glatt wrote:

The one thing I don't get in all this, is that Obamacare is still the law of the land, and one of the requirements is that insurance companies must spend at least 80% of their premium income on medical claims, with the remaining 20% allowed for administrative costs and profit; large group plans must spend at least 85% on medical claims.  Before the pandemic, I would routinely get notifications in my own plan that Cigna had to issue a refund in order to comply with this requirement, and the money was returned to my employer, who applied it to the overall costs of providing insurance to the employee pool.  So I know from personal experience that it is a real rule.

Everyone is saying that UnitedHealth Group is the worst and they routinely denied care, but they absolutely complied with the law.  The penalties would be too great if they didn't. Their loss prevention lawyers would keep them in compliance.   All this CEO was doing was trying to get as close as possible to that 80% threshold instead of being up around 90% or so.

I read something that indicated some health insurance companies have been getting around this number by owning healthcare facilities themselves. At that point, fuzzy bookkeeping means things like building maintenance, hospital executive salaries, etc. get counted as "payments to a medical facility" while not actually paying medical claims.

So, there is some amazing drama going on in the gaming world right now, but the short version (so far) is this:

There's an upload-it-yourself indie gaming site called itch.io, which is like YouTube for games: users upload their creations and get free hosting plus an audience, while itch.io makes ad revenue. It's not as massive as, say, YouTube, but it is a very, very large site. About 5 days ago, a user uploaded a "game" that was more like a fan homage to a major studio game called Funko Fusion--i.e., the same folks who maintain the FunkoPop toys. And Funko apparently uses a bullshit AI program called BrandShield to prevent copyright infringement across the internet on their products.

So BrandShield flagged the page, and sent an alert to itch.io's domain registrar, not for DMCA (which would be appropriate for cease-and-desist copyright stuff), but for "fraud and phishing." The registrar messaged itch.io, and itch.io said "okay," and took down the game.

But somehow, the report didn't get deactivated, so now, 5 days later, having "not been responded to," the registrar took down the entirety of itch.io. Again, this is like all of YouTube being taken down because one guy posted a video with a Michael Jackson song in the background.

Now, it's important to note that almost everyone screwed up here: the registrar should have cleared the report, but also, this would not have happened if BrandShield had correctly filed the report as DMCA, rather than fraud, and Funko screwed up by using bullshit AI with automatic reporting in the first place.

Anyway, after hours of downtime and no one being willing to fix the problem, the owner of itch.io took to social media--which is a problem for Funko, because there is a TON of overlap between Funko's demographic, and itch.io's demographic. Calls were made, wheels got greased, and the site is now back up--but people are still talking, and now someone from Funko just called the itch.io guy's MOTHER about her son's "defamatory stateme

Fun fact I learned the other day: nearly all of the developed nations that have single-payer healthcare instituted those systems in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression. The US government attempted to do it back then, too, and the key reason they couldn't get it through was that it would have created racially-integrated hospitals. Bigots were so determined to avoid sharing a building with a black person--or being a white doctor forced to treat black patients--that they killed a program they otherwise were widely in favor of.

Does that mean they'll still let you cash out 4 weeks' worth, or you can cash out none of it, ever?

IC wrote:

My goodness, you're a hostile, humourless soul.

Have a laxative.
 

I'm just asking difficult questions, because thinking about difficult things is how we all become better people. It's okay if you're not ready to answer them.

IC wrote:

Clodfobble wrote:

I'm not interested in stories about people you know. Philosophy about other people is nothing but politics; real philosophy is first, last, and always about the self. So I'm asking: what does it look like, for you, in a world where you personally are not able to demonstrate your intellect and receive the intellectual challenges you crave? Is it lonely?

I'll let you know when I get there.
 

This demonstrates either a lack of imagination, or a deflection to cover up fear. Which one sounds more accurate to you?
 

I feel strangely confident I actually know who IC is. He'd definitely deny it, though, so no point in guessing.

My question, instead, is: can you remember how old you were, IC, when your sense of self-worth became tied to intellectual pursuits? Can you envision a life where you lose your intellectual abilities, and yet still have value in this world?
 

I do think quite a lot of our current problems are, at their core, a side effect of our brains not being able to cope with scale.

You've probably heard of Dunbar's number, or at least the concept if not the name. Our neocortex is evolutionarily able to cope with about 150 stable relationships, and I think that, in an attempt to surpass this number (which modern life pretty much insists that we do,) we have fragmented those 150 "people" into swappable categories from one thought to the next.

Take attractiveness, for example. If I go to my local grocery store and compare myself to everyone inside the store, I'm doing okay. If I instead watch a few hours of TV, I have inevitably been exposed to 150 people who are all far more attractive than average, and since I can't hold more people than that in my head at a time, I now feel, for awhile at least, like the ugliest person in my "tribe." If I want to be a painter, and I follow at least 150 painters on social media who are all objectively better than me, I no longer feel capable of succeeding as I scroll my feed. (If, on the other hand, I follow 150 artists who all work in different media, I maybe don't feel as bad, because I can fragment my consideration into just "painting" and thus have fewer than 150 superior people right in front of me at that exact moment.)

The same applies to politics. If I see 150 really outrageous political takes in a comment section, my brain tells me, in that moment, that I am alone, and should despair. If I go back to my preferred website and cleanse my brain with 150 takes I agree with, I no longer feel alone, but now I feel invincible, because everyone in the world (i.e., my tribe, which I have forced to have flexible membership, but which is still my entire world at any given moment) agrees with me.

Small communities--the kind where, most importantly, you get to know more than one facet of an individual--are a useful countermea

Oh, but that story doesn't include the latest twist: After conservatives went all-in on Peanut as a martyr and a "Christ-like sacrifice" and "the Elon Musk of squirrels" (because they saw it as an opportunity to denigrate the Dem establishment running NYC,) they've now discovered that the entire Peanut TikTok account was just a way to direct traffic to the owner's homoerotic OnlyFans page, and now the conservatives' heads are exploding because they championed a gay-agenda squirrel.

Minifob's university is closed Tuesday-Friday, and they are encouraged to leave but allowed to stay. It seems to be more of a liability/logistics issue for the school than an actual danger. The mandatory evacuations closer to the coast are being told to go to the local high school for shelter, which is closer to the water and not as tall as Minifob's dorm, so he's going to stay put along with most of his classmates.

Since you said he's a stable three-legger now, I could only assume you murdered the cat if I also assume you taxidermied him into furniture.

Diaphone Jim wrote:

I started my current checking account in early 1970 with #0001.
Next one in my book is #9339. 

Yeah, my dad is at something like 12,000, but inventory in his business is purchased and sold almost exclusively by check or cash.