Never ever. It wasn’t the reason why I got my current phone, but I thought I would use it at least sometimes. I don’t.

…in the US

While we’re on the topic of CPR, I want to address the myth that CPR “almost never works”. It’s great at what it does, which is pumping blood through the body enough to keep vital organs supplied with a bare minimum of oxygen so they can survive.

However, there’s usually a reason why the heart has stopped beating and in most cases, CPR can’t reverse that reason. If the patient is in a car crash and has completely bled out, CPR won’t get any blood back into their system. Or if they’re at the end stage of a terminal disease, CPR can’t magically cure the disease.

But in cases where the cause for the cardiac arrest is simple and easily reversed, chances of survival are much higher. For example, if someone is drowning and you get them out of the water within a few minutes of cardiac arrest, CPR is very effective, with the majority of patients surviving. Here’s a study with 113 patients who were resuscitated after drowning and only 8 were confirmed dead. For 20 patients, the outcome was unknown, but even if they all died as well, that’s still a 75% survival rate.

Yes, a heart that has completely stopped beating cannot be restarted by defibrillation. It only works in a condition called ventricular fibrillation, when the muscle fibers of the heart are still contracting, but are no longer “in sync”. This causes the heart to twitch chaotically, which is not an effective way to pump blood. And without blood pumping, the heart itself does not receive any oxygen as well, so it will eventually go into a complete flatline after a few minutes of untreated ventricular fibrillation.

The electric shock helps the fibers resynchronize. If you want to see the effect directly, here’s a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCbawp9ZSnY

Be warned, it shows an open chest and an exposed heart, most likely during heart surgery. They are using spoon-shaped internal defibrillation paddles. In the beginning, you can see the heart in ventricular fibrillation. It’s twitching chaotically and not pumping any blood. After defibrillation, it starts contracting rhythmically again.

I’ve never heard of a punctured heart personally, but I do think it’s possible. A punctured lung is much more common. But both conditions are usually treatable if the patient survives.

CPR does carry some risks, but not doing CPR is guaranteed to be lethal. So any risk (to the patient) is worth taking at that point.

Ask the Kurds.

Also, Hamas didn’t just come up in a vacuum. People here in Germany are radicalizing because they were asked to wear masks during a pandemic and they heard that brown people are now seeking refuge in Germany. Palestinians have been suppressed, starved and killed for decades and none of the more moderate forces have been able to do anything about it. Not that Hamas would do any better, but it’s understandable that people support more radical movements when they’re literally fighting for their survival.

Slaughtering civilians is never justified. What Hamas did was horrifying and a crime against humanity. But the reason why Hamas ever got so strong in the first place has a lot to do with how Isreal has systematically oppressed and killed Palestinians for decades. And the war it is waging now against the Palestinian people is also indefensible. It should be widely condemned, any support withdrawn and Israel should be sanctioned.

There’s a new, more effective malaria vaccine coming out right now:

https://www.who.int/news/item/02-10-2023-who-recommends-r21-matrix-m-vaccine-for-malaria-prevention-in-updated-advice-on-immunization

I wonder what kind of storage solutions we could have today if we were investing as much into it as into nuclear fusion and fission…

We do in Germany, every two years. It’s not helping and I don’t know why. Maybe people are aligning their headlights correctly just for the test. Or the test is garbage. Next time my car is due, I’ll ask the guy.

No argument here. I recently talked to someone who works for an insurance company and he said it feels like working for the mafia.

You’re generally correct. Insurances are a bad investment from a purely financial standpoint. Never get an insurance to save money or to avoid cost. Don’t get insurance for things that you can easily pay for from your savings or for things you can do without. For example, don’t get insurance for your flagship smartphone. Even if you can’t afford the same model again if it breaks, you can always get an entry-level or used phone for a fraction of the price which will do fine for daily tasks until you have saved up enough money.

But there are cases where losing money is just part of the problem. For example, health insurance can literally save your life by paying for a treatment you otherwise couldn’t afford. Or personal liability insurance - if you cause more damage than you can afford to pay for, you can lose your house and pretty much the kind of life you may have lived up to that point. On the other hand, if you’re already broke, living in a shitty apartment and hardly own anything of value, then there’s no point getting that insurance.

Exactly, as soon as the money goes from your bank account to theirs, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it. Not saying that’s a good thing, but that’s how the system is currently designed.

What does ‘strip’ mean in this context? (not a native speaker)

Because AI is unpredictable. Which is not a big issue for art, because you can immediately see any flaws and if you can’t, it doesn’t matter.

But for actually useful work, you don’t want to find out that the AI programmer completely made up a few lines of code that are only causing problems when the airplane is flying with a 32° bank angle on a saturday with a prime number for a date.

Yes, even in small groups they can do absolutely horrible things, as they have done in the past. But that doesn’t really change if we allow them to have a bigger audience. And in the end, it’s also a numbers game. In a group of 100 fascists, the chance of encountering someone who is both motivated and capable of causing major harm to society is smaller than in a group of 10,000.

You’ll never be able to keep these people from talking to each other, but you can quarantine them in their own little circles where they cause as little damage as possible to the outside world.

It’s time other advertisers, media outlets and public personalities leave the platform. We should hold them accountable for keeping it afloat.

At my hospital it’s just luck of the draw. If you get the night shift in the spring, you work an hour less while being paid the same and in the autumn you’re working an (unpaid) extra hour.

The craziest thing was when my girlfriend had a patient die of non-natural causes during that night. In these cases, police have to be notified so they can investigate whether there was any wrongdoing. The police arrived a few minutes before the time of death of the patient, because in the meantime the clocks had been moved back an hour. Apparently they had also never had that situation before, so they were unsure how to document it correctly.