#should i get private health insurance

[thevioletcaptain]

the next customer to ask me "what's wrong with your eye?" is getting thrown into the sea :)

[bittwitchy]

see the reality is i post on my rps usually when nobodys been there a bit and nobody is probably online, but the mental illness in me keeps saying its bc everyone secretly hates me and i dont deserve love, and when i tell a gov doctor that, they basically just say ‘take your antidepressant’s and shut up’ which is also funny when said gov doctor wont refill my fucking antidepressants in the first place

[so-i-did-this-thing]

FLORIDA TRANS PALS, IT IS TIME TO PLAN

Especially if you are on HRT!

HB1421 is a bill that severely affects access to gender affirming care, including for adults. It outlines goals to:

1) Prohibit changing gender markers on birth certificates

2) Require that gender affirming care only come from physicians (not nurse practioners) who take on liability insurance for 30 YEARS after they provide care to a patient

3) Require informed consent forms at every single appointment, including distributing literature to dissuade patients

4) Ban transition care completely for minors

5) Make it so providers who accept state funds cannot provide gender affirming services (this is the big one that stands to affect anyone who takes medicare/aid, is a university, etc.).

6) Make it so providers who accept state funds cannot reimburse for gender affirming services.

We are facing a return to the Harry Benjamin days, or worse, an effective ban unless you are fortunate/wealthy enough to find a willing provider.

If it passes, this bill would take effect July 1, 2023. That is not a lot of time.

I would not count on any Rx or refill request to be honored after this date if the prescribing and dispensing sources no longer are allowed to grant care or decide to drop care because of the penalties.

July 1, 2023. Unless we hear otherwise, that is your clock.

This sucks, but there is comfort in seeing a clear date to plan around and the worst case is no longer completely unknown. It begins July 1.

--------------------------------------------

YOUR HOMEWORK, DUE ASAP:

--------------------------------------------

1) Get any and all your HRT appointments in now, including picking up your meds and doing bloodwork promptly.

2) If you think you will be living in FL come July, start looking now for providers where physicians - not NPs - provide the care. Get an appointment on the books for July. Be prepared to go in person for everything after July 1, because I believe telemed will also be shit-canned. Here is a map of informed consent providers.

3) If you are an old like me, also dig up your HRT permission slip from your therapist. Fuck, make a packet of all your transition documents, including Rx history.

4) If you are on private insurance, start budgeting now to prepare to pay out of pocket.

5) Create a simple spreadsheet of all your HRT dates (pls forgive, my experience is with shots on a 2 week cycle, so this is pretty easy for me to do) and plan out how long your current supply will last. Then, forecast how long all your upcoming refills before July 1 will last. Update it every time you pick up and take your meds. Refer to it for decisions like moving or finding backup providers.

6) Subscribe to the bill to get notified of changes asap

7) Follow this site to keep tabs on other very scary bills happening in Florida, including a bathroom ban and a child custody bill that is effectively kidnapping

8) If you need to change your birth certificate, do it now, pay the rush fees and write RUSH on the envelope. The Department of Health has the most up-to-date forms. Processing time for rush I last saw was around 18 business days.

9) Now that your own oxygen mask is on, so they say, boost mutual aid and recruit allies to assist in any way possible.

-----

Do try to continue seeing your current provider as long as possible, as they likely will need your support. Talk to them frankly about their plans if the bill passes.

Now. I am just a little guy and not a legal expert, but the aggressive enactment date on this bill makes me feel like everyone should plan now instead of waiting to see if it passes.

Be safe, plan, and then get a little rest. Do not lose hope - this bill could still fail.

[wildhannimal]

Before you pay that not-covered hospital bill:

I want to take a min to spread awareness for the No Surprises Act after noticing a reddit post earlier.

This protection for patients just popped up in the past couple years, and the one major downside is that it's up to the patients to speak up to make use of it, but not everyone knows what it is.

"If you have private health insurance, these new protections ban the most common types of surprise bills. If you’re uninsured or you decide not to use your health insurance for a service, under these protections, you can often get a good faith estimate of the cost of your care up front, before your visit."

Consumer fact sheet

Typically, health insurance companies will help pay for bills from "in-network" providers, AKA their VIP inner circle gang turf. They won't help pay if you get medical care from another gang's henchmen (out of network).

This means that sometimes, a person would go to the hospital, which they knew had been covered by their insurance before, so they expect it's going to be relatively affordable. But they didn't know that multiple medical "gangs" were working in the same hospital. Their anesthesiologist, for example, was from a different gang. That specialist was out of network even though the surgeon and nurses were all in network.

Boom. Big bill for thousands of dollars and their insurance refuses to help pay it.

But now we have this law! The No Surprises Act means that insurance companies need to cover "surprise" expenses (under certain conditions).

If you don't have health insurance, hospitals and clinics need to give you an accurate quote before you get services, then foot the bill if they were too far off the mark.

The Fact Sheet section (UPDATE: this consumer toolkit link is better) of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services have some wonderful user-friendly resources for you about health insurance and how this act works.

Keep in mind that Medicare and government-run programs always have weird rules for everything, so you might have different (yet similar) protections through those programs.

If you have a medical bill that wasn't covered by insurance and you think it might count as a surprise bill, please check out your rights and consider fighting it instead of letting it become a stressful expense or debt you can't repay.

Go here to start figuring things out for your situation:

Health insurance companies have way, waaaaay too much power over our lives. We need every drop of protection we can get - but it only counts as much as we can understand and use those protections!

[weaselle]

@biggyb I wanted to answer you and then it became so much that i felt it needed to be it's own post.

So, if it was enacted on a large or ubiquitous scale, that is absolutely a concern, that if everybody had more money prices would just increase, rendering the UBI useless.

what would we do about that?

One the one hand that is basically already what happens anyway, which is why cost of living increases etc are a thing. And on the other hand there are a few mechanisms that can curb that, things like rent control laws.

