So, there are basically two kinds of checks in the US - personal (or business) checks, and cashier's checks. The former are drawing off your account and will clear within a few days. There is a minimal fee, or no fee, for using them other than the cost of printing (and they are not expensive). They can be used to transfer any amount, but they won't be accepted by most merchants for very large purchases. This is the most common method for paying for something that is too big for cash but would charge a fee for using a credit or debit card. I use them to pay for a few bills that can't auto-debit, and for the guy who cuts my grass. I might also use them to settle a modest amount with a friend if I didn't have cash on hand. I use them to pay for items I purchase at auctions (they have a credit card on file that they will charge if the check is returned for insufficient funds, so they are protected from fraud, but they do charge 3% extra for using a card, so I pay with check to avoid that).
A cashier's check, OTOH, is issued directly by a bank. You go to a branch, you tell them you need a check for $X to pay for your new car. They debit the money from your account right then, and they issue the check. You can take this to the car dealer, and they will accept it and hand you the keys. They have more security measures, and of course the bank has a record of it - the car dealer can call the bank right then and there and ask them to confirm that the check is still valid before they accept it as payment. These are not free with regular accounts (although if you're worth enough money, they will do them for you gratis).
Also, there is no other easy way to transfer money directly from person to person via the regular banking system. Thus PayPal, Venmo, etc. You can't really do it with regular banks. If the amounts involved are small, or it's someone I trust, then I'll just do it in cash or with a personal check. If I were selling a car to someone for, say, $10 000, we would agree on a price, and then I would meet them at their bank. I would watch the bank produce a cashier's check. And I would hand them the keys and call a Lyft to get home.
On Delta, Google Maps (the iPad app at least) works with the free tier wifi. I assume it’s used for the satellite imagery displayed on their maps. So, if you can get a GPS signal, you can see that for free.
Is this a joke? It's been a long time since the previous season aired, but that was pretty damned huge. If you're not a fan of the show, fine, but if you're watching it, I don't know how you'd miss this.
Sorry I missed this reply, but where do you go in? I've seen lines over an hour in the US, in Canada, and in the UK. Barcelona and Stuttgart were almost instantaneous, but those have a lot fewer non-EU arrivals.
If you have the option, get it delivered to your workplace. This is my standard method for anything of significant value. A secretary is always there to sign for it and hold it until I can run it to my car.
Traffic data. The shortest route is a problem well solved by now, the fastest-assuming-normal-speeds is as well. But I’ve had GM spare me hours in traffic because it knows what is happening right now and can route around the problem. In one case, 2+ hours, just because of a bridge closure. I didn’t need to cross it, but it backed the highway up so badly. I don’t use it at home for short distances, but I always use it when traveling.
This is true, but those who are fairly certain they will be convicted often intentionally delay trial because they are generally credited for time served, which is a lot more pleasant in county lockup than in a state prison that might be hours away from family and has a lot more seriously bad dudes in it. Go to trial when your likely sentence is less than a year longer than currently served time, and you probably won’t ever go to the prison.
Town roads are not paid for by car taxes or car registration fees.
Maybe yours aren't, but mine sure as hell are. If you're out in the county, you have one tax rate. If you're in a city or town, you pay the county taxes and the city taxes on your car. When I bought a new car, the tag was almost 3% of its value the first year (on top of 3% sales tax). It goes down after that, of course, but you get hit pretty hard those first three years.
I live in a small city (metro: ~ 350k) with a dinky airport. They don't have a separate line for Pre. They just sort you when you get to the checkpoint: airline employees and Pre to the left, regulars to the right, and the employee/Pre line alternates with the regular line until the former is empty - you skip way ahead. If you're Pre, the TSA officer manning the front of the scanner drops a brick-shaped object onto the scanner, announces "PreCheck after the brick", and puts your stuff on it. You walk through the metal detector instead of the naked scanner. You don't have to pull your jacket, belt, or shoes off. You don't have to pull stuff out of your bag, and although technically you're supposed to bag all your liquids, they really don't enforce that as long as every container is within the 100 mL limit.
So, I can totally understand why this sort of shit happens, but there's really no need for a separate screening line in small airports. Just a separate queue to go through the line, and an understanding of what PreCheck people don't have to do.
