hyeonwho4

Was $10k before or after the insurance negotiated discount? Pre-discount prices mean nothing: I had the same tests ordered twice (needed the results urgently), once through my PCP/HMO and once paid to a walk-in doctor's office in cash. The cash price was $700. My PCP claimed a price of insurance $3500, who then negotiated it down to a "discounted" $710. So the worst of both worlds would have been a high deductible plan.

There use to be "Raccoon cafes" in Seoul. You go buy a drink and pet the raccoons. IIRC animal cafes were banned around 2019 or so.

Looks like IoT devices are the next frontier in residential proxies ... or provide spies the next leading indicator into SV business performance.

I don't know. I don't think that most Asian apartments have central fresh air. Usually the unit owners open windows regularly.

Human infant intestines in the ancestral environment are natively colonized by bifidobacterium infantis, which completely metabolizes oligosaccarides present in human breast milk and outputs highly acidic byproducts. This acid kills most other gut bacteria, allowing B. infantis to consist of 50% of the intenstinal microbiome in healthy infants [1]. Oligosaccarides cannot be metabolized by babies without gut bacteria, but human mothers produce more of them than most other mammals we know of, and the specific oligosaccarides present depend on maternal generics [4]. NICU infants untreated with B. infantis are 5x more likely to fall into sepis as a result of necrotizing enterocolitis[2,3], probably due to increased intestinal permeability to pathogens.

But B. infantis is coevolved for the digestion of human oligosaccarides, and those are specifically genetically coded for in human milk [4]. As a result, "vegan baby formula" or even baby formula without the correct oligosacarides could be a disaster for baby intestinal health, and even cow's milk has a different oligosaccaride profile, and we don't know how adaptable the gut microbes are.

[1] doi.org/10.1038/s41390-020-01350-0 [2] doi.org/10.1542/peds.2004-1463 [3] doi.org/10.1038/s41372-019-0443-5 [4] doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45209-y

This is called an FCU (fan coil unit) and is common in Asia. It consists of a high efficiency central chiller run by building management, and pipes to bring coolant to each unit. Then in each unit there is a heat exchange coil with a fan to blow the room air through the coil. Hence fan coil unit.

The advantages of this system are that the only sound in the unit is the fan, and air is not circulated between units. The disadvantage is that building management can turn off A/C centrally if they want to save money.

For some reason Americans are slow to pick up HVAC innovations that are common elsewhere: heat pumps, split-system air conditioners, FCU, etc. I guess it is because energy is cheap to them and they don't mind noise.

The White House press release had links to the eight grants in question. The claimed values of the grants were inflated by the press release, but they did actually involve studying the effects of cross sex hormone administration, so in this case the claims of confusion between "transgender mice" and "transgenic mice" were the fake news. (Also, the claimed 8M USD over N years is peanuts compared to the money spent annually on developing actual transgenic mice.)

The default setting on ChatGPT is to now include previous conversations as context. I disabled memories, but this new feature was enabled when I checked the settings.

That used to be the function of undergraduate and Masters theses at the Ivy League universities. "For the undergraduate thesis, fix someone else's mistake. For the Master's thesis, find someone else's mistake. For the PhD thesis, make your own mistake."

The unfettered computer and internet access was a desktop machine (which needed to run a minimalist distro) on dial-up in a very public room. The fun that taught me tech stuff was getting to distro to work, and there was no privacy. Parents were much more aware of the dangers back then.

Nowdays everythibg on smartphones "just works", and the OS won't even let the user access system files. I meet college students who have no idea what a file system is, or what a DNS server is.

Times have changed, indeed.

When I was a child, my parents had me work on a lot of puzzles. They saw this as a way to build attention span, ability to focus, and persistence to achieve long term goals (not to mention that we had the coolest, most intricate puzzles). I would probably work with my children work on something a bit more constructive and realistic, but the point is that as children we build intellectual habits and attention span from what we do, and being unable to focus on highly addictive stimuli for more than five minutes is a symptom of a strong deficit. One might even consider it an intellectual disability.

This kind of "smuggling" or failure to declare live specimens is very common in biological research on. This is the third time I've heard of international collaborations playing fast and loose with the law. (The other two were finding ways to send live samples by mail.)

Compromising and using empathy to understand the opposition's views so that you can negotiate for what you need does not satisfy the base, and does not satisfy social media. The (naive) game theory of negotiation says that it is better to stake out an extreme position so that you get more of what you want when you negotiate it away. And the dynamic of primary elections also allows traitors or traders to be punished if they defy the desires of the party too much.

That is true. What recently happened is that the Supreme court has determined that speech which benefits a foreign terrorist organization constitutes "material support" to that organization, and providing material support to a terrorist organization is a crime which can get a green card revoked.

Now, I don't think it makes any sense that speech is "material" support, but I also think it doesn't make any sense that speech is "violence," and US culture seems to have repudiated my thoughts on what distinguishes speech from action.

But whatever I think, under current law, speech in support of a terrorist organization is no longer free speech. And certain pro-Palestinian organizations were defined by the previous administration to be terrorist organizations back in November. So it follows that certain pro-Gaza activism is no longer free speech. I don't think this should be the case, but this is the current state of the law.