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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • 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?



  • 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.






  • 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.



  • 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.




  • I think that it’s irrelevant to whether or not it’s a real word. All words are made-up words. There wasn’t any term for cis-gender that had any kind of popularity until about 20 years ago, simply because no one thought of the concept in that way; you were either normal/typical, or you were transsexual (transgender is the preferred term now, since people are also more likely to understand gender in terms of social construction rather than genitals or chromosomes).

    Similarly, you can say that carnist is the opposite of vegan; a carnist is someone that is not vegan. A person that is cisgendered is not transgendered. A person that is heterosexual is not homosexual.

    Do I find what vegans imply with the term to be insulting? Yes. But that doesn’t make it any less real.


  • I struggle to understand how someone can acknowledge the cruelty of factory farming and turn around and eat a burger,

    Because cruelty is inherent to food production in most places in the west, to one degree or another. Even for non-factory farmed meat, there’s going to be some cruelty at the very end of an animal’s life, since event he most compassionate slaughter is still slaughter. But even going past that, to plant-based foods. in the US at least we rely on labor abuses in order to have groceries that are affordable. The migrants that pick oranges in Florida (or, picked; DeSantis is trying to eliminate undocumented immigrants, and the result is that farmers are having a very hard time finding labor) work in terrible conditions for horrible pay, conditions that no person protected by labor laws would ever accept. But we, as a society, are aware of this, and accept that this cruelty is necessary for us, because we won’t–or can’t–pay for produce that comes from co-op farms.

    We–all of us–pick and choose where we put our energy.