I’m going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It’s not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.
Given a little bit of reading first, you’d do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it’s hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.
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
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.
Generally, when you want to heat the beer is after fermentation has peaked. Higher temps means faster fermentation (obviously to a point), and fermentation generates heat (positive feedback loop), which is why you need to cool beer through the initial stages of fermentation). After peak though, the temperature drops and causes a positive feedback loop downwards. This means that your beer really crawls to the finish line. Your beer might be 90% done after 3 days, but then take a couple weeks for that last 10%.
Another benefit is if you are bottling the beer, you need to know how much sugar to add. Calculators ask for the beer temperature post fermentation to determine residual CO2. With a dropping temperature, it’s hard to say what that point is, and if fermentation is just stalled, not complete, you could have residual fermentation sugar. Bumping the temperature up at the end solves both problems.
I also second adding a fan. No need for anything crazy, just something little to move the air. I used a old computer case fan wired to a random DC charger from the “miscellaneous chargers” bin at the thrift store: just make sure the voltage works with the fan.
Moisture can be an issue when you are keeping a fridge above the designed set temperature, but below ambient. I just keep a long sock filled with silica beads in mine. To recharge, I can just pop it in a low oven. They sell devices to do this (evadry is the brand name), but you might get literally 20x less silica for the convenience of a case and built in heating element.
The last paragraph is a good catch. Someone from outside the US is not going to catch the difference between “a Wisconsin state senator” and “a senator from Wisconsin”.
Honesty is usually the right move for most interviews. People usually try to put their best foot forward, which is good, but it can end up coming across as inauthentic.
If, for example, you are a fresh graduate, and you get an interview, they expect you to be inexperienced. If you claim to know how to use every program and do every technical process, they will know you are bluffing. It’s much better to say “I’ve taken a bunch of classes on X programming language, so I know it pretty well, but ive done some tutorials and little projects with Y and Z, and I’m eager to learn more” or “I’ve done some labs where we used A and B machines, but I had a summer internship where 90% of my days were spent working with C”.
Also, questions like “why do you want to work here?” can be answered with “my significant other got a job in this town, so now I need to as well” (obviously not in those exact words). To you, it might seem like you aren’t acting “excited” by the company enough, but the people interviewing you likely aren’t drinkers of corporate kool-aid any more than you are, so they will appreciate the honesty. Also, the fact that you have a reason to move to that town shows that you are likely to be willing to work there for the long haul.
Tl;dr, don’t pretend to be a unicorn cause you probably aren’t, and people don’t expect you to be. Just make sure you show that you are serious about wanting the job.
Yeah, this is super important. I’ve interviewed someone before who was actually pretty well qualified, but through interviewing him, it was clear that he was actually just shopping for an offer to use as leverage against his current employer, and he had no intention of working with us.
For example, if a job would involve relocating across country, you’d better be asking questions about the area, or if you are already familiar with the area, make that obvious. At the very least, ask questions about what a normal day is like, and stuff like that.
I think I made the mistake as a fresh grad of not asking some of those questions because I was desperate for a job, and I didn’t want to appear “picky”, but I’m sure I just gave the impression that I wasn’t serious about it. From their perspective, they probably thought “this kid doesn’t want to move across the country, they are just trying to get experience interviewing”.
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.
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.
Total War: Empire. I’ve previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who’s played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.
There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It’s cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren’t located in the capital because it’s meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.
The new campaign missions seem a lot longer than what I remembered of the original campaigns. I like that they tutorials now give you some strategy, too.
P.S. Does anyone know where I could get some metric-only measuring cups?
The key is to never use measuring cups, stick to the scale for everything. Using recipes made with mass is the best way to do it, but if you are trying to adapt a volume based recipe, look at the serving size on the food package; it should be given in volume and mass. For example my king arthur brand 00 pizza flour serving size is 1/4 cup (30 g).
What kind of workshop are you running? I’ve been intrigued by direct solar applications since learning about this place on this low tech mag article.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever measured vanilla, it goes right in the bowl, lol. Small quantities are often easier by volume, though, for sure.
Yeah, it’s really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.
Technique can’t overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.
To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.
There’s no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can “use your core” or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.