volvoxvsmarla

My husband always says he’s normal when asked. It took some time to get used to not hearing “good”. Our toddler now also replies with she’s normal.

I know it’s off topic but I need to ask: what sunscreen are you currently using? I haven’t been very happy with my latest choices and could use some recommendations.

I’m so sorry you didn’t get the gifts you wanted and actually need. Especially since you got laid off. Under those circumstances gifting cash, gift cards and help is the nicest thing to do.

To be honest, a manicure set is a pretty horrible gift even if it is meant to be helpful or nice. I got a cheap one when I was a kid and I hated it too 😅 but with palsy especially - and just because it has to do with “nails” doesn’t make it equivalent to medical treatment. It reminds me of getting drugstore face cream when I started to be more into fragrance free, puristic skincare. Just because both is cream it’s not equivalent.

For us it has become just asking “what do you want?” and sending each other amazon links. That’s not really… The point of gifts. Moreover, if I need something, I end up ordering it right away anyway. If I need a new jacket, I won’t wait until the end of december to get it. The things that would be kind of a present (let’s say skincare products) don’t sell via amazon, but ordering anywhere else is also too much of a struggle and impossible task for my family. Or I would need to try it on (e.g. expensive new winter shoes), but then if it doesn’t fit I have to get them involved in returning the item.

And when I get a gift card (also usually amazon) I end up not using it for the longest time because I keep thinking “it’s a gift, I should buy something nice and cool from it, not just this little thingy I need right now. Not screws, not a calendar, not wall hooks,…” And then I end up not using it for most of the year until I eventually use it to buy necessities after all. I got gifted a voucher for a perfume and makeup store once, and this year I ended up using it… To buy perfume as a gift for my sister. I just can’t make myself spend money on something I would just like, it seems excessive.

Funnily enough, I wish I would get some useless luxury presents every once in a while. Ever since I became an independent adult - and much more so since I became a parent - gifts are mostly practical stuff that I actually want and need and am happy about saving the money on, or gift cards. But then I remember how my Dad used to get me some high end mascara that I hardly even had any use for because it was never waterproof or some way too expensive perfume that I could only wear to school basically, and I miss that a bit.

I mean I love that I got a purrrse this year, but it was also due to the fact that my old one broke and I needed a new one.

Oh, my bad, sorry! I’m with you on this one.

With my limited view from Germany, thank God that it is not Trump. Presidents come and go, Democrats and Republicans swap places every now and then, but at the end, the US stays an oligarchy. By killing Trump you don’t change much, you might create a public outrage, but it’s like popping a pimple without addressing the acne. It might lead to an even bigger divide within the working class - those who were fooled into voting for Trump vs Democrats vs disappointed, disillusioned Democrats. One of the problems of the election was that not enough left leaning people saw the Democrats as much different from the Republicans, and they are right. Killing a politician would just distract from the problem even more. Just think of how much momentum Trump (and his movement) gained from the assassination attempt.

Here, for once in months, when we see tiktoks or other clips from the public, we cannot even tell immediately where they lean politically - we just see that everyone is fed up with the same crap. Now both left and right, united, experience how the media lies to them and tells a skewed narrative. This is amazing. I sincerely hope it will not die, I hope this will grow and continue to spread like a cancer through society.

It is sad that it took the murder of a person and a young man’s freedom for this.

I’ve grown up fascinated with several diseases and was eager to study them and find treatments that would better and prolong the life of the patients. By the time I was done with university my disease pet peeves were already very well managed. Take cystic fibrosis, a disease that was still considered a childhood disease when I was born in the 90s. With trikafta and other treatments CF patients now climb mount everest and whatnot. They have kids, back in school I learned that the few cases who made it to adulthood were infertile because of their viscous mucus. Like, I would love to work on an mRNA based gene therapy for it, but it seems almost unnecessary, given how manageable the disease has become.

I also agree and want to stress what you are saying about the acceptance of gene therapy/ GMOs in general. I am in Germany and people here are insanely against GMOs of any kind. Manipulating the human genome is so far off the rails for the vast majority, I mean there is still so much hate against GMOs in food, we are nowhere near trying to use gene therapy on a broad scale. Let alone that to actually cure a genetic disease, you would have to undergo the gene therapy while you’re still a zygote. This is simply illegal here. Our research opportunities are severely limited on genetic manipulation.

To be fair, usually you get that when you are already employed somewhere with good working conditions and an above average salary. Eg Daiichi Sankyo does that with technical assistants, but they already have a great starting salary of roughly 43k with no job experience. That’s much higher than other companies pay their TAs (Eurofins paid 22k to new TAs), and these companies pat themselves on the back for giving you a punch on a 30 minute Christmas themed extra break as a holiday treat.

I have actually thought it might be misinterpreted because it’s vague in that sentence - no, I don’t mean that the guy thinks the hotel sucks. He still doesn’t care. But his wife thinks it sucks and she is solely responsible for her choice. In a partnership.

Most likely, when confronted with her dislike, he would not be comforting her like “honey, it’s ok, you picked a nice hotel, I don’t think it’s bad at all”, but just be like “look, it doesn’t matter, we’ll just sleep here”. Basically invalidating her feelings and experiences.

