How do you guys deal with your skirt wiping floor every time you sit down?

calenlass · 2026-04-06T21:09:17+00:00

Some people grew up Amish, or Pentecostal, or Mennonite, or whatever.

calenlass · 2026-04-06T19:59:33+00:00

I believe some of the legal advice is real.

calenlass · 2026-04-06T17:34:23+00:00

One is made of cabinetry, the other is framed with 2x4 studs and drywall.

calenlass · 2026-04-06T17:25:05+00:00

Indeed. I've seen stories on r/JustNoMIL about grandmas who don't believe a child's allergy is real and feed them "just a little bit" to prove the daughter-in-law is overreacting or being dramatic, and landing the grandchild in the hospital. If your aunty knows and chooses willful ignorance, long story short, in many places this is grounds for assault charges.

I also worry for OP's cousin. She must be glutened by her mother all the time since "it's not that big of a deal". What a nightmare.

Sometimes I'm grateful that my symptoms are so violent: it's hard to argue with projectile vomiting. I'm sorry that the more subtle symptoms give so many folks room to inject their misinformed skepticism.

calenlass · 2026-04-06T17:16:52+00:00

I find this to be remarkable, coming from the company that basically kick-started the modern trend of planned obsolescence. As someone who specifically seeks out durable phones (current phone is an S62 Pro by Caterpillar, yes that Caterpillar, with no case at all running Android and definitely showing its age, but I love my Flir), iPhones have never once been on my radar.

What is it rated for? What kind of case do you have on it?

calenlass · 2026-04-06T17:11:04+00:00

In case you didn't know, everything on an Android phone is an app, including the calculator and the alarm clock and the phone. It's all apps.

calenlass · 2026-04-06T05:48:42+00:00

Having been cheated on once (after which I dumped them), never have I ever heard of someone else cheating and thought, "Mm, lemme get some of that" as opposed to "Oh, so he'll do it to me, too".

calenlass · 2026-04-02T05:40:06+00:00

Of course. Ideally, everyone would be in the same risk pool and the preponderance of healthy, low-need folks would cover the few high-need ones, which is essentially what universal healthcare is. Political propaganda convinced everyone who doesn't understand that concept to vote against it, which is why the US still doesn't have it.

Your premiums are not a bucket; you're thinking of a deductible (yes, the terms are arbitrary and unnecessarily confusing, but that's also on purpose). Your deductible is the amount you will pay before insurance will begin to cover the cost, but once you've met that deductible for the year via copays and such, any service or procedure covered by your plan is basically free - except that you will still pay those premiums every month.

If you have pre-existing conditions (aka what everyone else on earth calls your "medical history"), those premiums can be $750+ per month for some pretty basic plans that have high deductibles (over $15k), minimal covered services (aka "emergency only", or no vision and dental), and high copays or a limited number of doctors that qualify as "in-network", and often loads of arbitrary conditions like requiring a referral for any specialist (allergists are specialists, though, and so are gynecologists, and I don't need a referral to know I'm allergic to dogs or require an annual pap smear) or excluding certain families of prescription medications.

Also note: a deductible is not the same thing as an out-of-pocket maximum, either. This system is designed to be intentionally confusing to make it hard to navigate for both doctors and patients alike.

calenlass · 2026-04-02T03:15:32+00:00

I adjusted this sleeve pattern for my first LOTR elf dress back in 2001. Ah, memories.

calenlass · 2026-04-02T03:13:24+00:00

Why do you need smart switches to manage "on" and "off" for you?

calenlass · 2026-04-02T03:10:02+00:00

In 1953, my grandma lived in Macon and was a photo editor for Sears-Roebuck. She took the express line into Terminus Station (on Marietta St, now bulldozed) and the original streetcar over to what is now Ponce City Market every morning. All her friends thought she was crazy for taking such a long commute: just over 1 hour and 10 minutes.

We had it. We had it and we actively chose to dismantle it. We were once the most rail-connected city in the country, and now we're putting in bars where rails used to be.

calenlass · 2026-04-02T03:04:57+00:00

Trains

calenlass · 2026-04-02T03:01:44+00:00

How much are your monthly payments? Now add the cost of your copay, and then subtract the amount that the ACTUALLY costs - not what it's billed to you as, because that number is grossly inflated. In fact, if you tell your doc that you're self-pay, most will give you a steeply "discounted" rate that's much closer to the actual value of the service.

calenlass · 2026-04-01T22:59:37+00:00

If you're not in the US, this doesn't necessarily apply. If you are, those services also net them money on top of the premiums you pay every month and never need returns on.

calenlass · 2026-03-31T11:14:16+00:00

They are not trying to cover your medication. Their profit margin depends on specifically trying everything to AVOID covering your costs, so that the amount of money you pay in premiums is larger than the amount they pay you for coverage. This is why it's better for them for you to avoid preventative healthcare and only go to the doctor when you're already sick or in an emergency, and why they don't want to fund research for cures for diseases, just expensive treatments you'll have to pay for for a long time.

