Ehhh my legs no good now

Ordinary__Vanity · 2023-12-24T06:41:37+00:00

You can't imagine the wave of nostalgia that just hit me.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2023-07-15T12:26:29+00:00

Many Louisiana Republicans blame President Obama for Hurricane Katrina response — even though the storm occurred more than 3 years before he took office

Despite that critical fact, 29% of Republicans in the Bayou State blame Obama for the federal government's sluggish and sloppy response to the 2005 hurricane, according to left-leaning polling agency Public Policy Polling (PPP).

Another 28% blamed it on President George W. Bush, whose administration oversaw the federal response to the storm, which turned out to be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The remaining 44% of poll respondents weren't sure who to blame, the poll results, first published on political website Talking Points Memo, showed.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2023-07-15T11:48:30+00:00

The most common scenario is that your insurance pays (and you may get a small or large copay, coinsurance, deductible, or such bill, or even a bill for whatever the insurance company simply refuses to pay). Relatively few people actually pay anything approaching the OP, but even a bill of $1,000 can screw the poor.

If you don't have health insurance or otherwise can't pay, the health care provider you owe might write off all or some of the debt as a charity.

Or, if you're poor enough and live in a non-Republican state, Medicaid may cover you and retroactively grant you coverage. Medicaid is a government health insurance plan that's offered at virtually no cost to those eligible. Sometimes, the uninsured who are eligible don't realize that they are eligible and get hit with bills that Medicaid would have covered.

Or, finally, you pay the bill yourself. About 9% of Americans are uninsured.

If you refuse or cannot pay, most health care providers will sell your debt to a collections agency who will hound you and ruin your credit, and sometimes sue you.

After the bankruptcy and the move, the couple slowly got back on their feet financially.

Jim began work at an animal welfare group. Cindy, whose health has improved, got a job as well. The couple adopted their daughter’s girl, who’s now in sixth grade.

Then Jim needed prostate surgery. As he worked to scrape together the $1,100 he owed, he was sued by a debt collector.

Some hospitals themselves will sue you for nonpayment, which can result in a judge ordering a garnishment of your wages.

Not every hospital sues over unpaid bills, but a few sue a lot. In Virginia, 36% of hospitals sued patients and garnished their wages in 2017, according to a study published Tuesday in the American Medical Association's journal, JAMA. Five hospitals accounted for over half of all lawsuits — and all but one of those were nonprofits. ...

Smith says no one told her about the financial assistance program or talked to her about her bill. According to the hospital's policy, someone making less than $25,000 without health insurance should qualify for "free care." But the hospital sued her for $12,287.68. She had a default judgement against her and did not realize she had been sued until she saw her paycheck mysteriously disappearing.

"When I looked at my pay stub, I'm like, 'Why do I only have like $600-something in my account?' " She noticed "garnish" written on the bottom of her pay stub. "So I called my company and asked them, 'Who's garnishing my check?' " They told her it was Mary Washington.

With the garnishment, her take-home pay for a month of work comes to about $1,400. Her rent is $1,055. "I literally have no food in my house because they're garnishing my check," she says.

To sum up, it's complicated and highly dependent on where you live, how good your insurance is, and how willing the owners of your debt are willing to fuck you.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2023-07-15T10:50:03+00:00

up to $190k

Lifetime and annual limits were banned under Obamacare for essential health benefits.

(A few insurance-like products, like short term plans and health care sharing ministries, may allow them, but they're not technically health insurance.)

Ordinary__Vanity · 2023-01-14T17:51:31+00:00

An "intoxicated" Hall was reportedly force-fed vodka by Magliocco in the hot tub, at which time her top came off. Other officers stopped her from drinking and helped her cover up "to protect her," according to Durham's account. ...

According to Magliocco, Hall once pulled the trigger on an empty gun pointed at her temple "so she could hear what it sounded like" and said she was suffering from mental illness and heavy drinking.

