if 2026 regulations are a deciding factor in Max's future in F1, GP China, 2024

in the emergency room ✌️

I live in rural Iowa.

Why the fuck is breakfast cereal 🥣 over $8?

‘do you work in the healthcare field’ bitch no this is america i work in the ilnessprofit field

just a reminder that BetterHelp is selling your fucking data and that they themselves have said at industry meetings that they're a data-driven company more than a people-driven company

It feels like for a while in there that people were dropping them as a sponsor but now that the controversy has slightly dimmed there are so many ads for them again; do not give them your information, do not give them your money

I know insurance is a pain in the ass and mental health treatments cost too much out of pocket for most people. So do they, that's why they're making this little bait and switch operation. Helping people is, at best, a side product of their data harvesting, and at worst just a trick to lure people in.

AN OPEN LETTER to THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Co-sponsor H.R. 732, the Save Medicare Act.

802 so far! Help us get to 1,000 signers!

As a constituent, I'm emailing to ask you to co-sponsor H.R. 732, the Save Medicare Act.

Medicare Advantage plans use deceptive marketing to oversell and overcharge for their private health care plans, and then under deliver on care. These private insurers are using government funding to increase their own profits, at the expense of their patients. And they take so much from the Medicare trust fund, that it’s threatening the solvency and future of traditional Medicare.

Congress must act to rein in Medicare Advantage, and should start by giving it a more accurate name. It is not Medicare and should not be advertised as such. The Save Medicare Act would force these plans to stop using “Medicare” in their name and would establish penalties for private insurers who don’t comply. Seniors and people with disabilities deserve to have this level of transparency when choosing their health care.

Please protect traditional Medicare by cosponsoring this bill.

▶ Created on April 4 by Jess Craven · 801 signers in the past 7 days 📱 Text SIGN PWAYKR to 50409

🤯 Liked it? Text FOLLOW JESSCRAVEN101 to 50409

I fucking hate employer sponsored healthcare. not only am I going to have to stop seeing my current pcp at the lgbt clinic because he's not covered, bUT even though I'm looking at the FANCY insurance with the WIDEST RANGE and it covers 11,500 doctors within 15 MILES OF ME, including OVER 100 ENDOCRINOLOGIST SPECIALISTS —

absolutely 0/11,500 of these doctors cover gender affirming care 🙃

experienced a unique flavor of rage today trying to update insurance information

Reasons To Consider Employee Sponsored Benefits in Greeley And Loveland, CO

Keeping medical and health care costs down is an essential task that makes numerous American citizens anxious. The best way to meet such unexpected expenses would be to buy the right individual health insurance in Longmont and Windsor, CO. This is particularly important for individuals who are not provided with a group insurance plan by their employers. ​ Getting the right health insurance coverage is not as simple as making the payment and obtaining the documents in an instant. Instead, it is essential to proceed during enrollment and pick up the best-suited plan in the open marketplace. The specified period begins November 1 onward every year and continues up to December 15 generally. Choosing the insurance policy haphazardly is not advisable. On the contrary, one has to check the associated fats and make an informed decision about buying health insurance. It is equally important to remember that such insurance plans may come with subsidies for a certain section of people. Checking the applicable benefits can enable one to save money on insurance premiums and/or get additional coverage. Buying health insurance for self and family members does not have to be challenging. Instead, it is best to proceed according to a plan by taking care to ensure the following:- · Time & Place- One’s locality may help the individual decide the insurance shopping marketplace. Twelve of the US States operate their exchanges while others may log in to the government website to select the best-suited policy. Yes! Using a Federal exchange necessitates completing the insurance purchase by December 15 but opting for any state exchanges may make it easier to get more time. · Plan Reviews-Sure, a person hoping to buy health insurance for the first time finds multiple options. Reviewing one’s existing insurance plan is equally essential to check whether any new plans have attractive features. It would be a mistake to continue with the same plan when nothing has changed in the household or income pattern. Many insured persons are pleasantly surprised to find that a few companies have decreased their premiums and upped the coverage limit. Switching plans can be wise in such circumstances. · Proper Comparison- A majority of insurance shoppers remain focussed on the monthly premium and decide accordingly. Insurance advisors suggest checking the yearly expenses instead. Sure, the math may be a trifle complex for a layperson, but one can always use a freely available tool on the government website. This will enable one to get an estimate of the annual expenditure with deductible and copayment factored in. Planning for the future can be more effective once one has an idea about the yearly costs related to health insurance. A business owner may find it advantageous to check for the employer and/or employee-sponsored benefits in Greeley and Loveland, CO, and select the best one. This will enable the company to retain valuable employees and avoid recruitment costs.