But ultimately, personally, i believe the real answer is to remove the money aspect and provide the basic necessities directly.

When we say UBI we’re basically talking about the government giving us money (which has to come from somewhere, and that probably means some kind of progressive wealth tax, which is really just wealth redistribution at that point but whatever)

Anyway I believe it would be more effective for the government to provide those things directly (but not exclusively). I believe the baseline for society is everybody has free access to:

HEALTHCARE

All forms of healthcare (this is an important one, the very best we can do should be available to anyone who needs it, with no conditions, no barriers to entry like complicated paperwork, if you need health care you should get it, period.

INFORMATION

This means a free press, and education, true, but i also mean internet access, which at this point in our society i think is necessary for equality

NUTRITION

So, not just food, but a complete diet. This can still be very basic, little more than rice and beans, with medical exemption options of course, but it can be enough that it is the bare minimum food types, maybe rice beans and a couple types of dark green veggie and a couple types of vitamin C fruit. Possibly eggs or peanuts or something. Nothing fancy, just good quality ingredients that contain enough nutrition to keep you not only alive but fully healthy. And i think this should be provided in both raw ingredient form and cooked form.

CLOTHING

This one gets overlooked a lot, but kids need shoes, and struggling people need blankets and jackets, and everybody needs access to clothes, actually. Again, can be very basic, maybe government issued overalls, socks, jackets, blankets, and some kind of cheap tennis shoes would be most of it, but everybody needs access to clothes.

And finally HOUSING

So for example, the government would build apartment complexes that were just freely available to the public, first come first serve, you sign for it and the apartment is yours until you give it up or take another apartment.

We already have our government building and running public schools and libraries, we just need to upgrade those a bit. We already have governments building and running hospitals, we just need to do a lot more of that a lot better and get these private insurance companies to fuck off.

And then we just need to provide the clothes, open the Food Distribution Centers and build the housing.

Because then it won’t be money, so you don’t have to worry about the prices of everything going up because everybody has more income, which you are correct, is a concern. So just provide those things directly.

This is much less like taking money from the super wealthy and putting it into the bank accounts of everyone else, and much more the way taxes are supposed to work taking money from those that can spare it and using it to build a society that is better for everyone - even improving things for those super wealthy people (who now at the very least get to walk around safer from the sick and the homeless and the desperate - i mean violent crime alone would probably do whatever the opposite of sky-rocket is. Ground-dive.)

And people will still get jobs and spend money! Like, just because you provide government overalls, doesn’t mean people will stop wanting fashion brands. But now nobody will die of exposure from not having clothes. Same with everything, for example, the government school system is extremely developed, but there are still private schools, right?

That would be true of all this. If you gave everyone access to basic nutrition, there would still be steak houses and sushi restaurants and stuff. But now you could actually have the public boycott foods they felt were sourced unethically, or you could, say, regulate the fishing industry into sustainability even if that meant fish became so expensive that the average person could only eat fish once a year or whatever. Businesses might die from it, but no people would. Not even the people who used to own those businesses.

For my money, no money is where it’s at. But UBI would be a nice stepping stone.

What UBI experiments show us is that when you give people money and they DON’T get a job, but just exist at the minimum level, they are usually only doing so to accomplish something like go back to school for a degree or take care of a disabled or elderly loved one.

And the same would be true if we just provided everyone with the basics (except healthcare, everybody must get the best we have when it comes to healthcare, anything else is a moral failing that doesn’t bear contemplating)

but yeah, there would be people who would only wear government issued overalls, only live in government barracks, and only eat government rice and beans… but UBI experiments show us that it would be a small percentage of the population, and they'd only be doing it either to accomplish something worthy, or because they were in some way impaired. 90% of everyone else would still be out there getting jobs so they could move into a nice house and eat fish, but now with the security to quit if those jobs didn’t treat them well!

imo, THAT’s how you fix the economic issues surrounding UBI, you take the “income” out of the equation and you just straight up provide the Universal Basics themselves.

"but how would we build all these apartments and run these food distribution centers?"

well, this dovetails into my other favorite solution for the united states.

See, we spend a FUCKTON on the military, and we're just never going to make that stop happening, apparently.

So I say, we INCREASE the military. I say double it even.

And then we use them here, keeping them sharp and employed and trained etc by doing public works.

The military is already full of engineers and cooks and doctors and electricians and forklift operators and everything else.

So get them building apartments and running food distribution and supplementing hospital staffs etc.

All that stuff involves, logistics, and teamwork, and knowing how to run projects and accomplish missions, it's all good training even for the combat personnel, which is only 15% of the people in the military btw.

The rest are those other jobs i mentioned. So hire and train even more of them, and then deploy them here, repairing bridges and building hospitals and managing clothing warehouses and stuff.

anyway. Food for thought.

[covid-safer-hotties]

COVID-19’s summer surge shows no signs of slowing down - Published Aug 17, 2024

Asurge in COVID-19 infections has swept the country this summer, upending travel plans and bringing fevers, coughs and general malaise. It shows no immediate sign of slowing.

While most of the country and the federal government has put the pandemic in the rearview mirror, the virus is mutating and new variants emerging.

Even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) no longer tracks individual infection numbers, experts think it could be the biggest summer wave yet.

So far, the variants haven’t been proven to cause a more serious illness, and vaccines remain effective, but there’s no certainty about how the virus may yet change and what happens next.

The highest viral activity right now is in the West, according to wastewater data from the CDC, but a “high” or “very high” level of COVID-19 virus is being detected in wastewater in almost every state. And viral levels are much higher nationwide than they were this time last year and started increasing earlier in the summer.

Wastewater data is the most reliable method of tracking levels of viral activity because so few people test, but it can’t identify specific case numbers.

