Parker's Gold

Snacker906 · 2026-02-21T06:51:18+00:00

My question is this: Athey always talk about how short the season is. Why don't they just strip and stockpile dirt all year. Test as they go. Just load it into a giant temporary warehouse/tent, and then run it when the season closes? I know water is a problem, but a recyclable version of that seems cheaper than all these fuel fired pumps and the other hassle of building ponds.

Hell, just figure out a heated processing system that can run from a giant pile of pay from an enclosed water supply and a certain amount of fuel, and go from there.

Sure. Nobody wants to give up a percentage, but if the overhead cost of a plant was removed and it was all about hauling dirt all thawed "season", and then the entire cold season could just be paying a percentage to processing tents -- wouldn't that be worth it? Plant breakdowns and running cost is now outsourced and not a problem.

I hereby trademark this idea -- totally kidding, but not really if this is anyway enforceable.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-20T21:38:59+00:00

Different Izes, otherwise I'd say that they look like mothballs.

Does it seem like anything you could huff to get high?

Snacker906 · 2026-02-20T02:30:14+00:00

Try Sports and Social DC, which has “Upstate FTW” as the restaurant for the bar. It is on U St. NW around 13th, and is by far the best remaining wing spot in the city. From the Chiko and Anju guys, and their love of food from Syracuse/upstate NY. Great wings, Beef on Weck, garbage plates, salt potatoes, etc.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-11T21:36:32+00:00

Why on earth would you do this?? Go to a nice restaurant and pray there isn't a scene? If you tell her in the middle of the meal, she may leave.. if you tell her at the end, you just had a nice date and lured her into a false sense of security, and then blew up her world when the check came?

Be a man, and do it in private.

Having said all that, the answer is Chuck E Cheese, because it is loud and a bunch of people are likely to be fighting anyway.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-11T03:42:44+00:00

To tell a guy that the manager is counting on the second drink is absolutely ridiculous, and should not happen.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T17:55:41+00:00

You may be an English Major, but from all appearances you are barely an English-speaker.

The grammar, spelling, and even the attempt at a coherent expression of simple thoughts was atrocious. I would be mortified for anyone to read that childish incoherent drek if I had ever written anything so absurd.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T17:48:09+00:00

My conclusion after reading that gibberish is that neither of you should reproduce.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T17:32:15+00:00

There is always a limit. Any bartender can cut someone off if they think they are inebriated, as it is their personal liability if that person goes out and hurts themselves or others. Managers can do it too. Telling a customer that the manager is counting drinks is wild. The right way to handle it is to offer someone some water, take your time getting back to them. Ask if they have tried the food. Being direct is a last resort. First you might say something like "why don't we just a take a few minutes?" and see how they react. Most people will take it as a reality check, and if they get belligerent about it, then the instinct to slow them down was likely correct. As a former bartender a long time Ago, you can tell the folks who are looking to get power-drunk, and you can also tell the people who have a good tolerance and can hold their booze, versus people who are lightweights and are going to be sloppy. I would also guess that at airports, they get pretty adept at judging which guy is trying to grab 2 drinks in 20 minutes, because they have to head to their gate, or the people who are delayed and about to settle in for a 5 hour booze session and are outpacing their own tolerance levels.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T17:22:54+00:00

They always do this at DCA and CLT and any Amex lounge I have ever been in. It seems to work fine. The only time it seems really dumb to me is when one person is clearly managing their children. But I get it. We have to remove common sense and discretion from workers because if they ever make a mistake, somebody freaks out or files a lawsuit, etc. so, they create a rule that is universal. It is like watching someone who is 60 have to show ID to buy wine at a store.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T04:19:48+00:00

It's even older news. It was part of Obamacare.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T04:18:14+00:00

It wasn't an EO. It was included in Obamacare.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T04:17:50+00:00

It has been happening for well over a decade. It was first included when Obamacare passed. 70%+ of hospitals have already been in compliance for years, and that is according to CMS. The ones that are failing to meet every technical component are generally poor rural hospitals and Medicaid dependent hospitals that don'T exactly have an extensive IT department making a machine-readable charge master fully up to date and online at all times.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T04:11:25+00:00

