dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
I'm half convinced all of the indignant posts on /r/fednews from so-called federal employees are North Korean agitprop designed to repulse ordinary people and get them excited about firing them in service of destroying state capacity.
The beauty of doing this as a random unplanned one-off is that if you're a Milton lost in the cracks, you haven't practiced bullshitting well enough to have a good story lined up.
I don't know how good it will be at determining who gets an A+ and who gets a D-, but I suspect it will reveal who to give some Fs to.
£200/300 was the cost of her monthly base touching with the psychiatrist, about 50 minutes a session.
I did get an ADHD diagnosis in the US myself and merely paid $500 for the first workup and $200 per month for that sweet sweet Adderall.
Psychiatry sounds pretty sweet from a money perspective. Though I recall, maybe it was a monologue in The House of God, that it's one of the more boring career paths for an MD.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
I was already exploring private care, and groaning at the prices, honestly 200 pounds is far from how high it could have gone.
It might have been £300/visit actually. I don't quite remember this was ten years ago.
Being an aristocrat's psychiatrist seems like nice work if you can get it.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
My wife tried to continue her mental health treatment in the UK after we relocated from the US and they did not give one shit about the letter she brought from her psychiatrist and they told us it would be a year to see their psychiatrist.
And no we couldn't have a refill for any of the mood meds she was on while she waited. Good luck with the withdrawal, they didn't say.
We ended up finding some private psychiatrist in a fancy neighborhood of London that charged £200 a visit and he wrote her all of the Rxes needed.
We were told by NHS that only NHS could prescribe these meds but the private psychiatrist we found didn't have any issues keeping it up for almost two years.
That's a long and excellent post. The executive summary is...
Being marked "alive" in the data doesn't mean they're collecting benefits. It just means they have no evidence that this person is dead.
Though nowadays funeral homes outright report deaths to SSA which immediately terminates benefits.
There are separate processes to follow up on people that are long lived and collecting benefits. One kicks in at 100 and a more aggressive one at 115. There's also periodic audits that kick in if someone does things like draws benefits but hasn't used their Medicare benefits in awhile (since dead people don't go to the doctor).
There's lots of garbage data in the database due to migrations over the years and some records are unfixable due to layers of kludges, but separate systems exist to stop them from getting payments.
There have been proposals to fix all of the records but they've determined the cost outweighs the benefits, which sounds plausible for a government to say (not that I would agree).
She’s doing so because she finds “the process of being pregnant and birthing joyful in and of itself” instead of for money but that doesn’t make it better.
I just mean it is not an immense sacrifice to some people that they might only consider because they wanted to get paid or had some other kind of illegitimate gain from it or wanted to pervert the social order in some way.
Some people, friends or family, see a loving couple that can't reproduce on their own and want to help.
Anyway, are you similarly against giving children up for adoption?
What about the people doing the adopting?
I would make an exception if she were willing to truly fulfil the role of a mother for the child in some sort of weird 3-parent relationship, but my understanding is that this doesn’t usually happen.
As an aside, the legal process is quite explicit that the surrogate has no rights to a relationship with the child. And again, it's controversial. People don't necessarily volunteer to strangers they they have done this.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
My own wife describes it this way when she considered being a surrogate during a single period between her first husband and kids and me and our kids.
To buy a child, to pay a woman to bring into this world a baby that (presumably) she doesn’t want so that you can take it from her breast forever, is to my mind one of the worst crimes that you can commit, and I can’t fathom why we don’t punish it accordingly.
Here's a hint for why there's no mention of the mother in the article, as OP wondered. It's controversial!
Not all women get paid for this, FWIW. And some find the process of being pregnant and birthing joyful in and of itself.
Why isn't participating in bringing a life into the world into a well resourced home seen as a moral good? If one is cynical enough, anything can be made to sound like a trashy business transaction.
huh. I guess I would expect universities to compete to have the lowest indirect costs? is the market not that robust? can lots of grants only be practically fulfilled by one university? are the NIH funders just like "yolo not our money"
Aren't they making $500k-1m/y total comp? Set for life even if they do get ground up after ten years.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
despite how online I am, I somehow didn't know what "make fetch happen" means
From the 2004 film Mean Girls, in which the character Gretchen Wieners repeatedly uses fetch as a synonym for cool, leading another character to tell her to "stop trying to make fetch happen."
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
Surely when the online left calls people Nazis they mean "white supremacist" and not "anti-Semitic" (not that the hypocrisy of the statement isn't absurd)
I don't understand. Let's say I'm a biologist and applied for a $100k grant to study some kind of esoteric ligand discovery method and that was awarded. My university can then go to the NIH and say "yooo we need an extra $55k for indirect costs" and the NIH is like "bet, here's $155k"? But if it was awarded to a more prestigious university they might have said "yooo $70k extra actually" and the NIH would be like "say less, here's $170k"
A system like this seems like it would incentive administrative bloat. Is this really how it works?
