I had a CPT like that during my second deployment. He was out in 60 seconds and in the funniest positions. The team made an entire photo album of him sleeping. MK19 range included.

I have an honors minor in medical humanities and took several medical policy courses. We looked at this exact graph from previous years as well as several other huge sets of data/graphs/studies and anything else related to insurance you can imagine. Insurance is not a standard market commodity and does not follow the same trend or logic. The only way you can lower premiums in insurance is by reducing the risk in the pool, or increasing the pool size to dilute the risk. This is either increasing the total pool size by increasing premiums, getting more people, or being selective about who joins the risk pool. The third one was what was called “preexisting conditions” and kept high cost people from entering the risk pool and draining the funds. This got banned and increased premiums. By increasing competition you end up splitting up the pools, making everyone’s premiums go up. This happened multiple times post ACA after the GOP started stripping out the funding and safeguards to prevent this. More and more competition opened up with artificially low premiums being subsidized by federal dollars, but then when the subsidies ended the premiums started jumping. Then when the premiums were jumping, new companies opened up to make more competition advertising lower rates, but then further fractured to pool sizes, leading to premiums skyrocketing. If you look back just 10 years ago there was a 3-5 year stretch of premiums increasing almost 30% year after year. It was due to all the competition opening up every year. This is why single payer systems have the lowest rates. If you have even one private company monopoly with a regulated cap on profits you would still end up with lower premiums. Then, if this single paying company was nationalized to take out the profit making middle man, the premiums are that much lower because your risk is spread across a massive pool. More competition in insurance makes the problem worse. I would agree with your stronger regulation though. There is a lot that can be done there.

Second on the ladybugs. You have a grow house to contain them and makes them that much more effective. They cost about 15-20$ for a container of them and live for about 2 weeks, sometimes more.

I used neem oil on other plants and it leaves a residue that I didn’t like. It also raises the leaf Temps and blocks leaf pours/stoma. There are also home made remedies with water/soap/alcohol that are better for the plants.

Can we do Icewind Dale instead?

Thanks for the reply, I was hoping to generate more discussion. It looks like you were the only one…

Hot take here and I would love discussion- but this is a small reason why I am against a full UBI in cash, but want UBI in voucher form with only a small portion in cash. Vouchers limit potential inflation spill over from sectors and you can now control how much people are getting depending on factors to better and more fairly suit their situations. This is also why I am a huge fan of “food stamps” or food welfare programs. This is essentialy what they are doing already, just make it universal. Then we look at things like housing vouchers, another great program that we can now just scale up and make universal as well. Then you only need to give a smaller cash handout for incidental spending. You know people are going to have to spend money on housing and food, so make those the priorities for funding vouchers and you can put rules in place to minimize inflation within those industries. Then if you have people who are well of enough to not need the full voucher, let them convert the voucher over to cash at a penalty rate, say 2 to 1 for cash, or some progressive scale for remaining money. They don’t need the money as much, but you also don’t want them to be completely left out unfairly and have them resentful of the system. This could even expand into other industries or normal costs. Transportation, cable/internet, cell service, even some insurance (like car, rental, umbrella- assuming that if you are at a level of providing UBI, you are already providing universal health care). Now for each voucher you can make it needs and situation based and evaluate a fair amount for each person through an automated system depending on some quick metrics of their life. Each voucher system is also industry specific with its own oversight and regulations and inflation reductions built into it. I think it would be a better system and am open to others thoughts.

How much am I responsible for? If I weigh the tires (all 4) when I buy them, then use them for X years, then weigh them when I get rid of them for the next ones- then that is how much I responsible for. And I can divide it by the years I had it for a yearly number too.

And that is how much microplastic I would agree I am responsible for with the tires. There is also the carbon cost of making them, supplying them, and disposal. But we were talking about microplastics…

Technically it would reach an altitude where it would become ‘null’ due to dividing by zero. You would eventually hit the vacuum of space where there is no speed of sound and any speed is faster than it.