@CrushBug -- Very good arguments in favor of absorbing the cost, even IF hormone therapy / gender reassignment is paid for by the military / government.

@entr0py -- Links that I've read from conventional news outlets claim that hormone therapy and gender reassignment were covered by military healthcare IF a doctor signed off on them as being medically necessary. An article I read about Chelsea Manning specifically stated that the hormone therapy was definitely paid for by the military, but that it wasn't 100% clear who paid the bill for her gender reassignment. I can't find that exact article, but here's another one from 2015 that suggests the same things:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/12/chelsea-manning-hormone-therapy/23311813/

Another article I read said that Obama issued an order / proclamation / whatever that the military would pay for those things if they were deemed medically necessary, which was a change from the former system (not covered). Not sure when/if that went into effect, but I think it must have. I'll look and see if I can find a link to that one.

I'm not saying that my info is right and yours is wrong, but it seems unclear. They (gender reassignment and hormone therapy) definitely weren't covered for a long time, but it seems like the hormone therapy was for sure at least in Manning's case.

Again, just to my personal opinion, I think the old system of "welcome to serve but we ain't paying for that stuff" was fine (ideal?). CrushBug presents a good argument for the military absorbing those costs since they are such a tiny fraction of the military budget (even though trans soldiers are arguably also a tiny fraction of the total).

Strangely enough, I'd pretty happily agree to those services being covered (if deemed medically necessary) as part of single-payer universal health care available to ALL CITIZENS. That would still be paying for them with tax dollars, but not tax dollars earmarked for military, which seems better to me somehow.

And again, I think Trump is 100% in the wrong for barring trans people from service simply for being trans. I agree that he's really just trying to rile up his base and trigger their righteous indignation. But, I do still basically think that the military paying for those services (or viagra / hair transplants / botox / cosmetic stuff, etc.) out of their budget is wrong. Even if amounts to a drop in the ocean that is military spending.

Yes, 15k soldiers is the number I have seen as well.

The other factor is the question about what that $8.4m is being used for. It sounds like you are assuming that it is for hormone replacement and/or gender reassignment, but I haven't heard if that is explicitly what the $8.4m is for, or if is the sum total of all annual trans health care in the military. That is something I would like clarified. It has only been stated as "the cost for health care for the 15k trans soldiers", so it is not clear.

I, too, would like to hear what is the Viagra "head" count. Hooooo!

I just think that it is a small price to pay (0.0017 %) of a $500b annual military budget, for people that are braver than myself, and willing to serve.

Netflix going HUGE with this one. Wonder what the budget was.

(edit) 90 million

ECB Research Bulletin:

In an economy with its own fiat currency, the monetary authority and the fiscal authority can ensure that public debt denominated in the national fiat currency is non-defaultable, i.e. maturing government bonds are convertible into currency at par. With this arrangement in place, fiscal policy can focus on business cycle stabilisation when monetary policy hits the lower bound constraint. However, the fiscal authorities of the euro area countries have given up the ability to issue non-defaultable debt. As a consequence, effective macroeconomic stabilisation has been difficult to achieve.

Translation:
- all members of the eurozone effectively use a foreign currency
- they can default, because they do not and cannot issue debt in their currency
- fiscal policy has thus been completely neutered

Ergo, national parliaments have a significantly smaller policy space compared to countries with their own currency. Our parliaments intentionally surrender power to unelected technocrats, even control of the national budget, which is the primary power available to any parliament anywhere.

"Sorry, lad. We cannot pay for healthcare/pension/infrastructure/education/wages/X, we have to maintain a balanced budget to appease the market." Yet it is still illegal to call for the guillotine...

Meanwhile, Japan doesn't give a fuck. The BoJ has been vacuuming up outstanding debt like there's no tomorrow. It currently holds in excess of 40% of all government debt, effectively canceling it. It's just book-keeping. The Treasury issues the debt, the CB buys the debt. Both are part of the consolidated government sector, ergo no debt. "Hyperinflation!", they scream. Can you hear them? Except Japan has been fighting deflation for two decades, with no end in sight.

Yet the inflation-hawks are still treated as persons of authority. Flat-earthers, the lot of 'em.

And my country wants the rest of Europe to sign on to the most moronic law in German history: the "Schuldenbremse", which makes running a deficit illegal at the constitutional level (except for undefined "emergencies"). They are either a) brainwashed, b) idiots, or c) straight up evil. And I'm not sure which one I prefer.

Hmm. I wasn't too sure about this. I love indie games that focus on gameplay/style/story, but don't have the budget for high quality art/graphics, so I was afraid this might just be copying the style.

Nope. The orginal won a 2014 cyberpunk game jam written in 6 days by two brothers, playable here:
https://timsoret.itch.io/the-last-night

I haven't played through it yet, but this shows promise.

Incidentally, it intentionally copies the styles on Blade Runner and Flashback.

Has Hollywood just entirely lost its shit?

