What is the dollar figure of your highest interest bill and its interest rate?

Thanks for spelling HIPAA correctly, so many people get it wrong.

I always confuse what the HIP stands for, but always remember the last two are “Accountability Act” so “AA” at the end is easy to remember.

• A common insurance co-pay to see a Primary Care Physician (regular family doctor) is $40. That could mean going to the doctor or not for some folks.

• $20 would pay for five different 30 day prescriptions of common generic prescription drugs.

• $25 ($5 short) would buy more than a month’s worth of insulin.

• $20 will by 35lbs or rice. That’s well over 2 weeks worth of meals (at 2000 calories a day).

• $20 will pay for one month of mobile phone service with unlimited talk and text along with 4GB of data (as well as hotspot functionality)

• $20 would pay for 100 full charges on a very large ebike battery. Thats enough to go 7500 miles of range on average.

Do HIPAA protections still exist after the person is dead?

When I read the headline I was really confused why the brutal Sudanese militia “Rapid Security Force” was running across Ukrainian reporters on the African continent. It took me a second to realize this RSF was Reporters Sans Frontiers or in English “Reporters Without Borders”.

I’m encouraged that these Ukrainian reporters might still be alive and hope for their quick release from their Russian captors.

How long until Russian officials start distributing crude oil to residents for them to refine in makeshift distilleries at home in their back yards?

Alternatively, how soon until Russian citizens convert their automobiles over to run on wood gasifiers?

In the near future I expect to see a bunch of these type of cars waiting in line at the Kerch bridge to get out of Crimea.

The draught on that ship looks really low is it in the process of sinking or possibly already sitting on the bottom of a shallow area?

We already have instructions to follow after the President dies. Its all laid out in the US Constitution. trump doesn’t get to decide what the nation does once he’s no longer President.

Dude, you realize the whole ‘going to the moon’ thing was just a way to convince the public to fund ballistic missile technology?

And this was true for both sides of the 1960s Space Race.

• Sputnik 1 was carried into space by the Soviet Sputnik rocket (an adaptation of the R-7 Semyorka Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) on October 4, 1957 source

• Yuri Gagarin was carried into space on April 12, 1961, by a Vostok 8K72K rocket. The Vostok 8K72K was a three-stage liquid-fueled launch vehicle derived directly from the Soviet Union’s R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) source

There was fierce competition inside the USSR for which rocket technology would be best used for weapons. The whole “exploration” or “civilian use” thing on both sides (USA/USSR) was just window dressing for weapons programs in space.

Just wait until you see how much they waste on unused life insurance!

I know you’re joking, but lots of people buy really bad life insurance products (whole life, universal variable policies) that are a horrible waste of money in 99.9% of people’s situations.

A large-ish term life insurance is fine if you have a family that needs to replace your income if you die early. Other than that, you only need enough money to get your remains put in the ground without burdening your family. Estimate $10k or so for full funeral and burial plot if that is your desire. If you just want cremation and spreading of ashes is much cheaper. If you’ve got the cash for that, you don’t even need a small term policy for that.

$250/year starting investing in 2020 into the regular S&P 500 would be worth $3,703 today. So maybe as much as a month and a half of rent depending on where you live. However the point being is, if the subscription is unused, you’re not getting any value for it. A free month (or more) of rent is something you’ll actually use.

it’s already enshittified with many customers reporting consistently double the ping and half the download speeds from their original experience.

I don’t think that is an example of enshitification in this case. In the technical world there are measurements for this call SLAs (Service Level Agreements). This means that if you pay for a specific service with contractually delivered performance. The service needs to deliver at least that level of performance, or you are entitled to refunds/credits/resitution for the service provider not meeting their obligations.

Now, just because a service provider is required to deliver a minimum of service, they can (and frequently do) provide even better service than they are obligated to. This is pretty typical of technology services where a new platform is being built out and there is lots of spare capacity as users are just being onboarded. I have no doubt that there were Starlink users that got fantastic performance when only a fraction of the network was in use by others. If this is their baseline, then from their perspective, they are getting less than they did before. If the performance still meets what was sold to them contractually, then they’re still getting what they paid for they’re just not getting a whole bunch more they never paid for.

It’s not the idea of a truly globally accessible internet that makes it worthless, it is the fact it is being done by a for-profit publicly-traded company owned by a trillionaire. Any one of those three things would mean the product is guaranteed to get worse eventually, all three mean it is guaranteed to get worse as quickly as possible.

That’s … a pretty questionable definition of “objectively worthless” then. By that definition all products or services from non-government owned companies would meet that definition of “objectively worthless”. I’m confident that moves the definition from “objectively worthless” to “subjectively worthless”.

You’re very welcome to hold that opinion, but I think the majority of its subscribers would disagree with you.

objectively worthless pet project

Regardless that Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole, lots of folks in working class rural regions around the world would disagree with calling it worthless. As an example, I visited southern Alaska recently and Starlink is very much in use there on working class small homes.

Shohreh Aghdashloo as Avasarala is such an amazing actor in that role. It would be so easy for her to take the easy way for a politician part, but instead she delivers both the anger, heartbreak, triumph and sometimes helplessness that exists in true leadership that is rarely portrayed accurately on screen.

• $variable1
• $othervariable
• $july2014fixvariable
• $notneeded

…and finally…

*$otherothervariable

These shall be the variable names until the heat death of the universe! Blessed be! So say we all!

“Socialist NYC Mayor sets highest rate of subway fares for regular Americans while providing subsidies for criminals to come to your neighborhood” /Fox news

It depends on what you mean by robotic mowers. If you mean motors that drive the wheels and you don’t have to walk behind them (or sit on them), yes, these exist without any cloud service. However, if you mean autonomous, then I don’t think those are here yet. The non-cloud robot mowers use human held remote controls.

I can think of one that is autonomous and doesn’t require the cloud for operation, but does require the cloud for the inital setup and mapping. Once it has the map loaded in, it doesn’t need an internet connection.

That pretty well describes 1st generation robo mowers: lawn roombas.

Thankfully they’ve evolved significantly since then and are on 4th generation tech now.

I’m thinking of moving from my higher paying career field to one that will pay me a nearly break even salary (for this living area) because my heart just isn’t in this anymore.

How close are you to retirement? If you increased savings from [high paying career], how much longer would you have to work at it before you could stop working altogether?

I’m old enough to be experiencing this, but I actually like it like this. I had zero desire to own a Labubu when they came out recognizing it as just that generation’s flash-in-the-pan fad like beanie babies was for my generation.

So many online services are sold for things I do not care about so I have zero to manage on those.

I’m not seduced to buy the “latest slightly incremental increase in performance” item for 99% of products out there because I have something that does the job for me already.

Some of today’s pop music styles I don’t like, but there’s thousands of hours of music I do like (including a chunk of new stuff) so I’m not put out.

Its actually kind of great to be immune to so much of the advertising thats out there today because you simply don’t want what they’re selling because they’re targeting the younger generation.