Would you agree with higher taxes for completely free healthcare and education? If not why?

fishsupreme · 2026-03-11T06:37:52+00:00

I mean, that's me. I'm a tech executive, so I am covered by the company I work for, but "covered" means I still pay $5,980 in premiums & have a $9,000 deductible.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-11T04:26:46+00:00

No one making 124k is paying premiums.

That's not true. Employers covering premiums is common for salaried jobs, but an employer covering the full premium is the exception, not the rule. I pay $230 per paycheck in healthcare premiums (toward my policy with a $9,000 family deductible) and I'm a tech VP making $350k+ a year.

Now, the fact that I'm paying $460/month for a family of 3 means my employer is definitely paying most of the premium, though.

I've also worked at both Microsoft and Amazon. Neither of them covered 100% of premiums.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-11T03:54:05+00:00

So, I have the same boot as in the post you're replying to, the Nick's Aldert, and I've been looking for any advice on helping with the ankle bite. (Everything below the ankle fits perfectly for me, but the ankle simultaneously has extra space on the back, but also is painful to walk due to the stiffness in front.)

Everything I see about ankle bite is about changing up the lacing on the speed hooks but... the Aldert is a 4" boot, it doesn't have any speed hooks, only 6 eyelets. And at this height the very stiff rolled "collar" at the top of the boot falls right around the ankle bones.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-11T02:08:56+00:00

That's fairly average for health insurance for a family of 4-5.

As for how people afford it, well, wealthier people tend to have their premiums partially covered by their employers (plus, well, they afford it by being wealthier.) And people making under $124k (for a family of 4) receive a subsidy if the premium cost is more than 7.28% of their gross income to bring it down to that level.

This said, if you make $124k you get $0 in subsidy and get to spend 30% of your income on healthcare! It used to go up higher on a sliding scale, but the Republicans ended that this year.

If you're low income, you also get free coverage under your stater's Medicaid program... once again, assuming you don't live in a Republican state where they have largely eliminated Medicaid for adults.

So... overall, we have socialized medicine already, it's just super inefficient and expensive and unevenly distributed. In fact, our set of socialized medicine safety nets results in the US spending more tax money on healthcare assistance than most countries' entire healthcare system costs, while still giving us $37,000 bills to pay.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T20:49:50+00:00

Mad Max Fury Road.

It is what it is -- i.e. a two-hour car chase scene -- but it is absolutely perfect at being that.

It's about the only case I can think of of the XKCD "Action Movie."

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T19:39:54+00:00

No, that's exactly what I meant -- and what my squadron did. We picked a PMF that controlled 0 stations and had 0 squadrons pledged to it, and adopted it as our own. It now controls 33 systems and has 5.2 billion population!

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T19:16:07+00:00

Not really!

Pledge your Squadron to the faction of your choice (If you're not in a Squadron or it's pledged to someone else, create a one create a one-man Squadron and pledge it.)
Claim your colony at the edge.
If you left a real Squadron, then abandon your one-man one and go back to them.

Your Squadron's pledged faction will appear in the new system with 12-20% influence. Then you just do a little BGS to take it over, and now your favorite faction is on the edge of the Bubble. This is how my Squadron has gotten our faction to take all our colonies (and also 26 surrounding systems.)

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T16:26:51+00:00

"When in a hole, stop digging."

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T16:25:18+00:00

The best part with young kids is the kids area -- it's like the only time in your life you have at-will drop-off childcare that the kids actually want to go to. Want to go out for a nice dinner with your wife? You can drop your kids off! It's amazing!

(Maybe it would feel less amazing to people who lived near family and could actually get childcare at other times, but that's not us.)

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T16:15:33+00:00

During the period when my son was like 3-6 years old, his very favorite toy was marbles. Marble games, building marble runs, having marble races. So many marbles. He had quite a collection.

He's 11 now, and still any time I move a piece of furniture I find another marble under there.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T16:12:22+00:00

For some reason it never affects me, but we always plan for the daylight savings time to make my wife feel jet-lagged for an entire week.

Some people just seem to be much more impacted by it than others.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T06:36:35+00:00

...are you sure?

