I distinctly remember my last time in a Circuit City. I don’t recall the date, but I’m going to say it was circa 2006. I had purchased a Nintendo Wii at one of CC’s competitors but the competitor did not have any suitable Game Cube controllers. So I went over to Circuit City to see what they had since they were essentially in the same shopping complex. In a surprising turn of events, they actually did have Game Cube controllers in stock, they had the style/brand I was hoping for, and the price was actually reasonable.

They had dozens of employees out in the various sections of the store, at least one per department. There were a plethora of customers. However, they had literally 1 cash register open. The line was backed up into the aisles. I am pretty sure I waited 45 minutes just to check out with this one single item, and that’s only because the customer service manager came over after about 40 minutes and offered to check out anybody with only 1 or 2 items.

Might be a complete surprise to the former corporate overlords, but for some odd reason I decided never to go back after that.

He’s a bitch. He’s a lover. He’s a child. He’s a zombie. He’s a sinner. He’s a saint.

The answer is “it depends”. There are so many hoops and loopholes and gotchas built into the system that 2 identical people with the exact same background and ailment(s) could go see the exact same medical staff and yet still end up having to pay 2 completely different amounts for their care. But it’s more complicated than that, because there are a myriad factors that come into play (insurance versus none, location/state of residence, etc) so there’s no one concise and accurate answer to these types of questions.

Most non-wealthy people who don’t have insurance, but who don’t qualify for government/public medical care, simply go without care. Or they use the emergency room loophole to get some kind of treatment. The loophole, with lots of nuance and caveats, is that the emergency room has to at least give you enough treatment to temporarily stabilize your condition, regardless of your ability to pay.

For check-ups and counseling - In a lot of places that sort of stuff requires you to pay up front. You can sometimes haggle or work out a payment plan. If you’re poor enough to qualify for government aid, it may be free. Otherwise, you’re expected to have insurance and pay the co-pay. If that doesn’t apply, these places usually have a “cash” price that’s slightly more affordable, but still usually require payment ahead of time.

For meds, you basically always pay up front. There’s really no concept of pharmacies providing medications in a manner where you can pay later. No money means no meds. It’s also ridiculous to even ask how much a person would expect to pay for meds, it could be as little as a few USD to thousands, really depends on the meds, quantity needed, location, etc.

Xrays - This is where debt might actually come into play. You usually pay for these after the fact. If you go to the doctor, you might have to pay the standard fee (or copay) up front, but all the other services/tests/etc are charged after the fact. So you’ll end up getting a bill after you’ve gotten the xray and consultation. To be honest, I don’t know the average out of pocket cost for an x-ray if you don’t have insurance, but it would differ from location to location and region to region. If you don’t pay that bill, you’ll get harassed and most likely you’ll have to change doctors because the office you owe money to won’t see you again until your debt is paid or you’ve worked out a payment plan.

For people with insurance, there’s pretty much always a maximum yearly out of pocket amount, after which things are basically all paid for by insurance. Again there are nuances and caveats. And the maximum out of pocket varies by insurance policy, number of people insured, etc, but $8,000 - $20,000 are not uncommon amounts. To be honest, I don’t even know what mine is, I’ve never actually reached it. Not everything is covered by the maximum out of pocket, though.

$27,000 medical debt could possibly be from someone who was uninsured or it may be several years of medical debt.

To give you an idea of how crazy the system is: I had a hairline fracture several years ago and what was deemed as “good” insurance. By the time everything was done, it ended up costing me around $3,000 out of pocket. That’s for co-pays, x-rays, medication, etc over the course of months.

On the other hand: A family member of mine had a heart attack, required emergency surgery, had no insurance, and had no money to pay for anything. In the end cost them less than a few hundred USD out of pocket. Hospital wiped the debt clean. Government programs and drug company programs paid for meds. Eventually disability stuff kicked in and took care of everything else.

I’ll be upfront: I don’t know. But I do have an anecdote.

I have a family member who swears that their phone is listening to every word they say. Their evidence is that they say they get ads or news regarding things they had recently had conversations about.

Fast forward a bit, they come and stay with me for a bit for a visit. This phenomenon starts happening while they are here. Absolute proof, right?

Well, no not really. Every single instance of “evidence” they pointed out could be explained as simple IP association.

“We were just talking about having okra for dinner and now my feed is filled up with okra recipes” – well yeah, we talked about that, so me being the good host I am, I looked up how to cook okra so I could maybe fix some for our dinner.

“We also had that conversation about Tom Hanks and I just got an ad for one of his movies” – yeah, we did, because you watched a couple Tom Hanks movies on Hulu yesterday so now they know someone at this IP is watching Tom Hanks movies and now might be a good time to advertise something else he’s been in.

