I’ve found that exercise does help, but for me it has to be exercise that I actually enjoy. I’ve been going for walks.

A walk to the good burrito shop a ways down the street is a good excuse for a burrito.

Well, there’s !gardening@lemmy.world, for one.

Chiefly the domain name registrar.

I’ve never used a nicotine vape product in my life.

I tried cigarettes once as a teenager and didn’t like them; tried a cigar once and threw it away.

I don’t like nicotine. I like beer and weed.

But the whole scare about nicotine vaping is utterly bogus.

Almost all of the harm of smoking is from the smoke — soot, tar, and carbon monoxide — and not the nicotine. Inhaling smoke is bad for you. It doesn’t matter if that smoke is from tobacco, or cannabis, or a forest fire. Inhaling smoke is bad for you.

If all the cigarette smokers could be switched to vaping overnight, keeping their nicotine doses the same but using vape juice rather than burning plants to get it, that would be a huge public health win.

The fact that regulatory agencies have gotten in the way of converting all the smokers to vaping, instead of gleefully endorsing such a change, is utter madness.

Air travel. I do it, I’ve been doing it all my life, but it’s basically a series of opportunities for something to get screwed up and waste your whole day, lose and/or destroy your stuff, end up stuck overnight in a smelly terminal with no food or bed, and maybe get puked on by someone’s baby or your junk grabbed by a dude in a fake police uniform.

Yeah, the 2019-2020 vaping lung illness outbreak had nothing whatsoever to do with nicotine vaping.

It was specifically caused by black-market THC vape cartridges containing vitamin E acetate as a filler. This chemical was marketed to black-market vape makers as “Honey Cut”, intended to dilute or “cut” cannabis extracts while keeping the mixture thick so it looked good to customers.

Legit cannabis vapes don’t include fillers; a typical California dispensary vape cartridge contains ~90% cannabinoids by weight. Nicotine vapes are water-based rather than oil-based, so vitamin E acetate would not mix with them.

Vitamin E acetate sounds like a healthy thing — it’s a vitamin, right? — but it’s not. When it’s heated in a vape, it produces a variety of chemicals that would be entertaining to the organic chemist — but no good for your lungs. You don’t need to be inhaling alkenes or ketenes, to say nothing of carcinogenic benzene.

(Hey stoners! Don’t use black-market carts, just like you wouldn’t smoke “synthetic cannabis” aka “spice”. If you want to vape instead of smoking, and you’re not in a place with good dispensaries with lab-tested vape products, use a dry-herb vape and plain ol’ herb.)

Sure, but incidence of lung cancer went way up as tobacco consumption rose heavily in the early 20th century.

Also non-stick pans, flame-retardant fabrics, …

Perfluoroalkyls aka PFAS appear to screw with all manner of body functions.

Since you mention tobacco: It’s worth noting that the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.

The Fugitive Slave Law wasn’t part of the Constitution.

The Fugitive Slave Clause, which authorized it, certainly is though!

This isn’t a forum for discussing Lemmy itself; please see the sidebar.

In the Lemmy web interface, there’s a setting to turn off all NSFW-flagged posts.

In order to explain the injustices of the early US, one has to comprehend English common law, the economics of empires bound together by wind-powered sailing ships, Protestant and Catholic Christian doctrine, and the legacies of the Spanish Reconquista that became ideological white-supremacism.

It is really easy to come up with caricatures that say “Jefferson was just a rapist” or “the Articles of Confederation were okay, but the Constitution sucked” or “the colonies would have been fine under British rule forever” or “everyone shoulda just joined the Iroquois”.

In fact, everything was worse and more fucked up and lots of people died in misery and horror.

… sit, altum viditur.

(“Whatever is said in Latin is seen as elevated.” / “If you say it in Latin, it sounds more profound.”)

Here in California, prisoners are employed to fight wildfires.

Until very recently, former prisoners were not allowed to be employed as firefighters when they got out. That was corrected by Newsom in 2020.

The original US Constitution is explicitly pro-slavery. Not only does it explicitly require non-slaveholding states to return fugitive slaves to their oppressors, but it has multiple mechanisms intended to ensure the dominance of slave states in the federal government.

The Constitution was never a unified idealist vision of liberty. It was a grungy political compromise between factions that did not agree on what the country should be. These included New England Puritans (religious cultists; but abolitionist), New York Dutch bankers (who wanted the money back they’d loaned to the states), Southern planters (patriarchal rapist tyrants), and Mid-Atlantic Quakers (pacifists willing to hold their noses and make peace with the Puritans and planters).

The third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not typically sung today. It refers to “the hireling and slave” among the foes of the Republic. “The hireling” refers to the mercenaries employed by the British crown in fighting the American revolutionaries. It is unclear whether “slave” is intended to derogate all British subjects as “slaves” of the crown, or if it specifically refers to enslaved Africans who were offered their freedom by the British if they fought against the revolution.

Well, no; Theophania was a common Christian name in the Eastern Roman Empire. “Tiffany” is an English version of Theophania, a Greek Christian name referring to the feast day also known as Epiphany or Three Kings Day. The masculine form is Theophanes.

“Jennifer” is, by the way, the English form of the Welsh name Gwenhwyfar, also known in French as Guinevere.

Superman’s X-ray vision would be awfully useful for surgery. For that matter, X-ray vision plus precise heat-rays could maybe be tuned to vaporize tumors in-situ.

Shattered seems to be the currently most maintained one.