No, nothing ever happens, actually. Nobody ever does anything interesting or worth talking about. Hosting exchange kids has, predictably, been one of the most boring experiences of my life, along with everything else.
No, nothing ever happens, actually. Nobody ever does anything interesting or worth talking about. Hosting exchange kids has, predictably, been one of the most boring experiences of my life, along with everything else.
Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.
I hosted a Russian exchange student who really liked joking about that stuff. He went as the ghost of communism for Halloween
Yep, that’s me. You could probably find a few more good examples of me stepping in shit on Hexbear, that’s hardly the first.
Yeah, I’ve had the experience of paying off a bill, only for the hospital to, about a year later, send us a newly adjusted bill from the same encounter where they discovered we actually owed them a further three hundred. Healthcare is the only field where this kind of shit is tolerated as a routine matter. Any other business doing that would be shamed in town square, but it’s Tuesday for healthcare.
Okay, so the American system is an employer based model, meaning that your health plan, if you have one, is determined by your employer. This means a few key things:
Your plan may (and probably does) vary wildly in nearly every regard from someone else’s despite both of you being with the same insurer.
You are not the customer, but the user. Your boss is the customer. As such, the insurance company doesn’t really care if they piss you off, because you can’t just fire them and go with some other plan. They only care about not pissing off your boss. Well, you can technically, but individual insurance is so expensive and bad (and there’s only a few big players in the market anyway) that it’s an obviously better choice to just get jerked around by your employer’s plan.
The entire healthcare payment process is so arcane, unintuitive, and complex that no lay person outside the system can be really expected to navigate it if someone says “whoops, we’re not paying because the florp code was misapplied during Venus Wednesdays, and though you flipped your florp last month, some businesspeople made a deal just last week to agree that florps will only be covered by approved Todds (the closest is a convenient 600 miles from you). This judgment is final, may God have mercy on your soul.” As an example, I’ve had insurance pre-approve something and then turn around and deny it once it got billed, and because I didn’t think to get physical proof of pre-approval first, the insurance basically just ended it with “nuh uh, we never said that, do you have a receipt?” Lesson learned. And a lot of times, the people inside of it don’t have the full picture. There are people whose entire profession is either arguing with insurance companies all day to force them to pay what’s due, or helping patients navigate the system. It makes it really, really easy to rip off both patients and health providers.
Government insurance like Medicare also sucks. Their reimbursement rates are terrible, among other factors, and it’s caused more and more providers (those who can choose, anyway) to stop seeing these patients, meaning that you start ending up with a few Medicaid clinics whose soonest appointment is months from now and spend about 20 seconds per patient. This is largely a result of our conservatives trying to prove that government doesn’t work by making the government not work. Just so we’re clear, private insurance holders also have long wait times and doctors that are pressed for time, it just tends to be a little less bad.
Since insurers have figured out that there’s money to be gouged in medication, they’ve gotten into the mail order pharmacy and pharmacy Benefit manager (if you want to get a tummy ache, read up on PBMs, they’re the biggest bastards in a field full of absolute bastards) game. Since then, they’ve managed to kill off most small business pharmacies and turn just getting your medication into the same bureaucratic, clown energy pain in the ass as trying to arrange an MRI. (YMMV by insurer, plan, medication, etc)
On top of all that, about a decade or two back, private equity figured out that healthcare in the US is practically a license to print money, so they’ve come in, taken all kinds of stuff over, made everything worse for everyone involved but the businesspeople, all while jacking up prices and cutting services. Yaaaaaaaaay
Dr. Glaucomflecken on YouTube provides a pretty good (and funny / simultaneously infuriating) insight into the mess of healthcare in the US from a providers perspective.
You’re not really using the fediverse until you’ve been told that you’ll get the bullet, too. Sometimes, it’s exhausting commenting something pretty uncontroversial and then seeing like eight notifications and realizing it was on Hexbear.
We have a second house (a trailer, really) and rent it to my mom for way under market rate. 100% of the rent goes to paying off the debt from rehabilitating the trailer and paying off her utilities. It’s not like we’re out here just raking in the dough, we’re just trying to keep my mom from being homeless. I know for damn sure we’ve got to do it, because the state is way happier spending its money bashing homeless people instead of preventing homeless people.
Real talk, it’s going to be like the troubles or the early days of Nazi Germany, not like people forming battle lines and shit. The only way the latter happens is if states secede; one viable scenario I’ve considered is California/Pacifica seceding and a subsequent shooting fight over water rights, because of how much water California gets from the Colorado River basin and other water sources outside its borders. But realistically, it’s going to be shitty partisan on partisan on innocent bystander violence.
Best advice I’ve heard is to form close ties and mutual aid agreements with your neighbors and friends. A small network of people can be far, far, far more resilient in defending protecting themselves than individuals or families can.
Calm down, satan
No, see, it’s not that you’re a nationalist.
Better yet, I need to know how much the global CO2/Water use delta is between the most bloated Linux (mint?) and your average Windows 11 install. Windows 11 phones home for so much bullshit all the time, it’d be good for a laugh.
Congratulations!
Idk if this is your first brush with Linux, I only recently had my own. Let us know if you need any help, but I promise that if you just follow the instructions, and you can, you’ll get through it. ChatGPT can also be useful for bridging small knowledge gaps in tech and IT.
Mint. It’s dead simple and works great.
Yeah, everyone else trying to be Trump 2 has spilled their spaghetti. Ramaswamy even tried to out crazy Trump and make up for the batshit insanity of his ideas by just doing a Benny Shaps and talking fast, and he couldn’t beat old puddin’ fingers. DeSantis tried his ass off to set himself up as the rightful heir to the throne, and ended up speedrunning a failed campaign. Haley’s having better success by just trying to do her own thing. I kinda think that MAGA is really a cult of personality around Trump, and there isn’t really a MAGA movement without him.
Anyway, if he runs again in 2028, man, just drag America out behind the shed and put it down. It’s just getting too painful to watch.
No, trust me, bro, Trump isn’t dead, he just had to go undercover, like Nick Fury
I’d like you to meet windows 11. Windows 11 bricked my Alienware computer for two weeks until I said fuck it and installed Linux. They pushed an update that triggered the Bitlocker secure boot policy, which is annoying but not a problem. Except that the Bitlocker recovery key page on Microsoft’s website has been down for over a month. There’s other users like me who’ve had their machines bricked because Microsoft fucked up a webpage and can’t be assed to do a git revert. It took me hours of navigating Microsoft’s intentionally terrible support pages to figure out how to talk to a person (over IM, phone support is not a thing anymore), another 40 minutes to get a support tech on the chat, and then they told me that basically my options are to wait or wipe the drives and re-install windows 11.
I didn’t want to wipe my drives, I liked my drives, but I’m not going to just let a machine sit there and be bricked for three months until Microsoft can be assed to un-brick it. So, I wiped the drives and installed mint. I can’t play all the games I used to (I can access probably 75% of my game library) but the performance is WAY better, like, obviously and shockingly better. Turns out that Bitlocker throttles your SSD performance significantly, and it also helps when your OS isn’t trying to both run a game and send your delicious, delicious data to ad servers or whatever.
And windows wants even more live service dependencies with 12? Fuck that. I’ve been with them since '95, but I won’t follow them there. 11’s live service dependencies have been a disaster, and I can’t see myself getting excited about even more of that.
America in one picture