Carl

Shot in the dark here, but consider L-methylfolate supplements. It’s the methylated form of folic acid (vitamin B9). Your symptoms line up extremely well with someone who is suffering from non-methylated folic acid, due to a mutation on the MTHFR gene.

Your body can’t use folic acid as-is. It needs to methylate it with an enzyme in your bloodstream (turning it into L-methylfolate) before it becomes biologically available.

Your body uses this biologically available L-methylfolate to break down something called homocysteine, which is a byproduct of producing DNA during cell replication. So the symptoms are caused by a 1-2 punch of your body working harder to replicate cells (because it doesn’t have the folic acid available to break down homocysteine when it is produced) and having too much homocysteine built up in your system (because it isn’t being broken down over time with folic acid.) High homocysteine levels contribute to all kinds of potential health effects, ranging everywhere from cardiopulmonary issues to brain fog.

And there is a gene mutation that causes you to stop producing that MTHFR enzyme, the same way you become lactose intolerant when you stop producing the enzyme to break down lactose. It usually happens in your late 20’s or early 30’s, so you’re right in expected timeframe for it to happen.

It’s not on most doctors’ radars, and testing folic acid levels on a blood test won’t help, because you probably have plenty of folic acid. Your cells simply can’t access it. So it tends to fly under the radar. Properly diagnosing it requires a gene test, which most healthcare providers won’t even think about unless you request it. Or I guess you could always just try the supplement and see if your symptoms improve.

The gene mutation is especially common in people who are AFAB, autistic, or Irish. I know because my wife is all three, and has the mutation. You can buy supplements on Amazon. Most people with the mutation take about 15mg of L-methylfolate per day, but suggest starting with about half that in the morning. It will likely keep you awake (and maybe give you a headache, oddly enough) at first, so start with just taking it in the morning. Then once you’re used to it, you can take a second one with dinner. Then you can simply move up to taking the full 15mg in the morning.

Obviously don’t start taking supplements without looking into it first. But at least this might give you another thread to tug on.

The issue is doing one at scale, with proper access controls. Also, let’s not skip past the whole “network isn’t air gapped anymore” side of things. Now you’re having to maintain firewalls, patch firmwares, manage users, enforce good password hygiene, etc… All without any additional IT support or hardware, because management is doing this as a cost cutting measure.

I can pretty much guarantee that the systems that get hacked aren’t the ones that do everything right. They’re the ones who have a single shared VPN password, haven’t updated their firewall since it was installed 8 years ago, and they haven’t even changed the default passwords for their control systems. Because they got tired of answering phone calls about what the password was, so they just made every username and password something stupid like admin/admin.

Literally this. It starts with “everything needs to be on an air gapped LAN so we can control it.” And then suddenly that air gapped LAN isn’t air gapped, because someone got tired of paying the call-out fee every time the on-call person had to drive to the site to push a few buttons on a keyboard. But figuring out a proper VPN (or at least a reverse proxy with access control) was too difficult or expensive, (management thinks the point is to save money on call out fees, not spend money on proper hardware) so they just poked a bunch of port-forwarded holes in the firewall and called it a day.

Also worth noting that this was civil court, not criminal. In criminal court, pleading the fifth simply means you’re refusing to testify against yourself. In criminal cases, you still have the presumption of innocence, so pleading the fifth isn’t an admission of guilt.

But the reason the civil/criminal distinction is notable is because civil court uses the fifth amendment against you. If you plead the fifth in civil court, jurors are instructed to presume that the testimony would be damning. The presumption of innocence doesn’t exist in civil court, so pleading the fifth isn’t going to help your case.

The only reason you would plead the fifth in civil court is to avoid having your civil testimony used against you in criminal court. For instance, if you committed a rape and end up in civil court, pleading the fifth can be a way to avoid being criminally charged with rape. Because if you admit it under oath in civil court, the criminal court can use it against you. But it will almost certainly hurt your civil case, because pleading the fifth to avoid criminal charges will have the civil courts presuming guilt.

Basically, if he plead the fifth 80 times, that was 80 times that the civil courts told jurors “presume his testimony would implicate him in {whatever he is accused of}.”