The point I am trying to make is: if you are in a committed relationship you sometimes have to care, have an opinion, help with decisions, even if it was something that you usually don’t care about. But saying “I don’t care about the outcome of something that you care about” is definitely neither kind nor loving and devastating in the long run.

Could it be because decision making is hard and you end up telling your partner that you a) don’t care about what they care about b) leave them hanging when they might need help to decide c) they end up having decision fatigue because you don’t have an opinion? Sometimes, a consultation or just a talk about something one tries to make a decision on feels good, doing it all by yourself sucks.

Let’s say you don’t care what hotel she books. She ends up doing all the research on hotels. Presents you with it, pros and cons. You still say you don’t care. Ok, so now the burden of choice is solely on her. You guys arrive, the hotel sucks. Can’t you see that this is frustrating in a different way than if the two of you decided on the hotel together?

I once broke up with someone because he couldn’t stop using ^^ after every sentence even in the middle of a serious discussion/argument

Peter I swear to God if this is how we meet again I’ll lose it

Go from Wales, Alaska near the Bering Strait to the southern tip of Florida. You have traveled 4,580 miles (7,370 km) in 14 states and provinces. At no point were you not in a jurisdiction that was predominantly English speaking.

Laughs in Russian

The thing is, while everything is so starkly clear for us here, it’s not that black and white for other countries. So yes, India and China will become stronger business partners. And I think even if they will pressure Russia into bad deals, those deals will still be enough to keep Russia somewhat working economically. Whether this economy will be sustainable in the long run or do the country any good prosperity wise doesn’t matter. The top 1% couldn’t care less about how well the economy does. Do you think Putin or some oil oligarch really cares about inflation or whether millions of Russians can’t afford to buy food?

The problem is that the west cannot really go without sanctions, but everyone is fully aware that the rich and powerful have no problem overgoing them. The rich guys will always have access to Gucci. They keep becoming richer. And it is very difficult to impossible to get rid of this problem. While, for them, it is a minor inconvenience, it is a major catastrophe for the broad population. I think even if we tried something like going after the brands as you described (“ban them from doing business in the west if caught dealing in Russia”) they will still find a way to not get caught, blame someone else for being sold, pay a fine, continue business as usual in both hemispheres.

Having no McDonald’s and a Russian rip off is not the problem here. Believe me, people whine a bit, but they are resilient to these changes. You have to be resilient in Russia because for generations, everything went further south, the more you tried the more so. No one will start a revolution because they miss McDonald’s, Palmolive or Ferrero. You whine, accept, and life goes on, just a bit harder and shittier than it was before, again and again, there is no time to care more than that because you have to survive. You know you’re absolutely powerless and the best you can do is focus on your little life and make it as bearable and enjoy the little things before it gets worse again.

What do you mean? What is the strategic value of banning western luxury brands in russia, is that the question?

I do care a lot about that. Brands claiming they are pulling out of Russia because they got the moral high ground and/or sanctions just to sneak back in because they still can make additional profit in this market. Especially luxury brands. As long as you are rich, you won’t care about sanctions and risen prices. And again the poorest people who are already suffering and are completely powerless politically suffer the most, be it from inflation, drafting, or sanctions. So fuck all those brands for making sanctions even less useful than they are, for catering to the oligarchs who give a fuck about their country going to shit and people dying.

Unfortunately most western brands still find their way to the russian market.

As someone living in Germany, I am so pissed at everyone for being pissed about the current government. It is a coalition of three parties that inherited a country that was led by one person for 16 years, post pandemic, and was hit with two huge wars that they are inevitably involved in. Cut them some slack, maybe? I honestly feel like I am the only one thinking they did quite OK. Give them some time (and fire Lindner) at least. But no, let’s be mad that they didn’t solve recession, climate change, didn’t establish world peace and got the country out of its stillstand of one and a half decades within three years.

Nice! That’s a great sign of how our mind can control our body. Something that we biomedics sometimes struggle with, in our eternal search for pathways.

I often had this when I had to study for exams. I was so stressed that I didn’t allow myself to get sick, and once the last exam was done, the stress level fell and I got so sick.

That might actually be cortisol released by a stress response. Do you tend to get sick a couple of days later when “there’s time”?

Yes, he is usually (and anecdotally) used in every introduction to works that cover vitamins and supplementation 😅 but unfortunately his ideas weren’t really backed by science. If you eat more vitamin c than you can absorb, you just pee it out. We actually did that in university (control group, breakfast group, breakfast + 1g of vitamin c group, testing the pee and I think capillary blood). Now, I think there are some findings with intravenous vitamin c acting like an oxidizing agent and killing cancer (?) cells, but macrodosing orally just doesn’t give you any effect.

Also, fun fact, your RDA can be met by eating one frozen pizza because vitamin c is used as a food additive everywhere.

When I start having a feeling of getting a cold I drink Bayer’s Aspirin Plus C. It’s literally just aspirin and vitamin C but I swear it works. Not drinking aspirin and vitamin C but only this overpriced combination. When it is dissolved in water, grossly enough. Nothing else works. If I don’t drink it, I get a cold.

I literally worked in pharmaceutical science and I know this is complete bullshit borderlining homeopathy but I still swear by it. I wrote a whole academic work on vitamin C supplementation having no effect on getting a cold. And I still do it 😭