I thought soda water (or sparkling mineral water) with lemon or lime was the official no-I'm-not-drinking-but-I-am-familiar-with-bars-and-don't-bug-me-about-it drink. Fake-sipping a beer would be bizarre.
In certain crowds you could also get away with still water w/o ice, since it looks like a vodka-water, especially if you're a woman (tends to be a women's drink—not pushing that norm, just observing it).
In either the still-water or sparkling/soda-water case, just get it in a highball or Collins glass and you'll fit right in. The glass is what sells it. 99% chance you won't be the first one to make this request to a given bartender. Unless they're a jerk they won't charge you for soda water from the bar's tap, and a slice of lemon or lime.
You could also ask for a coke without ice served in whatever they serve jack & coke in (collins glass, lowball glass, old-fashioned glass, could be any of several). Even if someone hears you order any of these, unless they're socially clueless this will signal some things to them and they'll know you are pointedly Not Drinking, for whatever reason, and they won't bug you about it or offer you anything. This is assuming you're around people who care that others aren't drinking, to begin with (I'd still use the specific-glass trick just not to look out of place, regardless, personally).
I make 102g of alcohol about 1 bottle of 14% abv wine (so, strong-ish, but not exceptionally so) per week, or about 3 cans of 10% stout. Unless my math's wrong (1ml ~= 1g [not quite since it's not pure water, but close enough], 750ml * 0.14 = 105ml ~= 105g)
For those playing along at home, regulator "drinks" always seem to convert to 0.25-0.75 actual drinks a normal person might call "one drink". I'm not sure why they do that, unless it's to confuse people on purpose so they drink more.
Legitimately very interested to see a comparable study for cannabis, in adult users.
[EDIT] everything I could find with a quick search is about heavy, long-term use only, which evidently has little effect on white matter, and uneven effects on grey matter, increasing it in some areas and decreasing it in others. Nothing about long-term light use, occasional "binge" use, anything like that.
I read that heavy cannabis users regain their full capacity just after few weeks. So probably if there's any damage it's nowhere near as extensive as in the case of alcohol.
I'd assume that, as long as they're careful about how they pressure you, it's not fraud if you decide to pay. AFAIK they're under no obligation to volunteer that you don't have to pay them anything, or to otherwise educate you about the fact that they're (in fact) just begging for money they're not owed, and hoping you'll give it to them. But if they ask you (the aggrieved, in the middle of hosting family and trying to plan a funeral and figuring out how to pay all the bills you actually do need to, as a result of all this) to accept this debt and you say you do, and then they help you work out a very convenient and gracious payment plan for this debt you unthinkingly accepted because you're not a damn lawyer and you're kinda stressed out and debt collectors are scary and now it's on auto-draft for the next 18 months, well, that's above-board.
I've known people who've been on the receiving end of those calls, so they definitely happen, and must be profitable, one way or another.
If it isn't fraud, it should be. The lack of liability or any requirements for due diligence for debt collectors is a utter travesty that primarily harms the most vulnerable and underrepresented people in our society.
I put quite a bit of effort into doing things "right" when I tried to board the cast-iron train. Pan was pre-seasoned, but I did one of those elaborate multi-step seasoning rituals online, using the expensive oil they recommended and everything, just in case. Horrible, smoke all over the house, smelled for a couple days. Everything sticks anyway, like I've never seen on any other kind of pan. Suitably-gentle cleaning (according to cast iron fans online) takes forever because there's so much crap on it after every use. Re-seasoned it again after a bit, thinking I'd screwed up. No improvement, everything sticks. My wife refuses to cook with it at all, and I'm pretty sure just seeing it in the drawer annoys her.
Oh, and if a tomato or anything else somewhat-acidic touches it then the entire dish will taste like blood. So that's fun.
It's alright for cooking steak (preheating for a few minutes on high is a must, though, it's gotta be terrifyingly hot or everything will stick, including steak), and if I drown things in scorching-hot oil or fat (say, from bacon) they they don't stick much, but that sure isn't healthy. The pan has zero inherent non-stickness, only what it acquires from whatever lake of oil I put in it.
They never get as non-stick as a Teflon coating, but over time they’re usable for pretty much everything.
Screw babying it. Get a chain mail cleaner for it (and you definitely can use soap), use the pan often and especially when you’re doing something oily, and soon enough you’ll use it a lot.
1) The creditors are full of shit. Don't accept the estate, don't acknowledge that you owe any debt, and you don't owe them a damn thing. If no-one accepts it, they're simply screwed. They'll try to trick you into paying anyway, because they are, in fact, monsters, but they're full of shit.
2) Look up (online) the correct magic words to tell the creditors to go fuck themselves, or else face charges. They'll stop. On the off chance they don't, a call of complaint to your representative(s) or to the correct state agency will do the trick.
One notable, and very underreported exception, is Pennsylvania's filial responsibility law[1]. In Pennsylvania, if a resident of a nursing home is indigent, the liability falls statutorily on their family, who the home is free to sue and secure a judgement. This may not have gotten much attention due to uncommon use, but it's very real, and it's been upheld by the PA State Supreme Court. A handful of children of seniors have been bankrupted by filial responsibility judgements.
