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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 5th, 2023

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  • Started on Friday… still coming in waves. I had a breakdown a few weeks ago… just pushed myself too hard for too long…it was probably building up for at least a year. Went to the VA (veterans affairs, for those not in the US, the VA is the sole source of health care for many veterans in the US), and they started making adjustments to my anxiety and depression medications which eventually precipitated into a ER visit. A few days later, they got me hooked up with the mental health clinic where I talked to a provider about going on short-term disability while we’re messing with my medication doses until I feel normal again. He says something along the lines “sounds like a good plan, sned me the paperwork.”

    Queue up to Friday, I get a call from the insurance company saying they got the paperwork from the provider, and it recommends I go back to work. Now I’m out of PTO, disability is denied, and I’m trying to decide whether I lose my job or go back to work on while tettering between “extreme anxiety” and “drug-induced haze” from all the new prescriptions.









  • Nothing. It’s a pretty fantasy. Best I think we can hope for is a few monopolies busted up so some little guys can break into the market. That’ll buy us about 20 years until those little guys have become the new Googles and Microsofts and Apples, and then we start over. We need to entirely rewrite how we do antitrust assessments to account for both vertical and horizontal monopolistic behaviors (a vertical monopoly is a company that controls the entire supply chain where a horizontal one controls the market and customer base. Historically, the US has been more concerned with horizontal monopolies.) It’d be great if we could come up with a better measure of consumer choice that we currently use. If you have the choice between 2 ISPs but they both charge the same amount for the same service, you don’t really have a choice there…at least not a meaningful one.



  • Did you read the whole article? Newsweek misrepresented the results by leaving out other answers that clearly demonstrate the vast majority think Hamas is a terrorist organization and the Oct 7th attacks were terroristic and genocidal in intent. The sample size was far too small. You’ll notice they didn’t even tell you what the actual question asked was. There’s a big difference between “do you support Hamas” and “do you support the Palestinian government” or “do you support Palestinian efforts to defend against Israeli attacks?” Surveys in general, and especially ones on politically decisive ideas, are notoriously easy to skew based on subtle differences in how you word questions. I’d recommend you be very suspicious of any report on a survey that doesn’t tell you what was actually asked.