I'm also not trying to get into an argument, but totally disagree, and honestly believe that your attitude leads to an untenable breakdown of the social contract.
I don't agree with use of the tongue-in-cheek term "riff raff" for unhoused people living in tents and shanties on the sideway. And I think such people deserve help.
But yes, they have less of a right to live on the sidewalk than the right of people and businesses that pay rent and expect public spaces that are usable, safe, and free of people so intoxicated that they have lost contact with reality and are not safe to be around.
> All surfaces should be comfortably above the dew point to prevent mold.
I agree that this should be the case, but actually achieving this in the UK (where heating is very expensive and housing is poorly insulated) is prohibitively expensive for many people.
> Maybe some of my difficultly understanding is being American
In the UK, in winter, ambient exterior air is both fairly cold (let's say 40F) and extremely humid, often around 80% relative humidity.
Houses are both poorly insulated and poorly ventilated. Heating is (relatively) very expensive.
Most housing units don't have clothes dryers, and it's common to dry clothing indoors on wire racks.
The net result is that you end up with extremely humid indoor air in the 55F-65F range, while the exterior walls and windows of the building never really heat up properly.
It's a recipe for condensation on the interior surfaces of those walls and windows.
You can fix this either by heating the building enough that the exterior walls actually heat up beyond the dew point (which few people can afford to do), or by keeping windows open in winter to provide some ventilation (which makes the already-poorly-heated building even less comfortable).
After finishing the article, I am left with a much deeper suspicion of the felony murder rule, and of plea deals in general, than I am of giving minors the same sentences as adults.
That's not to say that I agree with giving minors adult sentences. But it doesn't seem the worst thing about the cases discussed here.
In the US this always seems to be called "overdraft protection", as in "do you want overdraft protection on your account?"
I can never remember if overdraft protection means "we won't let your account overdraft", or "we will let your account overdraft"
It is an incredibly confusing name to me
I could look up the answer now, but I know I will just forget it again. I must have looked it up and then forgotten at least 10 separate times over the years
Source for the claim that nicotine use "ruins" gut health?
My understanding is that the relationship between nicotine and gut health (indeed, overall health) is much more complex and nuanced than that. I know that nicotine has a positive effect on ulcerative colitis symptoms for many sufferers.
Of all the diseases summarized here concerning systemic inflammation, especially in sepsis and endotoxemia, nicotine exerted the most pharmaceutical effect and significantly improved the survival. Next, nicotine is also a potential candidate for treating ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, multiple sclerosis, and myocarditis; the in vivo data provided a much better foundation. For local inflammation, the nicotine administration route may be more important to avoid its accumulation in other healthy organs—for example, the effect of nicotine on arthritis will be more pronounced when nicotine is directly injected into the focus of infection. Perhaps that is why, in the early years, tobacco was used to treat enteritis as enemas (4). It is evident that nicotine has a significant pro-inflammatory effect on periodontitis. However, the latest research also found that nicotine positively affects periodontitis at a lower dosage. In this regard, we consider that the effect of nicotine on periodontitis is mainly due to the influence of inevitable and original oral microbes. At present, most studies focus on the cellular level, and in vivo studies may be limited due to the difficulty of model construction. Therefore, we recommend that individuals with poor oral hygiene avoid excessive direct exposure to nicotine for oral diseases.
> It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it
A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.
diagnostic does not mean "not covered", it just means it moves out of the "zero cost even if you haven't met your deductible yet" categroy defined by the ACA, and into the regular category where you pay your deductible, copays and coinsurance
> I believe that in the US, there is a certain age, after which, they're covered.
There is a lot of confusion over this point, even among support agents for health insurance companies.
i) The Affordable Care Act specifies that all Marketplace health plans must cover colorectal cancer screening for adults 45 to 75 years at zero cost [i]. That means no copay and no coinsurance, even if you haven't met your deductible. You pay $0.
ii) That generally means that colonoscopies will be zero-cost for anyone in that age bracket, but only if it is a "screening". If you have symptoms, the service may be billed as diagnostic rather than preventative, which takes it out of the "zero cost" category
iii) All of the above is separate from whether the procedure is "covered" or not, because "covered" in the context of health insurance means "your plan covers this, subject to your normal deductible, copay and coinsurance, so long as it is medically necessary". If something is truly "not covered" then your insurance pays $0 and the provider will bill you the full, undiscounted cost of the procedure.
In other words, there is a difference between "your plan covers this (as it does for any other regular medical care)" and "your plan covers this at zero cost, as it falls into one of the narrowly defined 'preventative care' buckets as defined by the ACA"
It's common for people to confuse these things.
In your case, it sounds like the procedure was not covered at zero cost (as expected, as you are not in the 45-75 age bracket defined by the ACA, and in any case your procedure was diagnostic, not preventative), but it was "covered" by your health insurance in that you paid your regular deductible and copay, rather than the insurance company saying "your plan does not cover this procedure (at all)" and then the hospital billing you the full cost of the procedure, which would be tens of thousands of dollars.
> does anyone else have their entire day sidelined by a 10-minute call? is that common?
It's extremely common for me.
It really comes down to the point made in the article. If you have five or six calls already, the marginal cost of one more call is very low. If you have no calls, the marginal cost of one more call is very high.
>It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
I really couldn't disagree more strongly. I think it's much easier to correct misunderstandings over text. In a spoken discussion, there is a high degree of temporal entropy - the longer it's been since you made a point, the worse my recollection of your exact point may be. Detail and nuance is lost. But if you write your point down, I can refer to it at any point without any real loss of information.
In my experience, it's relatively common for two people to leave a spoken discussion thinking they have a strong, shared understanding, and only much later do they realize that's not the case.
> You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day
You could do this, but for the life of me I can't imagine why you do this over using a platform like DO, vultr, hetzner or any one of a hundred similar services that will give you a better developer experience for this kind of workflow, often at a fraction of the price
> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority
"Homeless people" is a broad category that includes people temporarily living in vehicles, bouncing between family members, or sleeping on a friend's couch. It also includes people who are about to lose their home, young people living alone.
But when everyday people use the term, they usually mean, specifically, visible homeless people - i.e. people who are homeless long-term, sleeping rough on the streets or in parks, etc.
The two groups are pretty different to each other. I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group
Increasingly, my reaction to AI-generated content of basically all types is simply a deep, resonant sadness.
The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb - there is an initial shock of sadness, an initial dose of loss, an initial sense of what has been taken away.
But then for months and years afterwards, the daily occurrence of some other little humdrum experience, and only at the moment of the encounter does one think, "Ah yes, this too is forever changed."
Like sounding the depths of a dark well, where every day you lower the rope a little further, but every day there is nothing to feel but a pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.
I can't help but wonder about the relationship between fathers (and, in fact, all parents) spending more time with their children, and people choosing to have fewer children, and later.
I think it's unquestionably true that fathers spending more time with their children is, on the whole, much better for those children.
But it's also true that it's a huge problem for society that people are having fewer children. And I think you can make a reasonable argument that increasing expectations around the quality of parenting are party of that trend.
This phrase is used so often, but I don't know how meaningful it is supposed to be
A family might make $300,000 a year and be living "paycheck-to-paycheck" while also maxing out 401k contributions, paying a mortgage on a $2 million home, and paying $80,000 a year in private school tuition.
Are we supposed to think that such a family is in worse financial shape than a family making $40,000 a year but with minimal expenses and a few months of living costs in a savings account?