Medicine in the US is the closest we have to a free market. (Newly developed pharmaceuticals being a bit of exception due to the nature of our patent system) In a free market you work on principles of supply and demand. An important concept here is that of inelastic demand. For certain goods, up to a certain point demand will remain constant regardless of price as they are essential to life or addictive. Think gasoline, water, cigarettes, etc…

With medicine people will generally spend whatever it takes often even going into debt if necessary because they value continuing to live very highly. As a result, hospitals are able to charge as much as they think people are willing to pay before they decide that dying is a better financial decision.

You could argue that in a free market, hospitals which charge less will see more business pushing costs down. For certain areas like elective plastic surgery the whole free market model actually works out fairly well since people have the option to shop around. However, let’s say you get in a life threatening car crash. In that moment you don’t have the time to shop around for the cheapest ambulance provider and run a cost benefit analysis on which one has the closest ambulance. After that you can’t shop around local hospitals to see which can offer the cheapest solution for your procedure because first off you don’t know exactly what’s wrong until you get to the hospital. Second, you’re currently suffering from serious injuries and need to get to the closest hospital. This is why just about the entire developed world apart from the US has nationalised healthcare. Is it completely free of issues? No. Are there some markets where private healthcare can offer better service? Yes. However, you don’t have people going into financial ruin because they needed emergency medical care.

I’m sure in casual settings they probably eat it more like an American, but honestly it doesn’t seem like the worst idea with assistance from the knife, especially factoring in the history of the fork. I gotta give it a try sometime.

I didn’t reply to this, but part of the reason why people type Reddit after a search is because more often than not it will yield the most useful results. This comes from the age and userbase size of Reddit. If you tried to do this with Lemmy odds are a good amount of the time you’ll end up without results or with less relevant results than from Reddit.

Same here, but with stuff like rice I definitely have to do a decent amount of plate scraping, especially towards the end. It didn’t take, but growing up my mom always told me to just use my knife to get the food on the fork when I was finishing my plate. I will say from my research (which could be biased more towards formal eating) the way they eat mashed potatoes is a bit wild to me. Keep the fork in the same position as when you’re cutting meat and push them onto the convex side of the fork. For informal eating with something like rice it was fork left hand, but more of an American style of holding the fork. It does make some sense though. Apparently forks used to be straight and the curve was added so that you wouldn’t poke the roof of your mouth so holding the fork curving downwards helps avoid that.

I feel like the American style is very much catered towards the culture of tv dinners and convenience around food. At the end of the day it’s all just variations in how we decided to do a task across cultures that get the job done one way or another. With Asia we see the use of chopsticks, in India they use their hands for a lot of foods with a refined technique to push the food from the fingers into the mouth so you’re not just shoving your hand in your mouth, in Ethiopian cuisine they use a special bread to pick up and eat the food. As long as the food is tasty and ends up in your mouth it’s not too much different than something like driving on a different side of the road or different plug designs. There may be some downsides/upsides to one or the other, but at the end of the day it’s just a different path to solve a universal problem.

I did some research and it seems like they do use their left hand, but additionally they tend to always use a knife to assist with getting things on the fork. While for things like rice I see some benefits to the American system, the European system makes a lot of sense for something like steak where you may not want to cut the whole thing before you start eating. I often find myself compromising and precutting more than I want to when I’m eating steak since I change hands.

The whole concept of dominant vs non dominant hand can be over emphasized. For example when it comes to guitar the dominant hand typically handles strumming, but the non dominant hand is responsible for the complicated task of fretting. Using the “non-dominant” hand for a task isn’t necessarily relegating it to a lesser status. It’s often just a matter of practicality and if you grow up doing something a certain way you’ll develop dexterity and be perfectly comfortable using your “non-dominant” hand.

They do that. They just don’t switch hands to eat.

Can’t really escape the power grid failures, but as far as hurricanes and intolerance go, there’s always Austin.

As someone who’s accidentally punctured a large lithium ion battery with 100% charge I can tell you that explode isn’t exactly the right word. While I’m sure you could create an enclosure that could explode from the pressure, the battery itself just kinda shoots out a small jet of fire along with some toxic gas.

