This is pure BS. I suspect you don't actually work in the USA. Perhaps you are just a foreign troll.

Almost no one in the US has insurance that doesn't have co-pays or deductibles. Even the best plan available to members of congress has deductibles and copays that would apply to the incident you described.

There is another possibility: you had already spent thousands of dollars for health care that year and had met your out of pocket maximum. Thousands of dollars that make your anecdote irrelevant.

Having experienced both government-run and private health care, I can tell you that private health care sucks. Deeply.

The problem with private healthcare is that, mostly, it simply doesn't exist. There is a health services industry, that is highly motivated to sell you more services. Thus (my wife has personal experience of this), you typically don't get the best treatment available, you get the treatment that makes the most money for providers. That's what your supposed competition gets you. You get treatments that have little to no proven benefits. Some time back I refused some such treatments, but only because a doctor in the UK that I knew told me that there is no proven benefit to what the "recommended' treatment.

The second problem is that you can't negotiate the price of health services. A negotiation took place, but you were not involved in it: that negotiation took place between the insurance companies and the providers. Among other things they negotiated was how much you got the pay before the deductible and out-of-pocket maximums kick in.

I sure there are people who never had a serious illness that think that they can negotiate the price of the hospital will charge while they are en-route to said hospital in an ambulance, but this is pure fantasy.

The other fantasy that some people harbor is the idea that an unqualified individual working for a private company with a strong profit motivation is more likely to approve some treatment than a doctor employed by a government health service, with no profit motive.

Stalin, who used communist rhetoric to prop up his fasicst regime, caused the famine. And the same way Mao did (and for the same reason), they believed in a discredited form of evolution called "Lamarckian evolution" where plants and animals are supposed to get stronger based on their environment, so the morons forced farmers to double plant, the farmers couldn't say no out of fear of death and the double planting inevitably resulted in famines. The Stalin added fuel to the fire by denying food to places that opposed him politically.

Again, fascism. In this case both Mao & Stalin bought into these discredited theories because they implied the land itself was responsible for the character of the people, e.g. it was a type of hyper nationalism common to fascism.

It's important to understand the distinction because you very likely think you're safe since you're not in a communist nation.

You're not safe. Multiple countries are moving in the direction of fascism and you won't see it coming because a pair of tin pot dictators picked Marx's books for their rhetoric.

That works if you're a prostitute. Without a government, it doesn't scale much beyond that.

Cool story, bro.

I subscribed to a streaming service that subsequently put up their price. At the time of the price increase, they required me to accept the new price. The streaming did not work without this acceptance.

I did not accept the new price and the streaming service no longer worked. However, they kept billing my credit card at the old rate.

I did not realize this for some time and when I did, I disputed the charge for that month, which was quickly refunded. Then they charged me the next month. Because they had forced me to take action again, I demanded refunds going back quite a long way. All of these refunds were credited to my account.

I was unable to log in to cancel. I was unable to get any response from their customer service, until I finally realized that, at some point in time, they had broken support for "plus-addressing".

But why did they keep charging my account? I wonder how many other people they are still charging, but not providing the service.

A couple of decades ago, I experienced something similar: I had been paying a monthly amount for dial-up Internet. About a year after the service shut down, I was still being charged. In this case, it was in the UK, where there are supposed to be protections against bad "direct debits", but the bank basically told me to take a hike when I complained. It wasn't so much money that I could be bothered to argue.

Why not? The whole concept of a "business" is nothing more than a fiat defined by the government.

There are all sorts of rules regarding businesses. One is that customers that owe you money have to eventually pay, and if they don't, you can run to the government for help. In this particular case, large employers have to treat their employees somewhat like human beings, and not just totally upend their families' lives with no warning.

Maybe if employees routinely quit en masse without warning, that would be an issue. But it's not an issue. How do we know? Because almost all businesses use an "at will" work policy if they are allowed. This means that being able to unceremoniously dump employees than is much more important to them than the risk of some employees suddenly quitting.

for electricity & water (yes, you can recycle that water, but data centers prefer not to because, well, it's cheaper to just use subsidized water). This while several electric grids are having a hard time keeping up and the entire American Southwest in in a massive drought.

