No, nothing ever happens, actually. Nobody ever does anything interesting or worth talking about. Hosting exchange kids has, predictably, been one of the most boring experiences of my life, along with everything else.

Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.

I hosted a Russian exchange student who really liked joking about that stuff. He went as the ghost of communism for Halloween

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.

I swear bro, please, I just need one more negotiation where Israel doesn’t even bother showing up. Please, bro, c’mon, bro, just one more negotiation and I swear it’ll work. We can totally get Israel to stop using the weapons we’re giving them if we just wait for the next negotiation, I promise Nettanyahu won’t pull the football back this time, bro, I promise, he promised me and I trust him. He was super cool and promised not to clown on me any more and said he was super sorry. Don’t you get it, bro? He’s changed, we can do this, just give peace one more chance, just

So let me get this straight, you want to commit mass murder, but you also don’t want to get hit? Idk, man, seems a little hypocritical.

It’s not blocked as much as it’s made more and more difficult, because they can’t hard block it (yet). So, the best advice, if you actually want advice and not just to bitch on the internet (it’s fine if that’s all you want, btw), is to organize. Organization is the single most powerful tool in political efforts, full stop. Examine the problem that affects voters in a given area and organize with the explicit goal of helping voters overcome those barriers. I’m not just talking about getting people to the polls, I’m talking demanding local policy changes, getting after state legislators, yelling at anyone who will (and many who won’t) listen, organize and run local campaigns for city council or county supervisor. Those races can actually be competitive in deep red/blue areas, especially if locals know a particular person on their team is a shithead. Those positions also hold a shocking amount of power, and open up political communication channels that would otherwise be inaccessible. Idk if you’re a communist, and I don’t care, the American communists of the 1800s didn’t just sit back and wait for the US to collapse, they got out there and faced likely being murdered to try and organize slaves to break up an unjust system. Get outside and stomp some grass if you want to see something different, bitching on the internet won’t change anything.

We have a second house (a trailer, really) and rent it to my mom for way under market rate. 100% of the rent goes to paying off the debt from rehabilitating the trailer and paying off her utilities. It’s not like we’re out here just raking in the dough, we’re just trying to keep my mom from being homeless. I know for damn sure we’ve got to do it, because the state is way happier spending its money bashing homeless people instead of preventing homeless people.

While gerrymandering and voter suppression aren’t nothing, the system is just completely incapable of responding to signals it never receives. If you don’t vote, the system is not incentivized or designed to promote people who have your political interests in mind. There’s a lot of critical reforms that need to happen, none of them as urgent as ranked choice voting, but as little as your vote means for a federal election:

• It means A LOT MORE for local elections, and these people have a shocking amount of power for how much people care about local races.

• It’s still at least some signal to the system that can be interpreted or responded to. It can’t hurt. Throw your vote away on RFK or the Libertarian Party if you want. Hell, I voted for Jorgensen last election. But I’m telling you that not voting when you could is almost always going to lead to the worst possible outcome for people who share your political interests.

Real talk, it’s going to be like the troubles or the early days of Nazi Germany, not like people forming battle lines and shit. The only way the latter happens is if states secede; one viable scenario I’ve considered is California/Pacifica seceding and a subsequent shooting fight over water rights, because of how much water California gets from the Colorado River basin and other water sources outside its borders. But realistically, it’s going to be shitty partisan on partisan on innocent bystander violence.

Best advice I’ve heard is to form close ties and mutual aid agreements with your neighbors and friends. A small network of people can be far, far, far more resilient in defending protecting themselves than individuals or families can.

Good to know our government can still get shit done when it’s something fucking stupid.

If only. Dude looks and sounds like he’s about drop dead. I cannot begin to express how enormously frustrated with the democrats I am.

If you’ve got better ideas, we need them, get out there and get on it. As it is, we’re sleepwalking into catastrophe.