And this went on and on.

So anyway, I do wonder if there’s a chance someone else on your same wifi / cell / whatever is looking this stuff up and it’s just coincidentally seeming like the all knowing omniscient internet gods are leaking your private conversations.

It’s definitely a fair bit of effort and responsibility to keep this many fish in this size of tank, so it pretty much needs to be a labor of love. Cichlid tanks like the one in the photo might be a little less work / stress compared to a typical saltwater tank of similar size, but they can still be a lot of work.

I wouldn’t want to take on the responsibility of upkeep on this tank, but I am certain if I had something like this in a nice spot where I could stop and lounge for a bit, watching the fish do their thing, in that moment it would be quite calming.

Same principle with captive birds as pets. The sounds of a happy, healthy aviary can be so soothing (with the right birds of course). However, birds are a lot of work. And the cost of caring for them, I mean, just wait until you see the bill.

1. Sperm is not an animal.

2. Sperm will drown in lotion, tissue paper, toilets, mouths, assholes, various fruit, couches apparently, condoms, and probably an order of magnitude or few more places than just this small list I’ve constructed.

3. Sperm don’t have a mouth and thus cannot bite.

It doesn’t seem to be a super common, general thing where I live. However, there are some more prone to it than others, like places that have a bar and/or otherwise serve alcohol. Typically though it’s only the nights they do live music and that’s most often weekends and around specific holidays.

Mostly I just avoid pretty much any establishment if they’ve got live entertainment for the night and I’m there to eat as well as talk with others. I avoid any that are particularly egregious in terms of loud music. I have been with a group where we asked if the volume could be turned down on the speakers one night at a live event where we were one of only a few tables in the entire place and it was clear that nobody was particularly interested in damaging their hearing. The manager slowly slinked over to the performers about 5 - 10 minutes after the request, and they stopped playing shortly after.

Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.

I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.

After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.

Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.

But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.

The honeys back in those days must have been powerless to resist these guys.

Never have I ever intentionally shoplifted anything from a store.

Thou shalt thank or otherwise acknowledge thine responders whomst volunteer their time to provide helpful comments and posts.

Yes. They stole everything of value in my home, which sadly was not much, and they killed the family pets while doing it. No clue who did it, cops tend not to care much when this sort of thing happens to poor people, and they never tracked down who the culprits were. Definitely did affect me and yes I care.

Depends on the type of “time travel”. Backwards time travel doesn’t seem plausible, so I guess we’re talking only about 1 way physical transport time travel. That kind of time travel is achieved either by traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light or via intense gravity, unless you consider something like being cryogenically frozen and then reanimated at some point in the future to be “time travel”.

As far as least amount of impact? I guess in terms of impact, its best to travel to the nearest point in the future that you possibly can, so that hopefully very little has changed and you’re still more or less the same person living the same life (with just a short gap from leaving the present and arriving in the future). Otherwise, you could take a huge risk and try to travel to the distant future to a time when all traces of your current life have disappeared and peoples’ memory of you has long been forgotten.

I chuckled heartily earlier today when I saw a post on the front page of the R-word site that was posted to the conservative sub. It was a picture of the band holding up a mask of Trump with idiot written on it and a title along the lines of “After Trump assassination attempt, Green Day holds up head of Donald Trump”.

Literally, it was just a mask of Trump with something like “Idiot” written on it from a band that quite literally is known for criticizing the government (understatement).

They were making it sound like it was an implicit threat to Trump and hateful rhetoric inciting further violence.

I swear there must be some brain damage involved in those types of conclusions.

I tried doing that for a brief stint while in college. It was awful. It didn’t make me hate what I love, but it definitely put a damper in it for quite awhile.

I’m wondering if it’s possible that the house is a bit larger than just this little bit that’s shown in the photo and that there may be more space where additional food items could be placed or stored.

My partner is a tv on the fireplace mantel viewed from a distance kind of guy. I’m a tv at or near eye level while sitting on the couch and viewed from a responsibly close distance kind of guy.

So we compromised, and placed the tv on the fireplace mantel all the way across the room from the couch.

I guess I’d fit in quite well in a tvtoohigh community.

Turn around. Look at what you seeeeeeeeeee-eeee-eeeee-eeeee-eee-eeeeee-eeee.

Within the past year or so, I’ve started seeing the option to tip show up on random e-commerce sites when I go to checkout. I’m hoping it’s a short lived fad and that it doesn’t start becoming a super common thing because for now it’s rare enough that I can abandon my cart and go shop elsewhere when it happens.

Did you take the photo? Congratulations. Also Betty Nunez has passed.