And what exactly are we getting for it? I mean sure, LLMs have some really great uses for scientific endeavors, but let's face it all the buzz is around replacing jobs.

You're not just getting replaced with a machine, they're going to take your water & electricity.

This is nothing new.

40 years ago, I had friends blowing big chunks of money they didn't have on things like new high-end stereo equipment, scuba gear and souping up their cars. They went through the same home economics classes and go the same parental advice as everyone else, but they just chose to ignore it. I'm sure the exact same thing is happening now to a similar subset of the population.

Until you take into account the weight of the storage tanks.

It's just years and years later that they do it. In the past that wasn't an issue for the manufacturers because he destroyed most laptops so that they didn't have to worry about the used market. But modern CPUs and gpus are not getting any faster but they are getting cooler so laptops are lasting longer.

A surefire way to build obsolescence into your product so that you're not losing sales down the road is to solder in ram. This is especially true for Apple devices.

As an added bonus you can't just buy a cheaper Apple product and then put your own ram in. I don't know if it's still true but at one point Apple was basically a ram company. It was something like 30 or 40% of their profit. I remember buying my kid a macbook in college and having to pay an extra $300 for the 8 gigs of RAM when I could pick up that much RAM for 45 bucks and that was at retail

By the time election season rolls around virtually everyone is going to have been exposed to some ai fakes. It's not at all unusual for a high-ranking individual in the company to be suspended pending an investigation. Investigation was conducted and he was put back in place. Meanwhile this story is making the rounds and hundreds of thousands of people are going to see it.

All in all it'll be fine. The sort of person who is foolish enough to vote based on a deep fake is going to get a hell of a lot more advertising thrown at them which is going to be far more effective than the occasional social media deep fake. And frankly those people only make up about 20% of the voting electorate anyway.

Deep fakes are going to quickly force people to start critically thinking for the first time in a long time maybe forever. Long-term it will force people to make competent decisions instead of just trusting their gut.

Wall Street got used to Intel having literally no competition for any kind of workstation CPU. AMD was being propped up by Microsoft and frankly Intel too for the longest time. It wasn't until the Ryzens that they started to catch up.

Landing the contracts for the PlayStation and Xbox really helped on the gaming front because they put an underpowered CPU in both forcing developers to finally switch to multicore programming in order to get the kind of performance they needed out of the consoles. Until then the CPU and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were so much more powerful than the gpus that everything was just single threaded and maybe occasionally they'd use a core to decompress audio

these days until has serious competition in their main space. And it's been like that for years. Neither company has been able to compete with the mobile processor manufacturers on power efficiency.

The only problem here is that we have to worry about Wall Street plundering and gutting Intel for short-term gains similar to what's happening to Tesla right now. If that happens they'll fall massively behind because they won't have the capital to keep up with AMD and we'll be back to one CPU manufacturer

No. Nintendo switch sales and even PS5 sales have been strong. There just isn't a lot of reason to buy an Xbox.

Microsoft has bought up tons and tons of developers so they could lock the games to their platforms but the problem with that is modern games are so incredibly expensive they can't really afford to let the PlayStation 5 platform go unless they want to massively subsidize their gaming division and their CEO doesn't like that. Hell even Sony is talking about putting their games out on the Xbox.

For multiplayer games that are focused on moving DLC yeah you want to keep it in your ecosystem so you can take that cut of the DLC revenue but for single player games the money is paid on the sale of the game itself so you need it on every single platform you can manage to squeeze it on. Especially when you consider every one of these consoles except the switch is just a PC.

In this case, it sounds like it might be a good idea to invest a couple of bucks in using certified mail with a return receipt.

the word you were looking for is "smarter". They smell your bullshit and they're not buying it.

As a kid I could be tricked into working *really* fucking hard for *really* low pay. Took a long time to grow out of that. My kid fell into it too, really pissed me off.

As an American you're taught from day 1 that your life isn't valuable and the only thing that makes it valuable is hard work.