Theoretically the contents of these lots would be insured, so if there was a sudden unexpected fire that happened to destroy all the cars Tesla gets a cash payout, unlike if they just sit there where Tesla has to take the cashflow hit of having paid to build cars that noone will buy

… My first thought was “is this loss?”. I’m probably too online.

Many years ago, the university I studied at did some construction work in the chemistry department, which included rerouting the supply lines from the big oxygen and LPG tanks so they could reach the new lab they were building.

Turns out the contractor was either an idiot or misread the plans, and ended up running the pipes straight through one of the fire-resistant walls designed to compartmentalize the building so fires can’t spread as easily - a hole in one is a Big Deal on its own, but then running pipes full of accelerant through it essentially voided the buildings safety certificate and insurance, and ment that if there was a fire, the main evacuation path would have been a deathtrap.

I don’t know what happened to the contractor, but labs were closed for a few weeks while they purged the lines of gas, removed the badly installed lines and repaired the wall

It won’t help, but not having it sure will hurt

An alternative suggestion - do what they did with UTC. It’s an acronym of both “coordinated universal time” and “temps universel coordonné”, which doesn’t work in either English or French so everyone is equally unhappy

It’s the tech aura. The machines know not to misbehave in his presence because they know what happens to machines that misbehave. It’s especially effective on printers, because (as everyone knows) printers are sentient machines imbued with the spirit of a lesser demon, and therefore do experience proper fear.

That’s the straw man behind all of this - saying anything in support of the Palestinian people is “pro hamas”, saying anything negative about Israel is “antisemitic”. It deliberately conflates political groups with ethnic identities to dismiss the argument

Isn’t this an admission that the US justice system is fundamentally unjust? Wouldn’t it be better if the judicial branch was functional and could update old unjust laws so there were zero people who needed their sentences commuting?

Ah, this must be the freedom, individual rights and small government I hear about all the time

Yeah, I get that from the US perspective the idea of there not really being a hard price tag on everything is a bit odd - the US system is bonkers and confusing from the outside as well (and it kinda feels like that’s by design).

Another example as to how this works in practice; my daughter was born a couple of years ago

• As soon as we found out my wife was pregnant picked a midwife from the list of available ones in our area (we talked to 3, picked the one we liked the best)
• We saw her once a month for the first 2 trimesters, then weekly from then
• We got ultrasound scans every 8 weeks to keep tabs on development
• Due to some minor complications we saw an OB/GYN at the hospital a couple of times
• My wife needed to be induced, and there were some more complications during delivery so our total hospital stay was 9 days
• She had an epidural, and needed a pair of specialists to help deliver the baby
• We kept seeing our midwife fortnightly for 3 months after birth
• We saw the OB/GYN again after that to check in on the complications and make sure everything was ok

Our out of pocket expenses were

• The ultrasounds, because we chose to go to a clinic near where we lived
• Parking
• The insurance excess for when someone put a dent in my car door in the carpark
• Food delivery for me for the time we were in hospital; I could have got very cheap meals from the canteen, but didn’t really fancy any of it

Grand total was less than $500 NZD (not counting the insurance excess), and we could have avoided the majority of those costs if we wanted to.

Not saying the system is perfect; it’s functionally impossible to get mental health support publicly, dental care isn’t publicly funded if you are over 18, it seems like nurses and junior doctors have to constantly fight to get pay rises that keep up with inflation, and the system as a whole has been chronically underfunded for decades - but we don’t have people choosing between death or bankruptcy, and we have higher life expectancy so shrug

Sort of.

I live in New Zealand, so this is hyper specific to how our healthcare system is set up, other countries will have radically different systems.

The way it works in NZ is that all hospital visits are free, and all medicine dispensed within the hospital are free. Visits to your GP are free if you are under 16, over 65 or pregnant. Medicines prescribed by your GP have a price cap ($100NZ/year/person iirc), as long as they are on the “Pharmac” list.

The 2 main caveats to this:

• Hospitals don’t have infinite capacity. If you need non-acute treatment (ie, you aren’t going to suffer serious harm by not getting treated immediately), you could easily be waiting a year to see a specialist
• Pharmac. The way the government ensures that drug prices stay affordable is by giving a government agency a big chunk of cash, and telling them to use it to buy the drugs that are going to have the best “bang for the buck”, and use the bulk purchase negotiating power to get as good a price as possible - hospitals pretty much exclusively prescribe Pharmac drugs because they don’t have the budget to buy anything else. This means that in general, if you’ve got something common, the drugs you’ll need will probably be on the Pharmac list and you’ll not have to pay anything, but if it’s rare, or you want a newer more expensive treatment, or you just get unlucky and need a drug that Pharmac doesn’t cover you can be in a really hard spot.

Private medical insurance does exist, and is pretty much there to let you “skip the queue” - there are private hospitals not funded by the government that employ their own specialists (who typically also work in the public system) - or to fund drugs that Pharmac won’t. Is fairly common in mid-end white collar jobs (especially finance and tech) to have private insurance paid for by your employer, but is pretty much just there for “what if I get an exotic cancer” or “what if I fuck up my knee and don’t want to have to wait a few months for surgery”. My wife needed her gall bladder removed a couple of years ago, and we just used the public hospital even though we do have insurance that might have paid for private - the public system is excellent for 95% of things.

Back when I worked a shitty retail job we would usually hire a few people on fixed term/fixed hours over the Christmas/New Year peak (ie, you get minimum 20 hours a week for 16 weeks starting November 1st), first couple of weeks are mostly training, then peak, then cover into the new year while the full time people take some leave.

Had one guy who got to the end of his training then informed management that he would need leave approved starting now and right through peak because his family was going to an expensive ski resort but that he’d happily pick up some more hours when he got back. Got really salty when he was told that that wasn’t going to happen, and he was welcome to go anyway but shouldn’t expect a job when he got back.

Kiki

It wouldn’t be out of character for Trump to fuck over a friend/ally of he thinks it would get him an advantage in something he wants

He can’t be prosecuted as president, but he isn’t being prosecuted. He was prosecuted and convicted before he was re-elected

This is a weirdly body-positive message for a gym; you can be fat and beautiful or skinny and ugly

In highschool I worked a shitty job at a butchery, and one day the boss decided to “test how smart” I was or something by asking me to get him 1000 wooden skewers out of the box.

Being an attention to detail kind of person, I spent a few minutes counting out 1000 cos I wanted to make sure I gave him exactly what he asked for - wouldn’t want a customer to order 1000 and get 995 or something cos I miscounted right?

Apparently not, cos that was the dumb way to do it - boss slapped 10 skewers on the scale then weighed out 100x that and was really proud until I pointed out that the certificate of accuracy only guaranteed the scale to +/- 2 skewers, then apparently I’m a “smart ass”. Can’t win with some people

Misappropriating funds to buy religious texts for a public school while insisting that the text includes the constitution that makes it misappropriation in the first place is some next level bullshit

The most unbelievable thing about these photos are that trump could kneel like that without shattering

“settler” is such a bullshit term.

These are armed people who attack civilians, forcefully evict them from their homes, then claim the land as their own. If they were Palestinian they’d be called “militants”.

They are settlers in the same way the conquistadors were settlers