First, start big. Get the basic shapes right with large lettering. Ideally you would have something you are comparing to like a stencil or grey printout so you can see the difference between your writing and the target.

After you have the shape fairly good large you can shrink it down. You can take your time getting to that and just make a little progress at a time.

If you find it impossible to shed your current handwriting consider using grid paper to force spacing and maybe try your non-dominant hand.

Yeah, meds are not the solution to all problems. Some meds can at some times be useful for some people, but it is not appropriate to just blanket the population with benzodiazapines and consider the population to be mentally healthier. All sort of other stuff like improving social connection, reducing working hours, building skills, and so on can do a lot more to reduce anxiety and depression, but where is the funding for a local community garden or woodworking class?

Australian healthcare is actually pretty amazing. I had endocarditis last year and had two collapsed lungs with my blood oxygen plummeting and no clear reason for the infection. The bacteria ate one of my heart valves so my heart had to do 4 pumps to have the effect of one, pushing my heart rate up to around 140 bpm while sleeping. I was flown from my regional town to the best hospital for the job and had an emergency valve replacement. I was up and walking 2 days later and I was flown home a couple of weeks later. I now take Warfarin and will for the rest of my life, along with a beta blocker. My biggest healthcare costs involved with this whole thing is my monthly medication cost of about $30 from 5 prescriptions including ADHD medications.

That all said, mental health care is not as good here as it used to be nor as it should be. We had a conservative government for 12 years and they absolutely gutted the mental health care system. They cut funding for extremely effective programs and did some real harm to vulnerable people (if interested look up robodebt). So yes, mental health is not great here. It is way better than in the US or in the UK but it is not in line with best practice research.

The fact that we can do better does not eliminate how we we do. I didn’t die from something that should have killed me, and this is the second time I have had a really major injury that required surgeries and so on. Well, third technically. Still, I have never paid a cent at the time of use for any medical care and I have paid for the medical care of others with my taxes. Am I coming out ahead of my costs? I hope not to be honest. I hope I have contributed more than I have cost the system because I care what happens to other people. I hope I have paid my way but I will be sure to honestly file my taxes every year knowing the system I am paying in to is the same one that has saved my life. Again. Man I am stupid.

In the early days the data was fairly clear. We have a new virus which could be of natural origin or lab origin, but the early spread data basically showed two different strains at first jump to humans, suggesting a fairly large number of infected animals in the same area around Wuhan. This is much more consistent with a natural spillover than a lab leak because the differences would take time to accumulate. If you have a virus in a new host it adapts to that host rapidly and changes, so if two separate animals of different species were both infected that would make two different strains with two different spillovers into humans and it happening at almost the same time is not crazy, both animals may have been in the same place and gotten infected at similar times.

If it were a lab origin it would be identical virus when it jumped over to humans. It would also have been better adapted to humans and not had as much change in humans in the first few months.

So is it possible it was a lab leak? Yes. Is it more likely than a natural spillover? No, not more likely. Possible, but no specific evidence that makes it reasonable to conclude either than we know for sure what happened or that it was a lab leak. The correct answer here is we don’t know for sure now but regardless of what happened this time we know another event will happen in time and natural spillovers are just as dangerous as lab leaks. We need to have a One Health approach, taking care of humans and also the natural environment and the interplay between them. Having humans living on the edge of wild areas is a recipe for disaster.

UBI will cycle in the bottom of the economy.

When you give a rich person more money they buy assets and increase their wealth, it does not impact their spending activity and has no measurable impact on economic activity.

When you give a middle income person more money they buy something new or pay down debts. Buying something new stimulates economic activity, but paying down debts is really just another wealth transfer to the banks which are owned by rich people.

When you give money to low income people they spend it. They have unmet needs and always have something they can spend that money on. That money then generates economic activity.

Increasing economic activity is what all of the interest rate and inflation talk is about. If you get people spending money that generates activity which increases wages, increases income, and decreases wealth inequality.

A good example is during the GFC the Australian government gave low income people $750AUD, about $350USD. The prime minister asked people to spend this money rather than save it. People bought a bunch of things, in the people I knew it was mostly TVs and new clothes, things you can put off for ages but benefit from whenever you buy them. All of this purchasing stimulated the economy, leading to Australia being less impacted than almost any other G7 nation. We recovered very quickly and boomed from there.

If you want a more long term example look at any welfare. If you have extremely poor people they just die. They are underfed, have weak immune systems, and they face imminent death. They can’t access housing so they end up on the street. They have tonnes of inteactions with police and end up in the criminal justice system. They end up having their lives ruined and being purely a drain economically. They suffer.

If you give them enough money to have housing and food they are not going to be as costly to manage. They won’t require policing, they won’t get sick as often, and they will suffer less. Will this increase the competition for the lowest cost housing? Yes, but the answer to that is to build more housing. Even with the impact to housing cost this will not result in 100% of that payment going to landlords. People don’t pay their whole income for rent, they will buy food and other needs first, so if they are faced with too high a rent cost they will remain unhoused but at least tbey will eat.

I have some experience with mental health in Australia and it is pretty dire honestly. There is a constant sense that the staff are concerned first with making sure you don’t hurt yourself because that would be a breach of their duty of care. This unfortunaty made much of the interaction between staff and patients adversarial.

I am currently entering the individual suppory industry and we have a concept called dignity of risk. You have to remember that people are entitled to take risks that they consider worthwhile regardless of what you think. This means if someone wants to smoke weed that is their choice, I can’t stop them. If they want to drink that is their choice and I have to respect that. This is because they are their own people and have their own autonomy.

Yes, it is possible, though fairly prohibitive. You can get modules for connecting a Sim card to your laptop to make and receive calls and SMS, so all the third party authentication messages and calls can be done. Apps can often be run through an emulation layer for Android, not so much for iOS, but yeah, it can mostly be done.

