prayer

Interesting to see the difference. In the US it's most common for mortgages to be "fixed rate" and remain the same for the entire loan period. Downside is a higher base percentage, we got down to about 2.6-2.7% in the same time period. Upside is that your payment will never go up.

Even if they did go through the trouble to do their own taxes, the IRS specifically instructs taxpayers to not calculate it themselves, but rather to use a "tax table" to lookup their income and next to it is listed their income tax amount.

MARC is unfortunately only a regional train for Maryland, and he is very limited on the weekends.. The national passenger train system is called Amtrak.

Check your owners manual to see if you have a button to disable "overdrive", it's for adverse conditions such as uphill or downhill, off-road or rainy, etc. It prevents the shifting up too early and gives each gear more range to operate in. By default it's on because it saves fuel, and they make the button hard to find sometimes.

Technically they have at least 2 "gears", forward and reverse. But does it really count if all you do is shout at the angry pixies to run the other way?

The Russia equivalent of the US "State", aka calling Canada the 51st State

Other way around. A US citizen marrying a foreign national grants the foreign national a path towards citizenship.

After looking further into it, however, it's not an immediate thing. It seems to take 3 years before you can apply for citizenship, and of course you need to remain in the country legally for those 3 years.

Boatswain -> Bosun -> Bo's'n

Supposedly the kids are conceived through IVF, so no fucking was necessary.

Y can act as a consonant or a vowel, depending on the position in the word.

Definitely a vowel: Baby

Part of a vowel sound: Play

Not a vowel at all: Yes, lawyer

When a Y starts a syllable, it typically doesn't take a vowel sound, closer to a "soft j" sound.

DEI is an attempt at merit-based hiring. The only difference is what the definition of merit is. The definition that is based on past achievements is biased towards those who have previously had better opportunities, not necessarily better skills. DEI takes a look at the potential of someone in the context of how well they've done with respect to what has been available to them.

Someone who has a GED instead of graduating high school on time might have had opportunities closed to them because they had a reason for dropping out of high school (e.x. had to help family by getting a job), so it wouldn't be equitable to judge them harshly for not having as strong of a resume as someone who had a "conventional" experience and was given more opportunities fresh out of highschool because they could afford to take an unpaid/low pay internship, instead of focusing on taking care of a family.

Nothing about either situation really can tell you about an applicants potential in the field or their work ethic or anything. But 9 times out of 10 the one who was fortunate enough to finish highschool on time will be ahead in the selection process for no reason other than they didn't have life get in the way of their career.

DEI won't be able to magically tell you which candidate is better, but it can allow employers to level the playing field and use different metrics to measure merit that might be less biased against people who have had nontraditional lives through no fault of their own.