• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Certainly. I’m not saying soap is bad by any means. It’s a tool for bathing just like any other. Not using soap to wash your body doesn’t imply unhygienic anymore than not using a scrub brush makes you unhygienic.

    What matters is that you wash regularly, get rid of grime, dirt, excess oils and dead skin buildup.
    There’s many paths to hygiene. For most people, the one with soap is the easiest and the only downside is “now moisturize”.

    Persistent advertising from cleaning product companies since the 50s have heavily pushed a level of cleaning and perfuming well beyond what’s actually necessary for hygiene.
    My body wash company would like me to use a silver dollar sized portion. I get better results from a dime sized portion and a moderate firmness silicone brush.


  • You’re taking “it’s possible to be clean after bathing without soap” as a way stronger statement than it is.
    Do you think I’m saying soap is bad?
    No one is talking about hygienic hand washing practices for medicine, food prep, after defecation, or after being coated in tough substances.
    We’re in a giant pile of people talking about routing bathing to prevent body odor and the skin issues caused by poor bodily hygiene.
    Washing with running water and a scrubbing action is sufficient for that purpose for many people. Bathing without soap is not a guarantee that you will have BO, a rash, skin lesions, or acne.

    The Africa point isn’t really the gotcha you think it is. Soap working better faster doesn’t mean that a lack of soap doesn’t work. As you said, when they didn’t have soap they still washed. People are generally interested in being clean, and pragmatic. They’ll clean themselves, and if something helps them get cleaner faster, they’ll use it.

    And yup, that passage does document that the Roman empire eschewed soap for personal hygiene until roughly year zero.


  • The primary action that soap has for fighting bacteria is breaking down oils and making it easier for debris and bacteria to be removed. Less food for the bacteria, and faster removal.
    Bacteria will be destroyed by this process, but that’s coincidental to why soap works and provides benefit.
    It’s why we don’t tell people to wash their hands by squirting soap on them, spreading it around and then rinsing it off. The critical step is the mechanical action that facilitates removal of debris with running water.

    Yes, soap is necessary for hand washing because we need to maximize bacteria removal after defecation or before preparing foods or medical activities.

    In the context of bathing however, you don’t need to sterilize your torso. You will also be rinsing your body far longer than you’re typically going to be washing your hands, which when combined with scrubbing results in a clean torso.

    I’m not one of those people who’s opposed to using soap or anything, but that’s not the same as recognizing that it’s possible to wash and be clean without it.


  • Did I say pure luxury, or did I say it makes it easier?

    I did forget that something is obviously 100% vital and indispensable or entirely worthless and void of functionality.

    Early soaps were used for the preparation of textiles rather than personal hygiene.
    As early as we invented soap, we actually had the notion that festering in your own rancid body oils is bad far, far earlier. As such, we had ways of dealing with that well before we had soap and people didn’t just immediately switch.

    So go ahead and use soap. I certainly do. But if you’re looking to have your mind blown, take a shower and just scrub your skin with a brush, loofah or the palm of your hand and be amazed when you still get clean. If you’re really grimey, you can do what the Romans did and rub yourself with olive oil and scrape it off with a scraper before doing that.


  • Phrasing it like that is weird, but you don’t actually need soap. It just makes the oils and grime come off easier, so without it you just need to scrub more diligently.

    If you’re cleaning yourself properly your skin is gonna be the same cleanliness afterwards either way. Cheap soap will dry your skin though, so use decent soap.

    Cleaning regularly and effectively is the key, not the specifics. Soap just lowers the bar for effectiveness, and maybe adds “and also moisturize”.


  • Most voters don’t have a business and never will.

    The value of a net new business is that it creates more jobs and economic activity.
    Most people benefit from more jobs to either work at or drive up labor demand.
    Per that school of economic thought, incentivizing a new business adds more activity to the market and more opportunity for people to find ways to innovate, provide value and become profitable.
    Giving money to an existing struggling business is subsidizing a businesses that’s already demonstrated that it’s not working.

    However, we’re both putting too much into it. The goal is to say $50k for small business, because people like a business friendly atmosphere.
    Trump gets credit for giving tax cuts to businesses for stock buyback, which only helps investors. The goal is to court people who want pro business policies without literal handouts to corporations.


  • If you watch the video, he wasn’t using it for anything political. He’s doing low stakes crowd work. He’s chatting with people, gives a guy in a trump hat a signed hat while making some self deprecating jokes and good natured insults to the guy in the trump hat. Definitely makes like he’s going to steal the guys hat, and puts it on for a second for a bigger laugh.

    Optics good, bad, or neutral, it wasn’t a planned “solidarity” thing like the headline makes it sound.

    A better headline would have been “Biden borrows trump hat for laugh at lunch following 9/11 memorial event”






  • In isolation it’s not great, but in conjunction with your own advocate talking about you not following a doctor’s orders? It doesn’t bolster confidence that the individual would follow doctors orders in the future.

    It means she hasn’t been able to quit drinking!

    Yes, that’s exactly the point. It’s quite unlikely her medical troubles started when she was hospitalized.
    A history of not following medical advice casts doubt about a future of following medical advice.

    Yes, addiction is a disease that the individual may lack the ability to control. That doesn’t change that it’s a risk factor for non-compliance that’s absent in others who need the transplant.


  • Not made up, I just read a couple other articles that mentioned it.
    It’s also part of the whole “the only people who can talk freely are the people with an interest in the doctors being wrong”.

    People aren’t turned away because they didn’t exercise or because they work too much or they don’t get enough sleep or they didn’t follow doctor’s orders. So, in Nathan and Amanda’s case, you’re seeing someone being told, ‘You didn’t follow doctor’s orders, so we’re not going to help you. We’re going to let you die’

    As a quote from the other interested party, as well as the “in documents shared with CTV News, notes show […] their decision was based on ‘minimal abstinence outside of hospital.’” is pretty much spelling it out.


  • It actually takes surprisingly little if it’s done consistently and without giving your body time to rest.

    A standard drink has roughly 14g of ethanol in it. People with notable liver damage tend to have a history of a decade or more drinking 30-50 grams a day, or two to three drinks.
    People who drink more than 80g a day for a decade are almost guaranteed to have liver problems (~5-6 drinks).

    Obviously drinking a half gallon a day is worse, but consistent long term drinking is also not great.

    It is essentially a poison that’s only around because it’s easy to make and traditional at this point.



  • A lot of it is also casting a wide net, and relying on people remembering your accuracy more than your inaccuracy.
    “I’m getting the feeling that there was someone you were close with who’s no longer in your life, and that their departure happened in the fall or winter, or around then.”

    Everyone has someone die or lose touch, and the given timeframe is nearly the entire year. The person will likely tell you the hit, and then you can build on it by agreeing with the detail they shared.


  • And even then, it’s not a piece of paper that you can just accept like a death coupon. It has to be signed and not contentious, and things need to line up very correctly.
    My Dad had a DNR in his legal name, but the nursing staff and his room all used the common shortening of that name. Because the names didn’t line up when things went bad and there was no one with authority to clarify they, correctly, operated under the assumption that they did not have an order.

    At one point EMS providers couldn’t even make the call, it could only be done by the medical facility. I’m pretty sure that’s no longer the case anywhere in the US though.