Figgy Pudding

nothing more embarassing than when you develop personal beef with a piece of media thats entirely petty. like sorry no i cant talk about that show it. bit me.

this is by far the most fun Ive ever had reading tags on a post that blew up

i think a big reason that I get frustrated with the "liberals have never made anybody's lives better" is that in the US it used to be legal for insurance companies to charge you more if you were sick or even just straight up deny you the ability to sign up for them if you already had a "pre-existing condition", and this was only stopped by the passage of the ACA during Obama's term. but a lot of people who talk about politics on here are too young to really be affected by that since they would have been on their parents insurance (which the ACA required insurers extend until you're 26). and this was all done via politicking and not blowing up insurance CEOs mansions or whatever.

I'm not saying that the ACA fixed insurance forever, god no. but "you can't deny someone insurance for being sick" is a massive change and people don't realize it!

You are underselling the change. Let us recall "rescission," where as soon as it turned out that someone had an expensive medical condition, the insurance company would start coming through their medical history looking for ways to invent a preexisting condition and revoke their coverage.

It really frightens me if kids don't know about how bad the US insurance system used to be.

My dad didn't have any health insurance in his 40s, because he was a freelancer and his (Frankly not bad at all) existing health issues allowed insurunace to fully deny him.

When his girlfriend was dying of cancer they had to have a long discussion about what they'd do when she hit her insurance's lifetime coverage limit and they would no longer cover her cancer care.

People should understand that it was Obama and the Democrats who stopped that kind of thing.

Yeah the way to avoid that shit was to get a group plan through your employer, without that insurance was unaffordable/worthless

And even those group plans were not reliable unless they were huge. I know someone who worked for a smallish company. About 100 people. One of their workers had a child with hemophilia. Required VERY expensive regular infusions to treat. When renewal time came around, the insurance company gave the company management a choice: They could either exclude hemophilia from the plan or double their premium. They got the (Democratic) state insurance commissioner and their (Democratic) state legislator involved and the insurers eventually backed down. But it could have gone the other way. The real solution is a single insurance pool that includes everyone.

Also: medical transition or a gender dysphoria diagnosis could be a preexisting condition.

I was denied insurance outright for having a high BMI and a thyroid condition, despite being in excellent health at the time. Them not being able to do this anymore is huge, actually.

JK Rowling has used her billionaire legal team to silence a Jewish woman for telling the truth about her contempt for trans victims of the Holocaust.

Scotland’s network of “freedom of speech” organisations, as per usual, have nothing to say about the use of wealth to gag critics of the wealthy.

However fast they race to condemn the LGBT+ community for saying the names of those who harm us. Statements at the ready to insist that transphobes no one wants to work with anymore must be given every possible opportunity to gain from their bigotry.

But it's not the billionaires who are being silenced, as our media breathlessly echo their every hateful proclamation.

It's journalists and activists forced to publicly humiliate themselves under the weight and the threat of billionaire legal teams or be driven into destitution.

We deserve better. Freedom of speech needs to mean something

The Streisand Effect strikes

This will swiftly become one of the primary things JK Rowling is remembered for. Trying to erase crimes of the Holocaust against trans people and then silencing Jewish journalists for calling her out.

With your help we can make sure JK Rowling is known as a Holocaust denier first, author of mediocre children's books second

bad

i looked up the source for this and its from an anime where a dude has to keep a constant boner for a month straight or he loses his house

is this the episode where he lost his house

I have not stopped thinking about this even once for the last 8 years

This info needs to be out there, it turned the tide against cryptocurrency in the public eye it might fit so too

This article is actually about a very serious problem. If you overgenerate electricity it increases the phase frequency of the power grid, and if that goes out of sync with your generators (including solar panels) it can destroy them. In the kind of way where your power grid is fucked for months. It is very very very very bad.

California started a program to make solar panels more affordable by offering very low interest rates for solar panels, to allow people to benefit from their lifetime $/energy cost that's below fossil fuels, without having to worry about the high frontloaded cost. However they did not do this for batteries. And power grid quality batteries with massive energy storage and serious charge-discharge lifetimes, are expensive.

And they did this because while solar panels are cheaper than fossil fuels per kilowatt hour of electricity over their lifetime, solar panels plus batteries are not. And California wanted a supplemented free market solution and didn't really want to think about the part that direct government intervention in the form of taxation and paying for this change would be necessary.

So everyone in California just kept adding solar panels to the grid with no disconnect mechanisms, until eventually it hit a point where at noon, solar panels generated more power than the entire grid needed. With no batteries to store the excess. This is a motherfucking power grid killer. It is a scenario where people get left in the fucking dark for months because of how badly it destroys the powergrid.

So the power grid authorities did the only thing they could do. They called up every industrial plant with heavy duty equipment and ovens they could and paid them to turn it on full blast (because using that equipment costs money in wear and tear even without the electricity cost). And in doing so, avoided disaster.

That's what this article is talking about. They are solar panel researchers criticizing a capitalist adoption strategy and promoting direct government intervention to create renewable energy. However as with most newspapers they don't get to choose the title, the editor picks the most provocative title that will get clicks.

EXTREMELY rare w from the uk media

Defamation lawsuits in UK are heavily weighted in *favor* of the plaintiff. You have to have a pretty weak case to lose over there. If there wasn't a rabbid, inescapable social media campaign against Amber Heard, he would have lost in America too.

haven't seen this on here yet so:

in case you don't want to slog through the shitscape that is the bird/letter website, take a peek beneath the cut (shamelessly copied from the something awful forums dungeon meshi thread)

Throwback to when I took painkillers and woke up with Photoshop open on my computer to this image I had made

Hi this currently has 37 thousand notes and I just want to ask - why?

Big Things Are Coming

💷🥄🥔 BIG THINGS ARE COMING🥔🥄💷

✨ Abundance Spell✨ 

Wealth, weal, and plentiful spoons are coming to me 👏

✨💰🪙🥄🥔💰🌟💰🥄🥔🪙 💰✨

Like to charge Reblog to cast

square dog

harry du bois steps up to the lectern in front of the crowd. "as a lesbian...." he pauses, looks at kim questioningly. kim shakes his head imperceptibly. harry looks back at the audience "...supporter"

...he is weaving the chocolate. Do you copy, this bitch is WEAVING CHOCOLATE

ding ding ding!