Tag Archives: smoke-medical

And Now For a Short Dental Interlude

by CareyHorsley66 Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m off to the dentist. My teeth are actually in fine shape, but when you hit your 50s all the fillings you got in your 20s and 30s apparently start to go south, so they have to be removed and refilled. Or so my dentist says, anyway. Today I get two or three of them replaced. I don’t remember exactly. Hopefully she does.

UPDATE: It was three. Two of them were old silver fillings, which she hates because of the mercury. So out they came.

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And Now For a Short Dental Interlude

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More Pluto! Troughs, Hills, and Pitted Surfaces!

by cazarehotel Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest from Pluto, a hi-res image of the Sputnik Plain, which should be enough to get Republicans seething. From NASA:

In the latest data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, a new close-up image of Pluto reveals a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.

….Scientists have two working theories as to how these segments were formed. The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp. On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto’s interior.

So, um, mud drying or lava lamps. Take your pick. Cool picture, though.

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More Pluto! Troughs, Hills, and Pitted Surfaces!

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I Want to Hear a Good Argument Against Obama’s Deal With Iran

by OscarBenham9 Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

Max Fisher talked to another arms control expert today, and Aaron Stein says it’s a very good agreement. The Iran nuclear deal “exceeds in all areas. It makes the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear weapon in the next 25 years extremely remote.”

Fine. The technical experts are all impressed. But what about the opponents of the deal? What do they think?

Luckily, Matt Yglesias did the legwork to confirm what I had already concluded anecdotally: they don’t really have any serious arguments against the deal. Oh, they toss out a few tidbits here and there about inspection times and so forth, but it’s just fluff. The inspection regime is actually very tough. No, the problem is that conservatives simply don’t want a deal. Period. They want sanctions to remain in force forever. Or they just want to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Or they don’t say much of anything except that Iran is a bad country, and we shouldn’t do deals with bad countries.

All of this is fatuous, and the critics know it. Sanctions never last forever. If we tried to keep them in place without ever offering Iran a reasonable bargain to lift them, our allies would desert us. Bombing would be just as bad. Instead of keeping Iran in check for ten or more years, it would merely set them back two or three. And it would confirm their belief that the only defense against the United States is a nuclear deterrent. They’d be even more determined to build a bomb after that. As for Iran’s leadership not being choir boys, no kidding. You don’t make deals like this with friendly countries. You make them with antagonists. That’s the whole point.

I don’t want Iran to build a nuclear bomb. It would quite likely set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, which is the last place on the planet that we want to have one. And as near as I can tell, this deal is our best chance to keep Iran nuclear free for a good long time. If any conservative can offer a better plan, I’m all ears. Either:

Describe a tougher deal that you can reasonably argue Iran would have accepted.

or

Explain why some other course of action would be better at keeping Iran nuclear free than a negotiated deal.

No name calling, no comparisons to Neville Chamberlain, no complaints that Iran hates Israel, and no blather about appeasement. Make an argument. A real argument about a course of action that would be better than the deal currently on the table. Let’s hear it.

This article:

I Want to Hear a Good Argument Against Obama’s Deal With Iran

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Compound Inflation Is Probably Higher Than You Think

by NevilleGipson Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Atrios wants the older generation to get it through their heads that kids today don’t exactly lead cushy lives:

I increasingly do think nominal illusion is part of it, as, say, $50,000 sounds like A LOT OF MONEY for a starting job for the older generation, but in 2014 it isn’t that much money.

Yes, yes, yes. If you’re my age, that sounds like a pretty good income for someone a few years out of college. But it’s nothing special. It’s the equivalent of $18,000 in 1980 dollars. If you’re part of an even older generation, think of it as the equivalent of about $6,000 in 1960 dollars.

This isn’t a poverty-level income or anything. But it’s not nearly as much as it sounds like if you’re just vaguely comparing it to what you made in your first job. What’s more, it’s not as if every 20-something college grad makes $50,000 either. Plenty of them make $35,000 or so, and that’s the equivalent of $12,000 in 1980 bucks. That’s what I made in my first job out of college, and although I was never in danger of starving or anything, I wasn’t exactly living like a king in the room I rented out from some friends.

People don’t always have a good sense of just how much inflation compounds to. But as a quick rule of thumb, prices have gone up 3x since 1980 and about 10x since 1950. Keep that in mind whenever you’re mentally comparing current prices and incomes with those from your early adulthood.

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Compound Inflation Is Probably Higher Than You Think

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