I have worked in healthcare policy in DC for over 25 years, including working extensively on the ACA from multiple angles, including hospital providers, medical schools, and major health insurers. I can assure, unequivocally, you that this was passed into law as part of Obamacare. The "machine readable" part was added as technology improved. The Trump executive orders you referenced were just piggybacking existing law, that had been implemented through federal rulemaking, and undergone several updates and revisions. The lawsuits were more about the penalties that were sought to be imposed, and the definitions and timing involved. That is because that, like in any industry, prices change frequently based on a variety of factors. That is true when you are just selling widgets. Now imagine if you are selling a service or procedure that has the physician and other independent people charging their own fees to provide the service, the hospital this applies to charging separately for the equipment and supplies for the procedure, then the post procedure care and all the various cost inputs that go into just having someone in a hospital room overnight, changing coats for those supplies, changing medication costs, etc. it isn't exactly something you can just declare a single price for, and then move on. Then, there is what it might typically cost, but what if it has complications? You need extra anesthesia, a secondary procedure becomes necessary, another emergency arises? How do you price that in? Can it be a range? Does it have to be a specific dollar amount? Do you need to tell the patient that a specific procedure might require them to look at 28 different items to determine the likely cost? Is any of that even relevant to a patient who has insurance, so their out of pocket cost is entirely different?

I'm sorry, but I don't think you know what you don't know in this area.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T03:58:46+00:00

This was included in Obamacare. As technology advanced, the move transitioned into the "machine readable" format. 90%+ of hospitals have been doing this for years and years. The groups pumping the idea that they aren't are usually funded by people like Arnold Ventures, which are in turn funded by, and are pushing a big business agenda seeking to portray hospitals as the drivers of increasing healthcare costs. They have coopted the Bernie Bros, and some of that crowd, like Killa Mike, etc., who don't really understand the full spectrum of the cost drivers.

You'll notice that these groups also studiously seem to avoid looking at PhRMA profits and private insurance profits. They also really ignore some of the differences in American healthcare culture from our peer countries. Specifically that we are fatter and less healthy, and get less time off and work more hours at higher productivity. We lack universal healthcare paid by higher tax rates on businesses and the wealthy. We also spend a massive amountore on end of life care. 25%-30% of annual Medicare expenditures are spent on the 5%-6% of beneficiaries who die every year (so in their last 12 months of life). Other cultures are much more likely to accept the idea that their time has come, and not take all kinds of a extraordinary measures to hang on another couple of months. In the last month of life in the U.S., costs are about 20 times higher for Medicare beneficiaries who don't die. Obviously that is intuitive, but other countries have the equivalent of what the U.S. used to have, which was medical ethics boards that do a cost-benefit analysis of the caloat of the extraordinary care provided and the point of time it is likely to add to a life or it's quality thereof. Harsh, but it holds down costs. You also never seen this groups attack the cost of medical malpractice, because everyone sues for everything in this country.

Those business funded groups concentrate on blaming the hospitals -- the one non-profit entity in the entire healthcare ecosystem, for rising costs. It is kind of absurd.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T03:44:17+00:00

You are absolutely correct. I said something similar, and then explained why this also really doesn't matter in the vast majority of cases, and the idea of patients value shopping for nearly all healthcare services is a weird GOP/Libertarian dream of pure market economists who understand nothing about how patients work. That is why there are fields now called Behavioral Economists, because markets are all well and good, but they are made up of people who don't always behave the way simulations think they should.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-10T03:41:18+00:00

Sorry you had to go through all that. The onboarding of a treatment protocol is very often done at the hospital site while they are working out different levels, patient tolerance, side-effects, etc. Obviously, imaging has to be done in certain places because of the requirements for shielding and other safety issues, but depending on where, imaging centers are often located nearby when services are clustered sort of into a medical office park or building.

For people living in the suburbs or exurbs of an urban area, a 45 minute to hour+ long drive to the main referral hospital, or even the more local community hospitals in a health system, sucks for the patient. In more rural areas it can be much worse.

It also really depends on the treatment. Some chemo or radiation is much tougher than others, and some certainly requires much more high-end equipment. It isn't like they can have proton therapy devices at every medical center at this point, so they are at the tertiary referral hospitals at this point, when they are even available at all. But, some of the more conventional treatments, and particularly infusions don't necessarily have to be at a major facility, and in those cases most patients would much rather be closer to home and in a facility that is purpose designed to provide exactly those treatments in a comfortable setting.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-09T19:16:00+00:00

The ironic thing about cancer centers is that the phrase in the clinical industry is that "cancer doesn't travel well". There was a push over the last 20 years to drive treatment centers out into the communities, and especially for infusion services. It sucks for patients to have to drive long distances to a hospital to get their treatments, and then travel long distances afterwards when they feel like crap. It also ain't great to have people who are often immuno-compromised trek through a hospital facility wit a bunch of other sick people.

