If we expect It to Happen within some soon-ish timeframe, we're liable to be disappointed in ways that damage our overall resilience. OTOH we can have confidence It Will Happen, without having an idea of when.
Meanwhile, plan as though we'll need to make a long slog.

'Hold still for concealer that doesn't totally suck' carries a bit less urgency than 'you shouldn't move because you have a large-gauge needle in your arm.'
Anyway, not to belabor it: I see it as a kind of a Stockdale Paradox thing: ...

& I get why people (like, say, Rubio) don't see this about him: they themselves do not have the courage or the assertive confidence in a skill/craft to exploit it. & we don't see it because we see him kowtowed to by...well, everyone, in everything, because that's what media covers.

Think e.g. about how he responds to Putin, or MBS: He fawns, because at some level he fears them.
What I'm saying is he'd put up with dialysis just fine if Nurse Ratched were setting him up for it.

There's a thing I think a lot of people don't get about Trump (& for good reason!): When he's put into a corner, e.g. confronted with an assertive, experienced nurse or medical tech - he'll often fawn. Really experienced skilled medical staff are familiar with that response & know how to exploit it.

Moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt talks about this as the main risk of what he labeled as 'bullshit', in his paper "On Bullshit."

Are they being diplomatic, or do they not understand that Americans positioning themselves that way is pure Frankfurtian bullshit?

Having watched someone take somewhere between 12-15 yers to die of dementia (starting point is always hard to say), my suggestion is to not put off anything waiting for It to Happen.

Crap I'm old.

That having been said I think this is objectively true, speaking as a person who's been continually working in internet tech for about 30 yrs as of sometime in the early Spring of '26.
bsky.app/profile/mari...

E.g. I remember things about the 70s that I see as good that were mostly accidental - people were confused, not paying attention. Stuff was allowed to thrive because it flew under radar. A lot of that stuff was bad; some of it was good.

Also "liberal" has pretty become much like "socialist" or "communist" in that it means completely different things to the people who self-label with the term & the people who derogatorily apply it to others. Alas there's no good term to replace "socialism" but we could can the other 2 with no loss.

(TBC I regard the term "classical liberal" as unredeemable. Anyone using it to its original purpose - to sucker liberals into listening to your elevator pitch - is trying to pull a fast one & deserves to be treated with suspicion, at best.)

Yeh I found I couldn't look away from what she was doing long before I knew she was Ethan's kid. She has that quality of magnetizing eyeballs, just like he does, even if one doesn't care for his performances (& I often haven't), I can't stop watching them.

been a minute since I read it but there are arguments in Lothar Buchheim's novel _Das Boot_ about whether to machine-gun survivors. IIRC the upshot was that it was common knowlege that some commanders ordered it & others refused. Whether Buchheim ever saw it happen, I don't know if he ever said.

There are optometrists with independent practices, but they tend to specialize. Mine actually works out of 2 shops: a corporate optical chain, & a private optician to whom I go because he's very good at making glasses for people with unusual prescriptions. (My optometrist is also great, TBC.)

I went 8 yrs at one point w/o an eye exam or new glasses because I couldn't afford it. I've never had the luxury of settling for the cheap glasses (I can't accurately be prescribed using a phoropter). But I did need have to find accommodating shops to repair/replace my frames, & asked questions.