That said, there are devices like the Pinephone which run a mainline Linux distribution like Arch or Alpine and can also do calls, SMS, and if you are brave use some android apps. If you can use a Pinephone for it then you can use another Linux laptop with a phone module to handle everything else.

I am much more worried about things like banking now. A bank that allows use of an app on your phone with NFC is great but when they take away using anything else I would become a little more worried. If they can keep an option open, say having standard cards along side phone NFC, then the lock in is much less profound. If we get to a point where they cannot operate without Google or Apple giving the go ahead then they cannot move away if things get bad, so those monopolistic companies can extract more value from those banks and that gets passed down. This applies to tonnes of other services like taxis, food delivery, booking doctors appointments, and so on.

Option 1, the vast majority of STI transmission is between m/f sexual partners.

Option 2, plenty of m/f couples have anal sex so it is either immoral for both or for neither.

Option 3, not all gay couples have anal sex, plenty just do oral and some don’t even have sex, plenty of ace people out there.

Option 4, condoms work well and really do prevent the spread of STIs.

Option 5, what about lesbian sex? They are also homosexual but don’t have penises, so is anal sex not an option for them?

Option 6, what right do we have to judge other people’s sexual preferences and activities? You are allowed to drink, smoke, and eat unhealthy foods, not to mention people refusing the vaccines for covid and influenza, so even with things that kill a lot of people every year we let you do it, so what makes anal sex for men different?

Option 7, what about pegging? Can anal in an m/f relationship involve penetration of the male? Is that the same or different to the gay men situation?

And lastly, option 8, if they get to say gay anal sex is immoral then what stops gay men from saying exercising power over a community based on unsupported claims is immoral? If their specific religion is correct then all others must be someone scamming or lying, so that must be immoral, right? If not, how and why?

If you flip the mouse over you should see a circular piece of plastic. Rotate this and it should be able to pop out, at which point the ball will also fall out. Inside you will see a pair of rollers and a wheel, all of which may have gunk on them. Clean off the gunk and make sure they spin properly. Replace the ball, the circular plastic, and then rotate the plastic to lock the mechanism.

Before the more modern definition took hold propaganda was not a term that held any real negative connotations. It was really just like marketing or evangelising, a behavior or product which uses various methods to change opinions. The big problem is when you have political or corporate powers using these tools to change opinion about something in a way that degrades democracy or causes harm.

For example, oil companies stand to benefit from people being uncertain about the science, so when they engage in propaganda they are trying to inject doubt where there is none and to do so in a way that will benefit them in the short term. This will cause massive harm in the future, potentially leading to a significant number of wars and a staggerig death toll, but that is not part of their consideration.

Another example is alt med. When someone claims that their pill can make your brain work better and will also boost your sexual performance all while protecting you from the dangers they just told you about they obviously stand to benefit from you believing them. They create the need and then offer the solution. Alex Jones is a good example of this. He tells you that the global elite are planning nuclear war, then in the next ad break tells you about iodine for radiation exposure.

So why is propaganda frowned on? It is more like propaganda is the label we give to marketing or evangelising that we consider worthy of frowning. Someone in another countries may sort different things into evangelising, marketing, and propaganda categories but they will do so based on their understanding of the world and you will likely agree with most of their sorting. Almost everyone thinks that Nazis are bad and put their marketing in the propaganda bucket.

For handheld bidets or the hose attachment this applies, the ones where it is fixed have much more flow and deal with the problem that way. That said, I’ve never used one of those so I can’t say.

Yes, there is more.

You sound like you are experiencing burnout and as a result anhedonia and depression.

Burnout is a very real clinical condition caused by the demands you are operating under being dysfunctional in some way. It is very real and can lead to a dangerous depression.

Anhedonia is the loss of enjoyment in things you previously enjoyed. For example, when I had anhedonia video games because uninteresting, boring even, and the effort required to play was too much and there was no reward to playing.

You need to deal with this before it escalates into full blown depression and burnout. It can take much longer to fix than it will take to stop now, so get started ASAP. Starting an antidepressant may be helpful, it may not, but it is just one tool and I personally would avoid it having done it before.

The other steps for managing burnout are largely about changing the demands on you, the level of connection to other people, and what you do to relax. Exercise is a really helpful tool and honestly is what makes me resilient against another bout of burnout now.

Good luck

I can provide you the answer my partner gave me to the same question. The bidet provides water with a direction to it. You wash front to back, so all the material is lifted and pushed further away from the vulva and only fresh clean water arrives at the vulva itself. Also, as in chemistry, dilution is the solution, as you are washing less and less undesirable material left and the water runs cleaner and cleaner. So take extra time, wash front to back, and do multiple slow passes.

When I am entering a space I have 360° visibility. I see all, I know all. I can therefore make a calm and practiced motion while being fully aware of my surroundings as I park.

When I am leaving the space my view is inherently restricted. If I am pointing out I can see to both sides, see oncoming and same side traffic, see pedestrians, and see even more as I pull out of the spot.

If I am pulling out in reverse I can see far less. I have a very twisty neck so I can see behind me (180°) plus another maybe 40°, leaving me with an 80° view, but it is from the opposite end of the car space so it is narrowed. As I pull out I see more, but the whole time it is more narrow. I can’t see the rear of vehicle and I certainly can’t see far to either side of the vehicle at the road level.

So I think the key is thinking about your worst visibility. I think the overall visibility is better when I reverse in to the space and drive straight out when compared with driving directly in and reversing out. I think I can see small people and kids better over the bonnet of the car rather than out the rear window and I think I can react better to the situation when I am reversing in than when I am reversing out.