It's your life and your time, but I drove 11 hours roundtrip for Global Entry for myself, and 6 hours roundtrip for GE for my wife a few years later. We just made them weekend trips. Both of us agree that it's probably the best $200 we've ever spent, and NEXUS is half that price (but a bigger pain to get). PreCheck on all domestic flights, GE on all international arrivals. I've easily saved more time waiting in immigration lines than it took me to obtain it, and I fly internationally maybe once or twice a year. Counting the time saved in domestic PreCheck lines vs regular ones, it's huge.
PSA for those who dont already know: don't waste your money on PreCheck alone. If you're going to do it, buy Global Entry, which is only $15 more, includes PreCheck, and will get you through immigration incredibly quickly, sometimes without a single question. (Or, if you go to Canada a lot, get NEXUS, which is cheaper and gets you essentially the same benefits in both countries - but it doesn't activate until you've been approved by both sides.) Last time I flew international, I said hello and handed the guy our passports., He scanned and looked at our GE receipts and passports, and he said "Welcome back". End of immigration interview. From the GE kiosk, to the booth, to being in - the walk to the booth was longer by far than the entire rest of the process combined.
Also, if two people are traveling together, and only one of them is PreCheck, the system will often offer it to the other if you've traveled together on previous occasions. My wife started getting offered it (but only when we flew together) about two years after I got GE, even though she didn't sign up herself until about four years after I did.
Yeah, I had a friend in elementary school who had pretty good parents - they were never cruel or abusive, very obviously loved their kids, and weren't idiots. His sister was pregnant at 15, and he was a heroin addict at 22. Both of them have straightened their lives out since then (and have good relationships with the parents), but there's only so much a parent can do. Some people just have to go be real fuckups for a while, and some don't survive the process.
I had a local video store that had a great back catalogue (they had been around a long while), lots of smaller-interest stuff. You probably had to go to Blockbuster to get a new release in the first week, because the local relied on renting each movie quite a few times in order to make their money back. The switch to DVD was tough for them, and Netflix (the original DVD-by-mail service) pretty much did them in, but it was great while it lasted.
110 on a divided road is pretty much in line with the US east of the Mississippi, where the limit is usually 65-70 mph. I agree that it’s too low. 130/80 is a better number. Austria manages 120 through the Alps, FFS. Colorado has 75 through the Continental Divide. Texas has 70 on almost every rural two-lane highway (but they have much better construction than most states, with paved shoulders), and 75+ on divided highways. Like in most of Europe, there is no need to speed. The limits are reasonable for the road. 90 kph/55 mph is a joke when you’re in the middle of nowhere with good sight lines for suicidal deer.
Ketamine is a pretty interesting drug, but I wouldn’t say that most people enjoy it without a lot of preparation for the experience. You can send people to some pretty strange places with K. I’m an anesthesiologist, and I have effectively been a tripsitter for people on ketamine. Like I said, strange places.
It's lasted as long as it has because the government periodically decides to change almost completely, and the Supreme Court goes along, merely retaining the appearance of continuity. The US of 1790 was a sparsely-populated littoral republic of barely-connected states, who banded together under the Constitution only because they figured they were mincemeat if someone else attacked while the Articles of Confederation were in force. By 1830, direct democracy was the thing. By 1870, it was established that you were going down if you thought you could get out. By 1940, the government barely resembled anything it had been even thirty years earlier. By 1980, the explosion of court mandates had completely changed the nature of legislation (and led to substantial, probably unconstitutional but who's going to call them on it, delegations of power from the legislative to the executive branch) to something that lives and dies by the whim of any five justices of the Supreme Court.
Do you really think that the Founders would say yeah, that's pretty much what we designed, if they looked at how it works today? I'm all for changing the way it works; I think they created a system that was too hard to amend, and so we have a system where five people can decide the law even if 70% of the population oppose their interpretation. If we're going to have an oligarchy, I don't particularly mind, but let's call it what it is.
Pretty much this. It's surprising how much education I've had to do with people about leaving a damned voicemail, though. I have mobile service through Verizon; the fact that the caller hears the phone "ringing" doesn't mean that my phone is actually ringing. The only way I know for sure that you called is if you leave a voicemail. Doesn't have to be long. "Hey, demonlapin, this is Dave. Call me back, got a quick question for you."
