I’ll bite. I had a brother with special needs pass away a year ago next week. He was born with cerebral palsy, was blind, nonverbal, totally dependent on caretakers (myself, my siblings and mother, his nurses) for literally everything since he didn’t have functionally-independent motor control. We were told he’d live to 10, and he lived to 29; he was a bundle of joy and loved going out when he could. People would stare and kids would ask questions, but we loved sharing his story and my brother liked when people were curious about it.
But, his health started declining in 2014. He had several close calls, and we told doctors each time to try their best with the circumstances they were given. On more than one occasion, his nurses or our mother would actually be with the doctors during hospital stays to assist with him since he was case they didn’t have much experience in and didn’t want to make his issues worse. That said, he had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) since he had a trache, and was brittle enough to die from chest compressions.
I prepped for my brother’s death countless times over 8 years. We all did. When he passed, we were so obviously distraught. But we were also relieved, in a way, that he wasn’t in pain anymore in the end. We let out our emotions that had been stored for those years, and the grieving process is still continuing. We all put our lives on hold to help him, and he just became our lives; our goal simply was to make him comfortable and let him know he was loved, knowing we couldn’t realistically do more. We spent years watching him in pain, watching him gradually lose his fervor and personality.
If you read this far, thank you. Not really sure what else to say, I just want to share this since it’s occupied my mind a lot.
TLDR; Preparing for the worst outcomes, coupled with grief, over prolonged periods of time really disrupt your emotions and outlooks. Needless to say, my family became stronger proponents of state-assisted suicide after this experience. It couldn’t be granted to my brother, but maybe we can help people in the future that coupd really use it. People understand, but not nearly as many are truly empathetic because they can’t be - they’ve never been through a similar experience. I simply ask that people try to be sympathetic rather than to pass judgement on others.
The one cause that I’d champion over all others is the right to have access to assisted suicide.
It’s really a travesty how we tend to hide just how grisly dying (and in some cases living) can be, and how those who most go through it inherently lose their voices to advocate for others not suffering the same drawn out fate.
I’m sorry you had to watch as it dragged out.
My SO is a doctor and the cases that most upset them are not the healthy patients that die, but helplessly watching the unhealthy patients that are forced to drag on living because of various factors.
We’re getting much better at unnaturally prolonging life, and while that’s a good thing in some cases where it can change outcomes for the better, there’s a very dark side of it as well that’s gradually getting worse.
Know that it’s not a topic that only you are thinking about, even if it’s unfortunately a topic that is too rarely discussed in public.
I understand the weird feeling of relief when someone dies. I know that sounds terrible. My situation was not yours, so I’m not directly comparing. One of my parents had long, slow cancer. Watching them waste away, choosing to fight a symptom or not, was draining and difficult. In one sense, I enjoyed all of those final moments and would give anything to have more. I miss them dearly. However, I’m glad they’re not suffering. It was difficult at the end. Their quality of life was not good.
Yeah my dad smoked a pack a day his entire life and had started getting a lot of issues with his lungs and health in general. He died of a heart attack not so long ago and while I did grieve him I still feel that’s the best way he could have died
If only it hadn’t happened on my sister’s birthday but that’s life for you
So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale…
Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the ‘banana-equivalent-dose’, which is about 0.1 microsieverts.
My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it’s also an antimatter source.
Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.
Nice – you wouldn’t happen to have any ideas on how to differentiate positron annihilation, from the continuous distribution of β− energies caused by the more common decay mode, using only a PIN photodiode? I’m a bit stumped on this point and suspect it’s not possible. I probably need to do gamma spectroscopy but would really rather not.
the trickery is to detect two gammas emitted simultaneously in exactly opposite directions
This is some seriously dangerous information to be feeding me bro.
Now… to find magnets able to contain the antimatter…
Bananas are not typically very high on the danger scale except in exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.
