Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

If I’m going to skin or peel the vegetable, I go with the cheap stuff. If I’m eating the skin then I go organic. I never buy the prewashed lettuce and salads when they are on sale because those have already started to go bad usually. And when it comes to things like berries, strawberries, tomatoes, and peppers I go with whatever looks like it will taste the best. Cheap blueberries for instance, absolutely do not hold up against the good stuff; life is too short for tart blueberries.

Think about how crazy attached that lady seemed for screaming for her bird from dawn to dusk. Now imagine that she is a parrot attached to you and multiply the crazy by 10. Now you want to travel and leave this emotional wreck with strangers in a strange place for a bit.

From what you’ve said in the rest of this thread, most parrots would not be a good fit for your lifestyle or level of experience. I guarantee that it will be traumatic for you and the bird. If you’re still serious about pursuing this, then it is absolutely critical that your first step be to volunteer at a rescue or care facility of some kind for birds specifically. Get dirty, get bitten, get some training, get some experience, and get some contacts for help when things inevitably go sideways. You’ll hear first hand all the stories about: someone’s loved pet that turned into depressed wreck on their owner’s death; or the parrot that was caged alone and never received any attention and went mad; or the malnourished parrot that was fed only seed; or the parrot that was bought as a gift and abandoned; or the family pet that permanently maimed and disfigured a child because of improper training and supervision.

I’ve known a few bird people and their unifying characteristic is a very high tolerance for noise, mess, chaos, bird shit, and emotional codependence. It takes a very special kind of person with a lot of extra time and space to care for parrots full time in a healthy way for either party.

Parrots do not make good pets. They can be kept in captivity, but they require specialized care by experienced and trained caregivers. They are a LIFETIME commitment that may very well outlive you, so don’t forget to include them in your will.

2fa: No issues, as I can easily migrate to a different device.

How exactly? This ability would seem to negate any benefit or security of multi-factor authentication.

Is your abuse of the ellipsis and dashes supposed to be ironic? Isn’t that a LLM tell?

I’m not even sure what the (‘phrase’) construct is even meant to imply, but it’s wild. Your abuse of punctuation in general feels like a machine trying to convince us it’s human or a machine transcribing a human’s stream of consciousness.

normal shirt buttons, which come off fairly regularly.

Maybe your technique isn’t sufficient and the posted method isn’t as “over the top” as you claim, but fundamental to not loosing buttons.

Classic Microsoft Business Strategy

• Embrace
• Extend
• Extinguish

Drugs alter your perception, not awareness. Mediation and a philosophy class you didn’t take on YouTube will cure you of that confusion.

Whenever I’m forced to use windows, show file extensions and show hidden files.

So, given your work history, where do you stand on the Clerks deathstar contractor debate?

You seem to be implying that you are somehow more entitled to that public space than kids. Sounds like something an entitled little bitch would say. Are you an entitled little bitch? Public space is for the public, ALL the public. If let your own hangups lead you to bullying the most naive and impressionable of us, then you are sacrificing other people’s freedom. And if you are people like this then I say, “fuck you too”. The social contract of public space doesn’t entitled you to be unbothered by other people.

To be clear I am in no way excusing parents that do not actually parent their children, especially in public. However the logic of the above comment is just a bunch of “get off my lawn” anti-social ME generation boomer energy. Also, kind of telling that the parent commenter just doesn’t see the parallels between their entitled attitude and everyone else’s entitlement. It’s a public space, if you can’t be compassionate, you don’t deserve it any more than anyone else.

Things often have various maintenance cycles that need to be maintained. Most tools require regular safety checks (usually performed by user right before use) that you probably don’t want to depend on the public for. Batteries may need to be charged or changed. Oil changes and the maintenance of other consumable parts. Firmware updates. Licensing (and maintaining a record of licensing) for said firmware or software. Warranty timelines for repair or replacement. Maintenance that needs to be done after each use, every time interval, or only (or especially) if the thing sits unused.

“On a previous android phone”

They’ve been incrementally locking down those features and options (or security holes) over the years. I’ve used Tasker almost from the very first android phone to automate tasks and watched those features it tied into slowly get stripped away or locked down to the point of being useless.

A space battle with transcendental Borg Spheres.

I mean that’s what you want when it comes to nuclear weapons. Right? Either be the first to know or the last to know. I guess some people would prefer to die in the flash than live and struggle through an apocalypse.

You’re not really making your own bread unless you grow and harvest the ingredients yourself. What do you mean you don’t mill your own grains? Refine your own sugar?Can’t really even call yourself a baker unless you build your own oven. /s

Cooking and baking are basically ALL prep work and cleanup. The actual cooking and baking is overall a pretty small fraction of the overall effort that goes into making dinner or a loaf of bread. Go ahead and feel proud of yourself if you take on more of those preparatory tasks, IF it makes for a better end result. But that doesn’t mean you get to act superior to somebody else on a different path of their own personal cooking journey. Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying “this is cooking, but that is not” is kind of like drawing a line between blue and indigo on a rainbow. It’s arbitrary and adds little to good the discussion.

Go ahead and cheat on those components where it works. Not everybody has the time, space, energy, or skill to make every bread, sauce, or spice blend from scratch. If you can make something better by getting back to the basics and fundamental ingredients, go for it! But let’s be honest when it’s more about pride than the final product, enjoyment of the meal.

Personally, the biggest reason I prefer to avoid pre-prepared foods that only require heating is so that I can avoid certain common ingredients that are often pumped into those things in insane proportions, particularly salt and sugar. It’s not so that I can feel proud of an arbitrary label.

If you’d ever been really swarmed by mosquitoes or lived in a place where they are ever present you’d not be asking this question.

• When they swarm enough they are nearly impossible to avoid.
• When their presence is constant some people just stop reacting to the bites. I only ever notice mosquito bites on places that get chaffed (like the wrists and hands, around collars and cuffs). If they bite a place you wouldn’t normally scratch and can avoid scratching the area after a bite, for some people a welt is much less likely to form.
• They don’t go after only people. Your irritation at a few bites is nothing compared to the diversity in the evolutionary arms race between mosquitoes and their prey.
• Only the mothers feed on blood. Other mosquito eat mostly plant nectar.

So much jamaharon.