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#Stacy Cross
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A Bay Area OB-GYN is organizing an effort to bring abortion services and reproductive healthcare to several southern states bordering the Gulf of Mexico via a ship sailing on federal waters.
Dr. Meg Autry, who also works as a professor at UCSF, had already been working to bring this effort to life. But when Roe v. Wade was overturned, Autry said their plans were accelerated.
As first reported by KCBS, this plan called Protecting Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes (PRROWESS) aims to bring reproductive healthcare to states where abortions are banned, limited, or hard to access.
In an interview with NBC Bay Area, Autry noted that people living in southern parts of states with restrictive abortion rules like Texas and Louisiana, are actually closer to the coast than to nearby states with more abortion access. Additionally, it is less expensive to board a boat than buying a plane ticket to another state.
Autry has performed abortions for decades and refers to herself as "a lifelong educator, a lifelong career abortion advocate."
"It is my life’s work," she said.
"Part of the reason we’re working on this project so hard is because wealthy people in our country are always going to have access [to abortions], so once again it’s a time now where poor, people of color, marginalized individuals, are gonna suffer --and by suffering I mean like lives lost," Autry said.
She explained that this ship will operate on federal waters — nine miles from the coast of Texas and three from the coast of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — where it can evade those states' abortion restrictions. PRROWESS will arrange for patients to be transported to the ship, which will vary depending on where they are coming from, once they pass a pre-screening process.
Autry and a team of licensed medical professionals will offer surgical abortions for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. The PRROWESS team would also offer other point-of-care gynecological services such as testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections.
"The project is being funded with philanthropy and the patients care is on a needs basis, so most individuals will pay little to nothing for services," Autry said.
Stacy Cross, president of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, which offers services in California and Nevada, said it's not surprising that health care providers are teaming up to offer services on the seas.
Cross explained that the abortion service provider community has been preparing for the possibility of a post-Roe world for some time now and that, "over the years we’ve talked about things like boats on federal waters out past the 5-mile line."
"It's just it’s a testament to the time we’re in, because its really horrific that we’re having to think of these things in the United States of America, how to keep people safe," Cross said.
Several California Planned Parenthood chapters told NBC Bay Area that demand from out-of-state patients at California clinics has actually been up for months already due to policies in other states.
“I think people are going to be as creative as possible, the people who have the funds are getting on planes and flying, we’re seeing other people drive here,” Cross said.
Autry's organization is still raising money to secure a ship and retrofit it for medical use. Once that happens, she says they'll put the captain, crew and medical team aboard and set sail.
Autry and her team maintain the process is legal in federal waters. Still, they expect legal challenges from those states every step of the way. The PRROWESS team has already tapped multiple lawyers to help them as they continue with this voyage.
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Amazon’s financial shell game let it create an “impossible” monopoly
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!
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For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.
Pro-monopoly economists embody Ely Devons's famous aphorism that "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’":
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse
Rather than using the way the world actually works as their starting point for how to think about it, they build elaborate models out of abstract principles like "rational actors." The resulting mathematical models are so abstractly elegant that it's easy to forget that they're just imaginative exercises, disconnected from reality:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful
These models predicted that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power. Even if they became a monopoly – in the sense of dominating sales of various kinds of goods – the company still wouldn't get monopoly power.
For example, if Amazon tried to take over a category by selling goods below cost ("predatory pricing"), then rivals could just wait until the company got tired of losing money and put prices back up, and then those rivals could go back to competing. And if Amazon tried to keep the loss-leader going indefinitely by "cross-subsidizing" the losses with high-margin profits from some other part of its business, rivals could sell those high margin goods at a lower margin, which would lure away Amazon customers and cut the supply lines for the price war it was fighting with its discounted products.
That's what the model predicted, but it's not what happened in the real world. In the real world, Amazon was able use its access to the capital markets to embark on scorched-earth predatory pricing campaigns. When diapers.com refused to sell out to Amazon, the company casually committed $100m to selling diapers below cost. Diapers.com went bust, Amazon bought it for pennies on the dollar and shut it down:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18563379/amazon-predatory-pricing-antitrust-law
Investors got the message: don't compete with Amazon. They can remain predatory longer than you can remain solvent.
