volvoxvsmarla

People have already pointed out the legal and financial aspects. But I also want to address the philosophical aspect of your question, which I think you had in mind. And I think the answer I would give you is this one:

Marriage has the meaning that you assign to it.

I strongly believe that if we got rid of any legal and financial benefits of marriage, even if we made it explicitly illegal, there would still be a bunch (or even a lot) of people who would get married.

I would compare it to a house fire. If my house was burning (and there were no living beings in it) and I could save 5 things, what would I save? What would you save? I would take, for example, my favorite soft toy from when I was a kid, and my old box filled with diaries. Is this worth any money? No. Does it have any value? To me, it does. To you, it doesn’t. Maybe you are a very rational person that isn’t attached to anything (or to nothing material) and you would indeed make the smartest choices, saving your passport and documents and money. Maybe you would save a small gift that someone important has given you. Maybe you would save the first guitar you ever bought. You save whatever has value and meaning to you. And these things have solely the meaning and value that you have attached to it.

Likewise, people have different value and meaning attached to marriage. If you look at it from a rational, logical side - it has its legal and financial perks and benefits and if they weren’t there, getting married would make no sense. But things don’t have to make sense. The meaning we assign to rituals, things, concepts, aren’t necessarily rational. They are, however, deeply personal.

So, as a side note, please beware of ridiculing people for their views on marriage or weddings, just like you wouldn’t want to ridicule or belittle someone for other things that mean a lot to them. Always sharing the last piece of bread. Always giving a coin to a homeless person. Having a breakfast for 30 minutes every morning. A good night kiss on the nose from their partner. Drawing a dick in the first snow of the winter. Some things mean a lot to people even if they do not rationally make sense.

In the case of marriage, of course, some of the meaning comes from culture, history, and tradition. Marriage might have had different purposes than it has now, and surely the origins weren’t that romantic. (Not saying, however, that marriage has to be romantic.) But it is there. It is important to some people simply because they have, at some point in their life, decided it is important for some reasons, rational or irrational, social, cultural, and hopefully personal too. To them, it makes sense, it has meaning, it has value. And whatever marriage or a wedding ceremony mean - you decide.

So the question you should be asking is not whether or not you should get married, it is what marriage means to you. Does it have any benefit or value in your eyes? Are the legal benefits enough for you to get married? What is your stance on divorce? Do you feel like you would get “closer together” with your partner? Would you feel it would make things harder to separate? There are a ton on questions like these that you can ask yourself, I hope you get the jist. There are not right or wrong answers. The only thing that is important is that the meaning you assign to marriage is (about) the same as the meaning your partner assigns to marriage. You can both not care about a spiritual meaning, but just get married for the benefits. You can both be a type of “whatever happens, we don’t get divorced, til death do us part”. You can be “we’ll keep reevaluating whether we still belong together”. You can also be “we get married because we have children and this is practical”. Or “we get married because I am hot and you are rich and when one of us loses their asset we split”. Or “we just want a fancy huge ass party to show our love in this very moment and celebrate it with our friends and whatever comes afterwards is secondary”. It doesn’t matter what your view is, it matters that you guys agree.

Yes, 4:30 am, but I was the one who was nuts for getting in so late

Patrick.

He was the only one on the lab tech team who realized that “core working hours are 10-13” meant you can actually come at 9 and it’s ok and did so because it worked better for him. My colleagues always bullied me for coming between 8 and 9 (him to a lesser extend). Even at 7:30 I was “the late one”. They all started between 4:30 am and 6:30 am. But the project managers actually hated that because they, as everyone outside the lab technician team, started around 9. And most techs left between 2 and 3 pm, leaving no possibility for late changes or dynamic workflow. Likewise, the technicians in the morning were unable to start working if they had questions about the work that was assigned for that day because the project managers weren’t there yet. But somehow me sticking to the core hours and my biorhythm (and later to my puke schedule when I got pregnant) made me the lazy and weird one - it was me and Patrick who were ok starting machines after incubation was done at 5 pm, do emergency tests at 4 pm, bring over vials at 6 pm. Patrick didn’t judge anyone and was the only one who liked me and supported my pregnancy while my tech colleagues wished me dead and my baby aborted, miscarried, stillborn or disabled. Fuck them.

Patrick quickly became the team lead. I am not at that company anymore but I am glad he managed to rise up that quickly. Patrick, I doubt you’re on lemmy but thanks again for covering for me and pipetting the formaldehyde. My daughter is a healthy girl and I am glad you had my back.

