Two or three years, I think. So far the price has stayed exactly the same, they still have no ads, and they haven’t made any changes to the app to try to advertise features or anything like that. It was (and still is) a nice change from Spotify, Apple Music, and even YouTube to be honest.
I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!
And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.
I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.
No actually! Napster bought Rhapsody and now runs a music streaming platform.
I get the reaction though lol. That was my reaction too when a friend of mine recommended it. But I tried it and it is actually really nice, and the price hasn’t gone up in the years I have had it.
I pay about that already (~$14 a month), but for Napster, which afaik gives the biggest cut of any streaming service to artists. They also have really good custom playlist management, I never get intrusive popups or emails, and premium means no ads, even with hours of listening. I switched after the Joe Rogan thing happened with Spotify and never looked back honestly.
Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.
I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.
Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.
I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol
https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s
Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.
Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.
A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.
There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.
Avocados and peppers to make guacamole 😋
No, they gave a reason and that reason isn’t covered under their policy, so she should still be covered.
If they let her go without a reason, then she would have to prove discrimination. But if they say “You violated our social media policy” and refuse to show how, and she can prove that nothing she did was on violation of the policy as written, then that is a clear case of unlawful termination.
Oh I will be having that conversation in a few days. I am taking a lesson from my therapist and letting myself rest from the hurt and decide what kind of resolution I want. I have a history of crumbling when I get pushback for standing up for myself, so giving myself time to sit with the feeling for a couple of days helps my brain realize that what she did was actually bad, and not just me overreacting.
If you are asking if she knew beforehand, yes. We once had to rush out of a restaurant because a dish included wine and I didn’t know until my mouth felt like it was on fire. She has been there many times as I have had to explain it to others, and when I have been checking food to make sure it doesn’t have wine or vinegar.
If you are asking if I have mentioned it to her since she gave me the gift, no. I haven’t had the energy to try to deal with that conversation, I still have plans with people through New Year’s. I will probably bring it up in a few days, but right now it hurts to even think about and I just want to get through the rest of the holidays.
My supposed best friends gave me and my husband a bottle of wine for Christmas. I can’t drink wine because I have an allergic reaction to something in wine, and they are very aware of this after me having reactions to foods at restaurants we would go to together. So they gave ‘us’ a gift that I can’t actually have.
This comes after my husband and I have spent the last year being there for them through losing their jobs, their car, almost losing their house, and a bunch of other drama. It also comes after we spent all day making a meal free of their allergies, as I always do, and after I spent several days making Christmas cookies that are safe for them.
I don’t know if the bottle of wine is cheap or expensive, and it honestly doesn’t matter. Last year they got me an ornament for our tree, and it is one of my dearest possessions because it has a small poem about friendship on it. This year’s gift stung because of how much of ourselves we gave to them, only for them to clearly pick up something last minute and without any thought.
I don’t really have any family or other friends to celebrate with, so the most important people to me besides my husband are them. It hurts to see how little I apparently mean to them in comparison…
Good thing hormones are only prescribed in a minority of trans kids anyways, even though the vast majority of them do not desist as they get older. In fact, the majority of them continue on to transition as adults, and 99.5 or so percent of trans kids given just puberty blockers, much less hormones, grow to adulthood with no regrets.
Also, before you ask, I can provide sources, but that which is declared without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, especially when the dismissal is in line with literally every major medical organization, including the World Health Organization, due to the sheer amount of clear evidence that transition is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria at any age.
Everything I see talks about how that was directly tied to emergency spending that needed to be signed off on by Congress, and how Biden expanded it while it was in effect and is actively trying to get it renewed, with sources much more recent and detailed that that one.
For example:
But sure, it was Biden who single handedly stole that money from families, even when Congress makes the budget.
That is true, but I am also proof that their stance was at least partially valid. I voted Bernie in the primary and voted third party against Clinton, and I was definitely not alone.
Again, whether actions are justified or understandable, to me, is not reason to excuse the real impacts that the election results had. It wasn’t helped by the results for Congress, but no one can deny that the US would be in a much better spot now if Clinton had been president, regardless of who was in charge in Congress. I will continue to support leftists in primaries, and especially in my local and state elections, and I continue to do activist and monetary support as much as I am able. But I hate being told that I am abandoning my values simply because I am voting for the highest chance for fewer people to be harmed.
Nice cherry picking of two examples without sources, while completely ignoring all of the other things Biden did repeal. It also ignores the fact that those things were replaced with better projects that were less susceptible to repeals by future presidents.
Again, I am not saying to vote for all Dems across the board, just not in the Presidential election. I vote third party in my home state for state and local elections because my state (solid blue) is set up in a way that allows for a candidate presented by the third party to run as a Dem as well, allowing people to vote effectively for a party line that makes it clear what actions we want taken while not risking a regressive candidate being elected by a split vote. There are also several blue states that are enacting ranked choice voting, which is also being supported by even most moderate Dems.
If the number of people who died due to benefit cuts, throwing out the pandemic action plan, and direct actions from right wing terrorists who were emboldened by a president who values the speeches and actions of Hitler aren’t enough to convince you of how much worse Trump was versus lib Dems, then you are missing the point of the values you claim to have. I support the values I do because they uphold human rights and save lives. What good are those values if my actions lead to the death and dehumanization of thousands, when another choice would have likely saved them?
Really? Because that issue was a combo of actual universal healthcare and climate goals. I voted for the only candidate who had a commitment to those goals. This was before it was revealed that this particular candidate had accepted a whole bunch of money from the RNC to remain in the race.
The result was enough people voted for that candidate that Trump won. The result of his win was that we saw even the half-measures that had been taken on these issues were stripped, setting us back potential decades because of new rules and packed courts who are now going against all precedent and decorum to prevent new leaders from enacting new policies. I voted for a few steps forward instead of half-steps, and got several steps back as a result.
Keep in mind that one of those several steps back was a gutting of voting rights, which is being continued by Trump appointed judges to this day. If you need to be a one-issue voter, vote to keep your right to vote by voting in a way that is most likely to prevent a Trump win. They literally already have a plan on how to remove and bar even more people from voting.
As someone who voted third party in the 2016 election, take it from me that you will feel more guilty if you know your vote could have helped prevent the fascist party from gaining power. The presidency is not the office to try to vote on morals, save that for state and local elections that decide things like state benefits programs, distributions of funds, and public works. The federal government is where you will want to vote for the people who are protecting your right to vote in the first place, and that is done by ensuring that the fascist party can’t get a majority or otherwise control a branch of the government.
If the Supreme Court were made up different, maybe, but ending up with an R president just gives them room to pack more courts and see a whole bunch more rights get removed.
While you are correct that it will likely be expensive, it is important to note that Descovy is an existing PreP pill that Gilead makes. So the cost of the new shot is yet to be determined, but the company has been criticized for the cost of their current PreP medication option.
It is also important to note that anyone with insurance in the United States will pay nothing, as the Affordable Care Act requires insurance to cover all PreP medications at no cost to patients. The pricing will only affect those who have no insurance at all, which makes this criticism all the more important to help this new medication reach those who would be the worst affected if they were to contract HIV.