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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.