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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.





  • Dude, vegans can and do eat fruits. For people who can’t afford seasonal fresh fruit, we have fortified foods like bread, pasta, rice, and cereals, most of which are also vegan. I specified rice and beans (and everything else you conveniently ignored, lol) because they make a complete protein, which is usually the only thing you need to monitor closely if you are vegan on a budget. Anything else and you are best off getting a multivitamin for best bang for your buck.

    Also, you saying none of us have been hungry and then lecturing us about not getting both fruits AND vegetables when fresh fruit is one of the most expensive things in a grocery store, outside of meat that is? You clearly have never been poor enough that you have been needing to have your ‘fruit’ be the cheapest jar of grape jelly you can find, or the cans of frozen ‘orange drink concentrate’.


  • Fruits are also available but usually tend to be more expensive and are usually considered a treat for people on limited budgets. Me not listing them was part of keeping to the usual budget shopping lists recommend for people with limited income. Unless you are further being a pedant and insisting that tomatoes are fruits and not vegetables.

    And while I am fortunate enough to live in the continental US, I mostly buy what is in season and local and therefore on sale for relatively cheap. And anywhere where that isn’t available, frozen veggies are available, often for even cheaper and with no difference in nutritional value or content. If you don’t have a fridge/freezer, dried veggies are also available in most markets (dried peppers especially) and canned goods are far better for you now than they ever have been, with only marginal decreases in nutritional value.

    Where do you live that absolutely no vegetables are available in any form for a dollar a can or five dollars for a family pack that would make a couple dozen meals for a family of four?

    (Edit: Or, if not in the US, where you can’t even buy local produce, unless you are in an area where there is famine. In which case you may object to the fact that almost half our farmable land is used to grow crops to feed to animals instead of being used to grow more food for humans.)



  • 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.



  • Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

    A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

    There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.



  • Obviously this is a joke, but there used to be an important reason we kept the flags wrinkled like that: it meant that you never knew who had bought a flag at a Pride event and who brought one they owned.

    This meant that people who were ‘caught’ at an event by friends or family they weren’t out to, they could say they just bought the flag to support the cause. It also meant there was no way to tell who had been there longer than others.





  • My memory for general facts. My husband has ADHD that impacts his working memory, so he is constantly losing or forgetting things. Meanwhile my brain will remember where he put down his measuring tape three weeks ago and why he left it there. I also remember thing like song lyrics, history facts, fantasy/sci fi lore, and other stuff almost indefinitely. I do not have a perfect/eidetic memory, just a very good one, according to most people.

    The downside of this is that it was cited as a main reason a psych, who agreed I met the criteria of being on the ASD spectrum, refused to give me an official diagnosis. He said that this meant I didn’t have a specific special interest, and therefore I couldn’t have autism. So now I have to find someone else who actually follows the criteria.