“Do you want to go to the pizza place or the burger restaurant, Timmy?”
“I don’t want either! I want macaroni and cheese!”
“Macaroni and cheese is not an option, Timmy, now pick from what’s available or I’m deciding for you.”
“No! I’m not picking!”
“Okay, we’re going to the pizza place then.”
(1 hour later) “This pizza sucks! It’s all the burger place’s fault for not appealing to me hard enough by serving macaroni and cheese.”
You have a pay cheque, don’t you? That’s something that they would try to go for.
To be clear, I don’t defend the broken system, but I am trying to see what you can do to make the best of the crummy situation that it is.
If you go to a hospital and the hospital bills $100,000, let’s consider two scenarios:
Scenario 1: You have a high deductible health insurance place with a $10,000 deductible. The health insurance company pays $90,000 and the hospital asks you to pay the rest. Hospital bills have a lot of wiggle room and all of it is negotiable. You tell them you’re broke. In this case, the overwhelmingly likely scenario is that they’ll do something like “Okay, pay us $50 a month for a year and we’ll call it good”, because they already got the vast majority of what they were asking for from the insurance company. They have already made most of their profit. It is totally not worth it for them to even send this to collections, let alone hire a lawyer to sue you.
Scenario 2: You have no coverage. Hospital asks you for $100,000. You tell them you’re broke and will declare bankruptcy. They might offer you a plan like $200 a month for the next three years, because nobody else has paid them anything. And here’s the thing: they have leverage over you, because they know that a bankruptcy lawyer is going to ask for a $10,000 retainer paid upfront. You can’t just go up into your local courthouse and shout "I DECLARE BANKRUPCY!” in the style of The Office. Nope. You’ll just get 25% of your pay cheque garnished for the next eight to ten years because you couldn’t afford a bankruptcy lawyer to stop it. The hospital knows that they can juice $9,000 out of you or more, because you being broke also means you can’t afford a lawyer.
Anyway, you do the maths. I don’t know your financial situation and how much the insurance companies want to insure you. You make the right decision based on your situation. I’m just providing information. Maybe the maths nonetheless points you to Scenario 2 being a better bet. But it’s not as clear cut as one might initially think, so at least give it some thought and punch in some numbers into a calculator. And if you already have, more power to you.
If you are young and fairly healthy, look into high deductible plans. Those should be significantly cheaper but won’t cover any routine health services at all. You’ll pay out of pocket for those (possibly at a much lower cash rate depending on provider). Then plan will, however, cover you if something catastrophic happens which requires expensive care.
I have no idea what this meme is supposed to signify.
The claims are already out of time. And Trump is only entitled to a few thousand dollars per occurrence anyway. If the IRS actually had reasonable lawyers representing them, they’d have settled this case for maybe $50,000. Ten billion dollars is a Dr. Evil-level demand.
Okay, so there’s a principle in law, which is that one calls a document by the thing it purports to be. If it is not valid, you prepend “purported” in the contexts where it would be ambiguous otherwise, and explain your reasons as to why and the readers will know what you’re trying to say. You do not play word games with finding creative and insulting things to call it.
This is what the judge ordered:
The Parties are prohibited from referring to the purported “settlement agreement,” or using, offering, admitting, or citing any of its provisions in any judicial, administrative, regulatory, arbitration, or any other official proceeding as evidence of a “settlement” reached in this matter, Case No. 26-cv-20609-KMW (S.D. Fla. 2026).63 “Plaintiffs” means the named Plaintiffs in this lawsuit: President Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, the Trump Organization, LLC and includes any of their agents, representatives, officers, directors, employees, partners, corporate agents, subsidiaries, affiliates, or any other person acting in concert with the party or under the party’s control, whether directly or indirectly. “Defendants” means the Internal Revenue Service and the United States Department of the Treasury.
This order doesn’t seem to explicit prohibit the parties from following the terms of the settlement. Merely that the settlement is not to be spoken of again in court.
