Yeah, everyone in this thread saying the phone bad is a Boomer cop out is oversimplifying the issue.

Yeah, there’s probably a component of taking the blame away from decreased quality of life by blaming it on phones—but you can’t neglect the effect that lack of social interaction has. I’m from the same era, and it’s overwhelming to think how much more complex everything has gotten.

Ha ha so true. I thought you were joking but you never know with the internet.

Slightly educated guess medical opinion here?

As far as risk is concerned:

Smoke>>>vape>nothing.

Vaping will definitely have adverse effects we start cataloging more in 10-30 years. My guess? Likely some form of lung disease (maybe more of a restrictive pattern due to the microparticles in vapes—I could see if being like silicosis or pneumoconioses) and some forms of cancer.

I mean you basically don’t smoke then. Most of the effects of smoking are based on pack-years, which is the number of years you’ve smoked a pack per day. So two packs a day for 10 years? 20 pack years.

You have barely any pack years, and you stopped so young that the adverse effects are definitely reversed (10 years of cessation to reverse risk of lung CA/COPD).

They mention this in the article, but the physiology would suggest this is related to CSF/blood pooling in low G.

Taking it a step further, I bet this has a similar mechanism to IIH or the high pressure headaches you get with obstructive hydrocephalus. CSF is supposed to drain down via a relatively passive system. Without G to regulate this I can envision that you’d essentially develop the same physiology as someone with IIH (too much CSF).

Really interesting. A good example of how we have no idea what insane health things we are going to experience with space travel, but also how space travel may shed insight on treatments for other conditions with similar mechanisms we experience in a gravity well.

1. Smoking
2. Smoking
3. Smoking

There are already a lot of good answers but I want to highlight this. Chronic tobacco smoke causes increased aging due to multiple mechanisms. Moreover, environmental tobacco exposure from second hand and third hand smoke prior to the 1990s was MASSIVE. So even if you didn’t smoke you got insane daily exposures to the same chemicals.

Having mega corporations design space networks for you sounds like a great idea until they decide to lock you out and hold your government hostage. Or sell intel… Or sell access to other actors….

Just admit it—the corporations run the world at this point.

We talk for our dog. We don’t have children, but our dog has full on conversations with us but it’s just my wife and I making his “voice.” It always goes along with the context and it seems to be what he would be saying. Our old dog and our current dog even have their own distinct intonation/dialect when saying things.

It’s to the point that sometimes we look at each other and go “huh, it’s weird when you think about the fact that he’s never actually really spoken before….”

Folie a deux?

House of Dragons was actually pretty good. Reminded me of the beginning of GOT. Not sure if it’s continuing, though. But at least it’s a prequel so the plot points are all already out there in his history prequel books.

Yep, been saying this for years.

We know he told the show creators huge future plot points. That ending was the ending, it sucked, he’s embarrassed, the series will never be finished.

This is so true. I try to explain this to my wife and she doesn’t understand.

If I’m on my phone I’m either:

1. Answering endless Teams chats or emails (I get work messages well outside of normal business hours because of my job—it’s annoying but I’ve also gotten used to it because we basically do everything async)
2. Doom scrolling

I hate social media. I’ve hated Reddit since API. Lemmy is great but I’ll go days sometimes with the same home page. So I basically cycle through the same 3 sites endlessly. I got a Steam Deck to try and help with this, but when I hop on it my wife thinks I’m “playing video games so should be working on something.” I’ve tried to explain that using a Steam Deck is the equivalent of her scrolling social media, but alas.

So yeah. Basically nothing to do these days. I think the most frustrating part to me is how most content seems to be geared towards making me angry. I never remember it being like that.

I think in some ways that could work.

I think a better one may be fish living in a tank that suddenly had its filter break (fish being the brain, and the filter being the BBB).

Not exactly—although an MRI w/wout contrast may show some microvascular ischemia or cortical volume loss. Based on the study there may be some clues from secondary inflammatory markers, but those aren’t specific (other things can elevate them beyond long COVID).

I think this will likely remain a clinical diagnosis for several years until we understand more.

Bringing in a medical perspective since there is a lot of subtle misunderstanding in the comments section:

The source study is not referring to “brain bleeding” or “mini strokes” as a cause of long COVID—the results point more towards a breakdown of the integrity of the blood brain barrier and maybe micro vascular ischemia.

You can essentially think of your central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) as being surrounded by a very selective security system called the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). The BBB exists to prevent certain chemicals and cell signaling molecules from entering the central nervous system and messing things up. Neurons and many of the cells that support neurons do not regenerate and tolerate stress as well as other parts of the body, which is why the BBB is so important. Through the various assays the primary authors used it seems like in the setting of long COVID there is a breakdown of the BBB—it starts letting things in and out that it shouldn’t be. This leads to inflammation and damage in the brain which likely results in immediate decreased processing ability and also long-term damage (which further leads to decreased processing ability). One of the components which “leaks” in this setting of BBB breakdown are components of the coagulation cascade (the things that make blood clot) which may potentiate small areas of clotting and decreased blood flow (a thing we called micro vascular ischemia—like an ischemic stroke but in very small capillaries). This entire mechanism is similar to (but very different in nuance) “leaky gut syndrome,” where the gut endothelium starts to break down and cause inflammation. I put that out there since leaky gut is gaining more popular understanding these days and may be more familiar for some folks.

As of now there is no available treatment that restores the endothelial integrity of the BBB. Off of the top of my head this study may suggest that more treatments to modulate the inflammsome (roughly—the amount of inflammation in your body) could be beneficial—which sort of tracks since there is some scattered evidence that high dose Omega-3’s help long COVID.

I feel personally attacked

EDIT: You gotta pump those email numbers up

If you put in the work upfront it will make the back half easier. If you slack on the front end you’ll need to sprint to the finish.

Mainly came to this conclusion in school with academics, but started applying it to everything. It’s not perfect—you can absolutely work hard and still not get the results because of forces of nature (or oppressive systems). But in general I’ve found it’s a good rule to live by.

You know it’s a been a bad day when you arrive to your shift and the Blakemore box is out…

My wife and I finally decided to take the leap and buy back in 2022. We had been waiting for years for the “market to correct” and finally just decided that we needed to stop waiting. Within months interest rates became unaffordable, and they’ve only gotten worse since then. We would not be able to reasonably afford our current home with current interest rates. It’s insane. The whole thing is rigged.

You can’t buy a shed for that price where I live. An apartment of that size would be $2500+ per month.

I don’t want this to be the future but it’s better than a future where no one can buy anything at all.

Yeah, my understanding of the physiology is that taking it that early leads to rebound sleepiness in 4-6 hours after waking. I think it definitely does, but the immediate caffeine helps if you have a job that demands immediate alertness lol.