Yeah I was using lemm.ee but the hexbear spam in the threads was ridiculous. They were swarming the meta thread discussing defederating them too, and it seemed like the instance admin was determined to keep federating with them. Went on the hunt to join a popular instance that doesn’t federate with them. There’s a few out there that do block the annoying authoritarian/boot-licking trifecta of lemmygrad, explodingheads, and hexbear. Sopuli.xyz was the one I ended up joining.

Luckily there’s no payments until death in this plan, except for people with short lifespans I suppose. If you make minimum payments for twenty years, and the loans aren’t paid off yet, any remaining balance is forgiven. That includes zero dollar payments if your minimum payment is 0 because of low income. If you apply for forgiveness under public service loan forgiveness it’s shortened to 10 years of minimum payments. Prior payments under other repayment plans should count toward forgiveness too, clock isn’t suddenly resetting to twenty years for everyone.

Unfortunately Biden is not able to change the interest rate. Even though the law clearly grants him the power to forgive or modify many loan terms, it does not grant him the power to change the interest rates, which are set by statute. And even though the law clearly granted him forgiveness powers we all know how that went with the supreme court. So I don’t see them changing interest rates unless democrats get back the house and find a way to overcome a filibuster in the senate.

Yes, if you were getting zero dollar minimum payments under an income based payment plan (not deferrment or delinquent), then that does count toward forgiveness, which is any balance remaining after twenty years of payments for undergrad and twenty five years for graduate loans under the new terms. Ten years of payments under income based for public service loan forgiveness. Also forbearance zero dollar payments during covid counts towards both too.

It’s even harder to spell than it is to say “ophthalmologist” What are the extra h and l doing there? I don’t know. Most people forget them. Another English word not really pronounced like it’s spelled. Trips me up every time I try to type it out. Optometrist, the non-MD eye doctor, much easier to say and spell.

Totally ridiculous ruling. Do we have to teach these federal judges about the commerce clause? About how the federal government regulates interstate commerce because otherwise we’d have fifty different sets of laws about what medicines can be used, basically making the practice of medicine and the sale and development of drugs impossible? But I guess that would presume conservative judges care about the constitution in the first place. They start at ban all abortion right now no matter what and write whatever crap they need to justify it.

There’s a legal standard they would have to follow to avoid commerce clause problems called “undue interference.” IANAL so cannot define it directly for you, but it’d be hard to argue outright banning isn’t undue interference. Whereas regulations may be permissable in some cases like you mentioned with opiates. But you won’t see a state that has a law outright banning sale of an opiate that’s approved for use by the fda for this reason.

Yes the phrase undue burden is nowhere in the commerce clause itself but is often in rulings regarding it and is often used in a commerce clause context, separate from it’s use in roe v wade related case law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-8/clause-3/facially-neutral-laws-and-dormant-commerce-clause

The fda ultimately derived it’s authority from and was able to be created by the federal government because of the commerce clause, so it is related to this. Congress granted power to an authority that decides what medicines are or are not available and has kept this uniform between all states. Sounds like at this point it may come down to a supremacy clause question and the original wording of the law that created the fda. If it weren’t for the commerce clause the fda couldn’t even really exist in its current form. The judge in the case acknowledged this but decided to override supremacy clause concerns on the basis that historically he felt states should be able to regulate anything concerning medicine or healthcare providers. It seems to me though this is an area that’s been a very defined federally controlled system for interstate commerce reasonings for nearly a century now, prior to now you don’t see states trying to outright ban certain medications, at least not successfully. Once a medication was approved by the fda for a use it was always available in the whole country for that use. If it was generally understood that it was just like fireworks or some other random product I would have expected a states to have banned drugs at least once before. There’s other examples of products like this where federal government retains control for interstate commerce reasons, like California required a specific federal law giving them an exception before they could have their own regulations for cars sold on the basis of emissions. You do see certain medical procedures being banned, like conversion therapy, or uses of medicines that don’t have an fda label, like puberty blockers being banned for helping transgender children. But I’m not aware of examples of a state disallowing an explicit fda approval. If you have examples though I’d be curious. Ultimately I don’t feel really qualified to go any further on this, but I did find this write up helpful for anyone interested in more, and much better informed and written up than anything I could do. https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/10/1/lsad005/7078178?login=false

I can say though if this is allowed to stand, I would expect even worsening interference by state governments into your doctor’s office and what they are allowed to prescribe or treat you with. I’d also expect continuing worsening of medical access and continuing flight of doctors and other health care providers to states that actually allow the free practice of medicine and use of fda approved medications.

Yeah, I still hope sanity prevails here before we have “heart failure guidelines: fifty protocols for each fifty states based on what fda approved medications they have decided to allow.”

Thank you for the article. I also found this write-up helpful as well: https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/10/1/lsad005/7078178?login=false

I’m not sure the atf is going to be the best analogy because of some specifics in the law creating the fda, explicitly disallowing states or other bodies to make their own judgements on prescription drugs. Thanks for the other example of a time this was attempted, let’s hope the ruling in the Massachusetts case wins out before the supreme court destroys the FDA and wreaks more havoc on the practice of medicine in the US.

I hope this works out and becomes a viable competitor to DLSS3, especially with this most recent generation of games getting so demanding spec wise. I also appreciate that they make it available for any graphics card from any company. Nvidia certainly has some edge in propiatary features that AMD is having trouble matching at the moment, but Nvidia becoming even more dominant is bad news. Lack of competition will only encourage them to stagnate in the future and increase prices even higher. I’ll probably be looking to upgrade my own gpu soon so am very interested in how the just announced amd 7800xt compares against the Nvidia 4070.