Posts made by HelloRaptor

@TNP said:

@ThatGuyThere I've actually heard about this kind of thing before. It even made the news. Meeting groups where all people did was hug and cuddle because they didn't get enough human touch in their lives otherwise.

I don't really bat an eyelash at the idea of using internet sites to hook up for anonymous sex with a random stranger, but that cuddling thing just creeps me out deep into my bones, full on physical shudders even.

I've had completely meaningless sex without a trace of intimacy, but I don't believe I've ever cuddled with someone who wasn't already a close friend or family, or suffering hypothermia.

@VulgarKitten said:

@HelloRaptor said:

@VulgarKitten said:

One more: the fact that cuddleup.com exists. I wonder how legit this is!

I suppose I love that my skin didn't actually crawl completely off my body and down a drain somewhere to hide at checking out that URL.

I love that I don't remember my dreams, because they will be haunted.

You don't love a good cuddle?!

From a semi-random stranger? NNNnnnnno.

@VulgarKitten said:

One more: the fact that cuddleup.com exists. I wonder how legit this is!

I suppose I love that my skin didn't actually crawl completely off my body and down a drain somewhere to hide at checking out that URL.

I love that I don't remember my dreams, because they will be haunted.

@Silver said:

@HelloRaptor It's interesting that you bring up suspension of disbelief.

Bzzt, that was @Arkandel, I was just replying.

@Arkandel said:

Yes BUT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief .

If a person really, truly can't suspend their disbelief that an alien technology that stores important data in the genetic code of a living creature doesn't mean that they totally leave that data behind every time they get a splinter or otherwise deposit DNA somewhere, they're pretty hopeless.

Edit: Edited because words are hard.

@Misadventure said:

I hate the art about seeking the Kryptonian DNA Archives. Having million if not billions or trillions of sequences in it, it would have to be stored in a holographic form, by which I mean that any small art of it can recreate the whole. Otherwise storing it in the blood is asking fr it to leak out, or be eliminated as the cells renew.

Blood. From Kal-el. Like the kind left on their spaceship floor early on,. Like the sample that could have been taken peacefully then.

You clearly don't have a firm grasp on how DNA-data encryption works. Not that you can be blamed, since it's make-believe.

@Coin said:

Though Metropolis and Gotham, whenever they have been given actual locations in the DC Universe, have been twin cities on opposite sides of the Delaware.

@Coin
Then why on earth is Bruce Wayne depicted on multiple occasions as having to take a private jet to Metropolis? Because that's a thing that has happened a lot, and that doesn't really seem like 'requires a plane trip' levels of distance, unless I'm vastly underestimating the Delaware.

Especially considering that there have been multiple matters of large scale devastation to both cities on more than one occasion, even in crossover Batman/Superman comic events, that people in the other city were only aware of from seeing it on television.

Ugh. I don't think you're wrong, I'm sure it's been shown that way in the past if you say it has, but goddamnit that makes no sense in the comics even.

Edit: Apparently this has been covered, bah.

@Ganymede

They are price-gouging the fuck out of the Americans, that's where. What the drug companies won't tell you is that several of them are heavily-invested in a variety of generic manufacturers. So, the generics aren't really competing against them: they are actually demonstrating how badly American consumers are getting price-gouged.

This. Forever this. >_<

@Luna

Why should someone who devotes so much of their life caring for others be relegated to chump change? I've done taxes for doctors.

This is kind of a fucked up thing, because while that's true, it's also very much not true.

For instance, according to economists it's estimated that 21% of doctors in the United States are in the top 1% of income earners (by comparison, lawyers comprise only 12%). However it's also true that general primary care physicians make pay that lags vastly behind that of specialist doctors, and that after including the costs of school loans and other factors (like you mentioned) those general practitioners often take hom far less than what most people expect when they think of 'rich doctors', even making less than general care physicians in other countries.

But it's also true that that's very rarely the case for specialists, who commonly bring in six figures, and 70% of the doctors in the United States are specialists. At least according to Forbes in 2013. I doubt that's changed much in the last 2 years.

So our general care doctors get paid less than general care doctors in other countries, but our specialists get paid more than specialists in other countries, and our distribution of general to specialist is a 70/30 split. Which is why whenever people argue about how much 'doctors' make it's often both sides (too much vs too little) that are correct, at least in the US.

Don't really like what they'r e doing with Gotham/Metropolis in terms of them being immediately adjacent to one another now. I realize they're both modeled after New York(ish) but ennnnh. I always preferred to think of them more like New York (Metropolis) / Boston (Gotham).

I don't have a problem with the palette or tone, though. Batman and Superman have both taken that tone before (hell, Batman has lived in it for decades at a time), as have some of the retreads of their direct conflicts, so it works for me.

Keep in mind that I'm a heathen who not only loved pretty much everything about Man of Steel, but thought the end with Zod was basically epic and spot on. It wasn't the first time Superman had killed someone, not even the first time he'd killed Zod, so people griping about that always seemed way off base to me.

@Ganymede said:

@Shebakoby said:

There's maybe only one thing that the US system, as flawed as it is, has over the Canadian system. Money available for R&D. * * *

Canada still doesn't have this technology.

It's entirely possible that the technology you've suggested isn't commercially viable. While the process may be superior to balloon angioplasty, there may still be a cost-benefit issue. It's more than probable that the reason no province has approved of the procedure is because the benefit is substantially outweighed by the cost. An efficient system does not always use the best available technology.

While his specific example is perhaps poorly formed, the leading statement he made isn't, really. The US health care system has had many, many, many, many, many flaws, but the 'private money' thrown at medical R&D isn't exactly one of them. Sort of. For a very long time the US has been the primary source of new drugs, tech, and procedures, vastly ahead of any competing nation (or continent for that matter, which is a weird comparison that gets made).

