He’s getting the Independence Day he deserves.
He’s getting the Independence Day he deserves.
Possibly state-by-state, practice specific, or insurance company policies.
My doctor told me that in my state a psychiatrist has to test and diagnose. The testing was covered by my insurance (if you have a referral), but the wait list is a problem.
It took me over a year to get a diagnosis from my initial inquiry with my doctor. She gave me a referral (otherwise it would not be covered by insurance), and a list of practices that did ADHD testing (not every psychiatrist does it), and I stumbled on picking a place for a few months. When I picked a place, their wait list was 3 months and I never pursued testing.
The testing process in my area takes a few hours - my wife’s took 3 on a video chat, and it took about 3 months for them to send their report to her doctor.
Cut to a year later, my old doctor had retired, and I had a new one. She gave me a new referral for testing, but cautioned me that the wait list for most places was now 6 months. Checking around with other folks in my area confirmed this. But while at that appointment, she recommended an online company, who - after a few weeks of weighing options, I did pursue, and tested/evaluated me (no video chat, just an online survey - about half was written responses - that took about 4 hours to complete), and got results back in a week. It was $180, and may have been eligible for a reimbursement from insurance, but I have ADHD, so I never bothered.
And like - I guess I appreciate it. It does seem like whoever made those policies made them so that the diagnosis won’t be given lightly, but it creates issues. I sorta feel that I cheated, but my test was actually reviewed by a psychiatrist, and when I told friends of my diagnosis, the most common response was ‘Duh. You didn’t know?’ - so even though the online approach is sorta ‘cheating,’ I know that it’s definitely a warranted diagnosis in my case.
Man. I hate to shill, but…
I faced many of those same issues, and after a year and a half of failing to set up testing, my doctor told me to go to adhdonline.com - they offer online testing for $180, and give you results back in like a week. She’d already given me an ADHD testing referral, and she suggested that my insurer would probably reimburse me for the cost, but I have ADHD, so I never bothered with it.
It took me about 4 hours to do the test (but I did it while I was sitting through a day-long virtual meeting where I had to be present, but not ‘present’. So like, it probably won’t take focused people that long.)
And - yeah. Morally, it sucks. It’s feeding into the commodification of someone’s job and is morally kind of like using Uber or AirBNB. It’s convenient and maybe cheaper. Maybe it upsets a system that could use a little upsetting, but will likely upset it too much and have unforeseen impacts.
But it worked for me.
But you’re not. You’re disagreeing with the person while asking leading questions, then arguing against the answers to the questions you asked.
It’s almost like you’re intentionally wasting their effort and mental energy to deal with your gish-galloping.
I’m cynically viewing this as not a positive. I assume this is so they can make pages 2, 3 and so on as spammy as page 1.
Not at first, obviously. You don’t boil that frog on high heat.
You throw out a second page with a cute little text ad off to the side, then 1 or 2 at the top, then a mid-page ad. Maybe some suggested content.
Instead of having to scroll through a page’s worth of ads to get to semi-relevant results with a gem hidden in them, it’ll be a pages worth of ads for your semi-relevant results per page, and maybe what you were looking for 4 or 5 pages in.
Google used to be good. They ‘know’ what people are looking for. So they’ll probably hire someone familiar with gambling to figure out a minimum dispersion of relevant results on the pages, to keep people using the service and scrolling past ads. … I used to remember this. Variable-ratio reward schedule?
What would be a compelling answer?
That’s completely fair. I was unfamiliar with Done until I searched for them just a few moments ago.
The service I used offers diagnosis for a one-time fee, and does not dabble with prescriptions at all. The diagnosis came from a practicing psychiatrist that is licensed in my state. Those factors, plus the doctor’s recommendation are what made me comfortable enough to go with it, but I normally don’t love going with online options for stuff like this. I just was tired of the runaround.
The diagnosis - which did not include treatment recommendations - was transmitted to my GP from the psych. And my GP worked with me on treatment options.
