A neighbor told me that her daughter had been out playing in the yard one evening and apparently mistook a couple of young skunks as being kitties. They were quite docile and followed her up to the house. Fortunately, nobody got sprayed, not even the dog. Skunks are surprisingly docile when they don’t feel threatened in my experience, so I guess that’s why the kid thought they were cats?

What’s the average price for an insurance for a middle class person living in a big city?

In the USA, shit’s so convoluted that it’s highly debatable whether average price is relevant. But, also, good luck finding someone willing to track that info down, assuming it even exists.

The costs depend on what state you live in, whether you’re getting insurance through your employer or the open market, whether you’re getting family or individual coverage, and a myriad other factors.

For insurance through your employer – The employer usually gets a group discount on a set of plans that range from shitty coverage to slightly less shitty, a range of costs based on how much the employer is willing to pay for each plan as a “benefit” to employees, and whatever other add-ons the employee selects (ex: dental, vision).

I don’t have average data, but I’ve paid as little as $50 a month for employer sponsored insurance, but it was the shittiest shit tier of insurance that was basically worthless (and that was over a decade ago). For my last few employers, the employee paid part of the plans seemed to be in the $200 to $400 range, again depending on the plan and the options selected.

For open market – This is even more complicated and complex. But basically everybody can get it through some version of what’s known as Obamacare or ACA. Costs and plans available vary from state to state. Technically, individuals are on the hook for the entire cost of the plans. In my area, when I last checked, there were a few options as low as $350 USD (but they were utterly terrible) to $2,500+ USD for ultra-premium plans. The caveat here is that the cost of these plans is partly based on income. So, in my state, basically everybody making below $60,000 USD (or so) gets a discounted rate (or rebate on taxes at the end of the year), such that people in the lowest income bracket can get health insurance for free or close to it.

Does families get an all-in-one or it’s different for any single person?

Cost-wise, there’s a different price for individual insurance versus family coverage. Usually the family coverage is priced so that it’s a bit cheaper per person than getting separate individual plans, but even then there are exceptions. Family plans tend to have a shared max out of pocket and deductible (which are basically the annual limits on what you pay) that’s higher than the individual plan.

Which sounds like great, practical advice in a theoretical perfect world!

But, the reality of the situation is that professionals are usually balancing a myriad of concerns and considerations using objective and subjective evaluations of what’s required of us and quite often inefficiency, whether in the form of programmatic complexity or in the form of disk storage or otherwise, has a relatively low precedent compared to everything else we need to achieve if we want happy clients and a pay check.

I would correct their grammar if they were a native English speaker because having “a dream of me in it” sounds super weird.

But otherwise, people don’t control their dreams and some people are super sharers so really all just depends on a myriad of context details. Mostly it wouldn’t be anything I’d think about too much, one way or the other. Like if they told me they had tacos for dinner or that they were wearing wool socks because it was cold this morning. No real difference.

I don’t know if it’s my “favourite” but I remember how hilarious it was the first time I heard that original Resident Evil line about “you, the master of unlocking”. Granted, at the time I assumed it was all intentional B-grade horror movie parody.

Okay, but have you seen the price of rotisserie chickens lately? I’m not made of money.

Honestly, I know it’s not the same, but that’s why I have always gravitated towards “news aggregators”, basically the sites that bore progeny like Reddit and Lemmy, where you’re presented with links to news or random websites and people have their say about it in the comments.

I never heard of Third Voice and truthfully anything that is 100% reliant on a third party app or plugin / extension / mod / etc probably isn’t my bag of tea, but still a cool idea.

Not to get too serious, given the topic and the community I’m in, but…

There’s a saying along the lines of “You can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.” And the overwhelming majority of the time, it’s completely true.

Ridiculous as it sounds, there are large numbers of people out there who believe that being gay is a choice. These people legitimately feel like any recognition and representation of homosexuality risks turning people gay.

You can spend all the time you want asking them when they chose to be straight and logically explaining things to them, it almost certainly will not matter.

I see this from two different perspectives:

1. There are some ingredients I just don’t like the taste of. But, in some recipes and if prepared properly, I’m fine with them. Green beans are an example. I don’t like them. But creamy green bean casseroles are fine and vegetable soup with green beans is totally acceptable.

2. Then there are things like desserts that I’m picky about because if I’m going to screw up my metabolism and caloric intake for the day, it better damn well be worth it. I’m not going to waste my time on a substandard sugar and/or fat filled treat. I’m going to skip on that dry cake, jello salad, faux ice cream, fake chocolate sludge, etc.

Unfortunately, I’m certain I’ll end up watching this due to circumstances beyond my control. But in my defense, watching it will ultimately spare me from having to watch Another Sandler Movie Part Two, so overall it’s a price I’m willing to pay. The things I do to keep the peace.

Really depends on the situation.

If I’m just feeding myself, I have no issue with going outside and foraging for food. I don’t hunt, but I’m not the type that needs an animal based protein main entree in my meals, so it works/worked for me to collect wild vegetables, fruits, and fungi.

