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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I fucking wish. At least then I wouldn’t have to be put on hold for 30 min just to have to eventually explain to a person who was hired 3 weeks ago how to do their job.

    Private insurance always has you speak to an actual adjuster for authorization, mainly because they know any sort of automated system would be more accurate and faster than having you talk to their undertrained and understaffed employees.

    Private insurance’s goal is to erect as many barriers between the provider and the patients as possible, and then blame the provider for all the barriers. It works every time.

    “I have the best insurance, they told me it would be covered”. Nope, Medicare is the best insurance and you traded that away for a privatized Medicare supplemental that lies to you about your coverage.




  • saw an open source project for 3d printing prosthetic limbs with a focus on making affordable prosthetics for kids since they grow so quickly they need new fittings quickly as well.

    Unfortunately 3d printing has mainly been a bit of a gimmick in the field of prosthetics, especially the more diy projects. Most people think that prosthetics is an engineering field with a side of medicine, when in reality it’s more of a medical field with a side of engineering.

    The project you were referring to never really took off because it ended up being detrimental to the patient’s long-term health. With how quickly children adapt to their conditions, if you don’t provide them with a prosthetic that provides more utility than their residual limb, they end up adapting to never wearing any prosthetic. Which in turn can vastly lower their mobility and ability to interact with their environments.

    The fact that much of our prosthetics technology isn’t that different from what they had in the Civil War is sad.

    I wouldn’t say it’s quite that bad. I mean I did carve a wooden socket in school, but haven’t ever seen one in a clinic setting. Prosthetic tech really advanced in the 90s with the introduction of materials like carbon fiber, titanium, new thermoplastics, and advanced mechanical knee units. With the amount of repetitive ground force reaction a human body can produce in motions, our field is pretty limited by the advancement of material science.


  • and she’s definitely not touching herself for any other reason.

    How dare you, the ancients weren’t tainted with the same levels of sexual proclivities found in modern society. They weren’t just grooming those boys because they just wanted to fuck them, they were engaging in pedagogy, not pedophilia! It’s why all my twink TA’s are underclassmen, someone must teach the youth. - every male art history teacher


  • Yeah, plus the “cutting edge” prosthetic tech we currently have is mostly overhyped marketing.

    There are about a dozen powered prosthetics I always see on social media that always look really cool and the “patients” always go on and on about how useful it is…What people don’t realize is those “patients” are being paid by the manufacturer, and usually part of the deal is that they get the limb for free.

    They don’t tell you about having to wear a heavy battery pack that only lasts for a couple hours. They don’t tell you that you have to pre-program routines like tying your shoe laces. That you have to purposely concentrate on flexing residual muscle groups in your limb to activate those routines. Nor do they tell you that the majority of patients who own those devices usually revert back to a manual prosthetic for functional tasks, or just choose not to wear a prosthetic at all because they can achieve more function with their stumps.

    While prosthetics have started looking more futuristic and functional, unfortunately we haven’t really advanced any technology that actually improves function and utility since the late 90’s. And I highly doubt we’ll ever make a prosthetic that provides more utility than the limb it’s replacing, not in our lifetime at least.


  • Yep, the old hot pan cold oil technique you use with a traditional woks works well with cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel.

    You basically get the pan as hot as you can, coat with enough to cover the pan with a thin layer of oil, and heat until smoking. Dump out your hot oil and add your cold oil and then your ingredients. If you get good at hot pan cold oil you can make just about anything nonstick.


  • I think the first sentence is probably enough to make anyone not afflicted with a eurocentric brain want to palm some face.

    I think excusing it as a “not serious” statement is dangerous, as a lot of people even on Lemmy won’t second guess it.

    The belief that the west is the origin of all science and culture is surprisingly pervasive, especially in the tech industry.


  • Depends on the plastic, you can safely heat most polypropylene and polyethylene based plastics. If it’s putting off noxious fumes then it probably has urethane, styrene, or vinyl in it.

    The worst plastic to overheat that I’ve worked with is kydex. Even though it’s most common application is as a thermoplastic, if you over heat it the stuff off gasses hydrogen chloride.


  • This isn’t going to be accurate, it’s ignoring a key aspect of the heat that will be generated, friction. When designing materials for prosthetics we have to be aware of how much friction occurs between the material and skin. If the amount of friction is too great, the material can create enough heat to damage tissue.

    The formula for the skin friction coefficient is cf=τw12ρeue2, where ρe and ue are the density and longitudinal velocity at the boundary layer’s edge.


  • I too have thousands of reasons why I shouldn’t be in charge of a country, however I do have one good pitch.

    My appointment to dictatorship would be guided solely by autism. I guarantee my powers will only be focused upon my two fixations that deal with the general public, trains and healthcare.

    If made supreme leader I will not only make the trains run on time, there will be more trains, more hospitals, we would even have trains that can take you to your job at the hospital. I would shape the perfect world for me, and vicariously a more efficient and safer world for you.

    Demand Me for dictator 2024



  • This means there’s no risk of default because the government can simply print money to pay off its debts. That’s how US is able to have national debt of $34.4 trillion right now. If The Economist thinks that Russia’s financial reserves will be exhausted in five years or so, then they have some explaining to do regarding the US.

    The US is able to have a national debt of 34.4 trillion because people are still willing to lend them money. They aren’t just printing money, they are selling securities, which is similar to taking out a loan.

    Printing more money in your own currency without backing it with some sort of security is just going to devalue your buying power and increase inflation. The Russian government is currently utilizing their reserves to sustain their spending, but if they run through those reserves they’re going to have to stop spending, or start selling securities. Either way, deficit spending cannot be solved via printing press.



  • That’s just thinking in logical fallacy. Just because the Republicans spent a bunch of effort and time focusing on invalid criticisms, doesn’t mean there are no valid criticisms.

    The DNC being made up of mostly center right pushovers is a byproduct of the Clinton’s popularizing Third Way politics in America. It was a way to get around the gridlock that was dominant in the 80s and 90s in Congress.

    The basic theory was that you would work across the isle on the projects you could, even if that meant making deep concessions. In theory you would end up getting credit for “getting things done”, and eventually become popular enough to leverage your bills through.

    In reality, Third Way politics is only effective until the opposition realizes that they now how the initiative over policy. They get to work across the isle on the projects they want, and that’s usually economic policy.


  • A person’s sex is science, but their gender is a social construct.

    Even sex is not the black and white dichotomy most people make it out to be. The way we define and dictate someone’s sex isn’t reproducible for everyone. The intersex population is larger than what most people assume, and can vary in ways that defy the way we normally evaluate sex. It can range from someone having different chromosomal pairings, to having a varied arrangement of secondary sexual organs.

    Anyone saying that someone’s sex is scientifically dependent on “x” is either ignorant, or academically dishonest.


  • “Protests must be polite and not ruffle any feathers” is what I’m hearing.

    I don’t think that protests have to be polite, however protests do have to be productive. If your environmental group’s political agitation only results in turning public opinion away from the greater movement…I’m not sure if that’s a productive use of political capital.

    I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question a group’s motivation who are participating in unproductive political agitation. Especially considering that their funding comes from an oil heiress, who could be using her vast fortune to be lobbying to the people whom actually have access to the power that can bring about real change.

    the protests will only become more radical.

    I’d hardly say paying some teens to “vandalize” a painting that your family owns is really a radical act of protest. Now if they were conducting these types of actions against oil companies, or the political bodies who support them… That would be radical.