You can renew it early. The passport doesn’t need to be expired in order to renew it.

You might as well get a passport card too while you’re at it when you renew. It’s $30 more and it’s useful if you lose your passport book, and you can carry it in your wallet as a form of ID that doesn’t have your address on it.

I oppose the death penalty, but if we’re going to have it, it should be by guillotine. I argue this for five reasons.

1. Proponents of capital punishment claim that the existence of the death penalty is to terrify people into not committing capital crimes. A guillotine is a far more terrifying implement of death than a gurney, and for maximum effect it can even be displayed in a museum when it isn’t being used and made available to traumatise schoolchildren with by taking them on highly inappropriate school trips.
2. Procurement of lethal injection drugs is difficult and expensive. Any skilled woodworker can make a working guillotine in a weekend for a thousand dollars.
3. It is easy to operate and even idiot prison officials in Tennessee can operate it without causing unnecessary suffering for the condemned. It’s harder to screw up. Relatively little training is required to operate it correctly and it is fast and easy to set up.
4. It doesn’t hide the fact that killing someone is taking blood and an inherently an act of extreme violence, regardless of whether you have the authority of the state behind you.
5. Nobody can deny that death comes extremely quickly to the condemned after using it.

I wasn’t aware that the execution of Jesus was a part of US history

Back when hanging was a common method of execution in the US, sometimes the rope would break and the condemned would fall onto the ground. Some religious people argued that the rope breaking during a hanging was a sign of God’s mercy and the condemned should be spared, but in most cases they would just find a new rope and try again.

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I would be shocked if the UN did anything substantial here. If they do anything, they’d probably re-declare Mandatory Palestine and give it to Donald Trump.

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Oh yeah, well I will pay everyone 91 dollars if Trump’s party loses. Pinkie promise.

Remember kids, if you did not back it up, it must not have been important.

Okay, and what are crypto miners then?

The moon, uniquely, has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, meaning the solar wind may have deposited large quantities of Helium-3 in the lunar dust over millions or billions of years. Helium-3 is possibly a viable fuel for fusion energy production at an industrial scale. Current reactors fust Hydrogen-2 with Hydrogen-3. Hydrogen-2 is abundant but Hydrogen-3 is exceedingly rare. If I remember correctly, there are only on the order of 10 kilograms of it currently available on Earth. Helium-3 is possibly a good substitute for Hydrogen-3 in fusion reactions.

Fusion reactions already produce net positive energy in laboratory settings, although it will be some time before this scientific net positive can be turned into an engineering net positive, and even more time still until it becomes an economic net positive.

What country are you in?

But I will give a few pieces of general advice: if food delivery is popular in your country, do not use it. Ever. It is a notorious money drain basically no matter where you are in the country. If you want to pick up food, force yourself to go out and buy it yourself. Or buy frozen foods for when you’re too tired to cook.

I did the maths for one of my friends who was essentially addicted to food delivery apps (ordering almost every day) and discovered that he had spent almost a third of his monthly earnings on food delivery. Cutting this habit essentially singlehandedly fixed his budget problems and allowed him to start paying down his credit card debt.

Which leads me to my second point of advice: don’t get into credit card debt. It is extremely painful to crawl out of.

You have a pay cheque, don’t you? That’s something that they would try to go for.

To be clear, I don’t defend the broken system, but I am trying to see what you can do to make the best of the crummy situation that it is.

I agree with that. But I’m also trying to help the parent commenter make the best out of a cruddy system. I don’t defend it. People have a tendency on Lemmy to downvote people who aren’t sufficiently negative about something, purely because they think the terms used to condemn it weren’t strong enough, and therefore I must actually be someone who supports it.

If you go to a hospital and the hospital bills $100,000, let’s consider two scenarios:

Scenario 1: You have a high deductible health insurance place with a $10,000 deductible. The health insurance company pays $90,000 and the hospital asks you to pay the rest. Hospital bills have a lot of wiggle room and all of it is negotiable. You tell them you’re broke. In this case, the overwhelmingly likely scenario is that they’ll do something like “Okay, pay us $50 a month for a year and we’ll call it good”, because they already got the vast majority of what they were asking for from the insurance company. They have already made most of their profit. It is totally not worth it for them to even send this to collections, let alone hire a lawyer to sue you.

Scenario 2: You have no coverage. Hospital asks you for $100,000. You tell them you’re broke and will declare bankruptcy. They might offer you a plan like $200 a month for the next three years, because nobody else has paid them anything. And here’s the thing: they have leverage over you, because they know that a bankruptcy lawyer is going to ask for a $10,000 retainer paid upfront. You can’t just go up into your local courthouse and shout "I DECLARE BANKRUPCY!” in the style of The Office. Nope. You’ll just get 25% of your pay cheque garnished for the next eight to ten years because you couldn’t afford a bankruptcy lawyer to stop it. The hospital knows that they can juice $9,000 out of you or more, because you being broke also means you can’t afford a lawyer.

Anyway, you do the maths. I don’t know your financial situation and how much the insurance companies want to insure you. You make the right decision based on your situation. I’m just providing information. Maybe the maths nonetheless points you to Scenario 2 being a better bet. But it’s not as clear cut as one might initially think, so at least give it some thought and punch in some numbers into a calculator. And if you already have, more power to you.

If you are young and fairly healthy, look into high deductible plans. Those should be significantly cheaper but won’t cover any routine health services at all. You’ll pay out of pocket for those (possibly at a much lower cash rate depending on provider). Then plan will, however, cover you if something catastrophic happens which requires expensive care.

Victims of capitalism tend to die from malicious or callous actions. Victims of communism, if you want to call it that, tend to just die because of incompetent leaders than anything else.

I think that is a different situation in your city. I don’t know which city it is, and I don’t claim to know much about how the Italian economy works, but housing prices seem similar to what I’ve got in my city (Portland, Oregon, USA), except that wages are drastically lower. So my guess is that it’s a problem with people being underpaid as Italy is a developed economy, similar to the US.

€24,000 a year would be about €12 an hour which is below minimum wage in my city. A minimum-wage worker would be paid about $34,000 annually, or €29,500. The mean hourly wage in my city works out to about $76,000 annually (€66,000). I prefer the median as a better estimate of what ordinary people make, but the census bureau only reports the mean as far as I could find.