I assume if the website got shut down, it would be inconsequential to my diagnosis unless the psychiatrist was found to have fraudulently issued diagnosis’. (Which is always a possibility.)
But that is a very good cautionary tale. Done didn’t just say they would diagnose ADHD in 30 minutes or less, but they utilized a subscription model and issued Adderall on an auto-renewing basis.
That whole thing seems pretty sketchy to me. It appears they were trying to tie your health care to their subscription model. They can go kick rocks.
Yeah - it’s about regional control, and defensive positions.
This comment is sort of a continuation of this one, but not exactly. (Sorry about the link to my instance, I’m new and don’t know how to do the thing.)
The U.S. has long needed a bully in the area to prevent the Middle East from being too unified, so the west can get relatively inexpensive access to its oil.
The state of play right now is that the U.S. actually produces enough petroleum for its own needs, but our western allies do not, and supplying them with enough oil will raise the cost to an unacceptable level/a level where they’ll have to channel money to the Middle East (which hates the U.S. for its meddling, or to Russia, which also hates the U.S.)
In about 10-15 years, technology and renewables will advance to a point where oil demand is going to have decreased to the point where the U.S. can supply all of its needs and those of its western allies without jacking the price up.
That means the U.S. won’t need a bully. But it will mean that the U.S. will cut funding to Israel, and more or less stop coming to their defense. Israel’s plan is to push out every non-Jew, using Zionism as an excuse for awful statecraft, and they’re going to push their borders to easily defensible geographic areas.
Once they do that, they’re going to basically become North Korea of the Middle East - armed to the teeth and hard to get into. Because if they don’t, everyone they’ve been bullying for the past hundred years (yes, this started before the declaration of statehood), is going to wipe them from the map - potentially leading to them launching the nukes they keep pretending they don’t have, so they don’t have to undergo international monitoring.
Assuming, of course, the plot by other countries to destabilize the U.S. fails and U.S. is still major player by the time Israel’s plan is accomplished. If the destabilization effort succeeds, we may see a full scale war against Israel before their aims are achieved.
That’s my take on it, anyway. They won’t stop because they don’t think they can stop, due to how horrible they’ve been. (At the behest of the U.S., who will begin dropping them once their usefulness has ended.)
Ugh. Yup.
I learned that after buying my house. My furnace is 3x what my house needs and is expected to be an expensive repair someday.
I got my oil changed a week and a half ago and they actually said - they couldn’t do certain things because of the cyberattack. As a result they couldn’t log it or print out paperwork or.. something. For an oil change it wasn’t a big deal, but I didn’t even think about the rest of the dealership’s operations.
Fortunately, their payment system is isolated, but it gave me pause before I swiped my card.
Anyone else think this was the “taking a selfie using a silly object” meme at first?
Spin off company - McJeanolds
~Shit.~
I wonder where installs through Microsoft’s Software Center, or when updates are pushed to managed devices fall in the known vs unknown category.
Completely anecdotal, but a lot more of colleagues use FF than I would have expected, and they only have one source for the software.
There you have it.
When I’ve been in OP’s situation, I filed a complaint with the FCC, performed a whois lookup on their site to send emails to the abuse/spam emails of their DNS registrar and host and inspected the email headers to email their email provider’s abuse/spam account(s). I’ve not yet had cause to reach out to my attorney general’s office when I’ve had a company violate CAN-SPAM, but it’s an option.
I also make sure each company knows there’s a pending CAN-SPAM complaint. I keep it convivial, but serious. “Hey, just letting you know that one of your clients is violating your terms of service and the law! A complaint has already been lodged with the FCC. Toodeloo!”
That bit of knowledge tends to shift the interpretation of your complaint from “annoyed nerd” to “someone politely informing you that you’re going to get skull fucked by the long dick of the law if you don’t fix this ASAP”
It may sound sort of excessive, but I’m a bit of a consumer rights absolutist.
The fun thing is that this bill would give any president that power.
…. Oh.
