For people with insurance, there’s pretty much always a maximum yearly out of pocket amount, after which things are basically all paid for by insurance.

With a few caveats, yes. At least with the insurance I had last year when I hit the max for the first time, it has to be both deemed medically necessary to do, and be in network. Just because you hit your annual out-of-pocket max doesn’t mean you can get free cosmetic surgery, for example. Out of network treatment also had a separate annual max, so if I saw the wrong specialist or went to the wrong hospital during an emergency, I could still have gotten hit with another $10,000 in bills before that kicked in. And finally, I learned that there are actually annual maximums for certain types of treatment. In my case, I have an autoimmune condition and my doctor wanted me to get blood work done for it every 3 months. In their boundless wisdom, my insurance decided I shouldn’t need blood work more than three times a year, and I got a $1,700 bill for going over the annual limit for such care.

The limitlessness of their wisdom and beneficence is matched only by my pettiness, so I had the pleasure of having my first colonoscopy and an endoscopy the day after Christmas because my gastro said there was a tiny possibility of me having a problem more serious than hemorrhoids and I knew those assholes would have to pay for it, since they pre-authorized it, which added a few grand to what they had to pay for the year.

Time to go take the Browns to the Super Bowl.

For native speakers, there is also the level of education and the contexts they use it in that can influence their vocabulary. I know a lot of Spanish speakers, both heritage speakers and those who grew up in Spanish a speaking countries. Heritage speakers often are educated in English and mostly use Spanish at home and in social situations, but are more comfortable in English for other topics. Lots of my coworkers who grew up in Spanish speaking countries have pretty limited formal education. In either case, they often don’t know the Spanish terms for technical, scientific or political contexts, and will just use the English word, even in Spanish.

This doesn’t mean that English has a richer political or technical vocabulary than Spanish, but it does create a chicken and egg situation in certain contexts. Why bother to learn and use the Spanish term if the English term is already more widely known, especially if it isn’t a topic that would lend itself to popular publications and discussions outside of industrial or academic contexts? Even in Spanish speaking countries, the increasing dominance of English internationally can result in highly educated people in these countries being pressured to publish in English, further reducing the number of occasions one might have to use these terms in Spanish.

My first OS was whatever ran on a Commodore 64. I guess the Commodore kernel and Basic?

My first distro was whatever version of Fedora was current in the fall of 2008. I’d gone to university that year and my laptop crapped out. Couldn’t afford a legit Windows license at the time to replace it, and I’m pretty sure I just remembered that Red Hat was a thing and found Fedora that way. One thumb drive and 16 years later, still using linux, so I guess that was about the only good thing to come from my abortive first attempt at higher education.

People are wild these days. My wife and sister have both, working in different industries and companies, come home and informed me they were freaked out and a bit repulsed to discover coworkers in the bathroom, audibly having a bowel movement of some sort, with an iPhone on the floor of the stall facetiming their partners. These were both work places that skewed younger, but people have just been going feral. My last job, I walked into the bathroom and heard what I assumed was the Smack, smack, smack of somebody jerking off, only to find out it was a guy near his 60s doing clap push-ups in front of the urinals.

Pretty sure you need to file them so long as you remain a citizen in any circumstances you would need to file them while in the US, you just don’t have to pay US taxes on income you’ve already paid taxes on in your country of residence, up to something like $100,000/year for a single individual.

I don’t know if they resolved it, but I also recall it became more of a pain to open a foreign bank account as a US citizen, because they US government was trying to impose reporting requirements on any bank that had accounts held by US citizens, regardless of where they were.

I don’t think it’s necessarily actually laziness, but rather a failure to change register as appropriate for the medium and context. The Yale link does show that the construct has its own grammatical structure that is followed, so to me, it’s more an error akin to writing, “Yeah, so check this: World War I was started because many countries said ‘You with me, bro?’ and others replied, ‘Yeah, you know it, boy’ but then shit got real when this guy ran up on Archduke Franz Ferdinand and blasted him.” when writing an essay.

That said, it’s painful to read.

The first one is something of a lost cause, so long as English grammar continues to be neglected in schooling. I very much doubt that more than a couple of students in my high school had ever heard the term subjunctive mood outside of French or Spanish lessons, where it was always presented as this very alien concept.

I think this is just a vestige of the original form “anywise” still popping up, so at least I can understand this one.

I don’t care so much when I’m just listening to people talk, but there’s something about seeing people use needs washed constructs in otherwise normally composed and edited messages that drives me absolutely mad, for some reason. Stuff like “I need paid more to afford to live there.” I first started seeing it on reddit a few years ago, but it seems as though I’m seeing it more and more now, all over the place. It’s not something that is used anywhere I’ve lived, and it’s just jarring to see sentences constantly missing a couple of words. I suppose I expect more variance in spoken language, especially in less formal contexts, but seeing it written is something else.

It also makes it harder for employees to do things that would give them a chance at getting a better job. Can’t go to college anywhere that requires attendance as part of the grade if you’re on a shift like that. Also can’t get another job that might turn into a better opportunity, they won’t deal with your constantly changing availability.

I feel as though I missed the heyday of youtube, and only really started using it within the last few years, so perhaps my perspective is a bit skewed, but I don’t really get the point of a lot of content on there. A lot of the content I consume could easily be replicated elsewhere, or in a different format. A good deal of tech content I consume would be improved, in my view, if it were just a website with an associated discussion forum for clarifying or expanding upon any points people don’t fully get. Plenty of food channels would be better if they were just a cookbook, because they waste so much time on stuff nobody cares about in order to hit a magic length for the algorithm. Most of the long form stuff I come across could just be podcasts without losing anything of value for me.

I’m entirely willing to say this may well be my “old man yells at clouds” moment, but I just don’t get the majority of youtube content. The appeal of things like Lets Plays (outside of seeing exactly how to beat a spot you’re stuck on) and Vtubers is completely alien to me. I do enjoy travel content, but I find a lot of the stuff uploaded by independent youtube creators to be pretty exploitative and don’t enjoy watching it. I don’t think BBC or Arte or the like willl disappear with youtube. I doubt I’ll miss it very much when it eventually gets killed and Google launches a worse video site one of these days.