Assuming that a 500 dollar car won’t incur major expenses potentially exceeding its value within 6 months is a super risky bet.

I can just about guarantee it’s worse since bombing hospitals tends to have a higher infant mortality rate than the usual causes of SIDS.

I will say it’s also easier to stretch a dollar when you have more money. There are some things that everyone needs where if you have more money up front you can buy something that will last longer and save you money over a period of time. Meanwhile if you’re living paycheck to paycheck you may not have the money up front and need to go with the cheaper option and ultimately spend more money over time than the wealthier person. But again it’s hard to even think about that let alone act on it when doing so could jeopardize being able to pay rent (which can in itself be an example of such a thing compared to owning a home,).

There is some stuff to be learned, but especially with USB-C I’d say the vast majority are not labeled. There’s even some devices charged with USB C that can’t be charged with a PD charger and need an A to C cable. Phones are a great example where you have to look up the specs to know data transfer capabilities. Additionally they renamed the USB 3.0 standard which has been established for over a decade to USB 3.1 Gen 1 which is completely unnecessary and just serves to confuse. The standard was largely understandable with USB 3.0 generally being blue or at least a color other than black and on decently modern devices USB 2.0 would be black. With USB-C indication has just about gone out the window and what used to be a very simple to understand standard has now become nearly impossible to understand without having researched every device and cable you interact with.

The passage of time is a cruel mistress.

Got it. I mean one thing about Reddit isn’t necessarily that it shows up in search results, but that people will go out of their way to append it to a search in order to get better results.

Elaborate?

With airpods I could see that on an iPhone, but if I remember correctly even on Macs the issue is present.

I mean, you’re probably not entirely wrong, but this was a test flight so I’m sure they knew first off that there was increased risk that they may not even survive the journey. This definitely wasn’t outside of the wheelhouse of possible outcomes.

To be fair that’s like 12 USD which would still require tipping. Also not sure if Canada has the same minimum wage exception for tip workers where they’re allowed to be paid significantly less than minimum wage so long as tips make up the difference. In the US it’s very typical for tip workers to only be paid 2-3 dollars an hour.

This is actually a pretty big deal. I got a lot of text coming up, but the short of it is that apple requiring calibration/pairing and not offering the tool to independent repair shops resulted in these shops being forced to offer substandard results to customers because of issues with a part that costs 6-8 dollars. This often put people in a position where they need to pay 1000+ dollars to get their whole logic board replaced by Apple or pay a reasonable price for minor repairs and not be able to have their laptop sleep when they close it.

With the previous models using a nearly identical lid angle sensor you could simply swap in a new one and it wouldn’t need calibration. With the apple silicon MacBooks, if you were to swap the display assembly or the lid angle sensor was damaged you would typically end up with a laptop that would not sleep when you closed the lid or would sleep at a weird angle along the path and wake up when fully closed. Only apple and apple authorized repair centers had access to the tool to calibrate an angle sensor. This is a problem because under Apple’s system if there are any signs of liquid on the logic board you would be forced to either get a whole new logic board or decline all repairs even if the issue was just the sleep sensor and the only issue on the logic board was a water sticker going pink. For anyone who doesn’t have a spare 1000+ dollars to tackle an issue with a 6-8 dollar part (likely cheaper through Apple’s supply chain) independent repair is the only real choice. This tool enables independent repair shops to perform this simple repair as opposed to an extremely difficult repair to try to fix the original lid angle sensor. It also avoids them being forced to return an improperly functioning laptop to the customer if they find an issue with the sleep sensor after doing board repair or god forbid they accidentally damage an 8 dollar part and can’t just swap in a new one on the house.

In isolation this tool seems pretty boring, but this sleep sensor issue has been genuinely worrying for the future of independent repair and what apple could do next along with artificially making independent repair seem far inferior to apple authorized repair. Someone creating a tool to solve the issue independently is a great sign that if apple tries to monopolize repair through artificial limitations then people can still find ways to work around them.