The answer is “it depends”. There are so many hoops and loopholes and gotchas built into the system that 2 identical people with the exact same background and ailment(s) could go see the exact same medical staff and yet still end up having to pay 2 completely different amounts for their care. But it’s more complicated than that, because there are a myriad factors that come into play (insurance versus none, location/state of residence, etc) so there’s no one concise and accurate answer to these types of questions.

Most non-wealthy people who don’t have insurance, but who don’t qualify for government/public medical care, simply go without care. Or they use the emergency room loophole to get some kind of treatment. The loophole, with lots of nuance and caveats, is that the emergency room has to at least give you enough treatment to temporarily stabilize your condition, regardless of your ability to pay.

For check-ups and counseling - In a lot of places that sort of stuff requires you to pay up front. You can sometimes haggle or work out a payment plan. If you’re poor enough to qualify for government aid, it may be free. Otherwise, you’re expected to have insurance and pay the co-pay. If that doesn’t apply, these places usually have a “cash” price that’s slightly more affordable, but still usually require payment ahead of time.

For meds, you basically always pay up front. There’s really no concept of pharmacies providing medications in a manner where you can pay later. No money means no meds. It’s also ridiculous to even ask how much a person would expect to pay for meds, it could be as little as a few USD to thousands, really depends on the meds, quantity needed, location, etc.

Xrays - This is where debt might actually come into play. You usually pay for these after the fact. If you go to the doctor, you might have to pay the standard fee (or copay) up front, but all the other services/tests/etc are charged after the fact. So you’ll end up getting a bill after you’ve gotten the xray and consultation. To be honest, I don’t know the average out of pocket cost for an x-ray if you don’t have insurance, but it would differ from location to location and region to region. If you don’t pay that bill, you’ll get harassed and most likely you’ll have to change doctors because the office you owe money to won’t see you again until your debt is paid or you’ve worked out a payment plan.

For people with insurance, there’s pretty much always a maximum yearly out of pocket amount, after which things are basically all paid for by insurance. Again there are nuances and caveats. And the maximum out of pocket varies by insurance policy, number of people insured, etc, but $8,000 - $20,000 are not uncommon amounts. To be honest, I don’t even know what mine is, I’ve never actually reached it. Not everything is covered by the maximum out of pocket, though.

$27,000 medical debt could possibly be from someone who was uninsured or it may be several years of medical debt.

To give you an idea of how crazy the system is: I had a hairline fracture several years ago and what was deemed as “good” insurance. By the time everything was done, it ended up costing me around $3,000 out of pocket. That’s for co-pays, x-rays, medication, etc over the course of months.

On the other hand: A family member of mine had a heart attack, required emergency surgery, had no insurance, and had no money to pay for anything. In the end cost them less than a few hundred USD out of pocket. Hospital wiped the debt clean. Government programs and drug company programs paid for meds. Eventually disability stuff kicked in and took care of everything else.

I dry them in a food dehydrator or in the oven. There’s no way I could leave them out, exposed like this in my part of the world.

My first thought as well: Those would be covered in flies, ants, and/or other bugs if I tried it around here (which is not Mexico). It makes me wonder if this photo is taken some place that doesn’t really have much in the way of bugs, as hard as that is to imagine, or if they go to great lengths to kill all the pests in the area to prevent them from taking over the tomato yield.

1. Sperm is not an animal.

2. Sperm will drown in lotion, tissue paper, toilets, mouths, assholes, various fruit, couches apparently, condoms, and probably an order of magnitude or few more places than just this small list I’ve constructed.

3. Sperm don’t have a mouth and thus cannot bite.

It doesn’t seem to be a super common, general thing where I live. However, there are some more prone to it than others, like places that have a bar and/or otherwise serve alcohol. Typically though it’s only the nights they do live music and that’s most often weekends and around specific holidays.

Mostly I just avoid pretty much any establishment if they’ve got live entertainment for the night and I’m there to eat as well as talk with others. I avoid any that are particularly egregious in terms of loud music. I have been with a group where we asked if the volume could be turned down on the speakers one night at a live event where we were one of only a few tables in the entire place and it was clear that nobody was particularly interested in damaging their hearing. The manager slowly slinked over to the performers about 5 - 10 minutes after the request, and they stopped playing shortly after.

Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.

I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.

After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.

Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.

But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.

Never have I ever intentionally shoplifted anything from a store.

Thou shalt thank or otherwise acknowledge thine responders whomst volunteer their time to provide helpful comments and posts.