Part of the testing decline can be attributed to pandemic fatigue, but experts said it’s also an issue of access. Free at-home tests are increasingly hard to find. The government isn’t distributing them, and private insurance plans have not been required to cover them since the public health emergency ended in 2023.

COVID has spiked every summer since the start of the pandemic. Experts have said the surge is being driven by predictable trends like increased travel and extreme hot weather driving more people indoors, as well as by a trio of variants that account for nearly 70 percent of all infections. Vaccines and antivirals can blunt the worst of the virus, and hospital are no longer being overwhelmed like in the earliest days of the pandemic.

But there remains a sizeable number of people who are not up-to-date on vaccinations. There are concerns that diminished testing and low vaccination rates could make it easier for more dangerous variants to take hold.

“One of the things that’s distinctive about this summer is that the variants out there are extraordinarily contagious, so they’re spreading very, very widely, and lots of people are getting mild infections, many more than know it, because testing is way down,” said William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.

That contagiousness means the virus is more likely to find the people most vulnerable — people over 65, people with certain preexisting conditions, or those who are immunocompromised.

In a July interview with the editor-in-chief of MedPage Today, the country’s former top infectious diseases doctor, Anthony Fauci, said people in high-risk categories need to take the virus seriously, even if the rest of the public does not.

“You don’t have to immobilize what you do and just cut yourself off from society,” Fauci said. “But regardless of what the current recommendations are, when you are in a crowded, closed space and you are an 85-year-old person with chronic lung disease or a 55-year-old person who’s morbidly obese with diabetes and hypertension, then you should be wearing a mask when you’re in closed indoor spaces.”

Schaffner said hospitalizations have been increasing in his region for at least the past five weeks, which surprised him.

“I thought probably they had peaked last week. Wrong. They went up again this week. So at least locally, we haven’t seen the peak yet. I would have expected this summer increase … to have plateaued and perhaps start to ease down. But we haven’t seen that yet,” he said.

Still, much of the country has moved on from the pandemic and is reacting to the surge with a collective shrug. COVID-19 is being treated like any other respiratory virus, including by the White House.

President Biden was infected in July. After isolating at home for several days and taking a course of the antiviral Paxlovid, he returned to campaign trial.

Biden is 81, meaning he’s considered high risk for severe infection. He received an updated coronavirus vaccine in September, but it’s not clear if he got a second one, which the CDC recommends for older Americans.

Updated vaccines that target the current variants are expected to be rolled out later this fall, and the CDC recommends everyone ages 6 months and older should receive one.

As of May, only 22.5 percent of adults in the United States reported having received the updated 2023-2024 vaccine that was released last fall and tailored to the XBB variant dominant at that time.

The immunity from older vaccines wanes over time, and while it doesn’t mean people are totally unprotected, Schaffner said, the most vulnerable should be cautious. Many people being infected now have significantly reduced immunity to the current mutated virus, but reduced immunity is better than no immunity.

People with healthy immune systems and who have previously been vaccinated or infected are still less likely to experience the more severe infections that result in hospitalization or death.

Almost “none of us are naive to COVID, but the people where the protection wanes the most are the most frail, the immunodeficient, the people with chronic underlying illnesses,” Schaffner said.

[regicidal-optimism]

reasons the QSMP admin situation might be taking so long to resolve

ONE: Discord.

Company communications happened over Discord. If people were using their personal accounts, which the company didn't have access to, trying to get DM logs out of people who have left or been fired and who may not be cooperating would be nearly impossible. Which means that if communications were happening in DMs, the studio may not have access to them at all. And things that Quackity Studios loses access to if they lose access to the private DMs of managers include:

Any promises regarding pay, promotions, or other compensation that was put in writing

Any discussion of responsibilities and/or employees job descriptions

Any paper trails of employee attempts to resolve issues or make complaints or otherwise seek help.

Any one of those things, let alone all of them, would be enough to cause an enormous logistical nightmare in terms of finding out what even happened.

TWO: Paypal.

The QSMP seems to have been using Paypal for transactions, according to the screenshots Lea posted. This is a terrible idea, for several reasons, including:

Paypal seizing funds and locking them arbitrarily is not uncommon

The records there are NOT meticulous and Paypal is opt-in for paper statements, which I doubt the studio did

PAYPAL IS NOT FDIC INSURED

It is very possible they weren't even using Paypal's invoicing system, leading to yet more problems with paper trails.

THREE: Taxes.

whatever amount of capital was initially invested in the QSMP is clearly not there now; Quackity has a year's worth of transactions which he needs to go through because proper procedures were not in place, with, as discussed, no paper trail

what employment entailed, what pay entailed, and what taxes were/were not paid may be one of the things he is seeking legal advice about

it is extremely possible that whoever was onboarding people was not in compliance with accepted HR procedures for legal employment

worse, it's extremely possible they were treating all employees/volunteers as contractors, but the working conditions that admins put forth sound a lot like de facto employment

which means depending on the number of US de facto employees, especially if compensation was promised, may put the QSMP out of compliance with US legal requirements for health insurance offerings

if anyone (who was a US citizen paying US taxes) got paid, were they issued W-2s or 1099s by the studio? Is Quackity facing down the April 15th tax filing date potentially out of compliance with federal requirements for the issuance of tax forms to contractors and employees?

AND THIS IS BEFORE EVEN GETTING INTO INTERNATIONAL REGULATIONS OR ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FRENCH.

Quackity cannot make promises of anything— not pay, not positions, not specific people being fired— or discuss proceedings before all of this is sorted out.

To be clear, this is not a defense of the studio. This is a condemnation in the strongest terms I can offer. Things should not have gotten to this point.

But if you're wondering what could possibly be taking so long, or why the discord has been locked down, or why they might be hesitant to fire managers who would have access to what limited paper trail might still exist— I expect this is part of it.

Also, if someone tells you they will pay you for something, get that in writing. In an email. I am going to go scream now and possibly start drinking.

