Ioper
1yr ago
I have a friend who recently went to pain clinic for therapy for like 3 months full time (no medication).
From what he described the pain doctors' conceptualisation of pain is fairly complex but for specifically chronic pain its often goes like this:
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Some initial source of pain from an injury, often in the back or some kind of nerve damage.
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This pain stays around long term and this fucks up the pain system in various ways.
First off, pain tends to naturally magnify and spread over time, as a sign that you need to be careful not to further injure or even move that area of the body. This is one way you can get pain in areas seemingly unconnected to the initial injury. Furthermore, the way pain is processed is through nerve signals sent to the spinal cord where they get converted into chemical signals that then get sent to the brain. The system is kind of segmented and when a signal gets sent long enough on layer gets overwhelmed and spills over to the next, that's how pain spreads. Now, this process can get self-reinforcing which means that you end up with pain completely unconnected to the original injury and that is unresponsive to traditional painkillers but responds to stuff like Gabapentin.
Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, our nervous system is adaptive. The more we pay attention to something the better we get at it. Practice violin every day and you'll get better feeling and agility in your left hand. Unfortunately this works for pain as well. Get chronic pain from some injury and you'll pay attention to it all the time which trains your nervous system to be sensitive to that pain, which can be crippling.
For the second point there is an obvious solution, practice feeling other things even when you're in pain. Try to find some area in your body that doesn't hurt or feels less pain and focus on that.
Here various meditative practices and yoga can be very helpful. Relaxation is part of it but not the only aspect, luckily they often go hand in hand. This doesn't necessarily remove all pain but it has a very high success rate at decreasing it and making it manageble.
Ioper
1yr ago
That is great man! There is so much amazing music to discover that is even better sung than just listened to.
What kind of choir did you go to?
Ioper
1yr ago
An issue to be sure, especially if you're in a choir of middling talent.
Singing a difficult piece is one thing, struggling with it for weeks/months and never really perform it well... Just kill me.
Ioper
1yr ago
I personally think reddit these days is 80% bots and "call centres" making comments. So there's no need to censor the site directly, just put backroom restrictions on what the call centres and bots are allowed to push.
I doubt this. Reddit is very easy to manipulate so you don't need a ton of "bots".
That said, it's so funny to go in to like corporate subs whenever they release a shit product, like Google with the Pixel 6, and look at the shill threads and comments. It's is so incredibly transparent.
Ioper
1yr ago
Best cure I've found is not going to bed or at least staying up until I feel kind of sober.
Ioper
1yr ago
I'm not saying that there aren't bots, I'm saying that you don't need a ton on Reddit because the website's design makes manipulation easy and requires far less engagement than sites like Twitter.
It's election today in Sweden.
Despite what people might think, there seems to be less excitement or conflict internally in Sweden than usual, ime.
The two blocs have largely converged on a set of desired policies and the question is just where the focus should be and just how hard you should go. One might argue that this makes a large difference but I would say that this at the very least diffuses a lot of the drama surrounding the election itself. People kind of expect things to continue on largely as they have been regardless of who wins. We've had debates between the leaders of the two major parties where one says something and then for the other to just reply "I completely agree".
There is no side that doesn't want to restrict immigration, there is no side that wants to dismantle the nuclear reactors, there is no side that doesn't want to join NATO, there is no side that doesn't want to strengthen the police. Etc.
Interestingly, where people have radically different opinions about things it's within the blocs rather than between them. Both blocs have parties for and against private profit in the "public sector", both sides have parties for and against rent control and both sides have parties for and against lowering or keeping the current levels of unemployment income insurance.
Even the drama surrounding the Sweden Democrats (anti-immigration/xenophobic populists) has somewhat died down. It's still there to be sure and part of the peculiarities about this election and the likely issues with governing after it has to do with this, but the hysteria is mostly gone in my estimation.
So, who will win? Who knows. It's incredibly even and might come down to a few votes or one of the smaller parities unexpectedly not making parliament (there is one on each side in the risk zone).
More interesting to me will be how the actual formation of government and governance will shake out after the election. The social democrats have been able to govern on their own for the past 8 months or so with a very small number of votes directly supporting this (also having to use the right wing parties budget) and it seems unlikely to continue after the election if they win since this was kind of a bridge solution after a crisis last winter and the next election being so close.
On the other side there is the issue of the Swedish Democrats and how they will be incorporated in a ruling coalition. The other parties don't want them in the government, which they might be fine with, but there are pretty severe issues surrounding the fact that SD is in many ways more closely related to the social democrats policy-wise than the right, despite often being labeled as "far right". One salient example of this is them saying that lowering the unemployment insurance payments is a "red line" for them, but it's a campaign promise for the right... This is obviously not the only issue.
Regardless of who wins things aren't going to be easy but my analysis is that the internal contradictions are a smaller on the "right" but that the social democrats are skilled political operators and might do things like create bi-partisan agreements regarding some issues in order to sideline some parties on their side, kind of like what has happened with NATO.
Ioper
1yr ago
Depends on what one means by those labels.
Both blocs have shrunk to fuel SD's growth, but is SD right or left wing? They are anti-immigration for sure and plenty of their representatives are xenophobic but their economic and social security policy mostly aligns with the social democrats.
The biggest loser in Sweden the last 8 years is liberalism, which is kind of dead after it won fairly big back in 06 and ushered in massive changes in Sweden.
