Yes. It is normal for your body to have some level of cancer cells, but the immune system constantly keeps cancers in check. As the immune system weakens, cancers are more likely to become problematic. There’s even a group of cancer that is so much more likely to happen in AIDS patients that they’re known as AIDS-related cancers.

At its best, nationalism in some forms can help unify people from disparate backgrounds into an imagined national identity. Unfortunately, most nationalism rots into division instead. Christian nationalism in the US, Hindu nationalism in India, Nazis in Germany. These all reject members of the physical nation in favor of their crazed fantasy version.

Just to explain my math point a bit more, let’s take the definition of recent by decade, where all presidents serving within those decades count:

• 1 decade (2014): 3
• 2 decades (2004): 4
• 3 decades (1994): 5
• 4 decades (1984): 7
• 5 decades (1974): 10
• 6 decades (1964): 11
• 7 decades (1955): 13
• 8 decades (1945): 15

Even going back fairly far, we still have a pretty small sample size to draw conclusions for presidents specifically.

I agree with you on the age issue as a broader problem. There we have a solid sample. We’ve become a gerontocracy at the federal level especially, with the older generations holding onto power far past when they should have moved aside to allow in new people and fresh ideas. People in their 80’s and 90’s holding on to seats clogs the pipelines so that everyone else is prevented from moving up.

What is recent? W. Bush was four presidents ago, Clinton was only five presidents ago. We’re only on our 46th president since Washington was inaugurated in 1789, 235 years ago. When you go through presidents that slowly, it’s easy to have your sample thrown off if you just include a couple of decades.

Yeah, I should have emphasized that we’re “dealing with” the problem. As late as 2005, Corelle was still putting lead in at least some of its dishware. But compare that to what was happening before, we’re not doing nearly as much to add to the problem. Compare with years past, where we were sticking it in paint where kids would eat paint chips, in gasoline, and even as a sweetener.

Surprise! It never went away, it just got covered with sealant.

Lead poisoning. I know, I know, there are a ton of other hazards we’re exposing ourselves to. We will have our reckoning with things like plastic, but at least lead is something we’re aware of and dealing with.

Along those same lines, ozone layer destroying products.

Recently I was practicing singing “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers for karaoke. I was looking back through its history. Originally it was poorly received, partially because the horrors of WW2 were pretty fresh. In terms of dates, it would be about like someone making a comedy about the 2001-9-11 terrorist attacks, but of course with a death toll that was five orders of magnitude greater. I can only hope that we continue our winning streak of not having superpowers duking it out.

I remember my family having an outdated encyclopedia because my aunt, a librarian, would hand off the old copy the library was trying to get rid of. I don’t think I looked at them more than a few times, and even then it was only vaguely useful. Good riddance, online reference material is so much better.

Cosmic background radiation?

Oh, huh, I guess being in training just kind of forces me to think about good habits instead of getting lazy. I’m also more used to biking, where I have a mirror and shoulder glances as my primary tools. But either way, I would want to have the tool, since I know I will use it correctly.

You should always be looking behind you, checking mirrors, and checking the backup camera. I am a rookie driver and even I know that much.

Why? I wouldn’t go without a backup camera. It only takes one time for a small child running after a ball to slip your eye and you’ve got blood on your hands. When a driver gets behind the wheel, they are barely in control of a multi-ton murder machine. A backup camera is a very easy-to-use tool to keep the murder machine under control.

I always felt empty and alone until I had a nice strong man to pump me full of babies! Ugh.

Fandom was exactly what I was thinking of. Just maybe without having more ads than content. That I’m not a fan of, especially for volunteer supplied content.

Extra thought on search: add a weighting option so individual servers can be searched, but don’t come up as high in the rankings. So keeping with the superhero theme, have the Flash comic wiki with a 1 weighting and the more general DC comic and Arrowverse wikis with 0.8 weightings.

I think this would be immensely helpful for niche topics, but I don’t really see it as much of a direct competitor to Wikipedia. Interwiki links have been a thing for a long time, but they’re not really used that much. They also are used by specialized shortcut syntax instead of using a more intuitive domain name syntax. So let’s say you have a wiki for the Flash TV show and you want to link to an article in the Flash comic wiki. This would be great for that. Maybe have “search related wikis” as an option to search some hand picked wikis?

But for going head-to-head with Wikipedia, I don’t really see it so much. Part of the success of Wikipedia is that it forces editors to work in a single namespace, debate the contents, use a common set of policies, and so on. There is also a lot of policy, process, human knowledge, and institution built up over the years geared solely towards writing an encyclopedia. If you go to Wikipedia, it may not be perfect, but it will have gone through that process. Trying to wade through hundreds of wikis to find a decent article does not sound like a treat, especially if effort gets spread across multiple wikis.

Like with Lemmy, I am excited to see where this goes. And nutomic, congratulations with your daughter!

dog walker

Not even walker. They just had to mind the dogs, but they got fired from that job because they were sleeping on the job, then were bewildered that they got fired.

I can remember all too well how it went for the r/antiwork mod who was interviewed by Fox. Anything Lemmy does needs to be very deliberately planned by people who know what to say and not to say.