The case can be thrown out, but it's still going to cause you massive disruptions. Everything from just being arrested in the first place and being held in custody for some amount of time, to having to hire a lawyer, to the social consequences of your name being tied to being arrested. It's going to cost you time, money, stress, family and social relationships. And there's a non-zero chance that if your life starts being investigated after such an arrest, something could be found to still affect you or your family and friends.
And once you're on their radar, you're probably going to also end up being marked for extra scrutiny. You might find yourself being pulled over more often, or getting the SSSS on your airplane boarding pass.
The article did mention there are other benefits, noise, improved temperature hysteresis, the ability to actually provide sufficient heat during the cold months.
Ever spend time in a hotel room with a noisy, rattly AC that turned on and off all the time because it couldn't maintain the temperatures at the set point? Hard to get decent sleep.
If your bedrooms are upstairs, at night you might be running heat a lot less since some of the heat from the first floor rises up to the second. If you have carpet, that can create a warmer area at the floor, closer to where your beds are. So you might not need to heat things as much, or to as high a temperature to feel comfortable.
I lived in an apartment where the floor was poorly insulated. When a new neighbor moved in downstairs that heated their bedroom more aggressively at night, my heating bill went down because the heat rising from below made it less necessary to run my own heating as hard.
It might also be the difference in electricity cost. Especially with tiered rates, you can easily find yourself moving into a higher tier where every kW is significantly more expensive than in the previous tiers. PG&E in the SF Bay Area charges between 43 and 60c/kWh. A 2kW heater is going to cost about $1/hr to run , so if you're working from home, have little kids it gets expensive quick. And in the middle of a NY winter, with a poorly isolated apartment, you might well be running the heat in some capacity pretty much 24/7.
Con Ed rates are about 0.16/kWh so in their case it's not the cost of electricity, it's all the things explained after the $1000/month line, a ridiculous lack of insulation and lack of air-tightness.
They may also keep the heat higher than most people. There's mention of an au pair so there must be a small child.
Also with medical practitioners dealing with anything renal. Though for them, it's more that it's one of the drugs you get asked about specifically whenever you have any injections that might be harsh on the kidneys. There's a reason they ask about it when you get contrast for a CT.
How long have you been on a GLP-1? It took me about a year to start to change my relationship to food. Initially, I had the same reaction -- I stopped enjoying food, which led to problems with caloric deficiency, and especially the lack of protein. But eventually my brain started to rewire itself from thinking food == good, to good food == good. If you've spent a significant part of your life treating food as an addiction, even if the physical urges go away, the mental side takes longer.
Funny enough though, is that it's caused me to spend way more time thinking about food because it's no longer a mindless activity. A bag of crisps can last me a month. The last pint of ice cream I bought got freezer burn because of how long it took me to finish it. If I'm cooking something, it's no longer going to be some recipe where you throw a bunch of stuff together and get a giant pot of food to stuff your face with, it's going to be something that takes effort and time and skill to prepare because it has to be _good_.
Coming up on five months now! Thank you very much for your comment -- I've been hoping based on research and talking to people I know that you do rewire eventually, and you reinforced all of that. Appreciated.
And yeah, caloric intake is a concern. The diabetes means I'm also changing my diet a fair bit which doesn't help; I haven't had ice cream in months. I am pretty sure I'm overcompensating and have recently pushed myself into more experimentation with food; the availability of real time glucose sensors is huge even if I feel weird walking around with a Bluetooth device plugged into my arm.
Regarding the caloric intake, my GP suggested tracking calories, but also to use protein supplements. It's not the tastiest thing, but it's a fairly easy way to both manage your caloric intake to healthy levels, and to ensure that you're getting enough protein. Otherwise you might end up losing additional weight from losing muscle mass. That makes it even easier to stop performing physical activities, and also puts strain on your kidneys due to the breakdown of muscle mass. Diabetes definitely makes it more challenging since you have to avoid foods that are an easy source of additional calories to make up for the deficit, but it's doable.
I don't know what your dosing schedule is, so this might not be as applicable. For me, it's weekly, so early on what I started doing was setting it up so that saturday or sunday would be the tail end of the week for the dosing, so that as the effects wore off a little I had more motivation for food. I would then use that to meal prep some easy freezable meals that I would use for the days when I had a longer or more stressful day, and would be even less inclined to cook. Soups and stews were especially good for that. So even if I wasn't feeling hungry, and had no real desire to prep anything, I could just throw something the microwave to heat up over like 30 minutes and I would at least have a good meal to eat, and avoid just skipping the meal entirely due to the lack of desire for food. And since I was cooking these myself still, it gave me some extra motivation to do it well, which eventually grew to the improvement of cooking skills I mentioned in the previous comment.
And as far as the CGM, don't feel too weird about it -- as far as I am concerned you're helping pioneer continuous metabolic monitors that not only monitor glucose levels, but other metabolic and hormonal measurements. I'd love to have a little device I can stick on my arm that gives me continuous monitoring of various metabolic properties instead of needing to have regular blood tests performed for them.
i think over time you’ll find yourself getting excited about excellent _meals_ instead of deserts. It’s a journey, hang in there!
The concept of a desert is also subjective. I always challenge people to ask themselves - why can’t our desert after dinner be a bowl of strawberries or an orange? Why must it be a brownie / cookie / ice cream?