It seems the right bloc won the narrowest of victories, although we won't know for certain until Wednesday because it's so even. Perhaps a similar change will occur now. The social democrats seems to have been on board with rolling back many changes but couldn't do so due to their electoral coalition but I suspect they might quietly keep a lot of the changes the right bring about now if they win in 4 years.
It seems the winds of mild reaction has finally reaction has finally reached Sweden and it's a bit hard to tell where we'll be in 4 years. Or perhaps the left will pull out a truly astonishing comeback with the late postal votes and Swedes voting from abroad. We will see.
I had not done that compass since I don't read the evening press but the results there seem a bit different from the other compasses I've tried and looking into it very briefly it seems like their methodology is different.
While the other compass makers have had the parties do the compasses themselves, Aftonbladet seems to source their answers from interviews etc. (Some of them pretty old) They also don't have any questions about social security which is peculiar.
I maintain that the primary identification of SD is populist. They promise both large increases in welfare and public sector and lower taxes. They want to finance this with cuts to immigration and foreign aid.
I don't think anyone really knows where exactly they stand, except that they are strongly against immigration. If the result stands we'll see where they are willing to compromise though.
Ioper
1yr ago
There is some of that but I think the primary conflict line is centered around how much people dislike/are afraid of SD and how afraid they are of the issues surrounding immigration. This is what has lead to all the current strange alliances.
There could be a conflict line between populists and technocrats but that like everything else gets distorted by SD (and to a lesser extent the issues surrounding immigration).
In theory it is still possible to deport hundreds of thousands that aren't citizens yet and didn't really have valid asylum reasons.
Permanent resident permits can be rescinded.
Will this happen? Of course not, and even if it did it wouldn't really "solve" things since many of the issues are with the second generation.
Ioper
1yr ago
I think it would be useful if the number of comments of threads and subtreads was displayed when you collapse them.
It makes browsing much easier because you can easily tell if there are new comments or if there has been any intense discussion in a thread without having to scroll through it.
Ioper
1yr ago
The only space I hear about anti-natal stuff is in the rat sphere. I have never really encountered it offline and I live in a liberal bubble.
The one guy I know that doesn't want to have kids doesn't because of mental health issues in his family that he doesn't want to propagate but even he seems to warming up to the idea.
Ioper
1yr ago
Consider products from other markets. Do you align with reviews of those or are you always off?
Personally I seem to be i broad alignment with reviews of shows and games coming out of East Asia. These are products covering a wide range of genres, artforms and cultures and yet reviews, even from westerners, seem to be broadly accurate while they miss the target in the west.
This isn't even some nerd thing either, it isn't nerds that are watching Korean romance dramas on Netflix...
I would therefore argue for 3 with a splash of 4. Media markets have fragmented and some things are only attractive to specific audiences which makes reviewing harder. It is also true however that reviewers (and producers!) have gotten worse for reasons related to corruption, politics and financing.
Ioper
1yr ago
I know (of) two people with fairly severe long COVID that still haven't recovered. I don't know anyone like what you described. Then again, we didn't have a very severe lockdown in Sweden.
Ioper
1yr ago
I actually know of three people but one guy recovered after 6 months or so and is now mostly fine although he complains of being tired but he muddles along.
Neither of the two i know that are still sick had super serious infections, it just didn't really go away and has kept reflaring when they exert themselves. One is a guy in his early 60s and the other a woman in her mind 30s. Both are fit and otherwise healthy.
The one person I know that died was a distant relative of mine in her late 80s with terminal cancer and COPD. I'm not joking.
If it weren't for the 2-3 with lingering symptoms, COVID might as well not have existed for me as disease any different from the flu.
There is a lot one could say about your post but I'd like to point out that the stuff about Swedish unemployment is a bit simplistic.
Sweden used to have persistently low unemployment until the financial crisis in the early nineties. This then shot up and eventually started trending down.
But as this downward trend started another did as well, namely mass immigration of unskilled labour, beginning with the Iraq war and continuing til this day.
Unemployment among ethnic Europeans in Sweden is in fact low and labour force participation is extremely high.
Perhaps it is the fault of social democracy that Sweden has been unable to integrate low skill, culturally hostile immigrants coming faster than at any point in US history or perhaps it's due to other factors...
Ioper
1yr ago
You use the motivation of inflation to raise prices across the board regardless of whether the price of an individual product increased or not.
Customers are largely locked in so they pay what they must as the oligopolistic market moves in uncoordinated unison.
Ioper
1yr ago
It doesn't actually get very cold where most people live. I live in Stockholm and it rarely gets below 25f for extended periods.
Ioper
1yr ago
There is also the matter of corruption. A boss handing out favours for sex is no different from doing for monetary bribes, regardless of whether the people involved perceives of the sex as such, it corrupts decision making in the organisation and is poison for team cohesion. Even just the suspicion of this happening is toxic.
Ioper
1yr ago
Do you get existential dread about the fall of the Roman empire? Do you feel sorrow about it?
I don't believe "anything" will happen, nothing ever does.
These are not new elements in Italian politics and she is euro-ambivalent, pro-nato and pro-ukraine. Who gives a shit about the culture war stuff given the circumstances here?
There is a major war in Europe, massive inflation, energy crisis and a looming depression. Who gives a shit if she is stricter on immigration or doesn't like trannies or wharever?
Overall, this is pretty much my position but plenty of pig and poultry farming is genuinely horrendous.
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