There was a sign right there telling them what not to do and they still failed.

Your first point is so huge IMO. If you can’t enjoy being at your own home then trying to have some kind of fulfilling life is going to be a steeper uphill battle than it already was.

Been on the dating apps recently. The number of people who present “travel” as their entire personality is unsettling. Every photo somewhere exotic, every prompt answer is about traveling. It makes me wonder what they’re all running from. I don’t disagree that vacationing can be enjoyable, but there’s more to life.

And don’t get me started on the people who try to say that “traveling” is different from “vacationing” and that what they’re doing is travelling and not vacationing. Egads.

Can we just stop putting these people with no background in health in charge of health systems? The hubris is astonishing.

I mean, what next, are we going to put a TV host in charge of the military, or a wrestling business executive in charge of education?

Right, like, who did you think you were making surveillance tools for? Because it wasn’t Mr. Rogers.

Not just suicide assistance chat bots, but suicide promotion chat bots.

sometimes it can be really disruptive and long-lasting. Why are we pretending that’s disordered?

Because if it’s “really disruptive” then a person might need support to be able to function well enough to, e.g., keep a roof over their head. Insurance companies require a label in order to pay out for that support, so there it is. If you’re grieving for 2 weeks plus 1 day, but still able to function, no one is going to arbitrarily slap a diagnosis on you.

Fwiw, “disordered” doesn’t necessarily mean abnormal in the context of mental health, it really just means causing problems (or, “really disruptive”). Indeed, it’s normal to grieve for more than 2 weeks, but our broader society is geared toward extracting profit from you, not toward making sure you can work through your emotions, so mental health professionals are often stuck with just trying to facilitate the least-bad outcomes. Also, as you said, sometimes the changes are just to appease insurers; the system is dumb, so sometimes you have to do nonsensical things in order to make it help people like it should.

As for narcolepsy/etc., yeah … As a mental health professional, I am also befuddled. I suppose a psychiatrist with appropriate training could diagnose and treat that, but normally it would be a sleep specialist.

Tl;Dr: the healthcare system itself doesn’t make sense, so we do things that don’t make sense in order to make it work for patients.

They’re allowed because who’s going to stop them?

They’re not allowed by law - they’re allowed simply by being in control of who enforces the law. This kind of government corruption would normally be investigated by the DOJ… Except it’s the DOJ doing it, and the only people who might be able to anything about that (the legislature and judiciary) are complicit.

And you can set up a pin code which, when entered on the unlock screen, erases the device instead of unlocking it.

Yes, but given that anyone can contribute anonymously, verifying every edit is a practical impossibility. Wikipedia relies on good faith in a world where bad faith isn’t exactly rare.

Especially when airports are considered borders.

Dickbaskets have an annoying habit of getting into positions of power.

Also consider a healthcare career. As a teenager, I wanted to do computer science/engineering, and sometimes I do wish I had stayed on that track. But now, as a nurse, I could get a job in any state in the US by tomorrow. I dare you to try to find a hospital that doesn’t have open nursing positions. Even when the economy goes down, people still get sick. Even if society collapses, the knowledge/skills will be useful.

And if you don’t want to change diapers or deal with blood, there are still options; I’m in psychiatry and rarely have to deal with either.

I used to do most of my grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. When they came out calling the NLRB unconstitutional, I never went back. Fuck Traitor Joe’s.

In some states, testing and then notifying CPS of positives is required by law. The healthcare staff hate it as much as the patients, because it does more harm than good.

I dunno. He accused the board members who pointed it out of lying. If he had nothing to hide, why say they’re lying? Why not just say “I have no idea how this happened”? The only alternative explanation I can think of for accusing them is that maybe he’s paranoid?

Having grown up in the ultra-conservative puritan world, with its absurd and unhealthy levels of sexual repression, I would be genuinely surprised if this guy wasn’t regularly consuming porn. And he’s a millennial, so I wouldnt be at all surprised by him knowing how to connect a screen…

We’ll convert the bloodmouths, one way or another! The next plan is mosquitoes that make you allergic to cheese.

Bezos is halfway there; his yacht cost 500 million:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koru_(yacht)

Give it a few more years and I bet one of them will buy a a billion dollar yacht. But in an ideal world, such absurdities wouldn’t exist.

That would require acknowledging that he is the problem. He doesn’t have that level of introspection. It’s easier for him to just convince himself that the professionals are the problem.

Nurse here: I have a hard time imagining vaccines won’t be covered by insurance unless federal law starts to prohibit it for some bonkers reason. Vaccines are the simplest and most effective prevention for a number of illnesses which can require expensive care. And they’re cheap. Vaccines are good for the bottom line. Like, they’re practically gold. If they didn’t make financial sense, insurance companies wouldn’t be covering them. It would be unfathomable for insurance companies to elect not to cover them unless they can also elect not to cover treatment for the resultant illness.

That said, I think the much more likely thing is RdumbFucK Jr. trying to make them unavailable, because clearly someone who has zero training in medicine or infectious disease or any science of any kind knows better than the collective consensus of the entire world’s medical community… So, get your vaccinations while you can.

But… What the fuck did just happened here? 🎶