I’m sure the Republicans will attempt to go crying to the SCOTUS, but they’ve already ruled that it’s up to the states to decide. Hopefully this will be the end of the bullshit that is the Wisconsin legislative map and my home state can finally decide freely who represents them.
This is super personal to me because it almost killed me. I’ve told this story on reddit, but it bears repeating:
tl;dr lost my doctors due to an insurance change 4 weeks in to a 6 week open heart surgery recovery…
In 2018, my company was in the process of being sold. No big deal, above my paygrade, nothing for me to worry about.
Then I got sick right after Thanksgiving. Really bad heartburn that lasted 5 days. It wasn’t heartburn. I had a heart attack. 12/3 I had open heart surgery, single bypass, and that started a 6 week recovery clock.
On 1/1, the sale of my company closed and we officially had new owners. I also officially lost all of my doctors because the new employers don’t do Kaiser in Oregon. They do it in WA and CA, but each state has to be negotiated and they never had presence here.
1/2 I start working with Aetna to find doctors, hospitals, etc. Beyond the cardiologist I need a new pharmacist, podiatrist, diabetes care and a general “doctor” doctor.
Fortunately, my new employer is a big enough fish, they have their own concierge at Aetna and she gets me into the Legacy system.
On 1/3 I start developing complications, but I don’t know it at the time. It starts with a cough. All the time. Then, when I try to lay down, like to sleep, I’m drowning, literally choking and gagging.
The concierge and I try to get an appointment, we’re told 2-3 months. For a dude still recovering from open heart surgery? Best they could do is 2 weeks. 1/14.
I can’t lay down to sleep so I buy a travel neck pillow and sleep sitting up.
I get to see the new doctor at the “official” end of the 6 week recovery. He doesn’t know me or my history so he wants to run tests.
I’m sitting at home playing video games and waiting on test results when the call comes… Congestive heart failure. Report to the ER immediately.
My heart developed an irregular heart beat, which caused fluid build up in my chest. They admitted me and were getting ready to pull fluid off me.
“What happened to your foot?”
“I dunno, what happened to my foot? I can’t feel my feet.”
Remember when I said I was sitting around playing video games, waiting for test results? Yeah, my foot was touching a radiator and I didn’t know it. 3rd degree burns, first four toes. Pinkie was spared.
So I’m in the hospital a week. I lose 4 liters of water per day. 50 lbs. of water. No wonder I was drowning. Regular bandage changes.
So now I’m facing two procedures. Electrocardio version to fix my heart, skin grafts to fix my toes.
This whole time the new insurance covers 80% until I reach the out of pocket maximum of $6,500. Then it will cover 100%.
The old insurance? ER visit for heart attack, hospital admission, 8 days in the hospital, open heart bypass… $250.
So we hit the out of pocket maximum almost immediately. My wife had a problem with her foot running through the Seattle airport. The doctor who did her toe amputation was decided to be out of network so that was another $1,100.
I was never unemployed through all this. I had enough vacation and sick time banked to cover it. Cobra didn’t apply. Buying my old insurance wasn’t an option, it was far too expensive without employer backing. Income is too high for assistance (thank god) and I took steps to max out my HSA account, which is good because we drained it twice.
Three 1 week hospital stays (2 for me, 1 for my wife), multiple ER visits, two more major medical procedures… That would be enough to break most people even with good insurance.
So if you read any of that, let me ask you something… Why does the quality of my health care and my quality of life have to depend on who I work for and what insurance companies they choose to work with?
This is the kind of story libertarians can’t imagine because they simply lack an imagination. We don’t choose when we get sick. Your companies merger should have had no impact on your ability to get healthcare. What an absolutely insane thing to read.
History lesson time: This wasn’t done on purpose. It’s an artifact of decisions made by Congress during World War II to support war production.
So many young men were away at war that it created a labor shortage, even with some women entering the work force. This led to spiraling increases in wages that were threatening the viability of critical war manufacturers.
In an effort to protect this manufacturing sector, Congress capped wage increases. But those corporations were still competing for workers and now they were no longer able to offer them higher and higher wages. So instead, they started offering them “perks” like health insurance, pensions, and paid time off.
THEN:
“In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls.”
Emphasis mine. And guess what? When those young men returned from war and re-entered the work force, they wanted those perks too. So which company was going to be the first to deescalate the arms race and NOT offer health insurance?
