The room at the old folks home will have a window, and the medical staff will be licensed to US standards. You also won’t be potentially either days or an expensive helicopter trip from quality health care that your Medicare will cover almost without question.

Chicken prices are sky-high right now because of the ongoing avian flu outbreak. Same for eggs, it really decimated commercial producers. The treatment for a case is to euthanize the entire flock...

Rent is not a long-term fixed cost. Also, plenty of mortgages are adjustable-rate. If you own a condo or live in an HOA-governed community, you have common fees that are going to adjust annually. Housing is not necessarily a fixed cost over the long term; arguably it adjusts annually for most people, especially in the…

The absolute numbers don’t matter. If you get a raise of X% and your rent/utilities/groceries all go up X+3%, and this happens every year, pretty quick you’re going to be hurting. Especially in the years that X= zero. And this is exactly what’s been happening to a lot of people for the last 40 years.

This. I know “low sodium” is pretty much the antithesis of instant ramen, but if it were more available, I would have it more than once every few years.

Heck, before the discovery of penicillin in the early 20th Century, you were lucky if you lived long enough to die of cancer or heart disease or any kind of disease of aging.

We were a split Ford / Honda family. My dad was pretty consistently a Ford guy, having owned a Model A, a Thunderbird, a Mustang, and a pickup, before purchasing a Datsun pickup in the early 1980s after the second OPEC oil price shock. (There may have been a Jeep between or along side the Mustang and/or the pickup,…

So I guess we can also get rid of drunk driving laws? People drink and drive all the time, clearly the laws don’t matter.

I still have the van — it’s my only car, in fact. It’s a Limited, which is the top trim, so leather everything. The rear bench is just contour-free and slab-like.

They would definitely need an entire separate setup if every restaurant was going to offer their entire dessert lineup every day. Including cakes and the other elements that go into their cheesecakes, they have well over 40 desserts they’d have to have available, plus frostings and sauces and toppings. Given that…

I grew up downwind and downstream of a dairy farm. That was enough knowing.

I have an ‘07 T&C and the rear bench is more akin to an anti-sleeping park bench than a couch. It’s horribly stiff but there’s no support at all. Just terrible.

Pre-pandemic, I got a car service home from work one late night. The car that showed up was a C-class and good God, the rear seat was miserable. I definitely expected better, particularly for a luxury marque being used as an upscale taxi. My old Corolla had a better rear seat experience.

Not a vegetarian but my best friend has been since 1990. We now live on opposite coasts and don’t see one another often, but when we do get together, we strategize our dining. We review menus online (or in windows) and check in with one another before we commit. “Can you find something here?” is quick, easy, and saves…

I still have whatever generation of iPod was the first to support video playback, and it’s the only iPod I ever had. I loved that thing, it was my faithful companion on my daily subway (and later, Metro North) commute for a lot of years. I also had some version of something like the iTrip and I found it to be…

I am older (aka >30) and generally cranky, so I pretty well hate these things. I do not want to have to be futzing with my phone to review the damn drink menu to order a different second cocktail. I don’t want to have to zoom in and then try to navigate around the menu on a tiny screen that maybe lets me see two dish…

This is the sort of thing I would expect at a higher-end corporate / chain restaurant, and you are correct, it’s awesome when it works. But for indie places who don’t have an entire IT staff or even a dedicated IT + website person, at best it’s just a link to the website and at worst it’s a non- or barely-functional,…

I am not a car-namer, for all I call my van “the fat bastard” — that’s just descriptive.

Is that a ziptie holding the rear bumper in place?

2007 Chrysler Town & Country with VMI Northstar power ramp conversion, 42,200 even on the clock. Note that I put north of $4k into the suspension on this fat b**** last month.