I read this as alligator washers and was very confused

Honestly, I SMS myself occasionally 😬

Know any good notes apps?

Holy crap, all these answers and hardly anything about how health insurance is supposed to work.

Basically, most people have health insurance. With the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) from years ago, it’s basically required but getting care is simpler (you can’t be denied a plan for a preexisting condition, for example. But it’s hella expensive. It’s also typically tied to your employer as part of your compensation package like retirement contributions, which means if you change employers there’s a good chance you need to change insurance and even doctors.

ANYWAY, say you have procedures done. Insurance companies typically have contracted amounts for stuff with each provider (a “discount” from insane prices nobody actually pays). You typically pay the first however many dollars, depending on what you’re having done and how your plan works. Eventually, you’ll reach a dollar amount that’s your maximum for the year, and from there insurance generally covers everything they normally would

Some people also have Medicare (ages 65+) and/or Medicaid (based on income or disability). Some people have private insurance on top of it. My daughter was born extremely early and stayed in the hospital for months. Her very low birth weight was a qualifying disability for Medicaid, and she was on my work health insurance. Claims would go through work insurance first, and any remaining costs (deductible) would be passed to Medicaid. If there was anything left, I’d be responsible for that. But I don’t think that ever happened

Obviously, coverage is different for different people - different employers have different plans that cover different things differently. But in theory, that’s how it should work.

Oh, for sure. Especially during pumpkin pie blizzard season. Plus they always seem to feed my FOMO with some other flavor so I go twice during that season alone

Here’s the fun part: while you’re all talking about their ice cream, technically it’s not legal to call their product that. You won’t see it anywhere on the menu. I think it has to do with the milk/cream/egg/sugar amounts? There may not be egg at all, but can’t remember for sure.

Anyway, all you’ll ever see on the menu is “soft serve”

The “120 volt cable”, assuming you mean NM-B aka Romex, is rated for up to 600 volts if you look at it closely. It is absolutely acceptable to use that wiring for a 240V circuit, as long as you wrap colored (not green) electrical tape around the white neutral wire to indicate it’s another hot.

Yes, there are 3-conductor (plus ground) wires one can also use for switches and 240V circuits with neutral. That neutral can be used to have 120V and 240V together (your oven may use 240V coils, but the light bulb probably runs on 120). Doesn’t mean you need to have it, if your 240V circuit doesn’t need a neutral. My air compressor is just a motor that can run at 240, no neutral needed, and its outlet is wired up with the same kind of Romex used for a 120 right next to it (with black tape to indicate a second hot)

Dat toaster

If you like both vanilla and chocolate ice cream do you have to prove that?

I am instead charming as fuck in person. Which was my other advantage. It doesn’t show online

Honestly? I totally saw it

Eastern Colorado might as well be west Kansas. Both areas I mentioned are in eastern Colorado.

I drive through it a few times a year, living in Denver but have family in Minnesota/Wisconsin. As crazy as it sounds, at least you have small towns and corn fields along I-80. There are some areas in Colorado (stretches of I-76, US-287 between Hugo and Kit Carson) where there’s just… Nothing. Like, you’d be surprised at how much more empty a corn field can be, and it totally does weird you out how far you are from a simple gas station, let alone a familiar McDonald’s (neither of those towns have that; I believe you’d have to go from Limon to Lamar to get from one McDonald’s to the next on that road, which is almost 2 hours)

If you wanted to do pineapple and soy sauce together, I bet that marinating the pineapple in some soy sauce (probably the low sodium kind for this one) would work great!

Burgers and pizza (and omelettes) are the perfect “blank canvas” foods. You can be boring with few/no toppings, you can be traditional with the expected combinations, or you can flex your creativity with whatever else your heart comes up with.

Either way, it’s an ingredient with plenty of potential, but it needs to be countered somehow. Canadian bacon doesn’t do it for me, in pizza but pepperoni and jalapeno does! For burgers… I like the comment mentioning soy sauce, but if I had to think of something on my own… Hmmm, maybe grilled with grilled jalapeno, crispy onion, and some cream cheese? Basically a jalapeno popper burger with the pineapple shaking things up and the crispy onion adds some crunch?

Damn, now I’m hungry

What happened after that?

Especially in the last month or so I’ve been noticing how uninspiring technology has been. I used to love seeing whatever the gadget of the season was at Target while my mom shopped. Now it’s all… Phone cords, and um, printer ink cartridges. The same wireless speakers we bought years ago. Nothing about it is cool anymore!

His Bluesky is also a delight

I worked in the airline industry for years and learned a GUI overlay for one system and another entirely green screen system called SHARES (see if you can guess the airline). Honestly I kind of enjoyed working with those systems; there’s some refreshing “back to basics” feeling kind of like driving a manual transmission.

In my current job I’ve been using another legacy system. Well, my job was to create a relatively modern service for the legacy system to call, but none of the remaining developers knew how to use the extensions of that system that does SOAP calls. So I had to learn just enough of that legacy system to hold their hands through the parts that call my service. Kind of fun, to be honest!

At 6 years old, you hardly understand how the world works. People generally realize that and act accordingly.

If anyone is getting divorced from something a 6-year-old did, either your parents don’t understand that (not your fault) or there was something much bigger going on already (not your fault) and whatever you did was the straw that broke the camel’s back (still not your fault, given the grace needed with a SIX-YEAR-OLD!)

If someone else said to you what you were saying to us, would you agree that “yeah, you must have been ‘born bad’* - that sucks”? And hold them to that same standard? Probably not. Don’t do it to yourself

* that’s not a thing, by the way

Huh?

At first I thought it was Instacart with fewer things available. After reading the press release “news article” it looks like it’s a way for people to buy things (no doubt at inflated gig economy app prices) for a party they aren’t necessarily hosting. Basically chipping in however many dollars but with a thing “attached” to it.

Yeah, if I’m hosting a party I’m not making people use that.