[mychlapci]

Cont Synth-En Ratchet Saga, Megatron definitely shakes the Vehicon's hands and gives him light duties and exceptions from dangerous assignment. His weird day turns into a weird month as he hits the horny/protective part of pregnancy and I say we treat Cybertronians like lions with 1-2 lions and a Pride of lionesses so Megatron following instincts shoves him in his room to protect their shared progeny (and sate each others sexual frustrations until Ratchet can be captured).

There's a bounty on Ratchet. Either his capture or more babies because Knock Out co formed ambulances and rewards are given to “expanding their forces”.

Ratchet meanwhile has managed to fuck his way through most of Team Prime but the others had birth control (Arcee and Bulkhead at least had regular partners and Bumblebee kept his health checks up to date) don't get pregnant. Though they are having regular “sessions” to burn out Ratchet's energy because his body is pinging he should have multiple carriers but only has a very grounded Optimus to fuss over.

Thankfully he recognizes the kids as kids rather than intruders so when they are around he is mostly grumpy and fussy and indulging them and constantly moving them to stay close to where he has herded Optimus. Which Optimus teases him about.

Things are mostly stable until the first time he goes out in an emergency. Dreadwing attempts to bring him in and Ratchet goes on defense but when he gets him pinned catches a whiff of Megatron and switches from Enemy to Sire Coding and poor Dreadwing is experiencing a very skilled medic touching exactly the perfect places on his frame. He us also loyal so remembering his orders flashes his panel ready to grit and bear it only to get fucked into the ground until he's clawing and panting and absolutely soaked while Ratchet drags hom by wing and knot to somewhere more private to insure he takes. He's in perfect condition, even repaired a little when he scuttles back the the Nemesis though with distinct red and white paint transfers.

Thus starts Ratchet's accidental campaign to knock up most of the species.

Synth-En Ratchet Anon

aaaaah i love the concept of sires surrounding themselves with multiple carriers. All Ratchet wants at this point is to have as many pregnant mates possible, siring coding urging him to protect them. He gets protective of the kids, they might be human and they annoy him but they are little offspring and they need to be with the carrier! Optimus feels so awkward, he’s already rocking a swollen belly and it is difficult to explain to the kids what Ratchet is trying to do right now.

But onto the sexy stuff. Needing more carriers has Ratchet even more horny, if that is even possible. Fucking the rest of team prime burns off energy but it doesn’t satisfy the breeding drive, and as much as he would, technically, be fully satisfied with only having Optimus as a carrier, his coding doesn’t allow it. Any decepticon he gets his hands on is just not safe from his rage and his spike.

He overpowers Dreadwing so easily. At first he’s a threat to be snuffed, but then the scent of Megatron reminds him he needs more carriers. Dreadwing could take, sure.

Megatron cannot believe that him and his soldiers are getting overpowered and impregnated by the Prime's little lapdog left and right. How is that even possible? At least Dreadwing brought back more additions to the ranks, but they're really missing a sire nearby.

Maybe they eventually realized what put Ratchet in a frenzy and decided to lure him in, slathering someone in Megatron's scent to get him following after no matter what... Frankly, if he got himself actually captured, it would probably be a little easier on his coding. Multiple carriers will make him happier...

[virtuallyinsane]

Hi all.

Decided to share lil bit of my story. Dedicated to those who suffer chronic illness. You are NOT alone. It's fucked up everywhere in the world. There is many of us and our stories are important.

I started my "let's really find out what the fuck is wrong with me" journey a long ago after my body slowly refused to work as it should. There was a lot that went on in my life at that point, but let's focus on the physical health. I suffered a collapse and a burn out.

During the past few years, I was misdiagnosed several times, I was given wrong medication because of it that made things worse to this day.

I suffered a lot of trauma by people around me saying I am just lazy and sensitive and by literal doctors saying the same thing, making me seem like a typical archetype of hysterical woman. They told me to just have kids, it will be better... They told me let them lock me up to psych clinic to help me... they tortured my mind and my body for a long time while whatever was wrong with me, just kept getting worse and my body was hardly able to function in day to day life anymore.

Until recently. I got help from an organization focusing on these kind of situations and after some more doctors appointments, I was told I have Ehlers Danlos syndrom with a few other diagnosis that my body developed because of that. I have one of its hypermobile forms that fuck up joints, connective tissue in my body, including some internal organs that don't function properly anymore and cause more pain and discomfort.

Well, at least I know what's wrong and I can adjust. Somehow tho, the doctors still refuse to help more than the bare minimum and give me advice such as "don't do sports" while me considering having a wheelchair because I can't walk much anymore, bitch what?!

Anyways, there's a long journey ahead of me still. I need to go to the private medical sector, because even tho I have an insurance, there's no real help in the system. Life is lifing.

To all of you that made it here, thank you for reading and remember if you suffer, you are not alone, please continue fighting because you are worth it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster

Going to Defcon this weekend? I'm giving a keynote, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse," on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

Last November, publishing got some excellent news: the planned merger of Penguin Random House (the largest publisher in the history of human civilization) with its immediate competitor Simon & Schuster would not be permitted, thanks to the DOJ's deftly argued case against the deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

When I was a baby writer, there were dozens of large NY publishers. Today, there are five - and it was almost four. A publishing sector with five giant companies is bad news for writers (as Stephen King said at the trial, the idea that PRH and S&S would bid against each other for books was as absurd as the idea that he and his wife would bid against each other for their next family home).

