Nonsense. Your insurance company would have a conniption fit if your doctors did that. Instead they have rules that say you must first try at least so many drugs from a preferred list of generics. Only then can you try the non-preferred genetics. Only after all that can you try a non-generic drug. I know this because I read my insurance policy and asked my doctor if this was normal practice and was told that literally all insurance companies do this, although what drug is on what list can vary a bit.

I just went and looked for these articles about fentanyl coming over the Mexican border and found..... Nothing. What I found was Americans throughout the country being caught with fentanyl (either powder or pills). The only articles that talk about it coming into the US talk about it mainly coming in through the mail from China. Furthermore, I found several articles pointing out that most of the drugs that come across the border with people come with Americans. Practically no asylum seekers bring in drugs. Your racist bullshit turns out to be just that: bullshit.

TL;DR citation needed for the claim that most of the fentanyl is coming in with asylum seekers over the southern border.

I think you're wrong on that Civil Rights Act presumption. In order to violate the CRA, you need to have a policy that turns on a person's religious beliefs, not something that just impacts members of a particular religion more than others. To discriminate against a religion, you need a policy that cares about which religion you have. While you don't have to openly say that your policy turns on a person's religion to trigger the law, you do have to do something that targets some class of religious believers in particular, even if not by name. Targeting purveyors of misinformation is not going to trigger the CRA since there's no religion that can be plausibly said to have a requirement of giving out misinformation (NB: this religion would need to advance the cause of misinformation itself, not just some particular collection of pieces of misinformation.).

What makes you think that securing the border (which is code, by the way, for keeping the brown people from the south out) is going to help with the problem of fentanyl in our heroin supply? That fentanyl is coming from China in small packages. Picking up on those packages as they cross the border is basically impossible, given the shear number of packages that come in from China everyday. Given that drugs like carfentanyl are more than 300 times as potent as heroin, small packages are all it takes. A kilo of fentanyl is like half a ton of heroin. How do block that? It's not like heroin itself, which needs to come in by the ton. I order shit from China all the time, and I've never had a package inspected. They couldn't possibly inspect enough packages to detect a significant fraction of the incoming fentanyl, even if they really, really wanted to. Republicans being in office isn't going to change that. The only thing that could would be to add significant tariffs to reduce the amount of incoming stuff from China. But that would be pretty harmful to our economy, so it definitely isn't happening, no matter who's in charge.

Realistically, the only way to deal with the problem of fentanyl contamination of our heroin supply is to create standards for heroin purity and potency. This, of course, would require legalization, which is the right answer. We could actually do without legalizing heroin, by legalizing narcotic replacement therapy, and making it freely available. Note that this doesn't mean methadone or Suboxone, although those two are fine alternatives. It means prescribing something like oxycodone or morphine to heroin addicts sufficient to keep them from going out and buying heroin. Neither the R's nor the D's are currently up for doing that though. The D's are a bit closer with wanting to legalize pot. Baby steps.

Around 18 years ago, I responded to a spam email. Ended up getting 180 10mg Lortabs (hydrocodone) in the mail. Unfortunately, that doesn't work anymore. Of course, nowadays I have a chronic pain condition, so I get other stuff prescribed legitimately (and I legit need it now) but it'd probably be cheaper if you could still do the pill mill thing.

The only reason the train forum doesn't get butt loads of spam and off-topic crap is because they are allowed to delete it. Moderation is required for a forum to succeed, no matter what. Without it, people will make bots to find and shit up every forum on the Internet relentlessly. Just look at the garbage on unmoderated forums today. No person in their right mind would want to visit the cesspool that is 4chan. If you want unmoderated crap, go there; it already exists. The rest of us will stick to moderated forums, thank you very much. You're welcome to stay away if it offends you so much. (I'll also note that /. Is just barely moderated enough for me to occasionally come here and throw out a comment or two. Over time, the discourse has gotten progressively worse, and I'm increasingly less likely to visit the comments, mostly due to the garbage levels currently present. Other, more well moderated forums like those at arstechnica are much more likely to get my views, due to the higher level of discourse and greater willingness to moderate the crap off the site.)

Review: the author spent entirely too much time waffling around before getting to the point, and then it was a line description of the business. When I read my slash fanfic, I want details. You should have told me more about how she felt, what Zuck was doing, the tears streaming disc her face as you switched from vaginal to anal, etc. You need to flesh out the naughty section quite a lot.

