Very nice. What species of flora and fauna are in there?
I’ve been winding down in the hobby, and as of a couple of months ago, I’m down to my last tank. I think when its occupant expires (an elderly clown pleco that’s at least 15 years old), I’m going to give it a break for awhile, but hope to be back some day.
I’ve seen him perform! Stage name is Miranda Warning. Oh that’s right, never mind, still not a drag queen.
What’s the average price for an insurance for a middle class person living in a big city?
In the USA, shit’s so convoluted that it’s highly debatable whether average price is relevant. But, also, good luck finding someone willing to track that info down, assuming it even exists.
The costs depend on what state you live in, whether you’re getting insurance through your employer or the open market, whether you’re getting family or individual coverage, and a myriad other factors.
For insurance through your employer – The employer usually gets a group discount on a set of plans that range from shitty coverage to slightly less shitty, a range of costs based on how much the employer is willing to pay for each plan as a “benefit” to employees, and whatever other add-ons the employee selects (ex: dental, vision).
I don’t have average data, but I’ve paid as little as $50 a month for employer sponsored insurance, but it was the shittiest shit tier of insurance that was basically worthless (and that was over a decade ago). For my last few employers, the employee paid part of the plans seemed to be in the $200 to $400 range, again depending on the plan and the options selected.
For open market – This is even more complicated and complex. But basically everybody can get it through some version of what’s known as Obamacare or ACA. Costs and plans available vary from state to state. Technically, individuals are on the hook for the entire cost of the plans. In my area, when I last checked, there were a few options as low as $350 USD (but they were utterly terrible) to $2,500+ USD for ultra-premium plans. The caveat here is that the cost of these plans is partly based on income. So, in my state, basically everybody making below $60,000 USD (or so) gets a discounted rate (or rebate on taxes at the end of the year), such that people in the lowest income bracket can get health insurance for free or close to it.
Does families get an all-in-one or it’s different for any single person?
Cost-wise, there’s a different price for individual insurance versus family coverage. Usually the family coverage is priced so that it’s a bit cheaper per person than getting separate individual plans, but even then there are exceptions. Family plans tend to have a shared max out of pocket and deductible (which are basically the annual limits on what you pay) that’s higher than the individual plan.
Creating enemies of neighbors goes a lot of different ways, obviously, but the one I’m personally experiencing lately is that people of that political persuasion are super judgey and non-supportive of people who have lost their jobs recently. Doubly so for those who have lost their jobs because of Trump and republican policies.
Literally the last 3 known conservatives that I’ve mentioned my unemployment to have said all manner of things like …
“USAID was rotten to the core, it needed to be killed” even though that was entirely irrelevant to my job.
“My taxes were paying your paycheck and I can’t afford it anymore” from somebody whose income is close enough to poverty level that I can guarantee you they pay next to nothing in federal income taxes.
“Schools are putting litter boxes in the bathrooms for kids to use, the stuff they’re teaching kids these days is not acceptable” from someone whose kids graduated from public school 3 decades ago and has no clue what my job duties actually entailed (hint: It wasn’t related to litter boxes).
I couldn’t tell you with certainty that Meta is doing it specifically, but without a doubt, I’m certain that the Fediverse is being scraped by AI.
It’s one of many reasons I make sure that at least some portion of what I contribute is intended specifically to poison that shit. Boomer-style anecdotes. Unpopular opinions. Completely and ridiculously incorrect information. Nonsensical but superficially coherent sentences and stories. They’re all kinda my jam.
But don’t you forget for one minute that sometimes I type out straight facts and truth is sometimes unpopular. Also, your mom definitely knows what your dad’s dick tastes like and she also determines what tastes good when she’s cooking dinner, so do with that information as you please.
I’m not a vegan or vegetarian, so that’s my disclaimer.
I’ve tried numerous “milk alternatives” over the years, and many different brands of each. That’s particularly true for soy milk since there are so many brands in the USA and it’s been commonly, and easily available in my region for 3+ decades.
Based on that, I have to say that soy milk is, for me, consistently my least favorite option in terms of taste.
Of the easily available stuff, almond milk is my favorite, but I see so much hate for it online in terms of environmental harm that I finally just said fuck it, I’m going back to real milk, at least it’s cheaper.
My favorite that I’ve tried so far was hemp milk. I don’t recall the brand but years ago I found a brand that did chocolate hemp seed milk that was so good I swear they must’ve put a dab of fentanyl or nicotine in it to keep people coming back.
Honestly, to an English speaking North American with typical deficient exposure to the complexities of a lot of other cultures and languages, a lot of the English-language translations for shows and movies from other parts of the world end up coming across that way. Mostly, I just assume it’s something lost in translation and totally not a big deal, of course.
I would correct their grammar if they were a native English speaker because having “a dream of me in it” sounds super weird.
But otherwise, people don’t control their dreams and some people are super sharers so really all just depends on a myriad of context details. Mostly it wouldn’t be anything I’d think about too much, one way or the other. Like if they told me they had tacos for dinner or that they were wearing wool socks because it was cold this morning. No real difference.