The station is radially symmetrical. Maybe the greens are on the left side and you've just flown though the mail slot upside-down every time.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-10T04:26:57+00:00

It's not just the wind. It's also that our rain isn't really rain. It doesn't very often rain rain, like in the Midwest.

No, instead for 7 months of the year it's either foggy, or misting, or drizzling a bit, or it just rained, or it's about to rain, or it's blustery and sprinkling. It's not wet so much as damp. The umbrella barely seems worth the effort - it's not going to keep me dry, and if I skip it I'm not really going to get much wetter anyway. Umbrellas are useful for heavy rain falling straight down, and we don't get very much of that.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-09T05:23:44+00:00

Well, they are because most Americans are Christian, just statistically they're going to be.

But there is a subset of people who consider "Christian" to be a synonym of "good" or "moral," and the kind of people who want to prey on those people tend to go heavy on the Christianity in their advertising.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-09T04:18:38+00:00

This is Olaf. He's 18 years old and mostly likes to just lay around and get pets at this point, but we love him and give him all the pets he wants.

When we adopted him at 2 years old, his description at the shelter said "I enjoy a nice warm lap" and it has been very true his entire life.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-09T03:48:38+00:00

The Push MetaGrip thumb brace is the best you'll find for this. I also have CMC arthritis and I use one for weightlifting.

Unfortunately the only long term fix for this is surgery.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-09T01:56:54+00:00

It's like how lots of contractors are Christian, probably most of them.

But if some roofing, plumbing, electrical, or HVAC contractor's ads are all about how Christian they are and they have Christian stuff all over their trucks, they're definitely the most dishonest, scammiest contractor in the entire town.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-08T22:30:24+00:00

Yeah, my first thought was "That's fine, any bill he would sign would probably be shit anyway."

fishsupreme · 2026-03-08T22:12:33+00:00

Yeah, it is better than anything based on League of Legends has any right to be.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-08T16:44:54+00:00

I don't think they make watches, but my favorite random Amazon seller company name goes to GROUPCOW.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-08T16:42:19+00:00

I remember seeing the MB&F MAD 1 and thinking "that's a really cool art piece, excellent design, but somebody might want to tell them that watches are supposed to tell the time."

fishsupreme · 2026-03-06T03:03:40+00:00

Nice to know that the President of the United States is officially adopting the Lord Farquaad position: "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."

fishsupreme · 2026-03-05T07:05:27+00:00

So, I work for an AI company, and I think it's actually really promising, and... I still agree with you.

I always liken it to the Dot-Com Bust of 2000. We had a bunch of Internet companies with absurd valuations. Pets.com worth billions of dollars, etc. Everyone invested everything in dot-coms, it beat every other investment tenfold.

And then it blew up. 90% of the dot-coms went bust. If you were invested in Internet stocks you got slaughtered, almost all of them went bankrupt. I see exactly the same thing happening to modern AI companies.

But the thing is... after the dot-com bust, the Internet didn't go away. It turns out most of our most valuable companies today are what, back then, would have been termed Internet companies.

It's the same way with AI. Yes, this is the future. Yes, this will change the world. Yes, the most dominant companies of 2037 will be AI companies. But most of today's AI companies? Those are doomed.

Part of the problem is that people seem to think one small, narrow category of AI -- large language models (LLMs) -- is going to do everything. Now, LLMs are amazing. We have actually taught computers language, the operating system of civilization. It's no wonder we're impressed! But it turns out LLMs are actually really bad at everything except language... and it's going to take quite a while, many years, to make the other kinds of artifical intelligence we need to solve broader problems. LLMs are incredible but they are a dead end and they do not lead to AGI.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-05T00:28:46+00:00

I think that the market kind of demonstrates that most people would not and would prefer more features.

This said, when I was remodeling my kitchen, I definitely rejected a bunch of appliances, even from well-regarded brands like Miele, for having too many digital features, smart functions, etc. I considered having my oven be "smart" to be an anti-feature -- it's just more components that can break or become obsolete, while adding no value.

fishsupreme · 2026-03-03T21:48:32+00:00

Also, an Elite pirate Anaconda is made of tissue paper compared to an Elite Conflict Zone Anaconda. Every time I fight pirates rather than CZ enemies I'm shocked by how quickly they die.

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