In fact, that’s another thing we could use bananas for scale with. Probably driving to work is equivalent to several kilobananas worth of danger daily :)
Anyway, I think the positron should be about 44keV if that helps you calibrate your magnets. The typical banana should produce something on the order of a positron every 10 seconds (although I used much rounding for the sake of brevity). Most commercial positron sources e.g. used in hospital PET scanners, are many times stronger than that!
exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.
As someone who tried to push a banana up their ass in uni - it doesn’t work.
I wouldn’t say nobody, but I would say the people that dominate the area I’m trying to volunteer and work in.
I work in a healing center where there are 29 women on staff and 1 man.
I cannot get these people to understand that as much as they want to push forward social movements, which I very much agree with, this must not come at the expense of men who are trying to heal.
I will literally have counselors co-facilitating with me, who want to make every point about how women are oppressed, pushed down in the workforce, face issues.
I’m not in denial of those, but no man coming into a healing environment to work on themselves, be vulnerable, and explore their own journey, needs to hear how much men are shitty.
It’s insane, I even made a complaint to the director who of course is a woman, and she effectively denied that it was happening or could happen.
I told her I don’t even want people not to think these things, everybody who is in their own place of trauma has to get their shit off their chest.
All I wanted was a place where men didn’t have to hear this crap.
And that’s being incredibly neutral in my opinion because there are a lot of opportunities for men to talk about just how insane and shitty women can be. But I don’t want to talk about those things, I just want them to stop shit talking men especially their own clientele.
There are many jobs that I don’t bother to apply for despite knowing I’d excel and enjoy it, simply because I’m male. Many people aren’t comfortable with males in certain roles. Obviously the reverse is true and disproportionate but most people seem to be oblivious that men are oppressed too.
That’s an excellent point and it’s one of these elephants in the room that people can’t see.
Does anybody wonder why there’s virtually no male kindergarten teachers? Convicted before the crime as if women have never acted inappropriately towards children?! I mean for fuck sakes my own mother sexually abused me.
If you’ve ever known any male nurses, they will tell you the stories of being outnumbered 30 to 1 at minimum, and then facing constant sexual harassment, abuse, and career suppression because of their gender.
And my own story, I work in a system of power, the healing sector, which is dominated by women. And as the one guy they’re trying to do the right thing and serve men, we face nothing but abuse. It is driving me out.
Maybe not nobody but most…
The freedom and control and depth and enjoyment in using Linux. I know, I know, shut up I’m answering the question.
There was a question here recently about partitioning, and that got me thinking about inodes and really wanting to understand how data storage works. I went on a deep dive and learnt so much. I feel like I have a real deep understanding of how my system works now.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things. Most people are just consumers of a thing. I do my own motorbike and car maintenance, and I know where my limits are in terms of skill and equipment. It’s so satisfying, it brings a sense of joy and accomplishment to my life.
I’m baffled that people just… don’t do this kind of thing. Don’t learn about metabolic pathways or companion planting or do careful research and just impulse buy… Like… Life must suck for them. It must be so dam boring to live life like that.
So yeah, I don’t think many people understand that.
I completely agree. And I’ve thought about this before. I can’t know what is going on in people’s heads but a lot of people just… don’t care. They have fun watching TV and playing popular video games. I think a large portion of people just don’t like learning things. Like it just annoys them. That’s what I’ve been led to believe. Which also makes it hard to get people into something I’m into. They’ll see I’m massively excited about something and the thing I’m into looks cool, so they’ll ask about it. Then whatever it is, be it some tech thing, a niche game, enthusiast grade flashlights, literally anything, turns out to require learning something, they just get turned off of it immediately. If someone wants to get into something I’m doing, I’ve started prefacing it with “this is not straight forward, are you okay with a bit of learning?” to avoid the disappointment and wasting their time. Usually the answer is no.
You’re implying that learning how to do well at a video game involves no mastery or learning. I don’t think that’s accurate for all games.
I’m not saying that about all video games, I was trying to say that people who don’t like learning tend to gravitate towards whatever video games are popular at the time and don’t necessarily form complex opinions about different types of games or their tastes. Anything below surface level enjoyment that would require learning would be too much. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with just loading up whatever new call of duty or fifa or something and just relaxing.
