Regardless of any wrongdoing that occurred during the animal trials, the way that Musk is marketing this and talking about it on X concerns me deeply.
It seems genuinely irresponsible to hype up a medical technology like this when it appears that the animal trials (and the implanted device itself) were not safe and effective.
I really hope the FDA did their due diligence when they cleared the device for human trials. The consequences of not doing so would be devastating for those affected by quadriplegia and ALS and who start experiencing unwanted side effects of implantation or device malfunctions.
Silent but not untraumatic and painless. Basically inert gases you don't even realize your not getting oxygen and carbon monoxide is similar but you take it up and it causes many horrible symptoms. For details a combination of these will explain it.
Your body has no sense of oxygen content of the air. What you sense is CO2 buildup in your blood (because it modifies the pH). In a pure nitrogen environment you can still exhale the CO2, but of course do not replenish any O2. It's not just that you won't notice -- there is nothing to notice. Your body literally lacks the sensory ability to detect it.
To be distinguished from a pure CO2 environment where you cannot expel the CO2 so you will feel the effect of being unable to breath.
After taking one or two breaths of N2, there will be so little O2 in your lungs that breathing will actually run your respiration backwards -- it will pull O2 out of your blood instead of bringing it in.
You'll likely experience a light euphoria, get a headache, maybe feel a bit dizzy. But this will happen so fast it's hard to even be certain -- unconsciousness in under a minute is expected and within just a few breaths is possible.
No. That will burn your lungs like hell. You'll feel like actually suffocating. Nitrogen is an inert gas, so you won't even feel it, another one is helium. You'll pretty much lose consciousness after just a couple breaths and then fade away quietly. It's very commonly used in suicide bags and there's modern assisted suicide methods that use it too.
I think death penalties are barbaric and uncivilized, no matter what, but comparatively it's probably better than almost anything the US used historically.
I'm going to start off this conversation by first saying I'm not an advocate of the death penalty. However, of all the methods used, asphyxiation is not "cruel and unusual." It is quick (as in immediate) and painless. This is why the defendant's lawyers have no idea what they're talking about.
Honestly if I had to choose, it would be nitrogen. The alternatives in Alabama are electrocution and lethal injection, both of which are absolutely horrifying. If I was him I’d be firing my lawyers for trying to get the state to use methods that essentially torture you to death instead of the one that just makes you fall asleep.
Absolutely monstrous that he’s getting the death penalty in the first place though. I hope he isn’t in the 5% or so who turn out to be innocent.
Jesus fucking Christ, I just read about the first attempt. The state of Alabama tortured this man for hours, injected him with who knows what, and now they want to do it again. As far as I’m concerned he served his sentence.
This sounds like a joke but this is the explicit problem: doctors won't be the ones to do it.
You guys all knew that right? Doctors don't administer those chemicals for lethal injection. And they won't be administering gas either. Some po'dunk cop will.
Because doctors take an oath that begins "first, do no harm". This has forever been the problem of the very notion of "humane execution", there are no physicians involved. None. At any step.
Know what's just as effective? Bullets. But we can't call a firing squad humane with a straight face, and the witnesses remaining are traumatized, including the shooters. That truth exposes the truth of the death penalty. It's not about justice, but retribution - for the living. They're lynchings. Violent theatrics. That's the point.
They shouldn't be legal, it's barbaric. But you already said you weren't for them, so I'm just preaching to the ether.
Your “I need to breathe” reflex is driven by the presence of CO2, not by the absence of oxygen. A lack of oxygen makes you euphoric, then you get tunnel vision, and then you pass out. This is why it’s dangerous to hyperventilate before free diving - you clear out the CO2 from your blood but don’t really add more oxygen. Instead of coming up for air when you need it, you might just pass out instead.
People panic while normal choking because their blood CO2 is rising and they can’t do anything about it. Being exposed to pure nitrogen doesn’t have that effect, it’s what makes working with nitrogen cannisters so dangerous. If they leak in a confined space and then displace all the normal 21% O2 room air with pure N2 the effect is that workers don’t even notice something is wrong. Instead they just calmly pass out and quickly die. It’s probably the easiest way to go.
The search function is nice and really appreciated. But, from my experience, the biggest problem with Mastodon is how much work you have to put into curating a feed, something traditional social media has done some of the work for you. I mean it's fairly simple once you get the hang of it, but a lot of people are used to having their hand held.
Also, I'm not looking to piss people off, but I think in terms of the users on the platform it is extremely progressive, and non-progressive people will be less likely to engage with that.
Or will change that. I suspect in their infancy most of the popular corporate owned social media platforms probably had a more left leaning clientele to begin with.
It's really nice to see some of these fuckers caught and investigated for a change.
The ever-growing pessimist in me wonders what he did to trigger this though. I want to believe this is good people in government doing their job and rooting out corruption. But I'm pretty sure most people in the Senate are doing this shit.
God damn, I still can't fucking believe Boebert and her husband's million dollar "cunsulting fees" (aka bribery payments) weren't quickly investigated and they're already in jail. It's the exact same shit.
I’m convinced that a high percentage of these assclowns run for these positions as a front to do whatever other illegal activities they really want to do.
If he was a member of the GOP the right wing media would accuse (Democrat of the month) of making up evidence and would eventually be pardoned by the next Republican president.
Colonizing mars is a stupid thing to do pretty much full stop.
Mars cannot be terraformed. It has no meaningful magnetic field. That's a dead end for a planet's ability to retain a useful atmosphere and ward off cosmic radiation. You'll have to live in shielded, sealed pods to survive there, always. In which case you may as well be in space with access to abundant solar energy and less of a gravity well to contend with for your frequent resupply missions. There's barely any advantage to being on Mars compared to orbiting some random Lagrange point or the sun itself. I guess you can make use of some earthworks for civil engineering? Hardly seems worth it.
I've read that Mars could retain an Earth-like atmosphere because, while it's stripped away by the solar wind, it would happen over tens of millions of years; any remotely plausible terraforming attempt would be able to replenish it much faster than that.
There’s also no point in colonizing mars. We have enough uninhabitated desert here on earth. It’s not a space problem, it’s a cost problem. And building on mars is a lot more costly than building in a desert.
Mastodon is a lot harder to enshittify being as it's decentralised and uses an open protocol.
If it looks like an instance has gone down the path of corporate enshittification, other instances will stop federating with it.
The software itself could be a target, but it's open-source. Even the original instance created by the software creators (mastodon.social), turns to the dark side, someone will inevitably fork the last open-source version of the software and other instances will then update from the most popular fork.
As long as the underlying protocol remains the same, it doesn't really matter what happens.
Heck, kbin is totally different software but uses the same protocol to federate with the various Lemmys, other kbins, and, yes, Mastodon instances too.
Consider what happened a number of times with Reddit where various groups left and used the last open-source version of the software to set up their own Reddit clones. It wasn't particularly successful for them, but one or two of them are still out there.
If there had been a large number of them all sharing content and posts like Mastodon etc., maybe they would have been more popular. (For better or worse).
news
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.