TL;DR 1/10 would not read again

Trademark protects the origin of products. So even though Mickey is out of copyright (when that happens), the trademarks will still mean that you can't sell a depiction of Mickey that appears to come from Disney even though it doesn't. When the copyright expires, you can use the character in new works, but it needs to be the character as used in the original films, not the character as it has evolved into in later films, or you can use an original version as long as it derives from the out of copyright version and not more recent versions. In no case can you use the Disney Mickey mouse logo or Disney logo on your Mickey depictions because of the trademarks. In fact, you have to make it clear that you're not Disney in some way. If you wanted to make a Mickey graphic novel in 2023, you could but the Mickey would have to look like he did in Steamboat Willie or be derived from that with no input from later, still in copyright, depictions.

Our brains are as deterministic as computers are. And, yes, that includes the quantum nature of the brain's elements. While one interpretation has quantum things having some sort of randomness, other interpretations do not have that randomness. They are deterministic. And there's good reason to think that those interpretations are more accurate. They're just harder to compute using, which is why we use the simplification of randomness. If this weren't true, then there wouldn't be a Black Hole Information Paradox. That paradox stems from the fact that physics must be reversible, which is a property stemming from determinism.

"first $950 of theft is jail free"

You say that like it's a bad thing. We really shouldn't be locking people up for minor shit. That's a recipe for disaster. See, the rest of the US prison population statistics. Punish them? Yes. With jail? Not so much. And that's the way it should be. We shouldn't default to throwing people in jail for minor crimes. We should default to figuring out what's going on with them and working with them solve those issues. That's why California is doing that.

The real question is where do you draw the line between minor enough for no jail and major enough for some jail. California said that's at $950. I could see how someone might think a lower number would be better, but the number needs to be somewhere. In Michigan, I believe it's $200, which is too low, in my opinion. But somewhere between $200 and $1000 sounds about right to me. Were I in charge, I'd probably go with $500. That sounds about right. But the cutoff needs to be somewhere. So where would you put it? Would you put it at $0.01 like Texas or would you be more reasonable?

If you look into modern air source heat pumps, you'll find that they're more efficient than gas all the way down to 5F (cost wise), and effective down to -15F, for the most efficient standard ones. That's good enough for practically anywhere. There are even models that can work at lower temperatures still for people who live in truly cold places, like Minnesota. I live in Michigan, and there hasn't been one day in the last decade that a heat pump wouldn't have beaten gas on cost during that time. Same with Chicago. In fact, my backup heat has never kicked in. My uncle has a geothermal heat pump, and the cost of running that is even lower. He doesn't even have a backup and has never needed to bust out the space heaters since he installed in
It nearly 30 years ago. Heat pumps are great. Furthermore, all air conditioners are heat pumps, just with a couple of parts missing. If you have central air, just add the parts (reversing valve and defrost timer) and you're good to go.

You seem to have (probably deliberately) misread the GP and missed his point. They said, "crypto seems only to existd to speculate and to pay illegal things..." If you read that quote carefully, you'll realized that they said that there seems to be only TWO purposes for crypto: 1) vehicle for speculation and 2) illegal things. You tried to discount the GP's point by pointing out that your use of crypto isn't an illegal one. That doesn't follow for two reasons. One is that your purpose is essentially speculation, which was the non-illegal purpose the GP listed. The other is that the GP didn't say that those two purposes are the only purposes, only that it appears that they're the only purposes. This last point is only relevant, of course, if you insist on claiming that your purpose isn't speculation, but since mining is speculation, his argument that the current apparent purposes of crypto are only speculation and illegalities stands unrefuted. Have a nice day.

Almost certainly your usb port was fine, but just full of crap. Get a heavy duty staple (I use swingline hd 3/4 inch staples), bend one side straight and dig that shit out. Problem solved. I have done this on literally dozens of phones and it worked every time but one. The one time it didn't work was because the guy who owned it tried to clean it with a fork and broke the center stud off. Everyone else just thought their usb port was broken because their phone wouldn't charge from it anymore and asked if knew how to fix it. The staple won't break the stud because staples are far too bendy, which makes them perfect.

Since=some. Stupid swipe

Except not all of what you're saying is true, and the false stuff is the bedrock of your argument. Specifically, Amazon does not and did not have a policy restricting cell phones. Since employees thought that they did and many of those carried them anyway. Furthermore, according to the workers, managers told them to take shelter immediately upon receiving the warning. That's the workers talking, not an Amazon spokesperson. At the time the tornado hit, everyone was already sheltering, so they had adequate warning from management. The big problem is that Amazon didn't have purpose-built tornado shelters for them to shelter in. While they aren't required to by code and this isn't unusual, they probably should have. That's the most you can fault them for, given what's currently publicly known.

I'm not saying Amazon is great, or even not evil, but they did the right thing here, given the circumstances. Trying to say otherwise because the owner is super rich is just nonsense.