Nocheez posted:

It was actually a music pun

TLG James posted:

I never saw this posted here, but it appears that youtuber Onision made some more bad choices:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3FmJh-NJIM

Includes tree law.

canyoneer posted:

Wait a minute, that's exactly what I paid for my flooring when I hired Vinyl Solution

Hoodwinker posted:

Dr. Eldarion posted:

Oh, I wouldn't say that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/bqq70e/would_two_18_year_olds_be_able_to_live_together/ posted:

Greetings Reddit. For a bit of background, I am a soon-to-graduate senior in high school, and a friend of mine turns 18 in August and is going to be a senior this Fall. He goes to a trade school.

My basis for asking this question is that this friend is being kicked out of his home when he turns 18 and has found nobody else that would live with him, and I (currently living with my parents) planned to move out soon as well. He doesn't want to live on his own, and likely couldn't anyway while working wages and doing school. Though I didn't plan as early as August to move out due to obvious reasons, I'd feel guilt knowing that someone I know is homeless and there's a chance of me stopping it. I'm aware this is more of a moral dilemma than a monetary one, but because finance was involved I felt it would be appropriate to ask the above question.

Here are a few notable factors:

We'd both probably be making $8-9/hour
We both live in Ohio, meaning there'd be a lower cost of living(?)
He'd be attending school still, while I'd be working full time
We both are capable of driving and would both have cars
He already has a job at Subway, and intends to go to college after he graduates high school (2020)
I've never been employed anywhere, but plan to work there with him at the beginning of June, and already planned to take a gap year before attending college for unrelated reasons.
I'd appreciate any words of wisdom I can get for this scenario. I intend to do research about, well, being an adult because I know nothing about owning or renting a place. Should I just tell him to do his own thing for my own sake, and move out when I'm more comfortable, or would it be wise to take this chance at having a roommate while also helping someone out who truly needs it? I can answer any questions below, and, thank you for reading.

Moatman posted:

Yeah, that is 100% made from human skin

DaveSauce posted:

When you meet a vegan who does crossfit, which one do they tell you about first?

22 Eargesplitten posted:

Spoiler: they don’t change their price for the soda, the consumer pays more, nothing changes because it’s still cheaper than water.

Krispy Wafer posted:

That’s kind of the rub. The system is made to squeeze hundreds of thousands of dollars out of prospective doctors and put them through a heinous internship so they can come out on the other side rich. If you lower their salaries you have to break apart the whole system built around their education and training. And all that to maaaaaaybe reduce healthcare spending by 10% (doctor salaries make up about 20% of overall costs).

One of the easiest and most effective reforms would be to clearly state costs. Healthcare pricing is so obtuse it’s tough to tell how much people pay and where the waste is. Your Epipen is $300, but insurance probably pays 1/3rd that. People without insurance can get it for half off. Hospitals pay a totally different price and schools, which are now required to stock them, pay something else. No one is paying MSRP, but no one knows what the ‘correct’ market price is. Without that knowledge you’re taking an already very price inelastic product and making it even more skewed to the seller’s side.

The invisible hand of the free market just wants to be freed.


The Russian retirement age is 60 and the average life expectancy for men is like...62. And Putin just raises the retirement age to 65 sooooo...

Alan Smithee posted:

y'all wish you could be as cool as Californians

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/c2tg83/gf_19_buys_an_incredible_number_of_giftcards_for/


oh my god

22 Eargesplitten posted:

Hopefully not going to out myself as a bad dog owner, but are crates bad in general or just when that’s the only space they ever spend any time? My dog has always had one. We didn’t have them for our dogs growing up, but my current dog has had one since before I met my ex-wife. It’s got a bed and blankets in it, big enough for her to stand and move around, she would pretty much only get locked in there when we were heading out somewhere or she was misbehaving enough that she needed a “time out” (or we did more accurately).

The goal was always to make it feel like “her space” as opposed to the rest of the house being under our control. Of course that wasn’t perfect because it seems she understood the concept well enough to grab food off the counter and run for her crate to eat it in peace. It got to a point where when she recognized that we were leaving the house she would run to her crate and lie down in it to wait for us to latch it shut.

Cacafuego posted:

What about Ethyl's sisters Methyl and Polyethyl?