There are two other orders. One of them is to issue a disciplinary referral against Trump lawyer Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar. This is the court telling the bar association that they strongly believe the lawyer in question has committed a violation of ethical rules. However, I frankly do not find it particularly likely that the Florida Bar will act strongly on this referral, though I’m open to being surprised. The second order is to ban Trump lawyer Daniel Epstein from filing any more applications for pro hac vice in the Southern District of Florida. A pro hac vice application is a tool used to request permission from a court to represent someone for one case only when the lawyer in question doesn’t have a valid licence to practise in the state where the case is being conducted.
The old owners could’ve been fined into bankruptcy and then the franchise was sold to someone else.
There was a filling station in my town which was also significantly cheaper. About 40-50 cents less than nearby stations. I used it for years but also wondered how it was so cheap. Then one day, I went there and the price had gone up from the bargain of a decade to merely reasonable. I was wondering why but then I noticed that someone had put a sticker next to the dispenser keypad that wasn’t there before: a fuel tax sticker. It’s required by law on all fuel pumps here but I guess I just never noticed that they just never had one there previously.
No points for guessing what happened lol
Another W for the DSA
I’ve never heard of a Libertarian propose more government agencies or more expansive welfare programmes.
Back in 2020, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination named Andrew Yang proposed creating a new Department of Technology to regulate technology companies, because, as he put it, technology is now a huge part of our lives and economy and the current regulatory framework is completely unequipped to handle the torrential downpour of bullshit coming from Silicon Valley.
He wasn’t right about everything, and I didn’t vote for him, but that was certainly a good idea in hindsight.
I know you mean to say it can’t be repealed by an Act of Congress, but the word “repeal” also applies to constitutional amendments. This is what the text of Amendment 21 said:
Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Not “nullified”. Repealed.
Company run by right-wing billionaire: We lost all our money, sales are down 600%, and our CEO got arrested for sexting a 13-year-old girl
Stock: Up 1.2%
As leftists in America, we all must realise: This is our party, and we need to fight to win it back.
Your vote in primary election can often be more influential than your vote in the general election. And any campaigning activity you do in the party’s primary will be twice as impactful as activities during the general.
The titles are each missing a colon.
The new Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche[:] We’re not going to prosecute the predators in the Epstein files or release their names to the public
Acting AG[:] We’re not going to prosecute the predators in the Epstein files or release their names to the public
The collection of texts today known as the Bible were not written at once. There’s actually a lot of interesting history about how it came to be, but the short of it is that there were a multitude of maybe-canon Christian texts floating around during the early period of Christianity. These texts were written decades or even centuries apart, and often falsely attributed to authors who did not write them. There was also the Septuagint, a Greek text which was a translation of various Jewish scriptures, many of which now form the Old Testament.
The early Christian church decided which of these were deemed to be canon and which were non-canon. The canon texts were compiled together to form what is now the Bible. Everything else that was deemed not canon is called the Apocrypha. Many of these texts were also deemed heretical or blasphemous to read, publish, or teach by the various ecumenical councils.
Each Christian denomination has a slightly different version of the Bible depending on which decisions and ecumenical councils they accept.
The most interesting difference would be the Bible of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), which has an additional text called the Book of Mormon. That was written in the 19th century by a guy named Joseph Smith, an American religious leader who founded Mormonism. According to Mormon theology, it contains the revalations he received from God about various other unknown saints who lived in America and other holy happenings which took place, making the US a second holy land of sorts. His group travelled to the western United States to find their own promised land and establish a Mormon theocracy (they were successful; it’s now the US state of Utah).
There’s no historical evidence that any of these texts were intended to be read as anything other than religious scripture, but keep in mind that in Biblical times, people seemed to have had a really difficult time differentiating texts written by people having fever dreams versus actual genuine accounts of observed events or legitimate attempts to write scripture. If you want a fun time, you can read some of the Apocrypha, which are often similar in style to the canonical gospels but are slightly… weirder. The line between religion and insanity was not so easily found back then. Regardless of their authors’ original intent, the Apocrypha certainly can be read for entertainment in the 21st century.
Oh, you’re talking about Palestine.
In that case, would you rather have a candidate that does nothing but pay lip service to your cause, or a candidate that actively donates your resources to destroy it?
Tough choice, I’m sure.
I do not feel bad about facetiously trivialising an argument about death and bloodshed into one about dinner in order to highlight the ridiculousness of the logic used.