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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 5th, 2023

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  • Started on Friday… still coming in waves. I had a breakdown a few weeks ago… just pushed myself too hard for too long…it was probably building up for at least a year. Went to the VA (veterans affairs, for those not in the US, the VA is the sole source of health care for many veterans in the US), and they started making adjustments to my anxiety and depression medications which eventually precipitated into a ER visit. A few days later, they got me hooked up with the mental health clinic where I talked to a provider about going on short-term disability while we’re messing with my medication doses until I feel normal again. He says something along the lines “sounds like a good plan, sned me the paperwork.”

    Queue up to Friday, I get a call from the insurance company saying they got the paperwork from the provider, and it recommends I go back to work. Now I’m out of PTO, disability is denied, and I’m trying to decide whether I lose my job or go back to work on while tettering between “extreme anxiety” and “drug-induced haze” from all the new prescriptions.



  • Nothing. It’s a pretty fantasy. Best I think we can hope for is a few monopolies busted up so some little guys can break into the market. That’ll buy us about 20 years until those little guys have become the new Googles and Microsofts and Apples, and then we start over. We need to entirely rewrite how we do antitrust assessments to account for both vertical and horizontal monopolistic behaviors (a vertical monopoly is a company that controls the entire supply chain where a horizontal one controls the market and customer base. Historically, the US has been more concerned with horizontal monopolies.) It’d be great if we could come up with a better measure of consumer choice that we currently use. If you have the choice between 2 ISPs but they both charge the same amount for the same service, you don’t really have a choice there…at least not a meaningful one.







  • Nobody wants to think of the guy in the latest drone video as the father of a 6 month old who’ll never know their father because he was drafted by an authoritarian government to fight in an unjust war. I’m sure a lot of those Russians are full on board with the war, but I’m certain a lot of them aren’t, too. Same reason people have such a hard time empathizing with both the Oct 7 victims of Hamas and the Palestinian people. It’s horror enough thinking of these things as good vs. evil…it’s so much worse when you see all the grey. As an American, I can’t help but see Israel making the same mistakes we did after Sept 11. I’m sure they feel the same rage and fear I felt then, and I imagine it’s making them blindly lust for revenge just like I did. It’s all just so fucking bleak how easy it is to convince ourselves that our enemies aren’t people.






  • I kinda get where you’re coming from… but just as an easy example…

    well-informedly isn’t a word.

    I have now told you what is and isn’t a word, dispote you explicitly not consenting to me doing so. What happens now?

    In this case? It isn’t a big deal. You can tell me to pound sand or ignore me or try to get into a flame war with me over it, but your lack of given consent doesn’t inherently prevent me from doing anything to you so I wouldn’t agree that its just the way things are naturally.

    There are cases where it is much more important. If what you stated were true, there would be no concept of rape because nobody could do that to you without your consent, and if you have consent, it’s not rape. Same with murder… the closest thing would be assisted suicide. I’d also argue that the Palestinians haven’t consented to what is happening there. In each of these scenarios, one entity refused to consent, but it didn’t impact the other perpetrator from continuing because the victim didn’t have enough strength or weaponry or whatever (a bigger stick).

    I honestly don’t see how you can have a society without both a mechanism to determine what the shared rules are, someone with a big enough stick to enforce those shared rules. Obviously, the tricky part then becomes ensuring that the enforcers only use their stick when its appropriate. Otherwise, you just end up with authoritarianism.