Going through the bills proposed in the kentucky 2024 legislative session and some of the things being proposed are

make a PFAS Working Group

require homeless shelters to provide free menstrual products (it's actually disturbing that they didn't already)

require schools to provide free menstrual products

create harm reduction centers and lower penalties for possessing controlled substances

require insurance to pay for cancer screenings (okay. low bar but okay)

abolish the death penalty (actually has a couple republican sponsors)

decriminalize cannabis

make fluoridation of water in districts optional (?????)

make coal the "state rock" of Kentucky

Prohibit children from being interrogated in a "deceptive manner" (?)

Make weight discrimination illegal

pay schools to food grown at kentucky farms to provide for school meals at low income schools (hey that's rad)

Lower the age of carrying a concealed deadly weapon from 21 to 18 (?????????????)

Require companies to give their employees earned paid sick leave

Impose restrictions on the collection of biometric data by private entities

Allow poultry to be sold at farmers' markets and at farms

pay for cancer screenings for firefighters

let pregnant incarcerated people have midwives or doula services

require that public high school curriculum include instruction on the history of racism

Remove Robert E. Lee Day, Confederate Memorial Day, and Jefferson Davis Day from the list of public holidays (WE HAVE THOSE?!!?!?!)

Retroactively expunge some cannabis convictions

"Prohibit public school districts from expanding any resources or funds on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging or political or social activism; prohibit public school districts from engaging in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging" (HUH?????)

require schools to give kids a lunch period of at least 30 minutes (the bar is in hell)

provide scholarships for teachers to help the teacher shortage and give teachers compensation for planning time

require schools to have defibrillators

make it so a homeless person doesn't have to pay to get a copy of their birth certificate

require a working smoke detector to be present in any house sold (...did we not already have this?)

create the Kentucky Urban Farming Youth Initiative

Require local governments to lower minimum square footage requirements for housing, and facilitate multifamily housing, manufactured housing, and "tiny homes," and require that zoning laws have a "substantial connection to protection of public safety, health, and usage of property" (This could be a good thing??)

require hiring and licensing authorities to allow people convicted of a crime an opportunity to get a job

Propose a new section of the Kentucky Constitution that guarantees the right of an individual to buy, sell, or use a certain amount of cannabis and to grow a small amount of cannabis plants, and put this on the ballot (LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOO LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE please this would be so funny)

Now let's watch how many of the good and basic common sense laws get left to die by Republicans because Republicans are ghouls

this is why it's important to vote in local elections, this is the kind of stuff that's being decided upon

i think it's funny that the first thing people go to when trying to discuss the idea of reshaping work and capitalist society is that "you just want an excuse to sit around and contribute nothing" when in actuality, i would be contributing far more to society if i wasn't chained to a desk 40~ hours a week or beholden to company-sponsored health insurance in order to survive.

here's a list of things i'd rather be spending my time providing to society rather than working 40 hours a week doing something i could not possibly give a fuck less about:

teaching - adults, children, general education, coaching sports

writing - fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, essays, comedy

art - painting, abstract expressionism, contemporary pieces

music - lyrics, beats, melodies

helping others - friends, neighbors, strangers; with whatever they need, however they need it, volunteering my time

helping animals - rehabbing, care taking and husbandry

tending to the planet - gardening, planting trees, trash pickup, farming

archiving - safely storing everything we've created; physically & digitally

i could truly go on and on and on with more things that i would be spending my time doing if i wasn't constantly held underwater by the capitalist machine. and i don't want anything in return; the free time to do these things and share in the creations of others is reward enough.

does this sound like an unmotivated individual who wants to do nothing? quite to contrary, in my humble opinion. i simply would like the freedom to choose the things that fulfill me in my quest for meaningful time spent, rather than being subject to the wills of a conglomerate making an ungodly amount of money, of which i see .00002% of the revenue.

