Yeah, that's one of the idiot plot tools that bothers me too. It happens in real life, but hopefully not in people who have entered adulthood.

Not wanting to hear about it? That's fine.
Irrational feelings of retroactive possessiveness or jealousy? Also fine.
Wanting some relationship reassurance? Also totally fine.

The key part is being mature and recognizing that it's about your needs, and not the other person's behavior. Being upset with someone else because of the above is unreasonable. Letting them know you'd like a reassurance isn't.

People be silly sometimes though.

To the best of my knowledge, not significantly.
The state I live in has a monopoly on the wholesale of liquor. The only difference you can tell is that liquor has the same price in every store. It can't go on sale or be discounted or used in promotions.

The problem is that the government is going to operate the retail operation so inefficiently, that the profit will be eaten by bureaucratic costs.

Citation needed. You're just repeating right wing talking points that holds that government can't be efficient, and that profit is the only source of efficiency.

Profit drives selling things for more profit, not efficiency. Sometimes efficiency is the driving force for more profit, but not always by a long shot.

The value of regulated pricing for vices is that it prevents the profit drive to lower prices, increase addiction, and then raise prices.

The goal isn't cheap vices. It's stable prices, controlled quality and predictable supply.

That's not entirely strange. Commenting on the health of a patient is really restricted. There are circumstances where it's allowed in limited capacities but I wouldn't expect a doctor to actually provide information. That information would be updated by a doctor, compiled by a PA, and given to an administrator to clear with lawyers.

It's locked down enough that I wouldn't expect any different even if the request was coming directly from the patients lawyer. Being a high profile patient just means there's more eyes making sure the statement is in line with the authorized disclosure.

Eh, kinda a stretch to make this about Americans.
In the original thalidomide problem it was the same 'paranoia' that kept it entirely off the market in the US.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I get the reasoning behind "Americans are so dumb that they put safety and usage instructions on cancer medication, with emphasis on the most severe warnings!”
Why wouldn't you want to label dangerous things that are actually, uniquely hazardous?

I can get that one, but it's definitely a bit more cringy.
Women often wear makeup for important photos in our culture, and they knew this was an important mission where photos would be taken. Same reason they gave the men shaving kits once they had more confidence. The silly to me is that we as a society expect anyone in space to look super proper.

Also: they gave the women shaving kits too.

I believe now they just tell you to pick your preference of mandatory hygiene products like soap and toothpaste, and let you pick what you want for your the rest of your self care budget. I think most people fill up on lotion and hot sauce, if I recall.

The real kicker is I don't even know that I've heard a proposal to make them taxpayer funded. I've only heard the proposal to tax them like bandages or toilet paper instead of cosmetics.

Neither bothers me in the slightest, but the people getting upset about fixing an obvious tax misclassification are just contrary assholes.

That story always makes me a little "harrumph". They act like the engineers were totally clueless when you get that number by looking at the box, applying their normal redundancy rules for consumables, and then weighing one and determining that it's easily within their per person weight budget.

The box says one every 4-8 hours. It's a six day mission, menses typically last six days but can go longer. The ratio for consumables is 1.5 to 2 times expected need.
Expected usage is 36, with 60 being a possibility with a mission delay and atypical period. Redundancy takes you to right around 100.

Then they asked.

Of the things they did wrong with dealing with women, the tampons are the least of it, albeit easily the most amusing.

People very comfortably say "Company made this", or "we made this" regarding a place they work even if not on the team if talking to someone external.
When people get houses built they often say they're building a new house, even if it's actually someone else doing every part of it.

There's a part of our language that lends itself to having the cause of a thing be responsible for the thing.

The closer it gets to being something you could have personally done every part of and another person is involved the more we tend to draw back, which is why the AI art language grates a bit.

My coworker said he's building a cabin up north: I have no uncertainty at all that he's approving a design and someone else is doing it.
I wouldn't say I put up a handrail on my stairs: it's plausible I could have, but I didn't (it's an awkward space with weird stud spacing, and I have older family I want to be able to rely on it, so I paid someone with licensing to do it right in 20 minutes). I don't want to take credit for what I didn't do.

With the art, only one person actually caused it to be made. But it also feels like taking credit for something more difficult than it was.
If I drop a bucket of paint off a balcony, I wouldn't say "I caused a giant mess to be made", but "I made a giant mess".
If I pointed at it and said "I have made art", people would assume I was joking, despite a surface similarity to some art. The amount of effort is disproportional to the claim.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N7xn5zeJ4D4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_on_hold#Cisco's_Opus_Number_One

Cisco also sells phone systems, and one of their phone engineers wrote a song with a friend once and used it as the default on what went on to become a very common phone system.
It's not the best song ever, but it's definitely the best hold music. Can elicit a proper, heartfelt "not bad" from most people.
It's also common enough that there's a decent chance any random person has heard it and had no idea where this song came from.

I attribute it's quality to it being an authentic piece of music, and not a corporate design creation, that was created on lower fidelity hardware, because that's what they had to muck around with, and so it had some actual creative feeling to it and it coincidentally didn't lose much being piped over a 90s voip phone system to a household landline handset.

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/xed4d7-OauM

This is why no one wants to go to Altoona.

I feel delighted by the implication that the pizza dough came from Cisco, and not Sysco. It's a $300,000 pizza, with a $15,000/mo support contract. You only get that discount if you're buying it as part of an 8+ figure contract though. It can handle 20 billion pepperoni per second though, and if you figure out how to eat it you can get a degree in it that pays pretty well.

You also get the best waiting music known to man while you wait.