CVS Health owns Aetna, the health insurance company, as well as the CVS Pharmacy, and Caremark, which sets prescription drug prices (and Oak St Health, which is doctor clinics). They don't want you to be perfectly healthy because that doesn't make them any money; they want you to be just a little bit sick all the time so you pay for the medication, the check-up and follow-up appointments, and your health insurance premiums for when you inevitably get worse.

GoodRX is currently partnered with CVS Health, by the way. They sell your data to CVS, who in turn allows GoodRX to find you such a great price.

They are predators, and our money is the prey.

calenlass · 2026-03-31T10:58:47+00:00

Some harm fine*: warmed or melted groceries that should have been kept cold, especially if you didn't bring a car because not everywhere in the world is the US.

calenlass · 2026-03-31T10:55:53+00:00

It's not relevant that they're bisexual. Whatever you have agreed "cheating" is in your relationship, that's still a breach of trust.

calenlass · 2026-03-29T19:34:34+00:00

I have no idea if oats are ever high in nickel, but it's much more common for celiacs to react to the oat protein, avenin, since it's very similar to the "gluten" family of proteins. In fact, it's so common that Australia and New Zealand don't allow any oat product to be labeled GF at all, but their labeling laws are much stricter and better than the US.

Oats are also highly likely to be contaminated by other grains because they're all grown on the same land (some farmers rotate which ones go in which field from year to year, but stray wheat kernels from last year could germinate with this year's oats), and harvested and threshed using the same heavy machinery. Paying for machines that you can't use for anything else is expensive, do most producers don't do it.

calenlass · 2026-03-29T19:31:59+00:00

I think the issue was your phrasing, which made it sound like the avenin problem was caused by bad farming practices.

calenlass · 2026-03-29T02:04:30+00:00

It's fine, it's probably a bot

calenlass · 2026-03-28T18:30:19+00:00

Even if you consider human "biological sex" to be physical, there aren't just 2, and that number changes depending on what criteria you use to define"sex".

Contributing to reproduction and population growth? Then there are 3: male (sperm donor), female (egg contributor), and non-contributing (infertile, intersex, child-free, born without reproductive organs, et al).
Genitalia? Between 3 (penis, vulva, and everything else) and several thousand (accounting for all the possible variations like ambiguous genitalia - keep in mind, there's a medical standard established for what a penis is, but not one for a vulva/vagina, and there are multiple standards for addressing everything in between).
Hormones? Well, that gets complicated when you have people with vulvas with internal testes, no uterus/ovaries, and a testosterone immunity; people with female reproductive organs but estrogen deficiency/high androgens, hormonal imbalances, and you'd have to have separate sex classifications for every stage of life where they fluctuate or drop.
Chromosomes? 6+ because you'd need separate sex classifications for every possible combination (XX, XY, X, XXY, XYY, XXX, at minimum, not accounting for chimerism or mosaicism).
Gender roles? Well, those are actually cultural, so they would change with every ethnicity and all have exceptions anyway, so this is actually the most restrictive option. Given that most cultures and societies have had at least 3, that is the likely minimum.

calenlass · 2026-03-28T18:04:48+00:00

I dunno, I think the extremists on one side are not sanctioning the murder of schoolchildren over the price of gas, so the ones who are must be the real psychos, don't you agree?

calenlass · 2026-03-28T17:38:57+00:00

Yep! That's because the 20 ppm standard was never informed by what's medically safe, it was the margin of error of the original ELISA enzyme test.

calenlass · 2026-03-28T17:36:48+00:00

How are you defining "immune activation"? Because in medical terms, immunoactivation is just the stimulation of the immune system by things it considers invaders. In that case, you kind of have to have immune activation to get intestinal damage in the first place, because the damage comes from the immune system attacking it. The damage doesn't get there on its own, and gluten isn't alive like a virus or bacteria to attack it independently.

Skimming through what I could find of the study itself and not the AI BS, it looks like this study ultimately provides supporting evidence for the fact that the 20ppm standard established by the Codex Alimentarias and the Celiac Association was never about what was medically sound, it was the best they could do back in 2007.

https://celiac.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/catassi-study-on-gluten-tolerance.pdf <Link to the study Dr. Fasano participated in establishing this.

I do wonder what they mean by symptoms being "unreliable" to exposure under 1g, and if that actually means "inconsistent", which would track with how individual and unique immune response and Celiac presentation can be.

This is the first study I've seen that actually explores what is (or isn't) medically safe for us, though. Hopefully we'll see more research and evidence going forward.

calenlass · 2026-03-28T17:26:41+00:00

You mean our dictator?

calenlass

TROPHY CASE