I think FDA rules explicitly prohibit paying blood donors in the US. Ostensibly because if you do, the donation centers fill up with junkies who'll lie about not having hepatitis so they can get paid, or steal IDs so they can go twice a week until they die of anemia, raising the costs of safety testing and generally being injurious to public health. Of course, everyone else involved in the process gets paid, just not the donors -- quite dearly, as you'll learn if you're ever on the receiving end of a transfusion.

Plasma is paid because it falls under a different regulation and their research and industrial customers don't care that the plasma came from a crack whore.

I really like approval among single-winner methods. It's a clear improvement over plurality and encourages honest over strategic voting with 3+ candidates. Promoting candidate diversity without punishing voters for supporting them is the best way to help minor third parties become relevant.

Among ranked voting methods, I prefer Condorcet methods over others.

Instant runoff voting / single transferrable vote has some merit in the multi-winner proportional representation case, but isn't fit for purpose as a single-winner method.

Party affiliation as listed on voter registration isn't a loyalty oath either. It's just a way of asking which primaries you want to vote in. You might as well pick a party with relevant primaries in your area whether you agree with their platform or not.

(Voter registration is public information and may affect which candidates and PACs send you mail.)

This phrasing is so weaselly you baited me into fact-checking it. Congratulations!

on track to

meaning it's crediting Biden with things that haven't happened yet? I didn't investigate how many future acres he needs to make this meme true.

more land ... first-term persident

The Pacific Remote Islands are much larger, but mostly water. Created by Dubya, expanded by Obama, both times in their respective second terms.

modern

Personally, I'd have counted Carter as modern. His Alaska Conservation Act weighed in at 157 million acres. I think that one got Congressional approval too, so maybe they're only counting land protected by executive fiat.

I'm not a Libertarian, but I sympathize with some of their economic viewpoints -- significantly more so than tends to be welcome here. Unlike some of you, I don't speak to the motives and attitudes of all libertarians, only my own. I'm not a Republican. I don't smoke pot. I did vote for Jo Jorgensen in 2020. I do give a flying fuck about liberty. I don't confirm or deny being a myopic cunt.

Oddly enough, I do support some form of public healthcare. I'm well aware that most libertarians don't. A hundred years ago, maybe even 50 years ago, I wouldn't have either. The problem is that medical science has advanced to where a free market insurance model doesn't work as well as it used to. Health insurance used to be a luxury when lung cancer would kill a rich man almost as quickly as it killed a poor man. That's no longer the case, and the costs have accelerated to where the treatment can bankrupt an uninsured middle class man.

The real sinker however is pre-existing conditions. You can't insure a house that's already on fire, and we don't ask homeowners policies to do so. Waiting periods for costly conditions sometimes almost work, except for patients born a pre-existing medical condition. If the insurer had the choice, they'd just refuse to write the policy, even if treatment is cost-effective from a public policy standpoint.

So I support free market solutions where they exist. Health insurance may be one of the few situations where it doesn't.

So I'm a male, fertile so far as I know. Suppose I walked into the county courthouse, hand in hand with my sexy sister and asked for a marriage license. Naturally, the clerk would say "GTFO you disgusting freaks. You's brother and sister and we don't need no more incest babies in this county." If I came back the next day with my beautiful brother, the clerk, seeing that our union would produce no natural offspring, agrees that love is love and we just need to sign and notarize these forms.

Science (incl math) is green. Blue is geography. Orange is sports. Pink is Entertainment. Art and Literature apparently can be either purple or brown. You're still missing yellow for history.

Myself, where a reflexive pronoun wouldn't normally be used, typically near a conjunction where it is less obvious whether an objective or subjective pronoun is appropriate. eg "Jane and myself ate Bob's donuts." or "Bob brought donuts for Jane and myself."

There isn't much math to do really. Take as axioms that the obvious way to balance 2 or 3 tubes is in fact balanced, and that if you add a balanced arrangement of tubes to an already balanced arrangement, the result is still balanced.

Buy three non-venomous snakes from an exotic pet store. Paint their scales with labels #1, #3, and #4. Hide them in one of her desk drawers. After she overcomes the initial shock, she'll spend the rest of the day wondering where snake #2 disappeared to.

Why is Gates' rate so much lower than the other guys'?

They're trying to capture the consumer surplus. Normally, a seller can have either high margins and low volume, or low margins and high volume. The retailers wet dream is to get the benefits of both. If the reward program profiles you as someone who buys coffee at $4.00, but not at $6.00, you'll get coupons for coffee that the people who buy coffee every week regardless of price won't get.

FWIW, I've found stores that don't even have rewards cards frequently have lower prices than their competitors' reward card sale prices.

There's doctrix and doctress, but wiktionary lists one as archaic and the other as obsolete.

I recently read a collection of novels by a prominent 1960s science fiction writer. In three novels and 400 pages, I don't think there was a single female character who advanced the plot other than by sexually entertaining a male character (Despite one of the books having a female title character, and another had a lot of minor female characters.) I know it's a product of its era, but even then, there were more woman PhDs than men who'd been to space, so I think a good science fiction author ought to be able to at least imagine the possibility. I have nothing against female sexuality, but the most interesting women supplement it with some other talent.

I assumed the only reason we don't already is because of the ethical issues with subjecting human women to the practices that make bovine milk economical.

Mail voting is great. I used it with no problems, even though I still had classes on election Tuesday.

Making election day a holiday probably won't have the effect you're hoping for.

Best case: Almost everybody goes to work as usual. A few of them get a pay differential for working the holiday.

Worst case: Holiday means holiday. We'll give all bus drivers the day off to vote -- and hope the bus riders live within walking distance of their polling location.

This is just about patient copays, right? And AZN still gets to charge patients' insurance as much as they can get away with?

So that's where they all went. I haven't seen those in circulation since I bought stamps from a vending machine.

A lot of users here have a lot of wrong opinions about a lot of things, but it's not our job to fix them.

and I stopped trying to argue in the comments.

This is allowed. Maybe if you let someone get their last reply, they'll think they won the debate and keep on being wrong. But if you keep arguing, they'll think you're an asshole, and still keep on being wrong. Myself, I rarely share my thoughts on a topic more than once per thread, even if someone disagrees with it.