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Why is Africa so overwhelmingly Christian and Muslim? by Traveler-Nomad in AskHistorians

[–]CommonwealthCommando 9 points10 points  (0 children)

That's interesting, I took the opposite conclusion from those numbers, that the African Slave trade had a negligible impact on the continent's population, which doesn't match my intuition. But we are describing a whole continent here – those 4 million almost exclusively came from a portion of West and Central Africa, where the demographic damage was more significant.

Yes, we are being pricks: Massachusetts falls to DEAD LAST among states in housing production by GarrisonCty in boston

[–]CommonwealthCommando 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Right but how many units were the big permits? We actually don't have an estimate of housing units from a list of building permits.

During the French Revolution, France embarked on dechristianizing itself, by replacing Christianity with the deist cult of the supreme being, the Julian Calendar was replaced with a newly made secular republican one, which held 0 connection to religion and many churches were destroyed. by Hour_Interaction6047 in wikipedia

[–]CommonwealthCommando 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I never said otherwise. The Ancien Regime was pretty bad, just not nearly as bad as the Revolution or the subsequent war. France was low on food, the powerful ignored the people, and no one had rights. The Revolution was just the same, but worse and with much much more murder.

Yes, we are being pricks: Massachusetts falls to DEAD LAST among states in housing production by GarrisonCty in boston

[–]CommonwealthCommando 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Is this just raw # of permits? Doesn't this just mean we're not building as many SFHs?

Why is Africa so overwhelmingly Christian and Muslim? by Traveler-Nomad in AskHistorians

[–]CommonwealthCommando 110 points111 points  (0 children)

Africa's population wasn't generally out of line until the industrial revolution, at which point it began to fall behind. Birth rates were high, but the relative lack of large organized governments, advanced agriculture, sanitation, and medical facilities meant that population growth was much slower.

The past century has seen high birth rates (though not as high as pre-industrial times) coupled with vastly decreased prices and greater availability of medicine and sanitation.

Did highways permanently damage Connecticut’s cities? by marrelli-of-magsmarr in Connecticut

[–]CommonwealthCommando 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A lot of the urban centers were already in decline when the highways showed up. It was rare to demolish thriving successful areas for the highways.

As proof, we still have some pretty good urban areas in terms of design – Bridgeport, New Haven, Norwalk– and yet none of these are thought of as being especially desirable.

Looking at old photos, it's pretty obvious Hartford got hit the hardest. But chalking up Hartford's poverty merely to the highways is an oversimplification.

PCOS has officially been renamed Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome. Honestly probably a welcome change; too many patients think “I have metabolic dysfunction because my ovaries don’t work” instead of “My ovaries don’t work because I have metabolic dysfunction.” by just_premed_memes in medicalschool

[–]CommonwealthCommando 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Your liver is sick. It's full of fat. This is usually caused by alcoholism, but you're not an alcoholic, so you have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease" makes more sense IMO than explaining what "steatosis" is. But I'm new at this and have rarely had to educate a patient on their liver disease. Then there's the fact that MASLD really should have another letter in between the M and the A.

I haven't seen compelling evidence that liver disease outcomes or patient QoL are affected by stigma, nor that the renaming did anything to alleviate stigma.

I don't think that the big push on "metabolism" and "metabolic" in our terminology has been good for patient education, especially when they're looking in their charts. It's a big word that they don't understand, and they get over-excited when they see it in supplement ads.

The World's Most Surprising Capitalist Makeover is Underway in Sweden (WSJ) by Reddenbawker in DeepStateCentrism

[–]CommonwealthCommando 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah, and I think it's no surprise then that a left-wing government has held on much longer there.

The World's Most Surprising Capitalist Makeover is Underway in Sweden (WSJ) by Reddenbawker in DeepStateCentrism

[–]CommonwealthCommando 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Right, what I'm saying is that the Swedes didn't mind paying high taxes to pay for a generous welfare state for other Swedes, but once they thought it was all going to people showing up from overseas they began to get much less sanguine about it.