Yes. They stole everything of value in my home, which sadly was not much, and they killed the family pets while doing it. No clue who did it, cops tend not to care much when this sort of thing happens to poor people, and they never tracked down who the culprits were. Definitely did affect me and yes I care.

Depends on the type of “time travel”. Backwards time travel doesn’t seem plausible, so I guess we’re talking only about 1 way physical transport time travel. That kind of time travel is achieved either by traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light or via intense gravity, unless you consider something like being cryogenically frozen and then reanimated at some point in the future to be “time travel”.

As far as least amount of impact? I guess in terms of impact, its best to travel to the nearest point in the future that you possibly can, so that hopefully very little has changed and you’re still more or less the same person living the same life (with just a short gap from leaving the present and arriving in the future). Otherwise, you could take a huge risk and try to travel to the distant future to a time when all traces of your current life have disappeared and peoples’ memory of you has long been forgotten.

♪ You’re so pretty. ♪

♪ Oh, so pretty. ♪

♪ You are pretty and witty and GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. ♪

The sky at night. I hope that there aren’t a lot of clouds and that the moon moves closer to the horizon so I can see some stars. It’s going to be super hot during the day, so I anticipate being inside for most of it this weekend. It will be nice to go out after sunset and enjoy some nature. Ideally I would like to sit out and enjoy the stars after dark and listen to the sound of crickets and frogs in the background.

I’m old and unlucky enough to have had many bad sexual experiences, for better or for worse. Unfortunately, by modern standards, I’ve definitely had some questionable experiences where I was taken advantage of (i.e. intoxicated, emotionally vulnerable, etc) and which would likely fall into the non-consensual category these days, so I’ll leave those out, since they were the worst by far.

I’ve had plenty of bad experiences that were totally on me, so for the sake of my own ego, I’m going to disqualify those.

The worse consensual experience I can recall at the moment was awkward and a bit weird. The guy was persistent and braggadocios while pursuing me. He was nice looking and we got along fine online and in phone calls, so when the conversation came up about meeting up for nothing serious, I was okay with that.

We hung out awhile before getting intimate and he was nice enough, nothing seemed off. It’s almost a stretch to call what we did together “sex”, though. He wasn’t able to get an erection. Not a problem honestly, there are still plenty of ways for two guys to have fun. We basically just snuggled together in bed.

At a certain point, though, he just started saying weird or off the wall stuff. I do not know if he had taken some drugs or if he was experiencing a mental health episode. It was like he was hallucinating that he could see the night sky even though we were indoors in his room with the curtains pulled, since he kept talking about how pretty the moon was and things of that nature. And he would ask me the same questions over and over so I know for sure something wasn’t quite right.

If it were maybe 15 years, I could very quickly identify some changes that would easily change the entire trajectory of my life.

At 10 years, it’s hard to say since by today’s perspective, I’ve had my life in reasonable order and heading in the right direction for the past decade. So there aren’t a lot of options to make different choices I’m certain would help me gain things personally. That being said:

I would make a more concerted effort to leave the job I had in 2014. It was a regrettable decision to stay as long as I did and a very toxic work environment for me. I could have made more money almost anywhere else and by that point I had met all the important and amazing people that worked there during my reign, so I wouldn’t have missed out on those friendships.

I do have much better employment skills than I had 10 years ago and most of what I know and do would still apply back then, so I guess I could make use of that to climb the ladder a bit faster and/or earn more money sooner in my career.

I suppose one day to day “exploit” would be that I’d know in advance if any specific purchase was a good decision or not. For instance, I’d know that the car I was going to buy ended up being a fantastic choice or that the piece of crap bookshelf was only going to last me a year before it started to disintegrate at which point I would have to replace it. This could be useful for saving money, since at the very least I could avoid purchasing the stuff that I know would not last or live up to expectations.

I did not have a lot of money back then and certainly not enough to make good use of any stock market foreknowledge from today turn into a big payday. I don’t keep up with lottery numbers. I’m not a sports person, so I wouldn’t / couldn’t make any money off that kind of betting.

If I were motivated enough, I might try to teach myself some music / music production skills and then start releasing my own version of popular songs from the future that haven’t been released yet. Maybe I’d luck out and end up with a lucrative music career! Or similarly, I might try to figure out the patenting process and then start patenting ideas for stuff that had not yet been invented, then do my best to become a bit of a patent troll.

