Can you imagine what it’d be like if mandatory childhood vaccines are eliminated? Can you imagine what a resurgence of measles or even polio would be like?!
No, you probably can’t, because vaccines made them non-issues before most of us were even born. And now they might come back because some dullard thinks he knows better than actual doctors and scientists. Dunning and Kruger must be crying themselves to sleep these days.
Decades of propaganda have convinced Christians that Republican=Christian, and the last decade of propaganda have convinced them that Trump is a good Christian man anointed by God and all the bad stuff they might hear about him is just Democrat lies. Many, if not most, honestly don’t know the half of Trump’s evils, let alone believe them.
Except China is doing exactly that, and it has been known for years, with multiple US federal agencies taking various steps to counteract it. E.g.:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-role-in-the-fentanyl-crisis/
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/16/1244964595/fentanyl-china-precursor-overdose
China, specifically the CCP, has an obvious interest in weakening the US, and has demonstrated that they have no qualms with injuring people to achieve their ends (for further reading, look up Hong Kong, the Uygher people, and Tibet). (And no, before you think it, I’m not saying that getting poor white Americans addicted to opioids is equivalent to genocide of Uyghers.) We have a massive opioid crisis in the US, and it has been fueled in the last few years by fentanyl. Virtually all of the illicit opioids available here now contain fentanyl or are comprised entirely of fentanyl, and it’s routinely found contaminating other drugs.
It’s a problem that is recognized by both parties. To say “China is flooding the country with illegal drugs” is, yes a gross oversimplification of the problem, but it’s a simple narrative the Republicans can use to try to convince their voter base that tariffs are somehow a sensible course of action. If their voter base was wont to grasp and meaningfully contemplate complex geopolitical issues, they’d never have voted Republican in the first place.
So, not exactly what you’re asking, but: I worked for 4 years as a psych tech before becoming a nurse, then switched to ED when I graduated. It took a solid 6 months in ED to start feeling like I had any idea what I was doing and not feel like I was in a panic every single day, then another 6 months before I started feeling actually somewhat comfortable. Part of this is because I was a new nurse, and part of it was because ED has a steep learning curve (the orientation period was 5 months iirc). I suspect it would have been an easier transition to ED if I had already had some experience as a nurse on something like a med-surg or cardiac unit. I switched back to psych as a RN and it really only took a few weeks before I was “standing on my feet” as it were, but I already had a good deal of psych experience from being a tech and I wasn’t a new-grad nurse anymore.
What do you mean by dedication? As in time/effort to acquire the necessary skills/knowledge, or emotional fortitude? Definitely oncology and hospice require a lot of the latter, as you and death will become familiar company. ED sees a fair amount of death and it tends to be constant demands, constant action, with days where you wont have a chance to catch your breath. Psych can be soul-sucking at times and tends to be at higher risk of violence from patients, but there’s also a lot less dying or cleaning up of blood and feces. How much dedication a specialty might take will depend in large part on what your strengths are and what you can tolerate or are willing to put up with. I hated ED because of the constant pressure and never knowing what will come through the door next, but I love psych despite often having to work with people with aggression problems and having been hit a few times.
Are you thinking of changing specialties? What’s your motivation? What do you want to do now, and do you have something particular in mind? I suspect the ease of transition will mostly depend on what experience you already have and how much skill/knowledge overlap there is with the new specialty.
Some people are in to that.
The only way it gets easy is by going through it repetitiously until you’ve become desensitized. Which is obviously easier said than done. It’s a gradual process and will often involve periods of regression in between periods of progress, but if you’ve been through years of fixing then you probably know this. Are therapy or medications an option for you? They can make the process easier.
Look at the shorter fence in the foreground. It looks like the space between the two fences is probably a line between the properties, and the neighbor did their fence backwards from what you’re imagining, whereas the foreground fence is oriented the way you’d expect.
We use it the same way here in the US medical system.
I don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. Current “AI” based on LLM’s have no capacity for understanding of the knowledge they contain (hence all the “hallucinations”), and thus possess no meaningful intelligence. To call it intelligent is purely marketing.
