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  1. 1 day ago on For Better or For Worse

    Here in Arizona the fee for card use was outlawed in the early 1980s. Some places offered a discount for cash or check as a work-around.

  2. 1 day ago on For Better or For Worse

    I remember sometime in the late 1970s there were rumors of a card that would take the place of checks, something that – in the not too distant future – would do everything checks do except bounce.

  3. 1 day ago on Arlo and Janis

    But, if they wreck the bed where will they… oh!

  4. 4 days ago on B.C.

    Over the last 65 years or so of nutrition theories I have heard the “truth” seems to vary radically every year. In the 1960s the Food Pyramid was the center of our health classes in school; now it is decried as a dairy industry promotional idea. In the 1970s the main theory about our weight control was that every calorie counted; as a science class assignment I kept track of my daily calorie intake for a week. I consumed about 3500 calories per day and my PE coach assigned me a goal of putting on at least two pounds every month; I never met that goal. Walking/running two miles to and from school (uphill both ways in the Los Angeles snow, of course!) had a lot to do with that, but I didn’t put on weight in the summer. Similarly, I developed my half gallon or so of Coca Cola consumption per day in my late teens, but I cycled about a hundred miles a week and never gained weight.

    I have long ago lost faith in any of the popular weight loss diets. Several can deliver weight loss but nearly all come with health risks. Wikipedia leads off its article on the Atkins diet “The Atkins diet is a low-carbohydrate fad diet devised by Robert Atkins in the 1970s…” but my nurse (retired from a career in geriatric nursing) explained it was a legitimate diet meant to be prescribed for specific medical needs. It was later hijacked for fad dieting. Truth can be mighty elusive, and we are rarely sure when we find it.

  5. 4 days ago on Arlo and Janis

    With two people in the family it can only be done as a joint project; both have to be present and awake to audit them. Worse yet, the company names can change fairly often.

    What can go wrong? Some of them are important. My wife forgets about the life insurance I carry: level premium guaranteed renewable until sometime in my 80th year. It’s a hefty premium but at this point it is betting me nearly 10:1 (in my favor) that I will make it another 8 years. Similarly, she only vaguely remembers the whole life policies on our adult children.

  6. 4 days ago on For Better or For Worse

    I’ve learned the hard way that important written work should be saved in several formats – text, pdf, and printed. One of the big values in saving as text – printed or plain text – is the ease of looking in multiple generations for past (but not always discarded) perspectives.

  7. 4 days ago on Arlo and Janis

    Sanity checker

  8. 9 days ago on For Better or For Worse

    Come to think of it, doors to hallways almost always open into the room to prevent accidents in the hallway.

  9. 9 days ago on Wizard of Id

    I presume you are referring to the yet-unresolved rape case in New York, commonly known as Carroll II. It is still in District Court. SCOTUS has nothing to do with it (yet). With the election past there may be some movement. Wikipedia has a good synopsis of the case under “E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J Trump”.

  10. 9 days ago on Wizard of Id

    I’m glad many people were helped by the ACA, but we personally were cost about $8000 in the first month it was in effect (timing was just wrong). My wife needed orthopedic surgery. Our existing plan covered it with only a $250 deductible, but it was a “Cadillac plan” under ACA so my employer had to replace it with one that had a higher deductible. No problems since then, mostly because we have had Medicare for a while now.