4grams

I know expensive, shitty healthcare in the USA is a stereotype, but in my experience it’s also largely true

I had a brain injury from a bicycle accident. The fact that my health has bounced back, but my finances likely never will, tells me everything I need to know about our system. One injury, and I now have a lifetime of bills to pay off. I guess it makes sense in some sick way, I do owe them my life, but man, they don’t let me forget (even if my broken brain tries).

There’s more to it than that but of course that is a large part of it. We live in a society that prefers to reward a confident idiot to a pensive expert; essentially we reward dunning krueger.

When exactly did society decide to give the dumbest people on earth, all the money?

I don’t know why people think rules still apply. They might say something but they came out 9-0 against him and he still claims a unanimous victory and the courts, media and American public all just shrug.

Unfortunately much of this country has developed a vaccine for this apparently.

lol, couldn’t even keep the dumbest people on earth on board. starting to smell popcorn.

I have a google voice number for that. Most things no longer accept it though.

I had delusions of trying to keep track of which address is sold by who which is why I did the hide my email addresses. But I’ve always kept separate personal and spam accounts. This was my attempt at combining to a single account.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Illogical meat brain that thinks odd numbers are more random that even I guess.

Don’t get me wrong, there are systems that work. I built up a very successful smart card based system many years ago after a failed audit. I initially hated the idea but in the end we built a crazy secure environment that was very easy to use and maintain. That project is long since obsolete but after doing that one, over a decade ago, I figured things were headed in the right direction.

I think I’m extra sensitive right now because my aging mom has made the issue acute. She’s not the same as she was a few years ago and helping her with all her online accounts has become a nightmare. It’s just too complicated for many folks.

Yeah, I’m up to 40 hide my addresses for that same reason. Figure if the password sucks, at least the email can be unique and obscure.

I call that a feature.

This shit pisses me off so bad. I had an identity theft a few years back, took ages to undo, and my credit score is still impacted by it. At the time I moved to a password manager and all my passwords are 31 characters of garbage. I’ve got several, highly sensitive accounts that my passwords don’t work for, in fact one a bank, until fairly recently, had repurposed a phone number field in the DB so passwords were limited to 10 characters numeric only (I managed to get one of their IT folks on the horn to explain why the password was so awful).

I cannot believe we live in 2025 and we still haven’t figured out passwords.

Precisely!

You have a lovely ass and we do not deserve to bask in its glory.

At least fart in our direction…

Why is nobody sending him a series of strongly worded questions!?!

I’m a little surprised they didn’t got with 1488 soldiers.

I think I’ll go get some tacos for lunch and mull this one over…

Almost got me with this one. I’ve heard the same argument deployed unironically from some of my own family…

I really do appreciate the words and the sentiment. I would normally agree but right now my faith is still shattered. I think there are good and amazing people, who have done magical and wonderful things. I just think that small and petty tyrants are more common and more indicative of humanity as a whole. That the righteous have to look up from underneath the bootheel of those who deserve to be crushed under one themselves. Instead, those type get to run the show, and obviously always have.

This weekend has been bad mentally. I hope I can find some optimism again. I’m just so tired of expecting the worst and being proven right.