Satisfactory according to what standard? Just the fact that you live in this country at all already means you're at a much higher standard than half of the planet.

If you're truly in a position where you can't save even small amounts like that, then your living situation was never sustainable to begin with. Something HAS to give, whether that's more of your free time or where you're living. Example: You're making minimum wage but you feel entitled to live in the SF bay area. That's a self-inflicted financial hardship.

Shit, I know some people who always complain about not having enough money for anything, but every year they have a brand new iphone they financed from apple. That's how you know your priorities are incredibly fucking broken.

When I was in college, I had to roommate with a fucking drug addict. He was annoying as shit, and would literally steal food that I put in our pantry (I later found it stashed in his closet.) Asshole also stole an entire bottle of hydrocodone I was given after having my wisdom teeth removed. Fortunately I didn't even need it, I only took one pill because the pharmacist suggested I do so. I put up with him anyways because the rent was cheap. Ended up keeping everything in my own room and went to home depot to buy a keyed doorknob. Also bought a mini fridge for I think $100. That investment was worth it because I was no longer buying food for two people.

Meanwhile, some people think they need to live on campus in an insanely overpriced dorm room, then blame everybody BUT themselves for the fact that they owe $300,000 in student loans. If a person is that stupid, they really had no business going to college to begin with.

And little numbers add up to big ones too. Why would you spend $5 on a coffee that costs 50 cents to make on your own? I've never seen anybody accuse coffee shops of usury. If you got a k-12 education within the last 50 years, then you already knew smoking was a bad idea before you ever could have gotten your first cigarette, and those aren't cheap. There hasn't even been a cigarette commercial since 1971. But It's mostly poor people and Europeans that buy them anyways.

Don't care.

Which ones in particular?

It wasn't a counter-proposal.

No it's not, and it never was. In the earlier days, and even some to this day, still keep adapters in their cars, while some chargers would include their own. That has nothing to do with reliability and is both a non-sequitor and a red herring.

And we've since standardized around NACS, which is what most EVs and chargers already had.

Better planning is always an option. Like pooling a rainy day fund, which should be in addition to investing, say dropping $100/month into an index ETF, and only using the latter when your rainy day fund is exhausted. And you're not talking about an "I lost my job" scenario, because this IS a payday loan. If you're already living paycheck to paycheck, you're living above your means, which is also poor planning.

And to those who say they should be banned or have the law make their business model unprofitable, then I have to ask: What is your other "better option"? A loan shark?

I think even one payday loan is a huge red flag. Anybody who uses those has a serious lack of sound judgement.

I don't understand the culture of "let's buy stuff, promise to pay it off, then cry foul when the bill is due!" Medical debt is one thing because you were stuck between a rock and a hard spot, but...a couch? an iphone? And these guys aren't exactly loan sharks. They're not going to cut off your thumbs. They'll send you some strongly worded letters, maybe call you, maybe garnish your pay (though generally not worth the trouble for debts this small) and that's about it. You're going to have a harder time borrowing again, but you probably shouldn't be doing that anyways, so it's probably for the best.

BNPL isn't really a new concept by the way, the idea dates all the way back to at least 3,500 BC, probably longer, and the penalty for not repaying is far more lenient now.

Just make sure their free palestine vest doesn't have a detonator before approaching.

Post-Script: If you did regulate them like that, you'd basically create an economic disincentive, effectively making it more desirable to simply not build any at all if it can be avoided. Which would leave the only company with any incentive at all as effectively the only company that continues to build them out.

That's a shitty analogy (not to mention, that doesn't seem to be forbidden by any regulation.) I think it's more likely that the gas station with the shitty payment app will lose customers to the one across the street without it. Besides, you love companies that will happily kick you in the butt if you don't do things their way, namely Apple, and you always nerd rage about any attempt at regulating them. To this day, you're still pissed off at the EU for killing the lightning cable. So go fuck off with that hypocrisy.

A better analogy is probably this: EV chargers aren't exactly profitable, and in a lot of cases they're only offered to customers of some stores as a convenience/enticement to shop there, either that or they're trying to greenwash. It's not at all in their financial interest to make sure that they work. The second largest charging network we have in the US was built by VW, who only did so as part of a settlement over emissions cheating. If we're being honest, they probably couldn't care less about it, and the settlement didn't include any kind of SLA on it, so they'll take months to fix anything if they want to.

Tesla is the only company that I can think of that has a financial incentive to maintain theirs: It's a major selling point for their cars in particular. And it shows, apparently they're the only company that actually has, at the very least, an internal SLA that they stick to. Some people have made youtube videos on trying to drive around the country in EVs without using Tesla superchargers, and it apparently sucks something terrible. This is likely why a lot of other EV manufacturers are paying money to Tesla over its supercharger network.

Of course, knowing you, because and only because Tesla isn't Apple, you're the kind of guy who would want the government to take it over. If it was made by Apple, you'd be livid as hell if they allowed anybody else to touch it.

