As a medical student, I have a negative amount of trust in and/or respect for anyone in the healthcare sector that has a business degree.

They don’t have a high fertility rate. They have a high death rate. If you look at the demographic breakdown, the number of people over the age of 30 or so drops off precipitously.

For me, it just looks like he has a certain coldness in his eyes. It’s not a dead or vacant look, it’s just the way a smile, or any other facial expression for that matter, just doesn’t seem to make it to his eyes. There’s obviously life and intelligence there, but it’s not a friendly intelligence. I pulled up the most lizard-man pictures of Zuckerberg for comparison, and even at his most robotic, his eyes still look human. Like there’s some capacity for empathy in there somewhere. With Musk? His eyes just don’t quite read as human to me in an uncanny valley sort of way.

I’ve had it for years and one of the biggest features that I find worthwhile is being able to easily download videos to watch on the plane or play like podcasts when I’m driving. When I first got it, I had a really long commute, so being able to download stuff and play it with my phone screen off is helpful.

I’m grateful that none of our cadavers were unclaimed remains. All of them had info sheets with demographics, profession, and a brief health history. Our school also holds a Donor Memorial ceremony every year, but I don’t know if that’s common or ubiquitous among medical schools.

An interesting thing about Benadryl (diphenhydramine): if you look at “PM” meds or things that are supposed to help with sleep, diphenhydramine is usually the active ingredient. Benadryl is a sleep medication that happens to also work as an antihistamine which I find a bit amusing.

I won’t be buying one for quite a while. I’m driving my 2021 Crosstrek with a manual transmission until it dies and I can’t reasonably repair it anymore. It’s the first new car I’ve ever had, it’s my first manual transmission car, and I’m not giving it up for anything besides another of the same in a newer model. (and unfortunately, it looks like manuals are getting phased out throughout the market)

(Edit to add: I would be sorely tempted by a BRZ though.)

Just based on build quality and reputation, I’d take a Subaru Solterra over even the highest-end Tesla any day. I live in Minnesota, and my bigger concern about Teslas is the lack of ground clearance. If I can get out of the snow bank in the ditch, I don’t need my car’s heating system to last 12 hours.

The music and food you mention specifically are the products of Black culture. They only come from the South because that’s where the African people were taken to and enslaved, then left destitute with no means to leave after their liberation. Some artists and luminaries from the South have been white, but many of the best ones have been Black and the most moving and powerful pieces of their work are rooted in the oppression they grew up with.

It is a profoundly complex issue, and that’s what makes much of this comment section so frustrating. Many of the arguments here are very reductionist and fail to account for detail or nuance. In this particular case, I have a hard time excusing the behavior of the accused interlopers given that this is a women’s conference that has been a recurring event for quite some time and has always been a women’s conference.

Lack of education or not, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask professionals to act professionally and refrain from attending events not intended for them. I think there’s a significant amount of leeway being given to the men/foreign workers who showed up at the women’s conference as if they cannot be expected to regulate their behavior in a professional context. It’s the same kind of hand-waving and excuses that perpetuate the good ol’ boys’ club that the tech industry already is. It is irksome that people here aren’t realizing that the arguments they are making about exclusivity or discrimination are the same arguments frequently used to excuse the misogyny and sexual harassment that is so ubiquitous in the tech industry to begin with.

Admittedly, my sympathies for some of the foreign workers is a bit more limited. One of the worst jobs I had was working as a contracted project manager at Google for an India-based contracting company. The team in India that I was supervising was extremely difficult to work with and my boss and coworkers that were all either H1B visa employees or over-staying expired student visas actively contributed to the problems I was having. There were a few times that my project failed to meet adequate performance metrics because the team in India refused to complete tasks that I had created for them and my supervisor did very little to back me up in that situation.

The other side of the coin for the foreign worker situation is that the mega-conglomerates like Google, Apple, etc. specifically hire foreign workers and H1B visa employees because they will work for less pay and minimal to no benefits unlike American college graduates that have student loans to pay off and nowhere else to go. I have a couple of friends still in the tech industry, and they are frequently undercut and out-competed by foreign workers that can accept lower pay and worse benefits as it is a temporary situation for them. I have much more sympathy for those that are actively immigrating and assimilating, but the ones who work on H1B visas or other similar contracts are part of the problem that drive down wages and benefits for everyone else. If they were working in genuine solidarity with American workers, I would feel very differently about it, but as it stands, the vast majority of foreign tech workers I have interacted with have been people abusing the visa systems and dragging down the market for everyone else. In some ways, they are victims, but they also help to perpetuate many of the worst problems in the industry.

