Just A Key Without a Lock(e)

But

Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study on retired boxers, about 11% of all retired boxers examined had a mild case of CTE, and about 6% of the boxers had major neurological problems. And if you just looked at boxers who were over the age of 50 and fought in over 150 fights, the rate of CTE went up to 50%. (2)

I’m sorry, but it is absolutely reasonable for a boxing fan to say that American football should be illegal due to the injury risk, because American football is a much more dangerous sport than boxing in relation to the risk of traumatic brain injury.

And if you’re surprised to learn that American football is more dangerous than the sport where you literally punch each other. Well. I’d say that that’s part of the problem, actually.

(1) Mez J, Daneshvar DH, Kiernan PT, et al. (25 July 2017).

To be clear, I personally don’t think that it’s necessary to outright ban American football. There are a huge number of things that we could do to make the sport dramatically safer, short of just banning it altogether! But I think that part of the issue is precisely that people don’t know the relative risks of these things. Many fewer parents are comfortable letting their kids play the “hit each other in the head” sport than are comfortable letting their kids play American football, and that’s absolutely an issue of informed consent.

While it is overwhelmingly focused on the NFL, it does also get into how dangerous football is for young kids. Which they could research because they tragically have some kids die young for unrelated reasons and researchers got to look at these teens and 20 somethings brains. And they had signs of damage. Even in some people that had never had a concussion reported.

Basically its cumulative damage via deceleration... not just concussion. Kids that haven't gone through puberty yet are particularly susceptible to damage done *below* the threshold for a concussion because they haven't fully developed neck strength. So anything with a lot of sudden sharp deceleration via collision where they may effectively get whiplash (or just below diagnosable whiplash) is the culprit.

So it's not the time they got a concussion, it's doing repeated tackling drills with the sudden stop. The helmet doesn't help, because damage is due to brain moving inside skull due to the sudden stop. Helmet helps vs collision vs a secondary object but not just sudden stops.

Teens and adults are at lower risk because of greater muscle mass that can absorb more of the force safely, but still AT risk because when they DO tackle... they have a lot more mass which means a lot more force is involved. Its sheer physics. A little more resistant to the low speed collisions, but engaging in far more high speed, high force ones.

Which is also some of why football is more dangerous than boxing. You've got full body mass accelerating/decelerating.

Force = Mass X acceleration

a boxer isn't using his full mass or running speed, so even though its a direct head strike... its still got less force applied than quarterback getting plowed by a linebacker. And just by the nature of boxing, routine practice is not involving head strikes or rapid deceleration of the head with near the force of someone plowing into a tackling dummy.

Overall young kids shouldn't play tackle football. It's not necessarily a hit in game that's the risk, its repeated drills in practice that aren't done in a safe way. With insufficient rest in between. brains are really delicate and heal slowly from even minor trauma you can't see. teens & adults likely aren't getting near enough rest to recover either, especially for routine practice cumulative stress. There's techniques to make it safer but it's never really safe because of the cumulative nature of damage without time to fully heal in between.

Football is, unfortunately, often the only way some teens can get scholarships to try and get out of where they are... all while destroying the ability to benefit from same scholarship. Same kind of trap as military recruiting.

The sexuality of a police officer is cop.

The gender of a police officer is cop.

When you become the enforcer and protector of capital, you are making the deal to be slightly favored by the system over others like you, in exchange for being its servant. Your solidarity is with the system that you serve, even if it hates you.

You know, given how C. lupus, C. lupus familiaris, and C. latrans can all create perfectly viable hybrids, and that the proto-dogs that domestic dogs descended from much more resembled coyotes than wolves, it's not really a surprise that some yotes are experimenting with domestication.

Goddamn that lady must be fucking shredded to be able to chase down a coyote through a swamp.

"Don't let wild animals into your house, you are not going to make Dogs 2.0, you're going to get injured and the animal killed." is probably obvious enough advice that I don't need to put it in the tags as a reminder.

...I know more than four people on this site that have poisoned themselves trying out 'foraging guides' they found online, two people IRL who tried to keep raccoons at pets, and have a family member who got hospitalized for Cat Scratch Fever after grabbing a feral cat bare-handed. This is apparently, not obvious enough.

Could coyotes be domesticated, sometime down the line? I know there are animals like bears that could never be, but coyotes seem close enough to dogs for it to work in many many many many generations.

Could Coyotes be domesticated again? Yes and No.

Yes: They're REALLY closely related and already frequently interbreed with domestic dogs and are in a similar ecological position to the proto-dogs: comfortable living in and around human settlements, especially garbage dumps. Biologically, it's a VERY short hop (possibly as few as 2 or 3 mutations) to domestication for them.

No: The actual practicality of domesticating coyotes is negligible. Humans domesticated dogs in the first place because partially because we needed help with hunting, but probably mostly because we had fuck-all else to do for fun back then. In the modern age of readily available livestock and needing to monetize EVERYTHING or suffer for it, there isn't really much need or interest in domesticating coyotes. It'd take a large canine farming facility, similar to the fox farms of the early 1900's, multiple generations of careful genetic testing and manipulation, and would be goddamn impossible to zone or get insurance for.

The re-domestication of Cheetahs has a slightly better shot because there is a genuine need for LOTS of them as an ecological keystone species and there's decent odds of finding some rich idiots to back that project so they can have The Coolest Pet Cat.

I wish they would realize that universal healthcare doesn’t mean they HAVE to get healthcare through the state, just that it is there. You can still pay millions of dollars out of pocket for your own treatment at a private hospital.

America actually has terrible healthcare compared to a lot of nations with socialized medicine:

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got