For anyone who’s confused as to how this sorcery could work, it’s due to the chemistry/physics of the battery. As batteries discharge, there is more crystal growth of the electrolyte. Crystals can store mechanical energy like a spring, while the electrolyte in solution absorbs energy. It’s like dropping a water balloon vs dropping a solid rubber ball.

I think body hair holds onto a considerable amount of water, so people without much body hair don’t carry as much water with them when they step out.

Usps has "informed delivery ", where they send you pictures of all of your mail before you get it, so you do know if you are getting something important.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the logic, and I just can’t get it to connect. Are they trying to say that although the ECOA gives them the responsibility, it doesn’t give them the power? Like paying someone to mow your lawn, and then saying they aren’t allowed on your property?

Or are they saying that the ECOA gives the FTC the power to challenge companies that discriminate by not giving credit to minorities, but not the power to challenge companies that discriminate by giving bad credit terms to minorities?

Bunch of city people want to destroy rural people’s lifestyles.

CAFOs are not “rural people’s lifestyle”. They are a relatively modern invention to create the largest amount of meat while employing the fewest people possible. Trying to defend them as “rural people’s lifestyle” is very disingenuous. If you want to defend them, there are reasonable arguments to make, like the price of food, the land use, water use, etc, compared to meat produced other ways.

Even if somehow having a corporation own 100,000 chickens that they raise down the road from you was an important part of your lifestyle, I cannot stand the constant argument that somehow, rural folks’ way of life is more important to preserve than urban folks’. As we make the climate worse, and pump out more pollution, and have more kids, and create more technology, everyone’s life is going to change. Rural folks have significantly more kids than urban folks and they produce more burden on the environment, yet somehow, it’s on people who live it cities who are supposed to bear the costs because we can’t possibly do anything that affects people who live rurally?

I, and most people, want small, family run operations to succeed. There’s no reason we have to protect Big Ag to keep small operations. Big Ag is the biggest threat to the little guys.

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

I didn’t even know there were non 24hr locations

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.

That’s exactly how you do it. It’s not same-day, but if you really need a passport same day, you probably messed something up, lol.

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

That’s how it has been in the US. Now, though, if you already have a passport, you can renew online and take the picture yourself, and get it mailed directly to you.

The thing that makes getting a passport slightly tricky to begin with in some circumstances is needing proper ID. In the US, there’s no generalized law saying that you have to have certain forms of ID. Most people use drivers licenses as ID, but obviously not everyone has one (by choice or as a consequence of drunk driving). There are a lot of people without ID, and there are ways to get ID, but they can be difficult for people without resources. A birth certificate is hard to get if you don’t have one already, especially if you don’t know where you were born.

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.

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.

Coffee beans aren’t beans. There are some beans that are roasted as a substitute for coffee, like the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree. In times of shortage, people have tried many things to replace coffee, like dandelion and chicory root. For the most part, the substitutes arent as good as the original, so people don’t stick with them. There’s a chance someone has tried to roast and brew pinto beans or whatever, but they probably taste bad.

Protesters and police don’t wear masks for covid, they wear them so they can’t be identified. Places like Hong Kong used them heavily before covid existed.

There are a lot of facists who pretend that any time a company chooses not to amplify their content, they are having their rights curtailed. They know that it’s not true, but if they complain loudly enough, they can convince companies to comply. They are also trying to use the Streisand effect to amplify their messages.

Any time they try to paint it as a free speech issue is a psy-op.

There are real free speech issues in the US, but they don’t look like this.

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.

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

that 12% of Americans (mostly men from 50 to 65) eat 50% of US beef

That’s a bit of a multistep twisting of the what the study said, vs the article, vs you.

The study showed that males were ~50% more likely to be in the category of “disproportionate beef consumers”. Likewise, people 50-65 were ~20-30% more likely to be in that category.

Sorry to be pedantic about it, but i don’t think males 50-65 are 12% of the population, so it sounded weird to me, lol.

Burgers for literally every meal?

Honestly, it isn’t actually that high of a bar. A “disproportionate beef eater” was categorized as 4 oz or more per day. That’s a single small burger. The whole study was based on a single day, on the assumption that if you ask enough people, a single day is representative (which makes sense). About half of people had no beef consumption on that day. Probably anyone who had a burger, or any particularly “beefy” meal would be in that 12%. Anyone who had a burrito, or pasta with meat sauce would be in between.

Honestly, it’s a sorta weird setup to me. If you eat 1 burger per week, and they ask you on that day, you’d be in that disproportionate category. Any other day of the week, you wouldn’t be. Basically 12% of people consume %50 of beef on a given day because that 12% had a beef meal that day. The next day, it could be a completely different 12% of the population.

If you took a random sample of 100 people and looked at yearly consumption, you probably wouldn’t have 12 people eating half of the beef.