• 5 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • You won’t be considered geriatric for about forty years. You might have a geriatric pregnancy, but that’s just the terminology. Like how an eighty year old can have juvenile diabetes, it doesn’t mean they’re a juvenile.

    You probably haven’t yet reached your mental prime yet, but yes, you might be at a disadvantage sprinting against a 22 year old at the same activity level. That’s only really relevant at the highest levels of athletics though, and you can still be healthier than you were in your twenties.

    I’m older than you are, and my sisters are more than a decade older than you are and none of us is experiencing this. None of our doctors (in three very different areas) prepared us for this. If it were normal, even if we didn’t personally experience it, wouldn’t our doctors warn us about it? All of the women in this thread are telling you that they didn’t have anything like this, isn’t that something to consider?

    You might not have anything that is showing up on a test you’ve had done so far, but isn’t it worth looking further into whether you could have normal energy levels?

    Even if they don’t find anything wrong, making your doctor understand that you’re not experiencing a normal level of fatigue might let them help you. I had a carpool buddy with idiopathic narcolepsy, which just means they don’t know what causes it. He was prescribed stimulants and worked with his doctor to figure out lifestyle adjustments that helped (like carpooling, so he could drive while alert in the morning, but didn’t endanger himself in the afternoon. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen be so tired that he sounded drunk while sober after a full night of sleep.


  • I think it comes from jobs where a physical limitation prevents people from “doing,” like retired athletes or really experienced surgeons who develop a tremor. Or even just people who no longer have the physical strength to do manual labor, but have a repertoire of techniques that will help others do it more effectively.

    I agree that the quote doesn’t apply to teachers in general.

    The US isn’t especially poorly educated on average.

    The US is so unequally educated for many reasons, but the biggest one is the cost, which is mostly due to (as always) Reagan. He defunded K-12 education and public universities. When universities raised their prices in response, the government, which had been offering some need based student loans regardless of major since the sixties, greatly expanded the program, partially privatizing it. In order to make loans to very young people without immediate employment prospects a less risky investment, the loans were made unable to be discharged in bankruptcy. The increase in available loans allowed universities to further increase costs without risking pricing their applicant pools out. That became a vicious cycle and the tuitions and loans became so bloated that many graduates start with six figures in debt. It’s not a good deal for a lot of students, and it’s a worse deal, the less stable the finances of your family, unfortunately.





  • It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.

    I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).

    My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.

    That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.




  • Yeah, I’m not under any illusion that it’ll be (literally) sunshine and daisies. The WHO estimates that 250k people will die annually because of climate change between 2030-2050 though, and (I sincerely hope) a shift in global power dynamics from something like this is unlikely to kill that many.

    China will also be more focused on preserving stability in general as a global power than Russia or the United States, though this would probably be very bad news for Taiwan, if successful.

    I agree that the effects for Europe are less clear. The EU is likely to benefit much more than Russia or the US, but it might lose power in comparison to an energy rich India or Indonesia. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, other places deserve a fair seat at the table, especially given the relative populations.