Stay and risk having to work for a leadership committing atrocities. Leave and risk there only being loyalists working for the them, further enabling the atrocities.

Hey, there. It sounds like you’re less concerned about your genetic proclivity to an autoimmune arthritis and more looking for ways to stave off any kind of arthritic degeneration, including your standard-issue osteoarthritis. I’m a 38-year-old who is embarking on a race against the progression of arthritis and other skeletal/connective tissue maladies due to a genetic joint hypermobility disorder that I’m similarly trying to get out in front of. Here’s what I’ve found so far, with the obligatory “I am not a doctor,” and, “Your mileage may vary.”:

1. Keep baseline-inflammation down wherever you can. It sounds like woo-woo crap, but finding things specific to your body that cause inflammation and cutting them out will go further than you think. That goes for both diet and activities. Consider an elimination diet to help you figure out what those things are. For me, anything that’s particularly acidic makes me feel like crap, as does sugar and processed meats. I go through phases of being good at avoiding these things followed by phases where I completely fail at it. A lot of people swear by ginger/turmeric for anti-inflammatory properties but I try to avoid taking supplements of it because there have been recent studies that show a lot of the supplements made from dried/ground down fibers like that tend to keep your kidneys from functioning as well as they should.
2. Omega 3s and 6s are great for maintaining (and possibly also repairing?) cartilage. Glucosamine, too.
3. Strengthen your muscles so you aren’t relying so much on your tendons and bones to support you as you age, thus reducing the overall load on them and keeping them healthy for longer. Probably want to do low-impact stuff. I’m personally doing Pilates because yoga over-stretches my hypermobile joints and I also just find it boring. Lifting weights is also proven to increase your bone density, so it’s just good for you overall. And I feel like this part is obvious, but the less weight you carry, the less you’ll tax your body.
4. This may be less applicable to you, but the things I take to keep my bones and connective tissue as healthy as possible include: Multivitamin, an extra Vitamin D supplement, a manganese B12 supplement, and collagen-based protein powder (though be careful of lead levels in protein powders in general).

I wish you luck in your quest. I personally am just holding out for a full-body exoskeleton. That’d be pretty badass.

Tennessee: a state in the USA.

For some completely unrelated reason, I suddenly have this song stuck in my head…

https://www.tiktok.com/@originalsinfluencer/video/7443873893430971678

Making a career change from an industry with several active unions (all of which continue to be proven as vital, even after over 100 years), into the tech industry in the mid-2010s, where there was no union and you’d hear horror stories (especially from the video game industry), I can’t help but feel like this was inevitable and I’ve been excited to watch it happen for almost 10 years. I hope it continues.

Who’s going to get rich making the app that actively trashes this data before it can be read by fingerprinting-ware? Because shut up and take my money.

Well, that’s slightly more encouraging

Last I heard, early numbers were reporting a 100% fatality rate in cats. Doubtful it’s still 100%, but that goes to show that it’s exceptionally dangerous to our friends of the feline persuasion. I’d previously been giving my cat freeze-dried chicken hearts as an iron supplement with the added benefit of dental health…not so much these days.

I will give that cat anything he wants.

Work!

Wow. I just got reverse-onioned.

We used to feed only dry and it ended up causing us problems when we had to switch to wet for medical reasons (one had diabetes, and then the other ended up with CKD). The one who was supposed to be smart was somehow bad at eating it (she kept trying to chew it and it would fall out of her mouth 🙄) and also just generally didn’t like it because it’s not what she spent her life eating.

I don’t think dry food is inherently bad or anything, but if that’s your primary source of calories, then you do need to make sure your cat stays hydrated and also that they don’t end up in carb-overload (unless you didn’t mind the thought of giving your cat insulin twice a day, exactly twelve hours apart).

And it sounds like you don’t have to worry about this last part, but for anyone else reading this: please make sure your cats have some amount of both when they’re young and not so set in their ways… don’t make the mistake we did!

I hear you–this obvious to you and I and to plenty of people, but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years it’s that the majority of people need to hear the same message, over and over, in lots of different forms, from lots of different sources, in order to internalize it. There is a disappointing amount of value in being Captain Obvious when it comes to communicating with large groups of people.

Most major audio companies like JBL, Bose, etc, are putting out linkable speakers. I’ve got a Bose sound bar which integrates pretty flawlessly with the Google speakers I haven’t brought myself to get rid of yet. I’ve found that, if the logic exists to sync it with other speakers in its ecosystem and an integration for HA exists, you can probably add it to a whole-house setup via music assistant. And you can probably use multiple ecosystems, too (though I’m not certain you can adjust delays across ecosystems… I’ve never tried that myself, and it’s going to be the most vital part of your whole-house setup. My living room, dining room, and kitchen all have to have their delay adjusted by several milliseconds so it doesn’t sound like auditory torture when you turn on multiple speakers in the same area. My bedroom doesn’t have to be synced, though, since it’s far enough away from the other speakers that you don’t hear both at the same time.

…okay, yes, just checked and it is, indeed, quite challenging to sync delays across different ecosystems. I’d recommend keeping all your speakers in a single area (e.g. kitchen, dining, and living rooms) all in the same ecosystem and you can change manufacturers as you change rooms. https://music-assistant.io/faq/tech-info/ )

I think you’d be well-positioned to buy a few speakers according to your budget, and add more over time of any manufacturer you like (as long as it integrates with HA/MA) if you so choose. Any of the well-known brands are generally good. I personally prefer systems that don’t require an external amp, but that’s personal preference. I’ve been very happy with my Bose stuff, but lots of people love JBL, Genelec, and even our pals at Sonos re: audio quality. I think the world kind of is your oyster here, friend. Do what your heart (and ear) leads you to.

Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.

I was literally just thinking that it definitely has Moonrise Kingdom vibes.

Seriously, though, that photo makes me feel a nostalgia that I can’t quite place. Absolutely phenomenal photo!