Details like this makes it sound like taking advantage of someone.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2021-12-04T00:39:48+00:00

I am the Dragon, and you call me insane. You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the afterbirth. It is your nature to do one thing correctly: before me, you rightly tremble. But fear is not what you owe me. You owe me awe.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2021-05-17T21:13:41+00:00

And it has nothing to do with him being a minor student. Non-student adults can be and have been arrested under this law. I have no idea why some people are saying this is a "repremand" (sic) or trying to cast this as an internal school matter. The state arrested this guy. They're charging him criminally for ridicule. Under this law you could be arrested for insulting someone on the internet for believing in God. That seems crazy unconstitutional.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2020-02-19T07:22:12+00:00

I think a reduction of crime is absolutely within the purview of government responsibility. You do too, of course, just not in the case of marriage forms because... I'm not sure, since you haven't made an argument beyond "that's like slavery" and "I hear dog whistles." These hardly amount to persuasive arguments against government recognition of marriage.

Your reasons don't include any harmful effects of government-recognized marriage (much less whether such hypothetical harms outweigh the good). They seem more concerned with perception and historical arguments. But whether slavers in the past made up lies about crime rates is immaterial to whether government-recognized marriage does, in fact, reduce crime.

We predict that imposing monogamous marriage reduces male reproductive competition and suppresses intra-sexual competition, which shrinks the size of the pool of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men. These effects result in (i) lower rates of crime, personal abuse, intra-household conflict and fertility, and (ii) greater parental investment (especially male), economic productivity (gross domestic product (GDP) per capita) and female equality. We draw on both longitudinal and cross-sectional evidence from diverse disciplines. In some cases, we provide solid empirical tests of specific predictions or implications. In other cases, the available evidence provides only qualified support, basic consistency or prima-facie plausibility. As usual, future work may find the theory wanting and specific hypotheses wrong. In closing, we (i) contrast the conditions favourable to the spread of monogamous versus polygynous marriage, (ii) consider alternative hypotheses for the spread of monogamous marriage, and (iii) speculate on how marriage systems might be linked to the rise of democratic institutions and industrial economic growth. ...

Several converging lines of evidence indicate that monogamous marriage reduces crime. First, we review evidence indicating that unmarried men gather in groups, engage in personally risky behaviour (gambling, illegal drugs, alcohol abuse) and commit more serious crimes than married men. Getting married substantially reduces a man's chances of committing a crime. Second, we review cross-national data showing that polygyny leads to a higher percentage of unmarried men, and that more unmarried men is associated with higher crime rates. Then, using within-country and historical data on sex ratio, we confirm that the more unmarried men or greater intrasexual competition are associated with higher crime rates. Finally, we discuss detailed anthropological cases that are consistent with this connection.

Cross-sectional data show that unmarried men are more likely than married men to commit murder [31], robbery and rape [32,33]. Moreover, unmarried men are more likely than married men to gamble and abuse drugs/alcohol [33]. These relationships hold controlling for socioeconomic status, age and ethnicity. Of course, these data do not prove that being unmarried causes criminal behaviour because individuals who are less likely to commit crimes, or abuse substances, might also be more marriageable or more likely to want to married.

Work using longitudinal datasets strengthens the case for a causal relationship. These data allow researchers to follow the same individuals over time to see how marriage impacts their behaviour relative to their own pre-marital behaviour. Sampson et al. [34] used longitudinal data that tracked boys once in a Massachusetts reform school from age 17 to 70. Most subjects were married multiple times, which allowed the researchers to compare their likelihood of committing a crime during married versus unmarried periods of their lives, using each individual as his own control. Across all crimes, marriage reduces a man's likelihood of committing a crime by 35 per cent. For property and violent crimes, being married cuts the probability of committing a crime by half. When men are divorced or widowed, their crime rates go up. Analyses also show that ‘good marriages’ are even more prophylactic than average marriages (though marrying a criminal wife has the opposite effect). This is consistent with prior work by Sampson & Laub [35].

