I’ll bet it’s a story of “well my car broke down and my job doesn’t pay enough to get it fixed, so it was either walk or get fired (and thus lose health insurance and the pay that’s keeping a roof over my head).” Seen it enough in my lifetime - a coworker used to walk 4 miles down the highway to his workplace for the same reason.

My brother gets this a lot when he goes out with his daughters, and I have been told my dad got this a lot when I was a young child.

Cue “Cat’s in the Cradle”…

Trans people all over the US still go to Thailand and similar markets because to literally fly to another country, get bottom surgery, spend the 3-6 month recovery period there, and THEN fly back to the US is STILL cheaper and faster than trying to get it done here.

The issue is that these surgical robots are a goldmine for companies specializing in medical devices. I work for one. They look fancy, they’re available to buy on loan if you can’t afford the several million dollars, and they sound modern.

Meanwhile, the instruments are not cross-compatible (meaning you can’t run Medtronic instruments on a US Medtech robot, for instance), so while they’re reusable and sterilizable (unlike most other handheld devices which are designed to be one-case-only), you have to buy a whole suite of endocutters, staplers, and whatever else you want that robot to be able to do in order to make it do that. PLUS there’s a proprietary computer system, an imaging system, the software to run those, often a televisual rig at the other end for the surgeon to run…you can get really pricey for these, real quick, and that’s not to mention the staple cartridges, the trocars, all sorts of stuff that can be proprietary.

For those who don’t know - almost everyone knows where most major missile silos ARE, in most nuclear-capable countries. From the time the rocket is fired, you, no matter which country, have about 5-10 minutes to decide whether it’s aimed at you, and whether to fire back.

My work phone for my old job, lived at work. When I clocked off, unless management really wanted to go dragging my actual cell number out of my resume, I was unreachable. If it’s that much of an emergency, you can get someone else.

Yeah, I thought the larger body of evidence all but proves that it was a wet market source.

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Nah, “conditional approval” is written into the regulation. You might know this wording better as “pay us a large sum and we’ll give you approval.”

The last also happens in the absence of religious motivation quite a bit.

Yeah, this feels more like “people haven’t experienced being in a walkable community with good transit”. My buddy is having to move back to the States after a year in Germany, and he’s so upset that he and his wife are gonna have to get a car again and not just walk/bike everywhere.

Narcotic? Nah, this is good old fashioned blackout drunk. My roommate at college was a heavy drinker and frequently found himself 4+ hours across the state on a Monday, with no recollection of how he got there.

For those who want to go the “well Europe/Japan/Korea/China/etc had the advantage of being bombed flat in various wars which made rebuilding for rail easier”, we STILL have plenty of unused, unmaintained rail in the US. We could do this. Hell, you wanna solve unemployment numbers going up? Public works to rehab the right-of-ways that the big companies aren’t using, rehab the rails they ARE using, and suddenly we can AT LEAST enable 100mph trains across the country in less than a decade, and probably bring back passenger rail if we wanted to invest in more rolling stock.

Of course, this means we’d have to lift the steel tariff. And rehab steel mills. And also nationalize good portions of the railway (I’d suggest the entire rail network, and lease usage to the freight companies).