And those perks being so ubiquitous meant the government never had an incentive to provide health coverage directly to anyone of working age, so we only have Medicare for retirees.
I think this is a failure of imagination on the part of the author. Norway is, on a whole, much more rural; a large portion of the population lives in small towns and villages in areas with difficult terrain (think fjords), where public transport beyond a bus is impractical due to population densities.
The public transport in Oslo and Bergen are fantastic - Norway’s only two large cities. Keeping in mind that over a quarter of the population of the entire country lives in these two, it’s not as bad as it sounds.
Clickbait headline, and stupid article. At no point are they making the claim that EVs are worse than combustion engines. The author posits that bicycles and walking are even more climate friendly than driving a car of any kind (duh). This entire article could be replaced by the sentence, “We should keep building trams and bike lanes in the EV era”.
LOL, let them fight. Also, the right wing’s weird obsession with trans women is just soooo revealing. I think they have some real inner demons they are wrestling with. I truly think some of them are deathly afraid they’ll be “fooled” by a trans woman and one of their buddies will find out and tease them mercilessly and their inner proclivities will be revealed…
I think people that are on the more hetero end of the sexuality scale don’t really think about this kind of thing at all (other than - “hey, that’s not really my jam, but live and let live”). But it seems to consume a certain kind of man, I’ve noticed.
By definition, a man being attracted to a femininity is the least homo thing possible. A man dating a woman is a hetero relationship, irregardless if she is cis or trans. Ironically, this post is telling on yourself for your own bias against trans people.
Having dated as a pre-op trans woman, there absolutely are a bunch of guys who clearly want cock (as in they beg me to top them/let them go down on me/cover them in rivers of sticky jizz), but still want to think of themselves as straight and feel guilty about wanting said cock. I think this is the population OP was talking about, they are often referred to as “chasers”.
My guess is that there are more conservatives in this situation because of the social repression associated with that belief. I also know from experience that unwanted feelings of attraction are often sublimated into anger and disgust … b-b-b-BAKA!
The guys who call themselves pan or bi and are like “I like tits, I like cock, let’s do this” behave completely differently and far less weird.
And there are also haters because Fox News told them to be (my father is one of them).
Perhaps! I am a trans woman not interested in bottom surgery, and that has led to a lot of men saying “where there is two pensises it’s gay”, regardless of the fact that I outwardly pass as a cis woman and have no interest in “using” my penis. Chasers were a real problem for me as well while I was dating, before my current (ace) relationship.
I think we could probally agree that there is a lot more conservative bigots out there then closeted chasers, but that’s kinds inherently unknowable, it’s not like these guys are gonna self report on survey.
So to my mind, it seems more likely to read this as a well intending yet confused ally instead of the much smaller subset of “publicly republican/closeted chasers”.
(and Im sorry for your father, my own family thinks I am dead because they are too concerned with making America great than respecting me)
The built cheap is the important bit. I think Firefox showed that all car.conpanoes are loaded with spyware. So, if the car is cool cheap and the spyware is no worse…,
What do you think China will do with the data, that the USA isn’t?
Look from the perspective of a us citizen and non us citizen, both not in China.
I don’t trust the Chinese government, but I also don’t trust the US government. I know many foreigners who no longer see America as somewhere safe to travel and whose interests are aligned with business interests, not people.
I know long term they want to kill off other car manufacturers. But so does Tesla, and gm, and every other manufacturer. If they ever get to that size, we could consider import taxes that equakise the market. At the moment, we need competition and scale.
Yeah, much has been written in the past week or two about how Oregon is misguided and it’s a knee jerk reaction. Similar to how a (relatively) small spike in violent crime recently has caused many states to introduce harsh penalties. Our crime rates are nothing like in the 80s anyway
The availability heuristic at work. Media attention (including social media) draw attention to more extreme examples of crime, and people then perceive these events as being more likely because they are more readily accessible to the mind.
110 was a massive failure that needs to be un-done, any issues with less problematic drugs can be handled on a one by one basis like we did with marijuana.
I understand your frustration, but I don’t think making drugs more illegal again is going to decrease the problem, though. The whole country is getting problems from increased drug use. The Fentanyl and Xylezene epidemic is all over the country now.
I think a better solution would be to actually force drug users into treatment when caught, don’t give them the option. Giving them criminal charges isn’t a push to getting an addict clean, though. It just makes it harder for them to find a job, which will lead to more despair and drug use.