Canada, the UK, Japan, nobody has come close to the amount of money and resources the private sector in the US throws at medical R&D. The problem with that being that since they frequently have control over the research and early results, companies can (and have) put a boot on cheaper, more effective drugs, procedures, etc because it might cost them money. Less than people often think, but it happens.

Even with that, though, the investment of private money into medical research in the US has basically advanced and refined medicine and health care globally on a level well beyond any other contributing nations. Supposedly that's starting to change, but it's still true today. Part of it is just how much money the private sector in the US has to throw around, but part of it (which is what I believe he was getting at) is that countries that want to avoid private investment in health care... well, they want to avoid private investment in health care.

A lot of the hype over Canadian doctors 'defecting' to the US to practice is nonsense, but it's marginally more true when you're talking about doctors who want to work on developing new or refining old. Either is very expensive, and you're far more likely to find funding in the US, if you're willing to accept the risks involved (a corporate entity having a stake in your work, and the ability to strangle it if they find it necessary).

Disclaimer: I think the US health care system pre-Obamacare is pretty shit. Even post-Obamacare, for a lot of folks (like me). I am not a knee-jerk MURICA IS THE GREATEST sort, nor hyper critical of the Canadian system (though I have been in the past, when I lived in Alaska, due to RL friends with bad experiences).

@Roz said:

pick up color palette, hand to Zack Snyder I think you dropped this

It's probably hard to juggle both that and his giant armfuls of money. A guy only has so many hands.

@VulgarKitten said:

Today's Hate: Why is there no cam copy of Magic Mike XXL for us agoraphobes??

Suffer! People who perpetuate the cam release scene should all suffer.

Not that I've got anything against piracy, but cams? Ugh. Wait for the BR rip. Watching cams is like eating cockroaches. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

@BetterJudgment

I can't find any references to Sea-Med or to this alternative to balloon angioplasty you mentioned.

Really? Because it took me two googles and a couple of click-throughs worth of effort to find out that the company was called 'SeaMED' and got acquired by and folded into Plexus Corp, and the device was called the Rotoblator Rotational Angioplasty System, whose patent was sold to and is now held by the Boston Scientific Corporation.

From other articles it looks as if it's not strictly an alternative in the sense that a lot of doctors aren't trained in its use anywhere but in the US, and even in the US the balloon method is still pretty common because the rotational system requires a lot of training, and the original method 'works well enough'.

I will admit to conformational bias. My bias is, frankly, that much of the time you're just talking shit.

Maybe you're bad at google? That or you just didn't try very hard because you just wanted an excuse to justify your knee jerk attack on somebody who dared to criticize the Canadian health care system.

I also couldn't find anything like the second story and didn't expect to

Funny how when you go into things with expectations, they're so easy to meet. Unfortunately, I've only got so much time or patience for fact checking assholes today, so you're on your own for that one.

@thebird said:

@Arkandel
So excited.

I dunno if I'd say I'm excited, but I'm defs interested in what they do with it. While I didn't like the first book all that much, I liked a number of those that followed, and have generally found the setup of the world, it's lore, history, magic, etc to be pretty cool.

My housemate despises it because she can't see it as anything but a Tolkien ripoff, but even when I read both as a kid it never really felt that way to me, even though as an adult there's obviously some easy parallels to make. But then there's easy parallels to make between Tolkien and basically any epic fantasy that came after him.

@WTFE said:

@Ganymede said:

@Corruption said:

We were scheduled for a noon pickup. We finally got home around 2PM. I was beyond pissed and filed a complaint. Of course, that had no effect. FUCK this cheapass, moronic service.

This is what happens when you privatize what has traditionally been a public good.

You don't understand! Privatization is always more efficient, and always provides better service than publicly-funded stuff!

The Tea Party tells me this!

Hospitals in the US certainly did an awesome job as for-profit entities for a long time. A++.

Linkin Park - In The End - Ten Second Songs in 20 styles.

He's done this for different songs, and some of them are funnier than others, but this one had me laugh in a few places.

Newest ERB for those who haven't caught it yet:

Western vs Eastern Philosophers

Nietzsche, Socrates, and Voltaire vs Laozi, Sun Tzu, and Confucius.

And if you missed the one before that, and you shouldn't have, it was Robocop vs The Terminator.

@surreality said:

@Sunny said:

I love you guys, thanks. I know it's just a signal of where I am right now, but reading all y'all saying horrible things about them is rather cathartic, and CERTAINLY makes me feel vindicated. I totally got a laugh out of it, too.

See, we can all be mean for you in this instance. Many of us are quite good at it!

Fresh peeve: Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy does everything seem to break at once? Seriously, I think my bathroom just decided to disassemble itself practically overnight. First the shelf with the bajillion makeup pencils collapsed in an explosion of chaos, then the tub rack whined in that oh-so-special metallic way before collapsing on me (in the tub, grr-clonk), and the roomie decided to start shuffling things randomly from the hall into the (tiny! house built in the 40s...) marginal floor space.

Obstacle courses can be fun, but not in bathrooms.

My eyes skipped over the 'makeup' part of that and I was like "Why does she have a shelf with a bajillion pencils in her bathroom?" for a good minute or so before I caught it.

@Coin said:

I see you got some sleep.

Managed to stay up till 12:30, then slept like a log till 9. Hurray!

@Thenomain said:

@Ganymede said:

The term "accuracy" in context refers to whether the opinion is a fact.

I'm not so sure; let's discuss this theory.