Anthem Sucks, Health Insurance Will Get Socialized, Water is Wet

Once again, Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield has denied me a prescription. It’s like the 4th time in the past couple of years. I spend $10,000/year on all the insurance I can get, while my company pays the other $20K of the mortgage-sized premium. Then I have — whatever it is — $1,500 of deductible, or something. Then I have co-pays. Then I go to the doctor, and he prescribes me something — after looking at their own guidelines, and choosing the worse of two formulations, because they won’t cover “the good stuff” — and then, after ALL OF THAT, Anthem looks over his shoulder, and says, “No, he can’t have it like you prescribed it. You can only prescribe it once a day instead of twice.”

So my doctor submitted a prior authorization, which they also denied. I finally got the letter “explaining” why. Apparently, someone in the bowels of this corporate behemoth went to a government web site which has label information for every drug, and the label for this drug says to take it once a day. Therefore, according to Anthem, a doctor cannot prescribe it twice a day. Period. I’m not sure which is more stupid, this one or their last excuse, which was to steadfastly claim that I have a disease my bloodwork repeatedly shows I do not have.

In the 80’s, when “the bean counters” took over corporations, we made fun of them. We watched as companies who actually built things lost the will to invest in R&D, and abandoned long-term planning for a focus on quarterly returns. It was kind of funny to us at the time, one, because we couldn’t do anything about it, and, two, because the long-term effects wouldn’t be felt for decades.

You don’t have to look too hard to see what it’s done to the American corporate landscape. There’s no heart or soul; there’s only a question of how can they extract another dollar from the operation to return to the shareholders, whether by squeezing the customer or the employees. (I saw a comment the other day that this trend started with Jack Welch of GE fame, and I think that’s probably true.)

When it comes to, oh, I don’t know, making mufflers, this whole attitude and approach is one thing, but when that capitalistic machine gun is aimed — not at health insurance — but actual health care — well, this is what we get.

Wonka review: Willy was never meant to be the hero – Polygon

As a prequel to the ’71 movie — and specifically not an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book, for rights reasons — Wonka uses a healthy serving of musical numbers to tell the tale of how and why its quirky chocolatier became a renowned confectioner. In Wonka’s world — a whimsical, unnamed European town — the chocolate biz is dominated by three stodgy companies who collaborate as a secret cartel, fixing prices, paying off cops, and selling inferior product to a public with no other local candy options.

Source: Wonka review: Willy was never meant to be the hero – Polygon

So it’s an allegory about late-stage Capitalism. Got it.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all there for that.

Should Retired Ministers Get a Pension from the Church?

Twenty three years ago, I had a pension with Arvin. They got “bought” by Meritor. After a couple years, they sent out an email that basically said that the pension fund was “theirs” now, and they were under no obligation to keep it running and pay me anything when I retired. I took the hint, and withdrew what little money was in it, and got hammered with taxes, because of course I was.

Almost no one gets pensions any more. The few people who still get them might get something like a third of their salary when they retire, if they work roughly their entire career at the same place. For the most part, we’re all expected to fund 401K’s, or otherwise figure retirement for ourselves. Am I going to have enough to live on? Well, considering that I’m going to retire the year Social Security officially goes “broke,” I highly doubt it. But that’s beside the point. It’s on me to figure out, one way or another, same as everyone else.

Which brings me to my question: should retired ministers get a “pension” from their church upon retirement? Now, obviously, churches are not funding some massive investment portfolio to pay an actual “pension” out of the dividends from, but the idea is the same. Should churches continue to provide some sort of income to former ministers after they have retired? If no, then I guess we’re done with this thought experiment.

If yes, then how much? Since we’re talking about the church providing an ongoing salary like a pension, what percentage of the former minister’s salary would be appropriate? And, since we’re talking about paying this out of ongoing tithes, which could be used to hire new staff, and give raises to current church employees, how long should this be paid?

Let’s put some numbers to this. According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary of a minister in Indiana is $60,000 per year. Let’s be generous, and say that our hypothetical minister was working at a large church, and his pay was double that, or $120,000/yr, or $10,000/mo. How much do you feel it would be appropriate to pay this retired minister, and for how many years? 100% for life? 50% for 10 years? Some sort of sliding scale that phases out over time? Nothing, as it was on them to prepare, like all of us?

Here are some additional thought experiments. Should there be anything in the “pension” for the minister’s spouse? Does it change your answer if the church had been paying into an ampe life insurance policy? Next, let’s say that our retired minister still has “some gas left in the tank,” and takes another job after retirement, and is making a non-trivial salary with that gig, as well as collecting Social Security. Does this change your answer? Finally, what if he had been working for a huge church, and making 3 or 4 times the average, at $15-$20K/mo? Does that change your answer? In other words, do you feel like this is based on cost of living today, or is it purely based on how much he had been making?

My own biases are leaking out in this discussion because I got the rug pulled out from under me, but that’s why I’m interested in other people’s opinions. I want to see this from other people’s points of view. What do you think?

Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

Source: Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED

I mean, I keep saying that they’re doing all of this, in the open, despite the clear intent and letter of the Constitution, but, here we are, and here we will continue to be, unless someone like Vivek Ramaswamy can get elected, and shut it down. Unfortunately, we’ve already witnessed our “deep state” kill three prominent national leaders to prevent them from changing their agenda, and watched in slow motion as no one was ever held accountable for these conspiracies, so it’s not like they’ll let him — or anyone like him — anywhere near the presidency.

