If you’re ever in Los Angeles and have the chance to swing by the Huntington Gardens, it’s worth going at least once. This painting had a pretty big crowd when I was there.

Doesn’t that imply it was the public that needed to be appeased? lol

Dress decently and bring a book or some other way to entertain yourself, you should mostly expect being bored. Most cases plea out so they wind up not needing most people they call in, so you might not even make it to the selection process.

It’s basically the same tactic, convince them that you’re too much of a pain in the ass to deal with and they should just give you what you want to get you to go away. Only it’s for accessing your own fucking healthcare that you pay them money for and not, you know, avoiding paying child support or truck payments.

My renewed passport came in the mail, which was a relief. They have some weird hard plastic page in them now, too? I assume it’s some electronic verification thing, I don’t like it. It makes the whole book way too stiff.

That’s a fair point! But I can’t imagine that these things are impossible to take apart, if only for the sake of maintenance. Like, I wouldn’t expect them to do it on site, but somewhere up the line someone has to be capable of modifying it to fit.

And the people that run those companies, should they kill people depending on their company for healthcare if it makes them money?

Oh hey, this was your same response to LGBT people being worried about Trump taking office. Meanwhile the Project 2025 crowd is champing at the bit to ban medical transition for adults.

You going to eat crow, or just be glad when it happens?

Where do you think they got the $10 million/year to pay this man? Who do you think instituted a policy to use AI for approvals/denials, which resulted in a 90% false rejection rate? What’s crazy is acting like the murder of thousands of people through denial of medical care for money, if done from a sufficient distance, is somehow less abhorrent than doing it up close and with a gun.

Expecting people who have either been directly impacted or had family medical care impacted by the policies of this man to show sympathy for him isn’t just unrealistic, it’s deranged. Considering United is one of the largest insurance companies in the US, that’s a lot of fucking people who are at best apathetic about the whole situation.

Obligatory ‘I suspect some people who can’t read might reply to this’ disclaimer: obviously you shouldn’t murder people. Including if you’re a healthcare CEO and it’s done by setting policies to squeeze the maximum profit out of people before they die.

Cut another fucking hole in the strap, this isn’t rocket surgery.

If he had killed him it wouldn’t have been a children’s movie, lol

Any child under consideration for a HRT prescription is already going through puberty. That is permanent in every way that HRT is. There’s not an option where nothing happens if you put it off until they’re 18.

I’m a soap-taster, unfortunately, but it smells really good to me! I just wish it tasted like it smelled

I’ve never noticed an ant smell, if I had to guess I’d assume it’s some different chemical I’m picking up on from the pill bugs.

This is a weird question but everyone else could smell these, right? Like a weird bitter, musty smell. That post about people smelling ants a while back made me wonder what other bugs not all people smell.

God, I bet he would have had some great jokes about this.

My dumb ass: mushroom on a vacuum? Kind of a forced rhyme…

The self checkouts at the grocery store near me used to have an absolute fit every time I placed my bags on the bagging section, after pressing the “I want to use my own bags” button that it has.

Every single time I asked, the cashier said it was because the machines were calibrated so that it considered the weight of a bag equal to the (somewhat flimsy) plastic reusable grocery bags that they sold. Anything heavier must be theft! So alert an associate. And half the time I was treated like this was my fault for bringing in a heavier (sturdier) bag, lol.

After having that problem for ages they finally fixed it (/got a manager to approve fixing it), but man, chuck it on the fucking pile of reasons I don’t go there unless I have to.

Funny to go through that post now that the bot was killed by popular vote and see commenters adamantly insisting that it was 1% of users who wanted it gone.

After a mod insisted that the .world admins would demod them if they removed the bot and reinstate it anyway, someone pinged an admin who was like ‘what? no.’

After that a poll was held, and the kill it option won.