Now, not everyone shared the antitrust establishment's confidence that Amazon couldn't create a durable monopoly with market power. In 2017, Lina Khan – then a third year law student – published "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," a landmark paper arguing that Amazon had all the tools it needed to amass monopoly power:
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
Today, Khan is chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that builds on some of the theories from that paper. One outcome of that suit is an unprecedented look at Amazon's internal operations. But, as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Stacy Mitchell describes in a piece for The Atlantic, key pieces of information have been totally redacted in the court exhibits:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/amazon-profits-antitrust-ftc/677580/
The most important missing datum: how much money Amazon makes from each of its lines of business. Amazon's own story is that it basically breaks even on its retail operation, and keeps the whole business afloat with profits from its AWS cloud computing division. This is an important narrative, because if it's true, then Amazon can't be forcing up retail prices, which is the crux of the FTC's case against the company.
Here's what we know for sure about Amazon's retail business. First: merchants can't live without Amazon. The majority of US households have Prime, and 90% of Prime households start their ecommerce searches on Amazon; if they find what they're looking for, they buy it and stop. Thus, merchants who don't sell on Amazon just don't sell. This is called "monopsony power" and it's a lot easier to maintain than monopoly power. For most manufacturers, a 10% overnight drop in sales is a catastrophe, so a retailer that commands even a 10% market-share can extract huge concessions from its suppliers. Amazon's share of most categories of goods is a lot higher than 10%!
What kind of monopsony power does Amazon wield? Well, for one thing, it is able to levy a huge tax on its sellers. Add up all the junk-fees Amazon charges its platform sellers and it comes out to 45-51%:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos
Competitive businesses just don't have 45% margins! No one can afford to kick that much back to Amazon. What is a merchant to do? Sell on Amazon and you lose money on every sale. Don't sell on Amazon and you don't get any business.
The only answer: raise prices on Amazon. After all, Prime customers – the majority of Amazon's retail business – don't shop for competitive prices. If Amazon wants a 45% vig, you can raise your Amazon prices by a third and just about break even.
But Amazon is wise to that: they have a "most favored nation" rule that punishes suppliers who sell goods more cheaply in rival stores, or even on their own site. The punishments vary, from banishing your products to page ten million of search-results to simply kicking you off the platform. With publishers, Amazon reserves the right to lower the prices they set when listing their books, to match the lowest price on the web, and paying publishers less for each sale.
That means that suppliers who sell on Amazon (which is anyone who wants to stay in business) have to dramatically hike their prices on Amazon, and when they do, they also have to hike their prices everywhere else (no wonder Prime customers don't bother to search elsewhere for a better deal!).
Now, Amazon says this is all wrong. That 45-51% vig they claim from business customers is barely enough to break even. The company's profits – they insist – come from selling AWS cloud service. The retail operation is just a public service they provide to us with cross-subsidy from those fat AWS margins.
This is a hell of a claim. Last year, Amazon raked in $130 billion in seller fees. In other words: they booked more revenue from junk fees than Bank of America made through its whole operation. Amazon's junk fees add up to more than all of Meta's revenues:
https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/AMZN-Q4-2023-Earnings-Release.pdf
Amazon claims that none of this is profit – it's just covering their operating expenses. According to Amazon, its non-AWS units combined have a one percent profit margin.
Now, this is an eye-popping claim indeed. Amazon is a public company, which means that it has to make thorough quarterly and annual financial disclosures breaking down its profit and loss. You'd think that somewhere in those disclosures, we'd find some details.
You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. Amazon's disclosures do not break out profits and losses by segment. SEC rules actually require the company to make these per-segment disclosures:
https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3524&context=lawreview#:~:text=If%20a%20company%20has%20more,income%20taxes%20and%20extraordinary%20items.
