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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • Exactly. And that’s what a doctor is supposed to do. That is why certain medications require a prescription. Much in the same way that it’s considered better to let five criminals go free than to unjustly punish one innocent, I think it’s better to let five people who arguably don’t need it get medication than to deny it to one person who truly does need it.

    There is an attitude in this country that if something is being abused, especially medication, that the best and only response of government and society should be to make that thing harder to get. But that doesn’t stop abuse. It has literally never worked in the past, and it does not work now. If someone is addicted to prescription painkillers and you deny them the prescription, they aren’t going to say ‘aw shucks I guess it’s time to clean up my life and get a job’. They’re going to get their fix somewhere else.

    And the result is that real patients get harmed. My partner is lucky to have a good medical team. But you hear lots of stories of people who go for surgery and get literally cut open and are sent home with basically Tylenol because the surgeon is terrified to have too many opiates on his prescription record. That isn’t okay. Our solution to one problem is not only making it worse it is causing another problem.


  • Exactly. My partner has chronic pain from an old car accident. Their neck is full of screws and bolts. Medications like oxycontin are literally the difference between them having a tolerable active life, and being in constant excruciating pain. Yeah I know a lot of people abuse it. But all the regulatory responses are just trying to make it harder to get, it’s like performing brain surgery with a sledgehammer and people like my partner get caught in the crossfire.

    If they want to fix the problem they should address pharmaceutical advertising, both to doctors and patients. Get rid of the kickbacks.




  • And that’s exactly why Ukraine is kicking ass. Paying $20k or $30k for a single enemy casualty is a pretty good deal in warfare. But these drones aren’t going through some huge defense contractor, they’re being 3D printed and assembled from off-the-shelf parts. Basically a little army of logistics people building hobby drones out of consumer level equipment, just with an improvised explosive like a grenade or some similar impact explosive strapped to the bottom.
    They aren’t even paying $20k for a casualty, they are paying $1-2k for a hobby drone and a grenade and many of them create multiple casualties.

    The more expensive ones cost more, but those are the ones you see that are reusable and can drop several grenades in one flight. Those are more like $5k-$20k. Still an insane bargain even if each one only creates one casualty before it is destroyed.


  • IT person here. Avoiding HP is a good idea. But a better idea is don’t buy shitty cheap consumer level inkjet printers from any brand. Most of them have this sort of bullshit, although not usually as bad as HP does. Instead I suggest buy it for life. Get a nice color laser machine, spend a few hundred bucks, and you will have a printer that lasts until you die. I like the Canon MF743CDw, it’s a little on the pricier side but it scans both sides of the paper in one pass. Also does color duplex printing.

    If you don’t want the extra size or weight of a color laser, get a black and white laser. How often do you really need color? And if you must get something cheaper, get one of the newer inkjet printers that use refillable ink bottles rather than cartridges, like there is an actual ink tank on the printer and you refill it with a squeeze bottle rather than replacing the cartridge.








  • I only know some basics of the whole situation, but I really don’t get this attack. Israel is a modern Westernized nation and enjoys STRONG support, financial and military, from many/most other Western developed nations. They have modern weapons of just about all types.
    Israel is accused of some awful shit and stealing peoples homes. From what I can see they’re probably guilty of this.

    But I don’t understand how killing a bunch of civilians at a rave is going to overall help the cause. It seems to me like a. it’d give your better-armed adversary an excuse to smack you down once and for all, and b. a good way to make the rest of the world feel like they shouldn’t be stopped in doing so (and if anything, helped in their efforts).

    So what is the goal? Is this just an expression of pent up anger? Because it seems a poor strategy to me.


  • Nice in concept.

    In practice this is useless- a $150k fine when removing the satellite will someday cost millions.

    It’s also worth noting that de-orbiting was never the plan here. Geosynchronous satellites are too far up to make that practical- at 22,000 mi altitude, the amount of delta-v necessary for a deorbit is gigantic. So instead the satellite ‘boosts’ up to a ‘graveyard’ orbit about 300km above the geosynchronous ring.
    Dish only boosted it 122km above the geosynchronous ring. Thus the fine. In practice this satellite will probably cause nobody any problems.




  • It’s not. In the view of many, civilian gun ownership is A Problem To Be Solved. Such people do not draw a distinction between law-abiding gun owners who keep their guns secure and threaten nobody, and violent criminals and psychopaths who frequently kill people. Thus, with that view, any law that restricts gun ownership or reduces the number of guns in society is progress.

    In reality, this law will do absolutely nothing for public safety. It will make the lives of gun owners harder, while the criminals and psychos will ignore this law just as they do every other law.