This sort of thing happens all the time, and it’s usually subject to some level of debate. Just look at the ponderosa pine (pinus ponderosa. Some say there is one species with multiple subspecies, some say they are just different varieties, some say that they are different species, or some are and some arent, etc.

Most people in America have health insurance through their employer. This was originally designed to be a perk of jobs back in the day, but now it unfortunately links healthcare to employment. If you are retirement age, you can get Medicare, which is government sponsored healthcare that still works through the private system, so there are no “government doctors” or anything like that for that population. Similarly, for disabled folks, or those poor enough (which can be hard to prove), they can get Medicaid.

If you lose your job, there’s a system to pay to extend your employer’s insurance policy until your next job’s plan kicks in, but it’s expensive cause your old job is no longer paying a big percentage of it, so a lot of people gamble on not needing insurance if for example, they end one job in May and know they have a new job starting in September.

With insurance, there are some government mandated policies. For example (and don’t quote me on this cause I don’t know the exact policies), things determined to be “preventative” have no out of pocket cost, so you won’t generally pay for a regular yearly checkup, vaccines, etc. There are often options for insurance types to pick from depending on if you anticipate needing lots of care (e.g., a healthy young person probably won’t, but if you are trying to have a baby, you know there are a lot of costs associated).

My employer pays for my insurance. If I were to get cancer, I would probably end up paying for a couple thousand dollars of appointments, scans, etc (called the deductible). Then I’d reach a point where my insurance covers most of the cost, and I kick in 20% (called the coinsurance level). Eventually, if my costs hit a certain limit (the out of pocket limit), insurance covers everything. I think it’s like $8k or something like that for me. That’s the most I could ever have to pay in a year.

People get screwed over by a few things. First is that while I could put together $8k if I had to, many people still have trouble with that. The second is people falling through the cracks of the labyrinthine system, and they end up without insurance while in between jobs or whatever. The third thing is that insurance decides what is necessary, so if you live in the middle of nowhere, and your child gets a specific type of cancer, you might not want to settle for whatever the “standard of care” is at your local hospital, you might want to fly across the country to go to the best hospital for that cancer, and your insurance isn’t going to cover that cost.

And it is incredibly important to note that the insurance companies don’t play fair. When your doctor tells the insurance company that you need a certain procedure, they have an automated system send out a “no”. Your doctor then has to spend time to appeal the decision. Eventually, you might get the care you need paid for, but by engaging in these practices, they are hoping you will either 1: pay yourself, or 2: die.

Also, a final note that I think is important is that cancer, and many chronic illnesses, makes people desperate, and willing to try anything. There is a huge ecosystem (and it probably exists in your country, too), of people selling alternative (i.e., fake) medicine to cure them. Yeah, it’s possible to wind up with a $50k bill for real medicine, but you also have people paying large sums to feed bleach to their autistic kids and then trying to pay for it with go fund me.

Air conditioning

Yeah, as someone with some all-clad, it’s really nothing special. I heard that the handles are geared towards maintaining the ability to prevent twisting of the pan in your hand while using pot holders/towels, and i think they work well for that.

I strongly agree with this. You aren’t necessarily going to get fancy brand names, but you can get a stainless frying pan with a big billet of aluminum on the bottom for heat distribution for $20. Spending 5 times that amount basically just gets you a mirror finish, a brand name, and the ability to put it in a dishwasher (and who does that with pans?).

Carbon steel pans are another one. You shouldn’t need to spend more than $10 on a carbon steel pan. The materials are cheap and they can be easily mass produced. There’s nothing that should make it expensive.

Technically, you can have 1 reservation on their system with multiple cars, so if you booked like a 15 person site, you could arrive in 4 separate cars. The receipt reflects this with a line item of “vehicles=x”. For mine, it says “vehicles=0”, so somehow it recognizes that the gibberish wasn’t a real car, but i was still required to do it.

pH doesn’t necessarily tell the right story if you are concerned about acidity for your teeth, GI tract, or taste. Something like distilled water will turn acidic with a pH of 5.8 due to co2 absorption. There’s barely any “acid” there, though, it just doesn’t have any buffering capability compared to water with some dissolved solids in it (like tap water). What really matters is what they call “titratable acidity”.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45776-5_22

Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.

I’m sure you know this, but some of the maesri pastes are non-vegetarian.

Strongly agreed on the delicious, lazy, vegan food, though.

“Tastes like it’s from your local Thai restaurant” is different than “tastes like it’s from Thailand”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america/

The TL;DR is that the Thai government has sponsored many Thai restaurants around the world as a form of diplomacy. Menus and recipes have largely been standardized by the Thai government, but adapted to local tastes.

