I was going to make a joke about this costing $6000/hit, then I read this:

Activists have urged Gilead to ensure that people in countries where low- and middle-incomes predominate can get access to lenacapavir. The company has long faced criticism over the price of its HIV medicines. Descovy usage carries a list price of $26,000 a year.

So based on their current HIV medicine, my joke answer was less than half of what it’ll likely actually cost (as you need two hits a year).

What a ridiculous world we live in.

I don’t know if they can thread the needle again but I’ll give the sequel a shot

At least with the premise of the sequel being about a sex-bot it opens the doors for all sorts of different madness.

Yeah. I used to watch a lot of horror/thrillers and most left me underwhelmed. As such, I had low expectations for M3GAN but it left me pleasantly surprised. Definitely campy, but that’s obviously what it was going for.

Now I’m thinking I might have to watch it again this weekend.

I was pleasantly surprised with M3GAN, so I’m looking forward to this. It’s got a different writer/director whose work I’m not familiar with, but looking at her IMDB it seems like a good fit for her.

With our current handling of the planet, probably not much.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine.

Hey now, AI transformed him into a tool who goes onstage to talk about AI. That’s transformative.

Don’t worry - there’s a documentary about when this happened last time. We can fix it again.

The Core

Suuuuure, just a quick little adjustment. Nothing more. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I can’t read any of the text, but the one on the left has the vibe of something that would get someone investigated for posting on the War Thunder forums to win an argument.

I’d go as far as to argue that running a nation has almost nothing in common with running a business.

A business literally exists to make a profit for its shareholders. The owners can try to do good things like pay high wages or give back to their community, but at the end of the day their goal is to make more money than they spend.

A government, on the other hand, should exist to protect and provide opportunities for its citizens to thrive. Generating a profit is largely at odds with that goal. People should have the same access to opportunities regardless of where in the country they live, and that’s going to sometimes mean that functions of the government are never profitable. That should be seen as okay, but people have been brainwashed to think that taxes are inherently bad, and that businesses are somehow naturally more efficient. I can say, as someone who has worked in business all his life, that that last bit is particularly a giant crock of shit. Businesses are no more naturally streamlined than any other organization. Hell, I’m currently personally leading a task force at my work to try to reduce all the egregious inefficiencies I’ve uncovered when trying to figure out why we’re not making nearly as much money as we should be.

The point is, providing government services doesn’t need to be “efficient”. If you can make that happen and save the taxpayers money, that’s great and you should do it. If that means letting any member of your society slip through the cracks, then efficiency be damned. The government shouldn’t be in the business of making money.

And, no, privatizing “inefficient” government services is never the answer. All you’re doing there is introducing new inefficiencies - the need for the business entity to make a profit, and the corners they’ll inevitably cut to make that happen.

Anyway, I hope I don’t come across as jumping on your comment. It sounds like I agree with you - just wanted to tack on this wall of thoughts.

God, this is so infuriatingly true. A few months ago I searched for info on types of spiders in my province, because I wanted to learn more about my many housemates. All of the top links were SEO blog spam that were clearly duplicate pages rebranded for different keywords (something that Google’s algorithm used to penalize but apparently no longer gives a shit about). I know this because, no, black widows are not fucking native to Manitoba, Canada.

Not to mention that goddamn annoying way of writing that SEO blog spam uses where they are so obviously reaching for long tail keywords. My job used to involve some of this stuff back when the search engines pretended to care about good content - when you were at least nominally rewarded with page rank for content that read like it was written by a person with a soul. Now it’s just a wasteland of mechanical prose. There’s still good stuff being said out there, but good like finding it with a search engine.

✓ Okay, boomer.

Absolute poetry:

I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

Throwing a dart at that poster and letting that determine your fate, right?

Yup, but politicians are always trying to play the game. They probably have some internal metric causing them to believe that making a show of looking into this might win them a few voters while retaining their base. Maybe they’re right, but I still don’t like it. Either way they’ll have my vote as they’re the only non-Conservative party with even a remote possibility of winning my riding. (Plus I’ve sworn off the Liberals for a good while after their broken promise on electoral reform.)

I get this. I don’t even actively seek that stuff out, but in the interest of staying somewhat informed I follow a lot of news/politics communities here. Negative news obviously sells (in the form of receiving clicks) so a fair majority of my feed is made up of depressing info. I only read one or two actual articles a day, but the summary and/or comments are usually enough to bum me out.

Thankfully the rest of my feed is shitposts, memes, and cute animal pics so it keeps me from actively wanting to die.

Yeah, I would have just thought she was holding a flower or something.

I wasn’t actually aware of that one, but will be following it now. Thanks!

Well this is disappointing, but at least it means there’s hope that they really are starting to prioritize quality in new releases. Still, I was really looking forward to a Sims-style game without EA’s involvement.