I guess I didn’t elaborate enough on that, I just said “popular video game” which didn’t get my meaning across. In short, I was saying those people also don’t put a lot of thought or effort into what entertainment they consume because whatever is easiest and most popular is good enough, because they don’t care to dive into learning about anything else.
I’m also not saying these games don’t have complicated and high skill ceilings. Most do.
I absolutely agree with you. Just yesterday evening, a friend asked me for help with his laptop. He was going to throw it away because the Bluetooth broke and he couldn’t use his favorite mouse.
Start, Settings, Bluetooth, turn on. There, I just saved you six hundred bucks.
It takes time and effort though, and usually that time and effort is spent elsewhere, especially if you’re an adult with two jobs and two kids. When you don’t have to think to better your mastery of your surroundings, making good hardware/software choices becomes increasingly disparate
I’m the kinda guy who’s aware of how cool Linux and system mastery can be, but also the kinda guy who’s too lazy to care enough about maintaining a dual boot Linux/Windows system so every other year I’ll install a new Linux distro I haven’t used before only to do nothing with it and delete that partition of my hard drive within a month.
Last week I installed Ubuntu!
I am in 100% agreement with you. I’m kind of in the same mindset in figuring out my homelab setup. Still learning docker and how volumes work 😢 haha
I’m in academia but I like to tinker with tech. So when my students or co-workers are surprised that I know so much about tech and how to navigate around most computer systems and troubleshoot (Mac/Windows/Linux) they are perplexed. They ask why I didn’t major in tech. I tell them that I majored in what I loved (history) and play with tech as a hobby to relax.
It’s why I selfhost my own Lemmy server. Gives me something to do with my hobby, keeps me focused on what’s new in tech, makes me learn to keep up with docker, Linux, editing CRON tabs etc.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things.
I have so many areas of my life that I think in terms of a skill, one of which is Linux, which I’m using now. Another is coffee/espresso, cycling, writing, etc.
Basically all hobbies. But the point is that I can develop mastery at my own pace in so many different areas. Sometimes, it’s slow and methodical, like coffee: I’ll try something new maybe every weeks. And sometimes it’s breakneck speed, like Linux…just do a deep dive and come out knowing a bunch of new stuff.
I fucking love being alive.
Eh, time and effort is limited depending on what the matter at hand is. Sometimes, you are required to just impulse buy or not live at all.
… And yet, I know exactly what you mean. There’s a class of people who just live with a phone for nearly everything they do 14 hours of their daily life, day in day out, 12 months a year. No rest whatsoever. And yet, the moment they find any resistance anywhere in their life, not even on something related to the phone, they just. dont. google. They literally refuse to help themselves and will just do what they know and refuse to do or even concern themselves with better.
I’ve seen a 20-year-old who, when asked to give in their homework on Moodle, like normal people do, instead… wrote everything on a Mac’s Notes app, took a photo and then pestered people for the teacher’s phone number so they could send the shitty photo of their homework on a very popular chat application. When told that this was not going to count, they just shrugged and stopped caring. Again, they used technology daily. That was objectively the stupidest and laziest “functional” person I’ve ever met, a true sheep, and I fear ever becoming like them during onset of dementia.
I’m sure other people out there understand this, but like I’m such a sinkhole right now. I lost my job a few months ago, and I am trying so hard to get another one but its just not happening. I feel like I’m always hitting like 2nd or 3rd place in the lineup. The interviews go well, get call backs, then boom last minute they went with the other candidate. And everyone is telling me I’ll be okay cause they say I’m smart and have skills.
But it doesn’t matter, I’m broke, my medications running out, I’m tired, I have bills, everything hurts, I have no insurance, and I don’t want to be a leech and already my boyfriend has picked up the rent and stuff, but like he has his own bills.
I just don’t understand, why does shit have to keep happening, can’t it just settle for like 5 minutes so u can catch up. I feel like I haven’t been able to breath in years, and there is something that everyone else is in on that my autism doesn’t let me understand, and I’m just… idk anymore.
I’m bleh.
