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“It was a joke.” If you have to explain that something is a joke, you either need to work on your setup and delivery, or it’s only a joke in your own mind.

Someone will just have to start a religion where masking in public is one of the purity rites for the devout. Better yet, join their religion first and schism another denomination off it due to the doctrinal demand for the ritual mask of purity. Then, they’ll have to acknowledge its “legitimacy.”

I would go even harder and say the formal/semi-formal/business/casual folkways are outdated and I wish those expectations or requirements didn’t exist. My work dress policy for the office doesn’t allow sweatpants or yoga pants, but jeans and khakis are fine if you aren’t “client-facing.” Fine, but in jeans or khakis I will be adjusting far more often and imo that’s less professional than just wearing more comfortable clothes.

“Underground economy.” Right…Nothing happens in China for long that the CCP doesn’t approve of, for a price.

You said, it is easy and inexpensive to manufacture generics and that the expense for drug production goes into research.

Did you not read the article you linked, or did you just not read my comment before downvoting it? It says the exact same thing in the “Controversies in FDA Bioequivalence Testing” section about the efficacy of the drug I listed as a specific example of generics not actually showing bioequivalence…TSH, free T4, and T3 in the blood are how the efficacy of levothyroxine is measured. Here, I’ll quote it for you.

Unresolved concerns surrounding bioequivalence undermine patients’ and health care providers’ confidence in making generic substitutions. Bioequivalence studies do not assess clinical or surrogate markers that directly correlate with efficacy and/or toxicity (e.g., thyroid-stimulating hormone [TSH], seizures, transplant rejection, international normalized ratio). In addition, manufacturers do not undertake comparative studies against other generic products with the same active ingredient, yet the FDA maintains that all approved generic medications are bioequivalent

That’s simply not true. Scale up and manufacturing of even the simplest small-molecule drugs even after all the clinical research has been completed is incredibly complex and hard to manufacture consistently, let alone replicate.

Even with access to all the research and manufacturing and quality testing procedures and records of a successfully manufactured drug (which a generic competitor would not have), I have seen and been part of an expansion facility at the very same location using the exact same raw material suppliers and exact same serial # equipment and even the same cleaning and manufacturing and quality testing lab employees just moved into a new building, take years and dozens of batches to get to the same level of consistent safety, identity, strength, purity, and quality as the previous manufacturing line after it was shut down to make room for a newer product. I’ve seen final product yield drop by nearly half from batch to batch just because the supplier of one raw material used as an excipient switched their own manufacturing process to make a powder slightly more consistently fine-grained and the mixing process no longer worked the same - and it took months of investigation to figure that out, plus much more time and money to find a solution and demonstrate it didn’t change the final product over the next three batches (a regulatory requirement).

Change over to modern large-molecule biologics where you have to grow them up in bioreactors, and things get a lot more complex to get it right and even harder to get consistent. You can’t just follow a recipe and double the ingredients to get twice the product.

Consider an extremely common drug like levothyroxine that’s been around for nearly a century and has many generic manufacturers because it’s one of the “easiest” and most well-understood essential drugs to make. It has such a low therapeutic window that the exact same process between two manufacturers, using the exact same raw material suppliers, passing testing with the exact same results, can result in such drastically inconsistent levels in the same patient at the exact same dose that many people are unable to switch from a one generic or brand manufacturer to another once their doctor has managed to find the right dose to keep their T4 levels stable. Something as mundane as the shape of the tablet press can make a huge difference even when dissolution is the same.

It’s not at all easy to manufacture drugs.

One of the dumbest social standards taught to kids that empowers bullies and bolsters peer pressure.

Why don’t you compare chamber to chamber? The top gun also only has a one round chamber.

Why don’t you compare magazine to magazine? They each only store one round (in the chamber) without a magazine. Standard hunting magazines for both in most states which allow hunting with them, is 5 rounds. You can also get 10, 20, 30, or higher capacity for either.

