railcar @ railcar @midwest.social

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4 mo. ago

Adding this for extra absurdity: going in no one knows, no one at all, how much your fees will be. Prices are negotiated between the insurance companies and health care providers. Until they send in the billing codes, pray they get them right, get proper authorization (from insurance, not your doctor) then go through with the treatment and finally issue a bill, which gets processed by the insurance company again - at that last step then and only then do you get a surprise bill for your share of the costs. It can take months. For a stay like yours, it would be anybody's guess.

Simple procedures planned in advance, you MIGHT get a price, but that will almost certainly miss things like incidental costs or direct fees from doctors or other practitioners who all invoice separately.

It depends on your insurance. You might hit a deductible and only owe a few thousand dollars, or you might be bankrupt.

Doing better until you happen to incur a medical emergency, then bankrupt.

He's as Catholic as Trump is born-again evangelical. They are just pandering

This is pretty much all you need to know about the state of the United States. It's being run by 10 year old imbeciles.

I doubt he'd accept organs of a different race.

Time to sprinkle DRM magic on every Windows application

In ye olde days software was obscenely expensive. That $74 is $260 inflation adjusted. Imagine losing your Word Perfect disks to an accident. That was a $2000 investment in today's dollars. Which means Zork II cost more than the latest Zelda. There was a reason people tied up phone lines for hours to get on the local BBS.

Replying to give you an extra boost. If your courses are remote or have online exams, you may need to install spyware onto your computer. I'm re-imaging my wife's computer this weekend because of it...

Yeah but private enterprise didn't. And if commercial, Leo can buy it without a warrant

Agreed - for someone moving from Windows / Mac, the immutables and flatpak are the way to go now. It's going to take a bit for the Ubuntu / Mint crowd to change their song. Bazzite in particular is a huge olive branch to the gamers. Even for someone who is "tinkering" learning distrobox and/or flatseal can enable most things you would ever want to tinker with on a desktop. If you are really developing something, chances are that you use containers or a VM anyway.

I have to concur on flatpaks though: they have room for improvement. More validation / trust is needed, and the options are wide open. For non-technical users, the *surety and security *isn't necessarily on par with the app stores of Microsoft, Apple & Google - though the experience is getting there.

Mass adoption won't come easily. People treat social media just like broadcast and print mass media: they want to follow big names and brands. It's a change in mindset looking for niche communities instead. Look at Bluesky, it didn't really take off until big Twitter accounts moved and brought their minions with them.

Using computers since before GUI was available... Sometimes I think we ought to go back to it

If you had installed bazzite those kids would worship you

I sick of the red state garbage. Nearly every "red" state has "blue" cities. Stop blaming entire populations, age groups or other demographics. You're just falling for the divide and conquer message they want to use against everyone.

Late to the party, but I've read that OP is going to be the sole admin. Do Not Do This. I admire what you are trying to do, but ultimately, you will have no rest, no vacation, no backup for yourself. The hardware & software aren't the issue here - it is the human support of those services. You will put a single point of failure on yourself, and likewise your peers.

Many of the FOSS projects you mentioned have commercial services. SAAS exists for a reason. By subscribing to those services as a business, you underwrite their ability to provide the software for free to the community. It's a win-win.

I just use SMB shares on my NAS. Why over think it?

This has been going on since the early 1990s. Just keep up the fight.

check out OPNsense routers and use your existing equipment only as access points. You can then make firewall rules to block them from phoning home. protectli sells some inexpensive models.

This reads like an angry old man complaining how the internet was better back in my day. It may have been better, but it didn't have every human being plus armies of bots. It was not user friendly. It was hard. So hard most people didn't bother with much more than email. Neither is the fediverse easy. Facebook, xitter, reddit, Instagram etc... they are as easy as passively watching television or listening to radio. They require no thought, or even much interaction. There are so many trackers across the web that they already know you and what bullshit you'll eat. That's both their greatest secret to success and their greatest danger to society.