That rule was enacted in 1966, out of concern that companies could use cross-subsidies to fund predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices. But over the years, the SEC just…stopped enforcing the rule. Companies have "near total managerial discretion" to lump business units together and group their profits and losses in bloated, undifferentiated balance-sheet items:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2021/dec/crouching-tiger-hidden-dragons
As Mitchell points you, it's not just Amazon that flouts this rule. We don't know how much money Google makes on Youtube, or how much Apple makes from the App Store (Apple told a federal judge that this number doesn't exist). Warren Buffett – with significant interest in hundreds of companies across dozens of markets – only breaks out seven segments of profit-and-loss for Berkshire Hathaway.
Recall that there is one category of data from the FTC's antitrust case against Amazon that has been completely redacted. One guess which category that is! Yup, the profit-and-loss for its retail operation and other lines of business.
These redactions are the judge's fault, but the real fault lies with the SEC. Amazon is a public company. In exchange for access to the capital markets, it owes the public certain disclosures, which are set out in the SEC's rulebook. The SEC lets Amazon – and other gigantic companies – get away with a degree of secrecy that should disqualify it from offering stock to the public. As Mitchell says, SEC chairman Gary Gensler should adopt "new rules that more concretely define what qualifies as a segment and remove the discretion given to executives."
Amazon is the poster-child for monopoly run amok. As Yanis Varoufakis writes in Technofeudalism, Amazon has actually become a post-capitalist enterprise. Amazon doesn't make profits (money derived from selling goods); it makes rents (money charged to people who are seeking to make a profit):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital
Profits are the defining characteristic of a capitalist economy; rents are the defining characteristic of feudalism. Amazon looks like a bazaar where thousands of merchants offer goods for sale to the public, but look harder and you discover that all those stallholders are totally controlled by Amazon. Amazon decides what goods they can sell, how much they cost, and whether a customer ever sees them. And then Amazon takes $0.45-51 out of every dollar. Amazon's "marketplace" isn't like a flea market, it's more like the interconnected shops on Disneyland's Main Street, USA: the sign over the door might say "20th Century Music Company" or "Emporium," but they're all just one store, run by one company.
And because Amazon has so much control over its sellers, it is able to exercise power over its buyers. Amazon's search results push down the best deals on the platform and promote results from more expensive, lower-quality items whose sellers have paid a fortune for an "ad" (not really an ad, but rather the top spot in search listings):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute
This is "Amazon's pricing paradox." Amazon can claim that it offers low-priced, high-quality goods on the platform, but it makes $38b/year pushing those good deals way, way down in its search results. The top result for your Amazon search averages 29% more expensive than the best deal Amazon offers. Buy something from those first four spots and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average, you need to pick the seventeenth item on the search results page to get the best deal:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645/
For 40 years, pro-monopoly economists claimed that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power over buyers and sellers. Today, Amazon exercises that power so thoroughly that its junk-fee revenues alone exceed the total revenues of Bank of America. Amazon's story – that these fees barely stretch to covering its costs – assumes a nearly inconceivable level of credulity in its audience. Regrettably – for the human race – there is a cohort of senior, highly respected economists who possess this degree of credulity and more.
Of course, there's an easy way to settle the argument: Amazon could just comply with SEC regs and break out its P&L for its e-commerce operation. I assure you, they're not hiding this data because they think you'll be pleasantly surprised when they do and they don't want to spoil the moment.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees
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Image: Doc Searls (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/4863121221/
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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crossharrmoved · 10 months
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MORE ATSV ANIMAL CROSSING VILLAGERSSS
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namonaki-arts · 4 months
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Many chibi gifts!!
OC credits (in order): Polaris - @crimson-chains Fabiano - @kaizuart Ochre - @dafox19 Ricky - @byronicbi Cactapus - @kairahara
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portwinestains · 11 months
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my gwenmj sense flared when spider-gwen interacted with her mj for .5 seconds in spider-verse... 616 gwen/mj always living rent free in my HEART
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mathysphere · 11 months
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Checkit out! An ornament for the mathematically-minded: a Koch Snowflake, fourth iteration. It's one of the most famous fractals, and a personal favorite aesthetically, too.
