Yeah, I’ve learned some discretion over the years. I once told a story that dead ass got me sent to therapy.

Me telling an EMS war story that brings the vibe to a crashing halt.

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.

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.

Yeah, that’s him. I was curious and looked him up a while back. Tay get really open about speaking for economic and social justice. He’s more or less always been that way. Chocolate Rain, is, IIRC, a song about the realities and struggles of being black in America.

It’s got to be more than that. This is a little like saying that there are at least two stars in the sky.

I would be very proud to say I had them on hand, but I don’t. I’ll look around, and share if I find them.

Beautiful stroadside shopping

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.

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.

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.

Thank you for the correction

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’ve been there, but I mostly just do it anyway. Fuck it, I said what I said. Half the time you don’t even get anything all that cutting, it’s just png salad. Every now and then, you’ll get a coherent response that isn’t a death threat, and those end up being good reads more often than not.

Thanks, homie. Yeah, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I know I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m focused on trying to build a better city for my kids.

It is in the valley, so, yeah, there’s a lot of default car brain to fight. That said, a lot of people I’ve spoken with here tend to agree with me, and really dislike being tied to a car. Even the mayor said that he agreed in spirit, but there was just no way to fund it. I think the gap that must be crossed here is much smaller than I expected going into it.

Idk, I give the mayor a lot of shit, but he’s a pretty alright dude. He’s constantly out volunteering in the community to pick up trash or feed the homeless. He also rides our pretty poor bus network every day.

I fuck with this energy. I think I’ll get this printed on a poster board.