MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown

And the increased availability of naloxone to emergency responders, opioid users, and the general public.

Elmer can go Fudd himself. Store brand non-toxic craft paste is just as flavorful an half the price.

Just to piggyback on this. The simple truth is that lot of things are just called things because they resemble other things, either in form or function.

Coffee is not a bean; beans come from legumes, coffee fruit seeds are roughly bean sized and shaped.

Cacao and vanilla are also not legumes.

The peanut is a legume like beans and peas, but the it’s fruit treated like a culinary nut.

Cashews are not true nuts. They Grow outside the actual fruit.

Nut milk and butter do not come from mammary glands.

Tea is made for the leaves of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis), which is a shrub or small tree, but many infusions of dried plant matter are often referred to as teas. The Tea Tree (Melaleuca) of oil fame is a different plant entirely. It got its name because some sailors made a ‘tea’ from its leaves after they ran out of real tea leaves.

Currants (genus Ribes) are actually named after raisins. Raisins of Corinth were small raisins that were produced and exported from… well… Corinth. Over time ‘Corinth’ morphed into ‘currant’, they dropped the ‘raisins of’, and the local small dryable fruit started being referred to as a currants too. Eventually, production of the tiny raisins migrated to other parts of Greece and some smart guy thought “Hey! Let’s market these fancy tiny raisins that we are importing from Zante (the greek island Zakynthos) by calling them Zante Currants to distinguish them from the common local currants.

I don’t know whether it’s available in Germany but the Oreck XL is a reliable bagged upright. No fancy tubes or attachments. No adjusting for carpet height or bare floors. Just a simple straightforward light, reliable vacuum.

My folks have had one for years, they have a dog. My sibling got one that had been used daily in a small business for years, works great for their pets. I picked one up at an estate sale, replaced the brush roller and it works like new. We have a long haired cat that leaves tumbleweeds in its wake.

link them together through the data and read-only slots to make a countdown chain.

Bean day!

nobody actually pays those bills. They’re just some elaborate dance between insurance companies and hospitals.

Sometimes there is an elaborate dance between the two on pricing. Sometimes the insurance company dances on its own to determine why the service is not covered.

If you don’t have insurance, the cost is lower

Depends what you mean by cost. insurance is always out to make money, that means paying less, and negotiating lower prices with providers. However, there are some situations where it benefits both the service provider and the insurance provider to inflate the initial price, and negotiate a steep “discount” to a final price (a portion of which the patient pays) that is higher than the non-insurance price. But I don’t remember the exact details, and I may be conflating this with some other healthcare industry scheme.

or removed entirely. Supposedly.

If a hospital is nonprofit, I believe they are required to have a (self determined) charity care policy that they must follow. If you make below a certain amount, you can apply for relief, but that also applies for to after-insurance costs, not just no-insurance costs. For-profit hospitals will rake you over the coals and send collections after you. Part of the problem with charity care, is that you may have to ask for it, and few people know enough about it to do so. And you may have to ask for it in the right way. If you aren’t specific enough, they may offer you “financial assistance” which is just a payment plan. Then they’ll treat you the same as a for-profit hospital would.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive, the Arm and a Leg podcast is a great show about healthcare costs in the US.

Looks like walkaway has given up the pretense of being moderates displeased with the Democratic Party. https://i.imgur.com/qhJSBYn.jpeg

Does it affect me negatively? sure. Does it affect me on a personal level? Absolutely not. I guess I view it with a kind of sad condescension, like: “I’m sorry society is so fucked up that you feel it necessary to lash out like that. I’m trying my best, but I’m only one man.” Now that I think about it, I’m not sure what the says about my engagement with system. I’m going to have to ruminate on that…

Down with the patriarchy!

No fuckin clue.

Where’s the crayons?

Maybe it’s Art Van

You don’t need religion to be a moral person, and you don’t have to reject religion to act amorally. But there is no perfect, universal, scientific morality. Cultures, communities, individuals will vary on what they consider a moral act, and morality can change with circumstance. When different moralities interact, there will be conflict. And the amoral (or rather those, who do not subscribe to the same morality as those around them) will always use others’ morality as a tool to manipulate, a curtain to hide behind, a weapon to wield, and a shield to defend with.

