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psivchaz

@ psivchaz @reddthat.com

Posts
0
Comments
208
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Deleted

    How embarrassing

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  • I knew healthcare was messed up but I legit didn't know how messed up until it happened to me. My daughter got put on a specialty medicine because of a relatively rare kidney condition. It had to be compounded, because she is a small child but the medicine only came in adult doses.

    Aetna denied coverage, stating I had to get the medicine from CVS (which is owned by the same parent company of Aetna). CVS does not compound medicine, so we couldn't get it from them. I spent almost a full year on the phone arguing with them and around $6000 paying out of pocket before I was able to switch insurances.

    I consider myself reasonable. Even in a functioning system, mistakes can happen and need to be resolved, and I spent the first month or more assuming this was just an innocent mistake. What got to me was the total lack of recourse. Day after day on the phone with people, some of whom genuinely seemed to care but could do nothing. They intentionally separate the patients from the people making decisions so that all the decision makers get is a few fields in a form, not the whole story. The people in charge are even more separated so they never have to hear anything about the people they're screwing over. And if I couldn't afford the extra $6000 burden, I just wouldn't have gotten the medicine and in the best case she would have spent that year in and out of the hospital and in the worst she wouldn't have survived the year.

    I tend to think most people are decent. But the system we've built makes sure to separate people by impenetrable layers of bureaucracy to ensure that the decent people either can't do anything or never know there's a problem, while the indecent never have to be confronted with the damage they do. It's insane.

  • Removed

    Biden pardons his son Hunter despite previous pledges not to

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  • I think about this sometimes but the challenges for direct democracy are very hard to overcome. To vote right now, you go to a place and someone verifies your identity and then you vote on a machine that should theoretically have not just your vote but some form of backup to ensure your vote is counted.

    Obviously this would get really obnoxious if you were voting constantly. So something like change.org maybe where people can propose things and others can vote on them. But now how do we handle identity verification, and ensuring only one vote per person? On something connected to the Internet, how do we verify security? This needs to be even more secure than a bank, as every hacker and government in the world will want to sway the results.

    We could maybe distribute something like a USB key to cryptographically ensure everyone's identity, but then you will need to handle people losing theirs, or theft, and it wouldn't work great with cell phones. There's other identity solutions like scanning documents or facial ID but they have their own security issues and also are a nightmare for privacy.

    I dunno. There's probably a solution out there that might work, but it would take a lot of work to make it trustworthy and that work would largely be overseen by people the system is meant to replace so they aren't exactly incentivized to get it right.

  • Latino men voted for Trump in large numbers. Here’s what they hope he delivers.

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  • I hate when people downplay the economy or employment as trivial or at least not very important. It is important, and for many it is rational to consider it the most important. At an individual level in America, employment means food, shelter, healthcare. It even means companionship... People who can't afford to date, have a harder time finding love.

    At a high level, even if we implemented universal healthcare and fixed our other problems, the health of the economy would STILL dictate our access to food, shelter, and healthcare. A government with no funds cannot sustain programs.

  • Child care cost as much as rent for many families at inflation’s peak, new data shows

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  • I just picked a state. Average infant daycare cost is $1172/mo. Maximum of 4 infants per caregiver, so a maximum of $4.688.

    Health insurance here averages $400/mo, for an individual (some often paid by the employer).

    Assuming they are employed, the employer is paying for federal unemployment insurance, workers compensation insurance, state unemployment insurance. It was really hard to get solid numbers but based on my reading, we can estimate about 2% will go to that.

    So we have $4296 left over. Assuming payroll and supplies and everything else costs nothing at all (which is definitely not accurate), and assuming we give the rest straight to the employee... Their gross would be $51,000 roughly.

    The average daycare worker in this state makes about $33k/year.

  • Being an adult

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  • And where's the list? Like if I could just find a list of like, "Congratulations on being a homeowner, do all this shit because if you don't the repairs will eat you alive" it would be handy.

  • Americans stockpile abortion pills and hormones ahead of ‘reproductive apocalypse’ under Trump

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  • Contraception is not perfect. If you are on birth control, and you take it every day, you can still get pregnant, it's just unlikely. If you have an IUD, you can still get pregnant, and even worse every pregnancy is more likely to be life threatening. And of course, condoms can break.

    As for having less sex ... that's an interesting thing to say ...

  • The sad truth is that anti-feminist backlash helped propel Trump to victory

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  • So your argument is "it doesn't literally say that to the letter, so you're wrong?" At best it suggests that this relatively wide swath of the population shouldn't vote. What's your interpretation?

  • The sad truth is that anti-feminist backlash helped propel Trump to victory

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  • From the article...

    These are the men swimming in the electoral pool. It’s not too late for it to be drained.

    The article is cautious at first, pointing at facts and figures. At times, it almost seems to care. But when it comes to the final arguments, it is just: We gotta get rid of these men. Not even a viable solution, much less a sensible one.

