It’s largely because the “tens of thousands” is usually a result of being uninsured. And if you’re uninsured, it’s usually because you’re unemployed. And lenders tend to get squirmy at the idea of giving a loan to anyone who hasn’t been fully employed since the day they were born.

There was actually a rule implemented by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau shortly after the pandemic, to prevent medical debt from impacting your credit history. Because lots of Americans were suddenly finding themselves in an awful job market with tons of medical debt from being sick. But last year, the fifth circuit court of appeals (the one that presides over Texas and Louisiana, and which is stacked with conservative judges as part of the Southern Strategy) voided the rule and allowed medical debt to appear on credit reports again. The ruling from the conservative court also prohibited the CFPB from implementing similar rules in the future.

It depends on the situation. Emergency rooms are required by law to stabilize emergency medical issues, regardless of the patient’s potential ability to pay. This is because there used to be a big issue with ERs dumping non-paying patients. If the hospital didn’t think a patient could pay, security would literally wheel them across the street, then just leave them there to figure their own shit out.

ERs run on triage, (and lots of people go to the ER for things which could be handled by an urgent care or family doctor instead), which means wait times entirely depend on your specific situation. Mildly upset stomach? You’ll probably be waiting at least a few hours, especially if it’s a busy night with lots of more urgent patients. Chest pains with a history of heart disease? You’ll have EKG leads stuck to you before you’re even finished telling the intake nurse what your issue is.

And the big key thing is that ERs are required to stabilize an emergency medical issue. They aren’t required to provide follow-up care, long-term support, etc… If you show up with a cut that needs stitches, they’ll stitch you up. But they’ll tell you to follow up with your regular doctor to make sure it’s healing properly, and to remove the stitches in a few weeks. Don’t have a regular doctor because you’re uninsured? Good luck, hope it doesn’t get infected, then maybe chew some Tylenol and remove the stitches in your bathroom.

The thing that really got her attention was me pointing out I can’t make a gallon of gas by myself, buy I can make a kilowatt of electricity with stuff I have lying around my house/yard.

Yeah, the Technology Connections video on solar panels vs ethanol production (growing corn to turn into ethanol to add to gasoline) was honestly a great tool for convincing people who simply never bothered to think critically about it. I don’t even need to get them to watch the video, I simply paraphrase some of the arguments he makes.

Kind of a “I’m going to shoot you in the head but I feel bad about it” sort of thing.

Not sure if you were making a reference, but one of Israel’s most distinctive propaganda tactics is literally called Shooting And Crying. Basically, get your former IDF soldiers to act all sad about the atrocities they had to commit, so the public focus stays on sympathy instead of the war crimes and genocides they committed. Nobody feels good about kicking a crying person while they’re down, so it’s a way to shunt blame and avoid being held accountable for your own actions.

Basically, divert the blame onto the shadowy and faceless “they”. They ordered me to do bad things. They put me in situations where I was forced to make impossible choices. They forced me to struggle to survive. They are the reason I had to do all of those awful things. Because “they” is a faceless amorphous entity that can’t be held accountable and can’t defend itself against allegations. Meaning “they” is easy to shift blame onto as long as I remain a sympathetic victim in the public’s mind. If I keep crying, I never actually have to apologize for my war crimes, because they should be the ones apologizing instead.

As someone who used to do projection mapping professionally: I agree

It’s notable among YouTubers, mostly because YouTubers quickly became the new emo bands. Know how it was sort of an open secret that all of the emo bands in the 00’s and 10’s were sleeping with children? And they all got canceled when the literal decades of allegations started coming to light?

Yeah, that’s YouTubers now. Especially YouTubers who make content that is popular with kids and tweens, like lots of the original Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite YouTubers. And Mark does well in that age demographic, so everyone was holding their breath to see if he’d ever be accused of anything. But for all intents and purposes, Mark seems to be YouTube’s version of Keanu Reeves; very down to earth, not full of himself, just wants to make content because he is driven to do so.

I actually hated the Hector plotline, but that’s just because I was expecting the angry and reluctant asskicker Hector from Curse of Darkness. Instead, we got an autistic-coded soft bean whose primary motivation for devil forging was “humans are mean and scary so I’ll just make my own friends instead.”

I liked the new Isaac, but he was certainly a different kind of villain. The original was engaging when you first met him… But the interest quickly waned when you realized he was just an absurdist psychopath who missed the violence, and there wasn’t really any deeper motivation behind his actions. He was pretty much exactly what you expected when you first met him. The new Isaac was more brooding, but that meant there was room for the writers to explore his motivations.

Also worth noting that Costco doesn’t require a membership for their fresh food, pharmacy, or (depending on where you live, and your local liquor laws) liquor store. You can just tell the greeter that you’re there for the pizza, and they’ll wave you through.

Their pharmacy is often one of the cheapest, and the pharmacy techs at my local Costco are all super helpful. Apparently working in pharmacies is pretty soul-sucking, but my local employees always seem to be in a good (and not just artificial “retail smile” good) mood.

And yes, the Costco brand vodka is every bit as good as Grey Goose.

Sort of. The program uses a specific part of the website for its auto update. And it also didn’t do any kinds of TLS (https) validation (which would prevent changing the destination). They also signed their installers (which would throw an error if the file had been modified) but the auto update didn’t check for a valid signature. So basically the two big things that a browser would do when you visit the site to download the installer, the auto updater just… Wasn’t doing.