Most of my reading is done via audiobooks these days, simply because I can listen while doing other tasks. I can wash the dishes, vacuum the house, etc, and those things would normally prevent me from reading. But with audiobooks, that isn’t a concern. Once I started listening to audiobooks, my annual book count went from ~12 to +60. Simply because I don’t have enough time to dedicate just to sitting in one spot staring at pages.

For visual reading, I tend to use my kobo. I got particularly lazy about bed-reading though. I got a gooseneck mount. It attaches to my headboard, and holds my kobo wherever I want. Combine that with a Bluetooth page-turn remote, and I can comfortably lay in bed and read without even needing to keep my hands on the ereader. In terms of comfort, the mount and remote are the two single greatest investments I ever made, and they fundamentally changed the way I think about reading in bed.

“Cashless” as in “the park and vendors don’t accept cash”. Meaning if someone wants to use cash, they need to use an ATM to deposit their funds onto a card. Pretty common these days in arcades too. You deposit funds onto a play card.

The point is that instead of maintaining cash for dozens/hundreds of machines, the company is able to consolidate all of their cash into two or three machines. So now the maintenance costs are drastically lowered, as you’re not constantly emptying and repairing dozens of cash handling mechanisms. In comparison, a card reader is extremely simple and will work nearly indefinitely.

1. No, you can’t. The rules state that you need to upgrade all of your properties in a given color at the same rate. For instance, if one of your green properties has two houses while the rest have three, you have to upgrade the lowest one before you upgrade the rest. Additionally, the rules specifically state that you must have four houses before upgrading to a hotel. Your post is a great example of one of the bad house rules I originally mentioned.

I mean, The Hobbit was primarily written to be a children’s bedtime story. The fact that adults latched onto it was sort of an accident. Tolkien was primarily a linguist, not a writer. He developed several fake languages, and wanted an excuse to use them. So he did a ton of world building, just to have a reason to write song lyrics in elvish and dwarven.

The scary part about this is that he likely has zero actual support from any kinds of disability, because chronic Lyme disease isn’t officially recognized in the medical world. Or rather, they recognize that there is a correlation between Lyme and long-term impairment, but they have no treatment nor palliatives for it. So they just sort of say “deal with it. Most people can return to work after a few weeks, so you can too.”

Sort of like how long COVID affected (and still continues to affect) a sizable part of the population, but government disability in America didn’t recognize it as official so patients with long COVID had to keep going to work even when they were dealing with debilitating long-term symptoms.

Most organizations in general. There’s a quote from a career congressperson somewhere, that basically paraphrases as “when I first got into office, I tried to find the big movers. The people who really knew what they were doing. I wanted to find them so I could learn from them. And all I learned is that nobody knows what they’re doing. We’re all making it up as we go.”

And the genocide of the Native Americans. Hitler used that as the inspiration for the holocaust.

Monopoly isn’t an awful game if you actually play by the rules. It’s not great, but it’s not awful either. But most people don’t know all the rules, make up a bunch of stupid house rules, etc… And as a result, the game drags on for hours even after it’s clear who the winner will be. In reality, playing by the rules has each game lasting like 20-45 minutes.

For example, most people know that when a player lands on an unowned square, they get the option to buy it. Straightforward, right? But most people don’t realize that if that original player turns it down, it goes to auction. The players can submit bids to purchase the square, and they can start far below market value. Meaning that all of the squares should get bought relatively quickly, instead of taking like ten rounds. There is actually a strategy to refuse to buy a square, to intentionally send the property to bid, just so you can then potentially buy the properly below market value. Basically, Player A lands on a square. Player A refuses to buy the square at the market price of $1000. Player A then wins the bid at $800. Player A effectively got a $200 discount, simply by sending the property to auction.

Also, the bank can’t go bankrupt.

You can run out of houses to build. Know how you can upgrade four houses to a hotel? And the game only has 32 houses? The hotel increases the square’s rent, but returns the houses to the available pot. It’s actually a perfectly valid strategy to upgrade all of your properties to four houses, and then refuse to upgrade any of them to hotels. Since the game only has 32 houses, you can use ~7 properties to effectively lock out any hotels from being built. And since nobody can build any hotels while you’re sitting on all of the houses, your 4-house properties are effectively the most expensive in the game simply because nobody can upgrade their properties while you’re hoarding all the building materials.

