[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 121 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

From a person with a lot of years of experience fighting mold on wood in a humid climate, what you want is borax:

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/green-home/21331232/killing-mold-on-wood

Borax kills mold and also soaks into wood and stays there to prevent future growth. Bleach does not help on porous surfaces like wood:

"Note that bleach should not be used to kill mold found on wood. While bleach is very effective for killing mold on non-porous surfaces, it doesn’t work well when it comes to wood. This is because the chlorine in bleach can’t penetrate wood, so only the water portion of the bleach gets absorbed.

The mold may appear to be removed from the surface, but it’ll likely continue to grow underneath and return within a few months."

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 102 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

There are a few things I wish we could really show the public. The first is how brutally savage and undignified CPR really is. And the second is what alcohol abuse really does to a person.

Chronic malnutrition, brain damage, hallucinations, anxiety, internal bleeding, fluid swelling your abdomen like a water balloon, literal ammonia building up in your blood that we treat by deliberately inducing massive diarrhea. That's not even mentioning esophageal varices and the increased cancer risk.

Alcohol is a horrifying drug.

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 365 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Critical care nurse here. The answer is esophageal varices.

It's the same physiological anomaly as hemorrhoids, except in your esophagus. Swollen, fragile veins caused by increased internal pressure. In the case of hemorrhoids, that pressure inside the veins is caused by straining too much when trying to poo. In esophageal varices, the increased pressure inside the esophageal veins comes from blood backing up from a swollen, scarred, and damaged liver. So we often see esophageal varices in end stage alcohol use disorder.

Horror stories abound in emergency departments and ICUs of having to do CPR on a patient massively hemorrhaging out of their mouth from esophageal varices. As soon as nurses I know saw this report, our immediate thought was, "Yep, varices."

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15429-esophageal-varices

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 125 points 9 months ago

My grandmother with Alzheimer's passed those clinical tests long after she had already asked us to take away her keys because she knew she wasn't safe to drive anymore. So yeah...

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 74 points 10 months ago

This headline is some absolute bullshit.

California already had health insurance for undocumented immigrants, as does Massachusetts. It's just limited to emergency care and pregnancy care.

California is expanding their existing coverage to comprehensive health care including primary care, which is cheaper than letting medical conditions get so completely out of control that they require expensive and disabling emergency hospitalizations.

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 129 points 11 months ago

LITERAL blasphemy. Like actual, textbook blasphemy. And his sycophants lap it up.

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 90 points 1 year ago

Not gonna lie, being a nurse during a pandemic with that jackass as president broke something in me

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 157 points 1 year ago

I could actually cry right now, what a fucking relief

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Starter comment: Prior studies of terpenes have shown them to be resilient to the development of bacterial resistance. These new derived compounds demonstrate efficacy against gram positive Staph epidermidis, Staph aureus, and two Enterococci in vitro. Compounds do not require destruction of trees to harvest.

Link to original study: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6382/12/7/1202

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 97 points 1 year ago

History lesson time: This wasn't done on purpose. It's an artifact of decisions made by Congress during World War II to support war production.

So many young men were away at war that it created a labor shortage, even with some women entering the work force. This led to spiraling increases in wages that were threatening the viability of critical war manufacturers.

In an effort to protect this manufacturing sector, Congress capped wage increases. But those corporations were still competing for workers and now they were no longer able to offer them higher and higher wages. So instead, they started offering them "perks" like health insurance, pensions, and paid time off.

THEN:

"In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls."

Emphasis mine. And guess what? When those young men returned from war and re-entered the work force, they wanted those perks too. So which company was going to be the first to deescalate the arms race and NOT offer health insurance?

And those perks being so ubiquitous meant the government never had an incentive to provide health coverage directly to anyone of working age, so we only have Medicare for retirees.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/#:~:text=In%201943%20the%20War%20Labor,of%20maneuvering%20around%20wage%20controls.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Chetzemoka@startrek.website to c/medicine@mander.xyz

Starter comment: This new technique uses glass beads to break the membranes of larger human cells in a sample, while maintaining the integrity of smaller bacterial cells. This allows the use of enzymes to wash away the human cell contents, leaving only bacterial cells when DNA testing is performed. The idea is to make clinical testing and characterization of human gut microbiome samples faster and more precise.

Link to study (pay walled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-023-02025-4

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[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 87 points 1 year ago

"he said he vetoed this bill because the fund the state uses to pay unemployment benefits will be nearly $20 billion in debt by the end of the year.

The fund the state uses to pay unemployment benefits is already more than $18 billion in debt. That’s because the fund ran out of money and had to borrow from the federal government during the pandemic, when Newsom ordered most businesses to close and caused a massive spike in unemployment. The fund was also beset by massive amounts of fraud that cost the state billions of dollars."

The reasoning and background, if anyone is curious

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 81 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"he vetoed this bill because the fund the state uses to pay unemployment benefits will be nearly $20 billion in debt by the end of the year.

The fund the state uses to pay unemployment benefits is already more than $18 billion in debt. That’s because the fund ran out of money and had to borrow from the federal government during the pandemic, when Newsom ordered most businesses to close and caused a massive spike in unemployment. The fund was also beset by massive amounts of fraud that cost the state billions of dollars."

The reasoning and background, if anyone is curious

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 119 points 1 year ago

I hate that we lost sight of what wealth really is and replaced it with the idea of profit. I bought my house to provide myself with financial security, not profit.

My monthly "rent" (mortgage payment) is locked in for the next 25 years and will not go up. At the end of those 25 years when I'm ready to retire, I'll have housing with only taxes and insurance payments. THAT is wealth. THAT is what home ownership is meant to be. If housing prices fall, it won't change my life a bit.

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Chetzemoka

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