So what if they did? It means he sucks at choosing women to marry. Some chick with a hundred notches in her bedpost might make for an interesting couple of months, but you don’t marry her.
They just need to play more stuff like Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Music that just sits there in the background, covering up the total silence, but that also is interesting if you sit and listen to it carefully.
I can assure you, based on long experience in hospitals, that you don’t let your charger leave your sight if you want to have it at the end of the day. And it can be quite hard just to find enough time where you don’t have to be mobile to get a solid charge. It’s not a totalky insurmountable problem, but it is a problem.
Even with the really amazing battery-saving techniques used in modern smartphones, you can burn through a full battery in a day of call if it's busy enough. Maybe you leave your charger at home by accident and, through a series of odd events, end up stuck at the hospital all day and night. In theory, I could be stuck there from 7 AM Friday to 7 AM Monday without ever getting the chance to leave. In practice, I've never spent more than about 36 hours uninterrupted, and I certainly got a chance to sleep during that time, but I had to stay in-house. By contrast, even a busy pager was good for a month or so on a single AA battery, and when it was dying, you had about 3-4 days to carry out the 30-second swap process for a new one.
I don't carry a pager these days, in a smaller community hospital (~500 beds), where we are all known to the people that need to call us. But when I was at a larger academic hospital, the staff changed all the time. Residents came and went, faculty came and went. If you wanted the anesthesiologist in charge of running things, you just dialed one pager number. It was always the same, regardless of who was on call. No need to look up a call schedule. You either got a faculty member or a final-year resident, and the senior residents always knew who their faculty were in case it got really hairy.
Like the AC below said, handing off the pager really was a momentous thing in its own way, in much the same way that there is an enormously formal ceremony for handing over control of a ship or an airplane. Once you put that in someone else's hands, you are relieved. Until then, you are not. There is no ambiguity about who is responsible: if you're the guy with the pager, you're it.
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So, there are basically two kinds of checks in the US - personal (or business) checks, and cashier's checks. The former are drawing off your account and will clear within a few days. There is a minimal fee, or no fee, for using them other than the cost of printing (and they are not expensive). They can be used to transfer any amount, but they won't be accepted by most merchants for very large purchases. This is the most common method for paying for something that is too big for cash but would charge a fee for using a credit or debit card. I use them to pay for a few bills that can't auto-debit, and for the guy who cuts my grass. I might also use them to settle a modest amount with a friend if I didn't have cash on hand. I use them to pay for items I purchase at auctions (they have a credit card on file that they will charge if the check is returned for insufficient funds, so they are protected from fraud, but they do charge 3% extra for using a card, so I pay with check to avoid that).
A cashier's check, OTOH, is issued directly by a bank. You go to a branch, you tell them you need a check for $X to pay for your new car. They debit the money from your account right then, and they issue the check. You can take this to the car dealer, and they will accept it and hand you the keys. They have more security measures, and of course the bank has a record of it - the car dealer can call the bank right then and there and ask them to confirm that the check is still valid before they accept it as payment. These are not free with regular accounts (although if you're worth enough money, they will do them for you gratis).
Also, there is no other easy way to transfer money directly from person to person via the regular banking system. Thus PayPal, Venmo, etc. You can't really do it with regular banks. If the amounts involved are small, or it's someone I trust, then I'll just do it in cash or with a personal check. If I were selling a car to someone for, say, $10 000, we would agree on a price, and then I would meet them at their bank. I would watch the bank produce a cashier's check. And I would hand them the keys and call a Lyft to get home.
On Delta, Google Maps (the iPad app at least) works with the free tier wifi. I assume it’s used for the satellite imagery displayed on their maps. So, if you can get a GPS signal, you can see that for free.
If you want that experience, pay for business class. It’s about the same price, adjusted for inflation, as tickets were in the pre-deregulation era.
And if you fly that much, you probably already pay for internet in the air - so you can just use flightaware to see where you are.
Is this a joke? It's been a long time since the previous season aired, but that was pretty damned huge. If you're not a fan of the show, fine, but if you're watching it, I don't know how you'd miss this.
Sorry I missed this reply, but where do you go in? I've seen lines over an hour in the US, in Canada, and in the UK. Barcelona and Stuttgart were almost instantaneous, but those have a lot fewer non-EU arrivals.
