Asbestos is mostly bad to the people that work with it, or manufacture products with it. If you have asbestos in your house or building, 99+% of the time it’s fine, and you don’t need to do anything at all. All of the remediation that we did in the 90s and early 2000s did more harm than good. Like, floor tiles with asbestos; how are the chrystotile fibers embedded in the tile going to break out in enough volume to cause harm to people?

On the other hand, the people that manufactured and installed asbestos-based products were often entirely fucked over.

You can get around that by getting a phone number from a fairly distant location. Spoofed numbers will almost always use the same area code as your number. So if I were to get a phone number from, say, Presque Isle, ME, and started getting calls from the 207 area code, I’d know that I could safely ignore every one of them.

As far as I can tell, they don’t offer internet services to end-users. Or, if they do, it’s buried pretty deep in their site (which makes their site a poor design). OTOH, Starlink makes it very easy to see if you’re in an area that can get coverage, and to order service. I live in an area where Starlink would cost 50% more than my only other non-satellite option, and be double or triple the speed at their low end.

Children having sexual urges towards and crushes on adults is pretty normal–particularly once they hit early pubescence and are flooded with hormones–so I don’t necessarily see it as a sign that a child has already been abused. But, again, an adult acting sexual towards any child is absolutely, 1000% wrong.

The perspective I’m coming at this from is that, based on feedback I’ve gotten over the years, I was sexually precocious, and my parents responded by, first, shaming, and second, taking me to a professional because they were sure something was “wrong” with me, and that it needed to be “fixed”. That ended up being deeply harmful to me, and it’s taken me decades to reach some kind of detente with who I am. (The psychologist was actually quite supportive of me. He said my parents were wrong, and that I was going through normal things, albeit at an earlier age than most. But that didn’t really help with the load of shaming that I was getting from my parents and religious leaders.) Parents freaking out and immediately going to an authority is going to have that kind of effect on a child. IMO, it would likely be better for parents to have a very frank, but non-judgmental discussion with a child before leaping to the conclusion that they were acting out because they were abused, rather than because they had a colossal lapse in judgment.

Why not use a fiber that’s not not stretchy, and also not smooth? How would using a synthetic fiber affect the sound?

😬

Being blunt here, but it seems like you like the idea of dating and relationships, but probably not the reality of them.

I would suggest a pair of guinea pigs.

The point was that sexual behavior in young children does not necessarily equal abuse.

TBH, I’ve got pretty low water pressure where I live. Low-flow shower heads are bullshit, and I would much, much rather have the bad, old, inefficient, high-flow shower heads, and a decent amount of water pressure. High efficiency toilets, washing machines, dishwashers, etc. are great. But dammit, I just want to shower under a high-pressure firehose, at temperatures that will boil my skin off in ten minutes!

Can you explain that? With one fan pushing air in, and one fan pushing air out, you should be achieving higher airflow than you would with a single fan pushing air either in or out. Especially if you only have the one window open. I know that when I open windows on both sides of my house, I get better airflow than if I have windows on only one side open.

the 12-year-old is probably being abused!!

Eh. I dunno. I was engaging in explicitly sexual activities with other children my own age when I was 7, and I wasn’t being abused. To the best of my knowledge, they weren’t either. Sexuality is pretty well baked into our DNA, and sexual exploration, sex play, and yes, sexual intercourse is something children tend to do because it’s so biologically coded into us.

On the other hand, parents should probably have a frank, shame-free discussion with children about what is, and is not, appropriate behavior with adults, how consent works with peers, and discuss time and space constraints on behaviors.

I know that you’re getting downvotes, but child beauty pageants are pretty gross.

Temperature is absolutely a problem. Without getting too deeply technical, a heat index above 99F/37C is dangerous even for healthy adults. Las Vegas this week has seen temperatures up to 120F. The forecast today is for a temperature high of 118F/48C (low of 90F/32C overnight), with a relative humidity of 8%. That works out to be a heat index of 111F/44C.

Where I am, today’s high will be 82F, but humidity is sitting at 90%, which is a heat index of 92F.

You can also look at wet bulb temperatures; at a certain point, your body can’t cool fast enough through evaporative cooling, and you’ll die from heat.

Huh. I thought that the new Quiet Place was really quite good, too. I wasn’t aware that people were being shitty about it because the lead character was black.

When I go to that right now, from my desktop, I get:

"Your Session Has Been Suspended

Something about your browsing behavior or network made us think you were a bot.

What can I do to resolve this?

Try again from a different device or a different location

Ensure you have enabled JavaScript in your web browser

Remove any third party browser plugins that may be running"

This is because I run all my traffic through a VPN, and Ticketmaster isn’t able to harvest information from me that it wants. It expects me to allow them full access to who I am and where I am, rather than just giving me what I’m paying for.

rescue helicopters

That, in particular, is especially fucked in the US. Life Flights/medevac helicopters are almost always private companies, and each insurance company has to negotiate with every medevac company separately. You can easily end up with a $100,000 bill from a helicopter ride to a trauma center because your insurer didn’t negotiate rates with the one company that was operating in your area, and you have no legal recourse aside from declaring bankruptcy.

Should we have socialized or otherwise single-payer medicine in the US? Absolutely. But are we realistically going to do that before some id10t decides to legislate ‘smart’ cars that prevent you from exceeding what the car believes to be the speed limit? Nope. (For reference, I’ve driven a car with driver assist; it tried to jerk the wheel out of my hands a few times because it thought the road was turning when it wasn’t, because it was misreading the lines on the road and the signs.)

The ambulance could also have been two houses down and there in 3 minutes.

That’s significantly less likely than the ambulance being either at the hospital or being farther away than the hospital. Let’s say that 33% of the time the ambulance is at the hospital, 33% of the time it’s farther away, and 33% of the time it’s closer. That means that 66% of the time it’s going to take you less time to get to the hospital on your own than it would to wait for an ambulance.

…And that’s only one specific type of medical emergency. What about uncontrolled bleeding? You want a real world example? Look at Kentucky Ballistics; he had a gun explode, and a piece of shrapnel went into his neck. If he had waited for an ambulance, he would have bled out before he made it to the hospital, and he was only about ten minutes away.

…If–and this is a big “if” in very rural areas–the ambulance has someone on it that can legally administer drugs, and the ambulance isn’t on the other side of the county dealing with another medical emergency at the same time. (In my state, you need to be a paramedic to administer drugs; there are different classes of EMTs in my state, and most of them are not paramedics. There’s a severe shortage of paramedics, largely due to the god-awful pay, and so not all ambulances will have a paramedic on them at all times.)

This was literally a best-case scenario: a doctor that had medications on-hand and could administer them, and able to get to the hospital faster than an ambulance could get to their home in the first place. And he still came very close to needing to be intubated.

I absolutely fucking hate Ticketmaster’s way of doing this, because they require access to your phone. And they won’t let me use my normal VPN, or anything that blocks them from having location access. I would rather drive to the goddamn venues–what are about 90 minutes from my home–and buy tickets in person, than to deal with Ticketmaster or AXS “security” measures that attempt to circumvent my security.

Presumably ambulances and other such emergency vehicles would be exempt from such devices?

Okay, but that misses the point.

This doctor was driving at the speeds that an ambulance would have been driving, but only had to make the trip in one direction. It took them 20 minutes, from stings, to pulling into the ER (15 minutes of that being driving time). If they had called an ambulance, it would have been a minimum of 30-40 minutes, because the ambulance would have to get to them first.

And again - 20 minutes for an ambulance to get to you is not all that bad, relative to even more rural areas, and counties that don’t even have a hospital or doctors.