This whole post is a good illustration to how math is much more creative and flexible than we are lead to believe in school.

The whole concept of “manifolds” is basically that you can take something like a globe, and make atlases out of it. You could look at each map of your town and say that it’s wrong since it shouldn’t be flat. Maps are really useful, though, so why not use math on maps, even if they are “wrong”? Traveling 3 km east and 4 km north will put you 5 km from where you started, even if those aren’t straight lines in a 3d sense.

One way to think about a line being “straight” is if it never has a “turn”. If you are walking in a field, and you don’t ever turn, you’d say you walked in a straight line. A ship following this path would never turn, and if you traced it’s path on an atlas, you would be drawing a straight line on map after map.

You essentially gamble a little bit. Most people get insurance through work (or they are part of a family plan). Generally, you’ll have a few plans to choose from. If you are older, or have recurring issues, you might pick a plan that’s a little more expensive, but covers more costs. If you are young and healthy, you might pick a cheap plan, essentially betting that you won’t really need healthcare other than your yearly checkup and some vaccines.

The biggest thing with healthcare in the US is that it’s very complex. Even if you have insurance that should cover something, it can be hard to find a doctor that’s part of your insurance, so people often put off going to the doctor, which is part of the reason why costs are high. Teeth and eyes have separate insurance cause they are optional, apparently.

You basically have “premiums” that are your monthly payment. If you get your insurance through work, they cover a percentage of that; generally a pretty hefty amount of it. They usually don’t outright tell you what percentage, though, so many people think insurance is cheap, and get a rude awakening when they lose a job, and suddenly can’t afford $1000 a month when they used to be paying $100. Those premiums are taken out of your paycheck pre-tax, too, which gives you even more of a benefit if you have a job.

Depending on the “style” of the plans, they cover things differently. They all (I think) cover “preventative care” completely, which includes your yearly checkup, vaccines, and birth control for women. After that, some plans have “co-pays”, which are set costs for a few things, like $25 for a normal doctors visit, $50 for a specialist, $100 for an emergency room visit. Some just cover a percentage of those costs, and some don’t pay anything until you hit a limit (the deductible). Finally, there’s an “out of pocket” limit. That’s most you’ll have to pay in a year, after which point the insurance covers everything.

All together, I pay less than $1000 a year for healthcare, but if I got really sick, and needed a bunch of expensive healthcare, I would quickly hit my out of pocket maximum, which I think is like $6,000. I could cover that, but many people cannot cover an expense like that on short notice.

The number on bills is very misleading. The hospitals know that insurance will negotiate down, so they start high, and then after the negotiations, insurance will pay some or all of the remainder. If you don’t have insurance, you typically don’t pay that whole number on the bill, either, cause the hospitals recognize that they dont have to adjust it up for the negotiation. You can still negotiate on your own, though.

Making the panels high enough off the ground with sparse enough supports to be convenient adds a lot of expense. I mainly see it in paid parking lots where the shade can be sold as a value add.

Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn’t have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it’s fine. That’s a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.

Fold your clothes immediately after drying, while they are still warm. Also, dryers that can add steam really help if you’ve got a few things that need wrinkle removal. Also, handheld steamers are cheap.

Mostly, avoid needing to iron by avoiding wearing formal business attire.

While I agree with you, I think Microsoft as a giant corporation could still go for the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach, and delete your content and make you appeal if you disagree.

I bought a variety pack of scouring pads and brushes that I can attach to my cordless drill. Super handy for cleaning stuff that would otherwise take some major elbow grease. Probably bad for my drill, but it’s worth it to me.

Belgian fries (and any good fries in America) are fried once in low heat for a little while to cook the potato through. Then they are allowed to cool, and they can be frozen to use later, or you can fry them again at higher temp to crisp them up.

Can confirm, I have the same set, and I do probably use them every day. It’s one of those tools that you don’t realize how often you need it until you start using it.

This seems like it’s flipped around backwards. The picture says you have to pump more than 4 gallons if you are getting E15, but the explanation seems to explain why someone pumping E10 would want to pump more than 4 gallons.

I bet the real reason is that someone could pump a couple of gallons of cheaper E15, knowing they’d actually receive E10, leaving the next person to actually get that gas.

This is an area of law governed at the state level. Some states are much better than others. Personally, I have not lived in a state that has a 3rd party hold the money (and I’m not sure if any do that). I did rent in a state where any charges that the landlord claims that they shouldn’t is met with triple damages. So if they keep $200 instead of the $100 of actual cost to repair something you broke, they owe you $300. It really incentivizes landlords to only charge accurately (e.g., not for standard wear and tear), and generally deposits were much lower there than in other states I’ve rented.

Lots of states also charge interest on any deposit money not immediately given back to the renter.

They gave me an itemized receipt where carpet cleaning was the only item on the receipt when I moved out of a place with wood floors. I actually recorded the whole final walk through with the person from the company walking through saying that it was perfectly clean and that I should get my whole deposit back.

When I complained, they said that it wasn’t carpet cleaning, it was just regular cleaning billed as carpet cleaning. I said I would take it to small claims court, but I never told them about the recording.

They decided to refund me just enough that the money they kept was equal to the cost of filing a small claims suit.

The particle board stuff is the midrange stuff. The cheapest ikea furniture is cardboard lattice

Ikea stuff, at least on the cheap end, is made of cardboard lattice coated in plastic. Maybe if you get more expensive stuff from particle board, or even plywood, you’d be better off, but that cheapest stuff is really cheap. Once the fasteners start to loosen, there’s nothing you can really do. With real wood, you could just put in a fastener in a different spot.

I cook my own food, which takes plenty of salt. I just have a little bowl full of kosher salt is use while I’m cooking. Generally, if you are a good cook, you shouldn’t need to add any salt at the table. If you go to a fancy restaurant, you won’t see any salt shakers. Salt typically needs to be worked into food to actually work well. There’s a huge difference in taste between bread made with dough that has salt in it, and bread with the same amount of salt added after baking.

The only times you need to really add salt at the end of cooking is if you taste it and find that you undershot the right amount of salt, or if you want to give a salty “pop” to something like a salted caramel. For those cases, a flaky salt works way better that table salt because its surface area means that it dissolves quicker, giving you that quick taste (and crunch) without actually adding much mass of salt.