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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!

Most adults want the law’s prohibition on insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing medical conditions to stay. Two thirds (67%) of the public say that it is “very important” that this provision remain in place, including most Republicans (54%) However, only about 4 in 10 people (39%) are aware that that provision is part of the ACA.

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thinking about the poll about canon vs non-canon ships that didn't define terms, and the current fandom focus on things "going canon," so i made up a scale.

this is NOT a question about whether canon matters to what you ship (or matters at all), just how to define the phrase "canon ship."

many ships start low on the scale and slow burn their way up, so vote for the point when you would have called them "canon." i agonized over the order (especially #4-6) for a day and a half, but i went with the order in which i think joe random with a nielsen ratings box and no tumblr account would notice/call something a romantic relationship.

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I want to call this part out again:

WE DO NOT KNOW THE CAUSE OF DIABETES.

There are theories, there's genetic risk, but nothing absolute.

fatphobia and ableism is so insidious. You can look up like, food, and it'll say "eating a lot of food causes diabetes" and you're like oh dang what? I thought we didn't know the cause of diabetes. So you look up what causes diabetes and it says "we still don't know what causes diabetes" bruh they're just making shit up to give people eating disorders

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So we all know that Tumblr is US-centric. But to what degree? (and can we skew the results of this poll by posting it at a time where they should be asleep?)

Reblog to increase sample size!

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The thing about people talking about how much they hate children is that I've never seen any correlation between "openly expressed loathing of children" and "support for policies that actively harm children."

In contrast, when people go out of their way to tell you how much they love children and want to protect children, it's at least a 50/50 chance that you are about to hear support for the most actively evil assault on children's rights and dignity that you can possibly imagine.

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I never thought I’d feel such kinship with a muppet alien

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There are currently ~2300 works in AO3 tagged with "Created Using Generative AI"

I'll be upfront with my opinion, which mirrors my opinion in regards to my field: using AI will only hasten your own obsolescence. The point of fanfiction is not to crank out fics, but rather to enjoy the hobby and communities of writing and fandom.

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This machine kills AI

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Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

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they need to invent a writing that is easy. and fast also

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A little cassette tape ghost. Be nice, they're shy :)