Minnesota: Honeycrisp apple hard cider and fried Ellsworth cheese curds.

But the front/hood is much shorter in length. Also, people driving that type of van are much more likely to be doing so in a professional capacity and are significantly less likely to be asshole drivers fucking around with their phone while driving. People are bad drivers at baseline quite frequently, but if someone is on the job in a van used for commercial purposes, they’re more likely to at least be paying attention and not speeding everywhere.

Edit: I marked up your image to illustrate the point made much more eloquently in the video. Because of the length of the hood, the truck has a much longer distance of road obstructed from view in front of it, and this is with a standard truck that doesn’t have one of the very popular lift kits (and assuming that the driver is relatively tall.)

Here’s a great video by Fort Nine that explains how and why the shape and size of these trucks are a threat to everyone outside the vehicle.

I do this now and didn’t have to as a kid…however, I have a weird kidney problem where my kidneys will just dump water, whether or not I have the water to spare. This means that I have a minimum water requirement of 4 liters a day. It’s not as bad as when I was on a really horrible medication that started the whole issue. When I was on that medication I had to drink about 4 gallons of water a day.

End result: I have a stupid party trick where I can down a liter of fluid in about 10 seconds, and a gallon of fluid in about 5 to 10 minutes depending on how recently I’ve eaten. (I did give myself water poisoning once, but that took 8 gallons over about 14 hours)

Edit: Also, having multiple water bottles means I have somewhere to put all my awesome stickers!

I was looking for someone to mention Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop.

What are your thoughts on Fullmetal Alchemist? I personally adore FMA: Brotherhood and I think it meets these criteria.

That is astonishingly stupid.

Ft Leavenworth is the military’s prison. They don’t send civilians there.

From the emergency medicine perspective on that last bit…we don’t care if you have a DNR somewhere on file. If you show up in cardiac arrest and someone isn’t shoving an official POLST into our hands, we’re running the code. We’d rather someone try (and fail) to sue for malpractice for saving them than accidentally let someone die that didn’t want to.

These companies investing in nuclear is the only good thing about it. Nuclear power is our best, cleanest option to supplement renewables like solar and wind, and it has the ability to pick up the slack when the variable power generation doesn’t meet the variable demand. If we can trick those mega-companies into lobbying the government to allow nuclear fuel recycling, we’ll be all set to ditch fossil fuels fairly quickly. (provided they also lobby to streamline the permitting process and reverse the DOGE gutting of the government agency that provides all of the startup loans used for nuclear power plants.)

I will pretty frequently just eat straight peanut butter with a spoon, but peanut butter cookies are also great. Peanut Butter an Co. has a cinnamon sugar peanut butter that is obscenely good. I found out about it because Babish did a peanut butter tier list video and the cinnamon sugar peanut butter was the highest rank.

Peanut butter, nice bread, and hoarding shiny little trinkets.

I didn’t say they paid no taxes at all, but I was explaining how the bottom 50% of earners in the country pay very little, if anything. The 19.3% is the bottom 19.3% of earners in the country, not a percentage of the bottom half.

I would argue that if you get everything (or most of your withheld taxes) back on your return…that means that you effectively didn’t pay federal income taxes or paid very little. If you get most of your withholding back every year, you could look at how you filed your exemptions on your I-9 and increase the number to the maximum allowable. I know some people that put the maximum allowances so that no federal tax is withheld from their paycheck and they just pay the balance at the end of the year when they file their taxes instead of getting a return.

They just try to slide it under the radar by not showing the taxes on your payslip because you’re more likely to look closer at that than your receipt from the grocery store.

And that’s not even getting into state income taxes, Medicare taxes, and Social Security taxes. Those all have different brackets and some states are more regressive than others. There are states like Texas that don’t have income taxes, but they make up for it by taxing everything else through things like sales and property taxes.

Of note: sales tax is always the most regressive taxation model, and tariffs are basically sales taxes on steroids.

