Now put the space shuttle on top of it.

Insurance company profits are already capped by law. I don’t think your ideal insurance company can possibly be that much better for the customer than the already-available options are.

The companies must spend at least 80 cents of every dollar they collect in premiums from small businesses and individuals on health care, and 85 cents per dollar for large employers. The remaining 15 to 20 percent is all they are allowed under the Affordable Care Act to spend on administrative costs like overhead and marketing and to keep as profit. Any additional revenues are to be returned to consumers in the form of rebates.

Note that the remaining 15 to 20 percent has to cover all the costs of actually running the company. It isn’t just profit.

Furthermore, insurance companies do have to compete with each other on price. Denying a lot of claims helps them offer cheaper policies. Employers who provide insurance want the cheapest policy that their employees will tolerate and healthy people want the cheapest policy that they expect to protect them from sudden, catastrophic expenses. (I’m relatively young and healthy and I have never even seriously considered picking a policy other than the cheapest one whenever I had a choice.)

In this context, if your business plan is to spend more money per customer than the existing insurance companies do, and your target market is people unhappy with their current insurance companies (these people probably have expensive problems) then you’re not going to do too well…

Too bad that situations where someone fails miserably but that’s a good thing because what he was trying to do is terrible don’t come up often enough for this phrase to catch on.

From now on when I try to do something stupid and fail spectacularly, I’ll think “At least I’m not President Yoon.”

You come for the Kring, you best not miss.

The current era of excess is unprecedented in the history of the world. For most of human history, starvation was a serious threat and hungry people would go anywhere where there was food that wasn’t already claimed by someone stronger than them.

(The people in very cold climates would fight to defend their resources too! Ultimately there was no unclaimed land that people could survive in, except shortly after major catastrophes.)

I don’t see why I would be in any more danger than a native-born American citizen.

1. I don’t expect anything catastrophic to happen so suddenly that I won’t have time to flee.

2. Everyone I know is here, including people who depend on me.

3. I don’t want to learn another language.

4. I feel a lot less connected to the USA than I did before, but I don’t feel more connected to any other country than I do to the USA. The one my family and I came from is a huge mess and I certainly don’t want to return to it.

I’m taking the idea of leaving the country much more seriously than I had before, but it still seems unlikely.

There are two components to this question. Did many in the working class feel that Democrats had abandoned them? And is Trump’s economic policy actually better for the working class than Harris’s? I think the answers are “yes” and “probably no”. However, voters don’t listen to economists. If they’re not happy with the status quo, they vote for disrupting the status quo even if experts tell them that that’s a bad idea.

I suppose Sanders thinks that the working class would have supported a Democratic candidate who proposed a leftward (as opposed to Trump’s rightward) disruption. My guess is that that isn’t true and socialism is still a dirty word in America, but who knows?

I thought that they checked to make sure people were psychologically stable before giving them special-forces training…

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I think “freedom” resonates emotionally in different ways for different people. If you try to pass a law making it illegal to drink bleach, I will oppose that law. I certainly don’t want to drink bleach, but right now I have the freedom to drink it and you would be trying to take away that freedom. It has value to me even though I intend never to exercise it.

Taxes, unlike drinking bleach, are a matter of trade-offs. I’m not categorically against them. However, I don’t buy into the argument that I shouldn’t oppose them as long as I will never have to pay them.

Are there a lot of Ukrainian Americans voting for Trump? The ones I know tend to be relatively conservative by American standards and a couple of them are voting for him, but most of them support aid to Ukraine and so they support Harris.

Don’t forget about device drivers. I can’t even install a newer version of Android on my Android phone because the community never managed to get the antenna to work after upgrading the OS.

It’s a bold move but I don’t see it changing the outcome of the ongoing war. If Ukraine could build long-range ballistic missiles in the near future, I think they could regain the advantage even without any nuclear warheads. Nuclear warheads would not be useful without those ballistic missiles.

(What would happen if Ukraine did have nuclear-armed ballistic missiles but Russia refused to withdraw from Ukrainian territory? I don’t foresee Ukraine actually nuking Russia, even in those circumstances.)

There’s no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn’t be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies

(I’m not picking a side in the “Are fetuses people?” debate here. They are from the point of view of the people against abortion.)

Heh, I walk around naked with the blinds open because where I live, people would need binoculars to see me and if they choose to, their resulting suffering is their own fault. One advantage of being unattractive…

I think people value private outdoor space differently than public outdoor space. I don’t actually have a balcony but I think I would usually prefer a private space to a public one, even if the public one was much nicer.

That’s funny. I see all the skyscrapers around here with balconies and I get jealous, but I never thought about the fact that I almost never see people on those balconies until I read your question.

I wanted a balcony but the real estate agent politely implied that I couldn’t afford one in the area where I was looking for housing. With that said, I can see myself using it for just an hour or two a week while the weather is nice. I like the idea of sitting out on the balcony but I expect that in practice it would be noisy out there and boring on my own.