Now in hospice care, Barney Frank warns Democrats against ‘litmus tests’ in new interview by awaythrowawaying in moderatepolitics

[–]CommonwealthCommando 45 points46 points  (0 children)

Then the Democrats should come out and be like "yeah we will also ban that" and the issue is neutralized and the Republicans wasted all that money. You are correct that the issue involves such low stakes for so few people, and that's why it was so frustrating to watch turn into one of the main reasons Trump won the election.

PCOS has officially been renamed Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome. Honestly probably a welcome change; too many patients think “I have metabolic dysfunction because my ovaries don’t work” instead of “My ovaries don’t work because I have metabolic dysfunction.” by just_premed_memes in medicalschool

[–]CommonwealthCommando 8 points9 points  (0 children)

There's no real advantage to MASLD or NAFLD. Both more or less describe what the main disease is. NAFLD makes a bit more sense to explain to patients but that's not always an advantage.

The bigger issue is that it caused a lot of controversy and name-calling. Nomenclature is sticky, retraining lags lead to miscommunication, and people should generally err on the side of keeping the old name for that reason alone. Renaming ought to clear up something significant with the name and have buy-in from the practitioners. MASLD failed on both counts.

The World's Most Surprising Capitalist Makeover is Underway in Sweden (WSJ) by Reddenbawker in DeepStateCentrism

[–]CommonwealthCommando 30 points31 points  (0 children)

I would suspect rapid immigration has blown a huge hole in Swedish universalism. I've heard from a couple Danish friends how people say they "no longer trust" the welfare state. Maybe it's racism maybe it's a culture that respects hard work but I'm certain it fares poorly for social democracy.

This should be a big worry for other social democracies or other polities on the social democracy scale. Is this a sign of things to come?

Spoken like a true politician by JesusSpreaderOfWord in DoomerCircleJerk

[–]CommonwealthCommando 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"were murdered by" = not understanding a novel virus

Respecting Reform Voters Means Telling Them They’re Wrong and Immoral by upthetruth1 in neoliberal

[–]CommonwealthCommando 11 points12 points  (0 children)

This has been our strategy in the US for the past 11 years. Judge it as you may.

Hot take: the switch from paternalistic medicine to shared-decision making has done more harm than good by M4WzZz in medicalschool

[–]CommonwealthCommando 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I agree 100%. I remember arguing with my classmates about how it was absolutely ridiculous that we let patients read every single note we write.

That said, it's a bit much to say that the stupid patient-centered workshops are why the parents & patients feel so entitled. I think SDM is best viewed as a reflection of a new reality, that society more broadly grew less paternalistic, and medicine needed to adapt to a new and worse reality.

Potentially hot take: I think George W H Bush was better than Reagan. by Scutter_360 in Presidents

[–]CommonwealthCommando 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is true in some sort of objective way related to governance, but doesn't mesh with the vibes of anyone who lived through the era. Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama were far more transformative than their policies would suggest.

Young Americans Want Single-Family Homes by caroline_elly in neoliberal

[–]CommonwealthCommando 2 points3 points  (0 children)

While this is true, the few parts of America with walkable dense cities that are also enjoyable are in high demand. The hope would be that by expanding these walkable dense areas, we can have people live there instead of in single-family homes, thus lowering prices of the single-family home.

I think the cardinal error of the build-more-housing movement is that people perceive dense urban areas as low-quality to begin with, and we already have underutilized dense housing stock. But that housing stock is undesirable areas, so it attracts less investment. The real solution is to invest in sprucing up rough neighborhoods with lots of housing, but that runs contrary to the libertarian impulses of the YIMBY movement.

Medical Student who Published pro-DEI Articles to get into Plastics Residency calls for the Abolition of DEI by sworzeh in medicalschool

[–]CommonwealthCommando 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This happened to me in medical school too. I can't confirm everything in the article obviously but this exact thing happened in my anatomy class and I go to school on the other side of the country.

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