This also is under the assumption you’ve met your deductable for the year already which for many HDHP can sometimes be hard.

Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.

But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.

As a portion of median income it’s still far far better than the out of pocket costs in the US (just like pretty much every other country on earth)

There does come a point where the inconvenience slowly moves the masses to other platforms. It’s not that difficult to access the full internet in China with any data-only esim being unrestricted by default and many VPNs working just fine. But it’s just difficult enough to do this that the masses don’t. Piracy functions the same way, if piracy were truly broad in scale then it would be taken much more seriously.

Conveniently just in time for Trump to blame it on the Democrats even though he started the process during his previous term.

This is an amazing idea I love it

Exactly this, they’re best used as a tax free investment account rather than anything health related. If you’re on a plan with high enough a deductable to be eligible for an HSA and can afford it you should max out your HSA contributions before even a penny of unmatched 401k contributions. Personally I’d argue that you’re better off maxing out the HSA and using post-tax money to pay medical expenses unless close to the end of your career. It’s one of it not the single most easily taken advantage of ways to not pay tax at all on a long term investment.

The system is indeed stupid but the least you can do is take advantage of it where possible and for the middle class the HSA is one of the best ways.

A3 TDI? I have one of those and so many breakdowns in the first year. Luckily the warranty they were forced to add from having cheated on emissions covered all repairs. Haven’t had any major issues for two years now on it thankfully, I’m not sure I’d recommend it generally but realistically with what you save on fuel cost the extra long term repair cost balances it out a bit.

WSL is sufficient for many Windows users and developers without privacy concerns motivating them to switch to a full Linux distro.

Yes

Back when the COVID vaccine was new it was reasonably common to hear my body my choice in this context

Not sure who would buy it full price but in most of the apps if you’re not picky there’s always some amount of deals to get a meal under $5. I only go occasionally as the deals aren’t as good as they used to be across the board and the quality is universally terrible. Taco Bell is also its own unique thing which no other Mexican restaurant will get you so occasionally it just sounds good.

That being said in my area you can go to nearly any proper restaurant and get carry-out under $15 with Texas sized portions. As someone with an unhealthy work/life balance particularly in the evenings, this or bulk curry is how I usually eat dinner.

Putin also was able to only serve for two terms, so he replaced himself with a crony until he could change the law to remove term limits…

I miss the old topic specific internet forums so badly, but having tons of different accounts made the barrier to entry high so I understand why they died out.

He’s far too busy with X, Trump, and his relationship drama to have any time to do anything close to being involved. Of the company’s he’s bought or been involved in creating SpaceX is toward the bottom of his priorities from what I hear.

Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon’s many, many side project misadventures he’s pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.

My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it’s worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.

At the same time those Republicans who they’d hope to gain support from by allowing to vote by mail now believe that voting by mail will lead to fraud.

Honestly early voting isn’t too much of a pain. I already know I’ll be out of town for work on election day but because of early voting I’ll be able to get it done before then. It’s silly how complicated a process they make registration and how most of the polling locations are churches, but allowing voting by mail won’t fix the main issue here, registration.

Offsite backup is not optional for anything important. It’s worth paying for AWS or literally any other online storage solution for that copy. You don’t want a natural disaster to lead to the loss of all your life’s photos for example.

I also personally don’t recommend doing your own software for anything related to backups, you can’t test edge cases easily and it could easily lead to loss of data. I once used an app that attempted to manage its own backups delete it’s online backup when it lost its local data as it attempted to back up the blank local data.

The ads on over the air programming are so so terrible. And even with a great antenna the many channels aren’t exactly the highest quality content even if they didn’t have ads.

YouTube has taken the place of over the air TV and for good reason.

Dental and vision are never included in US health insurance and operate on a totally different confusing insurance framework. They’re only available through separate plans and have their own deductables and terms. But unlike health insurance the premiums are generally orders of magnitude lower for both vision and dental.

The problem I’ve had is that the maximum benefit is typically in the range of $2k-$3k/yr for dental which is quickly hit if you have any oral surgery needs. Unlike with healthcare I don’t feel ripped off when paying for dental/vision since the few hundred dollars per year covers preventative care visits too.