I can’t agree with you more there. The way that Oregon decided to go about it was too lax. I was just adding that the way the rest of the country handles it isn’t the way to really help the problem either. That method is too harsh.
We need to decriminalize and regulate the drugs for harm reduction, and force users of hard drugs into treatment. I am totally okay with jail if they refuse the help. Just don’t ruin drug users lives even more with a criminal record, for the crime of ruining their own lives.
The measure was a good idea. The implementation was a failure. The plan included opening rehabs and encouraging/requiring addicts to get treatment if caught, but that part of the plan was never implemented.
So they never really committed to measure 110. They only tried half of it. So strange that a good idea would fail when only half of it was implemented.
KGW news reports that the treatment facilities were never built and that the citations for this program were never created. They also report that special citations to issue and instructions to contact any number were never given to police. So, there were no “new” citations issued, no new instructions given to the recipients of the standard (pre 110 style) citations and so there is no reason to expect anyone to call anything.
This was an implementation issue from the very beginning. They never even tried to issue the new citations. They used their same old citations without giving any instructions to call anyone. And they never built the specific facilities to support any of the potential new citation recipients. The only part of measure 110 that seems to have been implemented was not jailing people for drug possession.
Needle exchanges, methadone, nalaxone. All the things that let them keep using instead of getting clean.
2/3 of these are just things that let them not die as a result of use, and methadone is generally used to facilitate getting clean and minimizing withdrawal symptoms, so what exactly are you going on about here? People will use heroin regardless, but if you would prefer more entirely avoidable deaths, sure, get rid of needle exchanges and nalaxone, and enjoy community transmission of HIV and Hepatitis going up along with overdose deaths. That’ll really teach 'em, I’m sure.
These aren’t programs that facilitate ongoing use amongst addicted populations, they’re just stop-gap measures that mitigate the worst outcomes within these groups, which impact everyone. If you think people are just going to stop shooting up because they can’t get a clean needle or might OD on something that’s been cut, I don’t know where you’ve been for the last 40 years.
more people would have called if we had given them “special” tickets. There’s absolutely no evidence for that.
This statement is disingenuous. The citations aren’t “special” just because they are specific. The change in citation involves educating the recipient on the program and what will happen if they do not engage in the program. The “special” citations are clear, written instructions designed specifically to encourage addicted and often unhoused people to participate.
What was done instead was a small number of non-informative business cards (which were often not provided anyway) and regular (uninformative) tickets issued by officers who received zero training on encouraging participation in the program. There were no general orders created for police requiring them to provide instructions to ticket recipients and no training of any kind on implementing the new measure.
Police need to be trained and instructed on how to implement something like this. They can’t be expected to guess what’s needed or to make it up as they go. They cannot be expected to make an effective verbal sales pitch to an addict, or to even try without training. That is not an appropriate way to implement such a measure.
The few police who did their best to verbally explain it and handed out business cards did so on their own, without training or standard process. This program was simply never fully implemented.
I view Hong Kong as one of the casualties of the Trump presidency that we haven’t had the energy or attention to really understand.
Any typical, competent US government - either Democrat or pre-Trump Republican - would have been laser focused on a pressure campaign and diplomacy that I’m confident would have prevented China from breaking Hong Kong’s democratic institutions, which shifted decisively in 2019.
There’s nothing to say or do anymore to help, it’s just so freaking sad.
No fucking way, Hong Kong was lost in 2014 after the yellow umbrella movement was brutally crushed. It was death by a thousand cuts ever since. Trump or no Trump, nothing was going to change that.
More like 1997, or even 1983, when the UK handed them back to China, or the earlier date, when they decided to prevent them from having British citizenship.
If everyone in Hong Kong had the right to emigrate to any British territory, China would have to be a lot lighter touched there, or there might be a mass exodus.
There was a period in the early 2000’s where China showed genuine signs it might open up and become somewhat democratic, giving its citizens greater rights and representation. Obviously they decided to revert to their authoritarian ways and brutally crack down on dissent to keep control over the people, but there was a time HK might’ve had a nice future under China.
Ones what gop wants and the other isn’t. Amazing how that works just like almost all of the decisions this court has made. Almost like they don’t give a shit about presidence or the law!
They don’t even remotely give a shit about legal precedent. I haven’t been keeping score but this and Roe v Wade makes at least two examples of “settled law” being thrown in the dumpster.
Well yeah one primarily affects brown people and the other primarily effects white nationalists. It makes perfect sense when you understand where their obligations lie.
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