shikitohno

I wouldn't reduce it to a binary. I think there's a pretty good chunk of the population who are anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, but aren't reachable as swing voters. They're to the left of the current Democratic Party and might vote begrudgingly for Biden, but wouldn't vote for Trump under any circumstances.

My sense of taste kind of came back, but severely muted for some things. Coffee never quite got back to the same level of flavor, for example. I've also noticed my ability to taste salt is pretty shot. I can, but I have to add stupid amounts of the stuff. For an example, I had to do a clear liquid diet about a week ago prior to a medical procedure, and drinking some broth with 748mg of sodium per serving just tasted like drinking greasy water to me.

In terms of long term effects, it's a bit harder to say. I got covid for the first time in August 2020 (yay for being an essential peasant!), and I was out of work until May 2021. I had to do months of PT because of what my primary doctor called a post-viral fatigue syndrome. At its worst, if I tried to walk more than a block away from my apartment and back, I would wake up the next day feeling sore from my neck down to my toes. I remember a day where I slept for 12 hours, woke up and made and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and just doing that left me so tired I went back to sleep for another 6 hours or so.

Other stuff is less clear. It certainly started manifesting and presenting symptoms after I had COVID, but correlation and causation being what it is, it's hard to definitively say what might have just been low-level and not bothering me that much before and what could have been kicked off by COVID. I developed photophobia, Hashimoto's thyroiditis and some nerve damage after being ill for the first time, which are all fun.

I guess the photophobia is the easiest to manage, I just need to wear heavily tinted glasses at all times, as I get these awful migraines if I don't. Uncovered light bulbs, TVs, monitors, whatever can set them off. The thyroid condition I get to take a synthetic hormone basically for the rest of my life and get blood work done 4 times a year to see how it's working. The nerve damage I get to take another medication pretty much for forever as well, thanks to US insurance. Instead of a daily pill, my neurologist could give me an occipital nerve block every 3-4 months, but insurance doesn't want to pay for them unless it's done at a pain management clinic. For reasons I can't work out, every pain management clinic I looked at with my referral seemed to be out of network for everyone, so it'd run me like $700 for the initial visit and $400 every 3-4 months after that. I guess they know they've got you if the pain is bad enough? Anyway, my prescription has been working so far and it's the only thing I don't even need to pay for before hitting my deductible, so I have that going for me.

If you could offer enough money, you could probably get him to show up to hear cases dressed liked Judge Dredd.

I don't get how Republicans have any credibility amongst the electorate at this point. They demand blind obedience, or else cry foul, and somehow, a significant part of the population still supports this bullshit. Their eyes must be painted on, or else they're willfully ignorant.

If you assume they're all 13" wide laptops and stacked them on their side to get maximum height per unit, you'd still fall 305,752 km short of the average lunar distance. You normally only see this level of hyperbole in the estimated street value cops give for drugs they seize, pretty impressive.

Maybe users wouldn't have felt the need for adblockers if ad agencies hadn't made them increasingly obnoxious, intrusive and pernicious. They just couldn't leave a fraction of a penny on the table and made sites more and more unusable without adblockers, so screw 'em. They can reap what they've sown.

I'm rather curious how you relativise a lot of the US' recent history. Sure, Iraq and Afghanistan weren't pillars of stability, but I think the balance comes down pretty hard against the US with Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations as well. Our continued support of Israel and Saudi Arabia isn't looking so hot either.

Then we've got military intervention in the Dominican Republic and support of Trujillo until he stopped being useful, installing the Pinochet regime after helping topple the government of Salvador Allende, support for the military dictatorship in Brazil, as well as backing dictatorships in Argentina.

Our colonization of the Philippines was pretty awful, as is our continued treatment of Puerto Rico as essentially a vacation spot and Caribbean ghetto.

You get the idea. Seriously, I'm hard pressed to think of an instance in the last century where the US has intervened on the international stage and actually has a credible claim to having done good with the exception of World War II.

The government has created and fought for stability for a small subset of monied interests and has largely left the rest of us to jump for whatever table scraps they deign to let fall to us plebs. As @Nokinori mentions, even domestically, things are increasingly coming undone at the seams and looking ready to get worse.

He would leave NATO and risk the Pax Americana that has stabilized the world for almost 100 years now.

Stabilizing the world is just flat out wrong. At best, the US has stabilized itself and a select few allies. Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan most recently, along with a whole bunch of countries in Central and South America over the last 100 years would probably feel quite strongly that the US has been a disruptive force for them.

Do they not have phones or emails? Why do they specifically need to contact you via Facebook? The whole setup sounds rather intrusive and unnecessary, just tell them to call or email you.

Setting up a couple of spreadsheets at my job has basically been the entire grounds for me receiving bonuses last year, and it looks to be the same this year too. I don't even know that much, I just Google "excel xlookup" or whatever half the time, but people think it's black magic.

My main one last year turned a 30 minute daily task into something it do once a week in about 10 minutes on a busy week, and just print off the daily sheet each night to post. This year, I just added drop-down menus and some conditional checks to someone else's sheet.

I'm just amazed nobody else did this before, because I was sick of doing the old way everyday after my first week.

There are plenty of packages still going through the USPS system. Plus, it's how lots of people get their medicine, where delays can really cause severe and unnecessary problems. I would rather get all my prescriptions at the pharmacy two blocks down the street from me that usually has my refills ready in under 30 minutes, but my insurance won't cover any medicines I need to take long-term unless I have them switched to 90-day prescriptions filled by CVS' mail-order service, for "my convenience" they tell me.

Now, actual junk mail, sure, ban it, for all I care. But there's a lot of legitimate mail still going out every day.

I haven't really tested the limits on it, but so far at least one therapy session a week. Haven't needed any inpatient care or anything beyond this, thus far, so I can't comment on that.