HelixDab2

IIRC, there are ongoing experiments with organs are being grown in cloned animals; the animal is slaughtered, and the organ is harvested. Maybe someday they'll be more readily available and renewable than they are now.

...At least for the wealthy that can afford to have farms of cloned animals.

As someone else already pointed out, if the transplant from the living donor failed or had complications, now you have two people that need livers. It puts a healthy person at risk for a very low chance of a positive outcome. If they were paying out of their own pocket, then I'd say sure, go ahead, blow your own money on it, risk your own life and health. But they aren't.

I've known entirely too many alcoholics that have had too many wake-up and come-to-Jesus moments, only to go back to drinking as soon as the immediate crisis is over. Change only comes when the alcoholic wants to change for their own reasons, not due to external factors.

Livers are a limited resource. Wasting a donor's liver on a person that ~~us~~ is unlikely to stop drinking--despite their protestations--means that another person doesn't get one. It may seem like a cruel calculus, but it's the only reasonable way to ration a scarce resource. It doesn't matter if alcoholism is a disease, or you think that it's a moral failing; the end result is the same.

Two points. First, yes, you need batteries, that kind of a given. Second, increasing the systems generation size means that you can charge batteries while also consuming power. Third, increased generation system size means that you'll still be generating sufficient power during the rare times that southern Arizona is overcast.

You would generally want to be as energy efficient as possible though, because being off-grid does make you vulnerable to insufficient generation capacity at any given time.

Quick thing - you aren't obligated to throw out Neil Gaiman books you already have, but you probably should pirate media from him in the future so that there's no profit for him.

As far as shaving your head, it should be pretty easy to do with a decent pair of clippers, and a nice safety razor.

because my leaving will not change anything.

Well, telling him that you won't support someone that doesn't believe other people exist may not change his mind, but it might convince him to keep his bullshit to himself so that he doesn't alienate people that are his source of income.

Tangentially, I was looking at the cost of converting an existing house in Arizona to be entirely off-grid solar. The average single-family detached house in the US south uses 16,000kWh annually (the south uses more energy overall than any other region of the country). If I bump that figure up to 20,000kWh--which should allow for a purely electric home with zero gas for heating or cooking--and then plan a system that can produce 200% of my projected power needs, then I need a solar array that's about 30x30 (assuming roughly 20% efficient microcrystalline cells). (The actual array size varies based on where you are installing, since different areas have different annual amounts of sun; being able to produce more power than you project means that you're still producing power on more overcast days.) The solar panels to do that are about $18,000 right now, and have a projected lifespan of 25-40 years, with a .5% loss of efficiency annually. If my current power bill is $100/mo (it's actually more), and I'm currently using about 10,000kWh annually (which I am, but I also heat with a wood stove and have a gas stove for cooking), then over 25 years my electric bill is $30,000, which far exceeds the costs of the solar array alone, for less power.

Food for thought, y'all.

OTOH, living in Arizona has other problems, like, being hours from fucking anywhere, and water.

I've heard that kind of thing about a number of non-profits. Makes me wonder how they manage to attract so many awful people.

Or maybe people in general are just awful.

Senior managers were also awful then; part of their job is making sure that the lower level managers don't suck, and they weren't.

For all the people that insist that both sides are exactly the same - ask yourself why it is that people that are overtly racist, anti-semitic (not anti-Israel; those aren't the same thing), homophobic, christian nationalist, etc. all vote Republican.

Depends on what the concentration is, IIRC. 70% is better than 90%.

These leaks frustrate labels and artists and not just for financial reasons. Many musicians work months if not years on their tracks; seeing these being paraded on pirate sites, before their official release, stings.

I dunno about this. Most of the artists I give a shit about have their music up for free on Bandcamp. The ones I've asked point-blank about it have said that they don't care about piracy; they see it as free advertisement for their live shows, which is where they make most of their money (and on merch sales). This might be true of some of the largest acts, where sales might make up more than a few hundred dollars in total annual revenue, but probably a lot less true for most mid-sized or smaller acts.

OTOH, given that the labels are the ones making money off sales of music, they probably care quite a lot.

It's unlikely that Georgia will turn blue; Georgia will likely be purple for a long time to come.

There are a lot of Republicans in Georgia that never liked Trump, and still don't. But Republicans still easily control the House, Senate, and Kemp easily beat Abrams a second time in 2022, when the governors race is a straight popular vote. (What the fuck were Dems thinking in nominating her again, anyways? She lost badly the first time, and lost worse the second. Did they somehow expect a wildly different result?) Ossof and Warnock won originally in part because 'the election was rigged', and so Republicans simply didn't show up to vote in runoff elections.

I do not recommend people use absentee ballots in GA. They're being sharply limited, and you can expect them to be contested, given that power to certify elections has been taken away from the sec. of state. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to vote in person in metro-Atlanta, but that's a more sure way of getting your vote counted.

Anecdotally, I have not seen any Biden signs or bumper stickers in my area (I'm in Clyde's district), definitely no Harris signs, but most of the pro-Trump stuff I see looks like it's been neglected, e.g., yard signs that are falling down and haven't been re-staked in weeks.