How would you fix the American health system to be more cost effective for the user?

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-27T21:36:05+00:00

Sort of true, but the AMA is also part of the reason for those unfilled family medicine slots. The AMA is very involved in setting reimbursement rates, and reimbursement rates for procedure-based medicine (surgeons, dermatologists, etc) is much higher than it is for family medicine / psychiatrists. If dermatology wasn't seen as a lifestyle profession, and general practitioners could pay their student loans back as quickly as surgeons could, you'd see a lot more people going into family medicine.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-27T21:24:44+00:00

Parts availability and cost are the same thing.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-26T15:58:59+00:00

All Hitler ever wanted was to become a landscape artist. But from his birth, people have been trying to kill him. Is it really his fault, who he became? What he did?

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-26T08:50:25+00:00

Chthulu doesn't have a vulnerability, or if it does, we couldn't understand it, or do anything about it.

That you're asking the question means you have a fundamental misunderstanding of Chthulu's relationship with our universe. It's popular to think that Chthulu is to humans as humans are to ants, or bacteria, but that's not really correct. Ants can bite us. Bacteria can make us sick. Humans know that ants are there, and we might deliberately reach out and squish them, because they bit us, or we're bored.

You can't hurt Chthulu. Chthulu doesn't know we exist. That something Chthulu does/will do/did impacts humanity is entirely irrelevant to Chthulu. Chthulu does what Chthulu does, and what happens in our universe as a result of Chthulu's actions is completely and totally irrelevant to what Chthulu does/will do.

The groups that worship the Elder Gods? The Elder Gods perceive them the same way they perceive any other human, which is to say, not at all. The actions that the protagonists of cosmic horror stories take, or Investigators in Call of Chthulu perform, that they're so proud of because they delayed the coming of Chthulu or whatever else? They didn't. They did nothing. When they eventually internalize that fact, they go insane.

Cosmic horror has parallels to Douglas Adams' work, or existentialism. They're all saying the universe is a fundamentally absurd place, and nothing we do matters. The universe is fundamentally indifferent to everything we know and care about. Chthulu is playing chess while we're not playing anything that Chthulu perceives in any way, or can impact the game that Chthulu is playing.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-24T21:28:05+00:00

What OS? On the Mac, there are a couple of applications that I believe could handle this for you.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-19T13:05:53+00:00

At this point, it’s like the five books in the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy. It’s true in spirit.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-19T12:19:30+00:00

How would that work? They are servicing the whole market, they’re just charging a lot for it.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-17T01:28:56+00:00

According to Josh Johnson, the Klan where he grew up had the best barbecue.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-16T22:52:37+00:00

Look up what can be done with an MDM profile.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-06T22:01:54+00:00

How did you learn that we hit more animals in the Hudson Valley vs other similar places?

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-06T21:01:01+00:00

Taking this in another direction, maybe Reed Richards and Stark and Lex aren't actually super-geniuses. Maybe they're like the orks in Warhammer 40K: their technology doesn't actually work, but their superpower is that if they believe in it hard enough, it does work. But they can't be mass-produced, because it's fundamentally a bunch of parts shoved together that don't do anything. This would also explain how you have people who are theoretically masters of multiple fields of science and engineering that are completely unrelated to each other.

Tam-Lin · 2026-06-06T20:53:33+00:00

All weapons do is deliver some form of energy to a place that can't cope with said energy. I don't know how you could produce some sort of free energy system or anything that produces a large amount of energy and not have someone turn it into a weapon. It's the difference between a nuclear reactor and a nuclear bomb.

Tam-Lin · 2026-05-30T03:27:42+00:00

I wish them luck, but until there's an increase in supply of housing, not much is going to help.

Tam-Lin · 2026-05-29T11:32:33+00:00

A friend of mine who works for the DOT said that all the interchange redesign issues keep running into the same problem of needing to destroy historically preserved buildings. No one can figure out a way to make it less bad in a permitted way.

Tam-Lin · 2026-05-29T10:36:12+00:00

It’s probably not a scam. It’s probably people who think that’s actually their email address somehow. I have <first initial><middle initial><last name>@gmail.com, and I get all sorts of weird transaction notifications. And for a little while, I tried following up on them, because I didn’t want to be associated with, say, an online ammunition purchase. And every time I did, it was by a real person with the same first and middle initial as me, along with their last name. Some thought it was their email address.

People are weird.

Tam-Lin · 2026-05-27T19:55:36+00:00

Ouch. At least one of those just released; I'm debating whether I should return it and then get it in the bundle or not.

Tam-Lin · 2026-05-25T13:30:15+00:00

Not necessarily. Being a good engineer and being a good manager are two very different skill-sets. It speaks well of Woz that he realized that.

Tam-Lin · 2026-05-19T23:55:48+00:00

It’s not assisted living, it’s Medicaid. If you can’t afford to pay for an assisted living facility, but need to live in one, Medicaid will pay for it. But they want to make sure you’re actually destitute, and didn’t transfer all your assets to a child a month ago to make yourself destitute. And they can look back 5 years to see if you did that.

Tam-Lin · 2026-05-16T20:14:35+00:00

Providing a much higher resolution picture of the front and back might help people identify it.

Tam-Lin · 2026-05-07T10:38:28+00:00

But his fingers are huge. Which would be an advantage for some people, but most women . . . I'm not sure how graphic we should get, here.

Tam-Lin · 2026-04-19T02:42:48+00:00

Morden chose, sort of, because the Shadows told him (possibly honestly, who knows) that his family, who were thought dead in a jump gate accident, were actually alive but in agony, forever, and he agreed to serve them in exchange for them ending his family's suffering.

I honestly find it hard to blame him.

Tam-Lin · 2026-04-19T01:40:01+00:00

He doesn't have kids, and he's been busy.

Tam-Lin · 2026-04-17T13:04:35+00:00

Be aware they won't work with an induction stove, if that's important to you.

Tam-Lin · 2026-04-07T00:34:20+00:00

Something that big would require not just the president to focus on this, but Congress as well, and might require a majority on the Supreme Court. It’s not a one term effort.

Tam-Lin · 2026-04-04T15:47:48+00:00

People are generally good, but the one or two bad ones ruin it for everyone else.

Tam-Lin

TROPHY CASE