…That does not, in fact, make it any better.

That makes it even more terrorism.

People that are registered Republicans, consistently vote Republican, or hold Republican views make up a little under half of the overall population, current population in the US is around 340M (last time I checked, it’s been a minute), so 140M is a fairly conservative (ha!) guess at how many people would more-or-less be Republican, or lean Republican.

Oh, and the flip side of that is that there are a larger number of people that are registered as Democratic voters, consistently vote Democratic, or tend to lean Democratic in their views, even if they don’t vote/don’t vote consistently.

…It’s not even close to the majority of people in the GOP. It’s not even a particularly large minority

Jesus fucking christ.

Even if it was 100 people every single day that were being, caught, arrested, or convicted for CSAM or sexual misconduct of some kind with a minor, and every single one of them was in the GOP, that’s still 365,000 out of about 140,000,000, which is .2%, on an annual basis. Two tenths of one percent is about fifty percent away from being a majority.

Not a war crime; terrorism. Hezbollah is a political organization.

Ah! Got it.

I can’t say for certain that it will be hotter than regular hair, but it seems likely, because there’s a ‘cap’ built into them that the hair is tied to. Many wigs are also made with synthetic materials that can absorb and retain more heat than human hair. He best bet is likely going to be finding someone that specializes in wigs made of human hair, and talking to them about it. Be warned that wigs made from human hair costs quite a bit more than fashion items; they can easily be several hundred dollars each.

I have a lot more freedom in this area because of my gender; it’s socially acceptable for me to simply shave my head. If you mom doesn’t like the appearance of patchy or thinning hair, would she consider that option?

Any covering on the head is going to hold heat to one degree or another. If she wants to minimize that, then something like a shemagh or a keffiyeh is likely her best bet (although a keffiyeh is considered menswear). They’re both fairly light weaves, almost gauzy, and should allow air to circulate.

Hair in general is just hot, and the more you have, the hotter it is. If you’ve every gotten a crew cut or shaved your head in the summer, you’ll know that the difference is stark.

Why does she need a wig or hat though? Is this a religious issue, where she’s not allowed to show her own hair?

You get “compensated for you time” not paid

That’s what they say, but that’s not what actually happens. If the phlebotomist fucks up the draw, and your flow rate is so poor that they can’t get what they need, you don’t get paid. (Ask me how i know this.)

And yeah, IIRC most of the plasma goes to create clotting agents for people with hemophilia.

Blatantly false. “MSM [men who have sex with men] accounted for 67% (21,400) of the 31,800 estimated new HIV infections in 2022 and 87% of estimated infections among all males.”

When you consider that gay and bisexual men make up a small percentage of the overall population–under 5%–the fact that gay and bisexual men account for 87% of all HIV infections in men tells you just how alarming this is.

EDIT: For the people downvoting this - do you have statistics that you consider to be better, or more up-to-date? Do you want to refute them? Then post something and prove the CDC wrong. Downvoting because you don’t like things that are factually correct isn’t doing anything except making you look like a petulant child.

PS - wear a goddamn condom if you and your partner aren’t 100% monogamous. Yeah, no one likes them, I get it. But that’s a lot better than getting infected with HIV and needing to pay for expensive anti-retrovirals for the rest of your life.

In the past, I’ve had my local hospital call me asking for a blood donation, for example, because of an upcoming surgery of a hospitalised kid that shares my blood group. I got money for that too.

In the US, AFAIK you can’t get paid for whole blood. If you did, you would have to be paid significantly more than they pay for plasma, given that you can only do whole blood every two months.

To the question, it’s not a “scam” by any conventional definition. You are getting real money in return for the plasma.

The problem with the whole system is that if there was no payment for plasma, there wouldn’t be nearly enough people donating plasma for the need that there is. (You’re typically looking at 1+ hour per session, 2x/week.) That doesn’t include whatever travel time is involved. That’s a pretty steep time commitment every week for something that’s a very nebulous public good.

I think a better question is, is the amount that you’re being compensated fair and reasonable? Give the profit margins that are involved in products made from blood plasma, my inclination is that it is not a fair and reasonable amount. Plasma centers in my area vary in how much they pay, but it’s typically in the neighborhood of $50-$75 (USD); in other parts it’s lower, and in some areas it’s significantly higher. It’s clear that they can pay more, but choose not to because it increases their profit margin. That is something I have a problem with.