Religion helps communities to build a common morality in order to reduce tensions and foster fellowship within the group. But there will always be communities. There will always be disagreements, confusion, frustration, pride, loyalty, forgetfulness, honor, greed, hunger, struggle, disease, countervailing needs and desires, and mercy. The absence of religion would not stop people from seeking safe harbor and kinship in others, whether that is social clubs, fandoms, sports teams, political parties, activist organizations, etc. And when that kinship is endangered or perceived to be endangered, the absence of religion will not stop people from seeking to obstruct, forestall, eliminate, or revenge against whatever or whomever is perceived to be the cause.

I hide gold coins (but any kind of fun token will do). Who doesn’t like a finding a gold coin?

It started when I used to do leprechaun cosplay. When you do that, you inevitably will get asked where your gold is hidden, so I got a bunch of cheap plastic coins to hand out when I got “caught”, or to “drop” if chased. For the heck of it I started slipping them in my friends’ bags and costumes while they were out.

Eventually this lead to hiding them in peoples homes when I visit, and reverse pickpocketing friends: pockets, purses, hoods in winter so they will fall out when they flip them up to go outside, behind wall art, inside a skein of yarn someone is knitting from…

I think my biggest get was slipping one into a theater director’s shirt pocket while they were talking to someone else. And the biggest surprise might have been one I put in an attic ladder hatch so that it fell out when they went to go up there months later.

Huh. That’s an interesting way to explain what people mean when they use “steep learning curve” that way. I’d always been taught that a learning curve is proficiency vs. experience.

Right! I think the only thing they missed is airplanes just not being necessary for delivery (unless you count in-flight wi-fi). And the grammaphone was just leapfrogged; the first news radio broadcast was only 7 years after this cartoon

Counterpoint: Podcasts

We mostly order loose leaf from Adagio. Though I might try Yunnan Sourcing soon. No shop near us sells loose leaf in any appreciable variety or quantity.

Second point: the English language is heavily influenced by several historical processes

WARNING: I am not a linguist or historian and the following is greatly simplified, potentially to the point of falsity

1. The invasions of Germanic tribes: Angles & Saxons most notably, settled in what we now call England (Angle Land) and pushed the Celtic tribes west and north. Leaving mostly Germanic speaking peoples in the south and East.

2. The Vikings raids: another wave of Germanic speaking peoples raided and eventually settled in parts of the island, while no less violent than the earlier invasions, it did result in more intermingling of the local Germanic and the Norse Germanic languages than the previous Germanic/Celtic languages did.

3. The Norman Conquest: This invasion was more of a top-down invasion, where a French speaking monarchy replaced the English speaking monarchy. For a time French became the language of esteem, and state business was conducted in French, while outside the aristocracy, the common folk would use common English in their day-to-day. This is why a lot of modern legal and technical words, like litigate, defendant and plaintiff, have roots through French while rude words (“vulgar” comes from the Latin for “common”) often have Germanic roots. See: penis/vagina/intercourse vs. dick/cunt/fuck

4. Colonization and globalization: English speakers went out and invaded a lot of places. In addition to extracting resources, wealth and slaves from those places, they took a lot of words too, and just kinda squished them into the language where they could fit. Colonizers also forced English upon the invaded territories much like the Norman’s forced French upon England. Now you have many more English speakers in the world who are also have fusing their own languages into local dialects of English and English words into their native languages. All this gets mixed up into an era of global trade, travel and communication, and some words just get caught up in the global zeitgeist and make their way into common English usage.

5. Also, the Church and Romans are mixed up in there somewhere, but I have forgotten how.

Language is always evolving. A lot of “special” words are just lazy words that have fallen out of regular use over time, or have be pulled out of time and place to evoke the seeming of being old and authoritative. Sometimes "special” words or phrases are just memes used out of context, and sometimes the context is no longer relevant or it is forgotten. We have a “special” word for phases like that: Idioms. The rule for idioms is “Idioms mean what they mean”