How Funding Affected my Journalism Jobs

The different places I’ve worked as a journalist, and in related fields, have all had different funding. Here are my experiences at different places–and it seems to me that grant-funded stuff is the best. 

Internship at Nat Geo

Grants sponsored both of the other interns, but not me. Nat Geo makes a lot of its money through things like books at TV.

Mine was low-paid, but probably normal for an internship in 2016? LOVED the experience. Freelance at Nat Geo afterward was MUCH better paid. $14/hour part-time. IDK how much the grant-funded interns made. 2016.

Fellowship at PBS Newshour

A grant from the National Science Foundation funded me, but PBS is state-sponsored media. Interestingly, that’s a huge red flag in China and Russia, but I found the US-funded Public Broadcasting Service very fair to its subjects. Good experience, but even worse pay, at $13/hour full-time. 2016-2017

Job at Newsweek 

Their funding is from clicks. This place was crazy bad and paid garbage. Everyone hated it and almost everyone quit, unless they were being fired for making a living wage. Some people even got fired for accurately reporting on the company itself on assignment from their editors–there was no obscuring it, that was cited as their reason for termitation. Newsweek is Hellfire and damnation. I suspect the nonsense demand for 5 stories/day/person and silly demand that we make them go viral stemmed from the following: the fact that the company primarily made its money from clicks and higher-ups didn’t appear to care about the long-term reputation of the company or its reporters, and perhaps an ego-fueled refusal to try to understand what actually got clicks. $39k/year. 2017-2018

Freelance at VOX 

Funded by clicks/ads and grants at the time, but halfway through they started a contribution campaign. The difference I noticed between VOX and Newsweek was that VOX practices were smarter and they actually paid attention to analytics and sane business practices. Also, it's much easier to qualify for and get grants if you're actually doing good journalism, so I don't believe that Newsweek's policy of "lots of garbage" was actually business-savvy in any way.

Vox was a good experience, even though I wasn’t working as a journalist, but doing SEO/social media for journalists. $35/hour, then $50/hour part-time. Then I was laid off due to the pandemic. 2019-2020

Freelance at Alzheimer's Association 

Remote, not really journalism, but I liked it anyway. Nonprofit, so, funded by donations and grants. $65/hour part-time. 2021

Job at Bay Nature

My job was entirely funded by a grant. Odd situation–I got the grant and I could bring it to any legit journalism employer. Bay Nature was supposed to contribute 40% of my salary but flexibility happened and they just paid health insurance and such. They got basically no money at all from clicks, like, pennies a year. Not much from subscriptions. They have fundraisers, and at the time, there were 3 writers/editors and 2 fundraisers on staff. Later they hired another writer whose entire salary was paid by a philanthropist, and then I’m told they got another salary funded by a UC Berkeley journalism grant program. So, like half of their editorial staff was grant-funded.

Great experience, but low pay for the Bay Area. $50k/year, all from Poynter-Koch, 2021-2022.

Freelance at Politifact

A nonprofit and they probably get lots of grants. My particular position was also funded by a grant entirely. Loved it. $250/article fact check. 2022. 

Book

REALLY love it. $50k is from MIT Press, which is a not-for-profit, and it gets some grants and endowments. Then I got $56k from a grant from the Sloan Foundation on top. 

Future? 

I also got $500 (plus gas and hotels) to attend a day of learning with a program called Investing in Wyoming’s Creative Economy, and that means I’m one of 100 people eligible to apply for 10 $25k grants for future projects. The idea is to support creatives to stay in Wyoming and have sustainable businesses here. Maybe do some art that will bring in tourists. 

