dogmatism

Ok I don't know about soccer

But I know about DI Track and Wrestling. And they're essentially off like 2 weeks a year. This forbidden stuff is a fiction.

Finally, the cardiologist you see in the office is almost certainly not doing stents for you as those are very distinct skillsets (in the US).

Umm, what? No. It's exceedingly rare for an interventional cardiologist in the US not to do office work. The average number of PCI/yr is like 50 or something. Plus if one spent all one's time in the cath lab, they'd have a spinal fusion, knee replacement, thyroid cancer, and cataracts.

But what you are trying to get at is that there is law about self-referral ("Stark law") but in reality there are exceptions that render it fairly useless

Nah, by 2021 Prasad's reputation had gone into the shitter

I actually think he's just grifting and the notoriety he achieved went to his head. His pre-2020 takes were better reasoned and at least worth engaging with. I could see his takes shifting with popular misinformation ideas in real time as it contributed to his success

IMO this is worse than if he were just wrong. I think he knows better, but then he talked himself into a box, and doesn't have the people and political skills to survive on a bigger stage.

One can make the argument that Prasad has his title of Professor due to the stature he gained with his ill-founded contrarianism and subsequent notoriety. He was promoted in 2022 at the somewhat astonishing age of 39, at a time when his actual scientific output was not particularly high

The whole thing is kind of fascinating. Some of his "skeptic" fellow travelers like Cifu and Mandrola still carry water for him. Presumably he has a champion in Bob Wachter who also likes to fly the "contrarian" flag.

COVID really brought out a lot of crazies from UCSF and Stanford

I read a lot, and have since I was a child

edit: also, native English (well, American) speaker

Is this company public? Can I short them?

college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season

wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality?

Also, now with NIL etc, college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league

As an early-adopter of POCUS, I can't quite believe we actually still use stethoscopes

I still use one I got in 1994. Replaced the earpieces and diaphragm a few times, but the chestpiece and tubing are original

That's like a little over $3/yr. Can't complain

No competitive distance runner since like Zola Budd ran barefoot or minimal shoes.

The carbon plate revolution is the main driver for drop in times over the last 5+ years

Yeah, I just literally use table sugar, which is 1:1 glucose:fructose. Maurten et al using 1:0.8, close enough! And I don't believe the hydrogel thing is any magic, just marketing.

But yeah, this is a thing. There is some gut distress for sure at higher levels of intake. See guy finishing second -- still under 2 hrs! immediately puking, which is fairly common at the high intakes. I've heard of Blumenfeld (the triathlete) taking like 200g/hr or more. Insane. Though he's had some epic GI disasters too, lol.

If we're just doing fun apocrypha my favorite is the one about the USS Constitution and alcohol consumption

I didn't think so, but LLM's have taken so many tropes of a certain style of writing: the bullet points, the contradiction to make a point (not this...but that...) that when I see that style, I automatically question it

But you made actual clear points, so it didn't really feel like it, but honestly I can't be sure anymore!

Is this AI writing? Maybe from an outline prompt? I can’t tell

We’re screwed

hell no

I don't think I'm cut out for the modern world

Calais, ME

I’ll give you a counter example. I had an MRI of my neck for unrelated reasons. It found a thyroid nodule with suspicious characteristics. Incidentally I had had an MRI of the same areaa few years before and it wasn’t there.

So I had a biopsy. Which was equivocal also.

So I had it out which involved removing half my thyroid. Turns out it was a cancer but like the least serious kind, in fact the classification of it as actual cancer has gone back and forth over the years

But my other half of my thyroid couldn’t produce enough thyroid hormone, and now I have to take thyroid replacement the rest of my life to start alive

Also the surgery affected my voice and I sound like RFK jr now.

I clearly suffered some harm, and even after having the thing out, it’s unclear if that was beneficial at all. A large proportion of these kind of tumors quit growing and never do anything bad. But some do. So who knows.

Was the tradeoff worth it?

I don’t think it’s possible to say

If one is of a certain age, of course they studied for step I without it

and the classic method was the inspiration for Anki to begin with: making your own flashcards on index cards! You could do a version of spaced repetition by shuffling the deck.

Not sure the digital version is actually easier or more effective

answer: adblocking in the browser (and other data scavenging which can be done with native app more easily than PWA)

Operation "Catch of the Day"

I'm not kidding

and SCOTUS has ruled presidents have immunity for any actions while in office

The Trump regime is acting like it wants a civil war.

it's not out of the question that incitement to invoke insurrection act and then cancel the midterms is the strategy

also Ben Franklin: "A republic...if you can keep it"

(elipsis mine)

Even more of a relic: those militias weren't just bands of yeoman farmers. They were veterans of the recent French-and-Indian war. Often who had served with the commanders of the British forces arrayed against them. George Howe brother of William who ultimately became CiC of British forces in America died in the arms of Israel Putnam, one of the continental army's first generals at the battle of Ticonderoga. They thought so highly of him, the Massachusetts assembly allocated funds for a memorial to Howe at Westminster. George Howe (unlike ICE, lol) often had a hard time bringing ultimate force to bear as he didn't really see the colonials as "enemy".

I'd submit it's a violation of the 2A to allow the Nat Guard (essentially the continuation of those militias) to be forcibly nationalized (it took quite a bit of negotiating to get them all to join the fledgling continental army)

Anyhoo, tl;dr, for sure, 2A is an anachronism

given the entrenched attitudes and the time it takes to actually get people to do the thing as evidenced by all the contrarians in the thread...

it would take a lot more than that. Ain't no doc got all that time to go through all this with every person who should take cholesterol lowering medicine but wants to argue their internet sourced bs

I mean, how can you not like it?

It's hyperlegible!

you can get that both from Lenovo and Dell

The requirements for the physics major were only a handful of math credits shy of the math major.

lol, that's how I ended up with a math major. Got lost in the physics (realized I had no intuition for what was actually happening, just manipulating equations) took a couple extra courses, and boom! Math!

It doesn't really work like that for the most part

If you actually need a really high risk surgery, you probably have a terrible prognosis without it

For instance, in the pivotal trial of transcatheter aortic valve replacement for aortic stenosis (TAVR) the people were deemed too high risk for surgery, so got nothing (well, medicine only which doesn't really change anything for this condition) or TAVR. The medicine arm had 50% mortality (1 year I think?) whereas the TAVR arm was "only" 30%!

Now that didn't mean all those 30% of deaths were due to the procedure or even the aortic stenosis. I think that ran 10% or so (going off memory here). They just had so many other problems. For comparison, TAVR is now done in low-risk people, and I think the 1 year mortality is <3%

The things that go into making someone "high risk" in the STS (cardiac surgery) risk score are for the most part pretty obvious. If your heart muscle is super weak (or you need a machine to keep going before surgery), you have kidney failure, prior strokes, combined heart problems, bad liver or lung disease, etc etc. You can calculate a score, but you probably can guess it from the door of the room

I think there's a story about him beating a white kid from a rival private school in a boxing match

certainly unreliable reports of him doing well in informal rooftop bouts amongst the various Wing Chun students in Hong Kong

there are also stories of him getting his ass kicked by William Chung and Wong Shun Leung (others of Yp Man's students) and being a petty little bitch and getting kicked out of Yp Man's school

Who knows. It's all apocrypha at this point