But it's also bad news for publishing workers, a historically exploited and undervalued workforce whose labor conditions have only declined as the number of employers in the sector dwindled, leading to mass resignations:

https://lithub.com/unlivable-and-untenable-molly-mcghee-on-the-punishing-life-of-junior-publishing-employees/

It should go without saying that workers in sectors with few employers get worse deals from their bosses (see, e.g., the writers' strike and actors' strike). And yup, right on time, PRH, a wildly profitable publisher, fired a bunch of its most senior (and therefore hardest to push around) workers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/books/penguin-random-house-layoffs-buyouts.html

But publishing's contraction into a five-company cartel didn't occur in a vacuum. It was a normal response to monopolization elsewhere in its supply chain. First it was bookselling collapsing into two major chains. Then it was distribution going from 300 companies to three. Today, it's Amazon, a monopolist with unlimited access to the capital markets and a track record of treating publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con

Monopolies are like Pringles (owned by the consumer packaged goods monopolist Procter & Gamble): you can't have just one. As soon as you get a monopoly in one part of the supply chain, every other part of that chain has to monopolize in self-defense.

Think of healthcare. Consolidation in pharma lead to price-gouging, where hospitals were suddenly paying 1,000% more for routine drugs. Hospitals formed regional monopolies and boycotted pharma companies unless they lowered their prices - and then turned around and screwed insurers, jacking up the price of care. Health insurers gobbled each other up in an orgy of mergers and fought the hospitals.

Now the health care system is composed of a series of gigantic, abusive monopolists - pharma, hospitals, medical equipment, pharmacy benefit managers, insurers - and they all conspire to wreck the lives of only two parts of the system who can't fight back: patients and health care workers. Patients pay more for worse care, and medical workers get paid less for worse working conditions.

So while there was no question that a PRH takeover of Simon & Schuster would be bad for writers and readers, it was also clear that S&S - and indeed, all of the Big Five publishers - would be under pressure from the monopolies in their own supply chain. What's more, it was clear that S&S couldn't remain tethered to Paramount, its current owner.

Last week, Paramount announced that it was going to flip S&S to KKR, one of the world's most notorious private equity companies. KKR has a long, long track record of ghastly behavior, and its portfolio currently includes other publishing industry firms, including one rotten monopolist, raising similar concerns to the ones that scuttled the PRH takeover last year:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/books/booksupdate/paramount-simon-and-schuster-kkr-sale.html

Let's review a little of KKR's track record, shall we? Most spectacularly, they are known for buying and destroying Toys R Us in a deal that saw them extract $200m from the company, leaving it bankrupt, with lifetime employees getting $0 in severance even as its executives paid themselves tens of millions in "performance bonuses":

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/03/private-equity-bosses-took-200m-out-of-toys-r-us-and-crashed-the-company-lifetime-employees-got-0-in-severance/

The pillaging of Toys R Us isn't the worst thing KKR did, but it was the most brazen. KKR lit a beloved national chain on fire and then walked away, hands in pockets, whistling. They didn't even bother to clear their former employees' sensitive personnel records out of the unlocked filing cabinets before they scarpered:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/23/exploring-the-ruins-of-a-toys-r-us-discovering-a-trove-of-sensitive-employee-data/

But as flashy as the Toys R Us caper was, it wasn't the worst. Private equity funds specialize in buying up businesses, loading them with debts, paying themselves, and then leaving them to collapse. They're sometimes called vulture capitalists, but they're really vampire capitalists:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/private-equity-buyout-kkr-houdaille/

Given a choice, PE companies don't want to prey on sick businesses - they preferentially drain off value from thriving ones, preferably ones that we must use, which is why PE - and KKR in particular - loves to buy health care companies.

Heard of the "surprise billing epidemic"? That's where you go to a hospital that's covered by your insurer, only to discover - after the fact - that the emergency room is operated by a separate, PE-backed company that charges you thousands for junk fees. KKR and Blackstone invented this scam, then funneled millions into fighting the No Surprises Act, which more-or-less killed it:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

KKR took one of the nation's largest healthcare providers, Envision, hostage to surprise billing, making it dependent on these fraudulent payments. When Congress finally acted to end this scam, KKR was able to take to the nation's editorial pages and damn Congress for recklessly endangering all the patients who relied on it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

Like any smart vampire, KKR doesn't drain its victim in one go. They find all kinds of ways to stretch out the blood supply. During the pandemic, KKR was front of the line to get massive bailouts for its health-care holdings, even as it fired health-care workers, increasing the workload and decreasing the pay of the survivors of its indiscriminate cuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#socialized-losses

It's not just emergency rooms. KKR bought and looted homes for people with disabilities, slashed wages, cut staff, and then feigned surprise at the deaths, abuse and misery that followed:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/kkr-brightspring-disability-private-equity-abuse

Workers' wages went down to $8/hour, and they were given 36 hour shifts, and then KKR threatened to have any worker who walked off the job criminally charged with patient abandonment:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

For KKR, people with disabilities and patients make great victims - disempowered and atomized, unable to fight back. No surprise, then, that so many of KKR's scams target poor people - another group that struggles to get justice when wronged. KKR took over Dollar General in 2007 and embarked on a nationwide expansion campaign, using abusive preferential distributor contracts and targeting community-owned grocers to trap poor people into buying the most heavily processed, least nutritious, most profitable food available:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

94.5% of the Paycheck Protection Program - designed to help small businesses keep their workers payrolled during lockdown - went to giant businesses, fraudulently siphoned off by companies like Longview Power, 40% owned by KKR:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#ppp

KKR also helped engineer a loophole in the Trump tax cuts, convincing Justin Muzinich to carve out taxes for C-Corporations, which let KKR save billions in taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/02/broken-windows/#Justin-Muzinich

KKR sinks its fangs in every part of the economy, thanks to the vast fortunes it amassed from its investors, ripped off from its customers, and fraudulently obtained from the public purse. After the pandemic, KKR scooped up hundreds of companies at firesale prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#blackstone-kkr

Ironically, the investors in KKR funds are also its victims - especially giant public pension funds, whom KKR has systematically defrauded for years:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/22/stimpank/#kentucky

And now KKR has come for Simon & Schuster. The buyout was trumpeted to the press as a done deal, but it's far from a fait accompli. Before the deal can close, the FTC will have to bless it. That blessing is far from a foregone conclusion. KKR also owns Overdrive, the monopoly supplier of e-lending software to libraries.