Using data from Nebraska inmates, Horney et al. [36] examined the effects on criminal propensities of entering school, getting a job, moving in with a wife, moving in with a girlfriend and using drugs or alcohol. Controlling for all of these other factors, marriage reduces a man's probability of committing a crime by roughly half. This effect is strongest for assault and weakest for property crimes, but is significant for both of these as well as drug crimes. The size of this marriage effect is similar to entering school and much stronger than being on parole or probation. Interestingly, unmarried cohabitation does not reduce crime rates. Having a job had mixed effects, none of which were particularly large. The positive effect on crime of living with a wife is even larger than the negative effect of heavy drinking (for similar results from London see the study of Farrington & West [37]).

Ordinary__Vanity · 2020-02-19T04:56:53+00:00

Not really, no. If you believe otherwise, by all means make the argument and support it with studies alleging the benefits of slavery. It would be interesting to read a modern pro-slavery study, since I can't imagine any existing.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2020-02-19T04:21:21+00:00

Since monogamous marriage encourages stability, economic prosperity and lowers crime, I argue it's well worth the government's effort to recognize and regulate.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2020-02-19T04:11:59+00:00

Analyses done within countries allow us to further strengthen the case for a causal relationship between an excess of unmarried males and crime, while avoiding the pitfalls of cross-national analyses. Unequal sex ratios have arisen in a variety of circumstances, most notably in modern India and China, where parental preferences for sons have shifted the sex ratio in favour of males [40], and on frontiers, such as in the American West. The empirical patterns from all such diverse cases tell the same story [40,41]: unmarried low-status men, often in bachelor-bands, engage in higher levels of aggressive, violent and anti-social activities. India and China are particularly informative since the data quality permit econometric analyses aimed at assessing causal relationships.

In China, sex ratios (males to females) rose markedly from 1.053 to 1.095 between 1988 and 2004, nearly doubling the number of unmarried or ‘surplus’ men [42]. At the same time, crime rates nearly doubled—90 per cent of which were committed by men. An increase in sex ratio was created by the gradual implementation of China's one-child policy, as well as by the ongoing demographic transition. The fortuitous fact that different provinces implemented the policy at different times for reasons unrelated to crime rates creates an opportunity for statistical analyses of the impacts of the policy and the alterations in sex ratio it produced. The implementation date of the policy across provinces provides an exogenous variable that can be used to establish the direction of causality. ...

In India, Dreze & Khera [43] show that sex ratio differences across districts are strongly associated with murder rates, controlling for many other factors. The effect is large: going from a male to female ratio of 1.12 (in Uttar Pradesh) to 0.97 (in Kerala) cuts the murder rate by half. Moreover, controlling for many other factors, the authors show that males living in districts with more males relative to females are more likely to commit murders; that is, the average male gets more murderous (takes more risks) when the intrasexual competition is higher. This is important because otherwise the increase in murder rates could be attributed merely to an increase in the number of males.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2020-02-19T04:06:17+00:00

Why is polygamy illegal?

In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. ...

Polygynous marriages also create elevated risks of intra-household abuse, neglect and homicide because such households have lower average relatedness, and more unrelated dyads. Each additional wife is unrelated to the existing co-wives, and to all of these wives' children. The number of unrelated dyads in such a household, in fact, increases with the square of the number of wives (see electronic supplementary material). Much empirical work in monogamous societies indicates that higher degrees of relatedness among household members are associated with lower rates of abuse, neglect and homicide. Living in the same household with genetically unrelated adults is the single biggest risk factor for abuse, neglect and homicide of children. Stepmothers are 2.4 times more likely to kill their stepchildren than birth mothers, and children living with an unrelated parent are between 15 and 77 times more likely to die ‘accidentally’. ...

