Chetzemoka

"Means Matter"

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/

Reducing access to more lethal means of suicide reduces deaths by suicide in a population. The data on this is unequivocal.

That's because the majority of suicidal crises are spontaneous and of absurdly short duration, on the order of around 20 minutes. If you interrupt the process between decision and action, people survive. And 90% of people who survive a suicide attempt never go on to die by suicide at any future point in their lives.

Favorable terms with no means of legal leverage are just wisps of air. They can and will be rescinded at the earliest convenience of the corporation, which is literally why we're in the current situation we are today. The strongest middle class in the US existed when unions were at their peak. That is not a coincidence.

A formal, legal union gives employees power and leverage to enforce the favorable terms that they negotiate with an employer. You can argue that unions as organizations can be subject to similar corruption as any other organization, but contrary to popular propaganda, there is nothing inherent in the existence of a union that requires or lends itself to corruption any more than any other power structure.

Employees are legally permitted to organize a formal, legal union of their own outside the existing union organizations, but then they're starting from scratch. Existing unions have been through negotiations, have experienced lawyers, know the process and all of its pitfalls. The vast majority of workers are better off joining an existing union because of this.

Singing lessons. I'm honestly not even kidding.

I'm an American who grew up in a part of the country called Appalachia. My native accent is often associated with being uneducated and stupid, so I learned how to change it when I was a young adult.

The thing that helped me most was voice lessons that taught me how to control the muscles in the nasopharynx, throat, tongue. The reason that's difficult is because you can't see the way those muscles move when someone else speaks or sings, so you can't just mimic what they're doing. It takes a little bit more effort to learn.

Learning how to sing classical western music (opera type stuff) allowed me to learn how to speak in that kind of just generic Midwestern American accent that has less negative social associations.

Now, that being said, I also have Indian friends who grew up in the United States who still speak with a similar Indian accent as their immigrant parents, and it's really no big deal. So you could just roll with your native accent.

(And also, I still code switch back into my native accent when I'm talking to my family or I visit my home region. Your native accent never goes away even when you learn a different way of speaking.)

Yep, that's a strip mine

Ok I have no idea where you drove through, but the vast majority of the state is woodland and wetland. I spent my childhood summers just literally wandering around the woods all day with neighborhood kids while our parents were at work.

You were in a strip mining area.

Internal medical ethics controls do a pretty good job of dealing with this kind of nonsense though. You're never going to get rates of that kind of insanity to zero, and legal regulations don't make it any better.

This is actually how it's handled in a lot of electronic medical records. There is a different indicator for sex/gender assigned at birth and current gender. I've not seen a specific indicator for intersex, but I've not encountered an intersex patient so far in my career.

This is the actual reason I default to chicken and sometimes opt for fish. And oat milk. It's not everything, but it's a hell of a lot better than eating beef five nights a week and barely required any effort on my part.

Golf course lawns are lame and terrible for the environment.

That was me last fall with my "trash and leaves pile" that is now a nice new garden with flowers and decorative grass

I am definitely the bad kid on the block lol

I think "several inches" is a bit overwrought. It's like one layer of leaves that will be mulched up the instant I mow next spring. And what is a "good idea"? What's going to happen? Some grass might die. Oh noes, the world will end!

We need to rethink how we live in all respects. And not depleting lawns of nutrients that we have to replace with artificial fertilizer is part of that