Overdrive has a host of predatory practices, loathed by both libraries and publishers (indeed, much of the publishing sector's outrage at library e-lending is really displaced anger at Overdrive). There's a plausible case that the merger of one of the Big Five publishers with the e-lending monopoly will present competition issues every bit as deal-breaking as the PRH/S&S merger posed.

(Image: Sefa Tekin/Pexels, modified)

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/08/vampire-capitalism/#kkr

[angelsaxis]

"...[W]e must continue to challenge the societal arrangements that leads to preventable pain and suffering. Marriage can be quite beautiful and sacred, for example. Marriage can also privatize dependence: it encourages people to enter relationships for resources and benefits, like health care, savings, and tax deductions. I was nineteen years old when I got married, mostly informed by my faith tradition. I was also in love, but very poor, and marriage offered me a stability that I never had as a child. I was so lucky that the person I married was kind, thoughtful, and also very much trying to figure out his relationship to Christianity and his evolving manhood.

When we divorced nine years later and became friends and co-parents, I realized how the marital benefits I once aspire dot have did not make sense. I could remove him from my health insurance to account for the divorce, but I couldn't add any of my uninsured siblings, whom I would be related to forever. And our children had two options for insurance because they had parents who went to college and worked jobs that offered it, but independent contractors in my family did not have an option that wasn't a financial sacrifice.

If we focused on meeting the healthcare, employment, educational, and housing needs of people in society, then those who want to marry could more freely enter those relationships in their terms, and people who needed to escape because of violence could more easily leave without worrying what will happen if they get sick and need to see a doctor.

We should heed to calls for investment in the programs, opportunities, and laws that make everyone free and safe. Here too, universal basic income can help, allowing people to meet their basic needs and not rely on potentially sexually exploitative intimate relationships for income. Removing benefits from marriage accomplishes this, too. With universal health care, and other programs like free and quality childhood education, people vulnerable to violence have more free range to move, live, and practice healthy lifestyles."

-- Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell

[octuscle]

Hi, I was wondering if I could get some input. I work at a pretty large company- mostly construction related stuff, but me and my friends work on the accounting side. The higher ups have been laying off a lot of the white collar workers and offering them a deal to remain employed, but in positions where their skills are considered more valuable. Issue is, I haven't been able to get in touch with my friend since he took the offer. In fact, whenever I text him, I just get selfies of a guy I've never seen before on a construction site and lewd comments. I don't know what's going on and I'm worried. I just got a notice that my contract is up, but they have a deal for me. I don't know if I should take it- something seems really off.

I don't know about you, but I think the offer is fair. Two years job guarantee. Accident, health and pension insurance. The costs of retraining and the associated loss of working hours are reimbursed in full. And you are to be deployed together with your friend. Okay, there is a little less salary. But you are assured that the work will be much less mentally demanding. You said yourself that you are constantly on the verge of burnout. This might be a great opportunity! And you even get the rest of the day off! Loss, do it!

You sign. The boss from HR shakes your hand and says that you won't regret it. Your first assignment will be external, please be at the company's depot at 06:00 tomorrow morning. What the hell? Well, you've been given a day's vacation for that. And what are you going to do with it? Down in front of the company you stand in the sun. Beside you the box with your private things. You search in your jacket pocket for cigarettes. But you've already given up smoking in college. Fuck, man! You need a smoke now. And actually a beer, too. Dude, you're really out of it. Smokes are always in your sleeve pocket of your work jacket. The Zippo is in your pants pocket. Actually, you should quit smoking, you think to yourself. Or at least roll your own cigarettes. That shit is really too expensive. You grab your duffel bag and look for a bar. The one up ahead looks good. Sure, pretty empty at this time. But a couple of guys in Hi Viz clothes are standing in front of screens, watching sports news and drinking a beer. Probably on breakfast break. You order a beer, open the bottle with your lighter, empty it in one go and order the next one. Hey, your break is short, you have to use it. Shit, why break, today is your day off. Your buddy asks if you can stop by the construction site. If you want to finish today, they need every hand. Shit, in this company you never get off work. But if you're supposed to go to the new construction site tomorrow, you have to finish today, that's clear. So what? You're wearing the clothes anyway. And you've already got your stuff for tomorrow. Then let's go for a night shift!

By the time the bus comes to take you to the next construction site, you've been sleeping on the floor of the depot for maybe two hours. Anyway, the extra shift brought good money. And on the bus, you two can crash for another round. It's a tough job. But you don't know any different!

[angrybell]

David Harsanyi lays out the case why Harris should never be president. Some of the highlights include:

As a candidate, Harris supported abolishing private health insurance — “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on,” she told CNN. In addition to nationalizing health care and education, Kamala wants the government to control the manufacturing sector, the auto industry, food … and any industry that emits carbon.

Harris was in favor of getting rid of the filibuster to overturn state voting laws, nationalizing abortion on demand until birth, and passing the Green New Deal — an authoritarian takeover of the economy written by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which would not only ban all fossil fuels force Americans to retrofit every building in in the country, eliminate air travel and meat, create government-guaranteed jobs, among many other authoritarian measures. …

On foreign policy, we don’t really know, though we can guess. This week, Harris wouldn’t even greet Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. She reportedly won’t sit behind him during his speech to Congress. A few weeks ago, the same Kamala said antisemitic pro-Hamas campus protesters showed “exactly what the human emotion should be.” In the past she has openly protested with Islamic Republic propagandists from the National Iranian American Council. To be be fair, in some ways her disposition comports more with the latter than the former.

And I forgot about this… they say they want democracy, but want to install a president who would rule by decree and not according to the constitution or the laws of the land.