Fun fact: as the number of iterations goes up toward infinity, the perimeter of the snowflake does, too, but the area doesn't-- a snowflake with infinite iterations would have an infinite perimeter, but its area would be 160% of the area of the original starting triangle.
This one's up in Xstitch Magazine's Christmas issue now! Photo is by Stacy Grant, who works for the magazine, and you can get 20% off with the code 'Issue24Star' :)
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vikingknight90 · 11 months
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Miles and Gwen really went from nearly admitting they’re in love, talking about how Gwen is destined to fall for Spider-Man ("but it doesn’t end well"), nearly holding hands and Miles being all “First time for everything right?” *nudge nudge* Gwen smiles and leans against him, few hours later they meet Pavitr who outright goes ohh Miles is in loove and they’re both like ahdgshsh we’re not in love ha-ha who told you that like come on you dorks, which is it 😭
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sciderman · 6 months
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amazing spider-man #95
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Round one
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The Pogues 
Formed in: 1982
Genres: celtic punk, folk punk
Lineup: Shane MacGowan- vocals
James Fearnley- accordion
Jen Finer- guitar, banjo, mandala
Terry Woods-  mandolin, cittern 
Peter “Spider” Stacy-  vocals
Andrew Ranken-  drums, percussion 
Cait O’Riordan- bass replaced by
Darryl Hunt-  bass
Philip Chevron-  guitar
Albums from the 80s: 
Red Roses for Me (1984)
Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash (1985)
If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988)
Peace and Love (1988)
Propaganda: There is really no one else like them. Landing in the middle of the New Romantic era in London, the Pogues married punk’s contrarian tendencies with the fire of Irish folk music. They made music about displaced immigrants, political prisoners, and Celtic warriors, including the most popular Christmas song year after year in the British Isles, ‘Fairytale of New York’ . 
I wasn’t prepared for how sad I’d be when Shane MacGowan died this past November, even though I’d been expecting it for a while. 
The Cross
Formed in: 1987
Genres: Pop rock, dance-rock, hard rock
Lineup: Roger Taylor- lead vocals and rhythm guitar (of queen)
Spike Edney- keyboard and backing vocals (of queen)
Clayton Moss- lead guitar and backing vocals
Peter Noone- bass guitar and backing vocals
Josh Macrae- drums and backing vocals
Albums from the 80s:
Shove It (1988)
Propaganda: roger and spike and clayton make me drop 2 my knees g o d
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Skelly's Masterlist
Updated to include only fandoms I am actively writing in: Call of Duty, Far Cry 5, Baldur's Gate 3
All my fics can be found on AO3 as well. If you're here for the art you can search #skellysketches (my art tag)
(Please feel free to ask to be tagged for any of my ongoing fics/series, I only ask that you are 18+ and your age is in your bio)
AO3
**All fics considered 18+ - Minors DNI
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Ten Years Earlier... (18+ smut)
All Along the Watchtower (Complete)
Evening of Score (Ongoing)
Homecoming (18+ smut)
Injury Kiss prompt
Comfort kiss prompt
Merry Christmas Darling -2023 COD Holiday Challenge (18+ smut)
Protective prompt
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American Beasts (Ongoing Fic)
Kakia (Herald/Role Swap AU - Ongoing Fic)
The Animal in Me (Werewolf AU) - *ON HIATUS*
Only You (Soulmate AU) - *ON HIATUS*
The Wolf and the Wildcat (Jacob Seed x Fem!OC)
Wind Me Up (18+ smut)
The Hunt (18+ smut)
The Game (18+ smut)
Prompt: "I told you to stay still" (18+ smut)
Prompt: "I think you lost your underwear somewhere" (18+ smut)
Adaptation (18+ smut)
House Broken (18+ smut)
Great Motivation (18+ smut)
Will to Power (18+ smut)
Reunion Kiss prompt
The Baptist and The Blade (John Seed x Fem!OC)
The Baptist and the Blade (18+ smut)
Just Say Yes (18+ smut)
Temptation (18+ smut)
Absolute Opposites Attract Absolutely (Staci Pratt x Fem!OC)
This is Love (18+ smut)
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And When You Move, I'm Moved (18+ smut)
Untitled snippet
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staciesfeminineplace · 3 months
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Me standing in front of the Yule tree. Being me was my present to myself.
