In this case, though, it probably wasn’t $3.80. That’s what the cost would have been to the owner of the gas station, but to the cashier, letting a customer walk with goods could cost them their job. Definitely a different risk/reward

Recyclability, too

Cigna doctors spend an average of 1.2 seconds per case. Their whole system is to deny everything right off the bat, and then they only have to potentially pay out for patients who have the resources to appeal.

If it is expired, I don’t think you can do it. Just if you are in the last year of validity.

Here is a really good article about the topic. The gist is that typically in mountaineering, there’s not often an official definition of the “start point”, but the “end point” is back at the start, so people who die midway on the return journey don’t “count”. The “top” should be easy to define, but often, the top of a mountain is a large area, and you aren’t going to hike around looking for which part is just barely the highest. Also, some true summits are habitually avoided as sacred places to the locals.

I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.

Oculus was founded by a shitty person who sold to Facebook and then went on to help make a company to bring Big Tech into surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. Basically, he’s trying to bring on an orwellian nightmare.

Oculus would have gone bad weather or not Facebook bought them.

A huge problem with the wine industry in America is that they’ve always tried to position themselves as a premium product with respect to other forms of alcohol. With respect to the information available to the consumer, the pricing seems to be random. Products that are aged understandably are going to cost more, and huge brands should be cheaper than small brands. Other than that, prices just seem to be set to correspond to whatever market segment they are targeting. A $20 bottle of wine may taste way better than a $15 bottle, but it could also be worse. There’s no indication of what could make the $20 bottle better than the $15 bottle other than the fact that it’s more expensive. Some brands put a little bit more info in, like the percentage of grapes, and sometimes they tell you where the grapes came from, but most consumers are just going to grab the cheaper bottle.

Contrast this with beer, where you know higher abv=more ingredients=more expensive, aged beers are more expensive, and beers from smaller or foreign breweries are more expensive. Breweries often tell you the exact ingredients that went in, so you can get a decent idea of what a beer will taste like before ordering, and you can make an informed decision to buy slightly more expensive products.

Wine is a little more tricky because there are fewer ingredients, and less processing, but they could absolutely give way more info. The wines that are good just try to market it as the magic of terroir in a bottle, rather than actually pointing out how and why they are better or taste different.

Lots of cars > lots of traffic > stopped cars > radiators don’t cool > cars break down > roads blocked

You essentially gamble a little bit. Most people get insurance through work (or they are part of a family plan). Generally, you’ll have a few plans to choose from. If you are older, or have recurring issues, you might pick a plan that’s a little more expensive, but covers more costs. If you are young and healthy, you might pick a cheap plan, essentially betting that you won’t really need healthcare other than your yearly checkup and some vaccines.

The biggest thing with healthcare in the US is that it’s very complex. Even if you have insurance that should cover something, it can be hard to find a doctor that’s part of your insurance, so people often put off going to the doctor, which is part of the reason why costs are high. Teeth and eyes have separate insurance cause they are optional, apparently.

You basically have “premiums” that are your monthly payment. If you get your insurance through work, they cover a percentage of that; generally a pretty hefty amount of it. They usually don’t outright tell you what percentage, though, so many people think insurance is cheap, and get a rude awakening when they lose a job, and suddenly can’t afford $1000 a month when they used to be paying $100. Those premiums are taken out of your paycheck pre-tax, too, which gives you even more of a benefit if you have a job.

Depending on the “style” of the plans, they cover things differently. They all (I think) cover “preventative care” completely, which includes your yearly checkup, vaccines, and birth control for women. After that, some plans have “co-pays”, which are set costs for a few things, like $25 for a normal doctors visit, $50 for a specialist, $100 for an emergency room visit. Some just cover a percentage of those costs, and some don’t pay anything until you hit a limit (the deductible). Finally, there’s an “out of pocket” limit. That’s most you’ll have to pay in a year, after which point the insurance covers everything.

All together, I pay less than $1000 a year for healthcare, but if I got really sick, and needed a bunch of expensive healthcare, I would quickly hit my out of pocket maximum, which I think is like $6,000. I could cover that, but many people cannot cover an expense like that on short notice.

The number on bills is very misleading. The hospitals know that insurance will negotiate down, so they start high, and then after the negotiations, insurance will pay some or all of the remainder. If you don’t have insurance, you typically don’t pay that whole number on the bill, either, cause the hospitals recognize that they dont have to adjust it up for the negotiation. You can still negotiate on your own, though.

Making the panels high enough off the ground with sparse enough supports to be convenient adds a lot of expense. I mainly see it in paid parking lots where the shade can be sold as a value add.

Basically, from my understanding, the idea was that it wasn’t a defense in the sense of the person saying they were innocent. The defense was in claiming that an assult/murder was not premeditated, hence the “panic”.

I was thinking about potential for inaccuracy due to refraction from thermal inversion layers or other temperature anomalies, but then I realized that the refraction would equally affect the optics, provided that the optics remain on target throughout the firing.

With 17 year cicadas popping up, people were eating them like shrimp. There were actually warnings put out by health agencies not to try it if you had a shellfish allergy.

Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn’t have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it’s fine. That’s a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.

Fold your clothes immediately after drying, while they are still warm. Also, dryers that can add steam really help if you’ve got a few things that need wrinkle removal. Also, handheld steamers are cheap.

Mostly, avoid needing to iron by avoiding wearing formal business attire.

The current tunnel is a relic from a long time ago when trains were slower, and there were competing train lines that had to try and fit through baltimore where they could. If you look at a map of the train line, it actually sharply curves out of the way of that currently Black neighborhood to go under the currently white neighborhood. This means the top speed is 30 mph. Under the new plan, they could hit 100 mph.

There are other problems with the current tunnel, mainly just down to being old, and those you could fix by redoing it in the same spot, but that wouldn’t fix the speed issue, because the speed is governed by the curvature (and grade).

Yeah, definitely. Baltimore also has a good record of combatting that in the case of highway 70, too. In this case, though, it’s just tunneling under that neighborhood, not carving a path through it. Oddly enough, further down the track, there are ~20 people getting displaced (might have already happened), but that’s in a different neighborhood, and I think that would have happened no matter where the tunnel was moved.

This project is exclusively electric. But overall, yeah, I think trains are way way less worry than the cars that are already there

The problem is that the current tunnel has a sharp curve, and to make that curve less sharp, they need to increase the radius. That puts the path of a good new tunnel under a new neighborhood, which happens to be Black because most Baltimore neighborhoods are. Those 14 options are likely all under the same neighborhood.