George Carlin explains the MAGA cult almost perfectly:

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

Health Net is one of Centene’s companies and they pull this crap and worse every single day.

Health Net’s provider lists includes a huge number of ghost providers. In my case even the ones that were real were the wrong kind of specialists. Heath Net insisted I go to these providers despite the fact they couldn’t help me and refused to see me.

I ended up having to regularly make a 220 mile trip to get the healthcare I needed.

It gets worse. Health Net regularly refused payment for services that were covered under their policy. I easily spent 10 hours a week on the phone trying to get legitimate claims paid by this horrible company. The first 45 minutes of the calls were spent trying to get past their first line “customer service” people to someone who could actually deal with the problem. Health Net repeatedly refused coverage on DME that they had previously paid for and said the previous approvals were a mistake. They weren’t.

Health Net even refused payment for a visit to specialist after they had provided pre-approval for the visit in writing. It took seven months and probably 20 hours on the phone before the crooks paid the bill.

Centene and their subsidiaries should be shut down and their executives should be in prison.

Texas counties have already outlawed the use of their roads by women traveling to other states for reproductive care.

Not the first time. I thought a Windows 10 update wiped grub, but Microsoft actually deleted my entire Linux partition. Others have experienced the same thing.

Windows is required for a couple of apps I need with no alternatives, but the only way it runs on any of my computers is in a VM.

Could be a bad board. I have a Pi 3B+ that is intermittently crashes and shows insufficient voltage no matter what power supply is used.

I’ve been using DD-WRT for many years and just moved to OpenWRT. Although there have been various generic vulnerabilities that effected all IP devices and needed to be patched on these platforms too, I can’t remember a single vulnerability that was specific to either DD-WRT or OpenWRT.

Susceptible to intrusive ads and viruses.

My Windows computer was infected more than once by virus spreading ads on legitimate websites. The site owners denied any responsibility for the viruses saying it was the fault and responsibility of the ad companies. Never again.

These idiots are not only harming themselves and their children, they’re harming and sometimes killing others who are medically prevented from receiving vaccinations. These scumbags are literally spreading disease.

Likewise Trader Joe’s prices have shot up tremendously, like 50% on many items in less than a year. This while Aldi’s prices have not risen nearly as much. Meanwhile corporations are celebrating the highest profits in more than 70 years while simultaneously working overtime to convince us those runaway profits have nothing to do with inflation.

So we’re supposed to believe that the highest corporate profits in more than 70 years are not a primary driver of inflation? I don’t buy it and neither do all economists.

It is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years. Instead, the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages.

Corporations have such excessive power that they can even push the narrative that their historic profits don’t have anything to do with inflation. Some people actually believe the propaganda.

It’s obvious that my point is Brookings is deliberately ignoring the elephant in in the room. They are turning a blind eye to extreme corporate price gouging and record profits, in fact Brookings didn’t mention those things at all.

Thinking and critical analysis requires awareness of what is deliberately being omitted by a media source as well as what is being said. It has nothing to do with “somehow reading” the article wrong.

Right. The highest corporate profits in more than 70 years have nothing to do with it.

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I’m worried it would cause permanent tension between two friends.

Significant tension with our Mexican neighbors is exactly what Trump, Desantis and other weirdo’s rhetoric is causing. They’re just trying gin up more hatred from their bizarre, poorly educated, toxic supporters and they don’t get a fuck about anyone else.

Each time some GOP idiot talks about invading or bombing Mexico the news spreads like wildfire in Mexico while American news media ignores it almost completely. I repeatedly hear about bullshit the GOP freaks are spouting from my Mexican friends instead of reading about it in our own mainstream media.

How sad is it that I learned about Trump’s plan to bomb Mexico not from American news media, but from alarmed Mexican friends.

Manchin has as much chance of becoming the Democratic nominee as Pence did at being the GQP candidate.

Biden definitely learned something from watching the Republicans screw Obama again and again.

Makes not the least bit of difference: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/20/the-microsoftcrowdstrike-outage-shows-the-danger-of-monopolization

Literally hundreds of millions of people around the world have seen the Microsoft BSODs that resulted from this fuck up. Millions of people have had their lives disrupted. The vast majority of those will blame Microsoft. Executive boards and IT groups may know better but it won’t matter all that much - they will be aggressively looking to reduce their exposure to Microsoft’s near monopoly anyway.

I worked in sales for a Fortune 500 tech equipment and software manufacturer. When a customer had a serious outage with a single piece of our equipment it would cause them to stop and reevaluate their purchasing plans and dependence on my company.

IMO every government and business out there is going to be looking at this at every level and IT departments will be tasked to significantly reduce their reliance on Microsoft products. It will take years to actually happen, but I think Microsoft sales are going to take a serious, long term, and well-deserved hit.

The worst of the medical centers that knowingly overcharged me was USC Keck in L.A. They completely ignored calls, emails, faxes and certified letters for nearly a year - never once responding to anything. The scumbags actually sent my account to collections despite my having a zero balance because they flatly refused to credit my overpayments. I’ve learned to refuse payment of any medical bill before making absolutely sure I owe the company what they are billing, and that can take months.

The thing that amazes me with all of these companies is they expect you and I to be right on top of our accounts, respond to letters and calls, and pay their bills within 30 days. This despite the fact they don’t give a fuck about doing the same. My attitude has become the same as theirs: “fuck 'em, let them wait”. I get sternly worded bills with red “Past Due” printed on them every month, ignore them completely and pay when I’m ready. There’s been no downside.