Not to excuse it, but Protvino in the 90's was...kind of a shitshow. The early 90's were a little like post-war UK - think food stamps, standing in line all morning just to buy your measly weekly meat allotment, most city services on the brink of failure. Many of the chronically sick or disabled, or injured veterans, ended up basically being kicked to the curb when they no longer had the social safety net that (however low or high quality) they had in the USSR.
It took heroic efforts to leave to the west in those times. The best most people could swing was finding work in Moscow or Serpuhov and commuting there on the daily. And this is all considering that it was a 'science town'; Many of those who lived there in some way worked at or adjacent to the accelerator institute and were fairly well educated individuals.
This is speaking from my experiences when I was young.
> My kids and other kids in the neighborhood close by play around in the cul-de-sac quite often. Lots of people are out walking around. A lot of neighbors have patio furniture in their front yard and can be found out there, at least when its not 100F+ outside.
How big is the cul-de-sac? When I was a kid, my 'local neighborhood cul-de-sac' was about 50 kids playing around, forming their own little cliques, learning how to interact with a lot of other different kids. The actual cul-de-sac was more like 200-300 families with kids of varying ages, all interacting with each other
>The downtown area nearby has lots of events going on.
How many are spontaneous and unorganized? How often does the local band drop by for an impromptu performance that you didn't need to plan for, find parking for...that you could just be out walking your dog and stop by for a half hour?
> I hung out at the farmer's market this morning that's routinely held in town most weeks on Saturday mornings. Lots of people walking/biking to it.
How much of the market is just your average stay-at-home that is selling their extra produce to make some extra cash and avoid it going to waste? Do you need to sign up to be a seller, or can you just show up, set up at an empty stall and sell your stuff?
> My suburban town has 42 of them. Almost 2,000 acres. They're mostly connected by dedicated bike paths. There's a city park attached to nearly every neighborhood area. Down the street from me there's a park with multiple playground areas, walking path through some small woods, a fishing pond, some basic sports areas (fences and graveled areas for baseball/softball, space for soccer, etc). So yeah, plenty of parks to be had. And there's usually a good bit of people at these places.
Wow, 2000 acres...thats, not a whole lot. My hometown had something like 200mi^2 of public land around it that you could just go and make use of. And that's just in easy walking distance.
> Pools, farmers stands, churches, library...
My hometown had all of these a plenty too, and they weren't all heavily regimented. And by most measures, you probably lived in what was an ivory palace compared to where I came from. Yet, from your descriptions, you can't even manage the most destitute period of the post-soviet-collapse period.
We had plenty of third places to gather around with other people. Parks, beaches, forests. The biggest difference to me was that our experiences weren't sanitized. They weren't regimented to respond to certain rules, to be calendarized to occur on certain days or times. Our parents didn't need to plan play dates, or so schedule time off to make sure their kids could experience certain things. Those were just a given. The American experience with this is, speaking from 30-ish years of experience, is very lacking, and the saddest part is that most don't realize that.
> My hometown had something like 200mi^2 of public land
The city I live in is less than 30 square miles. Hard to have 200 square miles of parks when the town is only 30. And it's entirely surrounded by other cities and towns.
And are you just talking undeveloped woods or something? I'm talking parks, as in playgrounds, soccer fields, baseball fields, water fountains, stocked fishing ponds, etc.
But I do get that. Where I grew up (another US suburb), walking out my back gate connected to loads of creeks and bayous and woods and ranches.
Still though, goal posts moved even more than 200mi. We went from "there are no parks" to "there are no forests".
> They weren't regimented to respond to certain rules, to be calendarized to occur on certain days or times
Neither are mine. I didn't arrange a play date. My kids just went outside and played with the kids out there. We just go down to the park and play on the playgrounds with the other kids. We just hop on the bus and head to the downtown and see what's happening. We just go to the library. We just stopped by the farmers market. We just go to the pool. Maybe shoot some messages to some friends we're heading that way, but not necessarily something planned well ahead of time.
> you probably lived in what was an ivory palace compared to where I came from
I don't know where you came from. But where I'm from, the average household income isn't too far off from the current national average. This isn't some ultra wealthy place.
> And are you just talking undeveloped woods or something? I'm talking parks, as in playgrounds, soccer fields, baseball fields, water fountains, stocked fishing ponds, etc.
All of the above. Well, maybe swap baseball fields to basketball courts.
> Neither are mine. I didn't arrange a play date. My kids just went outside and played with the kids out there. We just go down to the park and play on the playgrounds with the other kids. We just hop on the bus and head to the downtown and see what's happening. We just go to the library. We just stopped by the farmers market. We just go to the pool. Maybe shoot some messages to some friends we're heading that way, but not necessarily something planned well ahead of time.
If it's anything like my experience in the US, the other side -- hosting such events, is regimented and calendarized.
> I don't know where you came from. But where I'm from, the average household income isn't too far off from the current national average. This isn't some ultra wealthy place.
When I was a kid, $3000/annum would have put you in the upper 2-3%.
I've since lived in places with very nice public spaces, what most would consider to be enviable 3rd places. Yet it all still feels so artificial, so made up. It feels designed, not organic, and the behaviours that I observe follow that.
And once you're on their radar, you're probably going to also end up being marked for extra scrutiny. You might find yourself being pulled over more often, or getting the SSSS on your airplane boarding pass.