Nope, I’ll spoiler the story (in increasing levels of graphic detail) below:

I can’t believe I actually typed that out three separate times… I suffered so hopefully some curious user can be spared.

Also worth noting that if this is the case, your diet will also slightly factor into it. Insulin triggers your sebaceous glands to produce sebum (skin oil), and fungus tends to thrive in oily environments (like your scalp and face), because it needs the oil to help retain moisture.

So keeping your insulin levels low (avoiding sugar and carbs, high fiber and protein, etc) will help starve the fungus out. Basically, if you see improvement from the dandruff shampoo and that gets things under control, your diet may be the difference between “spot-treating” and “completely clear”.

This means you had fungal acne. Fungal infections can cause all kinds of things, ranging from acne, athletes foot, jock itch, yeast infections, and dandruff. In fact, one of the easiest sources of anti-fungal skin treatments is anti-dandruff shampoo that contains zinc pyrithione.

OP, if you’ve tried most of the big things (it sounds like you have) and haven’t had any relief, try using some anti-dandruff shampoo as a face wash. It sounds stupid, but I swear it’s the only thing that helped me when I was a teen. I first noticed it when I used the anti-dandruff shampoo for dandruff, but then I did the typical guy thing of “use it as shampoo, conditioner, body wash, face wash, motor oil, cutting fluid, BBQ sauce, boat resin, degreaser, greaser, and garage door lube” thing. Basically, my bar of soap ran low, so I used the shampoo I already had in the shower with me. And then I started noticing that my skin was clearer too. After some googling, I discovered that fungal acne is a thing, and it’ll basically be immune to any of the traditional treatments because none of those are targeted at fungus.

If your acne improves after a few days of washing with the shampoo, you know you have fungal acne and can simply start using anti-dandruff shampoo to wash your face regularly. Technically you can get special zinc pyrithione soap… But why bother with that, when you can get Head & Shoulders in a giant pump bottle?

Piefed is problematic in its own ways, just FYI. I don’t know what it is about fediverse devs and trying to insert themselves as supermods, but the two seem to be strongly correlated.

You’re assuming it would immediately try to do something. A decent honeypot would take time to quietly gather usage data, instead of immediately phoning home.

Yup, the tankie triad: Lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad.ml

The three are pretty widely defederated. As a new user, they actually appear extremely calm and accepting. But it’s because all three are very heavily moderated, so anything outside of their extremely narrow overton window gets quashed very quickly.

Lemmy.ml is still federated by a lot of instances simply because the lead dev for Lemmy exclusively posts on .ml. So if an instance admin wants to stay on top of Lemmy development, they’re required to federate with .ml. But it’s also worth noting that any donations for lemmy’s development also go towards keeping .ml’s lights on. The dev has openly stated that he doesn’t do any kind of accounting to keep the two funding pools separated. So any donations that go towards lemmy’s development will also go towards one of the tankie instances.

Cute quip, but the trans-Atlantic slave trade was specifically trafficking slaves. I even said in my original comment that human trafficking can ferry slaves to slave owners. Human trafficking refers to the broader crime of illegally transporting humans, regardless of their status as slaves.

Someone illegally ferrying immigrants across a border is engaging in human trafficking. Are the immigrants enslaved just because they were illegally trafficked? Even if they go about their merry lives in the new country after crossing the border and shaking hands with the trafficker? Because if we define human trafficking strictly by the trade of slaves, then the immigrants who got trafficked would be slaves, right?

Someone illegally transporting their own child across country lines during a custody dispute is engaging in human trafficking. Is that child now their parent’s slave, just because they were illegally trafficked across country lines? I guess so, because trafficking equals slavery, right?

Or maybe we just accept that the two are different crimes. Words mean things, and falsely equating the two is (at best) disingenuous and misleading.

Believe it or not? Little Poop, Little Fart, Little Terror, and Little Pug. ^{(I don’t speak Dutch)}