I have no idea whether that movie is good or bad from the trailer. It's a cobbled together mess of action and dialogue that makes no sense in the context provided here.

I am so frustrated with big budget movies. There's so much garbage coming out of the studios these days and trailer editing like this doesn't help me as a consumer, it just turns me off the whole process. Like that Cloak and Dagger trailer that's also floating around. I want to like it, but I have no idea what it is based on the trailer. Considering how important trailers are to commercial success, you'd think they could hire a half-way competent editor to put them together.

Argh!

/rant

That's the worst time, the inevitable second act dilemma, of PC building.

You can budget in the expectation of how long it takes to do the housekeeping stuff. Loading the OS, essential programs, personal preferences - the games themselves...but there's often that one random thing.

I built a nice medium-range game PC with someone else recently, my building partner was so excited. It's amazing how much of a bond that creates between people, or how it can strengthen a relationship. Not just for building PC's specifically, but for sharing something and having that moment of realization of how cool that thing shared really is.

I felt more pissed off than anything for a brief moment during the boot up, when the display seemed to shutdown startup before anything really happened. Luckily, I'd paid attention enough when researching the GPU and eventually remembered someone mentioning there was a button on the card itself that controls the LED lights on it, pressing it seemed to clear whatever was blocking the startup processes for the card.

There was definitely a soul-crushing few hours of doubt and agony before I remembered that detail. During that time, I stared at the clean interior of the fully assembled build, having had a hard enough time getting the cords to fit and wondering if something minor and imperceptible had wiggled loose, wondering if I would go mad.

Having someone else depending on the solution was another intense emotion heightening element. I'd done my best to prime for this likelihood. I'd shared stories of problems I'd had on previous builds, the random thing that went wrong. I stressed the fact that the computer had always, eventually, got built.

It's a good, stinging bit of humility for me. Even when I try to minimize problems and anticipate potential issues, I'll still miss something as obvious as a big button right in front of my face.

i see loads of people shit on VFX and CG like it's ONLY bad (and with almost no understanding of the process). often the stuff they complain about are massively difficult shots that could never work in the real world or because it was what the client wants and/or because their reference was other VFX, not real things. there is very little actually bad VFX in properly budgeted movies insofar as artist ability and technical knowledge. this is why i think james cameron or ang lee deserve zero credit for the VFX of avatar or life of pi. all they did was secure the money to get them made and then shit all over them with bad ideas.

Yeah, I'm with Eric.

The question is not fix Earth or go to Mars. We can easily do both.

US defence budget is $580B a year. You could literally take the entire Mars budget out your defence spending for 1 year and you'd STILL BE SPENDING MORE ON DEFENCE THAN CHINA!!!

How big a travel and expense budget does Sessions get this time out?

LOL, East Palo Alto. I volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club there for a year when I lived in Mountain View. Two cops got shot and East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate ever that year. It's utterly insane how on one side of the 101 you have these multi-million dollar mansions and Stanford University and on the other side you have gangland.

Meanwhile, back on topic, when I moved to Mountain View in 2002 my rent was $800 a month for a studio apartment. The rent went up by $100 a year every year until I finally called it quits in 2007 when they wanted to charge me $1300 a month. I gave up ever actually being able to own a home in the Bay Area (let alone rent) and left in 2009.

In Japan now, and things aren't quite as bad as the Bay Area, but we've been house hunting recently and we're shocked at the disparity between what we want versus what we can actually afford, even with both us being full-time professionals. I know that 2nd place he goes to is supposed to be a joke but it's not that far off from the truth, at least as far as our experiences go. While the places we've been shown by the real estate agent are certainly habitable, they aren't particularly nice. So we're going to have to decide whether we want to live someplace not so great with the advantage being the mortgage will be paid off by the time we retire or just rent in a place we're comfortable with and wind up having to really budget hard after retirement since rent will consume a sizable portion of our pensions/social security.

Here's a thought, instead of adding $600 billion dollars to the US military budget, we could use some of that money to push broadband out to every home in the US.

When every struggling post-boom town has high speed internet, we just need to push the dinosaurs who resist "work from home" out of senior management positions in the corporate world and we'll have a migration towards the smaller, more remote communities, where property values are much lower.

It will mean that sprawl subdivisions will become the new slums...but that just provides incentive to bulldoze those warts off the map and return the lost farmland.

The paradigm shift would spark massive economic growth.

Naw...we need more tactical stealth fighters.

I thought it was a mistake having the bronzer-overdosed-human Klingon be canon rather than what they were, the best that Roddenberry's 1960s budget and f/x technology could manage.

I would have been more impressed if they somehow updated the f/x to use updated Klingons but still using the ST:OS original film.

Fuck yeah!! We don't need social programs and this is so much easier than figuring out health care.

I know that when I'm faced with tough economic choices in my family budget I just say, 'Fuck It', pull my kids out of college and buy myself a truck load of guns.

Merrca!!