_____________________

Note that a grant sort of does, and sort of doesn’t, mean free money. It means money to support a project that usually has to have a mission and a public good, like educating the public. You don’t pay these back, and the org giving the grants doesn’t require a percentage of the profits or anything. But, for instance, the $50k grant from Poynter-Koch was more like a gift to Bay Nature, so they could pay me, and I worked for a year to actually have the funds. 

However, I’m not yet convinced that there is any objectively good funding model to ensure the most fair and accurate journalism. In theory, the capitalistic ones would be the best, but the public desire to read inflammatory stories about how their political enemies are evil, or a different generation is full of idiots, adversely affected the accuracy of headlines at Newsweek IMO.

You might think that the worst funding source would be Poynter-Koch, which is a program run by Poynter and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. But neither Poynter nor Koch even asked me to tell them what I was writing, let alone try to stop me from writing it. (Poynter hosted mentor-led auxiliary groups to talk about our careers/lives and such, so the topics of our articles came up sometimes if we chose to share that.) 

Anyway, I’m thinking of writing an article on how funding models affect journalism, for better and worse. There are some high-profile examples of grant funding causing harm. But for now, the above is my experience–pretty much all good, except not enough funding sometimes. 

there is nothing esoteric about wealth

There is something profoundly cruel about telling people that the reason they're poor is because of their mindset- that the reason they can't afford basic needs like food, health insurance, transportation, mental health care, education, and etc is because they didnt think good enough.

not only because it's condescending, but because its nothing we haven't heard before: we have all heard that the reason poor people are poor is because it's a emanation of a personal failure. they didnt work hard enough, they didn't invest in the right stock, they didnt hold themselves accountable enough for their own spending habits. or better yet, the reason they are poor is because they lacked the intelligence, cleverness, and thirst for financial freedom that the wealthy has.

its always been especially menacing when they attach spiritual morality or exaltation- the reason you're poor is because you're faith is lacking, or you karmically earned your fate as a result of a past life, you didnt trust god enough.

whats new is that this this idea of poverty being a personal failure is being repackaged through the terminology of manifestation- you are poor because you manifested it. your mindset allows the reality of poverty to exist.

Yesterday I watched a video about how to obtain financial freedom at a young age. The woman in the video was herself, young, wealthy and free. she believes she achieved this freedom through and work and manifestation. (and totally not related at all, the video was sponsored by a very reliable and safe app that claims if you keep it running in the background for 24 hours a day you might make 30 dollars a month. that's totally not the impetus to making the video at all. )

her advice was the mundane, typical ''start an online business, do drop shipping, invest in real estate, become a landlord, stop saving money and invest it instead.'' but she centered the video around something interesting- she said: ''stop persisting in the poor girl mindset''- the reason we are poor is because we aren't affirming the right things, we're poor because we portion our paychecks each month to save money on the side, we're poor because lack the lucky girl mindset and therefore we have made ourselves unlucky.

how barbaric.

she then spoke a good lot of time discussing how doing our own work is a waste of time and money- instead, we could be paying employees to do the work for us while we sit back and relax as the passive income flows to our bank accounts. what she said was actually the lowkey version of ''your labor alone is not enough to produce sustainable income; you have to exploit the labor of a large group of people in order to achieve your desirable paycheck.''

The mass produced content of ''how to achieve financial freedom at so and so age'' is massively based on the metaphysical idea that you manifest your own reality, so- if you are poor then its because you believe you are. whats distinctly manipulative about this is that it shifts the blame from the systematic, hierarchal reason behind your poverty onto yourself. you are to blame- not the series of calculated, money-hungry decisions made by those who actually have power over you to keep themselves rich and to keep you poor. you are poor because your thoughts affirm you are, not because the people at the top have the ability to hoard their wealth and spend it stupid ventures that ultimately refund their own bank accounts. certainly not because capitalism is doing exactly what it was designed to do in the first place. no, thats not the convenient answer, thats not the repackged, pretty ''you have the power to change your reality in a broken system'' answer people want to hear. the truth is, the system isnt broken, its doing exatly what it was designed to do. you do have the power to change your reality, its just not the way they're willing to admit.

you want to be rich? you want to be in the top? thats determined by one factor and one factor alone: your willingness to exploit and fuck over large amounts of people.

thats it, thats all. there is no intellectual or metaphysical secert, there is nothing esoteric about wealth. the only quality the people have at the top that you do not possess is their ability to smile as they kill.