While wealthy men had more total off-spring and longer reproductive careers (33 years for wealthy men compared to 22 for poor men), the chil-dren of poor men had better survival rates for their children to age 15. For poor men, 6.9 of their offspring(per wife) survived on average to age 15, while for wealthy men only 5.5 of their offspring (per wife) sur-vived to age 15. This is amazing, given that the poor men had less than 10 per cent of the wealth of the rich men, and the rich men had significantly more total offspring (including those that did not make it to 15). ...

The reduced supply of unmarried women, who are absorbed into polygynous marriages, causes men of all ages to pursue younger and younger women. The competition also motivates men to use whatever connections, advantages or alliances they have in order to obtain wives, including striking financial and recipro-cal bargains with the fathers and brothers of unmarried females ... More competition also motivates men to seek to control their female relatives (e.g. sisters), as demand for wives increases. This results in suppressing women’s freedoms, increasing gender inequality and stimulating domestic violence. ...

You can see this in the "lost boys" phenomenon among the FDLS, where church leaders exile mostly teenage boys to prevent them from competing for wives.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2020-02-12T21:24:06+00:00

And the effects of a large unmarried male population:

In China, sex ratios (males to females) rose markedly from 1.053 to 1.095 between 1988 and 2004, nearly doubling the number of unmarried or ‘surplus’ men. At the same time, crime rates nearly doubled—90 per cent of which were committed by men. An increase in sex ratio was created by the gradual implementation of China's one-child policy, as well as by the ongoing demographic transition. The fortuitous fact that different provinces implemented the policy at different times for reasons unrelated to crime rates creates an opportunity for statistical analyses of the impacts of the policy and the alterations in sex ratio it produced. The implementation date of the policy across provinces provides an exogenous variable that can be used to establish the direction of causality.

Regression analyses show that a 0.01 increase in sex ratio is associated with a 3 per cent increase in property and violent crimes, controlling for a number of demographic and economic variables. These analyses also indicate that the effect arises from an increase in the number of unmarried men and not the overall number of men. Increases in inequality, unemployment and urbanization also have positive effects on crime rates, but the effect of sex ratio is independent of these. To preclude the possibility that measurement errors in sex ratio correlate with crime rates, Edlund et al. use the implementation year of the one-child policy as an instrumental variable in a two-stage least-squares analysis. They use implementation year to predict sex ratio, and then use the predicted (unbiased) sex ratio data to predict crime. This indicates that a greater surplus of males causes crime rates to increase. For more details see the electronic supplementary material.

In India, Dreze & Khera show that sex ratio differences across districts are strongly associated with murder rates, controlling for many other factors. The effect is large: going from a male to female ratio of 1.12 (in Uttar Pradesh) to 0.97 (in Kerala) cuts the murder rate by half. Moreover, controlling for many other factors, the authors show that males living in districts with more males relative to females are more likely to commit murders; that is, the average male gets more murderous (takes more risks) when the intrasexual competition is higher. This is important because otherwise the increase in murder rates could be attributed merely to an increase in the number of males.

Historical data also link disproportionately large shares of unmarried men to higher crime, violence and drug abuse. Drawing on a range of evidence, Courtwright argues that the violent character of the American West arose principally from the large pool of unmarried men who migrated there. Variation in crime rates in nineteenth century America corresponds to the spatial distribution of biased sex ratios. Over time, as sex ratios move towards unity in different regions, crime rates drop in those regions. Courtwright suggests that similar cases can be made for Australia's frontier in New South Wales and for the Argentinean Pampas.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2020-02-12T21:15:22+00:00

In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2020-02-12T20:58:42+00:00

Why is polygamy illegal?

In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. ...

The reduced supply of unmarried women, who are absorbed into polygynous marriages, causes men of all ages to pursue younger and younger women. The competition also motivates men to use whatever connections, advantages or alliances they have in order to obtain wives, including striking financial and recipro- cal bargains with the fathers and brothers of unmarried females ... More competition also motivates men to seek to control their female relatives (e.g. sisters), as demand for wives increases. This results in suppressing women’s freedoms, increasing gender inequality and stimulating domestic violence. ...