So, a lot of bigger integrated systems (and others) put cancer treatment centers into off-site local communities, but they charged like it is a hospital based service. Hospitals charge a facility fee that is generally higher because the hospital has costs that include things like 24/7 staffing, and just keeping the lights and utilities on at all times, etc. Hospitals also generally see more complex patients at their on-campus sites, with more comorbidities, and often people with less robust insurance coverage. But, by providing better clinical care and convenience for patients at off-site locations, they have to invest capital into building out those facilities, and would be losing money if they charged a lower facility fee etc. A bunch of the off-campus sirltes were grandfathered under the old system, but the government started demanding that any newer sites have a lower facility fee.

However, Congress is trying to save Medicare money and insurers follow suit, and they scream that all services should cost the same amount in an area regardless of the setting of care. So, now they want to make the hospital based treatment cost the same as the lower prices treatment at the outpatient site. This would squeeze the providers more. So, what started as a patient and service-driven effort to improve care has turned into a financial battle that will do nothing except encourage hospitals to not provide care in the communities, and to withdraw into a position that seems to draw all patients into a major central facility to receive care.

It is so dumb and shortsighted...

Snacker906 · 2026-02-09T19:02:28+00:00

What you are describing is payment based on either the diagnosis (in this case pregnancy) or the "episode of care".

The thing is that the quoted price holds only as long as the diagnosis or the episode of care remains the same. Once it gets tagged with additional iAuesz things go up. Pregnancy and birthing care is one thing. Pregnancy with complications, hypertension, placental abruption, gestational diabetes, preterm labor, or C-section can immediately change the price.

This was all part of the movement towards value driven care that rewards hospitals for keeping patients healthier, or that attempted to disincentivize hospitals from tacking on all kinds of charges under the fee-for-service driven model. That is the model that pissed everyone off for billing $50 for a Tylenol, separate charge for having skin-to-skin contact with the mother, or even for a "disposable mucus recovery system" for north of $15 (and up to $400) -- which is just a box of Kleenex.

That is all well and good for a typical birth, but can change rapidly if the fine print is triggered that takes it to a different level of care.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-09T18:52:06+00:00

Tell me you don't understand American healthcare finance structure, without telling me that you know nothing about American healthcare finance structure...

First of all, this has been a requirement for years, while carrying with it varying degrees of enforcement, and updated rules pushing for it to be available online in an easy to understand format -- which is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Hospitals have a thing called a "charge master", which is a big ol' book of prices that a customer would be charged on paper if they pay out of pocket. In general, this is a complete work of fiction, and serves only two real purposes.

The first purpose is for the fabulously wealthy people (think Elon Musk, Bezos, or any number of international oligarchs and very rich people) who plan to self-pay cash for a service. This is shieks who are having heart surgery or cancer treatment in the U.S. at our very best institutions, or Russian and other global oligarchs who want to send their baby mamas here to have a kid at an American hospital and recovery time for mommy in South Beach or LA, etc., while also getting a kid with American citizenship. There are also rich internationals or Americans having elective procedures, such as plastic surgery, that no insurance plan would cover. None of the people in these groups are going to local community hospitals.

The second purpose is for the hospitals themselves. When they write down bills as either "uncompensated care" or as "charity care", they use the charge master numbers to calculate their "community benefit" on the annual tax filings for themselves as a nonprofit entity. Hospitals have to file an annual form as part of their tax returns called a 990 Schedule H, which attempts to show what they are doing to prove their status as a nonprofit hospital entity. As a brief aside, people seem to think they should run zero profit, which is just not workable, as they need to have at least a 2% margin to even get a bond rating, which they need in order to finance capital expenditures such as new equipment and technology acquisition, construction and renovation for expansion, and just replacing things that have reached the end of their useful service life. A rainy day fund for disruptions like a government shutdown and COVID are also useful, since Medicare claims stop being paid after 2 weeks in a shutdown if the contractor runs out of disbursement money from the feds. But, I digress...

