“Martin, I’da shot ya myself but white folk got better aim.” -Uncle Ruckus

An under-appreciated aspect of the insurance industry is the fact that there is typically a multi-year lag between the collection of premiums and the payout of claims. Insurance companies invest the premiums in the meantime and profit off the returns. This allows them (in some cases) to be profitable even when payouts exceed premiums. As a result, not only are health insurers not troubled by rising costs, they actually benefit from rising costs because the premiums rise at the same time.

Not everybody. Some of us just die instead.

He (King George V) would have done it (in 1911). Asquith (the Prime Minister) told him that his father (King Edward VII) had promised to do it before his death in 1910 and King George assented. Asquith actually prepared lists with hundreds of names on them.

The British House of Lords used to hold the same sort of power with their ability to veto anything passed by the House of Commons. The House of Commons took this veto power away, but unfortunately they were only able to do this by getting the King to threaten to ennoble hundreds of new people and overwhelm the power of the traditional Lords. Our (US) current King would of course never agree to any such thing.

Actually a good sport to only require a two-year prenup. Rush Limbaugh made his “wives” sign ten-year prenups and being married to Limbaugh has to be worse than being married to the Dilbert dude.

I could easily do it but my bladder has other plans.

I went the grocery store today and was very good about not buying any snack junk. On the way out I encountered those demons from the depths of hell known as “girl scouts”.

Spend a half hour watching Fox News and you can see the alternate reality that magats are living in. My personal exposure to Fox News is an occasional accidental glance at the TV screens at the gym and even just from that it’s obvious what’s going on.

Slightly negative poll numbers + strongly-worded letter = REVOLUTION!

people just read to escape their terrible reality, and it literally does not matter what it is

I remember the good old days of reading the ingredients list of shampoo bottles while taking a shit.

I was at a funeral today. I swear the pastor’s sermon was written by an LLM. Dude needs to go back to the traditional way: downloading sermons from religious websites.

For all the good suppositories do me, I might as well jam them up my ass.

I briefly wrote Blackberry apps circa 2010 (yes, I knew RIM was dying a quick death). The development process was insane: any module from the framework that you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by RIM servers every time you tried to compile your app and deploy it to a device, even if you had only made a one-line change to the code. On good days, this would make the compilation take 5-10 minutes; on bad days it would be upwards of an hour or never happen at all. Some wags had even set up a special website that would tell you whether the RIM servers were down or not (long gone now, of course). I got in the habit of making a large number of code changes before attempting to run and test stuff, which is obviously not the ideal way to do things but it certainly teaches you to be careful. It also make me think long and hard before including a new module into my code. As one example, for my GUI I needed to use trigonometry functions which were naturally (lol) part of one of the cryptography modules which took an especially long time to get signed. I ended up writing my own sin() function in Java just to avoid the hit of including that module.

The great part of this was that I always had a ready-made excuse whenever I felt like taking a long lunch or going shopping or going home early. “Sorry boss, the signing server is down” and I made damn sure they never knew about isthesigningserverdown.com. It also helped that it was Blackberry circa 2010 and it didn’t make a shit bit of difference whether I got the app done or not.

An organisation that harvests the organs of homeless called “Rivendell”?

Surely “Mordor” would be a better choice?

Ironically enough, even most of the plantation “owners” didn’t really own their plantations or slaves. They were typically massively in debt, usually to English bankers who were financing the loathsome operation to provide cheap raw material for their cotton factories. This is why the British government – which had led the way in banning slavery in the British empire and using its navy to interdict the transatlantic slave trade – was somehow on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

If you’re blonde and hot, you’re an ex-pat, not an immigrant.

He’s just doing work for Putin.

This is libelous. He’s also doing work for the Saudis.

I hope he died in battle just in case the Norse are correct

He did, he died battling cancer.

They made him wear a helmet!