I think the pandemic will definitely have an effect. If I recall correctly, Fox News changed gears and started promoting the vaccine after realizing that their base was dying at a faster rate than Democrats.

It could have been a co tributing factor to Georgia voting for Biden in 2020 and could be a reason why Biden was closer to winning TX than Hillary was.

Florida is hard to say, because a lot of retirees move there. So while the Republicans there may have been hit harder during covid, those may have been replaced with more Republicans moving in to retire in the sun.

I thought they were banned to prevent free food and thus discouraged homeless people.

As long as they are done correctly. I’ve seen many new roundabouts that are two lanes wide and allow people in the middle lane to turn out of the roundabout. Only the outer lane should turn out, otherwise there’s essentially a stop sign because you never know what the other cars are going to do.

Don’t forget, insurance covers 50% before the deductible is met, not after. When a policy has that verbiage, usually there’s a footnote that states how those claims are handled in the future. From what I’ve seen, that could mean that insurance will cover 100% of said procedure after the deductible is met or it could mean a co-insurance of 30%.

After the deductible is met, OP won’t necessarily pay 50%. The percentage of the bill that OP and/or insurance will pay will be on a footnote at the bottom of the blue plan overview page (at least it’s blue when looking at plans from the ACA marketplace).

If you’ve met your deductible, you may not owe for the upcoming procedure.

However, you’d need to look at your policy or call the insurance company to see if the procedure counts towards your deductible. Normally the plan specifies that its 50% before the deductible and by an asterisk or buried somewhere in your plan’s terms, it may say that it’ll be 100% covered after tour deductible is met.

Is your deductible and out-of-pocket max the same? If you’ve met both, you may not even owe a copay. If you still haven’t met the out-of-pocket max, you will still owe co-pays.

Your plan documents or the company will be able to give better answers, as companies and plans can be very different in how they cover things.

That would be great once the heat index gets down to double digits.

Enya can be helpful for me. Otherwise soothing classical music, the fast and loud works can be a little too distracting. It also helps me to listen to the same thing when doing a task to train my brain to focus when listening to it.

It’s probably because they can remember how convenient and cheaper it was to see any movie or show that could be streamed. Streaming was supposed to disrupt TV by eliminating ads and allowing you to choose whatever you want to watch. Nowadays, in order to get the same amount of choices, you need to spend about as much as you did for a TV subscription and now many platforms have ads.

I think it’s more a frustration at what we lost than anything else.

It took me 6 months to get a graveyard shift stocking job in 2020/2021, indeed said there were a ton of applicants to all the positions that I applied for. That was applying across the metro area I live in.

If you don’t believe the official counts, than where would you go for a source?

We were only 600,000 votes away from a Biden victory in 2020 because we didn’t have enough voters. TX has pitiful voter turnout, even with 2 weeks if open polls, with polls required to be open at least 12 hours a day on the weekday.

In 2020, even with what’s called amazing turnout, with a voting age population of 21.5 million, 17 million were registered, and 11.3 million cast a vote. Then in 2022, when we had the entire legislative branch, almost all of the executive branch, and a good chunk of the judicial branch up for election, only 8.1 million people voted.

Even with these numbers, Biden still received more votes in TX than he did in NY! There’s potential for us to get some better representation, if we can just get more people to get to a polling station (usually open 7AM-7PM during the second week of voting).

We need more people to turnout this year, not only to keep Trump from our electoral college votes, but to kick Ted Cruz to the curb. There is a lot in the news pushing people away from the pills and making people mad at the DNC just like in 2016 and its really scary because those tactics helped keep people from casting their vote.

Turnout number source https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/70-92.shtml

How’d y’all communicate with builders? Do you say this building has 0 floors to say that it’s si gle story and say that it has 1 floor to mean that it’s 2-story?

Here in the US, minimum wage is still just $7.25. I don’t think they are going to do anything about it anytime soon. We have a hard enough time rallying people to slow rise of authoritarianism

In your younger years, you have a lot more to look forward to that’s tied to your age: first decade, teen years, driving, getting a job, voting, making your own decisions, second decade, and drinking age. After that, the only things that are still age locked are at 25 when you can rent a car and your insurance goes down, the other decades, and legal age requirements for reaching certain political offices. There just isn’t much else to look forward to at a specific age, so it’s not as important for your brain to remember.

Misremembering people’s names is not related to the age. A chunk of the population is really great at remembering names and another chunk remembers faces better. I’m more of a face person, I will most likely recognize you, but might not remember your name.

I was thinking about that and wonder if they are concerned about additional food waste cause by having so many more grocery stores. Off the top of my head, I’m not coming up with another reason.

Mass Effect Trilogy, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, Battle for Middle Earth, and Stardew Valley.

Wow, they were all out from the DFW metroplex and only found in rural cities by 2005 at the latest in TX. I thought they had all closed down by 2015.

Oh wow, I thought they had left cities in the early 2000s although maybe that was just TX. I thought they completely left the states by 2015.

I don’t think Twitter was founded by the time Kmart left the big cities around 20 years ago.

Profit, profit, profit, can’t make as much if we spend it to make the game look great!