But maybe that’s what they want. A president that can shut the border for political points would decimate industry. These tend to be industries that employ a lot of salt of the earth people, and the owners give a lot of money to Republicans. Republicans use this as a wedge issue and have spent years whipping their base into a frenzy. Giving them the authority to hurt themselves.
A stupid Republican president would shut down the border and harm industry. A smart Republican president would not fall into that trap, but be paralyzed until a new talking point arises.
The base would support populist moves like shutting the border. Donors wouldn’t. Farmers with rotting crops would not.
Shrewd.
Wow, he really slammed him.
Joking aside, I really appreciate that Bernie is speaking up. (And to a lesser extent that the headline doesn’t fall back to that overused descriptor.)
As a (very dumb) teenager, I went through security at Logan in March 2002 with a pair of handcuffs in my jacket.
The women who saw it on x-ray dug them out of my jacket pocket and sort of flamboyantly asked “What’chu need theeeese for?!”
I gave her a shit-eating grin and responded with the same energy that I was visiting my girlfriend.
After a beat, she said “Well alright. Go get your freak on! But put ‘em in your bag next time!”
The truth was that I had actually forgotten they were in that jacket. They just lived in that one pocket my senior year of HS because I was an edgy teenager. I was actually returning from visiting her. We didn’t even use them, and they didn’t get flagged on my departing flight.
I’m glad it was before the DHS militarized the TSA. I do not know how my idiotic teenage self would have dealt with a non-playful encounter.
I actually have all of the materials to build a motion activated smart light that interfaces with my home’s automation system for my dog’s food/water dish, but the ADHD goblin stole my fixation on the idea before I could design/print an enclosure for the circuit board and sensor.
Ironically, I got focused on building more storage because the parts were cluttering it up, but one delay led to another and then the weather changed. I don’t have an indoor space for woodworking projects, so now parts from both projects are just more clutter.
It’s kind of weird that you can get 30 years for lying to a credit union once, but only 2 for stealing someone’s identity for 30 years.
If the victim is a federally insured financial institution you get a huge jail sentence.
But if the victim is a person with no safety net, it’s a comparative slap on the wrist.
Skewed priorities.
They’ll learn to meet people in person so they can’t record them, and coach their HR reps to be more dismissive faster.
Interesting.
I signed up for GD with a semi-throwaway email account - not an actual throwaway, but it’s not tied to my real identity, not used for anything but spammy sites where I didn’t want to give them my info. Every site got a made up name.
Wonder what name they’ll slap on the account when they try to farm “my” data from a broker.
Having a “smarter” car has made me a bit of an angrier driver.
My car has adaptive cruise control, so it automatically paces the vehicle in front of me at a predefined distance. I use it extensively on the highway, and I often have it set for a bit higher than most other drivers go. This means that I know how fast the vehicle in front of me is going and has been for the entire time they’re in front of me.
This has lead me to realize that most other drivers seem to unintentionally (or intentionally) drive in infuriating ways.
Most folks in the left lane don’t maintain a constant speed, even when the lane in front of them is clear. They often go just slightly faster than the speed of “prevailing traffic” - which means they slow down when passing vehicles (often as slow as 10mph under the speed limit), and speed up quite dramatically when vehicles do get tired of them and move to pass - very often blocking would-be passers.
At best, I view these drivers to be inattentive. At worst, I envision them to be wannabe cops, enforcing their vision of highway traffic on others.
I wonder if they feel the same sense of satisfaction expressed in the above meme?
I feel like I fully lack the words to describe what I mean here, although I’m confident in my understanding of the idea. (Which is to say, please give me charity when untangling my rambling.)
I share your sentiment and I’ve been thinking about this the past few days.
I’ve read in a few places that Musk is trying to turn twitter into a ‘one-app’ in the same way that WeChat is. The common pushback against that is that we already have that - it’s the web browser. The web browser isn’t going anywhere.
