Depending on how much you have set aside it can work, if you don’t have anything set aside and break a leg in a freak accident you can get stuck making massive payments on $20,000+ of medical debt and set yourself back several years. I’m sure it’s gotten more expensive now too, that was 6 years ago, and while I don’t have the debt any more, I also have complications from the surgery that still bother me that I feel like I can’t afford to get fixed.

That said, a high deductible plan can also leave you screwed, and doesn’t save you as much money as they act like it does. The pricing is different for insured vs uninsured patients, and your insurance company has basically negotiated the rates higher so you think they’re more useful than they actually are.

Also, when donating to local food pantries, remember that donations of money go farther and feed more than donations of food. Food pantries have access to economies of scale and can buy food cheaper than an individual can. So you’ll increase your impact if you just donate your cash straight to the food pantry, rather than going to the grocery store to buy food to donate. In addition, the food pantry will be able to more accurately supply what people actually need and stock what they are short on, rather than you just guessing.

Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.

They’re cable, the FCC has no authority over cable. Fair point on the lawsuit front though.

Not even in the Apocrypha, in Acts 12 they voted to replace Judas with Matthias. And then later in 1st Corinthians 15, Paul claimed to be an apostle. So, not even counting the apocrypha, at best Kirk would be the 15th.

My personal scores have increased by about 100 points in the last 6 months (I started getting worried about interest rates getting even worse and consolidated my credit cards under a personal loan with a definite payoff date).

At this point I really don’t care what my credit score is, but this feels like a bad time to have debt, and for once in my life I feel lucky that I’m able to be paying off debt faster than I can take on more - which really hasn’t been the case since I went to university in 2007 (and never finished for financial reasons).

Without hardware decoding, it will take more compute to decompress, but sites usually wait to fully roll out new codecs until hardware decoding is more ubiquitous, because of how many people use low-powered streaming sticks and Smart TVs.

It’s not for the end user at this point, it’s for YouTube/streaming companies to spend less on bandwidth at existing resolutions. Even a 5% decrease in size for similar quality could save millions in bandwidth costs over a year for YouTube or Netflix.

I think the real reason they were hired was to give them something to do other than ask for the Epstein files all day on their podcasts. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino were both very outspoken about wanting the Epstein files released before they were given jobs leading the FBI. Honestly letting themselves show their incompetence to the world with this case may have been part of the plan all along. Make them look like the fools they are, and people will stop believing them when they inevitably decide they want to talk about Epstein again.

I would imagine they mean something like jellyfin/plex, which don’t necessarily get you away from torrents. Unless you want to go the slightly more legal route of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and re-encoding everything for yourself. I say “slightly more legal” because while you are legally allowed a backup or archival copy of your own media (in the US), you still usually have to violate the DMCA to break encryption so you can rip your archival copy.

Most of us that are younger than the Boomers or maybe Gen X don’t want to count on Social Security because we’ve been hearing our whole lives that Social Security is on the chopping block because the government is in so much debt. And at this point we kinda just expect that ladder to be pulled up behind the Boomers before we get anything, because that’s already happened in so many other areas like home ownership.

I also think people need to remember that Social Security is their own money that they paid in over their lives, and they are owed it back.

And also that even though the US government has a large amount of debt, we’ve also spent the last 50 years giving tax cuts to the rich, we’d probably be just fine if we went back to a 90% marginal tax rate on the top earners like we had in the “good old days” of the 1950s.

Grew up in the great plains/midwest around the dairy industry. Had extended family who owned a smaller dairy farm. This all sounds pretty standard. Not saying it’s right, but none of it sounds new to me.

I would imagine there were plenty of people who bought modern marketing that was designed to cruelty-wash the dairy industry. The reality is there’s no way to insert yourself between an udder and a calf without cruelty, and that’s the only way to get cow’s milk. Unless we can figure out how to get milk from lab-grown organs, which probably comes with it’s own ethical issues.

Problem is that even if he choked on his burger and coke at lunch, and had dinner with the devil, neither of the next two in line could pass a civics class either.

Duels are outlawed these days, but we seem to be bringing back old ideas every day lately, so maybe? I for one, think a dueling space to go with the new ballroom at the White House sounds period-appropriate.

I hate to say it, but if that’s what it takes to get Nettanyahu and his Zionist cronies turned into red mist, it might be worth it. But also in 2025 I’m not entirely sure anything would happen outside of some “condemnation.”

Unless the Vatican decides to reboot the Crusades, which also sounds about right for this Indiana Jones timeline we’re all living in.

It can be, but sometimes packages are removed from the official repos, but still available in AUR, only running yay -Syu will install the AUR versions of dependencies that are no longer needed, and can leave you with a bunch of unnecessary packages from AUR.

If you run pacman -Syu on its own the unnecessary dependencies will be removed and you won’t get the AUR versions, and then yay -Syu will only update things you actually want from AUR.

They’re probably gonna “90 days” this until the midterms, and then use it as a punishment if the democrats get a majority in congress so they can blame Democrats for higher prices.

Remember their names for Nuremberg Trials v2. All their talk about immigrants bringing crime, and yet they’re all soulless, assholes who lack a shred of empathy, and have convinced themselves they’re “taking out the competition.” Crime is fine with them as long as it’s their friends doing it.

As an aside I’m trying not to legitimize their twisted, racist views of immigrants, so I hope that’s clear in how I wrote this, but I’m also aware that I’m tired and should be asleep, so including this aside in case I didn’t make that clear. Immigrants belong in my country as much as I do (probably more than I do in many cases), and we should be working to treat them better, not worse.

Yeah, but then we have president JD. What we need is for Vance to snap, strangle Trump, get caught by Mike Johnson who he then uses his special anti-pope magic on to keep him quiet. Then in the power vacuum, America discovers we didn’t need a president this whole time, and we spend the next few years getting to know ourselves.

It’s the fantasy political thriller rom-com that could save the American movie industry.

Neither is his friendship with Epstein. Apparently half the country wasn’t paying attention in 2016.