Immersion therapy man. Go find a board game meetup, exercise meetup or sports meetup or something that puts you in a situation where you're gonna be able to have casual conversations.
Loads of people just like you with social anxiety and who are introverted though in the US, and honestly any nation in the Americas... and probably the world.
Realistically they will hire someone in the dominican republic or some other nation with fairly neutral english accents on a call center farm who end up getting paid way under US minimum wage.
Tons of companies do this. Choice hotels, boost mobile... many many more.
Alternatively those gig workers will get paid even less than DR wages and be from far worse countries. Those DR call center farms literally do not allow you to bring any personal belongings onto the floor, or take anything from the floor. Way too easy to steal financial information if you can write it down somewhere. Now imagine gig workers who work remotely and how they could handle financial data... doesn't seem feasible but maybe they have the liability angle figured out.
It's not that it's gone, it's that the platform continues to enshittify.
It's really hard to remove all their bloatware garbage, and features seem to get worse all the time. Subtitles had a big change and they really don't do a good job of supporting them anymore, as an example. Had one show that no matter what I did the subtitles just wouldn't work after updating to a modern version that had the modern 'updated' subtitle handling. I've continued to update but it's still questionable.
When I got it they never had 'ad supported plex tv', now they do and they promote it everywhere. All I want to do is keep supporting what they have, newer modern codecs, squash bugs, and act as a crappy dynamic dns so I can not setup a domain that goes to my home network connection which is a dynamic ip.
What I don't want is to have to go into settings to disable or hide all their garbage ad revenue supported services everywhere in my private media library I paid a lifetime license fee for. It didn't have that advertisement when I bought it, they shouldn't be adding it afterwards, and I shouldn't have to keep updating my config just to stay on a version that supports evolving hardware.
I tried Jellyfin but it's even worse for subtitles which are unfortunately mandatory in my household.
Yep, two years before Borderlands delivered a much superior experience.
At the time I had spent six years playing EverQuest, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online and World of Warcraft in various capacities, and this was looking like an MMO borderlands like thing. Few MMOs had gone under so soon after release.
Apparently the same devs are making a sequel, and I think i'll make sure to pirate it unless they give it away to lifetime Hellgate London subscribers.
Nowadays I know better than to trust any kind of weird offer like this announced before launch. They'd only do it if they knew they were going to win... or were so worried they were going to go under.
So we CAN afford these drugs to begin with, because employer sponsored health plans with minimal coverage cost around $14000 and have $6500++ copays (I don't remember today's limits for copays, but you have to pay those copays out of pocket before an insurance company covers drugs typically.) The actual drugs cost pennies to make but sell for hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands. The prices that are listed for these drugs at retail are not actually what the insurance pays for these drugs, we're never going to see those figures, but they're aligned to maximize profits from the industry. Pharmacy benefit managers also collude by using a third party service to recommend pricing.
Last year they had about ~63600 million in revenue.
~38691 million last year was in the US alone.
~16057 for "developed markets" aka europe and wealthy nations
~8879 for "developing nations" e.g. africa, latin america, poor asian countries.
So 38 billion in the us vs 63.6 billion total revenue.
If you have to choose between keeping US revenue or keeping non-us global revenue, you're gonna choose the US. It's not even close.
I'm guessing they can license their drug to some other business to sell internationally and get out of first party sales, but it's possible they may have a legal mechanism to skirt this already since it's typical for the US business to be a separate company than the holding company, and all the international businesses are separate companies under said holding company, it's hard to say. I don't have any inside information for today's strategy.
Just to tack onto this... it's possible that we will see different branded drugs, and perhaps even slightly modified drugs to contain effectively a placebo to go through clinical trials concurrently with the primary drug. From there they just release one drug in the US and the other drug exclusively everywhere else.
That's just one creative way to keep prices exorbitantly high. They can also target medical devices aka the delivery mechanism (think pre-packaged syringes) to try and keep profits high. Just release a US only delivery mechanism and suddenly it's different than the rest of the world. I've worked at companies that slightly altered the injector of their drugs to keep their monopoly going, as doctors preferred the improved injector that had no generic due to being in copyright, even after the drug patent expired.
The pharma lobby is so wealthy and powerful though I sincerely doubt even dumpy can fight them. There's a reason why biden started with just a handful of drugs, it built a foundation to slowly drain their profits while their current patents run out and they adapt to the new dynamic.
There's also all those health insurance companies that legally can only profit a % of overall revenue that will face severe profit cuts if treatment costs actually dive, drugs are a key component to building a sizable margin today.___
The gravy train of giant margin drugs is coming to an end.
Medicaid is gonna get gutted and drugs won't be very profitable in the US overall. I suspect the pharma answer to this may be suspending sales in all other nations so long as the US patents are live, the profits here are so above and beyond all other places in the world that there's little reason to focus on global markets if the restriction is lowest common denominator pricing in the US.
I worked in pharma for a while at a level that interacted with C level executives and the executive leadership of said companies. I've seen where the money is and seen internal numbers. US oncology sales are almost all profits.
Backfiring cars are not so common today, especially in affluent neighborhoods.
If you make it sound as close to a gunshot as you can, which isn't hard because it's easy to mix up the two if you're from an affluent area that isn't full of gun nuts, their imagination does the rest.
I'm gonna move the goal posts here and say smaller burgers are inherently better. I don't want to chew on a giant pile of ground beef.