Kamala was never one for legalism. When candidate Biden argued that Harris’ promise to issue an executive order unilaterally banning access to certain guns would be unconstitutional, she retorted: “I would just say: Hey, Joe, instead of saying ‘No we can’t,’ let’s say yes, we can,'” before cackling at the very notion that presidents couldn’t do whatever they wanted.

[jeremy-queere]

Screw it, I'm posting SQUIP lore anyway

I just spent an hour writing the word "squip" over and over with varying capitalization nuances, so I am posting the exposition whether it is needed or not.

Okay. OKAY. ok. SO. In the pre-musical days where the Be More Chill novel was published and the internet was young and exciting, there was a tie-in website.

I lied. There were TONS of tie-in websites. They all existed in-universe and were ridiculously interconnected, and thank god for the wayback machine. Be More Chill was advertised - or as Jeremy says, "I wrote that above. I wrote Be More Chill too, with the help of my squip, under the name Ned Vizzini, which I figured was so dumb no one would think was real." The websites were linked as product testimonials or website ads (cheekily disclaimered as "Ads by Squipple").

I don't know if I can even collect all the website urls quickly without missing some but here's a spattering (with the link going to the wayback machine). Most of these websites aren't just a single page but an entire site:

Humiliationsheet.com for a list of Jeremy's daily mortification events

Squipette, a SQUIP - but pink!

Bemorechill.com, Jeremy's book website

InterSquip.com for people worried about cybersecurity - with or without a squip, take this pill and see who has one installed!

GenerationSquip.com - Sort of an unreality disclaimer that also serves as fan hype. (How do we know it's old? It suggests we "google 'squip'" and helpfully provides us with a hyperlink to the google home page.) It calls this "the squipiverse" a "100% participatory reality"

Squipped.com - a gossip rag collecting user testimonials about bad experiences with squips. It, like many of these sites, collected fan-submitted content - "Tell us about what happened to you when you came in touch with a squip! (If you don't have a story, use your imagination--we need ruthless tactics to fight the industry.)"

Squipnews.com - collecting SQUiP tips from the community in the fields of Business, Technology, SQUiP & Society, Health, and Entertainment

Iwanttobecool.org - Promoting the use of squips despite those naysayers Squipsters Against Squips. As the site poll asks: "How should we deal with anti-squip cyber-terrorists? - jail time - fines - physical dismemberment"

SQUIPusa.com - SQUIP-specific insurance which regrettably does not cover squipotomy or squipiatry, but does cover some SQUIP viruses: "SQUIPusa squipsters are now entitled to one free virtual session with an Intersquip squipnician for each week they have lost their "coolness" due to a National Squip Board-recognized virus. Valid up to six weeks"

Squipsoft.com, the parent company of squip technology. Its homepage addresses important questions like: how can you get good grades that aren't so perfect as to tip off the authorities? Use "Squipsoft School" which promises "guaranteed averages of 96.82 in every subject" except for Business Ethics or Compubiology. Or install SquipServer, which is an honest-to-god VPN ad: "Using a virtual private network (VPN) framework, this revolutionary technology turns your squip into a server capable of temporarily extending your coolness to up to three acquaintances."

CelebritySquip.com - "What percentage of American Idol finalists have squips?"

SquipWorks.com - Offering add-on tech for your squip like the MakeOut Optimizer 4.0 or the Nanolyzer (which picks up on social clues to one billionth of a meter).

SquipWorld - A more chatty experience of Squips spotted in the wild and other squip news.

Squipzophrenia.com - (I'm not endorsing the term...) - Information about the phenomenon in the novel where, if a SQUIP is turned on while the user drinks alcohol, it starts ordering them to kill people. This site has academic research on the subject and related Squip disorders. "However, [avoiding alcohol] is not a foolproof plan. Marijuana and mescaline can also cause squipzophrenia, although with the mescaline we're not sure and just think it might be the mescaline, you know?" Other squip disorders include "Loss of recognition of squip insertion i.e. 'I didn't take a pill, I'm just cool naturally!'" which can be cured via the Konami code; Squip flashbacks after a Squip is removed (which the site describes as likely false claims for the sake of "perpetuating insurance fraud"); the dangers of buying used Squips on ebay; or feeling that you can't live without your squip: "acute squipdependence. The solution is to surround yourself with calming bright plastic objects and remember that everything is fine."

Squipsters Against Squips - The notorious anti-Squip lobbying group advocating for a National Squip Registry.

Squipster - A squip-based social media platform that sadly doesn't seem to have made it to the public yet.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Eliza Mondegreen

Published: Dec 3, 2023

A recent New York Times op-ed entitled “There is no way to live a life without regret” meditates on youth gender transition, regret and how we know who we are (I’ll save you a few thousand words: we don’t). 

As far as op-eds go, it’s poorly argued and far too long. But as an example of its genre —a genre we could call ‘Desperately Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall’ — it’s unbeatable. 

“[L]iberals and progressives who fret about the rapidly changing gender landscape,” according to author Lydia Polgreen, are too worked up about the possibility that children and adolescents may later regret the decision to transition. Rather than address their actual concerns, however, Polgreen gives readers a rambling tour of misdirections: gender is like race, somehow, and also like an arranged marriage. Further, life is full of “transitions” that are like “little deaths,” all leading up to the biggest “transition” of all: the big sleep. 

Some teenagers get nose jobs and boob jobs, so why should gender transition surgery be viewed as any different? “Cosmetic procedures can produce regret, sometimes famously so,” the author writes. Never mind that few of youth gender transitions’ critics champion cosmetic surgery for teens. The point is, “gender-affirming” care has not been billed to regulators, consumers, and the public as cosmetic, but held up as life-saving procedures, covered under many public and private health insurance plans, and carried out in the name of medicine as a treatment for distress. The stakes matter. 