Confession

I’ve not been posting because of serious stuff.

When Felicity arrived home from the hospital, I thought it was time to share with the community.

In mid June, I felt a lump in my breast. By mid July, I saw my primary care physician who assured me it was probably nothing but sent me to get a mammogram. That mammogram turned into a biopsy and that biopsy turned into a breast cancer diagnosis.

I am so lucky. I caught it early. I have employer sponsored health insurance. I have a support system. I am gonna be ok.

I had surgery in August and will have radiation in the next few weeks. My prognosis is excellent.

As my amazingly candid anesthesiologist said, “cancer don’t care”.

If you are a person with breasts, do your self checks, if you find anything, go to your doctor. 1 of 8 people with breasts will get breast cancer but treatment is not only effective, it is far less devastating than it once was.

Take care of yourselves my friends 💕 Felicity and I send love, hope and joy.

If JB stayed in Brawn turned Mercedes, and was the one partnered with Nico instead of Schumi then Lewis, do you think Nico would've stayed? Do you think the Mercedes domination could've run longer? 🥹

Okay, so Brawn was an absolute freak accident, to put it politely. It’s the only team to have won 100% of the championships it entered (one). Ross Brawn put his own money into preventing the BAR-Honda team from financially collapsing and making hundreds, if not thousands, if people unemployed. It made sure that Jenson Button and Rubén’s Barrichello could stay in F1. He actually paid only £1 for the team from Honda but financing it for the next year would drain basically all of his money. In many ways it was an act of supreme kindness as Ross Brawn was not the wealthiest of team principles.

Basically he knew he had enough money to finance the team for a year and afterwards it would collapse unless they could find another owner to buy them out. The year was less about winning a championship and more about just keeping a ship afloat. The vice-president of the FIA, in a bizarre moment of kindness for them, actually waived the entry fee for the team. They lost their engine supplied when Honda pulled out but managed to broker a deal with Mercedes (who would buy them out at the end of the year). At one point there were strong rumours that they would have to bring in a pay driver with serious sponsors, I think Bruno Senna was the name floating around, and kick either Jenson or Rubens, but fortunately they stuck to their guns and kept both. They fit KERS in a panic not knowing what it did. They were allocated the final pit lane numbers of 22 and 23.

Basically it was an absolutely insane that they won, especially with a driver that didn’t have a previous WDC. The money from winning could have potentially kept them afloat for one more year but if they didn’t win again they were financially finished. Even the drivers had made other arrangements for the next season, with the blessing of the team, fearing the team would collapse. Rubens had signed on at Williams and Jenson had muscled his way into the McLaren contract earmarked for Nico Rosberg.

Basically, a lot of stuff would have had to happen for it to be Jenson and Nico at Mercedes come 2010. Nico’s contract at McLaren would have had to fall through entirely for other reasons than being poached by Jenson. Jenson would have had to be insane not to have an insurance policy for team collapse. Mercedes also liked the appeal of having two German drivers and the return of Schumacher from retirement (he’d filled in at Ferrari in 2009 for Felipe Massa after his head injury - people forget about that, Felipe Massa had to have brain surgery and almost died) and might not have bought the team at all if it couldn’t sign him.

Hypothetically, you could have had a situation where you had Lewis and Schumi at McLaren (although this would have meant Schumi betraying his Ferrari roots - the McLaren-Ferrari rivalry was going strong at this point) and Jenson and Nico at Mercedes. A further possibility might have been, in the event of Massa’s death or continued ill-health, Jenson at Ferrari with Alonso and Lewis and Nico at McLaren fighting an earlier and weirder silver war.

Mercedes domination wouldn’t have happened any earlier. Fundamentally they needed a few seasons of prep to find their feet and no driver could have made the pre-Turbo-Hybrid car a championship winner.