There’s a slim chance I could save the lives of some relatives, but honestly that’s hard to know. I had one family member die suddenly of a heart attack and another that died of an accidental drug overdose. I also had a friend that ignored people’s advice to go see a doctor and ended up the problem she was having was cancer, which she passed away from. Apparently, one of her doctors even told the family that if she had gotten treatment a little sooner, things could have turned out quite differently. We’d been telling her to go for at least a year, but if I could go back I would try a lot harder and be more persistent.

Where I live, the big 3 are mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise.

If I had to limit it to the “big 3” you listed, I would have to go for mustard. There are so many different types and of the options listed, mustard is easily the healthiest (or can be the healthiest) since a basic mustard is going to be low in sodium, sugar, and fat while also containing healthy phytonutrients.

Mustard is also much more versatile than folks in my part of the world give it credit for. It seems like a cultural thing / learned behavior rather than based on actual taste preferences. For instance, a fairly bland yellow mustard actually goes well with french fries. A spicy mustard (the types that are almost like horseradish) goes well with a variety of roasted veggies like broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower. Honey mustard works well with chicken in various forms. Lots of cheeses pair well with different types of mustard. I could go on, but I’ll stop here.

Since the majority of folks are discussing condiments that aren’t in your “big 3”, I would say that my actual favorite condiment is hot sauce. I’m not a connoisseur by any means and I don’t have refined tastes. I don’t even like super spicy hot sauces. But I do use hot sauce of some type with almost every meal and I go through a lot more of that than mustard or ketchup. Granted, hot sauces tend to be high in sodium, so I try not to go overboard.

This seems like it involves gore.

I’ll have some cake please. Nothing fancy, no frosting, just plane.

Unless your life insurance policy is all paid up and your Earthly affairs are in order, I hope it’s not a Boeing.

I was in the market for a docking station. There was a particular brand that was showing up in recommendations, was well-rated, and had the specs I was looking for. I found it on Amazon, but I avoid buying from that place as much as possible, so I checked the vendor’s website directly.

They had the dock for sale on their own website, so I proceeded to purchase from there. However, when I was almost done with checking out, I saw that they were asking for / suggesting a tip. That’s honestly despicable for an online store and way past the line for me. So, I did some more research, found a different brand of dock, and bought that instead.

Looking back, I should have done what you did and notify jsaux of their missed sale, but I honestly just assumed it was a pointless endeavor. Maybe one day I’ll go back and see if it’s still there on their checkout, and if so, let them know they’ve missed at least one sale.

Anecdotally speaking, I’ve been suspecting this was happening already with code related AI as I’ve been noticing a pretty steep decline in code quality of the code suggestions various AI tools have been providing.

Some of these tools, like GitHub’s AI product, are trained on their own code repositories. As more and more developers use AI to help generate code and especially as more novice level developers rely on AI to help learn new technologies, more of that AI generated code is getting added to the repos (in theory) that are used to train the AI. Not that all AI code is garbage, but there’s enough that is garbage in my experience, that I suspect it’s going to be a garbage in, garbage out affair sans human correction/oversight. Currently, as far as I can tell, these tools aren’t really using much in the way of good metrics to rate whether the code they are training on is quality or not, nor whether it actually even works or not.

More and more often I’m getting ungrounded output (the new term for hallucinations) when it comes to code, rather than the actual helpful and relevant stuff that had me so excited when I first started using these products. And I worry that it’s going to get worse. I hope not, of course, but it is a little concerning when the AI tools are more consistently providing useless / broken suggestions.

I don’t know that I fully qualify as “gave up using Linux”, but I gave it up for daily personal use, so maybe that counts? I’m definitely not opposed to picking it back up again one day, though! And I do have a Linux device (Steam Deck) that I use frequently, so it’s not all doom and gloom.

For probably 10+ years, I used various flavors of Linux on my personal laptop. But around 8 years ago or so, my then current laptop was getting old and getting to the point where it needed to be replaced. At the same time, I was also wanting to get back into gaming so I opted for a laptop that came with Windows by default (Linux gaming at the time left a lot to be desired).

I did try to go the dual boot route with that laptop, but man it sucked. No matter what I tried, the touch screen functionality either didn’t work at all, or it was too buggy to be useful. The graphics card performance was terrible. That was still in the era where finding the right wifi drivers could be a chore, and even then they weren’t exactly the most stable. It was one problem after another. So, I gave up on Linux for personal use, entirely.

Now I have a different laptop that I specifically verified has decent Linux compatibility and there’s much better Linux support for games but at the end of the day, I just find that my time and interest in tinkering with the OS has diminished, so I’m sticking with what works (even if it’s FAR from perfect).