    It's everywhere. It's not hard to find, but it's not always overt. Usually, it is dismissive: "Well that's not what we're talking about right now." "Well feminism would fix those problems too." Or the person gets lumped in with Nazis, or misogynists, or whatever when what they've said doesn't really support that.

  • The sad truth is that anti-feminist backlash helped propel Trump to victory

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  • I'm going to say something that I fear will not go over well, but I think it would be said. The left has some culpability here. Not in who they chose, but in how they approach the problem.

    One of the things that draws me to the left is that people are all supposed to be people. No one is beyond redemption, and much of the worst aspects of people are due to changeable circumstances and not some genetic defect.

    Criminals probably do crime because of their circumstances so if we can improve those circumstances we can help rehabilitate them. Addicts who are treated with dignity and compassion are more likely to be able to get their lives together. We shouldn't paint over people with broad brush strokes, like assuming all Muslims are terrorists just because a few have done terrible things while claiming it is in the name of Islam.

    But the left has a blind spot for men. The problem is solely with them, and they are garbage beyond redemption. They clearly are acting only out of hate, and not a result of their circumstances, so people seem to think. "It's not my job to educate you" became a trope in a society where educating others is literally the only way to make change.

    I submit that these people can be changed and can be rehabilitated if they are shown a better way. If their problems are listened to, rather than dismissed. If their circumstances are improved, rather than belittled. There are valid concerns, valid reasons for them to be upset, but they are handwaved away: "Well feminism cares about that too (even if you don't see it)" or "The privileged feel like equality is oppression."

    Anyway, I don't expect anyone will learn anything from this result. The left will say, "Man, misogyny just won't let a woman be President" while ignoring how few people actually even voted. The left will say, "Men are to blame" without ever questioning beyond "I guess they're just spiteful." And if we get another election, we'll have a Democratic candidate who moves right on everything except these problems.

  • Idk if y'all knew this

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  • As a nerd, I don't expect my parental control settings to work forever. They're more there to prevent childish naivete from getting them into trouble, they probably won't stop dedicated teen horniness. And I won't even be mad, figuring out how to get around them requires learning more about how technology works.

  • How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?

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  • This. It's not an election, it's what's next. Is every American election just going to be "Outright Fascism vs. Traditional Conservatism?" Is it always going to be this unrelenting and horrible from now on? Trump losing would be a good thing, but it doesn't fix the problem.

    The way I see it, the problems are that we've lost trust in the concept of society. We don't trust expertise. That's not even a right vs left thing. I know it's unpopular to "both sides" these things, but in truth it's not even a matter of sides: Everyone of all political stripes just disregards what they don't want to hear.

    At the same time, truth is getting harder to discern anyway. Botnets distributing and promoting misinformation, deepfakes making lies look real, and hordes of the financially incentivized pushing whatever their audience wants to hear over what is real.

    Anyway, I try to be optimistic but I just don't see how things will actually get better.

  • Rule

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  • I've had a few of those little gimmick penis candies and they are terrible. I mean, it's just some trash molded into a penis to be funny. Where are the gourmet candy penises?

  • Alternative to syncthing for large music collection?

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  • You are correct that a reboot will trigger a full rescan. I'm always on the lookout for better sync. I just don't think it's out there right now for easy bidirectional sync.

    Basically, if you want to set and forget, Syncthing is the best option. If you want more control, you'll need to look into setting up rsync scripts or similar, which will at least better let you control how often to sync.

  • California inmate's wife who was sexually violated during strip search wins $5.6 million in settlement, lawyers say

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  • At least the drug test is on brand. Stupid, but in a way I've come to expect. I cannot fathom what the point of the pregnancy test was.

  • Removed

    He's got all their powers

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  • Usually I say "don't mistake incompetence for malice" because so often when people fuck up, they aren't doing it to be mean but just because they're stupid.

    In this case, though, you're mistaking malice for incompetence. Everything Reagan fucked up was 100% intentional. I mean, punishing black people and poor people was basically a campaign promise.

  • yeahh gay sex rule

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  • For a long time, I've just assumed this was a weird way that my bipolar and my bisexuality interacted. Is this just a normal human thing?!

  • Tesla's self-driving is still not working in Boring Company's one-way tunnels

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  • The idea of being able to make tunnels faster and cheaper is super exciting, though there's some serious doubt that is actually what was accomplished. Still, maybe if it works out a better company can mimic it more efficiently.

    I think a lot about this sci-fi race in an Anne McCaffrey book that put most of their infrastructure underground to preserve the natural beauty of their planet. I want that for us so bad. I mean, we can still have buildings and such above ground but imagine if transport was almost exclusively underground, the amount of space we'd save for building things we actually use and the amount of wildlife we'd preserve.

  • Hexed by async

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  • I like async but dislike await. I spend entirely too much time on everything I build trying to maximize how much I can do in parallel because I find it tremendously satisfying.

  • CrowdStrike unhappy with “shady commentary” from competitors after outage

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  • Nah, this one has a margin of error. It's just that "take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously" is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.