower’s death deemed suicide

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And make it abundantly clear to everyone that you're not suicidal. Record videos with date stamps. Send date stamped letters by mail to friends, with instructions to retain the letters indefinitely, and perhaps which are clearly marked "to be opened in the event of my death". The letters should say something along the lines of "I am not suicidal. I do not want to die. I am not going to kill myself under any circumstances. If I die, it was not by suicide. I want to live. I have ABC reasons to live. I have XYZ plans for the future." Etc.

Keep multiple copies of the information in multiple locations, and make sure multiple people know where a copy is. Ideally, have a dead-man's switch set up, or someone you trust to do it, to automatically send all the information to all the major news outlets if you do turn up dead, along with a statement akin to the letter outlined above to make it clear you were murdered.

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Nationwide anti-Trump protests planned for Labor Day: what to know

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I really don't understand why I constantly see this sentiment on every post pertaining to protests. Rome wasn't built in a day. How do you expect the masses to go directly to violent revolution when many of them don't even recognize there's a problem, and most of them have spent their whole lives in a system which hasn't required any political participation at all? Drawing attention to the problems is how you get more people active.

Obviously, protests won't do anything to directly influence the corrupt leaders in any meaningful or beneficial way. I don't know anyone who actually hopes for that. But a handful of individuals resorting to political violence will be easily quashed by the fascists' enforcers and then demonized or ignored by the fascist-friendly media, so the logical thing is to make the movement too big to fail or ignore. Drawing attention to the problems is how you get more people active.

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Player two has entered the lobby

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Suddenly realizing the anti-education efforts of the Republican bunch, the Koch's and all their ilk, is actually motivated by self-preservation. It's harder to know how to kill your overlords if you never learn about anatomy to know what parts are fragile. For example, you'd never know that cutting the femoral arteries can be every bit as fatal as the carotids, or that when targeting the heart/lungs a knife blade in a vertical orientation would just get caught in the ribs, or that puncturing both lungs would also be extremely bad.

A gut wound that reaches the abdominal aorta very well could be death, but how many people even know where it is?

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well I dont have chests at home

Ouch. Feels. I religiously organize everything in Minecraft and Valheim. I got so frustrated with others I played with not putting things in the right places that I made boxes labeled "sort later", and they dump everything in there and I just sort it myself. Whereas my house always feels like a mess and I have always struggled to change that.

I've adapted by keeping a relatively spartan home environment. Stuff can't be as much of a mess if you don't have stuff you don't need, and the space is easier to clean with less in it.

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Even households earning $150,000 a year are struggling with credit card and car payments

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Imo the entire concept of the middle class should be abandoned as capitalist propaganda. There's the rich and there's the working class. Anything else is a distraction to keep us from focusing on the rich stealing from the workers. Bezos owns a $500,000,000 yacht while thousands of his employees rely on government assistance programs which are funded by taxes he doesn't even pay.

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College enrollment is falling at a ‘concerning’ rate, new data reveals

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While Park said an [sic] seeing an enrollment cliff isn’t occurring just yet, [...]

None of those people are 18 yet. The 2007 kids, from when birth rates last peaked, are just now 17. The declining birth rate hasn't caught up yet.

The article says it's multifactorial, but predominantly cost and the need to work;

The cost of college is the number one barrier to enrolling in higher education for adults not enrolled in such a program, according to a 2024 report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. That report also found that for more than three-quarters of the more than 3,000 unenrolled adults polled, cost and the need to work were preventing them from pursuing further education.