Pharmacists do have a say in that kind of thing. They review every medication and dosage. At least they’re supposed to.

You’re risking being harmed by doing so. If you’re hormonally female, you metabolize medications like a cis woman. On medications with different male/female doses, you should be given the female dose, not the name one. And very few pharmacists are aware of this. Putting male as your ASAB is just asking to be improperly dosed.

You know how HRT changes your alcohol tolerance? Do you think that’s the only substance it has this effect on?

There’s always DIY.

This is more likely to hurt patients though. People metabolize medications according to hormonal sex, not genetics. If you report your assigned sex at birth, some dumbass is going to try and give you a medication dose based on that, not your hormonal sex. It’s just an invitation to bigotry and medical errors. Even people who are nominally allies may still think “well I support your identity and pronouns, but your medical needs are obviously still those of your sex at birth.” Medical people tend to be pretty ignorant about trans bodies, and trans people need to look out for our own interests, because the system certainky won’t.

Just put your hormonal sex. That is the most accurate sex you can use for any pharmacology purpose. If you’re hormonally female, you metabolize medications like any other woman, regardless of your genetics. Systems like this are built by ignorant fools who think that someone’s assigned sex at birth maps directly to their medical needs. They think being trans is just something that involves changing clothes or surgery. When in reality HRT rewires your body at the cellular level.

Ultimately, like most fascist regimes, it’s going to stop military force to stop the Israelis. If sending aid to Gaza requires sending the Israeli Navy to the bottom of the Mediterranean, so be it. People fighting to prevent innocent civilians from receiving food deserve to die.

You have to post anything a fascist would hate. Fascists love undesirables killing themselves.

You’re just classist when it comes to your views on violence. You don’t actually care about human death and suffering; you only care about optics. You’re perfectly happy with someone murdering tens of thousands of people as long as they wear a suit and use a pen as their murder weapon. Sorry, but if you concoct an insurance system that is deliberately designed to remove people from the life-saving care that they are legally entitled to receive as part of their insurance plan? If you deliberately design a Kafkaesque nightmare literally designed to make people die of their conditions before they’re able to navigate through all the hurdles you place in their path? If you do all of this just to drive your stock price higher? You are every bit as much a murderer as any psychopath that carves people apart with a knife.

And no, this scarcity mentality is bullshit. Yes, there are always some novel, experimental, and ridiculously expensive treatments that need to be denied for cost reasons. But no system, private or public, covers those, so there’s no point considering them for this discussion. But bog-standard well-established treatment do not need to be rationed. No one is going on chemotherapy just for fun. You absolutely can have a system where no one dies from lack of affording standard well-established medical treatments. The US is the outlier here. The rest of the developed world doesn’t have this problem; only us. Yet you’re here, having gouged your own eyes out to willfully blind yourself, saying that you simply cannot see a way how this can be done!

Tailgaters like that are the worst, especially if they have a clear path to pass you but just don’t for some strange reason.

To deal with folks like that, I like to do what I call the reverse pass. I’ll go into the left lane, slow down, and then drop back behind the tailgater. Then I’ll happily let them be the pace car, letting them be the radar shield, matching whatever speed they choose to gun it to.

This is the worst on the highway. I have my cruise control set to 65 in the right lane. I come up to someone going 60. No worries, I’ll pass them on the left. We can each go our own speed, that’s why why have two lanes. No need to make a big deal about it.

Except some people, especially men with tiny dicks in giant trucks, get unreasonably offended about a woman in a small sedan daring to pass them. So when I try and pass them going 65, they also speed up to 65. If I say, “fine, I’m happy to ride behind you if you’re going 65,” they go 65 for a bit and then slow back down to 60. Just passive aggressive bullshit.

In this situation, I resolve it by moving to the left lane, gunning it to 80, and leaving the tiny-dicked man with the giant truck firnly behind me in the rear view mirror.

Their facial recognition software gave them some people that vaguely resembled the killer. They dug through their backgrounds and found a queer kid living in a youth hostel, someone estranged from their family. If you were going to pick an innocent person to pin this on, he’s the classic type. Cops have been pinning unsolved crimes on drifters and other undesirables for centuries.

Want to know what I want to know? Where is Luigi’s workshop? That’s my question. How the hell do you print out, machine, refine, prototype, and build a 3D printed gun while living in homeless shelters and youth hostels?

Printing a gun is not like printing a page on a laser printer. It can be done, but it requires a long iterative process and a whole workshop worth of tools. If you want to convince me Luigi made a 3D printed gun, then you damn well better be able to show me his workshop.

So again. Where is Luigi’s workshop?

Read your own source. Before 2025, right wing attacks outnumbered left wing ones twenty to one. We have one outliar year, a year where all the right wing terrorists can now get jobs at ICE, where they can assault minorities freely. And of course some on the left inevitably respond to rising fascism with violence.

You remind me of Julius Streicher. He used the same evidence standards as you do. He argued that left wing violence was out of control. He did so, like you, not through statistics, but anecdote. He would demonize minority groups and ideologies by breathlessly posting the few crimes committed by them, while ignoring the overwhelming number of crimes committed by conservatives or the racial majority. Fascists thrive on anecdotes and hypotheticals and wither in the face of actual statistics.

As for your buddy Streicher? We hanged him in 1946 at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and incitement to genocide.

Bullshit. In sane countries, if a doctor bills a service, the insurance simply has to pay it. In most health systems, if a licensed doc bills what is a normal unexceptional standard procedure for a condition, the insurance simply has to pay it. They’re a licensed doctor. That’s just one of the powers of their position. If an insurance company thinks a doctor is committing fraud, they can haul them in front of the medical licensing board and make them justify their diagnoses and treatments. Sane countries simply do not allow insurance companies to arbitrarily deny coverage for non-experimental, non-cosmetic medical treatment. If a doc sets a broken arm, insurance isn’t even allowed to try and weasel their way out of covering it.

Most medical systems around the world work like this - by simply trusting the judgement of state licensed physicians. They do this, and the sky doesn’t fall. And we’re the ones stuck with the most expensive medical system on the planet.

Brian Robert Thompson, the serial killer that murdered 40,000 innocent people, did so by overruling doctors for profit by denying life saving medical care. In most countries his actions would have been a national scandal that would have seen him in a cell for the rest of his life. He was a mass murderer personally responsible for a dozen 9/11s. He literally dwarfed the body count of Osama bin Ladin.

Somewhere out there, there’s a single lonely soul who really, really gets Threshold.

Now afford a place to pitch that tent.

Interestingly, the one glaring exception to this is hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They had to work less hours than modern day workers. Hunter gathered groups tended to evolve cultural practices that lead to constant population. When you’re living off the land, the land only gives what it gives. When your area is already near its population carrying capacity, there isn’t a ton to gain from putting in extra work. You go and gather what you need for the day, and that’s it. Getting extra will just mean more food that is rapidly spoiling, leaving less for tomorrow. Better to just sit in camp, sit around the fire, sing some songs, and conserve some calories.

No, we must return to the traditional system: old-timey mechanical punch card systems - literally punch in, punch out.

I have this wonderful image of people working at a software company being forced, for some stupid reason, to use an actual mechanical punchclock system.

They can inspect the drives if they want. The key is they can’t access anything, as it’s encrypted, and they don’t have control over your physical person.

Why not keep your data remotely accessible and then go through customs with a blank device? If you’re only out for a few days, then download files as you need them. If you’re out for weeks or months, transfer a few TBs if need be. If you’re worried about internet transfer speeds, encrypt the files, put them on an external hard drive, and mail them to someone at your destination ahead of time.