But turning the browser into a closed ecosystem that Google gets to set the standard for, harvest the data for, advertise through, and ensure that users are locked in to their version of the experience/data that they collect essentially makes Chrome the one-app.
In much the same way that google killed XMPP, Microsoft used its weight to hamstring open document formats - this seems like an effort to thread a rope around the neck of the open internet and use google’s considerable market share to close off the open internet.
Somewhat ironically, we may find ourselves in search of a ‘new, open internet’ if corporations continue to define our current internet.
Maybe we’ll call it “Web 1.0.”
I knew something once. It was awful.
At some point before the healing brush and patch tools were available, I saw an entire porn gallery (heh, remember when porn came in galleries?) of pixel perfect stitches where someone had joined waists to waists, to create a bunch of concatenated top/top, bottom/bottom images in front, back, and front/back configurations of a naked woman.
Because this was the early days of the internet, all I’d seen was gross, taboo, or unsettling stuff. I was sort of immune to it, but this was definitely my first “confused boner” situation. I still remember my absolute bewilderment. I was way more unsettled by that than goatse or whatever.
He maintained that Republicans are “still the majority party,”
Are they?
I’m not questioning the numerical advantage, but more the insinuation they’re a single party and somehow capable of governance.
Don’t get me wrong, the democrats are also just a bunch of affiliated ideologies in a trenchcoat, but their body politic isn’t being steered toward a flight of stairs by a few wayward feet in this baba yaga political trenchcoat.
Good thing T-Mobile just upped my bill, so they can afford to buy up their competitors!
Can’t wait until it’s only 3 companies that just charge the most they can possibly charge.
They have teeth. But half of the people who decide whether or not they pursue charges against someone are republican appointees.
So, you know… teeth, but corrupted leadership.
And the Democratic Party needs to pull its head out of its ass and embrace its base, rather than smugly scheme in ways that are ruining lives.
I have no problem with Biden’s job as president. In fact, I got into a big argument with someone a few weeks ago because they keep parroting anti-Biden propaganda from astroturfed pro-Palestine social media groups.
Biden has been doing a great job for the most part, on a number of fronts.
But I’m sort of bittersweet on that, because the harder I look, the more I see the illusion of choice, and an intentional effort to barely keep up with the will of the people.
2016, Bernie vs Clinton. He had the votes, but the party pulled some superdelegate shenanigans to give it to Clinton. And with the same confidence of someone who had just been handed a layup in the primary, she managed to smugly fumble the presidency by a tiny margin.
Post 2020 - Democrats had a majority, and instead of doing things the populous wanted, they wrung their hands about two candidates the Democratic Party had helped elect - Sinema and Manchin - and whether or not they were going to block bills.
The other day I did a deep dive into Elissa Slotkin - a candidate so unlikeable she had to move to a much more certain democratic district when districts were redrawn. When the senate seat came up, the Democratic Party cut deals with more liberal candidates who are vastly more likable, to get them to not run in the primary. So now Michigan is going to wind up with an unwanted centrist that used to be an ‘analyst’ for the CIA during the Iraq war. She’s going to pretend to be a democrat while being the same sort of heel the Sinema or Manchin was.
That’s just the people. In their post 2020-majority they could have done so much legislatively that they didn’t even bother considering - like campaign finance reform or expanding the courts, or even changing the rules around judicial nominees to prevent future shenanigans, but that would impact their bottom line or their ability to inspire panic at election-time. They could have strengthened the ACA, but that hurts some of the corporations that donate to them. Or do things to help people so that their rights wouldn’t be at risk - like codifying Roe, instead of allowing it to continue to be a wedge issue that destroys lives, but gets people to vote.
The Democratic (and Republican) Party is playing us all.
I’m not disaffected with Biden. I’m disaffected with a political party that nakedly fucks around to preserve the status quo, rather than embracing their base and winning with an encouraged and engaged populous. They lack the mandate to lead because they only desire to govern. (In contrast to the Republicans which lack the mandate to lead, are unable to govern, and only desire power and to abuse the government for personal gain.)