The acceleration and handling feels much more responsive in an EV. I never realized how jerky ICE cars are until I had an EV to compare them to.
Much less maintenance involved since the cars are so much simpler. I've had one for 3 years and don't miss oil changes or other annual service bullshit. Your actual brakes last longer as well because of regenerative braking.
Regenerative braking is nice because it enables "one pedal driving" most of the time: if you're not pressing pressing the accelerator the car slows down -- nice in stop and go traffic.
A lot of people will say they hate this, especially if they're too cool, but I find the app integration really convenient. EVs don't need the motor running to have power, so it's actually a computer that's always available to take commands over their cell data connection, like warm the car up, or tell me your location, close the trunk now that I'm inside the house with all of the groceries, etc
As a software engineer I find all of the software in cars borderline retarded. In Teslas it's actually relatively good (though still sometimes retarded).
In the summer time you can tell the car to never let it get above 100 degrees while parked, so you don't have to burn your balls off when you get in. Uses power but not that much. And power is cheap.
Never have to visit a gas station again. Ended up buying a portable tire inflator that connects to the cigarette lighter port since I'm not going to gas stations anymore but still need to inflate tires once in awhile.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
They're awesome. But I now can't stand driving ICE vehicles after owning an EV.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
Let's not forget that Ukraine had inherited a ton of the USSR's nuclear stockpile when it had collapsed and they were pressured to give them up and transfer them to Russia in exchange for security guarantees. Oops!
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
Isn't that because most of the land in Nevada is desert with no water access though? The rare bits of it that I've seen for sale are practically free and not being developed any time soon.
That said I would love to see ten more cities like Vegas get built that aren't dedicated strictly to gambling, with lots of indoor public spaces suitable for biking and running.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
As any hunter will tell you, a lot of public land has no public access. It's land locked entirely by private land owners and there's no implied easement to allow access. You are trespassing if you cross private land to get to public land, even if there's no other way to get to it.
Unless you have a helicopter, a lot of public lands are de facto private extended gardens for their neighbors.
So, the public land stats are somewhat fake.
I'm open to reforming this but a lot of private land owners will go to war.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
... what are you working on?
I find it kind of hard to work on software projects for fun knowing AGI will make it significantly easier to work on if I wait a year before starting. In fact this might always be true.
Labor done in 2025 will be so much less leveraged than labor done in 2026, and so on.
Curious. What gave you the impression that Trump had principled beliefs in the integrity of the US's legal system and upholding political norms? Why did you think he couldn't cross these lines?
I am 0% surprised he could tweet something like that.
Whether he actually has the cajones to lead a revolution is dubious. He's fairly shy when it comes to bloodshed, going by his last presidency. In fact the only durable principle he seems to have is an unwillingness to get US troops killed, which I find commendable even though I'm more of a neocon myself.
I think he loves to troll though, especially for political edge, but also knows when it stops being fun and games.
Yeah I dunno man. After UK NHS told my (then) wife it would be a year wait to see a psychiatrist (to continue her mood meds she was on in the US), we found some Covent Garden psychiatrist that charged £300 for her once monthly sessions and it was all no problem and reimbursed at 100%
I don't think it's normal for a health insurance plan to let you just see any specialist with zero triaging and cover 100%
I really have no idea what their limits were. I went to a private GP to get a health certificate to run the Paris marathon, and it cost £100, and that was reimbursed. A years worth of sports physical therapy was also reimbursed 100%
I could only conclude the cohort was so healthy that even our splurging didn't matter.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
The only thing that's better is the Cigna Expat plan. The properties are as follows
- You must be domiciled in the US
- Your US based employer must be having you work abroad
- The premiums are low, like $500/mo
- You pay out of pocket
- You submit expenses and they reimburse you 100%
Turns out if you're high value and healthy enough to send abroad, insuring you is really cheap
Wild. The effect it had on me is making me find sugar kind of gross. I consistently add only one teaspoon to coffee from now on whereas I used to always add two. Additionally I used to take my kids to a coffee shop in the mornings for some goodies a few times a week and now everything in there seems gross. I haven't had a thing from there since starting Semaglutide for weight loss.
It hasn't affected my interest in alcohol though. I can still have a beer or two with dinner, though alcohol never had a grip on me.
When it comes to snacking I find my behavior changed. I can lay in bed now at night and think "hmm I'm feeling a bit hungry. there's some delicious vanilla yogurt in the fridge. I should go have some. go on, go have some" and ... the actual urge to get up and do this is just gone. The abstract thought of pleasure around snacking is still there but the dopamine boost to get me to jump out of bed is missing.
This seems like it could have profound positive effects on addiction, but it's kind of weird how selective it is.
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