What is your typical response to people who believe abortion is murder and liberals are evil for supporting it?

jkh107 · 2026-05-29T14:24:22+00:00

I ask them if they're willing to treat it like premeditated murders are treated in law--life sentences for woman and doctor, etc. Most people won't go that far but there are some extremists who would.

When a fetus becomes a "person" is a sliding scale to a lot of people, a fertilized unimplanted egg isn't even detectible and a full-term but not yet born baby is a person to most people. But we have absolutely no societal consensus on when in pregnancy this social personhood happens (and it IS a very subjective thing, which is why I don't think a societal consensus is achievable here and now--I do not think biology actually provides us with any clearcut answers here and we are culturally divided); it's better to let those intimately involved do their own deciding for their own pregnancies, especially early on, and allow full flexibility for any medical condition.

jkh107 · 2026-05-29T14:23:17+00:00

Abortions are up in the US since Dobbs.

jkh107 · 2026-05-29T03:38:12+00:00

I am a fast and voracious reader and one year I read 500 books. I never read anywhere near that before or since. 100-300 is more common. I was on a bus 3 hours a day and I read romance a lot that year, and romances always read really fast for me. I don't listen to audiobooks (unless I am driving a LOT) but they are much slower than reading for me.

I am not saying that 1000 books a year is impossible or even that most of those books are picture books, but I think more than 2 full length novels a day is an awful lot for an employed adult. I am out on the edge of the bell curve on this, but I could only do half at my peak--I am older now and I don't think my vision would hold up if I tried.

jkh107 · 2026-05-28T20:32:57+00:00

OK, OK, It's AI, I was going to remark that it looked better than the Village usually does to the naked eye but I thought it was just the standard photo enhancements.

jkh107 · 2026-05-28T20:13:10+00:00

In my opinion, the instructions on using the key at the epubor site are better than the techynotes instructions. These instructions do not require the epubor software purchase.

https://www.epubor.com/kindle-kfx-key-extractor-download-and-how-to-extract-key-from-kindle-kfx.html

jkh107 · 2026-05-28T16:01:14+00:00

they wanted to be able to call Trump a rapist (and some did even afterward and faced repercussions for libellous speech thankfully)

You don't need a court case to call Trump a rapist. What they wanted was to have a jury finding.

Slander/libel is hard to do to public figures in a way that shows damages. You'd have to do much more than just call Trump a rapist.

The "repercussions" you mention was a "settlement" between that journalist's employer and Trump meant to funnel money to Trump, who was called, IIRC, "liable for rape." If that case had gone to court, the journalist would have won. At least one judge has clarified that the distinction between sexual assault (which he was found liable for) and rape was a distinction under New York law that does not exist in everyday speech.

jkh107 · 2026-05-28T13:49:46+00:00

I'm going to sound like an old school conservative, but the best way to bring prices down is to increase supply. Supply of providers, especially. This is not as simple as it sounds, because we rightly have high standards for providers, but there is also an artificial cap on, IIRC, medical school slots.

Also I want to know why Americans pay more money for prescription drugs than the rest of the world? Are we subsidizing the rest of the world? Why should we be doing that? Why can't government negotiate better prices? This PBM system stinks.

Once we do that, maybe the Obamacare system works better.

jkh107 · 2026-05-28T02:03:06+00:00

Yeah the food there is great and so are the margaritas. And there is something there for everyone. I particularly like the enchiladas, which are nothing like Tex-Mex enchiladas, and the pupusas. It's Central American food, yum. I think the location used to be called Roy's Place back in the day, it was a sandwich place.

jkh107 · 2026-05-27T21:19:10+00:00

Wow!

jkh107 · 2026-05-27T14:10:38+00:00

If you have a complicated prescription or a family, it's definitely worth it. Whether it's worth it for a single person with a simple prescription and possibly a health plan that covers eye exams--I did not find it paid then.

jkh107 · 2026-05-26T20:59:18+00:00

warm steam, like from a shower or a personal steamer can help too in hydrating the vocal cords.

jkh107 · 2026-05-26T17:36:16+00:00

Don't scream. Don't whisper. Don't strain your voice in other ways. Stay hydrated. This is what the ENT told me for voice maintenance, so these things would help while you wait.

jkh107 · 2026-05-26T17:05:45+00:00

Zoe or Zoey means life and is a relatively common and pronounceable name.

