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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • While you are correct that it will likely be expensive, it is important to note that Descovy is an existing PreP pill that Gilead makes. So the cost of the new shot is yet to be determined, but the company has been criticized for the cost of their current PreP medication option.

    It is also important to note that anyone with insurance in the United States will pay nothing, as the Affordable Care Act requires insurance to cover all PreP medications at no cost to patients. The pricing will only affect those who have no insurance at all, which makes this criticism all the more important to help this new medication reach those who would be the worst affected if they were to contract HIV.




  • I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!

    And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.

    I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.




  • Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

    I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

    Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.





  • This is correct, and it isn’t just associated with acids. It’s because of an effect called ‘freezing point depression’, which is the same reason salt lowers the freezing point of water while raising its boiling point.

    There are a few explanations as to why this happens, with the easiest being this: if you add something that can’t freeze to something that can, then the whole thing will need to lose more energy to allow the whole mass to solidify because the un-freezing stuff physically interferes with the attempts of the freezing stuff to bind together.

    However, there is also the additional aspect of vapor pressure, which comes into play when adding things that can freeze to another thing that also freezes, but at a different temperature. I don’t really understand that at all, so I will pull from the Wikipedia article on it:

    The freezing point is the temperature at which the liquid solvent and solid solvent are at equilibrium, so that their vapor pressures are equal. When a non-volatile solute is added to a volatile liquid solvent, the solution vapour pressure will be lower than that of the pure solvent. As a result, the solid will reach equilibrium with the solution at a lower temperature than with the pure solvent. This explanation in terms of vapor pressure is equivalent to the argument based on chemical potential, since the chemical potential of a vapor is logarithmically related to pressure. All of the colligative properties result from a lowering of the chemical potential of the solvent in the presence of a solute. This lowering is an entropy effect. The greater randomness of the solution (as compared to the pure solvent) acts in opposition to freezing, so that a lower temperature must be reached, over a broader range, before equilibrium between the liquid solution and solid solution phases is achieved. Melting point determinations are commonly exploited in organic chemistry to aid in identifying substances and to ascertain their purity.

    So, TL;DR is that chemistry is weird, things react weird at the molecular level because of energy states, and that is what allows us to make ice cream!



  • Good thing hormones are only prescribed in a minority of trans kids anyways, even though the vast majority of them do not desist as they get older. In fact, the majority of them continue on to transition as adults, and 99.5 or so percent of trans kids given just puberty blockers, much less hormones, grow to adulthood with no regrets.

    Also, before you ask, I can provide sources, but that which is declared without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, especially when the dismissal is in line with literally every major medical organization, including the World Health Organization, due to the sheer amount of clear evidence that transition is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria at any age.



  • That is true, but I am also proof that their stance was at least partially valid. I voted Bernie in the primary and voted third party against Clinton, and I was definitely not alone.

    Again, whether actions are justified or understandable, to me, is not reason to excuse the real impacts that the election results had. It wasn’t helped by the results for Congress, but no one can deny that the US would be in a much better spot now if Clinton had been president, regardless of who was in charge in Congress. I will continue to support leftists in primaries, and especially in my local and state elections, and I continue to do activist and monetary support as much as I am able. But I hate being told that I am abandoning my values simply because I am voting for the highest chance for fewer people to be harmed.


  • Nice cherry picking of two examples without sources, while completely ignoring all of the other things Biden did repeal. It also ignores the fact that those things were replaced with better projects that were less susceptible to repeals by future presidents.

    Again, I am not saying to vote for all Dems across the board, just not in the Presidential election. I vote third party in my home state for state and local elections because my state (solid blue) is set up in a way that allows for a candidate presented by the third party to run as a Dem as well, allowing people to vote effectively for a party line that makes it clear what actions we want taken while not risking a regressive candidate being elected by a split vote. There are also several blue states that are enacting ranked choice voting, which is also being supported by even most moderate Dems.


  • If the number of people who died due to benefit cuts, throwing out the pandemic action plan, and direct actions from right wing terrorists who were emboldened by a president who values the speeches and actions of Hitler aren’t enough to convince you of how much worse Trump was versus lib Dems, then you are missing the point of the values you claim to have. I support the values I do because they uphold human rights and save lives. What good are those values if my actions lead to the death and dehumanization of thousands, when another choice would have likely saved them?


  • Really? Because that issue was a combo of actual universal healthcare and climate goals. I voted for the only candidate who had a commitment to those goals. This was before it was revealed that this particular candidate had accepted a whole bunch of money from the RNC to remain in the race.

    The result was enough people voted for that candidate that Trump won. The result of his win was that we saw even the half-measures that had been taken on these issues were stripped, setting us back potential decades because of new rules and packed courts who are now going against all precedent and decorum to prevent new leaders from enacting new policies. I voted for a few steps forward instead of half-steps, and got several steps back as a result.

    Keep in mind that one of those several steps back was a gutting of voting rights, which is being continued by Trump appointed judges to this day. If you need to be a one-issue voter, vote to keep your right to vote by voting in a way that is most likely to prevent a Trump win. They literally already have a plan on how to remove and bar even more people from voting.


  • As someone who voted third party in the 2016 election, take it from me that you will feel more guilty if you know your vote could have helped prevent the fascist party from gaining power. The presidency is not the office to try to vote on morals, save that for state and local elections that decide things like state benefits programs, distributions of funds, and public works. The federal government is where you will want to vote for the people who are protecting your right to vote in the first place, and that is done by ensuring that the fascist party can’t get a majority or otherwise control a branch of the government.

    If the Supreme Court were made up different, maybe, but ending up with an R president just gives them room to pack more courts and see a whole bunch more rights get removed.