You get “compensated for you time” not paid

That’s what they say, but that’s not what actually happens. If the phlebotomist fucks up the draw, and your flow rate is so poor that they can’t get what they need, you don’t get paid. (Ask me how i know this.)

And yeah, IIRC most of the plasma goes to create clotting agents for people with hemophilia.

Blatantly false. “MSM [men who have sex with men] accounted for 67% (21,400) of the 31,800 estimated new HIV infections in 2022 and 87% of estimated infections among all males.”

When you consider that gay and bisexual men make up a small percentage of the overall population–under 5%–the fact that gay and bisexual men account for 87% of all HIV infections in men tells you just how alarming this is.

EDIT: For the people downvoting this - do you have statistics that you consider to be better, or more up-to-date? Do you want to refute them? Then post something and prove the CDC wrong. Downvoting because you don’t like things that are factually correct isn’t doing anything except making you look like a petulant child.

PS - wear a goddamn condom if you and your partner aren’t 100% monogamous. Yeah, no one likes them, I get it. But that’s a lot better than getting infected with HIV and needing to pay for expensive anti-retrovirals for the rest of your life.

In the past, I’ve had my local hospital call me asking for a blood donation, for example, because of an upcoming surgery of a hospitalised kid that shares my blood group. I got money for that too.

In the US, AFAIK you can’t get paid for whole blood. If you did, you would have to be paid significantly more than they pay for plasma, given that you can only do whole blood every two months.

To the question, it’s not a “scam” by any conventional definition. You are getting real money in return for the plasma.

The problem with the whole system is that if there was no payment for plasma, there wouldn’t be nearly enough people donating plasma for the need that there is. (You’re typically looking at 1+ hour per session, 2x/week.) That doesn’t include whatever travel time is involved. That’s a pretty steep time commitment every week for something that’s a very nebulous public good.

I think a better question is, is the amount that you’re being compensated fair and reasonable? Give the profit margins that are involved in products made from blood plasma, my inclination is that it is not a fair and reasonable amount. Plasma centers in my area vary in how much they pay, but it’s typically in the neighborhood of $50-$75 (USD); in other parts it’s lower, and in some areas it’s significantly higher. It’s clear that they can pay more, but choose not to because it increases their profit margin. That is something I have a problem with.

More like going to a cheap motel and not expecting bedbugs.

imitation factor of a shotgun roar in an enclosed space is pretty potent

Are you willing to bet your life on that? Or would you rather stack the odds as heavily in your favor as you can?

How many people are entering the house?

In this case, it was three armed home intruders, plus a getaway driver.

Are they all Jason Bourne like fanatics who are willing to commit suicide in the process of killing you?

If they are, then you have done something seriously horrific and they are most likely justified in seeking your end.

…That’s quite a stretch, don’t you think? Bluntly, if anyone breaks into my home while I’m home, I’m going to assume that they’re intent on causing harm to me, because I’m sure as shit not going to politely ask them to fill out a questionnaire before acting.

To add to this - it’s modular because there’s a US military specification for it. As long as parts are to spec, they’re interchangeable. If I wreck my barrel, any AR-15 barrel (…that uses the same length of gas system…) should bolt on to my receiver. If I break my bolt carrier, any bold carrier should work. If the length of pull on a fixed stock isn’t good, I can get an adjustable stock.

‘Building’ an AR-15 from parts is only slightly harder and more expensive than building Star Wars Lego ™ kits. A bod-standard milspec AR-15 that’s reliable and accurate enough (3 MOA) can be had for about $450.

And, BTW, @Schadrach is absolutely right about it being a common hunting rifle. .223 Rem is commonly used for medium sized game and varmints; it’s commonly used for coyotes and feral pigs, and some people (depending on your state) use it for deer with heavier, 70-odd grain bullets.

Yes, it absolutely is. The only people suggesting that it’s not are fudds. At home-invasion distances, there is no effective spread on your pellets; your shotgun pattern is a single hole. That means that, yes, you need to put that shotgun to your shoulder, and you need to aim. Given that–outside of box mag fed shotguns–you get 8 shots or less in that shotgun, you better hope that you’re a really good shot when someone else is actively shooting back.

You know that the alternative in WWI was a bolt-action battle rifle, right? A pump or lever gun would have been far faster. The sturmgewehr StG-44 wasn’t invented until 1943; if it had been in existence in 1914, the Germans absolutely would have been using them in trench battles over. As it was, the Bergmann MP 18–the first real submachine gun, fielded in 1918, near the end of the war–gave a significant advantage in trench combat. (But by the time it hit front line troops, there wasn’t anything that could have stopped Germany from losing.)