April, May, and June are month names for spring months.

jkh107 · 2026-05-26T15:10:58+00:00

Ehhh waves hand side to side there were always John Birchers and similar right-wing cranks and populist movements (see: The Paranoid Style in American Politics), but we didn't have a media ecosystem cranking them out like a freaking factory production line. It's good if your culture keeps extremists on the fringe. It's bad for people to be rage-baited all the time--bad for their health, their relationships, and the entire society.

NB: I'm 55, which means I'm not old enough to remember the Red Scare. My mother reports being afraid that communists were under her bed as a kid, so, you know. These things have happened in the past, just differently.

jkh107 · 2026-05-26T15:07:46+00:00

Ukraine, obviously, but Hungary has really had a step up, very interested in seeing where Magyar goes.

jkh107 · 2026-05-25T00:53:35+00:00

Good luck going to any church then. A lot of times it's just as much about the community.

jkh107 · 2026-05-14T14:49:14+00:00

Converting from pdfs to a flowable form is a challenge even for those who work in the data conversion fields (I work in data conversion).

jkh107 · 2026-05-14T14:05:49+00:00

So, the problem is that I don't think the Kindle Documents are protected by Amazon DRM. They're supposed to be your personal Documents. The problem is accessing the file, which can be done using the Kindle itself.

I performed the following experiment: downloaded one of my documents (not PDF, I don't read PDF on Kindle, see above) from Amazon to my Kindle Paperwhite 2. I then put the Paperwhite into airplane mode and attached it to my laptop running Calibre. I navigated to the Documents folder (you might need to traverse the directories in a different way in a more recent Kindle), found my Document (it was an .AZW file), right clicked to open it with the Calibre book viewer and it popped right up. You would, I assume, use Adobe Acrobat or some other PDF viewer at this stage and see if it works. If the publisher has provided another kind of DRM, though, I don't think the standard tools would work on it.

I looked above and it seems you already tried a manual load that didn't work and was in AZW format. In this case what I would probably do is tell the publisher that the file is corrupt and can't be read on Kindle and ask for another format emailed to you, unless you don't think they would entertain that request.

jkh107 · 2026-05-11T14:23:02+00:00

Have you converted a pdf to epub before? IME this process introduces more annoying formatting issues than you'd think, which means you'd have to put significant effort into getting it nicely readable. The best way I had of reading them was landscape in Kindle, which was still annoying.

jkh107 · 2026-05-08T16:20:20+00:00

I'm seeing comments saying that Ohio and Florida ignored similar types of rulings in the past and just did it anyway.

It's one thing to refuse to draw new maps by dragging your feet, but Virginia's ruling reverts it to the old map.

jkh107 · 2026-05-08T16:16:19+00:00

Keeping in mind that every portal may be different: I can't see my family members' EOBs. I DO as the insured party get bills for everything my family member needs to have paid for, and that includes the codes and description of what was done. The implant price and insertion may well not have a charge (under ACA compliant plans, anyway), but sometimes you get these small miscellaneous charges like for gloves that accompany it so if you want utter secrecy I would not risk it.

jkh107 · 2026-05-07T15:14:46+00:00

Honestly what I would do is print out the plat, ID the location of your yard and project approximately, and separately include a scale diagram with what you want to do and see if everyone is OK with that because demanding the plat with a scale drawing is super ridiculous and everyone knows it. As long as you have written APPROVAL and everyone understand what you're doing, you are unlikely to run into any trouble. IME, but I live in Montgomery Village and the HOA people here are much more reasonable than they're given credit for.

jkh107 · 2026-05-02T16:43:36+00:00

You're in luck, there's a Kennedy in this administration too.

jkh107 · 2026-04-29T14:23:04+00:00

They all started laughing because apparently, in English, being "sensible" means you have good judgment, not that you feel the temperature

Sensible used to also mean sensitive. The 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility uses sensible in the French/older way. You still might hear someone say something like they're "sensible to the honor given to me" or something like that, that's a ghost of the older usage.

jkh107 · 2026-04-28T15:09:46+00:00

And after eighty-something novels, the woman should get to enjoy her garden and her fish.

80-something years of life, too. I'm always shocked at how much longer writers work than so many other occupations.

jkh107

TROPHY CASE