Personally, if I want takeout style Thai curry, I use maesri brand curry paste cans. They are cheap and don’t take up much space, and they have instructions on them like “add curry paste and 100 ml coconut milk to wok and cook till fragrant. Add 400 g protein …”. It’s easy to keep a selection on hand of the different flavors. Yeah, it won’t be the same as doing it 100% from scratch, but a lot of Thai restaurant food like pad Thai is notorious for requiring a lot of ingredients.

Agreed. Jobs don’t go to the applicant with the highest GPA (or the most “skilled”), they go to whoever had an internship at their dad’s friend’s company (or friend’s dad’s company, etc.) each summer and got grades that were “good enough”. If you can get something like that, even if it’s not exactly in your area of interest, you don’t need to be too concerned about grades.

On the other hand, if you don’t have those connections, you need to be smart.

There are people who are able to get decent enough grades and get jobs on charisma alone, but they are a nightmare to work with cause you’ll always be picking up their slack (even if they are perfectly nice people that you enjoy being around).

I tend to disagree with people on the “numbers game” thing. The barriers to submitting a million resumes to a million jobs have never been lower, so people in charge of hiring are inundated with applications from people who’s skillsets and stated interests make it clear that they have not even read the job posting. It makes it so that people who are fitting for the job are like a needle in a haystack. It also doesn’t help that the people reviewing applications are not often the people who you’d be working with, and they don’t necessarily know all the right things to be looking for; they just have a list of magic words that they are filtering for. You might have a synonym of the right word on your resume, and they’d never notice it.

These days, knowing someone is especially the key in my experience. It doesn’t even have to be someone you know well enough that they’d give you an actual “recommendation”. You are probably better off sending your resume to 10 people who already have the job you want than submitting 100 actual applications.

It’s not the best resume in the giant stack who gets interviewed, it’s someone’s niece’s college roommate’s former coworker’s step-cousin.

I feel like it’s only a matter of time before those get banned, so i kinda want to get one, even though I dont really need one.

It’s such an easy thing to predict happening, too. If you did it perfectly, it would, at best, maintain an unstable equilibrium and just keep the same output quality.

So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors

Don’t forget to also resent how much money sneakily goes to defense contractors (or other megacorps) by way of every other government office. It depends on the agency, but the majority of the federal workforce is not US government employees, it’s contractors, so taxpayer funds go to an army of middlemen before trickling down to the people doing the work. Taxpayers end up overpaying for labor, and the laborers make less money and with less job security than if that tax money just went directly to the worker.

healthcare, bicycle lanes, cheap and very good trains/metro/ferries/buses everywhere

Danish healthcare is cheaper than US healthcare, and bicycles/public transit are also cheaper than the car centric US transportation infrastructure. If the US adopted socialized healthcare and sane transit, we’d pay less taxes not more.

To me, there isn’t too much difference between brands. Fully clad pans will be dishwasher safe, but I never put pans in the dishwasher, anyway.

I bought some of my first stainless pans from a restaurant supply store, and they were really cheap, but worked well. They basically have a big aluminum disk fused to the stainless part that contacts food. It heats really evenly, but it’s not dishwasher safe.

I also have some All-clad pans. They are expensive, but you can get them on good sales (also, rich people buy big sets of them cause they are shiny and expensive but then donate them to a thrift store when they realize that they don’t know how to cook on stainless steel). Honestly, they are just fine. The handles are weirdly uncomfortable. They make a mirror finish on the outside or a brushed finish. I like the brushed better because there’s no way someone who actually uses them can keep a mirror finish looking good.

They make a 3 ply and a 5 ply (and even a 7 ply). The 3 and 5 ply are the same thickness overall, and theoretically the 5 ply should be more warp resistant, but i don’t know that it should really ever be a problem. I think the higher ply pans are also heavier, so they probably hold more heat, too.

Realistically, I think the only things that matter to me are that it’s oven safe and induction capable.

I’ve used this, too, and it was great. They also tell you if it’s something actually scratch/dent or if it’s just the box that got mangled so they can’t put it on a store shelf.

Pet food containers are a classic option for home brewers storing grain. The other one is 5 gallon plastic utility buckets (I’m assuming there are equivalent sizes in other countries), and you can buy lids for them that make them airtight with a gasket (brand name gammaseal, is believe).

OP if you are looking to reuse something, one option I’ve used in the past are frosting buckets from grocery store bakeries. The cheap cakes you can buy usually dont use house-made frosting; they purchase big buckets and discard them when empty. You can ask at the counter for a few, and they are usually happy to give them to you rather than throwing them away. They are essentially the same thing as the big utility painter’s buckets, but you know they are foodsafe, and they are a bit smaller (maybe 10 liters?).

Those are the nice, clear ones, too. The polypropylene ones are opaque and a good bit cheaper, but seem to function more or less the same. I’m not sure on the pros and cons of polypropylene vs polycarbonate in this application, though. The downside of this kind of container is that they aren’t airtight, so if you are storing something like whole wheat that can go rancid, you need to make sure you are still using it quickly enough.