For something very relevant to health: cooking, knowing how to measure food, and how to read a nutrition label. Obesity would be much less common if people were able to cook their own food more often, and knew how to actually measure out accurate portion sizes.

I totally get that time, upfront costs like cookware, and access to decent ingredients are MAJOR factors in whether or not someone can learn how to cook, but anyone can and should know how to read a nutrition label and know how to measure accurate portion sizes for the things they eat. If you are trying to lose weight or work on healthy habits, a food scale is infinitely more valuable than a body weight scale. Most people do not know what 28g of chips looks like.

The bottom 50% of Americans make less than $40k a year. They do pay some federal taxes, but with the standard deduction, the 19.3% of working Americans that make less than $15k a year don’t pay any federal taxes. The standard deduction goes up to $22.5k for a head of household (i.e. a single working parent). Given that the federal minimum wage still works out to $15,080 a year, that means a full-time minimum wage worker doesn’t make enough to get hit with income taxes.

Edit: Here’s a wikipedia article with the numbers I pulled and the tax bracket info is on the IRS website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States

It is absolutely nonsense. People are subjected to stronger, more direct magnetic fields all the time in MRI’s, and MRI’s are substantially safer than most other imaging modalities in medicine (besides ultrasound). The amount of radiation from non-atmospheric sources vastly outweighs the cosmic (non-UV) radiation humans are subjected to, to the point that it’s not really even worth considering outside of maybe astronauts or people who take long-haul high altitude flights extremely frequently.

The amount of ferrous material in blood is negligible at best, and there’s an estimated 3 to 4 grams of iron in the entire human body. The pressure from your heart pumping and the relatively high percentage of blood’s mass that is not iron (about 5kg) means that the effect of the iron if it was responsive to magnetic fields is slim to none.

For a lot of doctors, the incentive to not do risky procedures is the fact that you have to live with the guilt of your patient’s death, even if you did everything perfectly. Or, you do everything perfectly, but they still have a poor outcome because they weren’t healthy enough to go through the procedure and the recovery, and you get sued for millions of dollars because you didn’t spend 4 hours going through the informed consent with the patient to ensure that every single possible complication was adequately discussed.

I’ve worked in emergency medicine and I’ve had patients die in my care that we had absolutely no way of saving. The screams of their families still haunt me and I will carry those cries of anguish and loss to my grave. I would not perform a procedure that was not 1000000% necessary if the risks are too high because I have enough blood on my hands already, and I haven’t even finished medical school.

Sometimes. It depends why the first surgeon would be unable to do the procedure. If the problem is that the patient might not wake up from anesthesia because of problems with heart disease, lung problems, or other metabolic issues, then it doesn’t really matter what the surgeon has to say about actually doing the procedure because the anesthesiologist is the one saying “no”. If it’s an issue of too much adipose, sometimes it would mean that the surgery would take longer than it’s safe for the patient to be under anesthesia.

Another possibility is that the first surgeon operates at a facility that doesn’t have access to more advanced technologies or other medical specialists in the event that something goes wrong. And there are some surgeons that are just more willing to accept the risk of a bad outcome, and I would argue that that’s rarely in the patient’s best interest. There are alternative options that the surgeon should discuss with the patient as part of the informed consent process, and sometimes, the alternatives to surgery are just safer than the risk of the surgery itself, even if they aren’t as effective or are a long term treatment (ongoing) as opposed to a definitive treatment (cure). If the patient has a high risk of serious complications, up to and including death, then attempting the curative procedure might be more risk than it’s worth compared to a long term medication that mitigates the disease.

You’ll see this with pregnant patients too. For elective procedures that have safer alternatives or temporizing measures (a holdover treatment until surgery is safe), those are generally preferred to putting a pregnant patient under anesthesia because of all the cardiovascular, immunologic, and other physiologic changes that happen during pregnancy alongside potential risks to the fetus.

There’s a reason you have to get a pre-op physical exam for any non-emergent surgery. Figuring out if you’ll wake up from the anesthesia at all is part of the calculus that determines whether the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks.