You can renew it early. The passport doesn’t need to be expired in order to renew it.
You might as well get a passport card too while you’re at it when you renew. It’s $30 more and it’s useful if you lose your passport book, and you can carry it in your wallet as a form of ID that doesn’t have your address on it.
I oppose the death penalty, but if we’re going to have it, it should be by guillotine. I argue this for five reasons.
I wasn’t aware that the execution of Jesus was a part of US history
Back when hanging was a common method of execution in the US, sometimes the rope would break and the condemned would fall onto the ground. Some religious people argued that the rope breaking during a hanging was a sign of God’s mercy and the condemned should be spared, but in most cases they would just find a new rope and try again.
Oh yeah, well I will pay everyone 91 dollars if Trump’s party loses. Pinkie promise.
You have a pay cheque, don’t you? That’s something that they would try to go for.
To be clear, I don’t defend the broken system, but I am trying to see what you can do to make the best of the crummy situation that it is.
I agree with that. But I’m also trying to help the parent commenter make the best out of a cruddy system. I don’t defend it. People have a tendency on Lemmy to downvote people who aren’t sufficiently negative about something, purely because they think the terms used to condemn it weren’t strong enough, and therefore I must actually be someone who supports it.
If you go to a hospital and the hospital bills $100,000, let’s consider two scenarios:
Scenario 1: You have a high deductible health insurance place with a $10,000 deductible. The health insurance company pays $90,000 and the hospital asks you to pay the rest. Hospital bills have a lot of wiggle room and all of it is negotiable. You tell them you’re broke. In this case, the overwhelmingly likely scenario is that they’ll do something like “Okay, pay us $50 a month for a year and we’ll call it good”, because they already got the vast majority of what they were asking for from the insurance company. They have already made most of their profit. It is totally not worth it for them to even send this to collections, let alone hire a lawyer to sue you.
Scenario 2: You have no coverage. Hospital asks you for $100,000. You tell them you’re broke and will declare bankruptcy. They might offer you a plan like $200 a month for the next three years, because nobody else has paid them anything. And here’s the thing: they have leverage over you, because they know that a bankruptcy lawyer is going to ask for a $10,000 retainer paid upfront. You can’t just go up into your local courthouse and shout "I DECLARE BANKRUPCY!” in the style of The Office. Nope. You’ll just get 25% of your pay cheque garnished for the next eight to ten years because you couldn’t afford a bankruptcy lawyer to stop it. The hospital knows that they can juice $9,000 out of you or more, because you being broke also means you can’t afford a lawyer.
Anyway, you do the maths. I don’t know your financial situation and how much the insurance companies want to insure you. You make the right decision based on your situation. I’m just providing information. Maybe the maths nonetheless points you to Scenario 2 being a better bet. But it’s not as clear cut as one might initially think, so at least give it some thought and punch in some numbers into a calculator. And if you already have, more power to you.
If you are young and fairly healthy, look into high deductible plans. Those should be significantly cheaper but won’t cover any routine health services at all. You’ll pay out of pocket for those (possibly at a much lower cash rate depending on provider). Then plan will, however, cover you if something catastrophic happens which requires expensive care.
I never understood why console players always get so worked up about exclusives. People say the stupidest most absolutely nonsensical things like “the PS5 has no games”. What the hell do you mean?? The PS5 has lots of games, you’re just salty that other people can play those games too. Why can’t people just be happy that more people can enjoy the games? They have to have that feeling of superiority I suppose
What a fantastic article.
Epic charges less than 30%. I think it was 10-15%. That’s their whole selling point. And when I say it is their whole selling point, I do genuinely mean it, because the platform and software itself are pretty bad compared to Steam.
I think that is a different situation in your city. I don’t know which city it is, and I don’t claim to know much about how the Italian economy works, but housing prices seem similar to what I’ve got in my city (Portland, Oregon, USA), except that wages are drastically lower. So my guess is that it’s a problem with people being underpaid as Italy is a developed economy, similar to the US.
€24,000 a year would be about €12 an hour which is below minimum wage in my city. A minimum-wage worker would be paid about $34,000 annually, or €29,500. The mean hourly wage in my city works out to about $76,000 annually (€66,000). I prefer the median as a better estimate of what ordinary people make, but the census bureau only reports the mean as far as I could find.
To make my point clearer because you missed it: Councils should NOT be paying for these regardless of whether anything relating to corporate bailouts happens, because detached single-family houses are a poor use of resources and an inefficient and wasteful form of housing.
I don’t agree that the reason single-family detached homes with lawns are necessarily unaffordable primarily because of greed. That might be one factor, but I think the main factor as to why they’re unaffordable is simple geometry. Councils don’t want to pay for miles of roads, pipes, and electrical cables just to serve less than a hundred families, so these costs get imposed on the developers and homeowners. Some states, including mine, will require new single-family developments to have an HOA, which is responsible for paying for the upkeep of some of these resources. That directly results in higher assessments for ratepayers. Or, where the council absorbs the costs, they still get passed on to owners and renters through higher property taxes.
So while I’m sympathetic to your arguments, I feel that blaming only greed is a shallow understanding of why nobody can afford a house.
I think that the US as a country needs to abandon the idea that every family should have a detached house with four bedrooms, two cars, and a lush green front garden surrounded by a picket fence. It’s just not sustainable. That made sense in 1960, but the country’s population has doubled since then.
On the other hand, I would like to see it possible for every family to be able to at least afford a basic 2-bedroom condominium with all the amenities that modern life has to offer, including walkable spaces, accessible green areas, and reliable public transportation.
11,000 hours of minimum wage labour in my city would be $185,000. Maybe a bit too low to be entirely realistic, but $200,000 is probably within reach with a bit of elbow grease on the government side.
He said that because he thought his involvement in politics had cost him money. It damaged Tesla’s brand image and hurt its sales. He thought that this could cause his wealth to decrease. That Tesla’s share price would go down. That the markets would punish him for his folly.
It did not.
He has instead found himself richly rewarded for it.
“growing questions” this, “demands proof of life” that, all of that is meaningless. Either declare him dead and issue the writs of election or he shows his face in public.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of ANPRs (automatic number plate recognition) as these are called in the rest of the world. It’s more of an issue that there is a complete lack of laws surrounding how that data is to be used, and especially when it’s controlled by a private company. If there were strict laws limiting the situations where ANPRs could be used, such as requiring a warrant to begin searching for plate numbers and automatically discarding data from non-matching plates, I doubt people would complain as much about these.
It’s legally, technologically, and financially possible. But this provides so little value in the eyes of most local governments that it would be regarded as a poor use of taxpayer resources.