ErikAG59 But Even Wordier

With CGMs, Bluetooth is how you get the data from the cannula under your skin to an actual display (phone, pump, separate receiver) so you can do anything with it; there is no functionality with Bluetooth.

With insulin pumps, I don’t know the exact proportions of tubed/tubeless in use pumps, but tubeless are in major if not the majority use, and they don’t have displays/controls on the pump itself, but with your phone or a separate receiver, which only function via Bluetooth. Tubed pumps are technically functional without Bluetooth, but ideally you want them integrated with your cgm bc this drastically increases quality of life/care, and once again you can only do this with Bluetooth.

If you’re a tubed pump without a cgm, i guess you could try to hack it, but I can’t envision that not voiding the warranty, which can be medically precarious for reasons not really relevant here. There are plenty of people adventurous enough to do warranty voiding things to their pump, but it’s not really worth anything without a cgm

the biggest hurdle honestly is probably just that at a certain point the rate of a device results in qualitatively different capabilities as you ascend the power-law curve. babbage could envision a general purpose computation device in the early 19th century, and the biggest conceptual leap from that to a cell phone is orders-of-magnitude improvement, but this gets you from "a way to speed up tedious by-hand computations for mathematics" to "a complete modern information-technology ecology," which is qualitatively fundamentally different. there are people who do grasp the Implications of that sort of thing intuitively (ray kurzweil predicting AI in the 2020s just based on increasing computational power) but there are a lot of smart people who have trouble with that sort of thing. and then of course "at a certain point of computing sophistication you can use statistical methods to train a machine on the whole corpus of human language and get a computer program that has enormous general-purpose capacities starting from nothing but blobs of random numbers" is also deeply counterintuitive. i still have trouble with it!

but i wonder how far back you can go and still find somebody smart you could Explain The Smartphone To. you would have to explain a lot more about the basic operation of electricity and magnetism to newton, hooke, and huygens; but they seem like they'd get there pretty quick. certainly newton would. and you don't have to delve into relativity here or anything that's really going to cause a philosophical headache: newton might be quite relieved that you can point to specific physical waves as your medium for electromagnetism, especially if you mention as an aside that that model works for gravity, too. i guess if you go back too far and you lose symbolic algebra--and concepts like "the square of the distance" become principally about geometry, and not a free-moving mathematical abstraction, you lose a major conceptual tool for the formalisms. and once you hit the 15th century you might lose inertia, momentum, and the idea that terrestrial and celestial matter all obey the same rules.

Wildberries is the largest Russian online retailer. It was founded in 2004 by Tatyana Kim. Besides Russia, Wildberries serves the United Arab Emirates, and former Soviet republics Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Until 2022, the company had services in France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Moldova, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States.

I'd never heard of this business until Ukraine started bombing it, but I guess I don't keep up to date with the Russian retail environment.

On 18 September 2024, a group of armed men led by Vladislav Bakalchuk tried to enter the company's headquarters in Moscow, leading to a shootout that left two people dead. Bakalchuk was briefly arrested on a murder charge, that was subsequently dropped.

okay then

In April 2025, a video was posted suggesting that "hundreds of North Koreans" were working in a Wildberries warehouse in Russia (which would likely breach U.N. Resolution 2375).

There's a podcast I listen to called History That Doesn't Suck! that's basically "a college-level history course if the professor had as long as he wanted instead of just a semester, and also taught it via narrative format." You get to hear real stories and letters from the people involved (and once we got to Calvin Coolidge we started getting radio broadcast clips as they became available, too!), real stories about who they really were, and how everything went down. It's a great learning resource and it's fascinating.

I will tell you going in that it's not always as critical of historical policies as either you or I might like it to be. That's not to say the host just blows smoke up the ass of America (he doesn't), he's just...less cynical than the average Tumblrite, I think. You'll have to bring some critical thinking skills to the moral part of the conversation, because it's a history lesson rather than a bully pulpit, but it's really good at giving you all the facts and context so you can draw conclusions, and also at giving you facts you never learned elsewhere. (Wanna know why the midnight ride of Paul Revere was so fucking impressive even though he wasn't actually the one who went all the way from Lexington to Concord? ....well I'm not gonna give it away, I'm gonna make you listen to it. But there's one little fact, something that can be stated with complete objective accuracy in only five words, and it changes everything you thought you knew about the start of the Revolution.)

I really can't recommend it enough and I hope you give it a try.

