I know these types. Grocery prices supposedly quadrupled a year or few back. Having experienced quite a bit of inflation myself but knowing quite well that my grocery bill wasn’t even double pre-Covid era prices, I inquired further. The only example at the time of anything that had even remotely quadrupled in price was eggs. And that was a temporary thing at the time blamed on bird flu but later also revealed to be also due to corporate greed.
I don’t bother. 99.55912432140001521439566917234% of the time it says “Fuck the colorblind” or some variation thereof.
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.
And then Einstein clapped the Baby Jesus’s ass and all the harpies cried at the wave after wave of baby bald eagles flying over. Amen.
Why is this making me hungry all of a sudden?
Make your own beanee weenie at home with better quality ingredients (like top shelf hotdogs and home cooked beans) because it tastes a lot better, costs less, and you have slightly better control over the amount of sodium and sugar going into it.
He’s a bitch. He’s a lover. He’s a child. He’s a zombie. He’s a sinner. He’s a saint.
I have never seen a man with this hairy of a torso / chest who also had smoothie upper arms like that. Quite the combination.
I typed this question into the all knowing AI and it returned false.
Yep, lots of bees and wasps do this because they don’t actually want to sting defensively if it can be avoided, so they are merely trying to intimidate a potential threat. Unfortunately, it’s very common for people to panic and behave erratically in response, and that tends to make the critters feel like they are in danger, so they do end up stinging. It basically becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
As far as I’m aware, it’s the females that dig the holes in wood as a nesting chamber, not the males. So I don’t think the males are even a thread to a wood framed house.
Shitty wasps like Yellow Jackets give almost all the other wasps a bad reputation. Yellow Jackets are mean and spiteful, even when they aren’t protecting their nest.
Most other eusocial wasps are pretty docile, unless you mess with their nest or really go out of your way to harass them.
In many parts of the world, like my own, there are far more species of solitary wasps than eusocial wasps. Solitary wasps are nearly all non-aggressive, they don’t have communal nests to defend, and they basically don’t have time to fuck around with stinging shit because they are too busy building a chamber for their eggs, collecting food for their upcoming progeny, and trying to stay fed and hydrated while doing it.
So what I’m getting at is that most wasps I encounter on a regular basis are pretty chill. Really, this goes for bees as well. Most of the ones I see on a regular basis are solitary types and non-aggressive. The most aggressive bees I tend to encounter are male carpenter bees. They are highly territorial and they’ll even buzz a human to scare them off. However, there’s no threat. Male bees and wasps cannot sting, they do not even have stingers.
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.
If he’s late 30s to early 40s then he did not age well. I know several full blown alcoholics in their 50s who look younger than the guy in this photo.
Same for the fish, the cycads, and the ferns. But not the unicorns.
We’re all eating craps on this blessed day.
I remember that site, but 80s and 90s horror movies had already inoculated me against the gore aspects of it. There were quite a few fictional and non-fictional gore clips movies popping up in video rental stores back in those days. Some of it was pretty grotesque and horrific, perhaps even more so than a lot of stuff you might have seen on rotten.com.
fark
Fark is still around, but it’s barely a glimmer of what it used to be before it went downhill. I certainly understand if someone wasn’t aware it was still around, it’s been almost 20 years since the case could be made that it was an important player in the news aggregation category of websites.
I’ll drink to that. It’s never anything interesting anyway. Always something mundane like evil “booing” or scraping noises from the basement. I ain’t got time to stress with the devil’s mess.
For me it’s a little less haphazard, but I’m guessing this person has lived something of a life of privilege and is probably significantly younger than myself.
I had an ex who was arrested because a gas station employee accused him of not paying for gas after he declined the receipt. Grocery stores and department stores, I want a receipt because there’s too much bullshittery and asshattery going on at those types of places for me to go without. I want to see when Walmart charges me $5.99 instead of $3.00 like it said on the shelf and I want the money back on my card when I inevitably have to do a return. Restaurants, I want my receipt because unfortunately some of the folks who run the card will “accidentally” miskey the tip amount, and strangely it’s always in their favor.