Now we just make an overnight hospital visit cost $38,000 so so that people without workplace-provided healthcare die instead.

As a bonus - people who get too sick to work have their Healthcare canceled so they’ll die too.

The CC company makes a killing off your purchases. They charge a fee to the merchant for every transaction. Between that fee and a separate fee for processing the fee, they end up charging between 3.5 and 6 percent more on the transaction, while handing out 2-3 percent in rewards if you’re lucky.

The reason there isn’t a cash discount most places is because it’s actually against the terms of service with the CC company/processors for the merchant to charge more for their customers. The CC company essentially requires that everything be more expensive for everyone whether or not they actually use the cards.

The card companies make absolutely stupid money off those fees.

Yeah - I just knew I was gonna die a few months back, and it was a panic attack. Which is weird because I’ve historically been low-stress. But between work being crazy and the world being what it is right now, things apparently got to me subconsciously.

My chest got tight, my breathing was labored, my arm went numb. It was terrifying.

And thinking you’re having a heart attack doesn’t help with the panic attack. But it was amazing how as soon as the EKG showed normal, everything started feeling better quickly. Just the knowledge that it was panic helped so much.

But you should still go to the ER in those cases, because if you assume it’s a panic attack and dont go, but turn out to be wrong…

Small rant, but people saying they believe in science is a pet peeve of mine. Belief has no place olin science.

You can’t “believe” in science any more than you can “know” in your religion.

Belief and faith are the realm of the unknowable. Knowledge and fact are the realm of science.

What you get out of it is generally less than the processing fees. That’s how reward cards work. The seller has to pay the processor to process the payment, and you get a portion of that as a reward.

It may feel like free money to you, but that processing fee is built into the price of anything you purchase.

You aren’t sticking it to anybody.

It’s about taking the state out of the process. If citizens are suing each other, it’s an entirely civil matter that keeps Texas from having to go to court against another state. SCOTUS has original jurisdiction (i.e. the case goes straight to SCOTUS instead of working through the lower courts) for disputes between states, and this is NOT something the conservatives want going to SCOTUS.

Either they lose, or they win and set some precedents they do NOT want. Imagine California being able to go after Winchester when a California resident buys ammo in Nevada.

They’re banking on the US eventually turning back around. The US presence in Germany has been historically very beneficial to them, and kicking them out is the kind of move that’s hard to take back.later.

Yeah. They solved protien folding with ML a few years back. And I like using it for things like noise removal in Lightroom.

But so much of it has been focused on useless (at best) bullshit that I just want the bubble to burst already.

I was fully prepared to hate the remake.

I played all the FF games I could growing up. I played the original when it came out, and I played IV and VI (as II and III in the US) on my SNES.

I got a PS1 instead of an N64 because I knew FFIV (didn’t know it was gonna be called VII yet) was gonna be on Playstation. I saved up my money for months to buy the PS1, and a few months later my mom (angel of a woman) went to Sears on the release day for FFVII while I was in 8th grade football practice and picked it up for me with my remaining savings.

I devoured the game. It was truly special. When a certain character left the party at the end of disc 1, I was devastated. I was and still am an unapologetic die-hard superfan of FFVII.

When I heard about the remake I was skeptical. When I found out they were taking away the ATB system and making it an action-RPG and bloating the opening chapter of Midgar into the entirety of the game I wrote it off.

But I still bought it, of course, and I have never been happier to eat crow.

The remake is fantastic. It’s an entry point to the story for newcomers that’s somehow both a retelling and a sequel that will keep old fans interested. The expanded Midgar section makes the events of the early game much more impactful as you really get to know the Avalanche crew, and everything about the production design is top-tier. The gameplay is a great balance between action and strategy that does its own thing instead of just copying what had already been done with the first game. It’s a love letter to the original while being an amazing game in its own right.

I still haven’t played the sequel, as I don’t have a PS5, but I understand it’s also excellent.

The city I work for put up Flock cameras with specific instructions from Council that they were only to be used for identification of cars flagged in active warrants.

Within a week of their installation, police used the cameras to track the movements of someone who filed a complaint.

This is a great observation, because it works in a lot of situations, and is a useful tool for empathy.

Someone’s level of stress/despair can be very relative. What’s normal life to one person can seem earth-shattering to someone else. And it also explains some of the most ridiculous stuff we see in society.

I’m thinking specifically about privileged people. Much of the MAGA movement, for instance, is fueled by straight, white, Christian men feeling threatened by “wokeness”. All they’ve ever known is privilege, and when people try and balance society to give a greater voice to women, POC, religous, sexual, and gender minorities, etc they start to lose privileges they’ve always known. To them, it doesn’t feel like equity. It feels like things are being taken from them.

They grew up in a world where it wasn’t as hard to find a good-paying job for them. They really could often get by on hard work and dedication, and assumed that was the case for everyone. When they lose the advantage and see women and minorities getting more jobs, they assume that it represents society valuing “wokeness” over qualifications. Pain is relative to each person, and when your life is privileged the loss of that privilege can have the same subjective emotional sting as discrimination.

