a prorate fee will be billed to reactivate

To my reading, both ‘fee’ and ‘billed’ indicate the customer will be charged an amount to regain access. If it were as you suggest, I think it would have been worded differently, to provide more benefit to the customer. Maybe something along the lines of:

‘When you are ready to come back, your membership reactivation will be prorated to reflect freeze term payments.’

As it is, I can see both interpretations. Which might be on purpose to surprise people who turn up at the gym after a few months break, banking on an eye roll and the fee to be paid so they can get on with their workout.

Am I reading this right that to reactivate they’d be charging the difference they ‘lost’ during the freeze term? Wild.

It’s worth noting there’s a difference between a heckler video and a crowd work video. If the performer solicits audience participation, that’s not them being heckled.

That said, many comedians do several shows a week, some even doing multiple spots a night. These days, most of them record their sets - and the audience, to a degree. When they amass so much footage, it’s easy enough to have a video now and then involving a heckler.

Of course, sometimes, some things do get ‘scripted’ with the audience. This is a funny example of a bit Gianmarco Soresi did using the audience to get this clip parodying a Rocket Money ad.

“Privacy-centric” my elbow.

I will be adding this turn of phrase to my vocabulary, thank you.

Probably just the law of large userbases. The more people around, the more rude people there are likely to be. Rude people are always a minority, but they tend to be more vocal.

A large portion of fediverse users have abandoned Reddit for moral or ethical reasons. So while occasionally people will be rude here, it tends to skew more towards polite discussion.

That’s a cool service the restaurants provide, I wouldn’t have thought of that. Wish something like that was available everywhere, even seeing a show would be nice to be picked up and have a table waiting.

I wonder at what point it’s worthwhile to have a group to park at some mall and rent a van to drive to the stadium parking.

If any positive outcome is possible here, I’d be nice if this gets people accustomed to carpooling to such events. Sure would be nice though if these stadiums would be serviced by more effective transportation.

Well perhaps you’re right, though if I search for green apples and the first few results are from applecatelogue, I might not think that an ad so much as a search result.

I see your point though, multiple of the same domain can seem questionable.

I don’t see an ad in there but even so, why quibble on a dead man’s behalf that the communication method is called Vail’s cipher and not Morse code. It’s like taking up arms whenever a guillotine is mentioned.

To chime in from the Great White North, I agree with much of what you’ve written, though I haven’t spoken to anyone that thinks Canada has moved too slow.

What’s been done so far has happened as efficiently as government workings can be done, but when I go to a restaurant I don’t skip the entree if the waitstaff brings out the appetizer with haste.

For a question as broad as ‘what is this country doing about that other country’, it might be a good idea to drop the editorial names and instead include position descriptors. Canadian politicians don’t have the same name recognition as American counterparts.

Mark Carney is Canada’s Prime Minister, who won the position over Pierre Poilievre.

I’ve done some time in waste handling, and about a decade ago I had the opportunity to work with a mattress recycling outfit. They had set up a disassembly line that would separate the various materials within a mattress, it was very interesting to see.

My memory is failing me now, but they were sending about half the material to some other outfit that used in it production of some kind. So at least some recycling was happening through them.

The mattress industry is wild even without managing the product’s end of life. So many of the same mattress get wrapped with slightly different fabric and stitch work and sold under a different name and whatnot. Personally when mine meets its end I’m going to try a tatami instead.

Your post has reminded me of this video that calculates how many mattresses you might own if every time a mattress company tried to get you to buy mattress, you did.

It goes rather off the rails once the problem of where to put them becomes a concern. It’s worth a good laugh.

Just a guess but, I wouldn’t consider anything that was an order of magnitude more expensive than what I was looking to spend.

It might have been the sixth closure of the day that person was involved in.

I’m sure you’re right about the original buyers and it would be nice to see a non pro variant, but let’s not get mixed up here. It hasn’t been “several” years - it’s been less than two.

While not about France, the prominent example that comes to mind is Star Wars personifying the United States as the Empire.

Golf carts in the city can be done well, with Peachtree City as the prime example. However they have infrastructure, and more importantly, laws surrounding the use of the carts.

Intoxication, unrestricted parking, and no rules combine to be a disaster waiting to happen. In your situation, I would attend city council meetings and speak out regarding the safety concerns you’re witnessing. It would be useful to also begin documenting misuse of these carts to present at these meetings.

Parks in my area have signage forbidding motorized vehicles. There’s no logical reason the people driving carts can’t leave them in the same area as cars. Driving across park fields is bound to become problematic in terms of lawn maintenance. Once your area implements laws, it could be nice to replace some of the vehicle traffic with cart traffic.

Funny how a mistake in a single sentence earns vitriol on the entire comment.

Despite what I’d mistakenly wrote, I meant that to overcome inflation and see a return of double to quadruple your investment - which is what the comment starting this thread suggests as the outcome - you’d have to beat the market by around 10%.

Regardless, my point was more to do with whether someone with only $50 to spare a month is truly in a position to invest in anything or whether they might be better off saving it for a rainy day or something like that.

If someone has a few dollars to spare come month’s end, but has found themselves skipping the odd meal, that money would probably be better spent on a small grocery trip than putting it into an ETF that’ll take years to turn a profit.

Taking a step further, if the last thirty five years are any indication, that future $21k would be worth less than today’s $10k.

Besides, to overcome inflation, you’d need to average double digit returns on your investment every year for half a lifetime.

Like you say, it’s a tough decision if there’s anything that can provide you value now. Not to argue against savings, but expecting it to grow exponentially with no effort is folly.