California recently passed legislation that now protects social caste against discrimination because the massive Indian population in the tech industry has been horribly discriminatory and brutal to Indians from lower castes. It’s also worth pointing out that many of the H1B visas and more temporary workers are from the upper castes and they intend on moving back to India after making enough money and the ones who are truly immigrating are usually from the lower castes and are working under green cards. The workers from the lower castes are also much less likely to be tech workers in the first place because they did not have access to education in India. All of this to say: there are injustices that foreign workers face, but for foreign workers in the tech industry, I’m more inclined to believe that they are among those that are part of the problem.

(Not to mention the fact that some of the worst sexism I have dealt with was from Indian workers from upper castes.)

As a woman who used to work in tech, I would like to point out that you are missing some very key details here. The expectations placed on women in tech are much stricter, much more demeaning, and much more harsh than those placed on men. I had an employer while I was a contractor decide not to renew my contract because I “didn’t smile enough” and “wasn’t friendly enough”, and this was not an expectation placed on my male coworkers. The contracting agency I was working through tried to argue in my defense, but the employer was allowed to discontinue my contract at any time for any reason. Unfortunately, the contracting agency didn’t have any other positions open for me, so I was just out of a job.

In just about every tech job I’ve had, it was made explicitly clear to me that behaving and interacting with others in the same manner as my male coworkers was not acceptable. I was hired with the implicit understanding that, in addition to providing my labor and expertise, I was required to present myself as feminine, demure, and almost submissive to any men I worked with, even if I was their supervisor.

Women need more help getting jobs in the tech industry because they are more likely than their male counterparts to lose jobs to sexism, unequal expectations, sexual harassment, and hostile work environments. This job fair was not allowed to officially exclude men, so it would be helpful for male tech workers to acknowledge and understand their inherent advantages and refrain from interfering with opportunities aimed at helping women in the industry.

I treat mine more like a dual screen setup than a fold-able setup. As far as I’ve seen, none of the other folding phones work like that and my entire device ecosystem is tied together through OneDrive, so having it natively on the phone is awesome.

Apparently Georgia has some pretty draconian means-testing to qualify for a public defender. I remember reading something like 250% of the federal poverty line or thereabouts. (Which works out to about $36k per year, by the way.) They should really look into fixing that.

Something I’ve seen at some restaurants (ranging from casual to Michelin star) is the increasing prevalence of mocktails. If you mix non-alcoholic ingredients with the same kind of style and objective as mixed drinks, you can make some really tasty stuff.

If you’re still looking for resources (particularly if you are needing non-religious resources) a lot of health systems have outpatient programs and support groups for various substance use disorders, so that would be a good place to look. Depending on how severe the problem is, presenting an open and non-judgemental front regarding medical intervention and medication use can help reduce the stigma of getting chemical help for a chemical problem.

Unfortunately, the medications that help with alcohol withdrawal are somewhat dangerous in their own right and need to be fairly tightly controlled. Delirium tremens (the shakes) from withdrawal are usually managed with benzodiazepines like Valium for emergent use and Ativan for prolonged control. The other main maintenance drug for alcohol withdrawal is Librium, and that one is also a benzodiazepine. It would be amazing if there were safe OTC options, but because of the serious damage alcohol does and the dangerous nature of withdrawal from it, it really needs to be closely medically managed. Opiate withdrawal sucks…alcohol withdrawal can very easily kill you outright.

It can be administered up to a couple weeks after exposure. It’s a very slow virus.

The “no interest accrued” bit is huge for the medical community. Newly graduated doctors with hundreds of thousands in loans were getting absolutely ruined by runaway interest while they were in residency on income driven repayment plans. Now, combine the SAVE plan with PSLF, and medical school is suddenly a lot more viable as an endeavor.

I’m a medical student and I’m here to tell you that no amount of medicine, physicians, nor technology will save a patient if they don’t have the personal strength and fortitude to survive cancer treatment. Chemo is literally poison that is carefully dosed out so that it hopefully kills the tumor before it kills the patient. People who are strong enough, mentally, emotionally, and physically, to survive cancer treatment are incredible and claiming otherwise is ignorant and disrespectful.