Smoking ecigarettes will give you way too much nicotine for what you need, and you'll habituate rapidly (not to mention the social cost). Get gum so you can better regulate the dosage, or potentially get the liquid from the ecigs and just rub a bit on your hands to let it soak into your blood stream.

I think that people often assume normatively prescriptive intent when one makes a statement like that

Can you unroll this? What do you see as the crucial difference between "I think there are strong gender overtones here" and "I think that water is wet"?

What creates the "reasonable assumption" that the statement is normative when the text doesn't specify it?

It worries me a bit that several young LWers appear to be leaving paid employment to do (presumably?) unpaid work for their partners.

Name three?

So. I’m Samwise. If you earn my loyalty, by convincing me that what you’re working on is valuable and that you’re the person who should be doing it, I’ll stick by you whatever it takes, and I’ll make sure you succeed. I don’t have a Frodo right now. But I’m looking for one.

...

For me, finding someone who shared my values, who was smart and rational enough for me to trust him, and who was in a much better position to actually accomplish what I most cared about than I imagined myself ever being, was the best thing that could have happened to me.

Just out of curiousity - is Frodo person implicitly intended to be a romantic partner here? Or can Frodo just be anyone you work closely with? The wording certainly makes it seems seem like a romantic partner. And it could be a spurious trend but I also couldn't help but notice the female skew of all the Samwise's you mentioned, which, given the low grade dominance/submission dynamics often at play between the genders, makes me suspect this even more.

I think nursing is a valid life choice, and I think being a Samwise is a valid choice, and I think wanting to find a romantic partner and take care of them and make their ambitious dreams come true is a valid choice, and I think in general just being a person who isn't actively trying to save the world is a valid life choice. (Mostly because I'm not certain that people who have a burning ambition to save the world are actually contributing that much more than the rest of the population.)

I feel like things get kind of... weird... if these perfectly good traits are recombined into "I want to be in a super-intense relationship with someone who is successfully saving the world". I'm not sure how to describe this - I'd like to try and "save the world" myself with my own little contribution, but I don't want that contribution to be the major reason my partner is drawn to and stays by me. I don't want it to be because my work is "valuable".

If Frodo utterly fails in his ambitions, Samwise-who-wants-to-save-the-world-via-auxiliary-roles aught will hop to a new, better Frodo to support. Can a bond which is essentially based off of someone's propensity to succeed at what they are doing in life really grow to be unconditional? What if Frodo suddenly gets a debilitating disease and can't be a Frodo anymore?

I'm well aware that I might be completely misreading/projecting the intended relationship between Frodo/Samwise here, and feel free to put me in my place if that is the case. But If I presumed rightly, I would say: It's okay, you don't need to conceptualize yourself as a sidekick, - by doing so you're still implicitly buying into the whole comic-book heroism meme, in which you must behave dramatically and drastically in order to be relevant.

It's perfectly alright to just say that you would like to live a simple life of devotion to your partner, patients, friends, family, and community, and that abstract ideas of "saving the world" have nothing to do with it. People like that are the fabric of the society the comic-book types want to protect and enrich in the first place!

Would you (or anyone else) have good suggestions for index funds for those living and earning in the UK/Europe? Thanks!

Here is the newest version of the rationalist masterlist I know of, thought it's still a few months out of date. Also people who follow you (looks like we are following each other now, yay!). Also it can be fun to follow blogs for fandoms or things you think are cute, or whatever random things you are interested in.

I just started a tumblr (coffeespoonsposts) - which tumblrs should I follow?

Its the same as pre exposure prophylaxis.

I was young in the 80's, but my impression is that HIV/AIDS was considered a pretty gay-specific thing at first. Later there was more media pushing the idea that it can affect anyone - for example, one of my schools had a straight woman with HIV visit to tell us about it. While this was presumably well-meaning and may have even had good effects in terms of encouraging safety, it did lead me to a quite skewed perspective of the relative risks (I was still aware that it was more prevalent in gays, but not by how much).

Regarding HIV, what about Truveda?