Yep, indeed.

Universal healthcare is also a significant reason why the US loses out to every other rich country in the world in objective metrics of healthcare.

(e.g., cost, longevity, infant mortality, maternal mortality, etc.)

My CU offers a bit of reimbursement, which I don't use.

Fidelity, however, has "all fees reimbursed" for a number of accounts.

Then again, you're not likely to have a cash account there if you don't have significant other assets with them.

>Dawn Wells (Maryann on Gilligan's Island) did because her
>manager/husband asked for them and the studio thought it would
>flop so they said OK as they didn't expect to pay them.

this appears to be an urban legend, although oft repeated.

In the last years of her life, she was pretty much pleading for help for her medical bills.

The end game will be dismissal of the case for lack of standing.

It is well established that cows lack standing to sue, even if they can be in chk-a-fil ads! :)

hawk

>I can hit the mute button if need be.

the mute button was the most important technological advance in the second half of the twentieth century, even ahead of recording and fast forward.

It does, though, mean missing all those opportunities to by precious metals for a third their value, guaranteed acceptance insurance with a benefit of three months or so of premiums, and so forth. Oh, and all those products worth about the shipping cost, but with the opportunity to pay a few tines that plus shipping.

>Some of the antenna farms are 50 miles away.

you don't need that kind of distance go have a problem.

most of the transmitters in town are something like 5-7 miles from me. I can clearly see them with my naked eye from about half my front porch (a two story pool building across the street blocks the line form about half).

But they seem to have crammed two many sub-channels into too little bandwidth. Some days my wife's favorite western channel comes in perfectly clearly, but mild weather variation can cause it to collapse into non-watchable, with no sound and a half a frame every several seconds. All the while, the main .1 station would be coming in just fine.

over time, they allocate more and less bandwidth to the various little channels.

But the real question is: is he making this up?

hawk

more importantly, what happens to the cats that eat these mice?

I do very much understand what you're saying and it certainly adds to the complexity. One cannot put sociological or psychological factors on a box.

That aspect of the problem is indeed going to be much harder to deal with than, say, salt, trans fats, or known carcinogenic compounds.

Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do about those aspects - financial incentives help a little, but honestly I don't believe they make a huge difference - which is why I've concentrated on unsafe levels of ingredients, because although we don't know exactly what those should be, we've at least got a rough idea for some of them. It's going to be a delicate one, though -- you don't want to overly restrict sources of sugar because diabetics can suffer from crashes due to excessively low sugar just as badly as excessively high levels, and some items get unfairly maligned (chocolate, per se, isn't bad for you, it's the additives, and indeed particularly high percentage chocolate can be helpful for the heart).

But, yes, I absolutely agree with your overarching point that the problems are primarily psychological and sociological. I just don't have the faintest idea of how these can be tackled. Jamie Oliver tried (albeit not very well, but he did at least try) and the pushback was borderline nuclear, and that was where there was clear and compelling evidence of significant difference in health and functionality. If you can barely escape with your life for saying eating better reduces sickness and improve concentration, and pushing for changes where these two factors essentially dictate whether a person is functional in life, then I don't hold out hope for change where it's more ambiguous or the economics are much tougher.

There are papers arguing that smoothies aren't as good as eating real fruit because it seems that there's actually a benefit to having to break down cell walls, even at the expense of not getting 100% of the nutrients from it. However, cooking food breaks down cell walls, although obviously not to the same degree. It's not clear that breaking down cell walls is harmful, even if it's not beneficial.

A lot of ultra-processed foods have been accused of having unhealthy levels of certain ingredients (usually sugars or salt) and certain styles of cooking can add harmful compounds.

It would seem reasonable to say that there's a band at which a given ingredient is beneficial (analogous to a therapeutic threshold), with levels above that being increasingly harmful, eventually reaching a recognised toxic threshold. In terms of the harmful compounds from cooking, it seems reasonable to suggest that, below a certain level, the body's mechanisms can handle them without any issue, that it's only above that that there's any kind of problem.

So it would seem that we've got three factors - processing that can decrease benefits, ingredients that follow a curve that reaches a maximum before plunging, and processing that can increase harm.

Nobody wants to be given a complicated code that they need to look up, but it would seem reasonable that you can give a food a score out of three, where it would get 3 if you get maximum benefit and no harm, where you then subtract for reduced benefit and increased harm. That shouldn't be too hard for consumers, most people can count to 3.

Yeah, understood, food is going to vary, since it's all uncontrolled ingredients and processing itself is very uncontrolled. So take two or three examples as a fair "representative sample". Further, most manufacturers can't afford to do the kind of testing needed, and our understanding of harm varies with time. No problem. Give a guidebook, updated maybe once every couple of years, on how to estimate a value, which can be used, but require them to use a measured value if measured, where the value is marked E or M depending on whether it's estimated or measured.

It's not perfect, it's arguably not terribly precise (since there's no way to indicate how much a food item is going to vary), and it's certainly not an indication of any "absolute truth" (as we don't know how beneficial or harmful quite a few things are, food science is horribly inexact), but it has to be better than the current system because - quite honestly - it would be hard to be worse than the current system.

But it's simple enough to be understandable and should be much less prone to really bizarre outcomes.

>the de minimis being $800 dates to 1934, when you could
>probably buy a complete *house* from Sears for that price.

Nah, I keep seeing $1,092 for that.

*whew*. saved from cheap foreign houses!

however, they seem to have started as low as $360 in some earlier years.

Over 90% of my family's connections are from our home, but most of the rest is from our data plan, so it's three more IP addresses plus when I'm at my job.

They do that, I'll complain.

Who knows if I won't sue for mal practice.

That's in part because a lot of products sold via third-party sellers on Amazon are fulfilled by Walmart or Target by retail arbitrageurs.

>These are folk creatures with two legs shorter than the other two,
>optimized to spiral around mountains. There are therefore two
>sets of them, left spinning and right spinning, which can't breed.

I forget which kind, but there is a crab found off both North America and off of Europe. Each has one big claw, but it's on the opposite side from those across the ocean.

biologists bred them together--and got crabs with *two* large claws--that couldn't walk due to the weight!