Have you ever fired a gun while under time pressure? Like, for instance, in a 3 gun competition? Or shot at someone while they’re shooting at you? Misses in combat are common. Would you rather miss a lot with a firearm that only carries 7 bullets, or one that has 30?

Oh, and before you spread some fudd about shotguns pellets spreading and not needing to aim, at home defense distances–<10y–your shot pattern with no choke on a 30" barrel with 00 buckshot is going to be about 4". Firing a shotgun without it being braced on your shoulder? Good fucking luck hitting anything. And your shotgun is still going to be about half again as long-at a minimum–than a carbine.

55gr FMJ BT–which is pretty much the most common .223 ammunition–tends to fragment pretty dramatically inside about 300y after hitting something solid. Once it hits something solid, it starts tumbling and tears itself apart pretty fast, in part because it’s moving at supersonic speeds. That’s part of the reason why it’s so lethal at short ranges; it’s turning into a lot of small fragments… (That, and the cavitation that is produced by bullets moving >2600fps; that will produce a temporary wound cavity that exceeds the elasticity of tissue, and turns into a permanent wound cavity. The cavitation produced by subsonic bullets isn’t great enough to turn into a permanent wound channel.) At subsonic speeds, it doesn’t fragment, and just ‘ice picks’. A shotgun with birdshot would definitely not over penetrate, but then you run the risk of not being adequately lethal on your target. Buckshot is still going to penetrate exterior walls pretty handily without being deformed significantly or fragmenting, even if a lot of the energy has been eaten up by a house’s cladding; it might not kill easily, but it can still wound. But then you’re back to the original problem: large/long firearm, heavy recoil, very limited ammunition in a tube magazine, and slow to reload.

Would anyone you know tell you if they carried a knife for self-defense, given that it’s generally a crime to do so in the UK?

Al least once. I’d have to dig up the article, but somewhere in one of the flat states (Kansas, I think?), a group of three armed people broke into a home that a teen was home at. He confronted and shot all of the robbers with an AR-15. I believe that two died on the scene, one made it out to the getaway car and bled to death in the car. The driver of the car was charged with three counts of felony murder.

AR-15 carbines and SBRs are very, very good for home defense, far better than a shotgun (long/unwieldy, low ammunition capacity) or handgun (poor sight radius, more difficult to aim), and the small, light bullet tends to not overpenetrate (e.g., you’re less likely to accidentally shoot your neighbors than you might be with a larger, heavier bullet).

Nuke the world.

That’s not murder; it’s a war crime.

Huh?

I loved Fallout 4, and I still play it. I’ve got it installed on this computer, but I don’t have Skyrim installed. I’m not as attached to the London mod for it, TBH.

Can’t say a lot about what Bethesda is going to do with the next Elder Scrolls games, but I’d love to see a return to the more complicated skill trees and level advancement that they used in Morrowind and Daggerfall. I also really loved the limitless number of randomly generate dungeons in Daggerfall, and how it took years (in real-time) to walk across the continent, but that’s probably not what most people want now.

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.

That’s why you generally would want to call cops; it’s supposed to be their job, and they’re supposed to be trained to do shit like that. No, they often aren’t, and don’t do their job, but they’re probably better equipped to deal with it than most non-police are.

I have gotten in the middle of something before–a driver in a huge pickup truck trying to run over a motorcyclist that he was angry at–and shit is not fun. It’s one of the few times that I wish that I remembered to carry concealed regularly, or at all.

Interfering in a domestic dispute is a really, really good way to get assaulted.

I quit smoking four times, IIRC. The first week was always the shitty part, and then it would get dramatically easier. Three of the times I started back up because my ex-wife would secretly start smoking, get tired of hiding it, and offer me cigarettes (‘just one, as a treat’). The last time I quit we were in the process of separating prior to divorce, and so that shit didn’t happen. That was a little over ten years ago now.

This last time I quit because I was waking up every morning coughing. I had that nasty dark-yellow smokers’ phlegm that I’d cough up, and I’d have that first cigarette along with my cup of coffee. When I realized the direction my health was going, and that no amount of cardio and weight training was going to fix it, that’s when I decided to quit.

Each time I quit was cold turkey, no aids. The times I tried cutting back, using gum, etc., all failed miserably. Vaping wasn’t a thing at the time.

I still love the smell of cigarettes, pipes, and cigars. That’s never going to stop. But it’s pretty easy to resist now.

PGP is ‘pretty good privacy’; it’s an encryption standard. It’s not the best, but it’s fairly easy to use, and it going to resist decryption pretty well, for most use-cases. The idea is that you have a public key, and a private key. The public key allows messages to be encrypted, while your private key allows decryption.