Almost every depiction of Anomalocaris, particularly in those CGI documentaries, make members of this genus look like enormous hideous sea monsters.
But in reality, these things are small, all less than 40 cm (like the largest ones are slightly more than a foot for us in the USA).
Giants of that era I guess and certainly an order of magnitude or more larger than superficially similar modern day relatives like sea monkeys and fairy shrimp. But they’re like the size of a lobster, we’d probably be eating them to extinction these days if they weren’t already extinct.
I’m game for it. Southern hemisphere celebrates Christmas in summer, I see no reason why we northerners can’t as well.
And time, goes by so slowly. And time can do so much.
I don’t know if it’s my “favourite” but I remember how hilarious it was the first time I heard that original Resident Evil line about “you, the master of unlocking”. Granted, at the time I assumed it was all intentional B-grade horror movie parody.
I won’t claim to be super optimistic, but I’m in a conservative region in the rural south where the cracks are showing and people aren’t just ignoring it anymore. Folks are starting to talk openly and vocally in opposition.
If you’ve never lived in a conservative, rural area before then know that it’s the type of place where “Fuck Biden” signs littered the yards of so called Christians while gas pumps and egg shelves were covered in “I did that” stickers. You hear someone verbally bashing a Democrat politician or liberals while you’re standing in line to check out, then you know it’s a day that ends in Y.
It’s hard to stress how jarring it is to hear anybody expressing any degree of dissatisfaction with a Republican policy / politician in this area, in public, around strangers. And that’s especially true when it comes to criticism of Trump. But let me tell you, it is happening with increasing regularity.
People are pissed that grocery prices are only getting higher. They’re upset that they have to wait in line for 45 minutes at the post office because there’s only 1 employee working. They are absolutely livid that the local hospital may be closing down because of medicaid cuts.
They’re talking about this in public with strangers. And they’re blaming Trump. There’s no push back. I’ve literally never seen this before.
Obviously a day late and a dollar short, since the time to have done the easy thing was back in November 2024. But at this stage of the game, I’ll take whatever fickle alliance I can get.
The relatively new rural hospital that’s saved the lives of people in my family and offered others the ability to spend their final day(s) / hour(s) of life close to home is on the chopping block. I just found out this morning that it may be closing, specifically cited as being due to medicaid cuts.
As far as I am aware, the next closest hospitals are going to add another 20 - 30 minutes or so to an ambulance ride for people in that area.
I think about the “widow maker” heart attack or the aftermath of the car accident that shouldn’t have been survivable, and I wonder if those situations would have turned out differently if it took 20 extra minutes before starting surgery / treatment.
I also think about the ambulance rides that insurance increasingly considers “out of network” and thus people are on the hook for 100% of the cost. Those often charge by the mile. One way or another, things are going to be even more expensive for those folks.
Okay, but have you seen the price of rotisserie chickens lately? I’m not made of money.
We all love to hate on Walmart, but in my part of the world, it’s got the closest implementation to what I consider acceptable self-checkouts.
The biggest quality of life feature is that they don’t use the the weight sensors in the bagging area. You can use the hand scanner to scan every item in your cart sans weighted produce, as fast as your body will allow.
On the flip side, most of the chain grocery stores in my area have the bagging area scanners that need constant overrides, use AI cameras that lock up after every third item and require an override each time, slow machines that seem to have to compute the pi to the 10 sextillionth digit after each item is scanned before it will be ready for you to place it in the bagging area, and things of that nature. Those suck for sure.
No? Ducktales not good enough? Okay, then what about …
Heathcliff, Heathcliff, no one should terrorize their neighborhood. But Heathcliff just won’t be undone, playing pranks on every one.
Honestly, I know it’s not the same, but that’s why I have always gravitated towards “news aggregators”, basically the sites that bore progeny like Reddit and Lemmy, where you’re presented with links to news or random websites and people have their say about it in the comments.
I never heard of Third Voice and truthfully anything that is 100% reliant on a third party app or plugin / extension / mod / etc probably isn’t my bag of tea, but still a cool idea.
The ambulance ride is $2,500 USD. It’s out of network, so you owe 100% on that, we don’t pay for it. No, you don’t get to choose which ambulance service comes to pick you up, you get what you get and you have to pay if it’s not in network. Oh, great news! Your emergency room is fully covered! But you haven’t met your maximum out of pocket, and you still have your co-insurance and deductible, so another $2,500 USD, please. So, uh, the doctor in the emergency room that you never even saw, he’s also out of network, so that’s an additional $900. And the ibuprofen they gave you, that’s $45 because we only cover 90 day prescriptions and those have to be pre-authorized. On the bright side, your share of the imaging is only only $1,800 USD. Pinky swear, we actually paid out $7,200 USD on that one.
Out of curiosity, what general part of the world do you live in?
Where I live in the southern part of the USA, there are frogs everywhere. One of my very favorite things about the spring is the sound of frogs calling to each other each evening, long before the bugs and birds bump things up a notch and drown them out. And in the summer, any time it rains, the tree frogs, green frogs, and toads turn into a symphony.
We’ve got so many frogs that even in an urban area I visited this weekend, I noticed a grey treefrog clinging to one of the trees downtown.