I made .iso files and mounted them in virtual drives to do the same thing. I could have used cracks but I didn’t want a virus and I still had the delusion that doing things “fairly” actually meant anything.

They’re not talking about natural monopolies. A natural monopoly is when there’s some barrier to entry that prevents competitors from entering the market, like a need for prohibitively expensive infrastructure.

What OP is talking about are situations like Walmart opening a store in a new location, operating it at or near a loss to drive the local competition out of business, and then jacking up prices once no competitors remain. The government isn’t forcing them to do that.

I was responding specifically to the implication that Biden isn’t trying to do loan forgiveness, which is factually incorrect. It’s the courts that keep blocking the plan and forcing it to be narrower in scope, not Biden.

As for this proposed cap on rent increases, I fail to see how a limited increase is worse than an unlimited one. Is it less action than we need? Definitely. Is it insulting that it took the credible threat of a fascist dictatorship to extract this tiny concession? Absolutely. Am I going to kick and scream because it isn’t everything I wanted? Hell no! Just the fact that the President is seriously discussing this is an improvement, and we need all the leftward momentum we can get if we ever want to start pushing the Overton window on economic issues.

I used to scoff like this at early efforts to decriminalize marijuana. “Lower penalties? State-issued medical cards with heavy restrictions? None of that actually solves anything! It needs to be completely legal!” Now look at where we are: Fully legal in 24 states, partially legal in most others, and the DEA has started the process for rescheduling to a less-restricted category. It was slow going and we’re still not quite where we need to be, but that’s way more progress than I ever thought we would get!

Seems kind of weird to blame the guy who is trying to do the thing you want and not the people who keep blocking it from happening.

No mention of trans people, which is odd given that Florida is a Do Not Travel state for its government’s efforts to criminalize being transgender.

This was before they added F2P, but ten minutes a day of checking my two hisec market alts (who didn’t have a lot of skills because it meant pausing my main’s training) was making me just enough to pay for my account and there was room to expand further. Granted, it did take me several months of trading to build up enough funds to support this operation, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect to do this on day 1.

It’s because the furry fandom, when it was founded back in the late 70’s by a gay polycule of sci-fi fans, was one of the only communities in existence that accepted openly gay and trans people. (And the only non-fetish community.) For many queer people, the furry fandom is the first place they ever feel welcome.

That link is for a previous breach against a different entity, so not the same story at all.

True, but it’s still the right thing to do. At the very least it will force some members of Congress to clearly and undeniably declare themselves as supporters of tyranny.

Unfortunately, honest questions are indistinguishable from the horde of transphobes spreading misinformation and sowing uncertainty under the guise of “just asking questions” (sealioning).

If you are genuinely curious, then I recommend starting with the Wikipedia article on puberty blockers, and also reading the one on precocious puberty which is a condition in very young children that is treated by the same drugs. (Tellingly, this usage is non-controversial and exempted from all of the new laws banning puberty blockers for trans children.)

If zero kids on puberty blockers decide not to transition that would be pretty telling.

Maybe, if that were anywhere close to what is actually happening. In reality, there are more cisgender children taking puberty blockers than there are trans children taking them, so the number of kids deciding not to transition after taking blockers is >50%. Your speculation is baseless.

Remember the NYPD who were jumped by a gang of illegal immigrants?

No, but I do remember the NYPD harassing a small group of migrants that were just minding their own business on a public sidewalk (without blocking it), ordering them to leave, and then assaulting one of them while he was attempting to comply.

So would a cisgender man with De la Chapelle syndrome, who has XX chromosomes, be required to compete with cis women? Would a person with XY chromosomes whose body was assigned female at birth due to Swyer syndrome or complete androgen insensitivity be required to compete against cis men?

Or would you just disqualify anyone who has any intersex characteristics, which are about as common as having red hair?

So… After they have been on HRT for a while? Periods are triggered by hormones, and there’s a lot more to a period than just bleeding. Many trans women experience cramps, bloating, mood swings, etc. on a monthly cycle. There are also some cis women who have irregular or no periods; would they still be allowed to compete or would you ban them as well?

A Pharisee (politically powerful religious faction) lawyer decides to test Jesus by asking what the most important commandment is. Jesus answers by stating two commandments: Love God wholeheartedly, and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. All the other rules are based on these two.

The lawyer asks for clarification: “Who is my neighbor?” (He can’t mean everyone, right!? Some of them are, you know…)

Jesus responds by telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan: A story about a Jewish man, much like the lawyer, who is violently mugged and left to die in the street. A priest and a Levite (member of the tribe in charge of the temple), both highly respected leaders in Jewish society, pass by while pretending not to notice. The only person who stops to help is a Samaritan, a member of a hated ethnic and religious minority that had recently defiled the Jewish temple in an act of terrorism. (The Samaritans’ own temple had been destroyed a century earlier and the date of its destruction made into an annual holiday, they were hated so much.)

“Which of the three men was a neighbor to the one who was robbed?”

“The one who showed mercy to him,” the lawyer admits, unwilling to utter the name of his mutual enemy.

“Go and do likewise.”

It says to love everyone, especially the ones society hates.

Trans-women athletes are essentially testosterone doping.

Are you seriously suggesting that trans women, the people taking anti-androgens to suppress testosterone production because testosterone is literally poison to them, are doping themselves with testosterone to gain an advantage in sports? Is that really a thing you believe?

They’ve got more muscle mass, and a heavier bone structure. That doesn’t go away after the transition. The British Journal of Sports Medicine confirmed that.

Why don’t we take a look at what the British Journal of Sports Medicine actually said:

One of the most noticeable disparities between gender groups was in height and mass (table 1), with (cisgender men) and transgender women being taller and heavier than their cisgender and transgender counterparts (table 1). Body composition measures (fat mass % and fat-free mass %, table 2) between transgender women and cisgender women found no difference. However, transgender women are, on average as a cohort taller and heavier.

So you’re partially correct in that trans women do, on average, have more mass than cis women, but only because trans women tend to be taller. Does that translate to an advantage in athletics?

Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and (cisgender men). Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women.

Apparently not. Trans women, despite being larger on average, performed worse than cisgender women. This is from your own source. Did you not actually read the study, or are you intentionally cherry-picking to misrepresent its conclusions?

When you’re talking about the Olympics and college sports where the girls have trained their whole lives for a given event only to be beat out by someone who got to take the equivalent of human growth hormones and testosterone is unfair.

Imagine a woman training her whole life for an event and being beaten by Brittney Griner. That actually happened, and I bet it was emotionally devastating.

Imagine training your whole life, and then finding out that you were born with a permanent medical condition that will require taking drugs that reduce your athletic performance to below the average of your peers, and this condition will also make lots of sexist chuds want to ban you from sports entirely. I bet that would really be unfair, wouldn’t you agree?

If I use my Persuasion skill to help someone think their way through a problem, is that a “mind-effecting affect”?

I already turned down a free copy of this game because it installs a rootkit, and now this happens. I hear the game itself is a lot of fun, and I feel bad for the actual developers who are watching people shit on their work because of management and publisher bullshit.

When a friend of mine moved away to be with his trans girlfriend, my parents said it was a sign of the world’s corruption in the End Times. That’s how most Christians think, in my experience. Anything they personally agree with is God’s will, anything they don’t like is Satan’s corruption, and anything they don’t understand is “mysterious ways”.

I’m sure a lot of white women felt uncomfortable sharing a locker room with black women when segregation ended. Comfort isn’t a good enough reason to have “whites only” locker rooms so why the hell would it justify “cis only” ones? It’s not Lia’s responsibility if Riley can only handle being around certain types of women.