And from there, I eat whatever is cheapest. Grocery store mark-downs and deep-discount sales would guide my decisions. If an acquaintance was giving away food, I’d take it. When the food bank is doing a giveaway and it was close enough for me to visit, I’d go there and take what they had to offer.

At my poorest, when I had no access to a kitchen, peanut butter sandwiches were a mainstay. Tuna sandwiches were next best, but more expensive. At the time, powdered milk was a bit of a luxury, but it definitely helped wash down the peanut butter and was way cheaper by volume than fresh milk.

A lot of stores and restaurants, at least where I live, will have condiment packages out in the open. Don’t go hog wild, but my experience is nobody cares/notices if you grab a few packs of whatever items are out: ketchup, mustard, mayo, honey, hot sauce, soy sauce, salt, and pepper – in moderation – so those can be free to you to use for meal prep.

When I’ve just been broke and/or saving money, my main protein was usually chicken. I’d just buy whatever was cheapest on sale, and try to stock up a bit or get rain checks. Then I could cook that in a crock pot and literally have meals for days. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas, turkey usually goes on deep discount and there are almost always a myriad of programs that just give them away. If you have room in your freezer and a crock pot, then you can be set just from that.

Add in some rice and/or beans/legumes to soak up the flavor when cooking meats.

Eggs were also always a solid choice, pretty versatile because they could be hard boiled, scrambled, fried, mixed into other things like noodles, or used to cook/bake other dishes.

Potatoes were another cheap source of carbohydrates, something that goes on sale often enough that I could usually find a deal, and if properly stored (cool, dark, dry) they can last a long time. Plus, they can go into the slow cooker with some chicken thighs and both ingredients benefit flavor-wise.

So, meals would be whatever combination of those things you can physically obtain. Your meal items don’t have to have a name. If you have potatoes and mix those with scrambled eggs and mix in some wild dandelions, that’s still a meal even if that’s not going to show up in a recipe book. If you boil some noodles and add in some mayo and a pinch of rosemary from a bush you saw down the road, that’s still a meal. Basically, just get creative with what you’ve got.

Really, I just want to figure out a way to make a stable, livable income without having to become a corporate wage slave again. The corporate wage slave part is negotiable.

What about people who wear solid color t-shirts that have long-ass slogans on them which are super specific and seemingly only apply to a single person on the entire face of the Earth often written in a variety of fonts and font-sizes and including bizarre details about their lives like the t-shirt that was given to me by my same-sex lover on the second Saturday in June of 2021 to celebrate the fact that I managed to clear an entire thornless blackberry bush of berries that we used to make the most delicious blackberry cobbler from that very same evening?

Don’t you fucking dare speak ill of my Martha. I will hunt you down and force you to eat honey braised turnips from Martha’s website until you agree that her shit’s the bomb

I’m a purist. The stable and persistent main branch, regardless of what you want to call it, should always and only ever be exactly the same as the code that’s currently deployed to the production server. Generally the only exception is for the short duration between a push and deployment under normal circumstances.

But every job I’ve ever had, there’s at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced, so they do their own thing which is totally better in a million different ways but essentially fucks everybody else over. And I’m not even here to say they aren’t smarter than the rest of us and I’m sure that somehow their process is better than what we currently do. But with version control, my anecdotal experience has been that the most important things for running smoothly are: consistency and having everybody on the same page. Process doesn’t need to be perfect, maximally efficient, bleeding edge, etc to achieve that.

I was the kid whose creating writing assignments over the years triggered more than one parent-teacher conference.

But in all fairness, I absolutely loved horror movies and my parents let me watch pretty much whatever scary movies I wanted regardless of the violence and sexual content. And I turned out okay, I guess, depending on who you ask and relatively speaking. I mean, I have relatives around the same age who are already dead due to their bad decisions in life, so I’m just saying who cares if an 8 year old writes a story about crocodile-like aliens that eat their meals ass first.

… and nobody is there to poop on it, does it even bear repeating at all?

Yeah, I just commented before I saw yours. Taco Bell has declined the most, by far, of the fast food places I’ve eaten at in the past 5 or so years.

I gotta give their corporate overloads credit – it’s kind of impressive that they figured out so many ways to make trash tier food so much worse, charge triple or more for it, and still remain in business.

If that’s a Taco Bell 5-layer burrito, I don’t remember them being 29 cents (grew up poor, we rarely ate out). But by the time I was out on my own as an adult, I could get two 5-layer burritos and a drink for around $3 - $4 USD and some change. It was enough food to sustain me for a day if it came down to it.

But yes, these days the 5-layers are more like dried out 3-layer mini-burrito abominations that cost $3 or $4 a piece. They are pretty much nothing like the large succulent many layered dollar / value menu beasts of the past.

I guess if typing up this post is considered yelling and web hosting is basically all cloud-based these days and I’m an old man by 2025 standards, then yes, I am indeed an old man yelling at clouds. But mostly I’m an old man avoiding Taco Bell now that it’s completely ruined its brand.

My granny used to snatch them things out the air with her hands and shove them in her mouth. Said they tasted good. But she stopped after one time she accidentally caught a palmetto bug instead and bit down before she realized what was happening.