I can’t imagine a governor, let alone a governor of a state as populous as Florida, inserting himself into fucking school board elections. Ron, don’t you have anything better to be doing, like, at all? Really? This is the best way to serve the public in your post as governor? What a nincompoop.

Oof. There’s fucking up, and then there’s getting banned from Wal-Mart. The only lower position is getting banned from the dollar store.

Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.

There’s a number of other studies that show that, overall, letting people go unhoused is far, far more costly than just fucking housing them. It’s not just paying for the cops and demo teams to chase them around, you’re also paying for excess use of medical services that wouldn’t be taking place otherwise, lost revenue because of people wanting to avoid the homeless, and a bunch of other things that all just pile up. It doesn’t help that some startups have entered this space and you’ve got cities like San Francisco paying them something like 40 or 80 thousand a year to keep the homeless in a fenced off area in a tent grid. It doesn’t really fix anything, it’s just another shitty, expensive band-aid whose funding could have gone to fixing the problem but didn’t.

We should go to global UTC. One time all the time.

Externalities with no direct impact on the company? No way! Milton Friedman assured me that capitalism was perfectly balanced with 0 exploits!

Just have a limited nuclear exchange, as a treat

I’m not totally sure you need a source. I mean, sure, by all means, but I seem to remember from 16 that the secret service was really unhappy with all the outdoor venues and kept harassing the Trump campaign to pick more indoor venues because they’re much easier to secure. That’s why you almost always see the candidates in indoor rallies, and why Trump has almost exclusively been at indoor venues since the assassination attempt.

Please, let there be reliable sources because it would be really funny

I was wondering if this was a legit tribe or one of those shitty “white people desperate to open an Indian casino” tribes with two registered members that are like 1/24000 native American or some shit. I kind of looked them on Wikipedia, they seem legit.

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.

I’ve only ever run games online with small groups. It inevitably turns into such a fiasco that the campaign fizzles out.

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.

Maybe on paper. IRL, they want that land, and they’ve determined that they’re done killing a little at a time to get it. There are already plans to redevelop the newly occupied parts of Gaza. I wonder if they’ll even bother digging the bodies out of the rubble or just pave over it all and have done. There’s a reason why Nettanyahu funneled millions to HAMAS. The worst outcome for him, politically, is a two-state solution. He needs an excuse to commit genocide and get the rest of the land. That’s partly why they weren’t interested in HAMAS laying down arms; it’s counter to their goals.

Oh, cool. Not only is it a way to avoid corporate accountability, it’s a way for our government to slip accountability too. Thanks, SCOTUS! I’m certain this is exactly what the founders had in mind, a totally unaccountable government that gets to pick winners and make them totally unaccountable too.

Thank you for the correction

Python is Skyrim. It’s fucking everywhere, anyone can pick it up, there’s a kajillion mods, and that’s what makes it good. Some day, though, you wake up and ask yourself what you’re doing with your life.

Israel hasn’t even bothered showing up to these ceasefire talks, while HAMAS offered to permanently disband. Why bother negotiating against yourself when the other party doesn’t even show up?

I wish the train fairy would visit the US :(