The meme that homophobic people are in the closet is, in itself, not only factually wrong but also deeply homophobic.
It is factually wrong because, objectively, there are far more homophobes in conservative areas than there are gay people even in the most tolerant places.
And it is homophobic because it puts the blame of homophobia on the victims themselves. Yes, there are closeted gay and bisexual people who display performative homophobia to separate themselves from the LGBT community, but they are a tiny fraction of the homophobes.
I understand you mean well, but you are not helping the community.
Yes, that is indeed part of what I said. There is also far more than an 8% rate of homophobia in most places around the world [0]. This fact flies in the face of the meme that homophobes are repressed gays.
Okay well do the math. Way more than 8% of people are homophobic, depending on the country.
Putting the societal onus of homophobia on gay people just makes no sense. Even a couple seconds of thought will completely demolish that reasoning. So, think.
They can do the math, but they don't like what it plainly shows.
If homophobes were self-hating gay people, then they feel like they can wash their hands and walk away. "They hate themselves, because of course they do. It is their problem, not ours".
But when unimpeachable data is presented, showing that homophobes vastly outnumber gay people, now they have to face that their community is hurting a minority that has done nothing to them other than existing.
They can no longer place the blame on the very minority that they hold in contempt, and the door now opens to ask why is it that some members of that minority hate themselves in the first place. The answer to that is also obvious, and they don't like it either.
Everyone who goes through the procedure says the same thing: it really is no big deal and the procedure itself is less of a problem than the laxatives you need to take the day before.
You are not going to catch the gay for having a colonoscopy, if that is your fear.
The only thing they might possibly judge you on is how well you followed the prep instructions. They've all seen thousands of assholes, most of them professionally, and will forget about you as soon as they wheel you back to the recovery room.
> The only thing they might possibly judge you on is how well you followed the prep instructions.
Same with if you get snipped. I didn't realize that "shaved" meant with a safety razor and I just trimmed with a beard trimmer. I ended up having two younger women give me a proper shave as I laid there, which was about the dumbest I ever felt in my entire life. Made for a great story for my friends though.
> GI doctors and their teams do this all day long.
I've had an extended conversation about this with an ER nurse friend, in which I reminded her that although the staff go through the gamut all day every day and it's normal for them, the patient (hopefully) does not and whatever procedure(s) are new and scary.
Add in the fact that (sexualized) abuse and med students using anesthetized patients for training without explicit consent is more common in the medical field than any of us would like, and people having concerns strong enough to avoid treatment sounds pretty reasonable to me.
"we see this all the time" may settle a few concerns, but it makes others (such as the power imbalance) worse.
And because everybody sees the risk, it is already priced in.
The stock market is unpredictable precisely because everybody is trying to guess what is going to happen next. Dollar cost averaging takes the guessing away.
The bubble can't pop until most investors believe it's not a bubble, it's the new normal. As long as they believe it's a bubble they'll have money on the sidelines to throw in whenever it goes down.
Or at least it can't pop for purely financial reasons. It might still pop if, say, Anthropic and OpenAI both announce they've hit the scaling wall, or Iran somehow bombs TSMC, or a court rules they have to pay a royalty to every book author every time they answer a prompt.
Developing the habit of investing at frequent regular intervals eliminates the desire to time the market. And that's what threads like these are about, for most people.
I have a yearly plus subscription and I am still seeing 3.6. I am not renewing it once it expires. Why not give subscribers a small usage quota of their latest flash models?
Clearly! I was a happy customer, but that decision made me go through the effort of setting up a pay-as-you-go inference service with open-weight models, which I didn't want to bother learning how to do. But now I am perfectly happy with them and lost any interest in Gemini.
I paid for their lowest-cost subscription, thinking that it would give me a small quota of use of their most recent flash models. Instead, they give me an unnecessarily large quota of their old models, which I have precisely zero use for given that open-weight models are better and cost next to nothing.
Consequently, I have zero intention of renewing my Gemini subscription. What a dumb business choice they made.
> Most people here probably have around $5-10M in assets given we’re mostly in tech.
You would be surprised. Not only because, as you point out, recent graduates often have a negative net worth, but also because people tend to increase their spending in lockstep with their income.
Saving millions takes the intersection of multiple factors: sufficient disposable income, prioritizing investing over lifestyle, long-term discipline to stick to the plan, and luck to keep it all going smoothly.
> “A human error by an [state-owned railway infrastructure company] Adif operator in response to a malfunction in the main signaling system is the likely cause of the accident,” government sources said. This safety system is automated, but when it fails, it switches to manual mode. That is why the trains came to a stop when the automatic safety system failed, and service resumed under human control — and that is where the error occurred, according to initial analyses.
This is not the first time something broadly like that happens. In 2013 another train crashed because there was a section of the track where the operator had to manually adjust the speed, and he didn't.
One would think that the operation of these trains would be fully automated at all times, and with sufficient allowances to handle emergencies safely.
Point in case: Japan has not had a single death due to a crash of a high speed train, even though they have been operating an extensive network for decades.
The operation is fully automated until the point when the system breaks and the human controller orders manual overrides.
They could have waited for recovery etc. The issue is they switched to manual and then botched it. We don't know root cause yet (bad management, timetable pressure, lax work culture...?).
According to the available information, the failure of the automated system caused six trains to stop. They were then given manually the go-ahead to proceed at full speed (!!!). Six does not sound like a huge number of them to ensure that the train ahead is moving normally before the train behind is told to continue. This sounds like a massive failure in either the protocol or the operator's ability to follow the protocol. Mind boggling stuff, really.
As a Spaniard I am profoundly ashamed that these crashes are happening, when other countries like China, France and Japan seem to manage just fine with their extensive high-speed rail networks.
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