Most people tend to buy the imperfect cheap product rather than the better, more expensive product.

If we refused to buy crap, they wouldn’t make it. If we refused to buy it, they couldn’t make it.

They sell us crap because collectively we prefer it.

More likely tribalism.

I’m ready to weep from this.

Every time any problem comes up, my current manager insists we must use Excel to solve it.

Whenever anyone talks about how high interest rates are now, I remember when my wife and I bought our house in 1997. We were pre-approved for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at 7.5%, and we were told to take it.

What we were actually told was, "you’ll never see a rate this low again.

When people ask me why I like Linux, my go-to reason is my main personal machine. I use it for everything I do outside of work, including running my Emby server.

I built it from $500 worth of parts 13 years ago. I’ve kept updating the os and applications. It’s starting to slow down a bit after the last os upgrade, but it’s still plenty usable.

I am getting concerned about the spinning platters. As far as I am aware, Linux won’t prevent an ancient hard disk drive from reaching the natural end of is life.

It’s probably time to move on to a new machine. Well, new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and disks at least.

Pong.

I work at a large, private university health system.

Annual up front cost for insurance is $4967 for medical insurance and $609 for dental. Those cover me, my wife, and two of my three children. The insurance is a plan funded by my employer, but managed by Independence Blue Cross, AKA “Personal Choice”.

There are three “tiers” of coverage.

First tier is for facilities that are part of my employer. Generally, for procedures performed at my employer’s facility there is no additional charge. For a primary care provider who is part of my health system, there would be a $20 copay per visit. Specialist would also be $20, and an ER visit would be $200.

There is an “in network” tier, made up of external providers that accept personal choice. Primary care copay is $35, specialist is $50, ER $200.

The third tier is “out of network”. If we see someone out of network, we would have to pay them directly, then try to get partial reimbursement from insurance.

There’s also a prescription plan, but we get a discount by using the hospital’s outpatient pharmacy.

Everyone always talks about the cost to give birth. All three of my kids were born at the hospital where I work, and none of the births cost us any additional money.

https://youtu.be/PZbqAMEwtOE

Edit: if it were actually a commercial, it would be the best commercial ever created.

not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack

As we’ve discovered, both can be true.

On Friday, as we were running around the hospital where we work trying to get every computer working again, we were following the work-around to rename the Crowdstrike folder under C:\Windows\system32\drivers to “bad-CrowdStrike”.

When my coworker was typing the rename command, instead of typing “cro TAB”, he started typing “clo TAB”. He’d ask me why it wasn’t finding it, and I’d point out the typo.

I started saying, it’s not “CloudStrike”, it’s “CrowdStrike”.

By the end of the day, we were both a little loopy. I started typing “CloudStrike”, and cursing him out for screwing with my head. By the end of the day I wasn’t sure what it was either.

CloudStrike

CrownStrike

ClownStrike

It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.

No certainly not, but I didn’t see it on the list yet.

It’s it too soon to say, “letting Crowdstrike push updates to all your windows workstations and servers”

My mom often used two:

“Useless as tits on a bull” (often referencing her husband, my dad)

And also, “shit fire and save matches”, which I never understood to actually have a meaning, it was more like just an exclamation of surprise.

Or it shouldn’t be a fine, but criminal prosecution for the executives responsible.

I just had the odd experience of using a manufacturer’s discount card to pick up a medication for my wife. The medication is relatively expensive and seldom covered by insurance.

According to the information on the card, if you have private insurance which covers the medication, the discount card covers the co-pay, so you pay nothing. However, if your insurance doesn’t cover the medication, the discount card covers the cost, and you still pay nothing.

Our insurance didn’t cover the cost, and we didn’t pay anything for the medication.

I don’t understand how that works.

I think it’s important to remember that the USA isn’t a single culture. Things vary dramatically even within a single state to say nothing of differences between states.

In some areas prom is very important. In others, not so much.

Only one of my three kids went to prom (Eastern PA).

Prom in my high school was a relatively big deal. You rented a tux or bought a dress. Some people would rent a limo. The prom was held in some kind of banquet hall with a fairly fancy meal. There’d be a DJ and dancing.

My wife was one year behind me in high school, and we attended FOUR proms (my junior prom, then the next year her junior prom and my senior prom, then the next year I came back for her senior prom).

I think for most people it’s just an opportunity to get dressed up, have a good meal, and dance. If you’re already dating someone, it obviously has more significance, but I had plenty of friends who just took another friend as a date for the prom and others who didn’t go with anyone. However, there was a lot of pressure to be a “couple”, even if you weren’t actually romantically involved with your “date”.

Typically the parents take pictures of the kids in their dresses and tuxedos. From the parents’ point of view, it’s a moment to sort of take note of how your kids are maturing and think about what the future holds for them. Lots of thinking about how old you are ;-)

Often there’s an after party that goes on late into the morning, and for many kids the after party is more important than the prom.

I think social media has had an effect on what prom is, but it also has the effect of distorting what it is to people who only experience it remotely. When you’re seeing the crazy YouTube videos and Instagram posts, you’re not seeing what prom is. You’re seeing a snapshot of what those particular proms are.

the 1950s. This was a high water mark for conservatism in the U.S., and in order to go on any date at least one parent, usually the girl’s dad, had to be present.

Perhaps this was a regional thing.

I was born in 1970, but from what my parents have described, dates were not chaperoned in the 50s unless you happened to have particularly strict parents. Like maybe if you were Amish or something.

Here’s the only thing I was able to find online about dating in the 50’s

https://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/projects/sombat.html

Came here looking for this.

https://www.stroke.org/en/about-stroke/stroke-symptoms

I run Linux on my personal machine.

My needs aren’t particularly demanding. Web browsing, watching streaming services, accounting software, some low impact games, 3D modeling, and running a video server.

I assembled my machine from $500 worth of parts 12 years ago. In between, I’ve added some RAM, and about 8TB of mirrored disk to store movies for the video server.

Admittedly, I’m starting to be concerned about the age of the disks, and I think I’d like a better processor, but money is tight.

Given the age of the thing, there’s a chance that it’s just going to drop dead one of these days, but it’s been running for years without me having to do anything but install updates for the OS.