That shit should be illegal.

Moderna has their combined vaccine currently in clinical trials.

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I as of this very minute just got the alert that it was back up (and yes, it did also ask you to not call in to check)

Right as a big heat wave kicks off, too.

When I saw the message come up on my phone, all I could think was how glad I was to not be whoever is responsible for the outage, because people are likely going to die from this and I’d never want that on my conscience.

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Sadly, I don’t think there’s any way this goes to court. Opinion on genocide is not a protected class, and as long as it’s not a protected class, a company in the US can decide not to hire you for essentially any reason.

He only can get one more term

Until the corrupt Supreme Court decides to adopt the “unconstitutional constitutional amendment” doctrine and gets rid of that pesky 22nd amendment.

Moot point though because the old fuck will probably die before a third term is even on the table.

I think you may have misread what I was suggesting.

Trans people should never have to disclose part of their medical history to stay employed. Even if you get regular testing and it’s no big deal, what goes into your medical record should be between you, your doctor, and no one else. There should never be a scenario of “Star kicker of [team] barred from competition because her labs showed she is too masc.”

My point was not to suggest that as an option, but more that it would be a bad proposition to try to avoid the scenario where trans people would be incentivised to partially detransition (MtF) or take too many supplements (FtM) when athletic performance is directly correlated to how many androgens your body has.

I don’t know how to avoid that scenario in a capitalist system, to be honest with you.

That sounds like a more ideal compromise, though I am not sure if even that is without its own set of issues.

Basically, athletic performance falls on the same gradient as masculinity. The more masculine your body is, the more capable you are as an athlete on average. If you are a trans woman taking T blockers/estrogen supplements, your body becomes more feminine, but in turn you lose much of that athletic capability.

So hypothetically, if I am a trans woman and an athlete, where I am paid based on how well I do, am I incentivised to not take T blockers/estrogen supplements, or take them in more limited doses, in order to be a more capable athlete? Basically, am I forced to compromise my gender identity for a better paycheck?

We could force every trans athlete to undergo lab work before every match to make sure their T levels are within a certain threshold, but then is that someone’s fault if their body is not being as responsive to the medication they’re taking, and now they’re out a job? Not to mention how that would basically force their medical history to be public knowledge.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable inviting these sorts of scenarios to occur, to be honest.

Hah, got me there on a technicality.

An example though would be one friend I have who was telling me recently about a story from back when we were in high school. When quoting someone who was talking about her, she chose to use her current pronouns and current name even though realistically those wouldn’t have been used at that time. Even if it’s less “accurate” in a historical context, it’s a positive affirmation to be able to say “this is who I have always been, even if I couldn’t share it publicly at the time.”

And it also helps those in the present who may have never known her back then and might wonder who she was referring to. A bit like how one might talk about the childhood of Lady Gaga and not the childhood of Stefani Germanotta.

A lot of trans people would disagree. Just because someone was forced to conform to their biological sex for years doesn’t mean they felt that way on the inside.

Every trans person I know, without exception, prefers to refer to their pre-transition selves by their current pronouns and would take issue with the suggestion that they were still a boy/girl before becoming a girl/boy.

It’s sad that this has basically become a standard. Subscribe to a service, but then you have to pay extra on top of that to not see ads. Are we now supposed to be grateful that products and services we already pay for aren’t trying to bleed us for every cent they can get?

Everything is politics, to be fair.

FWIW, cost of living is through the roof in Massachusetts, especially on Martha’s Vineyard. $139,000 in MA doesn’t get you as much as $75,000 in some other states.

Finally Apple is ready to use all that training data they say they don’t collect.

Fair points, though I definitely wouldn’t suggest to a New Yorker that the MTA should cater to the needs of tourists first, haha.

Why not just call it “Stonewall”?

The T which serves the Boston area has a lot of stops that are very directly named, just 1 or 2 words that are short and to the point. Ashmont, Davis, Porter, Back Bay, Braintree, Alewife, Harvard, etc.

No one wants to hear “Now arriving at Christopher Street Stonewall National Monument”

A New York City police officer has been charged with attempted murder…

Oh wow, I am honestly surprised he wasn’t just given a slap on the wrist and placed on leave with pay like every other cop who shoots someone.

Hieu Tran, 27, was charged Thursday…

Oh that’s why, he’s not white.

FWIW any state that has a reliable political majority will do the same. Massachusetts had ranked choice voting on the ballot and it ended up getting defeated at the polls by a sizable opposition campaign because it would only make it likelier that the democratic party might lose some elections, either to Republicans or (gasp) actual leftists.