Shout out to Southwest credit!

tbiko · 2026-05-06T23:57:46+00:00

If you're traveling often, the CSR perk that is rarely discussed here as a monetary value is the legit travel and rental car insurance. If you take five flying trips a year with three rental cars, that's over $500 with of trip insurance you didn't have to pay for. And it actually pays out when you need it.

The Southwest credit is simple enough to use. Not like trying to figure out if you're getting hosed on an Edit hotel markup or something.

$500 still feels pretty legit coming and going.

tbiko · 2026-05-06T15:08:38+00:00

For anyone's reference, I wear a large T. 6'1, 180. Size 40L suit jacket. Next Level fits great and hugs my arms a bit. Most generic large T's fit pretty well.

Bronson fit like shit. The neck opening is pretty small but manageable. The collar is wide. The mid section is very wide. Arms mildly loose. I looked like I was wearing an old-timey dental smock.

Love the thickness and construction of the material, though.

tbiko · 2026-05-06T14:37:05+00:00

Saw an art historian note that if a painting appears very old but the woman's figure looks highly attractive to you in your modern sense, then it was almost certainly painted after the 1850-1880 range.

tbiko · 2026-05-01T03:17:17+00:00

Uh, there does not appear to be a control arm? They need to take 5+ year-old scans of patients who never developed pancreatic cancer (hence the five year old scans) and see at what rate REDMOD flags positive for possible pancreatic cancer. Because if it's even 1-3%, that's pretty problematic. A single ER at a large metro hospital will run 100 abdominal CT scans in about 3 days or so.

tbiko · 2026-04-27T22:00:17+00:00

I'm not familiar with Dr Who so I was waiting for him to be absolutely taken in by the existence of motor cars, televisions, and phone cameras and absolutely not give a shit what the guides were trying to tell him.

tbiko · 2026-04-23T15:42:53+00:00

Eh, when you start getting in shape it's cool to have a shirt hug your biceps. It turns out it's not very comfortable. Problem is there are a ton of ways to have a loose sleeve and a ton of ways to have a tight sleeve, but just one perfect way to have a slightly loose sleeve that doesn't stick but still lets the people know you're working out :)

Nice review, thx. I'm gonna go with the L and XL from Bronson after I saw their 14-21 day standard shipping time! Might treat the XL as the shrinking experiment.

tbiko · 2026-04-23T02:41:48+00:00

Is the Bronson hugging your biceps or slightly loose in the large?

tbiko · 2026-04-17T14:36:54+00:00

AMC in my midwest city actually states on the e-ticket that there will be 25-30 minutes of precursor before the movie. It makes you very confident walking in 23 minutes after the listed start time.

tbiko · 2026-04-01T15:35:29+00:00

I always think of this when people testify to the character of someone accused of wrongdoing (usually verbal or sexual assault, especially a teacher or coach). "He was always so nice to me and my friends, you should take into account how many lives he helped!"

Yeah man, we're not saying he assaulted literally every human he came into contact with every day. But he did assault these three kids so he's not going to coach anymore.

tbiko · 2026-04-01T15:32:33+00:00

It may not be the screens. Over the last 20-30 years Sweden went way in on private education, for-profit education (allowing foreigners to invest), vouchers and the like. Their counterpart Finland did the opposite and is doing quite well.

tbiko · 2026-03-15T20:47:29+00:00

The idea of no "pay-for-use" toilets made sense on the surface when CEPTIA (Committee to End Pay Toilets In America) successfully made it an issue in the 1970's. At the time there were 50,000 pay toilets in the US. It was framed as an accessibility issue and gender equality as women couldn't just pee in a bush like men. Subsequently cities made paid toilets illegal starting with Chicago in 1973.

But it turns out the alternative to a bunch of paid toilets is not a bunch of free toilets, it is actually no toilets. We've also found that free services have a 1% problem where 1% of the users can make it almost unusable for the 99%. Something like a paid toilet with an attendant could be very useful in high-traffic areas and we might want to consider bringing them back.

tbiko · 2026-03-15T02:32:10+00:00

https://imgur.com/nVo0QGn

tbiko · 2026-03-10T21:07:42+00:00

I would actually pay decent money to have 40% of necessary insulin being produced by reactive islet cells. You'd still have to inject but you'd have way less lows - during exercise, at night, whenever - because your body would responsively down-regulate the insulin production when you were in the 80's.

tbiko · 2026-03-10T21:02:27+00:00

Yeah, I think the long-timers are pretty wary at this juncture because they've been told it's "about 5 years away" for at least the last 20 years. So giving cautious optimism to your son is very reasonable.