If you have the option, get it delivered to your workplace. This is my standard method for anything of significant value. A secretary is always there to sign for it and hold it until I can run it to my car.
Traffic data. The shortest route is a problem well solved by now, the fastest-assuming-normal-speeds is as well. But I’ve had GM spare me hours in traffic because it knows what is happening right now and can route around the problem. In one case, 2+ hours, just because of a bridge closure. I didn’t need to cross it, but it backed the highway up so badly. I don’t use it at home for short distances, but I always use it when traveling.
This is true, but those who are fairly certain they will be convicted often intentionally delay trial because they are generally credited for time served, which is a lot more pleasant in county lockup than in a state prison that might be hours away from family and has a lot more seriously bad dudes in it. Go to trial when your likely sentence is less than a year longer than currently served time, and you probably won’t ever go to the prison.
Town roads are not paid for by car taxes or car registration fees.
Maybe yours aren't, but mine sure as hell are. If you're out in the county, you have one tax rate. If you're in a city or town, you pay the county taxes and the city taxes on your car. When I bought a new car, the tag was almost 3% of its value the first year (on top of 3% sales tax). It goes down after that, of course, but you get hit pretty hard those first three years.
I live in a small city (metro: ~ 350k) with a dinky airport. They don't have a separate line for Pre. They just sort you when you get to the checkpoint: airline employees and Pre to the left, regulars to the right, and the employee/Pre line alternates with the regular line until the former is empty - you skip way ahead. If you're Pre, the TSA officer manning the front of the scanner drops a brick-shaped object onto the scanner, announces "PreCheck after the brick", and puts your stuff on it. You walk through the metal detector instead of the naked scanner. You don't have to pull your jacket, belt, or shoes off. You don't have to pull stuff out of your bag, and although technically you're supposed to bag all your liquids, they really don't enforce that as long as every container is within the 100 mL limit.
So, I can totally understand why this sort of shit happens, but there's really no need for a separate screening line in small airports. Just a separate queue to go through the line, and an understanding of what PreCheck people don't have to do.
It's your life and your time, but I drove 11 hours roundtrip for Global Entry for myself, and 6 hours roundtrip for GE for my wife a few years later. We just made them weekend trips. Both of us agree that it's probably the best $200 we've ever spent, and NEXUS is half that price (but a bigger pain to get). PreCheck on all domestic flights, GE on all international arrivals. I've easily saved more time waiting in immigration lines than it took me to obtain it, and I fly internationally maybe once or twice a year. Counting the time saved in domestic PreCheck lines vs regular ones, it's huge.
American Express Platinum will. It's not worth getting just for that, but if you use the card's other features, it's a nice perk.
PSA for those who dont already know: don't waste your money on PreCheck alone. If you're going to do it, buy Global Entry, which is only $15 more, includes PreCheck, and will get you through immigration incredibly quickly, sometimes without a single question. (Or, if you go to Canada a lot, get NEXUS, which is cheaper and gets you essentially the same benefits in both countries - but it doesn't activate until you've been approved by both sides.) Last time I flew international, I said hello and handed the guy our passports., He scanned and looked at our GE receipts and passports, and he said "Welcome back". End of immigration interview. From the GE kiosk, to the booth, to being in - the walk to the booth was longer by far than the entire rest of the process combined.
Also, if two people are traveling together, and only one of them is PreCheck, the system will often offer it to the other if you've traveled together on previous occasions. My wife started getting offered it (but only when we flew together) about two years after I got GE, even though she didn't sign up herself until about four years after I did.
Yeah, I had a friend in elementary school who had pretty good parents - they were never cruel or abusive, very obviously loved their kids, and weren't idiots. His sister was pregnant at 15, and he was a heroin addict at 22. Both of them have straightened their lives out since then (and have good relationships with the parents), but there's only so much a parent can do. Some people just have to go be real fuckups for a while, and some don't survive the process.
I had a local video store that had a great back catalogue (they had been around a long while), lots of smaller-interest stuff. You probably had to go to Blockbuster to get a new release in the first week, because the local relied on renting each movie quite a few times in order to make their money back. The switch to DVD was tough for them, and Netflix (the original DVD-by-mail service) pretty much did them in, but it was great while it lasted.