But what is a life without regret? This is a talking point that started circulating relatively recently, in response to mounting evidence of regret and detransition, and concerns that social influence may be driving the explosion in gender-distressed youth — the way just about everybody acknowledges that social influence drives the recent surge in TikTok tics or multiple personalities. So what if it’s a social contagion? “What is gender if not contagious?” Polgreen asks. 

Because few young people who embarked on transition as children have spoken up, the author first dismisses their experiences as rare and overhyped (“a handful of such people have appeared over and over again in news stories across the world”) before writing them off altogether a few paragraphs later (“when the media fixates on the hypothetical regret of children who do transition…”). 

Besides, maybe deciding to transition as a child is like quitting the swim team: “so what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming?” 

Of course, a child who quits competitive swimming merely forecloses a competitive swimming career. One needn’t give up the ocean or the pool whereas children who undergo puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries foreclose more than one possible future. Fertility, sexual pleasure, the possibility of growing up and becoming comfortable in one’s own intact body, to name a few.

We have no idea what childish decisions like these will mean 50 years down the road. And again: Polgreen has pulled the conversation off-course to avoid the inconvenient topic of medical responsibility. The decision to quit swimming is not a medical decision, cosigned by medical authorities. Youth gender transition is. 

The author goes on to make a number of bizarre analogies in this 4,500-word slog. But she never touches the real arguments that she pretends to counter: that children are not just small adults, that the medical system needs to be accountable for the power it exercises, and that children who struggle with gender distress need real support, not empty meditations on identity, autonomy, and the ubiquity of regret.

Polgreen misdirects and obfuscates in a half-dozen creative ways, then reifies her misdirections. She misses the point — on purpose — and then wonders why so many people care so much about this issue.

==

We're into the "...and that's a good thing" phase. Where the thing that they were denying was happening at all actually is, but it's a good thing. Teaching (using) CRT, cancel culture, ROGD, juvenile surgeries, and now detransition and regret.

This is just more gaslighting. Before it was, "nobody's doing that, you're being crazy for worrying about something that's not happening." Now it's, "well, that's completely normal, you're being crazy for worrying about something that happens all the time."

Pay attention to who was endorsing, facilitating and cheering this on. Eventually they will be trying to convince you that they never did.

[thestrangestthlng]

Public Figures Owe You Nothing

Same thing, different fandom. Now, my first soiree into internet fandom was Glee nearly fifteen years ago. Given insane popularity of the show and one of their two main couples, Klaine, and Darren Criss being a straight man, I am no stranger to the "only gay (out) queer actors should play queer roles" argument.

I don't necessarily disagree completely. Queer actors should be highlighted in queer roles. But guess what, the film industry is shit.

Not everyone is out, can afford to be out, is ready to come out publicly, or cares to have anyone in their business. There is a huge number of fans who are way too invested in the parasocial relationships with their "favs" and cross lines.

It's a tale as old as time. Darren Criss' now wife, Mia (Swier), was mercilessly harassed online and honestly in person. I distinctly remember people MAILING her things. There was an incredible amount of hate directed towards her because SHE wasn't a HE and a group of fans were hellbent that he and Chris Colfer were secretly in a relationship, even though both were happily in their own relationships. (Both of them are actually still IN those relationships and I love that for them.)

Someone gave Dannell Ackles (wife of Jensen Ackles) a gift at an event. When she reached it she was cut by a bunch of rusty hooks in a fucking voodoo doll.

One of the NSYNC members (I can't remember if it were Chris or Joey) ended up being broken up with by their partner at the time because of the amount of hate they were getting.

This came up because someone said on instagram that they "will not be watching [RWRB]" because [Taylor and Nicholas] "are not out" and "they are gay for pay". So, me being me, says to them that the actors owe you nothing. Their sexuality/gender identity is no one's concern but their own.

Also, it was really disgusting what alot of Heartstopper did to Kit. He's just a baby and they strong armed him to coming out before he was ready and made him feel like he had to justify it. Cruel irony being that it's the exact opposite of the point of the books, and exact opposite of his character. I'll never forgive them for what they did to my son.

I went on to tell them that Hollywood is shit. It's homophobic, racist, sexist, xenophobic, transphobic, everything phobic. They like beautiful and handsome, classically beautiful, white, straight actors that fit into their perfect mold. As soon as actors come out they get type cast, lose rolls (because how could a homosexual portray intimacy with a woman? It's not like they are actors or anything). I, of course, got blocked because they didn't agree with me and that's fine.

Did you know that many actors in the union don't even make the $26,000 a year that is required to qualify for health insurance? Most actors are working class. Yes, many acquire a net worth, but it's honestly one huge disaster from losing what they have. The median salary for actors in the US is about 60K a year. So why would a working class actor or even a upper middle class actor, want to potentially dismantle their career trajectory by telling something that is really no one's concern anyway?

Not everyone wants to be stuck in a Ryan Murphy rotation. Maybe once we get more queer film and show makers and Hollywood execs start to fuck off we'll get more. I'm 99% sure that RWRB is the ONLY gay romcom without underlying trauma porn. The only other one that comes close is a Christmas movie.

Actors are still human and deserve privacy. They owe fans nothing. Their partners deserve privacy. If they are queer good for them. If they are not, good for them. But fans don't get to dictate who comes out and when. So yes, we want more queer actors in queer roles, but we don't get to decide if the ones who are not open get to have these roles. Sometimes it is who is best for the role.

As far as RWRB: Neither Taylor nor Nicholas have ever made any public statements on their sexuality and are both private people when it comes to their relationships. It's really goofy that people think it's an appropriate question to ASK them personally. Interview or not.

All that matters to me is that they killed that online and the characters they acted were madly in love with each other.

Moral of the story: they can want someone and love some one and not want that life for them. Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka were together for three years before they came out and that's when NPH came out - at 34 on his terms, as it should be. Some people really missed the message of the book; that queer people deserve to come out when and how THEY want to.

/Ted Talk