It isn’t though. They—specifically one moderator that seems to have been summarily removed—don’t want a separate space that’s entirely their own, they want to exist within a greater community. They want to be able to provoke–yes, I use ‘provoke’ intentionally–people without those people being able to directly respond.

If they want their own space, they’re free to set up a defederated instance, or create their own message board.

Libertarians don’t usually practice what they call Libertarianism, any more than most Christians practice anything that resembles Christianity. I’m aware of what Libertarianism supposedly is, but that’s absolutely not the same thing as what Libertarians say and do.

My brother in Satan, these are literally the ideas that the US was founded on. That’s what the 1st amendment is all about. If irrational, batshit crazy conspiracies are winning in the marketplace of ideas, then it’s because people that are sane are doing a terrible job of leading people, and helping them to discover truth on their own.

The only things I can quickly find about the first suicide hotline is that it was created because of the high suicide rate in San Francisco.. There might be more to it than that, but it’s what I can find right now.

Oh? Then why did so many self-proclaimed libertarians resist any measures to help minimize the spread of a highly contagious disease that ended up killing over 1M people in the US alone, not to mention the tens of millions more that ended up hospitalized? And why, with the benefit of hindsight, is the author of this particular article decrying any attempt to minimize the spread, including such minimal measures as wearing a mask?

Of course, and I agree (…even as I’m looking at buying a few hundred acres of land in a desert three hours away from any town over 1000 people…). But you’ve got a lot of incentives working against that.

The town I’m in is starting to be a suburb of the city 90 minutes away; the town wants these people, and their homes from the low $400s, because that’s more tax base; they pay property taxes that the town wouldn’t otherwise have. So my town is happy–kind of–to be part of the problem.

AFAIK, the issue around me is largely profitability. You can buy up acres if land, chop it up into 1/2ac parcels, quickly build cheap “luxury houses”, and sell them for 2-3x your costs, easily earning $200k+ per house sold (“Coming soon, from the low $400s…!”). And it’s all with fairly minimal regulation, compared to building high-density housing in existing cities. Compare and contrast that with building low- and middle-income high-density housing, where you’re going to end up managing it as apartments (probably not condos; that’s uncommon in my area); that means that you’re in the red for a larger number of years before you pay back the initial costs of construction, since the profitability comes through rents.

Maybe I’m wrong; all I can comment on is the kind of building that I’m seeing in my area, and the way that the closest city–which was originally about 90 minutes away–is now alarmingly close.

Mostly to avoid having infrastructure and social safety networks overwhelmed. Yes, you will also see wages be depressed by large-scale immigration, but that’s something that could–in theory–be controlled by strengthening unions and labor regulations. That’s not where we are though; right now, unions and labor regulations are fairly weak, and are being gutted by courts even as the NLRB tries to strengthen them.

Housing takes time to build, and good city planning is necessary to ensure that cities are sustainable rather than being sprawls. (Not many cities do that, BTW; it’s usually, “oh, we’ll just add another lane to the existing 20 lane interstate”). Given that we’re currently in a situation where there’s insufficient low- and middle-income high density housing, and few companies are willing to build any more, competition for most of the immigrants that we’re seeing–people that are trying to get away from deep economic woes–would be fierce for housing.

Sounds like Libertarians broke Libertarianism, mostly by being so opposed to evidence and science.

More like going to a cheap motel and not expecting bedbugs.

I also think spaces for minority views can’t really exist if they are just going to be overwhelmed by volume,

Isn’t that kind of the point of the concept of free speech though? Like, sure, you’re welcome to your belief that Jews have secret, giant space lasers that are starting wildfires in California (because I guess Jews hate liberal mecca…?), or Haitian refugees are eating pets in Springfield, OH, or even shit like Churchill was the real genocidal maniac that murdered 6M Jews, Romani, gay people, autistic people, and other “undesirables”, but if you want to express your minority views in public, you have to expect pushback. If ideas are good, and you can convince people that they’re good, then your ideas should eventually be either tolerated, or become mainstream.

But if you don’t want to exist in the marketplace of ideas, then… Don’t.