Yes, in fact the details vary some depending on which state you're in and how you're related to the deceased. In general, though, I'd treat unsolicited calls attempting to get you, personally, to pay for a dead relative's debts, as bullshit until you're 100% sure they're not. Most (all?) state governments have FAQs for this sort of thing online, and the federal government also offers guidance (all trivially Googleable).
The interesting part is how they're not applied. There are federal statutes that are more specific - and only two states have used these laws within the last 20 years.
There are only extreme corner cases where you need to worry about this.
No one needs to worry, until money gets tight. Then it's every man for himself, and the government will go after you. Or they will stiff the nursing home, and then let the nursing home go after you, like the what happened to the guy in Pennsylvania.
With the government budget situation in many places, and large amounts of people about to become elderly and rack up bills, I would consider it more than a remote possibility in the future.
I wish I'd been more aggressive about this when my mother in law died. She left behind a house, but also a half a million dollars worth of medical debt from a decade of chronic illness that eventually took her life. We thought "fine, we'll let the creditors fight over the house and be done with it", but they refused. They told us it was our responsibility to sell the house at at least market rate--which was hard because it had several decades of deferred maintenance. They would only take cash and refused to do any work for it beyond making threatening phone calls about garnishing our wages if we didn't get it done in time.
Since it was the state Medicaid office harassing us I really didn't want to get in a legal fight so we did all of the work of selling the house. Our lawyer did at least manage to get our costs taken out of the closing fees so we weren't out of pocket except for the time and effort and miles since we live in a different state. All in all I can't recommend having a loved one die.
The worst part is back when my mother in law got sick my wife convinced her to write us out of her will because we were told that the state would get the home anyway after her medical bills piled up. What she didn't tell us is that she just changed her will to name her church as the beneficiary. Once we read the will it became yet another mess to clean up. It should have been easy enough, we talked with the pastor and convinced him to refuse the estate easily enough. Unfortunately the church board overrode him (I think they believed we were trying to pull a fast one), and then found themselves in a fight with the state over a house they also had no intention of putting the effort into selling and also a huge medical debt. It was very tempting to just drop the thing and walk away at that point, but it was clear the problem would never be resolved and it would almost certainly come back to haunt us in the end. We had to do the work because nobody else was going to. I never did get a clear answer from the Medicaid debt collectors why they couldn't just put the estate up on a government auction. I think it would have required them to do some work and they really just didn't want to.
Personally, I would hire a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction and specialty. Laws are complicated, and collections and court cases are very expensive if you happen to be wrong. The lawyer can help you reduce the amount if you happen to be responsible for part of it. The "magic words" will have much more power if they come from an practicing attorney.
Yeah this article is a bit dramatic. As evil as the rich people who try to recover debts may be, children are not legally responsible for their parent's debts.
That is so ridiculous. You can be born into this world without your decision or input. Your parents made that choice. Your parents can also choose to kick you out right at 18, after fulfilling their legal obligation.
Then, down the line, you can be held responsible for potentially even more than 18 years of more expensive care? Absolutely unfair.
Real life can be very dramatic and it doesn't make it less true to the people involved. Many people don't know to question the debtors, get overwhelmed, get bullied, and don't have the energy or resources to fight the onslaught of aggressive communications and serious looking mail they receive from these predators.
I was aware of filial support laws but it seems like they're only applied this aggressively in Pennsylvania? Generally they're used to keep children from looting grandma's bank account and then sending her to a nursing home on the government's dime--which seems reasonable to me.
Flyover country checking in. Non- or semi-technical bigcos of the sort with big IT departments who take most of a week to get you your laptop when you start, are almost all Windows but may tolerate some macOS. Technical bigcos are mixed Win/macOS, with the business side preferring Windows and the tech people all on Macs. Smaller tech companies are all Mac, pretty much universally. Every now and then you get the one weirdo whose laptop can never connect to the projector and whose screen sharing always fucks up on calls or takes 5 minutes to get their bluetooth headset working, because they're on Linux (disclaimer: many years ago, I've been that weirdo). I've only seen one shop that was mostly Linux + Windows with little or no Mac presence, and they were in hardware (drivers or proprietary libs for embedded devices can be hard to come by Macs).
> If you gave europeans those 25% as an extra net pay, there would be a lot more new cars on the road, a bit more savings/investments, and a lot more problems when people get old. "Smart" people would save and invest, and have better "pensions" than they'd have in the current system, and "stupid" people would work until 85yo, and die of hunger.
Part of the problem with giving everyone more money and expecting them to invest it is that it frees up that money for competition for things like better schools (housing in better school districts, private school tuition). You can sacrifice your retirement to give your kids a serious advantage. Tons of people do this, in part because once some start doing it, everyone has to a little or their lives actually get worse than if the money were taken out for retirement before they ever saw it. Then there's the "keeping up with the Joneses" effect which is very hard to entirely resist when the spending-norms for your income-peers are set by people who aren't putting away enough for retirement.
I'm curious about the net societal effect of a large fraction of successful people investing in their children's education. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that previous selection would lead to this type of psychology (i.e., selection favors parental investment when it increases fitness, which is particularly true when humans are near carrying capacity, see K-selection). However, this pattern leads to increasing inequity and, historically, societal instability (which would favor R-selection).
