My great grandfather was an Italian immigrant. My father is looking into getting an Italian passport. Maybe being a soon-to-be physician will improve my chances of getting one too. (Maybe I’ll switch from learning French to learning Italian too)

The problem is how he got that $55 billion to donate.

Also check out www.pirateship.com

FIP Warriors is who we went through, but it progressed too quickly because the fluid accumulation was in his lungs, not his abdomen.

That medication is quite new to the market and wasn’t available when this happened about 4 years ago, but I will mention this to our current vet so that she knows about it.

Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.

My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that if there were any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it’s a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you’re gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.

By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.

Unfortunately, the swing to the right and the rise of shit like “Blue Lives Matter” has changed this in some places. When I was in the western part of Virginia for school, there was a local car dealership called “Pinkerton” and I saw their dealership license plate frames and emblem on a LOT of cars in the area. Many of those cars also had the Gadsden vanity plates and a bunch of blue lives matter, trump, etc. stickers on them.

I am quite familiar with this nonsense from the patient side as well. As a physician, I think I will be well-placed to ensure that my patients are getting appropriate care while not giving the insurance company bullshit reasons to deny claims.

I’m in medical school now and looking at either emergency med or family med, and either way, I am going to be exceedingly careful about how I construct my notes, diagnoses, evaluations, and treatment plans to leave as few cracks as possible for the insurance companies to try to weasel their way into.

I was the feisty little gremlin that fought with the insurance at a cancer-focused plastic surgery clinic. I got really good at stacking up all of the info in the first submission so that they couldn’t drag their heels on shit that was time-sensitive.

When I was a clinic assistant in a cancer-focused plastic surgery clinic, it was my job to fight with the insurance companies. I did prior authorizations for every surgery and they would do shit like approve the removal of a melanoma without requiring prior authorization, but performing the skin graft to repair the 10cm diameter hole required a prior authorization because the procedure code falls under the “Plastic Surgery” heading and they wanted to make sure you’re not getting skin grafts for cosmetic reasons.

There have been a lot of pictures of black cats, and black cats are lovingly referred to as “void cats” or “voids” because they just turn into a blob of black nothing if they close their eyes.

She’s named Nova after the Waframe. All of our cats are named after various Warframes.

I thought the point was to be better than Hamas? Of course they mistreat detainees, but that doesn’t mean Israel gets a blank check to do the same. Also, many of the Palestinians currently being held by Israel without charges in indefinite detention are innocent civilians, including many from the West Bank. Israel has been illegally detaining and mistreating thousands upon thousands of Palestinians without any kind of due process or concern for human rights for decades. Pointing a finger at Hamas and saying “Look! They’re doing it too!! October 7th!!1!!” is not a valid argument for how Israel has been treating captive Palestinians for years.

The way that Hamas treats Palestinians is partially the responsibility of Netanyahu and the Likud given that they provided Hamas with material support to take power in the first place. Also, the fact that Israelis stormed an IDF base in protest of the punishment of IDF thugs that anally raped innocent Palestinians to death with rifles tells me a lot about what Israel thinks of all Palestinians, not just the ones that are actually part of Hamas.

Edit: Here’s an article describing the way the IDF treats doctors and paramedics. (Who are not members of Hamas) https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/27/hrw_report

That’s the thing though…I think it is part of their due diligence to know what’s going on in their own business. If they can’t guarantee that it’s safe, they shouldn’t release it.

The c-suites have the ultimate power and therefore ultimate responsibility for whatever happens in their organization. Similar to how parents can be held criminally liable for their children’s actions. It’s just that much more incentive for them to make sure things are in order in their organization.

Also, Citizen’s United ruled that corporations are people, so they can be held to the same standards of responsibility as other people.

I think the threshold for proving the “reasonable person” standard for companies should be extremely low. They are a complex organization that is supposed to have internal checks and reviews, so it should be very difficult for them to squirm out of liability. The C-suite should be first on the list for criminal liability so that they have a vested interest in ensuring that their products are actually safe.

I’d accept that if the makers of the self-driving cars can be tried for vehicular manslaughter the same way a human would be. Humans carry civil and criminal liability, and at the moment, the companies that produce these things only have nominal civil liability. If Musk can go to prison for his self-driving cars killing people the same way a regular driver would, I’d be willing to lower the standard.

The nuclear industry is heavily regulated by the government via the NRC, but they impose even stricter regulations upon themselves. Solar and wind are cheaper, but they are less reliable. A grid comprised of a mix of solar and wind, bolstered by nuclear is the most effective and least environmentally harmful option that we currently have.

The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn’t the cleanest either.