The value earned back isn’t strictly monetary, you realize. A little bit of stability is hard to measure in dollars, but suffice to say it’s worth a lot to most people.

There’s a lot of reasons to stick around besides the obvious “help defend” one. It serves an important diplomatic purpose both to the US and those hosting them and exerts pressure on nations who might be feeling opportunistic if one of those allies is having a rough patch, among a long list of other things. In many…

But it’s never one debt. Sure, it starts with one, and sure, no one is garnering wages, but having an outstanding debt leads to more, often by necessity. My dad spent more than 20 years recovering from a single incursion of debt. It doesn’t just get better after seven years or because you can’t pay it. You don’t need…

Sure it matters. That debt means your credit tanks, and any money you do get has to pay those debts eventually. Hospitals themselves are usually pretty lenient about debts, but sooner or later it’s likely to be sold to a collector, and they aren’t always so pleasant about it.

Yeah, really. With decent insurance, we’re still talking a few hundred for ambulance fees, a couple hundred for the doctors’ fees, and a couple hundred more from the ER billing department for taking up space in the ER. I can’t even begin to imagine how high it would be without insurance.

Pity the Republican platform seems so focused on stripping workers’ rights, though. Right to work is some hardcore bullshit.

While this is probably technically legal in most parts of the country, you can still get arrested for brandishing a weapon if you’re anywhere but your own property, depending on the state/city/county/township/etc. You might not get indicted for anything, ultimately, but if I saw some bloke creeping around neighborhood…

That really isn’t censorship, even under your exceptionally broad definition of it. Let’s say you go around telling people to stick forks in power outlets, because you do it and haven’t died yet. Someone comes along and reminds you that doing that is dangerous, so you think about it for a while and decide that, yeah,…

That’s not true at all. A public university can’t, say, tell you not to be out on its streets, because they’re public roads and sidewalks, but it is entirely allowed to deny you use of its facilities and lecture halls. Those belong to the university for exclusive use by the school, just like courthouses, while public,…

It depends on the area of study and the program. For most STEM fields, any university worth their salt will cover costs or offer an income through teaching and waive tuition for their PhD students, for example, and many do this for their Masters students.
In most research sciences, there’s a shift away from bothering…

Any of the bows that zoom in when you draw them shoot farther. There’s at least two that I can think of finding, including the golden bow.

This model was popular for a little while in the early days of Youtube, but the cost of maintaining a passable video streaming service—even a smaller, dedicated one—is ludicrous. And that doesn’t even take into account the extra overhead of negotiating with advertisers, creating a system to deliver the ads those…

I’m not sure I follow on that. The first hop from your device using a VPN service isn’t to the internet, it’s to the VPN’s host server to be decrypted and (hopefully) redirected directly from there. In the large corporate example, that probably means to your corporate network directly since they’re already handling…

I’m a sysadmin in a large network system, this isn’t just the rambling of some bloke. Corporate and private VPNs use the same set of technology. Either way you’re going from your client to someone else’s network before being routed out into the internet. Don’t think for a second any private VPN doesn’t also have…

I’d disagree with the sentiment that everyone should spend time deliberately dating casually. It’s not for everyone, to be sure. I’m similarly uninterested in casual dating, have never bothered with it, and am now in a stable, very long-term relationship.

I’d argue this depends a lot on your company and its policies. No matter how you go about it, someone can see your traffic, be it your ISP, your VPN provider, or someone else. If you know your company’s policies and trust them, their VPN service is just as viable as any other, especially considering so many VPNs are…

There’s a difference between “controversial” and “abhorrent.” Maybe some folk attack controversial opinions with a little too much fervor, but there’s an awful lot of trying to pass off inhumane ramblings as “controversial opinion” lately, and that seems much worse.

A small ficus 2018

The witches in Macbeth feed into his fears and insecurities which is in part what drives him to madness. The same could be said for Ursula. Sure, they don’t explicitly cast some evil magic that makes people act out of turn, but they push the protagonists towards their own downfall during times of personal turmoil.…

Neither have the billions of people being systematically oppressed. Protests are supposed to inconvenience people.