Tbh I struggle to come up with an actual good and not just mediocre movie that Tom Hanks was in.

Adding to the trash list: Incredibly loud and extremely close. They massacred the book.

He is in this abomination of a book adaptation for Incredibly loud and extremely close.

I’m sorry but… Most of them? Especially since it’s his performance that has become poor. He is playing himself more and more. A similar thing happened to Johnny Depp. Look at both of them in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and then at stuff like Great Gatsby, Wolf of Wall Street, Shutter’s Island, Django / Willy Wonka, Pirates of the Carribean, Shadows, Transcendence. The acting and characters are so similar and they don’t give an effort anymore (or try to, and absolutely overdo it).

(Sorry I somehow incorporated a Johnny Depp rant in a critic of DiCaprio, their story of decline is just too similar to me. And Gilbert Grape is an amazing movie.)

God that sounds disgusting. I think, for the first time in 4+ years of sobriety, I actually feel genuinely sad for not being able to try that one out. It sounds so awful it must be good.

Yeah now try being absolutely unknowledgeable when it comes to tech and very much into makeup, skincare, 90 day fiance and parenting content. Lemmy, it’s been nice, but after one and a half years I started lurking to Reddit every once in a while again.

I’m afraid you won’t have time. It will take minutes. And I’m not even sure it would be announced.

So, in the best case scenario, the US as we know it is done and, after a hard fall and hitting rock bottom, will emerge as a country that is less of a capitalist hellhole. Ideally, in the process, other countries will find more independence from the USA, be it trade wise or security wise.

The more realistic scenario is that everything will stay the same/similar and just get slightly worse all the time but every other country will still suck up to the USA and everything gets a little worse. Oh yeah and climate change will fuck everyone up the ass.

The worst case scenario, I would argue, is that this ends in the destruction of the world via nuclear war within less than an hour. This is what I am scared of the most.

I wouldn’t eat soap simply because it’s amphiphilic, which is why, well, it makes good soap. The molecules have a hydrophilic and a lipophilic side and this will much rather soap off and severely damage the lining of your digestive route, potentially and probably also resulting in dangerous foaming.

If you take the most simple soap that’s just like potassium ions and negatively charged fatty acid residues, I’m not 100% sure but I doubt that the fatty acids want to accept a proton because they are rather stable when negatively charged, hence they won’t work well to buffer the stomach acid. And again, by the time that the fatty acid thinks about accepting a proton or not it will most likely be soaping up your cells’ membranes.

That’s kinda sweet… I think

I’d take yellow because nothing would change

I’m so sorry to hear that. I hope they find some qualified care soon. Is the problem the access (money, status) or can’t they find proper treatment for other reasons?

That’s a perverted amount of money. But yeah that should do.

So it’s not like she is being denied treatment. She is being denied a specific treatment in a specific prestigious clinic in Britain. But honestly, Russians can cure cancer just as well ( - provided you have the money to pay them). Moscow has prestigious clinics and great resources. I’d much rather get treatment there than in some rural British hospital to be honest.

A young doctor’s notebook - based on a Russian novel from Michael Bulgakov. I’m so sad they discontinued it 😭 I think about it once a week at least!

But it takes place around WWI, so… Not exactly a 1:1 portrayal of Russian medicine today

That’s true. Russia does have really good doctors - if you have money. And you have to be able to withstand yelling and belittling but as a Russian you get used to that.

Nice! That’s a great sign of how our mind can control our body. Something that we biomedics sometimes struggle with, in our eternal search for pathways.

I often had this when I had to study for exams. I was so stressed that I didn’t allow myself to get sick, and once the last exam was done, the stress level fell and I got so sick.

That might actually be cortisol released by a stress response. Do you tend to get sick a couple of days later when “there’s time”?

Yes, he is usually (and anecdotally) used in every introduction to works that cover vitamins and supplementation 😅 but unfortunately his ideas weren’t really backed by science. If you eat more vitamin c than you can absorb, you just pee it out. We actually did that in university (control group, breakfast group, breakfast + 1g of vitamin c group, testing the pee and I think capillary blood). Now, I think there are some findings with intravenous vitamin c acting like an oxidizing agent and killing cancer (?) cells, but macrodosing orally just doesn’t give you any effect.

Also, fun fact, your RDA can be met by eating one frozen pizza because vitamin c is used as a food additive everywhere.