It reminds me of a small child crying over dropping their ice cream. It’s objectively not a big deal, but to that child it’s absolutely devastating, because that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. As they grow, life will temper them and they’ll get over it eventually. We just have to show a little empathy as we help them move forward.

I tried correcting you by spelling it correctly, but working out the syntax with the asterisks and slashes was huring my brain.

But yes - great show.

Also the only one where I think every cast change was an improvement.

Trapper was just a clone of Hawk, whereas Honeycut was his own character. Henry was fun, but Potter brought real gravitas and represented a good man who was career Army - which was necessary. Burns had no redeeming characteristics at all, whereas Charles served as an antagonist while still hating the war and being a strong character and excellent surgeon.

And the way they transformed Kilnger from a cheap side gag into a fully-fleshed out character was remarkable.

And the decision not to cast a new regular when Radar left was inspired. We felt that hole the remainder of the series.

It’s the most-commonly rejected card. It has high fees without the clout of Amex. Amex customers are typically pretty wealthy and places will accept them because of their high-roller status. But Discover doesn’t have that going for them, so there’s less reason to accept the card.

Where you’ll find it rejected most often is small shops and government agencies.

For instance, my career has been in government, and no organization I’ve worked for has ever accepted Discover. We aren’t allowed to “profit” from our fees, so we have to include credit card processing in the adopted fee schedule. But since we can’t profit, we have to set the fee at whatever Visa and Mastercard charge. That extra 1 or 2 percent Discover charges can be millions for a large government (large city, statewide agency, etc). So, agencies simply don’t take Discover (and frequently AmEx, though they’ll sometimes negotiate).

Large retailers are able to negotiate better deals with Amex and Discover, but for smaller shops it just isn’t gonna happen. And that 1-2% (of the total charge) extra taken by the card processor is huge when your margins are small.

Heck - even the Visa and Mastercard fees are a huge deal. When I worked in retail management, those fees were secretly the big reason we pushed our store-brand credit cards. It wasn’t the 80 dollar commission for the account the store got - it was that if someone used our card in our store, we didn’t pay the processing fee.

We’d give 2% in points back for using the card in the store, which was a great deal for us since we didn’t have to pay the 3-4% fee to the processor.

That’s why nobody takes Discover or Amex. Their fees are higher than Visa and Mastercard.

But the prices won’t go down. Reductions in production costs are only reflected in sale prices when there’s a market force driving the costs down. Right now, people have to own cars, and the barriers to entry into the matlrket are too high for new competitors. There’s no reason for the auto manufacturers to lower prices if their costs go down. They can just pocket the difference.

I legitimately think that’s a relative of mine.

I need to send this to him.

Also, despite being surly in general, he used to carry square-rimmed spectacles he’d put on when children “recognized” him.

I don’t know how much it would encourage Putin to invade again.

It’s not like he invaded part of Ukraine and was allowed to keep the annexed territory in the name of peace, then 8 years later invaded again, right?

The other thing they gloss over is that it takes time here too. Unless you’re going to the ER, you’re often waiting months for an appointment.

I had to cancel a follow-up with my primary care doctor in September, and the next available time was this coming Monday.

A few years back, I needed a spinal injection to control my sciatica, my insurance company denied my pre-authorization, and I had to fight it. I eventually won 52 days after the initial request for the procedure, but they said I had to have the procedure within 60 days of the initial request. So the pre-auth expired and I had to go through the whole thing again. I spent nearly 4 months in so much pain I couldn’t put on pants some days trying to get that fucking injection.

And to add to the fun, the injection started wearing off in the last week or so, so I’m gonna have to do the whole thing again.

When I was a mid-level retail manager, my philosophy was that my floor worker’s job was to take care of the customers, my store manager’s job was to take care of corporate, and my job was to facilitate both. The best way to do that most of the time was to take care of and protect my floor workers.

Most of the time the customer complaints were baseless. Sometimes they were legitimate. But in all cases my priority was taking care of my workers. I may have had to coach them on something after the complaint (usually on how to better handle asshole customers), but ALWAYS in private, and always calmly.

Sometimes I had to do something for the customer if there was a legitimate issue, like give them a $20 gift card or something.

But no matter what the situation was, if a customer was abusive to my staff they were banned from the store on the spot. I’d trespass them, put their picture on a board for our greeters, and if they attempted to return we’d have polkce escort them away.

If they had been trying to buy a firearm (we were a massive destination outdoors store), we’d blacklist them in the corporate system and I had a text message group with all the nearby firearm dealers where we’d share the names of customers we’d blacklisted.

Nobody’s business was worth allowing my people to be abused. I didn’t care that we were losing a $20,000 sale - my staff was worth more than that, both from a basic humanity standpoint, and also because having a good, experienced, loyal employee is more important than having an unreliable asshole customer. And you don’t retain good employees if you don’t protect them.

Scaling goes in both directions.