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womenwwe · 1 year
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Behind the scenes of WrestleMania 39: Part Two
Get a candid look behind the scenes of WrestleMania 39, featuring photos of Roman Reigns, Logan Paul, Rhea Ripley and more WWE Superstars.
[x]
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aliice-darling · 9 months
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So, this is what ppl do here right?
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ardenteclipse · 3 days
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makesitprecious · 2 years
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A TRAGEDY
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Basil & Cleopatra // Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out; // Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out // (vi) Richard Siken, War of the Foxes // Richard Siken, Planet of Love
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zero-max · 9 months
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I keep forgetting I can post here but, I've recently been toying around with the idea of making some Miles centric au content, so here's what I've cooked up recently.
- Miles gets yeeted through the collider during the first Kingpin fight, and ends up stranded in a bizarre subsection of the spiderverse commonly known a the void (it kinda looks like the hologram Miguel showed Miles but on a larger scale)
- He's trapped in void the for the better part of 2 years (he's 16 instead of 15 during the main events of atsv now so everyone's aged up a tad and everything happens way letter than in canon)
-He ends up running into a being that refers to itself as "The System", a glorified sentient supercomputer created in the wake of the spiderverse to monitor it and protect it (so like what spidey hq does but to a terrifying degree) and contains knowledge related to the creation of the spiderverse and the origins of the spiderman mythos
- Miles winds up working for The System in an attempt to find a way home, and learns how to repair dimensional rifts, how to travel through different dimensions without using a watch and a handful of other things to make his dimension hopping shenanigans less painful
- He's still bitten here, so Miles gets all his cool spidey powers with some neat upgrades courtesy of the The System
- 1610 Peter doesn't die here so he takes over for Miles and helps Peter B and the others get home and stop Kingpin. Peter is constantly thinking about what happened to Miles and feels super guilty about letting him die (thankfully he's not but he doesn't know that)
- Peter ends ups working for Miguel (Migs is not too happy about it but he has to admit Peters good at what he does) and has frequent teams up with Peter B when he's not taking care of Mayday
- Miles pulls some vigilante shit in order to please The System, and ends up leaving the void semi frequently at it's request, since the spiderverse has been a bit more unstable than normal
- He remains pretty elusive for the first couple of months, mostly showing up near the end of fights to deal the finishing blow and leaves the anomalies for Miguel and co to deal with
- The System hates Miguel and his team believing they're meddling with things they shouldn't be and fucking up the spiderverse in the process (in reality The System really doesn't deal with any of the problems Miguel's team does opting out for only dealing with problems it deems worth its time)
- The whole Spot thing still happens, but Peter takes the fault this time and Gwen has to help him sort things out but by the time she tracks The Spot down he's already gone
- Miles saw the whole thing and it's by this point he's getting real sick of putting up with The Systems bs so he decides to find spider hq and help them stop The Spot on his own without it's help
- The Mumbattan fight is basically the same only Peter's there, but Miles shows up once the fights over to close the rift in Pav's dimension and is promptly dragged to spidey hq
- From there he's taken straight to Miguel who demands to know who he is and what's he's been doing hopping from dimension to dimension and getting in there way
- Miles doesn't explain much (he's looking worse for ware after fixing the dimensional rift) simply telling him they have the same goal and that he can help him defeat The Spot and stabilize their dimensions
That's about the most I have as far as concrete plot points go but, I'll potentially make a separate post that goes into more detail about Miles, The System and anything else I think is worth mentioning.
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