Dik Hz posted:

It's a real chem-Mystery.

quote:

Between August and October, according to an internal company investigation, Mark sold nearly $2.5 million worth of scrap pipe from the Knight Oil Tools inventory and instructed the buyer to pay him $504,900 directly, via 51 checks, each made out for $9,900. The remaining $2 million would be paid in a similar fashion after the scrap pipe was delivered. After the money landed in Mark’s bank account, he used a shell company to purchase a 40-acre plot of land, worth $2 million, in one of Lafayette’s most upscale neighborhoods.

Alan Smithee posted:

BWM near success story:

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/c6ojm4/lifestyle_creep/


i mean good for him but how the gently caress do you get that many credit cards

22 Eargesplitten posted:

Clarifying: he means actual big farm owners, not people who own a few acres or live in poverty working seasonally harvesting and planting.

Elephanthead posted:

Even with the cost I approve of that crown vic purchase and recommend he stop paying on those rims so he can get a kenne bell supercharger and some weld wheels with slicks. Those are good on a daily driver right?

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

Super rare and nice to see one without docked ears! They usually attract real poo poo head owners

H110Hawk posted:

Oh are we doing self-post BWM pets now?



Birds: Not even once.

Motronic posted:

Ceiling fan posted:

Phase outs tend to get cut to "save the government money." Those sharp ACA subsidy cliffs used to have Medicaid platforms sitting right up against them. Social Security disability and work comp didn't used to throw people off after they started getting income over $15,001 a year from other sources.

StormDrain posted:

If you think that qualifies as booze, I'll be skipping the annual Krispy Wafer end of summer blowout BBQ.

Nocheez posted:

Years ago I read a story about a guy who would order uncut sheets of $2 bills, then had them put into a book with wax so he could "tear out" the bills when paying people. Of course it looked sketchy as hell and lots of people called the cops on him at one time or another.

edit: apparently it was Wozniak who did that.

Volmarias posted:

Isn't the solution to a potential rentback scenario "push the closing date back"

Switchback posted:

The most memorable blue story moment for me was her emotional difficulty with letting go of used takeaway containers. She’d have to leave it on the counter near the trash for a few days to get used to parting with it. I hope she was a troll.

quote:

Bill Of The Month: Estimate For Cost Of Hernia Surgery Misses The Mark

August 29, 201912:07 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
RACHEL BLUTH

Before scheduling his hernia surgery, Wolfgang Balzer called the hospital, the surgeon and the anesthesiologist to get estimates for how much the procedure would cost. But when his bill came, the estimates he had obtained were wildly off.

Balzer, an engineer, knew for several years he had a hernia that would need to be repaired, but it wasn't an emergency, so he waited until the time was right.

The opportunity came in 2018 after his wife, Farren, had given birth to their second child in February. The couple had met their deductible early in the year and figured that would minimize out-of-pocket payments for Wolfgang's surgery.

Before scheduling it, he called the hospital, the surgeon and the anesthesiologist to get estimates for how much the procedure would cost.

"We tried our best to weigh out our plan and figure out what the numbers were," Wolfgang said.

The hospital told him the normal billed rate was $10,333.16, but that Cigna, his insurer, had negotiated a discount to $6,995.56, meaning his 20% patient share would be $1,399.11. The surgeon's office quoted a normal rate of $1,675, but the Cigna discounted rate was just $469, meaning his copayment would be about $94. (Although the Balzers made four calls to the anesthesiologist's office to get a quote, leaving messages on the answering machine, no one returned their calls.)

Estimates in hand, they budgeted for the money they would have to pay. Wolfgang proceeded with the surgery in November, and, medically, it went according to plan.

Then the bill came.

Total bill: All the estimates the Balzers had painstakingly obtained were wildly off. The hospital's bill was $16,314. After the insurer's contracting discount was applied, the bill fell to $10,552, still 51% over the initial estimate. The contracted rate for the surgeon's fee was $968, more than double the estimate. After Cigna's payments, the Balzers were billed $2,304.51, much more than they'd budgeted for.

Service provider: Hartford Hospital, operated by Hartford HealthCare

Medical procedure: Bilateral inguinal hernia repair

What gives: "This is ending up costing us $800 more," said Farren, 36. "For two working people with two children and full-time day care, that's a huge hit."

When the bill came on Christmas Eve 2018, the Balzers called around, trying to figure out what went wrong with the initial estimate, only to get bounced from the hospital's billing office to patient accounts and finally ending up speaking with the hospital's "Integrity Department."

