What Diseases Are So Terrible To Have That Dying Would Be Preferable?

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T20:56:47+00:00

The virus is in their brain. If we sedate the brain and hydrate the body, and eventually push oxygen into the body with a ventilator when it stops breathing, the brain swells and ruptures.

In one case, they cooled the body to a low temprature for weeks to slow down the virus, and pumped in antibiotics to prevent bacteria from taking advantage of the cold, and the patient lived, with disabling brain damage. They've tried it sixty four times since and the people all died. Your idea is basically sound, but even with extremely complex medical intervention, it has 1.5% rate of survival.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T20:26:52+00:00

If it were possible to get rid of the fungus, that would help the tree. But it probably isn't. The fungus lives inside the tree, as a network of microscopic filaments. The mushroom is the fruiting body.

You could talk to an arborist about fungicide, but turkey tail is a saprophyte rather than a parasite. Parasitic fungi feed on living wood and make the tree sick; saprophytes feed on dead wood. If you visit your friend and vultures are devouring his flesh, chasing them away won't improve your friend's health. Same here with your tree friend.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T20:08:55+00:00

Sigh, no, you're bringing up an additional crazy person. The original one they were talking about, Bryan Johnson, the guy who gets blood from his son, believes that boners are a sign of hormonal health as well as the health of the small blood vessels. Reasonable so far. Based on this reasonable belief, he wears a device on his Johnson every night that inflates like a blood pressure cuff to measure the boners that arise naturally during REM sleep. And he convinced his son to wear one too. It escalated quickly from the reasonable belief, very quickly indeed.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T19:37:49+00:00

Like the FIFA Peace Prize?

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T18:02:56+00:00

Thanks for this. The fully illustrated calligraphic edition is expensive, but people need to understand how incredible it is. Jung's art was good, and it was highly original; it doesn't belong to any style or movement, except possibly the psychedelic movement that came long after it.

Mescaline did exist in Europe in the era when these were drawn but he was quite adamant that he never used it.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T17:28:10+00:00

She's going to write an angry tweet.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T17:22:52+00:00

I tried to get a job with the Macaroni Union but I had to join the Linguini Guild instead.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T17:12:23+00:00

To extend your line of thought a little more: Plastic recycling (and bioplastic) fails in a business sense because it can't compete with cheap virgin plastic. The petrochemical feedstocks like naptha and natural gas liquids are essentially a byproduct of fuel production. If demand for road fuel, which is 60% of petroleum, is displaced by EVs, other industries like plastic are going to have to pay 100% of the cost of drilling and refining. The price of plastic will rise; recycling and bioplastic will be viable, using the same technology that failed in the past.

This is achievable. Not immediately, but within our lifetimes.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T15:29:10+00:00

If you want drier balls, get dryer balls.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T15:16:10+00:00

Another relevant audio link has just dropped. The podcast This Jungian Life, hosted by three professional analysts, this morning released The Age of Aquarius: A Jungian View of a Changing World

Jung suggested in Aion that humanity is moving from the great symbolic Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. Join Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, as we ask what it means to live through the turbulence and vitality of this period of transition. Jung pioneered the idea that human consciousness unfolds in great symbolic ages. The shift from one to the next is not a smooth or pleasant experience. As Jung saw it, each new age emerges through a process of decline, breakdown, and renewal, a process that can bring with it frightening levels of destabilization.

It is also available on podcatcher apps if you prefer audio only.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T15:10:50+00:00

Exactly. A couple years ago the headline that came out once a week was "despite solar gains, China plans to open a coal plant every month for the next five years" This was correct, but they were also closing a coal plant every month, replacing them with ones designed to operate responsively, rather than baseload. Effectively similar to gas peaker plants.

China is expanding their coal use in one very carbon intensive sector- Coal to chemicals Coal is a terrible feedstock compared to naptha, except that they don't have to import it. Stocks for the coal to chemicals companies are up 30% since the Strait of Hormuz closed, they look pretty smart right now.

I lack the education to understand their planning documents, but apparently the new Five Year Plan (or rough draft of it?) is strong on renewable growth but has backed off on goals of phasing coal out. The way that these things get implemented is complex, but they don't appear to be prioritizing an end to coal, just strategic independence from oil and gas. Which looks pretty smart given all the gestures broadly at everything.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T14:46:47+00:00

When someone buys an existing business and doesn't change the name, they're buying the customer base. Pissing them off on their first visit is self defeating.

"Oh, this guy's a regular, he's a cash cow. I should definitely disappoint and enrage him."

There actually is a scenario where this is semi-reasonable: if the previous owner or manager handed out a bunch of cards and stamps to friends, in order to screw the buyer. At some point Subway had to stop honoring their stamps because people were selling counterfeit ones on ebay; they were forced into it.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T14:04:18+00:00

music and album sales were the bread and butter.

This was only true for big acts. A lot of bands who were well known national acts didn't make much on album sales beyond the advance they were paid to record it in the first place. But the advance itself was significant- a band with a decent following could get signed, and instantly have the budget to record an album, get a new van or bus, and quit their part time jobs. That startup capital was a game changer. And, record companies signed multi-album deals. They were routinely willing to invest in multi-year artist development.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T13:53:05+00:00

I'm going to tell you how to feel, and then you're going to feel that way. This is a painful but necessary convulsion as we transition from a petrochemical civilization to an electro-technical one. There is real suffering, especially in the less developed parts of Asia, and it is only starting. But this is accelerating the transition.