So go ahead, give me the downvotes.
This wouldn’t be an issue if we had ranked choice and a coalition government instead of this ‘winner take all’ nonsense that just incentivizes entrenchment rather than inspiration. But, you know, that doesn’t help the businesses that are political parties, so they ain’t gonna vote on it.
I’m all about ACAB.
But here’s my understanding of it:
U.S. Marshalls (not local PD) were sent to apprehend a man that had weapons when he shouldn’t have. They had not yet reached his house, because he was in his front yard when they approached.
The man opened fire on them from the front yard, and they shot and killed him. They were fired on by someone in the house.
They called for backup, and retreated while the house occupants barricaded themselves. 3 hours later, unable to resolve the situation, they used armored vehicles and ended the standoff without killing additional people.
I guess I don’t think these officers did anything bad in this situation, even though they represent a horrible system.
We need the name of those officers and the contact information for every relevant ethics/review/legal committee that can fuck up their lives.
I wonder if he’ll later say he only implanted people who were already dying with the devices.
I learned recently that in engineering there’s a saying that anyone can build a bridge that will stand, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands.
Which seems dark, but bridges are built on budgets while adhering to aesthetic, material, and site/traffic (on, under, and sometimes over) requirements.
And besides, that ship was between 210 to 257 million pounds, traveling at whatever speed it was going. I’m not a physicist, but I recon that’s enough force to knock down a bridge. (As evidenced.)
A chemical that can’t target cancer cells can be triggered to vibrate in such a way that it destroys cell membranes by a light source that attenuates by about 90% over 1mm of flesh (down to 1% of the original strength at 2mm).
If they could target just cancer cells, it would work for some skin cancers.
Infrared and near infrared transmit a good amount of heat. I imagine that even if they figure out the targeting issue, unless the light to vibration process is highly efficient, the point at which the light source is just burning the patient’s flesh will be reached long before there’s anything but a limited use case.
I guess the mechanism is good to know about, but it’s unlikely to turn into a cure for cancer.
That’s great in theory.
If the Supreme Court chooses to hear the case before the election.
The U.S. has had numerous elections in the past few years held with maps deemed to be unconstitutional because the courts either decided ‘too late’ or did not require those drawing the maps to adhere to a deadline.
In North Carolina, after the 2020 map was tossed, they used it anyway because the state republicans did not offer a new map. When they won big under the illegally gerrymandered map, which included changing the makeup of their state Supreme Court, they redrew the maps to be even more discriminatory - with no normal recourse for citizens to fix them. A federal panel adopted the issue last year, referring it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which despite hearing arguments 8 months ago has so far not issued a ruling.
My confidence level in the rule of law is incredibly low right now.
I have ADHD, anxiety, and trauma.
A solid 75% of everything I’ve ever attempted to do takes more time to do than regular folks because it has to be perfect. And then I may not tell anyone about my efforts because I don’t want the attention. Or if the work is too hard or I’m too scared of revealing I can’t do it all myself, I give up. Assuming, of course, I don’t forget about what I’m working on until the relevance has passed.
It sort of depends on the impact and stupidity of the problem.
If it’s a first time call, and I don’t really know if the problem is me or the company, the voice gets “I need a human” followed by “representative” if it pushes back. If it pushes back a second time, I start scatting and speaking gibberish into the phone, with random pauses built in, so the phone system has no hope of understanding anything I say.
If it’s a multiple call, dumb issue that’s clearly their fault, I immediately begin insulting the automated voice and demand to talk to a human. “I bet you’re running on a Pentium 2, you dumb fuck. Get me a human. You’re not qualified to open doors, let alone answer calls. I want a representative. You can be hacked with a cereal box whistle, you inadequate and poorly executed excuse for taking jobs away from people with families! Speaking of, get me a human, you scab!”
Usually I’m speaking with a raised voice, throwing ever more deranged statements at the bot. I don’t know if it helps, but I enjoy it.
It’s probably this one: Reading Rambo.