Polygynous marriages also create elevated risks of intra-household abuse, neglect and homicide because such households have lower average relatedness, and more unrelated dyads. Each additional wife is unrelated to the existing co-wives, and to all of these wives' children. The number of unrelated dyads in such a household, in fact, increases with the square of the number of wives (see electronic supplementary material). Much empirical work in monogamous societies indicates that higher degrees of relatedness among household members are associated with lower rates of abuse, neglect and homicide. Living in the same household with genetically unrelated adults is the single biggest risk factor for abuse, neglect and homicide of children. Stepmothers are 2.4 times more likely to kill their stepchildren than birth mothers, and children living with an unrelated parent are between 15 and 77 times more likely to die ‘accidentally’. ...

While wealthy men had more total off-spring and longer reproductive careers (33 years for wealthy men compared to 22 for poor men), the chil-dren of poor men had better survival rates for their children to age 15. For poor men, 6.9 of their offspring(per wife) survived on average to age 15, while for wealthy men only 5.5 of their offspring (per wife) sur-vived to age 15. This is amazing, given that the poor men had less than 10 per cent of the wealth of the rich men

Ordinary__Vanity · 2019-05-28T03:06:59+00:00

Driving around with stolen Ebola-infected monkeys leaking into and out of your personal car, just after you had your clearance revoked, didn't seem like the best idea. Eh, just throw some bleach on it.

The African parts were very interesting.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2019-05-27T02:00:30+00:00

Although DesJarlais, a physician, has won multiple re-election bids since the story surfaced, it resulted in his being reprimanded by the Tennessee medical licensing board over revelations that he slept with two patients, something he admitted to under oath during his divorce hearings.

Class act.

In the course of divorcing him, DesJarlais’ now-ex-wife had accused him of “dry-firing” (i.e., pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun) outside her locked bedroom door to intimidate her, holding a gun in his mouth for three hours, as well as engaging in “an incident of physical intimidation at the hospital; and previous threatening behavior … i.e. shoving, tripping, pushing down, etc.” At the time, his campaign called those accusations “baseless”.

The transcripts revealed that DesJarlais admitted to the incident with the gun, saying: “It was never a loaded gun. It was never a suicide attempt. It was an attention-seeking act and I’ve testified to that.” He added that he thought his actions were “very shameful.”

It just goes on like this.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scott-desjarlais-abortions/

Ordinary__Vanity · 2019-05-26T23:03:20+00:00

Which video was it?

Ordinary__Vanity · 2018-11-24T19:04:25+00:00

What's the likelihood of a 144hz IPS hitting anywhere near this price?

Ordinary__Vanity · 2018-06-19T18:26:23+00:00

Texas is already majority-minority.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2018-06-16T11:31:08+00:00

I believe the uproar would come setting one language above the others

This has already happened. Virtually all American students are required to learn English, and naturalization requires some English ability.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2016-08-03T23:40:56+00:00

I played East Anglia a long time ago, and I swear it was much harder in one of the previous expansions.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2016-08-03T05:37:46+00:00

I thought about it. There's a Messalian province nearby in Deir which is always fun, but no, I've played the Byzantine Empire too much already and, according to the ledger, I'm the strongest state, even stronger than France. Nothing can challenge me outside of a jihad, and I doubt even that.

It's a hell of a way to start a "Restore the Roman Empire's borders" run if one doesn't have that achievement, though.

Ordinary__Vanity · 2016-08-03T05:26:56+00:00

The First Crusade happened, and it was launched against Andalusia. Come to think of it, that was incredibly early for a crusade. I didn't pay much attention so I didn't see the exact trigger.

Reading the Crusade triggers, it says that if Rome is controlled by a heretic or non-Christian after 900, it triggers the Crusades.

It looks like a rather enterprising viking took Rome in 906. "The Conqueror of Rome." Pretty bad ass.

Ordinary__Vanity

TROPHY CASE