Really depends on who is running them.

On the Electrify America chargers, apparently this can take weeks or even months to fix basically anything. And for those who don't recall, VW was required to build that out as part of its settlement for emissions cheating. It kind of makes sense that they have no incentive to make sure it works well, or even charges particularly fast. So say an rsilvergun comes around and, believing that copper being a natural resource means he's entitled to it, will cut the cable and fence the copper, because in his mind it was already stolen from him first, and he believes nobody should be allowed to have cars to begin with because he can't drive.

On the Tesla chargers, the whole point of the supercharger network was to not only charge quickly, thus negating a common complaint about EVs, but also to solve a chicken-and-egg problem. (Compare to how Toyota handled its Mirai, where they only commissioned hydrogen stations in California, and then at some point they stopped maintaining it outright, so now they're getting sued by the owners who basically can't fill up their cars anymore.) Naturally, when shit breaks, customers who paid $60k plus for these cars are going to be pretty pissed. So they have some kind of rule about there being a 48 hour turn-around time, and supposedly they've been able to stick to it. This includes those times when a drinkypoo threw molotov cocktails at one, torching every charger on the lot, because he's a rebel, and he'd rather they stick to German goods, like Electrify America chargers made by the people's car company.

You're talking about insider trading. The volume of trades that would have to happen just before these events sticks out like a sore thumb. If the same people or group of people kept doing it like you're suggesting, the SEC would stick a probe so far up their asses it would hit the back of their teeth.

The only people believed to do that and get away with it are congressmen. Kind of ironic that you're pointing the finger at Trump when Nanci Pelosi is perhaps the most well known for this, so much so that a lot of people base their trade decisions on any given morning to follow whatever Pelosi does, the idea being that she knows things the public does not.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Finsider-trading.org%2Fth...

No idea. It's only ever found out when the recipient just stops taking their medication for whatever reason, which needless to say is a very bad idea.

You sure it was styrene? Everybody gets exposed to trace amounts of it often, especially if you consume coffee or cinnamon. Compare cinnamaldehyde with styrene for example, it's damn near the same molecule.

I got discharged from the Army for having night blindness
I had stage 4 renal failure, which caused all kinds of problems (e.g severe gout) in my late 20s to about age 36 when I got a kidney transplant
I'm also apparently autism spectrum with ADHD and depressive disorder.

Probably other things I'm not thinking of right at the moment. Anything else you want to know? I'll volunteer a few other things:

I'm basically in-state community college educated, which I mostly paid for on my own with minimum wage savings.

What else do you want to know? I'm basically an open book. The only thing I won't do is provide personally identifiable information to slashdot.

And they can be pretty nasty at that. Long-term, you slowly (but surely) lose peripheral nerve function (neurosis) renal function, eyesight, brain function, congestive heart disease, toes, even limbs if it gets bad enough.

I'd take the immunosuppressant, but that's just me.

Might be lymphoma, possibly caused by chronic EBV. I've been told I have chronic EBV and to watch for certain signs that it could turn cancerous. But there's no hard data on how often that happens as there have not been any studies. The bigger concern is actually melanoma.

Anyways, being on the third kidney tells me that whoever this is has been on dialysis a few times. I never had to do dialysis (waited 3.5 years for a cadaverous donor, maintained >17 eGFR throughout that period.) You can get away with doing that on the first kidney but after that, no such luck. Everybody I have spoken to who has been on dialysis says how terrible it is (among other things, you can't drink more than 16 oz of fluid per day, and each session leaves you physically drained as it isn't albumin sparing.) And as it turns out, while you can live many years on it, the rate of fatalities from any cause is significantly higher for dialysis patients than transplant patients. So transplants are, statistically speaking, better than the disease.

And your immune system doesn't necessarily kill it. Mine only seems to be doing so in the same way it damaged my natural kidneys, though maybe less aggressively than before. But strangely, despite being on a very tiny dose of only tacrolimus and prednisone (no cellcept like most others,) it's not showing any sign of rejection. They said the reason they offered this kidney to me (and that I got it so early) is that it was such a good match, likely the scale of 1-6 they use for measuring matches didn't explain the whole thing as mine was a 2 rather than a 1, where 1 is such a good match that often immunosuppressants can be skipped outright.

Regardless, about 5% of the time when people stop taking their anti-rejection drugs, nothing happens because for reasons we don't quite understand, somehow at some point their immune system accepted the graft. This is possibly where I am now, but we don't experiment with removing the immunosuppressants, because the test to check for that (a kidney biopsy) is slightly destructive to the graft. For livers, my understanding is that this is 20% instead of 5%, though unlike a kidney, you can biopsy a liver all you want with no real consequence.

Also something they likely told the patient but maybe not you, is that the half-life of a cadaverous kidney transplant is about 10 years, from any cause of loss of graft. The half-life of living donors is 20 years. It's not all about the immune system.