One area where this principle really applies well is transportation. For example, you will save money on gas by carpooling, but a lot of your fixed costs such as insurance and your car payment will stay the same. And while you might avoid some depreciation by putting fewer miles on your car, it’s still getting older —…

As a rule of thumb, if you drink a cup of typical American-strength coffee, it’s about as hydrating as 2/3rds of a cup of water once you account for the diuretic effect you mention.

Yep, I grew up believing that coffee (and alcohol too) is dehydrating. It was something that everybody in my parent’s generation “just knew”. It wasn’t until I actually needed to study some nutrition that I discovered the truth.

If somebody is going to be an Originalist, the first thing they need to get straight is that the rights not explicitly ceded to the government belong to the people.

That’s a complete misreading.

In fairness to Paul, a lot of the worst shit that is attributed to him was not his writing. His letters were extensively sub-edited by different factions in the church in the first few generations after his death as each attempted to shape the emerging church according to their own prejudices.

Can I interest you in my church, The Eighth Day Apatheists? We really don’t care whether or not there is a God (or gods), however it is our sincerely held belief that Monday should be a day of rest.

For Lent, I’m giving up alcohol and lying.

Yeah, the kids singing “I’m an accident because my parents had drunken post-Superbowl sex” was the creepiest thing all night.

I have this on my AmEx credit card. I think it may be a facility that the company can offer on your account, rather than a distinct type of card.

I have this with my AmEx credit card — it has a nominal credit limit but no “charging” limit. They spontaneously told me that they’d given me this facility without me asking, but I don’t know if that’s generally how it works.

These are all great exercises. My piano teacher gave me a fold-out with a bunch of strategies and some of these are on there.

I’m trying to figure out how to translate this to piano. What’s “just enough of a change”? Transpose to another key? Change up the tempo?

Conversely I have way more accounts than I want — several of them are store cards that I opened just for the “10% off and free credit with first purchase” and never used again (and never will). But even though they have been inactive for years, they still count as “available credit”, which makes the “credit used to…

You are misinterpreting what the loan officer told you.

Strictly speaking you’re correct. I was using the word colloquially — which was probably not a good idea in a financial thread ;-)

I have to call “citation required” on that.

It’s like when it says that a frozen pizza is “about four” servings. Nobody takes that seriously either.

Drinking beer straight from the bottle is cool. Drinking wine straight from the bottle is crass, it turns out. Why is that?

So offering storage for free and trying to make it in volume is not a viable business model, it turns out?