So people who visited the site to manually download the installer were fine. They would have been alerted if the TLS cert was invalid or if the installer wasn’t properly signed. But if you used the auto updater, you wouldn’t get any of those errors and it would happily install the malware.

Rebooting your phone actually encrypts the device, and it will stay encrypted until the first unlock. But the side button simply disables biometrics. The phone is still unencrypted on the backend, so other workarounds (like some sort of exploit that allows them to bypass the PIN) will allow them to see the phone’s contents.

This is particularly important because cops can image a phone after they seize it, to try and hack later. If they manage to image the unencrypted phone, that whole process is much easier. But if the phone is encrypted when they image it, they’ll basically just get white noise.

They also weren’t doing any kind of SSL verification for the download request, nor were they doing any kind of hash verification or signing. The former would have prevented a redirect attack in the first place, and the latter would have prevented downloaded files from being modified or swapped out.

Trump is fighting tooth and nail to only be called a pedo rapist. That’s the best case scenario for him. If that’s where the bar is, imagine all of the even more depraved shit that hasn’t been released yet.

Even if 99% of the files are complete bogus, that remaining 1% is still enough to justify publicly broadcasted flayings for everyone involved.

Take their assets and put $10M towards keeping the bounty program going. Take another $15M and put it towards a second (even bigger) bounty. Every day a billionaire’s name gets lottery’ed and killing them wins the big pot plus the original $10M bounty. So every single billionaire has a constant bounty on them, plus the chance of getting lotto’ed… At first that lotto may only be $25M. But as more and more die, that bigger pot continues to grow.

Their private security teams may not be willing to turn against their masters for only $10M… But for $25M? $40M? $55M? $70M? Everyone has a price, especially the billionaires’ mercenaries. Of course, the billionaires would probably start requiring bomb collars for their private security at that point, to ensure they remain loyal. But that means the teams would inevitably weigh the price of a bomb collar vs an easy $10M payout in the first place. And that $10M alone would be enough to have them gunning down the billionaires before they put the collars on.

The rest of their assets go towards a fund for reducing homelessness, bolstering food stamp programs, unemployment insurance funds, getting people back on their feet, forgiving debt, funding Social Security, expanding Medicare and Medicaid, maybe even UBI if the fund is large enough to be self-sustaining, etc…

It’s a fire box. You can actually see a pretty good shot of another one in the first frame of the video. They’re basically public fire alarms with a pull lever, just like you’d find in buildings. When you pull the lever, it automatically alerts the fire department. They pass several throughout the video; Boston is full of them.

I can’t imagine riding in a cable car lane. I’d be terrified of my tires getting stuck in the recessed tracks. Plus there are plenty of videos of cable cars mowing down drivers who were in their lane, with absolutely zero fucks given. At least the drivers have a cage.

There are an infinite amount of real numbers between 0 and 1. On the top track, when you reach 1, you would only kill 1 person. But on the bottom track you would’ve already killed infinite people by the time you reached 1. And you would continue to kill infinite people every time you reached a new whole number.

On the top track. You would tend towards infinity, meaning the train would never actually kill infinite people; There would always be more people to kill, and the train would always be moving forwards. Those two constants are what make it tend towards infinity, but the train can never actually reach infinity as there is no end to the tracks.

But on the bottom track. The train can reach infinity multiple times, and will do so every time it reaches a whole number. Basically, by the time you’ve reached 1, the bottom track has already killed more people than the top track ever will.

I mean, in that case it’s not really a matter of the trolley killing them, per se. The number will tend towards infinity, until it suddenly spikes to real infinity as people starve.

As someone who occasionally has to scrub through hours of security camera footage, these cops need to learn what a binary search is. We had some art get stolen from our gallery, and I had to search through ~5 days of footage to find it. I found it in about 3 minutes with a binary search.

Start by defining your timeline. In my case, it was about 5 days (so roughly 120 hours) over the course of a long weekend. Then divide that time in half, (60 hours) and start at the middle. Is the artwork still there? If so, you know you don’t need to bother scrubbing through the first 60 hours at all. Or if it’s already missing, you know you don’t need to bother searching through the second half. Then divide the remaining half in half again, (30 hours) and do the same. Repeat, each time dividing the potential search by half. With only 10 divisions, (each taking only a few seconds to figure out what the next halfway point is and jump to it in the security camera program), I have already narrowed my search down from 5 days to ~7 minutes. And it only took me a few minutes total. And at that point, I just scrub through manually until I find the culprit.

My boss was just sitting at her computer, watching the video at like 2x speed from hour 0, hoping to eventually catch the person. After like 20 minutes of that she gave up and passed it off to me. And I had the incident found in like 3 or 4 minutes total.

The only real reason the cops have to avoid scrubbing through footage is laziness.

You don’t seem to be getting it… American copyright law can’t affect someone in Libya, unless the Libyan authorities allow it. American lawyers can try to sue all they want, but it won’t do anything unless the business owner visits America.

Libya doesn’t have an official extradition treaty with the US. So the American authorities can bitch and moan about it all they want, but they can’t arrest a Libyan citizen and drag them to America without Libya’s consent. If this is legal in Libya, they’re not breaking any Libyan laws, and they’re not harming Libyans, why would the Libyan authorities care?

“Sign this NDA, and your consideration is that we won’t toss you out on your ass with a less-than-honorable discharge.”