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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • Signal no longer requires a phone number. You can now create an account. Not sure if that helps your outlook on it, but yeah. It was a fairly recent update that this was rolled out.

    Edit: being told we still do need numbers to register. I haven’t gotten a new phone since well before the change was made, so I haven’t actually created an account and gone through the process. It looks like I misinterpreted what was going on when I read the changelog.





  • Admin and billing would still exist, but it would be savagely curtailed. We now have to account for every insurance agreement between insurance companies and healthcare systems. These can vary on a hospital by hospital basis causing the incredibly complex system of pricing that are currently used. A single payer system would vastly decrease the need for this administrative overhead. Of course this would result in lost jobs, and an honest assessment of M4A would acknowledge this. Bernie Sanders 2016 M4A bill had funding for the workers having to transition jobs during this change if I remember correctly.



  • In the book “Highrisers”, which is about the Cabrini-Greens housing developement in Chicago, there’s a short section talking about how certain buildings were turned over to the tennents in a management capacity. It didn’t fix all of the problems, and it didn’t save Cabrini-Greens, but it did have some measure of success over beurocratic management by CHA, which was a joke. (FWIW I read this several years ago, so take it with a grain of salt)

    That model has stuck out in my mind since. Why not have a simple budget for each building and let the work of maintenance be managed by the people who live there, with resources from the appropriate housing authority. The US is so fucking paternalistic about poverty and the people living in it. We build huge beurocracies incapable of truly scaling that then result in obsene waste like shown above. With some management some of that could be put on tennents, with them keeping some of benefits as well.







  • For me using signal wasn’t about becoming Jason Bourne, it was about changing the threat model. I don’t have any dilusions of grandeur that I can’t be owned if I’m targeted, but you know what? My calls and texts aren’t stored with my phone company with a direct link to the Government and advertisers. That may be low hanging fruit, but that’s dealing with most of the issues the average user is going to run into. I’d suggust that the step from SMS to Signal is of greater benifit to a normal user than from signal to something more advanced. And, fwiw it’s open sourced and audited, which gives me more confidence than something like imessage or WhatsApp, despite similarities im encryption schemes.


  • The other commenter is comparing FSA to HSA which is right I think. I think FSAs work for some people (I never understood who though) but there’s literally no downside to an HSA. It basically can end up as another tax sheltered investment account, if you have enough money/luck to be able to pay off your healthcare costs out of pocket.

    Like everything in the US, it’s amazing for people with money. Less useful for those that don’t. But at the very least it provides a buffer for the insane deductibles that US persons need to pay to keep living.


  • I’ve seen this in banking too. I have my health savings account with a provider that charges a percentage of your holdings as the admin fee. That can add up. My old one is a flat rate per month. I have been transferring the money every year to the flat rate provider and the process is completely arcane.

    1. Find the document on their site. The correct document isn’t named clearly like the document you use to pull other providers into your account.

    2. You have to print it and write by hand (not an editable PDF)

    3. Assuming you’ve done this correctly you must mail them the document, like he said, with a stamp like a fucking caveman.

    4. Behind the scenes the process is even more arcane, because again they claim they PHYSICALLY MAIL A CHECK to the new provider like fucking cavemen.

    It’s really clear that this is in bad faith. Banking “innovation” is a joke in the US. I know that everyone hates crypto up in this bitch (I get it), but a little self custody would go a long way in situations like this.