The point is that they’re both highly customizable and acquirable, and their basic functions and performance are identical, but only one is publicly stigmatized. Either do both or neither.

I don’t get the point about firing from the hip, no one who is trying to hit a target is firing from the hip unless they’re a trick shooter or firing a shotgun and even then, very rare. And you can also have a pistol grip on a mini-14. And even if it was an issue, holding a pistol grip from the hip is less natural and more awkward than holding a standard hunting rifle grip at that angle.

I, for two

In theory, maybe. Many troops have meetings at church facilities where the local church beliefs are treated as superior to others. The second troop I was in had meetings at a Methodist church and there was bullying from two scouts working on their service projects for Eagle toward a Roman Catholic kid, for “worshipping saints.” Bringing it up to the Scoutmaster, who was the father of one of them, responded with the “don’t be a snitch” lecture. Eagle is supposed to be the point where you’re a pillar of your community, and both of those kids became Eagle scouts. “Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind,” just 1/3 of the scout laws right out the window with no repercussions.

You can’t possibly know if people who don’t support the BSA have experience with it or not if they don’t mention it, what a wild assumption. I was in scouts and enjoyed the outdoor activities and merit badge system, but it was definitely not an inclusive troop by any means. I didn’t notice until my teens, but anyone who was even a little bit different was bullied not just by the other scouts but also the adult leaders. It made me not want to continue past Star. And it’s so weird that they taught the concept of exclusive secret societies for the elite (Order of the Arrow).

I went for a walk at like 10pm in my hometown the first winter break I was home from college, just on the main two non-residential streets that downtown consists of, fully on the sidewalks with all the streetlights on. I got stopped and IDed and grilled by one cop who pulled over, and then called for another cop to come back him up. And they both were so angrily asking me question after question about why I was outside walking at night “suspiciously” I had no idea what was going on and asked, “why are you interrogating me for walking? Did someone just commit a crime and you’re trying to find them?” I really believed like an idiot they were acting in good faith, but one grabbed my forearm and asked me why I would ask something like that, had I just committed a crime? I was incredulous. They let me go on my way after like 20 minutes of that and told me “go for walks earlier.” I didn’t even think to get angry about it for a day or so while I was processing how lucky I felt to not be arrested, when I realized, arrested for what? I was just walking.

It’s been decades but every time a cop talks to me (pulled over for speeding), I think about that. Some of my family members are cops and I still know ACAB. When I mentioned it to one of them he tried to justify it with, “maybe he was having a bad day,” and told me, “you don’t know what you’re talking about,” when I told him how psychotic it sounded to justify someone taking out their bad day by bullying a random person who didn’t have the ability to leave the situation, and just had to “legally” be at their mercy.

Yes, and also is fine if you’re using a cell hotspot.

You can also use network namespaces on Linux which Wireguard has a nice explanation and walkthrough on, recommending this as part of setting up wg connections. https://www.wireguard.com/netns/

This is not a system where institutional changes have much chance of occurring, especially where “tradition” is involved.

Half of the voting population is against anything resembling reform or progress, and only “for” regressive draconian changes. The other half has such a broad difference of opinion on what should be addressed first that they waste their time squabbling about it even when they have control of the executive branch and both parts of the legislative branch. When they do make changes, they make so many compromises and concessions that the changes are effectively small.

Only 19 more to go.

She was an idiot to go to Russia in the first place. It was like a week before the start of the Ukraine invasion, but it wasn’t like the signs weren’t already there, they’d already done it a few years before with barely any western response, and international tensions were extremely high. The US state department was advising their citizens to leave Russia. Additionally, Russia is incredibly homophobic. She had a million things telling her not to go there, and not only did she not listen but compounded the issue by giving them a legal reason to use her. Even though it was terrible of them to imprison her and use her as a pawn, this felt like a case of a famous person thinking they should get special treatment from the very start, which in the end is exactly what happened.

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You really don’t. You can get all kinds of regional cuisines outside the regions they originated and became popular, pizza styles being perhaps the most ubiquitous.