I also am slightly confused with the replies im getting on that post it genuinely was supposed to be a fun post to talk about getting different people from history and placing them in modern day I did a similar project for highschool and it was just a fun way we got to start talking about history and perspective on how different views and American culture was throughout the years

I replied in a comment to your reply but i genuinely did just get teddy Roosevelt and fdr mixed up in the end of explaining why i think he would support universal healthcare I’m dyslexic not an excuse but i didn’t double check like usual so that is completely on me i was in the car (not driving) and talking about this hypothetical with my mom actually and It slipped my mind

I really like history too and I’ll definitely add that podcast to my list i just need to finish some documentaries first lol

I wish I could find a definitive source on the auhd claim but unfortunately the only thing we have is speculation based on what we know like most historical figures especially with how cultural effects neurodivergent behavior (but the taxidermy fixation is usually in the evidence)

When it comes to judging historical figures i usually try to separate my morals away from the situation as possible because of the difference of time and beliefs I try to base it on what they did in terms of how many good vs bad things came from their actions and to what degree they impacted people

For example outside politics the worlds deadliest book was made with the intention to help families avoid toxic wallpaper but it lead to the recorded death of three women (good intentions bad result) but it’s immediately pulled from shelves (good intentions good result)

Mostly when it comes to my history fixation it is in the folklore and storytelling part especially how stories change and develop depending on the location and time period (American history is my second historical fixation)

I'm struggling a little to read this (When Disabilities Conflict), but I want you to know this paragraph made me really happy:

"When it comes to judging historical figures i usually try to separate my morals away from the situation as possible because of the difference of time and beliefs I try to base it on what they did in terms of how many good vs bad things came from their actions and to what degree they impacted people"

Top administration officials engaged in an elaborate deception to spirit President Trump out of Turkey during the NATO summit there last month, transporting him in a catering container to a military jet because of a threat against him and Air Force One from Iran, two senior U.S. officials said on Monday.

Mr. Trump and other officials had said publicly that he would be leaving Turkey on July 8 aboard one of the older versions of Air Force One rather than a luxury 747-8 donated by Qatar that he had flown in on. Mr. Trump told reporters at the time that he was making the switch for “old time’s sake.”

Mr. Trump boarded the older plane from the left-side door in view of cameras, and news organizations, including The New York Times, reported that he had traveled on it to Britain, where he switched back to the newer plane. The Times reported at the time that the decision was driven in part by concern about the security of the new plane donated by Qatar, which had not been equipped with all of the defensive capabilities of older versions.

But instead of flying out aboard that older, powder blue, modified 747, Mr. Trump was whisked off that plane via a catering container that had been lifted to the opposite side of the plane from where the journalists traveling with him boarded, one of the U.S. officials said. The president was then taken to a third plane, which he flew in secret to Britain, the official with knowledge of the matter said.

Reporters on the older plane were not told that Mr. Trump had not flown with them from Turkey to an air base in Britain, making them unwitting participants in the ruse and leaving them, along with some White House staff members, to serve as unknowing decoys.

Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

what I mean is people smoke (say) even though they dislike the consequences of smoking, or substitute whatever your preferred example is of likes(A) and dislikes(B) and clearly A -> B and yet they do A anyway.

now you can build an entire academic career on explaining why people are this way or an entire self-help career on trying to coach them into not being this way but really it's just fucking annoying!

The problem isn't that the person you quoted doesn't know enough about immigration policy. Nobody can know everything. It's that they appear to have adopted an epistemic posture in which their intuitions are treated as sufficient evidence.

The pattern is roughly:

I see crime → I know who's responsible. I see demographic change → I know why it's happening. I dislike the results → I know who betrayed us.

And then contrary evidence can be dismissed as coming from the very institutions that are supposedly part of the conspiracy: academics, journalists, bureaucrats, Democrats, “elites,” etc.

That's more consequential than ordinary ignorance. Ignorance can be corrected by information. Anti-intellectualism can make information itself suspect.

There's also a subtle irony in the Asimov quote. “Democracy means my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” is not really an argument against ordinary people's political judgment. Democratic legitimacy doesn't require everyone to be an expert. Rather, a functioning democracy requires people to recognize where their own knowledge ends and defer to competent evidence when appropriate.

You can have the perfectly legitimate democratic opinion:

“I want much lower immigration.”

without claiming:

“The Civil Rights Act caused Black crime, immigrants are criminals, and virtually every president has deliberately ignored this obvious truth.”

The second requires a tremendous amount of empirical knowledge. Yet it is presented as common sense, while expertise that contradicts it is treated as propaganda.

And that connects directly to what you were saying about MAGA's systemic scapegoating. A sophisticated understanding of structural problems is cognitively demanding and often unsatisfying. The anti-intellectual version offers something much easier:

complexity → suspicion → villain → certainty.