I’ll give that a try next time!

Not necessarily. A lot of podcasts are hosted by places that detect your ip and splice in location-targeted ads for each individual download. Hence OP’s struggle with timestamps.

Even off of Spotify etc, the source is poisoned.

DHH with a pants-on-head stupid argument just because he hates the big players in tech? Must be a day ending in Y again.

You assumed I was saying a thing because I was a racist. I explained why I wasn’t. And you just refuse to believe me. That says so much more about you than it does about me, and I’m pretty tired of explaining it to you. Consider the conversation over.

LLAP 🖖

I don’t suppose you can elaborate on what makes a main character bad without using the word woke?

Your words. Maybe you didn’t explicitly accuse me of racism. But you did the Joe Rogan “just asking the question” thing of proposing a question and already implying the answer you presupposed.

It is equally baffling to me that because you don’t understand why I have an opinion, it must be because I’m a racist.

I’m kinda done trying to explain to you why I have an opinion. It’s not that I haven’t explained it well enough. It’s that you refuse to believe me.

My dude, I am literally praising the writing they did on DS9 and LD with Sisko and Freeman. Two people of color who are in charge.

I am not criticizing Disco or the writers for the existence of the characters. I think it is very cool that there’s a woman of color running the ship. And that the mushroom engineer has a loving marriage with his doctor husband. And that they picked up a cool enby person with a ghost boyfriend who plays the cello.

I am not criticizing the existence of these characters. I am criticizing the execution.

I am saying that the writing was bad, the plots made no sense, and the characters’ motivations were all over the place. And yeah, the main character thing was bothersome. Not very Star Trek. The show about an ensemble cast doing space stuff.

If one person says hey we should do this thing, and everyone else says no we shouldn’t based on the information we have, and it turns out that the one person was right because of things nobody knew at the time, that’s a boring plot device. When it happened multiple times, and then kinda all the time, I stopped watching.

Kirk and Sisko sometimes disagreed with their crews. Sometimes they were wrong. Burnham was always right. And it got old.

Don’t worry, I’m not the type of person you think I am. I have queer friends. My partner’s a bi she/they. I drive a Prius. I’m gonna vote for the woman of color here in a few weeks. Pretty cool of you to make that assumption, though.

I actually really liked Disco S1 and kinda S2. But the whole “one special person across time and space” thing got kinda old. One person is always right. No matter what. That and the Discovery-is-special-ex-machina Burn alongside the ridiculous constantly-reconfiguring-geometry ships made me lose interest. I hear half the Disco bridge crew had like zero character development in the last season, and they just didn’t even bother having Detmer there for a lot of it.

Strange New Worlds? Lower Decks? Hell yeah. Perfect Star Trek. 10/10. Disco and Picard? Trying too hard to make “prestige TV” and ending up forgetting why Star Trek is good: ensemble casts working together.

Counterpoint: Star Trek with a “main character” is no good. Recent shows make that pretty clear.

The Nobel committees frequently give prizes in an area that really have more to do with other areas. Six of the last ten Nobels in Chemistry have been explicitly biology focused. Two more were materials science stuff, so maybe half chemistry. Only two were what I’d consider actual chemistry.

But this one is pretty rough. The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to setting the world’s energy reserves on fire so coked-up executives’ lines can go up and basement-dwellers can generate waifus with big tiddies. UGH

I think it would be just as viable as Monk up in the front lines. As a lvl 4 monk, you’ve probably got 18 Dex and 14ish Wis. That’s AC 16. Dance Bard will have 14ish Dex and 18 Cha, so also AC 16. Same d8 hit die as Monk, too.

The industry standard is HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography). Those things go for tens of thousands of dollars up front, plus maintenance and consumables.

If there was a less costly way of doing it, you bet companies would have settled on that by now.

make the best decisions they can

I would recommend an HPLC and a competent analytical chemist to gather data and decide whether or not a batch is safe to consume.

This has been posted to a bunch of different communities, and I’m gonna be a stick in the mud each time.

I’m a process chemist. I do this for a living. I’ve made kilo-scale batches of pharmaceuticals at work that have gone through the regulatory process and made it into people. I went to school for ten years to do this.

This is a colossally dangerous thing.

Every time you run a chemical synthesis, you generate impurities. Slightly different temperatures, concentrations, reagent quality, and a million other things will vary the identities and concentrations of those impurities in your product.

The nature of biochemistry is that most compounds, even at very small concentrations, can have effects. Usually bad ones. So drugs have tight specs on how much of each potential impurity can be present. Usually it’s in the 0.1% range, but sometimes a lot lower.

Detection of impurities at that level cannot be done with ‘hacker’ gear in your garage. So if you do this, you’re going to be taking unknown quantities of unknown impurities.

There are trade-offs. If you’re definitely gonna die without the medicine, then the worst that can happen is you die faster, or more painfully. If it’s medicine to maintain quality of life, then you might die fast and painfully.

I’m not saying the current system is good at all. Medicine is too expensive. It shouldn’t be limited by right wing nutjobs. Those things are true. Those things require a solution.

This is not a good solution.

No. Never. It takes whole teams of people to get it right. (Even then, they sometimes get it wrong.)

That’s a false dichotomy if I’ve ever heard one, dude.

No, just follow the money. It’s all going into marketing. Ban marketing (like the rest of the world!) and prices drop overnight.

There is exactly one easiest option: be like the rest of the civilized world and ban consumer marketing of medicine. HUGE amounts of the prices of drugs are just down to TV ads. “Ask your doctor about…” is horse shit, let your doctor decide what prescription drugs you need. And fire the cocaine-riddled, law-breaking marketing departments that soak up so much money.

“Our recipes are consistent, like a good espresso maker.”

“Okay cool, how do you know that?”

“So many questions! We’re hackers! We are very smart.”