I'm going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It's not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.
Given a little bit of reading first, you'd do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it's hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.
You can save a lot of money by buying a used baratza. They sell literally every part for replacement, so you can just buy a used one and swap in whatever parts
This sort of thing happens all the time, and it's usually subject to some level of debate. Just look at the ponderosa pine (pinus ponderosa. Some say there is one species with multiple subspecies, some say they are just different varieties, some say that they are different species, or some are and some arent, etc.
And for anyone curious, it's an old enough (1869) book that it's in the public domain, and you can download it free from project gutenberg. As always with older literature, there's going to be some stuff that's not scientifically best practice, so don't take it as gospel, but use it as a starting point.
In the same vein "Living on a Few Acres" is a US dept of Agriculture publication that you can also get free online. Mine is from 1978 and also has a lot of good stuff.
Most people in America have health insurance through their employer. This was originally designed to be a perk of jobs back in the day, but now it unfortunately links healthcare to employment. If you are retirement age, you can get Medicare, which is government sponsored healthcare that still works through the private system, so there are no "government doctors" or anything like that for that population. Similarly, for disabled folks, or those poor enough (which can be hard to prove), they can get Medicaid.
If you lose your job, there's a system to pay to extend your employer's insurance policy until your next job's plan kicks in, but it's expensive cause your old job is no longer paying a big percentage of it, so a lot of people gamble on not needing insurance if for example, they end one job in May and know they have a new job starting in September.
With insurance, there are some government mandated policies. For example (and don't quote me on this cause I don't know the exact policies), things determined to be "preventative" have no out of pocket cost, so you won't generally pay for a regular yearly checkup, vaccines, etc. There are often options for insurance types to pick from depending on if you anticipate needing lots of care (e.g., a healthy young person probably won't, but if you are trying to have a baby, you know there are a lot of costs associated).
My employer pays for my insurance. If I were to get cancer, I would probably end up paying for a couple thousand dollars of appointments, scans, etc (called the deductible). Then I'd reach a point where my insurance covers most of the cost, and I kick in 20% (called the coinsurance level). Eventually, if my costs hit a certain limit (the out of pocket limit), insurance covers everything. I think it's like $8k or something like that for me. That's the most I could ever have to pay in a year.
People get screwed over by a few things. First is that while I could put together $8k if I had to, many people still have trouble with that. The second is people falling through the cracks of the labyrinthine system, and they end up without insurance while in between jobs or whatever. The third thing is that insurance decides what is necessary, so if you live in the middle of nowhere, and your child gets a specific type of cancer, you might not want to settle for whatever the "standard of care" is at your local hospital, you might want to fly across the country to go to the best hospital for that cancer, and your insurance isn't going to cover that cost.
And it is incredibly important to note that the insurance companies don't play fair. When your doctor tells the insurance company that you need a certain procedure, they have an automated system send out a "no". Your doctor then has to spend time to appeal the decision. Eventually, you might get the care you need paid for, but by engaging in these practices, they are hoping you will either 1: pay yourself, or 2: die.
Also, a final note that I think is important is that cancer, and many chronic illnesses, makes people desperate, and willing to try anything. There is a huge ecosystem (and it probably exists in your country, too), of people selling alternative (i.e., fake) medicine to cure them. Yeah, it's possible to wind up with a $50k bill for real medicine, but you also have people paying large sums to feed bleach to their autistic kids and then trying to pay for it with go fund me.
Pro tip for killing the lanternflies: they are super quick and jumpy, but it takes a bit for them to build up a second jump, so once they land on their first, it's easy to squash them.
Air conditioning
This is a great example of why to check before killing/removing any bugs from your plants. Same thing when you see eggs planted on your leaves. It would suck to crush a bunch of assassin bug eggs on a plant.
I had yellow jackets build a nest inside one of my potted plants last year. On one hand, it's a little sketchy, on the other hand, wasps and Hornets are great multipurpose predators if they aren't located where they will bother you much.
Yeah, as someone with some all-clad, it's really nothing special. I heard that the handles are geared towards maintaining the ability to prevent twisting of the pan in your hand while using pot holders/towels, and i think they work well for that.
I strongly agree with this. You aren't necessarily going to get fancy brand names, but you can get a stainless frying pan with a big billet of aluminum on the bottom for heat distribution for $20. Spending 5 times that amount basically just gets you a mirror finish, a brand name, and the ability to put it in a dishwasher (and who does that with pans?).
Carbon steel pans are another one. You shouldn't need to spend more than $10 on a carbon steel pan. The materials are cheap and they can be easily mass produced. There's nothing that should make it expensive.
Basically an allied country having a base in your country means that any attacker would presumably also have to attack your ally, drawimg them into the conflict. Obviously agreements like NATO article 5 can do that, but people can back out of agreements. Physical presence is more binding than paper.
Yeah, it's really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.
Technique can't overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.
To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.
There's no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can "use your core" or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.