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Cake day: August 4th, 2024

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  • America is not a meritocracy. It is big racist misogynist shithole with misogynist racists usually in charge of selection processes. “But we have legal protections against that!” you cry. Yeah, as long as you can prove it. If they don’t say something or leave a paper trail, you can’t prove shit. The system is still absolutely rigged against minorities and women and set up in a way that protections against any form of bigotry are so fucking vague as to be virtually unenforceable in all cases except the most extreme. Affirmative action is one of the ways to combat that. It, too, is not a perfect answer, but it is better than letting the bigots win. Indeed, the end game of Affirmative Action is to get enough women and minorities lifted up that the US can actually become a real meritocracy.



  • You have no idea how interconnected the world is, do you? How reliant the US is on its ports. Not just any place on a coastline is big enough to pull a cargo ship up to, as well as having the infrastructure to unload it and coordinate all that. All they have to do is hose every port capable of handling cargo ships and we are entirely fucked. The cherry on top would be nuking the oil refineries, completely wiping out our ability to move goods even if the ports were open. We will not have enough food to feed the country within a few days. Mass starvation starts a week or so afterwards. Two to three weeks later and at least a quarter or more of Americans will be dead from starvation. Then comes the massive waves of diseases due to all the unburied dead. Inside of two months at least half of America will be dead or dying. More likely to be closer to three-quarters.

    All out nuclear is not something we survive.


  • My wife has stage 4 colon cancer. One thing people who don’t know some who has had cancer don’t understand is that you can have it for a long time before it becomes so obvious that you have it. So while she has been far more susceptible to diseases before we figured it out, she found out because she went into the first stage of sepsis due to a necrotic tumor in her uterus that got infected. Sepsis isn’t a disease, it’s condition. Any infection can cause sepsis so it isn’t a symptom but something caused by the symptoms, an add on effect, if you will. If not treated in time, you die of septic shock. Again, septic shock isn’t a disease but a condition brought on by a disease. So no, dying from all diseases does not cover everything that you can die from that cancer or emphysema or COPD can have an effect on. In my wife’s case, had we waited 24 hours more, she would have likely died because her organs would have started failing due to acidosis. Again, not a disease, a condition. Even if they had been able to treat her in time, her cancer would have likely made their treatments less effective than as they would have been for someone without cancer.

    Let me try to put it in better terms. A disease can create a condition which can have a negative effect on the body. This condition is not necessarily solely caused by that disease, so it isn’t a symptom. This condition, like acidosis of the blood, can then go on to create further problems, like organ failures, which you can die of. So in this example, the cause of death is organ failure, not acidosis, not the disease. and not the cancer. Without the cancer, the disease might not have spread as fast or happened at all. And thus, quitting smoking improves your chances of not dying from all causes, not just all diseases.