110 on a divided road is pretty much in line with the US east of the Mississippi, where the limit is usually 65-70 mph. I agree that it’s too low. 130/80 is a better number. Austria manages 120 through the Alps, FFS. Colorado has 75 through the Continental Divide. Texas has 70 on almost every rural two-lane highway (but they have much better construction than most states, with paved shoulders), and 75+ on divided highways. Like in most of Europe, there is no need to speed. The limits are reasonable for the road. 90 kph/55 mph is a joke when you’re in the middle of nowhere with good sight lines for suicidal deer.
Ketamine is a pretty interesting drug, but I wouldn’t say that most people enjoy it without a lot of preparation for the experience. You can send people to some pretty strange places with K. I’m an anesthesiologist, and I have effectively been a tripsitter for people on ketamine. Like I said, strange places.
It's lasted as long as it has because the government periodically decides to change almost completely, and the Supreme Court goes along, merely retaining the appearance of continuity. The US of 1790 was a sparsely-populated littoral republic of barely-connected states, who banded together under the Constitution only because they figured they were mincemeat if someone else attacked while the Articles of Confederation were in force. By 1830, direct democracy was the thing. By 1870, it was established that you were going down if you thought you could get out. By 1940, the government barely resembled anything it had been even thirty years earlier. By 1980, the explosion of court mandates had completely changed the nature of legislation (and led to substantial, probably unconstitutional but who's going to call them on it, delegations of power from the legislative to the executive branch) to something that lives and dies by the whim of any five justices of the Supreme Court.
Do you really think that the Founders would say yeah, that's pretty much what we designed, if they looked at how it works today? I'm all for changing the way it works; I think they created a system that was too hard to amend, and so we have a system where five people can decide the law even if 70% of the population oppose their interpretation. If we're going to have an oligarchy, I don't particularly mind, but let's call it what it is.
Pretty much this. It's surprising how much education I've had to do with people about leaving a damned voicemail, though. I have mobile service through Verizon; the fact that the caller hears the phone "ringing" doesn't mean that my phone is actually ringing. The only way I know for sure that you called is if you leave a voicemail. Doesn't have to be long. "Hey, demonlapin, this is Dave. Call me back, got a quick question for you."
Maybe so, but the fact that she’s basically a one-woman Trump reelection campaign still stands.
So what if they did? It means he sucks at choosing women to marry. Some chick with a hundred notches in her bedpost might make for an interesting couple of months, but you don’t marry her.
They just need to play more stuff like Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Music that just sits there in the background, covering up the total silence, but that also is interesting if you sit and listen to it carefully.
I can assure you, based on long experience in hospitals, that you don’t let your charger leave your sight if you want to have it at the end of the day. And it can be quite hard just to find enough time where you don’t have to be mobile to get a solid charge. It’s not a totalky insurmountable problem, but it is a problem.
Even with the really amazing battery-saving techniques used in modern smartphones, you can burn through a full battery in a day of call if it's busy enough. Maybe you leave your charger at home by accident and, through a series of odd events, end up stuck at the hospital all day and night. In theory, I could be stuck there from 7 AM Friday to 7 AM Monday without ever getting the chance to leave. In practice, I've never spent more than about 36 hours uninterrupted, and I certainly got a chance to sleep during that time, but I had to stay in-house. By contrast, even a busy pager was good for a month or so on a single AA battery, and when it was dying, you had about 3-4 days to carry out the 30-second swap process for a new one.
I don't carry a pager these days, in a smaller community hospital (~500 beds), where we are all known to the people that need to call us. But when I was at a larger academic hospital, the staff changed all the time. Residents came and went, faculty came and went. If you wanted the anesthesiologist in charge of running things, you just dialed one pager number. It was always the same, regardless of who was on call. No need to look up a call schedule. You either got a faculty member or a final-year resident, and the senior residents always knew who their faculty were in case it got really hairy.
Like the AC below said, handing off the pager really was a momentous thing in its own way, in much the same way that there is an enormously formal ceremony for handing over control of a ship or an airplane. Once you put that in someone else's hands, you are relieved. Until then, you are not. There is no ambiguity about who is responsible: if you're the guy with the pager, you're it.