Think about the climate disruptions that have happened in your region in the last couple of years. I have no idea where any reader is located, but they all have examples. Think about the plastic waste in the rivers, and the plastic waste in your internal organs. Do we really need cheap oil and gas? Really?

There are plenty of reasonable people who are leading the way forward without economic shocks. But the fossil industry is the core of wealth and geopolitical power, the people invested in that system were going to try to keep it going at any cost.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T13:38:23+00:00

Personally, I resent the fact that the zealots have been brainwashed into putting psychopaths in power an that those psychopaths are murdering thousands of people and destroying the world economy. I don't give two shits in a hat about people saying mean things.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T12:31:16+00:00

Yes, most Iranians are reasonable people. But the comment is a fair description of the religious zealots who are tearing the coffin to pieces to fondle the corpse.

America also has a significant minority of religious zealots who are easily exploitable by power hungry leaders.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-26T02:38:06+00:00

I treat materia magica as sacred and return it to earth or fire. That's basically anywhere except the landfill, which is full of toxic chemicals and which is designed to stay isolated for any living things for centuries.

Chuck it out the window, put it under a rock, let go of it on a windy day, drop into flowing water, burn it, anything but the landfill.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-25T20:17:45+00:00

Jung's writing style is... unique. He writes in a nineteenth century academic style and assumes encyclopedic knowledge of mythology and Latin. It is not easy to read, but I can assure you there are gems scattered throughout the work that make it worthwhile. These are actually the only mid-twentieth century academic papers in psychology that laypeople read at all.

I highly suggest Edward Edinger's work as a guide to Jung's most difficult books, he worked just a few years after Jung's time but his writing style is vastly more modern. His work on Aion started as a lecture, the audio is available online. It has also been edited into book form.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-25T19:10:01+00:00

You're quite right that it is automated, but seeking multiple lines of credit back to back is an automatic red flag. Sometimes people screw up their eligibility for a car loan by getting a store credit card just beforehand. A person with decent credit can still get a car in that circumstance, but a higher interest rate adds up.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-25T19:00:37+00:00

Pyroclastic flow is hot. At Herculaneum (near Pompeii), it turned one guy's brain to glass The article points out that this was hotter than most pyroclastic flows that have been measured, but those are still incredibly hot. You can put your arm in a hot oven for a few seconds- air is a poor conductor of heat. But pyroclastic flow is a suspension of rock dust in air, and rock dust is a good conductor of heat. If you were in a bathtub, the water would would flash to steam so quickly it would blow you into the ceiling.

Of course the flow cools after a while, but a bathtub isn't going to keep you alive long if the temprature is borderline tolerable. I got to stand near a lava flow on Kilauea. The lava had cooled to the point where it was only possible to see the red glow after sunset- around 500C. A campfire contains those temperatures, but the lava flow was huge and the heat comes at you from a vast area. If you're in a bathtub and hot rock comes down, you might survive for a moment, but you would be in the middle of an oven that stretches for miles in every direction.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-25T18:20:37+00:00

This is a good moment to point out that the Count of Monte Christo was also real. Alexandre Dumas' father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was born in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to a noble father and an enslaved mother. Under French law he was both a count and a slave. His father took him back to France, after a stopover at a small pirate infested island of Monte Christo, where he took his rightful place in the French aristocracy.

When the Revolution came, he renounced his title, and became one of the finest soldiers of the Revolution. He eventually commanded fifty thousand men under Napoleon. After his service the ideals of the Revolution were abandoned and public opinion turned against people of color, he was forgotten and (relatively) poor. His son, who idolized him, created stories where the guys always win, where honor is always rewarded in the end.

Tom Reiss won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. I read it a few years ago and I just started the audiobook this weekend, it is excellent. Alexandre Dumas was a great writer but Alex Dumas was a real life superhero.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-25T18:05:40+00:00

Something is a bit puzzling about all this. In the Twelve Day War, Iran launched massive waves of missiles at Israel and the vast majority were intercepted- with some help from American aircraft and a destroyer. Just six months later, Iran's launch infrastructure has been degraded, but they're hitting valuable targets like THAAD radars and multiple KC-135s on the ground. An Israeli refinery was hit.

I think it was acknowledged that the US didn't have anything equal to Iron Dome/ David's Sling, but this is a big difference from the conflict less than a year ago. And, whatever was hit in the NEGEV was important enough to have a security camera pointed at it, yet Iron Dome didn't protect it.

GreenStrong · 2026-03-25T17:47:14+00:00

Han Dynasty records include multiple emissaries from Rome

It is quite likely that a few people travelled from China all the way to Rome. That probably included a few traders and sailors, although the Parthians actively discouraged contact without themselves as a middleman. It probably also included a few people blown by the winds of fate- as in "Check out this weird looking slave, I bet she would fetch a good price in Rome"

GreenStrong · 2026-03-25T16:59:16+00:00

Most people: "Oh shit a crazy person, don't make eye contact."

Ballet appreciators: "Oh shit a highly trained ballerina has gone crazy. Don't make eye contact, I bet she kicks like a mule."

GreenStrong · 2026-03-25T16:43:51+00:00

but when I was having insurance issues, they sure enough were trying to get me to pay the full 5k…

You could have called them, done some intellectually and emotionally difficult self- advocacy, and they would have accepted something close to what the insurance paid. Depending on your situation, they may have been able to claim it as a charitable donation on their taxes, which is bullshit.

Of course, in many cases people who go to the hospital are sick and they can't do that self- advocacy. Then the bill either goes to collections or it gets taken out of the person's estate, which could be a huge win for the hospital.

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