Right. The John Sturges that was born in 1910 was directing films in 1890, twenty years before his birth, and also pioneered color and sound films several decades prior to their patents. Cool.

You’re not a very effective or amusing troll.

The Magnificent Seven was released on October 12, 1960.

The Seven Samurai was released in 1954, six years prior.

A number of Kurosawa films have been remade for American audiences. Take The Hidden Fortress; it was remade as Star Wars. Meanwhile, Kurosawa did take inspiration from western playwrights, such as Shakespeare’s MacBeth (Throne of Blood) and King Lear (Ran).

And, BTW, I happen to absolutely love chanbara, especially and including the schlock garbage like Sleepy Eyes of Death, Zatoichi, Lady Snowblood, Lone Wolf and Cub, and especially Hanzo the Razor. Samurai film share a lot of similarities with western films, and many of the low-budget sword-fighting films were modeled after the western genre films (only with a funk and jazz soundtrack).

Kurosawa Akira’s The Seven Samurai was released in 1954. John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven was released in 1960.

So, uh, first, The Magnificent Seven was the remake, not the other way around, and second, it comes only 6 years after the inspiration, rather than close to a century. If The Magnificent Seven had been made 80 years prior to The Seven Samurai, it would have been made in 1874. …Which would have been before some of the firearms used in the film were even invented, and only 10 years after the US Civil War.

One of my favorites that I don’t often see mentioned is Upgrade. It’s very nearly perfect as a near-future cyberpunk dystopia.

…80 or 90 years? You sure 'bout that?

Four hours after I had a laminectomy, discectomy, and foraminotomy on the L4-S1 vertebrae and discs, the nurse was telling me that I had to get out of bed and walk up and down the hall. That was pain that morphine didn’t seem to touch, and was easily my worst experience moving.

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.

Nuke the world.

That’s not murder; it’s a war crime.

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.

Technically you could use PGP to encrypt a .txt file with all your passwords in it. Which would be more or less the same thing with a lot less polish to it.

Pong, probably around 1983-ish.

Biafra is… Something. I can’t say whether or not it works in Dead Kennedies, but IMO it works just fine in Lard. I think that for the ethos of punk music–not pop punk, but the real shit–he’s pretty good.