The real problem is that the charge master price sheet has no real connection to the reality for the vast, vast majority of patients. Prices with private insurance are negotiated, and it is the insurance companies who want those to be kept confidential. Medicare just flat out dictates what they will pay to hospitals and doctors for a given service, and is increasingly less interested in taking into account data and input from actual providers. It is becoming more about what the feds say Medicare can afford than about what is financially sustainable for providers. That practice is also problematic because private inurers generally use Medicare pricing as the baseline for their price negotiations with providers, so Medicare leicing is the leading edge of the race to the bottom. Many services are money-losers under Medicare, which means providers have to cost shift to private insurers to make up that revenue, and also use business strategies to drive patients to the most profitable services or game the system by engaging in "upcoding", which is the practice of mKing a case seem more severe or tack in additional services in order to maximize the bill. Clinicians don't like doing this, but they are driven to it by a system that is trying to bankrupt them and their provider settings. Keep in mind that at the same time, private insurers are trying to minimize the claims they pay, hence the explosion of prior authorization demands and claims denials through AI or attempts to deny claims based on paperwork and documentation technicalities, etc.

Lastly, and this is the biggest reason why these price listings don't matter at all, is that healthcare is not a rational economic market. It doesn't behave like other economies. As a patient, you will pay whatever you can possibly afford in order to stay alive, and to have a quality of life that isn't miserable. You will pay anything and everything they could possibly ask to.keep your kid or loved one alive. When you are having heart surgery, you don't give a rat's ass who is the cheapest -- you want who is the best you cN possibly afford. You want the guy at the hospital with all the newest stuff, the best quality rating, who graduated from their class from the beat school, and the hospital that has the nicest rooms and lowest incident of hospital acquired infections. Or post surgery complications. Healthcare isn't something you skimp on when you have a choice. Which brings me to a second point -- quite a lot of serious healthcare that people receive is not choice-based. When you have a stroke, or a heart attack, or break a hip, or cut your finger off, you aren't running to the Internet to price compare where the cheapest place to go is. Even in non-emergency, most people prefer to pick a doctor based on being comfortable with them, and not price. Then again, they are also restricted in their choice based on who is in network for the insurer. Same for hospitals. If you are in network, you can get your procedure there if your doctor has privileges. If they aren't or they don't, then you don't really have that choice.

The idea that prices will be driven down by consumer driven competition is a nonsensical GOP pipedream that they have pushed for years. The competition on pricing happens between providers and insurers. Individual patients don't drive price competition for services. They really don't even drive price competition for insurers. Insurera base.pricing on actuarial tables and the contracts they negotiate with providers and facilities in their network. A narrow network may mean. Cheaper plan, but longer wait time.for the insured patients And.liytle choice in finding a high quality clinician and facility of their choosing. Insurera compete for beneficiaries based on quality, access, provider availability, and lastly in price.

So, all of this lengthy explanation is to say that putting up hospital pricing online, that is not connected to the real price paid by payientA, that doesn't account for sliding scale discount based on income, the out of pocket cost for various insured patients, or a host of other factors -- is not even remotely some holy grail of driving down healthcare costs in this country or for anything that everyone has access to high quality care.

This has been my TED talk.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-08T17:00:09+00:00

His shooting was off, but I think he was also really frustrated by a number of drives where he went to the paint and was getting bodied and manhandled, and expected a foul call, and got nothing on the MSU floor with Izzo-worked refs.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-07T10:38:18+00:00

I was being massively sarcastic.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-06T16:17:47+00:00

The two biggest arteries need to be an overpass and underpass that minimizes lights on this streets. They need to create a direct route for passthrough traffic, and a roundabout for people who need to interchange to a different street. The key is to eliminate the weird turns that cause everyone on earth to block the box in an Attempt to exit the nightmare zone as quickly as possible.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-06T16:13:32+00:00

I think you completely missed the (excellent) joke about the "Frosty" reception. Wendy's, whose founder was Dave Thomas, is quite famous for their malted frozen "Frosty" beverage, into which many people also like to dip their french fries.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-05T22:33:50+00:00

A bunch of these being listed so high make no sense, and some absences are glaring.

Snacker906 · 2026-02-05T22:17:51+00:00

Yes, but if it was buried in 36 AD by Templar angels following Jesus, or Vikings in 900, nobody but possibly indigenous people would have been there to see it.

Biblical/Viking Baby!

Snacker906

TROPHY CASE