The US is an outlier in how it charges prices for healthcare services.

But every country in the world has prices charged for cold liquid helium. It’s very expensive to gather, process, store, and ship, regardless of what kind of health care economics apply in your country.

I’m still active in my 40’s and I have a bunch of nagging sports injuries, some of which trace back 20+ years. Overuse injuries are common, too. Ask pretty much any serious runner or lifter or full time athlete, and they’ll all have things that they just live with.

the kid is gonna die after it wears off

Ah yes, the SUV is basically the bride from Kill Bill, doing the five point palm exploding heart technique.

That JNCO era was really something.

The different style guides are designed for their particular environments. Most American newspapers and magazines follow AP, but most book publishers follow Chicago. Academics in the humanities tend to follow MLA, while academics in the social sciences tend to use APA. Hell, IEEE has a style guide for electrical engineers.

So do whatever you prefer. I tend to use Chicago because that’s what I know best, but I have worked professionally in writing and editing publications that followed the Chicago rules.

The two dominant style guides in the U.S. (Chicago Manual of Style and the A.P. Stylebook) prescribe no spaces around em dashes. When I do professional writing I default to Chicago, so I learned to eventually omit spaces around em dashes. That’s still my main way of distinguishing myself, for now.

I do live in an expensive area, but didn’t mean to imply that the prices I’m describing are the lowest available. Some people choose to go to more expensive places, or order a more expensive option.

Most people I know don’t go to bars for an efficient alcoholic experience.

To reinforce what you’re saying, bartenders I know tend to only have stories about one-off degeneracy that happens over the course of one night. But liquor store cashiers have stories about their regulars destroying their own lives over the course of months or years.

Some of us might be drinking more than 6 pints (6 UK pints is about 7.2 US pints). That’s one way.

Another way is paying more than $15 per drink, yes, after including tax and tip in the US. That’s somewhat common in some places, especially if cocktails are involved. Or higher end wine or spirits. Or even certain craft beers.

My body is a machine for turning the flashes of tiny little lights precisely arranged on a slab of glass into little taps of my thumbs on precise positions on that glass slab.

Yes, but that’s part of the humor, isn’t it? Sarcasm works best when there’s a nod towards (fake) sincerity.

I’m finding it shocking the number of comments that don’t seem to realize that this is the joke.

That’s basically just em dashes, which these days will get you accused of being an LLM.

Abe Froman? The sausage king of Chicago?

Controversy and debate about whether the condition exists for literal hostages in a violent/deadly situation is a step removed from talking about whether people become irrationally attached to manipulative romantic/sexual partners, and stay despite all rationality pointing towards leaving.

I don’t know if Stockholm Syndrome exists for hostages held at gunpoint. But I do know that plenty of people have behaved irrationally about attachment to abusive people in their lives. And we don’t have to call that particular condition Stockholm Syndrome, but your argument doesn’t really disprove the topic of this discussion.

It’s convenient for a lot of things. Curly quotes, specialized dashes, mathematical symbols or Greek letters used in math/science, foreign currencies, things like paragraph symbols (¶) or section symbols (§), etc.

Em dashes often replace parentheses:

The company has a policy of having any newly hired employee (like Steve) introduce themselves at the monthly all hands meeting.

The company has a policy of having any newly hired employee—like Steve—introduce themselves at the monthly all hands meeting.

Em dashes also often replace colons:

I’m going to bring my signature dish: bacon-wrapped dates.

I’m going to bring my signature dish—bacon-wrapped dates.

Em dashes are commonly used to denote interrupted speech:

He started to explain, “I was hungry and you weren’t home yet so I—”

“You’re not a diabetic, you can handle waiting a few extra minutes to eat”

Replacing commas is unusual and probably incorrect according to most style guides.

This is also highly localized. Style guides tend to apply only to one particular country, not all English-speaking countries. The AP guide is used by most American newspapers and magazines, and the Chicago Guide is used by most American book publishers. Each have their own rules on dashes.

Long pressing the hyphen on the Google keyboard on Android also gives the option of selecting an en dash or em dash.

On Linux, if you have the compose key enabled, Compose key + three hyphens in a row will generate an em dash (en dash is two hyphens).

The “circle of life” is a song about a sex position

Some fungi found to be thriving in Chernobyl, and seemingly growing towards radiation sources, are hypothesized to be able to capture and use the radiation energy to support biological processes. If it turns out that some fungi can synthesize compounds that convert ionizing radiation into chemical bonds that can be metabolized by biological organisms, one could theoretically imagine some kind of symbiotic relationship between organisms that comes out of that.