For all his faults and evils, Vance is not a narcissist who pathologically seeks the approval of those he sees as high status, which is what has compelled Trump to try so hard to be buddies with dictators. Vance is more cunning than Trump and would need to have a profit motive beyond just an ego stroking before putting his position at risk (even if the risk is evidently slight, but his relatively low popularity / lack of cult following makes me think/hope he’d have a harder time getting away with stuff than Trump). I suspect most dictators don’t have much to offer Vance in the way of profit that he couldn’t just as easily secure for himself as president without the personal risks of selling out the country to foreign adversaries, and the most salacious scandal we’ve heard about him has to do with a couch rather than Epstein so the kompromat is probably minimal or nil.
Don’t get me wrong, a President Vance would be awful in a lot of ways, and arguably worse than Trump in some ways. It’s just that I don’t imagine him as being quite as much of a national security risk. But, again, maybe it’s just naive hope. 🤷
I suspect (naively hope?) Vance would be less inclined to just hand over national security information to Putin, so … maybe two benefits?
Or if it is Trump’s fault, it’s actually a 4D chess move that will make things better in the end, we’re just too dumb and educated to understand.
And immigrants. And occasionally black people.
90 years ago the entire US population was less than that 140 million, let alone eligible voters. Percentage of eligible voters would make a better argument than absolute numbers when you’re comparing over time.
That said, 140m versus 158m is a huge drop. An astonishing drop. The final total could still amount to a >10% reduction in turnout, despite a slight increase in the number of eligible voters. I don’t understand how that could be viewed as not sad, regardless of who you vote for.
Some people are genuinely apathetic or feel like it doesn’t directly impact their life, but a lot of people fall for the propaganda of “both sides are the same” and that it makes no difference either way, and a lot of people are intentionally disenfranchised by various voter suppression efforts by Republicans. Then there’s the electoral college nonsense which leaves the populace of 43 states with essentially no say in who the president is, leading some to wonder why they should bother, not being mindful that their vote may carry weight for the federal legislature and state/local elections. And many people are just too busy surviving to worry about anything else.
For my part, voting straight Democrat in a heavily Republican-leaning state, my vote literally means nothing at all because my state will inevitably give all of its electoral college votes to Trump, and will elect nothing but Republicans to the federal legislature and for almost all state/local offices. But I voted on the first day of early voting, and I will vote in every election, because we have to show support for change if we ever want there to be change. There are enough left-leaning people in my state for it to be a swing state (hell, we had a Democrat for governor 2003-2011, and he was popular), but so many see their votes as meaningless simply because their fellow left-leaners also aren’t voting…
Maybe one day they’ll enjoy it enough to elect representatives who will try to extend democracy to the rest of us by eliminating gerrymandering and the electoral college.
Do you remember that time Biden rode a bike? With a helmet of all things? So weak. Not like that Putin fellow who rides HORSES without a helmet OR EVEN A SHIRT. So stronk. Much manly.
Well, you see, the Dems control the justice department because deep state hunter’s laptop biden crime family buttery males, q.e.d. the poll monitors were only there to rig it for the Dems. Pizza gate!
CPR. Doing 2-3 chest compressions, seconds apart, and then some mouth to mouth, followed by 2-3 more chest compressions. Or the needle into the heart thing. Or the shock a flatline thing. All of it. It’s just all wrong.
On Andromeda? I believe it was, a villain used the stereotypical twist the head to break the neck and they fall over dead bit. The character proceeded to be not dead and did the stereotypical express their love while dying in the protagonist’s arms bit, talking and moving their neck as if it wasn’t broken. And then died.
In the mental health field in particular, it’s not unusual to list various not-a-diagnosis problems, stress factors, life circumstances type things, in the diagnosis list (see also: social determinants of health). E.g., a lot of my patients are homeless, and I also work with a lot of forensic patients, so their diagnosis lists often includes “homeless” or “legal problem”. Which, obviously, aren’t actual diagnoses, but it’s often the best way to communicate to other members of the care team or future caregivers what the major factors are influencing a patient’s health. For many people, “low income” is a major source of stress which drives or exacerbates their mental health problems, so it does make sense to include if the therapist thinks it’s a factor.
Now, why it’s the only item listed is another question entirely. It could be a quirk of whatever system they use for patients to view their records; with the electronic medical record system my employer uses, on some screens it only shows the first item in the diagnosis list, so if I put in “homeless” first then that’s all I would see on some pages. The system isn’t smart enough to know what’s an actual diagnosis or not, so it relies on humans to put in the data correctly.