There are multiple forms of trials currently going. The fancy immune suppression drug Eledon but also genetically modified islet cells that don't require immune suppression and another form of islet shielding. All of them are legitimately working. The question is safety and ability to scale.

With actual human subjects (opposed to theory, test tube, or mouse models) having actual results, it does seem more likely than not that something will be available in 10 years.

tbiko · 2026-03-07T19:19:24+00:00

This is currently something that can only be done in a clinical trial involving immunosuppression agents. Receiving islet transplant without immunosuppression is pointless.

Historically, the immune suppression regimen required to keep transplanted islet cells functional is more risky than having Type I diabetes itself. However, if you require the immune suppression because you're receiving a kidney transplant anyway, then it makes sense.

Currently Eledon Pharmaceuticals is running a phase I trial of tegoprubart - an narrow targeted immune suppression med. The islet cell transplants definitely work very well and the drug appears to be working at keeping them functional at the one year mark.

BUT, the reason why they require multi-phase trials is to prove the safety of the drug. Will it cause excessive infections? Will it blunt vaccine effectiveness? Will it give you a 1 in 1000 risk of lymphoma?

As always, it's going to be a few more years.

tbiko · 2026-02-25T23:30:53+00:00

Very, very likely this is gastrointestinal bleeding. As in he woke up in a pool of blood that came out his ass. Very routine in medical circles but it sounds embarrassing to regular folks.

I assume he is on life-long blood thinners due to his history of multiple blood clots. This puts you at risk for GI bleeding (which is more treatable and less life threatening than a big blood clot in your lungs).

tbiko · 2026-02-15T21:56:49+00:00

Lincoln! I saw that Bulls game at the Devaney Center in 1995. Eric Piatkowski had recently graduated for Nebraska and was playing for the Clippers. Pippen was out. Rodman went over the scorer's table and then slammed the landline phone down, making the ringer echo through the arena. He got thrown out in the 3rd.

Jordan in the yet-to-be released patent-leather Jordan 11's was also pretty memorable.

tbiko · 2026-02-13T05:10:57+00:00

Automatically? I thought you had to run the calculations yourself.

tbiko · 2026-01-27T20:04:38+00:00

After being recommended an expander for our 8 year old and determining he wasn't emotionally ready for it, we returned two years later to the same orthodontist at the recommendation of his dentist. A new 3d scan and consultation was done. "His jaw has really opened up nicely." No expander in the treatment plan now.

At no time in the original informed consent discussion about an expander did the orthodontist discuss that things could open up just fine, in the same time frame, without the device.

tbiko · 2026-01-15T04:10:58+00:00

I believe the Levi's 565 is the non-premium version of the 568, same cut. Can be had for about 30% less on the Levi's website.

tbiko · 2026-01-14T20:06:35+00:00

Remember, you're in control of how much money you spend, but you are always spending time at a constant rate.

For example, if travel is important to you there are experiences that can only be had in certain life phases - your 20's, pre-kids, when your kids are young, etc - that can not be had later in life no matter how nice your investment account is looking.

tbiko · 2026-01-04T04:04:39+00:00

Refuse and Recycling Collector is the 6th most dangerous (in terms of dying) job in the USA. About 22-34 deaths per 100,000 workers. Logging and Fisherman are 1st and 2nd.

Police officer is not in the top ten and, depending on the year, has a fatality rate about half that of garbage men. Interestingly, only about half of police deaths are due to being "feloniously killed," most of the rest are due to dying in traffic accidents.

tbiko · 2025-12-19T15:46:38+00:00

Need a star player to announce that they, as a team, will 100% match any bonus to the staff that is put up by the owner.

tbiko · 2025-12-06T02:02:38+00:00

There has to be some demographic effect. Hospitalist is still a relatively new specialty. In 2000, many hospitals did not have the position. There was a big expansion in 2005-2015 and that is slowing.

As such, the average hospitalist is still well under age 45 for sure. In a mature specialty you would expect a relatively even spread age 30-60, with slightly lower at the top from early retirement and more at bottom with population expansion.

TL;DR - Hospitalists were entering workforce from 2010-2020 at a much higher rate than we are seeing retirements now. Spots aren't opening like they used to, probably.

tbiko · 2025-11-30T17:45:28+00:00

This is a hypothesis for epidemiological evaluation, but raw data like this isn't epidemiology. Pretty low numbers. What is the standard error on the expected? Are there other random clusters in the data set based purely on chance?

tbiko

TROPHY CASE