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.

Peppers are a north/south American thing, there aren’t any native to the old world, so it has to be a coincidence.

I just read into it a little bit. Seems that I was wrong, and “tar paper” is typically not completely waterproof, it’s just water resistant. Most stuff these days isn’t technically tar paper, either, it’s roofing felt. I guess it’s only called paper if it’s made from cellulose. Apparently they did make the felt from asbestos back in the day.

Seems like it’s definitely common enough to use it under flooring, especially if it’s a thinner grade.

I haven’t heard of tar paper being used as underlayment, but I have used big rolls of paper for that. In my understanding, the point for the paper is to allow the wood to be able to move seasonally, and to prevent squeaking.

I don’t think I’d want to use tar paper, though, cause it’s hydrophobic. Whatever finish is going on the wood is going to also be a water barrier, and it’s a general rule of thumb to never have 2 water barriers next to each other in a house. That’s how you get trapped water that can damage stuff. If you spill water, and it makes it in a little gap between floorboards, it could just sit there indefinitely.

I could be wrong, though.

There are a lot of problems with it. Lots of people could probably tell you about security concerns and wasted energy. Also there’s the whole comically silly concept of them marketing having AI write your texts and emails for you, and then having it summarize the texts and emails you get. Just needlessly complicating things.

Conceptually, though, most people aren’t too against it. In my opinion, all the stuff they are labeling “generative AI” isn’t really “AI” or “generative”. There are lots of ways that people define AI, and without being too pedantic about definitions, the main reason I think they call it that, other than marketing, is that they are really trying to sway public opinion by controlling language. Scraping all sorts of copywritten material, and re-jumbling it to spit out something similar, is arguably something we should prohibit as copyright infringement. It’s enough of a gray area to get away with short term. By convincing people with the very language they use to describe it that they aren’t just putting other people’s material in a mixer, they are “generating new content”, they hope to have us roll over and sign off on what they’ve been doing.

Saying that humans create stories by jumbling together previous stories is a BS cop out, too. Obviously, we do, but humans have not, and do not have to give computers that same right. Also, LLMs are very complex, but they are also way way less complex than human minds. The way they put together text is closer to running a story through Google translate 10 times than it is to a human using a story for inspiration.

There are real, definite benefits of using LLMs, but selling it as AI and trying to force it into everything is a gimmick.

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.

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.

There’s actually more methanol in the tails than the foreshots due to complicated chemistry.

They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like “34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor”. Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here’s a good writeup about it.

Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store “denatured alcohol”), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.

Sure, people love it when you make your chocolate iridescent, but hate when their pork is, lol.

Just to add on, having genetic variation in a particular branch is also called a botanical sport, and the example in that wiki page is the same thing happening in this pic.

I think it really goes back through history. Finland was a possession of Sweden and then Russia. The nobility would have spoken either of those languages depending on who was in charge, and ethnic Finns were essentially pawns for the larger powers, and the finnish language wasn’t even written down much.

This changed when Russia started to crack down on Finnish culture, leading to a surge in pro-Finnish sentiment. People even changed their names from Swedish versions to finnish versions, and went from using “Christian” names to names from finnish mythology or culture. Actually, it’s somewhat similar to how black Americans changed naming conventions in the Civil rights era. The very concept of finnish-ness was somewhat of a working class concept. This, combined with a similar law of jante type belief meant there was and is much more of a focus on the collective good than in other countries.

During the Russian revolution, a Civil War erupted between left wing and right wing, with the right wing wanting a German aristocratic monarchy over finland. The right wing actually won, but it was very short lived because Germany lost WW1 right aftwards, and a liberal democracy was formed. Finland was super poor, but started to build itself up as it’s own country.

When WW2 rolled around, most people are familiar with the Winter War where they held their ground against a Russian invasion. Most people aren’t as familiar with the Continuation War against Russia, where they (with the support of germany) continued to fight against Russia, or the Lapland war, where they actually had to fight against Germany to kick them out of the country. The Germans actually used scorched earth on finland as they retreated, knowing they were losing WW2.

After all of that, a huge swath of finland was destroyed by the Germans, or annexed by the Russians, leaving many homeless. Finland had to provide for those people, so homes were rebuilt rapidly throughout the country. Since they were in the soviet sphere of influence, but they weren’t a Warsaw pact country, they didn’t get any assistance from the eastern bloc (and they actually had to pay reparations as an axis country). They were also not included in the Marshall plan that helped provide recovery to western Europe.

They survived as a people by taking care of each other, and they are very proud of that. If you go to a Finnish museum, next to works of art and science, you’ll see things like the baby box, or other displays about the establishment of the welfare state. Many countries have a welfare system, but treat it like a dirty secret, while they celebrate what they were able to accomplish.

One last thing I think is really cool is that they are not afraid to experiment with policies. Many governments will do little trials of policy here and there, but not many go to the point of actually doing scientifically rigorous studies.

While I agree with you, I think Microsoft as a giant corporation could still go for the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach, and delete your content and make you appeal if you disagree.

Yes. It cooks faster with the fan. Btw, it’s also referred to as a “convection” oven as opposed to a “conventional” oven. Air fryers are just small convection ovens.

I bought a variety pack of scouring pads and brushes that I can attach to my cordless drill. Super handy for cleaning stuff that would otherwise take some major elbow grease. Probably bad for my drill, but it’s worth it to me.

Can confirm, I have the same set, and I do probably use them every day. It’s one of those tools that you don’t realize how often you need it until you start using it.

This seems like it’s flipped around backwards. The picture says you have to pump more than 4 gallons if you are getting E15, but the explanation seems to explain why someone pumping E10 would want to pump more than 4 gallons.

I bet the real reason is that someone could pump a couple of gallons of cheaper E15, knowing they’d actually receive E10, leaving the next person to actually get that gas.

For anyone not reading between the lines, taxes like sales taxes and property taxes are designed to disproportionately target those with lower income (i.e., regressive), while income tax is mostly supposed to target higher incomes (i.e. progressive).

Only if you live in New Jersey

And 7.62 is just .30 caliber rebranded