I hate how relevant this question is in so many situations.

This is especially true with generic medicines.

The cheapest I can get Claritin in my nearest supermarket is 50¢—$1.12/pill.

The store brand can be as low as 7¢—37¢/pill.)

The CostCo version is 2 or 3¢/pill.

All of them are the same. 10mg of loratadine, highly regulated by the FDA.

They can differ with inactive ingredients, so maybe you’d like a syrup or something from a name brand. But it legally has to be the same active ingredients, in the same amounts, in the same forms.

Somewhat off topic, but the names of both the publisher and the developer are also used by unrelated tabletop game companies. Hero Games makes the Hero System tabletop RPG, and GameScience (no space, so there’s a difference) make dice. It threw me for a loop.

Same. I’ve been thinking of replacing the cheap immersion circulator we have, and was going to go with Anova. This blatant enshittification is enough to make me look elsewhere.

From the same folks who were just calling Kamala Harris a “DEI pick.”

My favorite part was that Vance, supposedly, wrote about it in Hillbilly Elegy. Reading the book would easily solve the issue once and for all, but no one wanted to.

It’s also why the AP article was retracted. They could obviously prove that it’s not in the book, but like you said, it would be impossible to prove that he never, at any point in his life, when no one was around, fucked a couch.

…but also, the AP article didn’t even involve reading the book. They just used Ctrl+F on key terms because, again, no one wants to actually read that book.

For sure, and it is absolutely true.

I just like “weird” because it only works one way. For people who value individuality and diversity, it doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation. For people who value conformity, it’s a devastating insult. Apparently Ben Shapiro went on Megyn Kelly’s show to cry about it, which is great.

Yeah, that’s true.

It’s just that based on prior arguments I’ve had, they’re just so agitated by thinking things through. even if you put aside the overt heinousness, they just wave away the collateral damage, dismissing them as trivial details as though the whole fucking point of policy is the effect those policies will have. It’s partly that they’re advocating for awful things, but also frustrating that they are too willfully ignorant to realize how bad their own arguments are.

If only the people who supported regressive, dumbass positions like JD Vance’s could be swayed by thinking about things for even a few fucking seconds.

Totally understood, and I apologize for implying you might have. It was not my attention. I just meant that, even though it’s something I avoid jumping to conclude, it does happen, and there’s reason to believe it’s the case with Rowling. She’s got issues. It doesn’t absolve her of anything, but there’s a little pity in my condemnation.

Yeah. I know that calling bigots secretly closeted is problematic, but IIRC she has outright said that, if she were a young person today, she would question her gender identity.

JK Rowling did that not too long ago. (She didn’t call it Jewish, but absolutely called it lies and propaganda that trans people and trans researchers were early targets for the Nazis and victims of the Holocaust.)

I don’t say this to obsess over the Harry Potter author, but to point out that you don’t have to go cherry picking to find this shit. She’s a prominent person using her platform to spread bigotry and misinformation.

I know, right? But it’s not. You can check it out here.

I forgot to mention. He thinks that there is no game, besides LARPing, that could possibly appeal to women (who he consistently refers to as “females”), so it is a waste of time for anyone to try.

For those wondering if Gygax grew beyond this kind of thinking, no, he didn’t. There’s an infamous forum post of his from 2005 where he calls himself a “biological determinist,” and says that “females” are generally incapable of enjoying RPGs as much as men “because of a difference in brain function.” Could it be that, for some reason, the women he played with just didn’t enjoy the games he ran? No! It must be that RPGs are simply beyond their female brains!

Also, anyone have links to a copy of the issue of Europa cited in the article? I’d love a primary document to cite in the future.

Holtorf: That’s just a story. What’s more important is the policy.

The policy is the whole fucking problem! His hypocrisy is an issue because, even with a complete lack of any ability to empathize with different people in different circumstances (which I assume as a default from right-wingers), he ought to understand this situation because it did happen to him. Yet he just doesn’t care. Christ, what an asshole.

Yeah, there’s a gap between “basic integrity and human decency” and, far below it, “average Republican behavior.” He went in between.

It might even be simpler than that. Capitalism just doesn’t care past the next quarter. And when ownership is disconnected from labor or even from customer, than it’s just a really rudimentary collective intelligence. The shareholders just want the line to go up, and everyone in the corporate structure is accountable to the shareholders, so they all do their part, big or little, to make that happen. It completely dispenses with personal responsibility, whether for negative externalities, direct harm, or even the future as close as months from now.

The last time Google pulled out all the stops to fight ad blockers, I had to update uBlock Origin every now and then until the whole thing passed. That’s all.

So I’m not worried. But I am amused that they keep making ads more obnoxious, which pushes more people to use ad blockers. I didn’t even use sponsorblock until a particularly egregious bit of native advertising. They could probably gain ground by just making ads less irritating, but they absolutely will not.

Tankies: The word ‘tankie’ is meaningless because it gets overused by disingenuous people on the right.

Also tankies: Everyone who criticizes my position is right-wing.

It honestly reminds me of fascists saying that harsh criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. It’s a dishonest rhetorical game.