They were told "a quote is only a quote and doesn't take into consideration complications." The Balzers pointed out there had been no complications in the outpatient procedure; Wolfgang went home the same day, a few hours after he woke up.

The couple appealed the bill. They called their insurer. They waited for collection notices to roll in.


Hospital estimates are often inaccurate and there is no legal obligation that they be correct, or even be issued in good faith. It's not so in other industries. When you take out a mortgage, for instance, the lender's estimate of origination charges has to be accurate by law; even closing fees — incurred months later — cannot exceed the initial estimate by more than 10%. In construction or home remodeling, while estimates are not legal contracts, failure to live up to them can be a basis for liability or a "claim for negligent misrepresentation."

In this case, Hartford Hospital produced an estimate for Balzer's laparoscopic hernia repair, CPT (current procedural terminology) code 49650.

The hospital ran the code through a computer program that produced an average of what others have paid in the past. Cynthia Pugliese, Hartford Health's vice president of revenue cycle, said the hospital uses averages because more complicated cases may require additional supplies or services, which would add costs.

"Because it was new, perhaps the system doesn't have enough cases to provide an accurate estimate," Pugliese says. "We did not communicate effectively to him related to his estimate. It's not our norm. We look at this experience and this event to learn from this."

Efforts to make health care prices more transparent have not managed to bring down bills because the different charges and prices given are so often inscrutable or unreliable, says Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, an associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School.

"The charges on there don't make any sense. All it does is, people get pissed off," Mehrotra said. "The charge has no link to reality, so it doesn't matter."

Resolution: "Because I roll over more easily than my wife does, I'm of the mindset to pay it and get done with it," Wolfgang said. "My wife says absolutely not."

Investigating prices, dealing with billing departments and following up with their insurer was draining for the Balzers.

"I've been tackling this since December," Wolfgang says. "I've lost two or three days in terms of time."

For the Balzers, there's a happy ending. After a reporter made inquiries about the discrepancy between the estimate and the billed charges — six months after they got their first bill — Pugliese told them to forget it. Their bill would be an "administrative write-off," they were told.

"They repeatedly apologized and ended up promising to adjust our bill to zero dollars," Wolfgang wrote in an email.

The takeaway: It is a good idea to get an estimate in advance for health care, if your condition is not an emergency. But it is important to know that an estimate can be way off — and your provider probably is not legally required to honor it.

Try to request an estimate that is "all-in" — including the entire set of services associated with your procedure or admission. If it's not all-inclusive, the hospital should make clear which services are not being counted.

Having an estimate means you can make an argument with your provider and insurer that you shouldn't be charged more than you expected. It could work.

Laws requiring at least a level of accuracy in medical estimates would help. In a number of other countries, patients are entitled to accurate estimates if they are paying out-of-pocket.

Most patients aren't as proactive as the Balzers, and most wouldn't know that the hospital, surgeon and anesthesiologist would all bill separately. And most wouldn't fight a bill that they could afford to pay.

The Balzers say they wouldn't have changed their medical decision, even if they had been given the right estimate at the beginning. It's the principle they fought for here: "There's no other consumer industry where this would be tolerated," Farren wrote in an email

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

i bet im more successful than fellow azn sensazn john smith and somehow i managed to not turn in to a total loving dickhead so im pretty sure its a personal john smith problem and not like, a FORUMS HIVEMIND problem

Eric the Mauve posted:

The forums hivemind problem is everyone loving constantly talking to and about him. If we all would just ignore him we wouldn't get 3 pointless pages every time he posts, jfc

e: ...poo poo

DaveSauce posted:

van Gogh Coin. Pronounced properly, of course, lest you receive a 10 vGC fine.

Cyrano4747 posted:

We’re the revolutionary shitposting vanguard. When the proletariat is ready* we will hand over power to create utopia.

*this will never happen, don’t point it out or I’ll put you in the kitty gulag.

Magnetic North posted:

Isn't this how tax collection happened in some Rome or something? You'd bid on the right to collect taxes and then go shake mufukkas down?

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

the middle class is a very malleable concept - should we hold ourselves to what would have been a "middle class" lifestyle in 1910? or 1950? or 1980? where's the line you draw?

ChickenOfTomorrow posted:

there's no such thing as middle class, just proletariat and bourgeoisie

(bourgeoisie: own the means of production, e.g. business owners, employers
proletariat: don't)

TVsVeryOwn posted: