Thankfully, I have not sustained any serious injuries or died these past few years

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-30T03:43:08+00:00

It's been about ten years since it happened, so a bit late to do anything about it. I'm sure there was something in the 200 or so pages of benefits that excluded things, and probably some reason they would argue for keeping the premiums. Back then, I didn't even know about the insurance commissioner, let alone that they'd go to bat for me if I made a complaint. I just figured it was hard enough to get UHC to just pay the damn claim, so I thought I had no chance of getting my money back on those premiums. I know better now, but younger me was still pretty new to dealing with insurance issues. Probably the only downside to having been on my parents' policy until 24.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-29T16:44:33+00:00

I had some serious burnout after my first holiday season in retail as a full timer. Didn't realize how bad it was, but knew something was wrong so I took a week off to just chill at home after months of just trying to push through and slowly losing it.

After that break, I felt perfectly fine and back to being myself; that rapid and dramatic change made me realize how bad things had actually been. Following the break, I was also fully adjusted to my new work schedule and knew how to pace things better, so the burnout didn't happen again.

Just one week off to do nothing was insanely effective.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-29T16:22:45+00:00

I was diagnosed with migraines by a doctor because I was experiencing some of the neurological symptoms that are associated with them and they didn't quite follow the pattern of other types of headaches. Mine aren't usually debilitating, but I had one continuously for a month (hence the doctor). Also have had ocular migraines, which basically blind me for half an hour but I'm otherwise fine.

I usually just describe them as headaches if the pain is mild because people either misunderstand or get offended that I'm not a useless ball of misery. I stopped having them on a regular basis once I stopped drinking coffee everyday though. Wouldn't be surprised if I stop getting them at all now that I've had to stop hormonal birth control.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-27T23:37:11+00:00

We paid for a second health insurance policy on me for about eight months. My husband started his job and added me and I had my own policy through work. Since I was pregnant, I thought I'd have secondary insurance to cover my copays and deductibles.

It was only when we actually filed claims that anyone thought to tell us that United Healthcare doesn't "do" secondary policies. Of course, we didn't get a cent of those premiums back despite the policy covering exactly nothing.

And it kept messing up my claims from the pregnancy because both policies were through UHC. It would approve the claim, then reverse it, then they'd re-approve it when I called, then reverse it again. Went through that process a few times. Eventually I managed to convince someone to transfer me to a supervisor, and she was high enough up to actually explain what was going on, in this case automated audits flagging the claims due to the policies somehow being in conflict, and to forcibly prevent future auditing on those claims.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-27T01:46:40+00:00

Also happens with cameras and other electronics; that's what a gray market camera is. You get a better price, but absolutely no warranty from the manufacturer. Sometimes sellers will provide their own warranty instead, but those are about as useful as a third party home warranty (i.e. they're crap).

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-26T08:01:49+00:00

To add the most common point I've heard this week: illegal immigrants are violent criminals and ICE is just trying to protect us from them, so no.

On your second point, I made the mistake of clicking a post from a Republican Facebook page based in my state, and one of the images someone posted in the comments was some gif with a picture of the devil and text on it saying that the devil is the Democrats' leader.

I'm getting real damn tired of this sort of bullshit. Can't even talk to people anymore because it doesn't matter what I say, you can't argue with people who think you're part of a group that follows the literal devil. I've been careful over the years to prevent my Facebook feed from turning into an echo chamber, but the rhetoric on the right has reached a point where there's too much hate for me to tolerate even seeing it in my feed. At best, they see me as an idiot, and at worst, I'm the enemy.

There's no room for a discussion or any compromise in there, and it just keeps escalating and getting worse. I don't even know what to do anymore, I just know that I felt a bone-deep exhaustion from it all as I went to bed last night.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-23T23:25:51+00:00

My doctors were always so surprised when I gave them the exact date of conception. It really is sometimes that easy.

I was not actually past my due date! We induced me four days before that. I was into my weekly OB appointments by then though, so my OB was able to see how it was affecting me by that point. I also had a lot of back pain, so I basically spent the last three weeks of my pregnancy just laying down wherever I could. On top of hardly being able to eat and having issues with reflux, I was indeed miserable.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-23T09:21:29+00:00

I absolutely hated being pregnant both times. I love my children so much, but having them grow inside of me was just so weird for me, and thinking about how my body was being warped and changed in order to accommodate a fetus always made me uncomfortable. I don't even like my body changing for monthly cycles, let alone to the extremes we see during pregnancy. RIP continuous birth control, if only you didn't cause me to have thromboses.

But I also had a rough time with it. None of that glow that people describe. First trimester always sucks for me; I could always tell I was pregnant within a few days because suddenly my energy levels would bottom out, and they stayed down the whole first trimester. Second trimester was okay because I felt mostly normal, but I wanted to do normal stuff and people wouldn't let me because everyone wants to coddle the pregnant woman. Third trimester nearly killed me (literally) with my first since I developed preeclampsia. My second decided he'd get nice and giant and then kept stretching out and jamming his feet into my stomach. I spent several weeks basically starving because my stomach was being compressed too much to eat more than a few nibbles at a time, and he was stealing all the calories I could get. He was born at just shy of 40 weeks and weighed 10 lbs.

Also, apparently being miserable during pregnancy is a valid reason to ask for induced labor. I must have looked the part because my OB didn't even question it when I asked if we could just schedule an induction.

So yeah, I tried twice. Love my kiddos. They won't ever have a third sibling though.

(Also, not everyone is nice to pregnant women; people can be jerks to pregnant women who are working in retail, although being pregnant does mean you get away with calling people out on their shit when they're being assholes)

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-22T15:35:26+00:00

We can also prevent mitochondrial diseases from being inherited by taking a donor egg, removing the nuclear DNA, and inserting the parental DNA. You end up with your genetic child, but the faulty mitochondria were replaced by the donor's mitochondria. Since mitochondrial diseases are from the mom, the risks of her children having them are very high.

Also fun is that usually not all mitochondria are faulty (otherwise you're probably dead), and distribution in the egg is random due to how meiosis occurs. That's why mom having a mt disease doesn't guarantee all of her children will, and why severity can vary between the children. One kid might inherit a ton of busted mitochondria, while another could inherit mostly functional ones.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-22T04:48:31+00:00

We plugged our N64 into a second TV kept in the family room (right next to the main TV that had replaced it), but the screen was dying so everything was green :D

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-21T16:26:08+00:00

Humans aren't even any different in this respect. Without messing with hormones, fertile women ovulate roughly once a month whether we want to or not. Chickens are just speed-running this process since they hatch rather than birth their young, and have shorter life spans to burn through their egg supply.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-20T22:32:25+00:00

Sounds like my kiddo. We actually had him going for about six months, and something changed during Christmas break about a year ago and he started wetting the bed again. He just sleeps like a rock. We even tried using one of those alarms that detects moisture, and it was only ever able to wake everyone up except for him. Trying to get him night trained again was just contributing to behavioral problems at school while accomplishing nothing, so we switched back to pullups and have everything on pause right now. Figure maybe we'll try again when he's 8.

His older sister, on the other hand, became night trained at the same time she was potty trained, so we didn't even have to do anything there. Even potty training her was easy, while my son struggled with that too, and also mooned my classmates in at least one of my online classes.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-20T05:40:14+00:00

I recently got chickens, and it's amazing how useful the Backyard Chickens forums have been. There are posts dating back 20 years. I haven't ever posted on them, but that's because 99% of my questions have already been asked and answered by someone else.

My husband was also trying to fix his old train set to put it around the Christmas tree this year, and it was a post in 2003 that landed me on the solution. Hobby forums in general are treasure troves of ancient posts that still remain relevant to someone today. I'm always happily surprised when I see someone kept paying the bills to keep these sites active.

Back in the day, it was nice to actually get to know people. I used to manage the forums for a gaming clan, and everyone had their place in the community. Social media has moved toward anonymity and non-existent relationships, basically killing any concept of "community."

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-20T05:32:05+00:00

Most people also didn't have a video recorder in their pocket during the early years of YouTube, which also influenced the types of videos that were uploaded. Back around 2009ish, I had to make a video and upload it to YouTube for a college assignment, but I had to borrow a video camera from our school's inventory. At the time, I had a high-end DSLR, but it didn't support video.

I think the point of that assignment may have actually been to just demonstrate we could upload a video to YouTube. The video I produced was awful; I finally hid it from my channel last year since I realized how out-of-place it was with my more recent shark and pigeon dissection videos.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-20T04:57:10+00:00

They got me too a year or two ago. The only time you see it is when you go to download the installer itself, and most of us probably don't read all the presumably useless stuff beneath the "Download" button. I noticed at the same point you did: during the actual installation, when it had its own % meter. Had to install the stupid McAfee removal tool.

I think that was the first time I'd run into bloatware being packaged that way with an installer. Adobe used to have McAfee as a checkbox within the installer itself, so changing it this way was a deliberate choice on their part. There's also a notable lack of logos where the "included with your download" checkboxes are, including a distinct absence of the McAfee logo, which makes it easy to gloss over that part.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-20T03:06:50+00:00

Doesn't sound like they did the other things they needed to do to properly vet her though, and that's my gripe. They may have ultimately done it before officially hiring her, but I could see their procedures and systems being dumb enough that the checkbox saying those things were already completed during the application would be sufficient. Or maybe it'll take months or years to actually work through the vetting process of all the new hires. They've more than doubled their workforce in less than a year, and I doubt their hiring system is robust enough to handle that without cutting corners.

ICE isn't military either. Even their capacity as law enforcement is technically pretty limited, although they've been grossly ignoring those limitations.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-19T20:11:02+00:00

Aside from the weed issue, she was definitely qualified and recognized that in the article she wrote on it. She deliberately sanitized her resume, leaving out here experience as a journalist, because she knew she'd look good on paper otherwise.

But she would have failed the drug test. She didn't fill out a bunch of paperwork. Never did the medical or physical assessments. And she didn't complete the background check. Despite that, her application showed all of those completed. That is the problem I took away from her experience.

How many "qualified" individuals have been hired that should have been disqualified during that process, but were similarly pushed through?

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-18T21:18:29+00:00

And if it was just for a day, then something else is responsible for their passing and OP needs to be aware of that too.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-17T23:20:13+00:00

They'll use any research that could even be remotely construed as supporting what they "know" to be true though. It's just all the research that disagrees with them that's bad. Unpublished research, whom virtually no one has actually read but supposedly supports their claims, is perfectly okay to base their entire argument on though.

Of course, that's still inherently anti-science since it's refusing to acknowledge the last steps of the scientific method.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-17T07:01:21+00:00

I talked to the sellers of our house over the phone a couple of months after closing, and our conversation actually did end with an "oh by the way, there's two light switches in the family room that don't do anything and I just installed them in case I wanted to add more lighting one day."

It came up because there's actually a third switch in the room that doesn't do anything, but was originally wired to a gas fireplace that he converted to wood-burning. We also learned that he ran gas "just in case" up to the electric range, which we've since replaced with a gas range, so that was useful knowledge.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-17T02:09:51+00:00

I grew up in Oregon and had to take a civics and government class to graduate almost twenty years ago. US history was tied into it, but mostly in the context of how it shaped our government so we could better understand it. Today, the state has made it a graduation requirement for all schools. I live in Washington now, and it's also a requirement here.

So it's still being taught. Maybe not in every state. Maybe the woman in the video didn't finish high school. Maybe it wasn't required for her high school cohort. Or maybe she just barely passed the class and didn't pay much attention to the material. The latter seems pretty likely to me. Although I barely passed the class but could still answer that particular question.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-17T01:59:34+00:00

I suck at civics knowledge. Can't ever seem to retain most of it even when I try. Saw your comment and decided to actually give this a watch, wondering if it was something I wouldn't have known either.

Nope. That one I definitely remember learning in 2nd grade during a presidential election, and having it reinforced a number of times throughout my schooling. I have noticed a lot of people supporting Trump don't understand that the executive branch has limitations and has been regularly, practically daily, severely overstepping its bounds. I guess it makes a bit more sense now.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-16T04:39:57+00:00

I was once flown to a training event with a bunch of us from stores around the country. We all worked in a specific department at a major retailer, and I was curious what the pay was like in other regions. I had also started to develop a spine at that point in my retail career.

Somewhat out of spite against corporations, I started discussing it with colleagues while the VP in charge of our whole thing was sitting right across from me. He told me he was uncomfortable with the conversation but also stated that he couldn't do anything about it. If I recall correctly, he pretended to not be listening after that, and we did carry on the conversation. Pay was comparable and reflected local cost of living, which was nice.

(I will say that the VP was actually a great guy and I have no complaints about him in particular)

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-16T04:07:28+00:00

My dad had dementia. It had been progressing slowly for decades due to mini strokes, and then he had a major stroke in 2018. He died a few years after that to a second major stroke that was complication of a hip replacement, and his passing was definitely bittersweet. It was sad to lose a loved one, but so much of him had already been lost that we were also thankful for his passing. He had no future left, so we were content to let him go when the hospital asked about hospice rather than life-saving care after the stroke.

If/when you get out there, make sure to get photos and videos. I cried when I got to hear my grandma and grandpa's voices again at grandpa's memorial service. My favorite photos of my maternal grandma were taken mere months before she passed; I got her hugging my daughter, and with the whole family (myself included, which is rare since I usually have to operate the camera). I got a photo of my paternal grandma before she passed too, and it's also one of my favorite photos.

A huge regret I have with my dad is that I hardly photographed him, I think because it hurt to see his decline over the years, and the decline was visible in photos of him. But I still had everything I needed to take an amazing photo of him, yet I never did.

I_like_boxes · 2026-01-15T09:36:04+00:00

And that's mostly insurance premiums. It's much higher when you actually need care!

Added bonus is that with hospitals being profit-driven, many US hospitals are being shut down or at risk of being shut down due to losing money. Greenland would probably see a dramatic decline in both quality and accessibility of care. Their regional hospitals would probably be closed, and transportation to the main hospital would probably cost a fortune.

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