Why do people use VBA?

Why do people use VBA? In order to answer this question, we must first look at another question – who actually uses VBA in the first place? In 2021 I ran a poll on /r/vba where I asked redditors why they code in VBA. From these data, we can clearly see that the majority of people who use VBA do so mainly because they have no other choice. Many organisations run their entire business processes with Excel, and when a little bit of automation is required VBA is usually #1 on the list.

Source: Why do people use VBA?

I was just ranting about this to my kids a couple days ago.

Even in large companies, with massive IT departments, and lots and lots of internal databases and information systems, US businesses are still run on Excel. That’s not subjective. I’ve worked for decades inside three Fortune 250’s (and a couple smaller shops), and bad Excel “applications” are in use at all of them. And after one person learns enough VBA to get a spreadsheet dealing with a particular issue to save a little time for themselves, they start sharing them with their colleagues, and the problem gets worse. Half of my career has been built on making “real” applications out of Excel spreadsheets that were wobbling under their own weight.

But why?

Back in the old days, IT grew out of the accounting department. They had the only computer in the building, and it was an IBM mainframe. Great stuff, right? Saved a lot of time and paperwork, right? Except that it didn’t. It quickly ossified the company’s work flow, and permanently hobbled its ability to adapt to change. It would take years to get any changes made in the mainframe group, and people were frustrated. Along came spreadsheets, and everything changed.

I saw it myself in my first engineering job in 1993. We got new computers with Windows 3.1 and Quattro Pro. (And AutoCAD. And, of course, on mine: DOOM!) After weeks of bugging the lady who ran the mainframe — who apparently had to write a whole program — I got her to dump the BOM for a couple of our products to compare for similarities. I downloaded the 2 files to my PC with a token ring mainframe interface card. I think they were only about 1MB each. With 8MB of RAM, I had twice as much memory as our System 36, and I could open both BOM’s in a spreadsheet, and analyze them to my heart’s content. Understanding that I had more processing power on my desk than the freezer-sized unit in the other room was eye-opening.

American manufacturing companies (at least) never got the message. The invention of the spreadsheet spared them from facing the fact that the mainframe had become the black hole of their IT world. As changes were becoming impossible to get from the mainframe group, PC’s with Windows and Excel allowed people at all levels and in all job functions to start working around the mainframe and its limitations.

Now, these kinds of companies are decades behind the curve. They thought “outsourcing” was going to fix all of their problems. When it didn’t, they thought “consultants” would be the trick. Surely “agile” will do it this time, right? No. It’s not the process; it’s the mainframe. Forcing every corporate workflow and piece of data to be kept canonically inside a 40-50-year-old legacy system’s limitations is quite literally killing the company. It’s certainly killing their competitive advantage.

My current company still breaks our primary software component into 8 pieces because that’s what would fit on floppies to send to the plant to program the hardware. Every IT system — and every spreadsheet — in the company has to deal with this 40-year-old legacy issue because that’s what we programmed the mainframe to expect, and now that’s the only way to bill a customer for it. So the logistics of dealing with multiple trees and branches of software (and multiple trees and branches of documentation about the software) is multiplied by a factor of 8 to this day. There is no escape from this black hole. You can’t re-engineer this situation. It’s too ingrained.

I worked for one group which, on every engineering release, had to get a giant table of software versions — each with their 8 part numbers — into the mainframe. The process was so onerous that they would spend days clicking through mainframe terminal emulator screens to get the information they needed, to make a spreadsheet in a particular format, which they would send to another group to actually enter back into the mainframe. Part of the problem was the spreadsheet had to be in 3 columns, but the mainframe screens were in 4 columns (or vice versa), so a lot of it was purely formatting. I wrote a little program to automate all of this, but I’ve left the group, and I’m sure no one uses it any more. The particularly stupid part of this story is that people fought me to write a little software that saved these people 10’s of hours a week in the name of their own job security.

And no one in the corporate hierarchy cares. In this day and age, the executives are all just playing the waiting game, letting things atrophy — saying all the right things publicly — while they wait until the financials are inverted enough to make the company a juicy prospect for a buyout in an industry-wide rollup by private equity.

Meanwhile, actual people have to get stuff done to stay employed and feed their families. Inside the company, the managers have to look at the three year lead times to get a simple application written by “corporate IT,” and can do nothing but just continue to throw bodies and VBA macros at it. Or, in my case, have me write something to do it. That is, until it gets successful enough that people notice, and it gets taken away from me, but that’s another story…

Concerns over Cryptocurrency Mining and the Environment

When BitCoin prices were spiking a year ago, people concerned with such things started pointing out that the energy required to perform all the mining could power a small country, and lamented the implied acceleration of the destruction of the environment due to the CO2-producing energy sources that were running overtime because of it.

It occurs to me that a massive portion of the US economy now relies on digital advertising, which is unquestionably one of the least efficient investments in the world. Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs per dollar of ad revenue is? I mean, it must be profitable, or they wouldn’t do it, but it surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. So, sure, complain about cryptocurrency “setting the earth on fire” to make some investors billions, but Google gets a free pass on miles and miles of private server farms cranking away 24×7 running their ad services and the auction house to make their trillions?

And that’s just Google, the poster child of this kind of thing. Where’s the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? I can’t remember anyone ever bringing this up. I think it should make people wonder why this isn’t seen anywhere. Could it be that the very companies making the most money from this activity are actively suppressing this kind of criticism?

Stealing Dolmens in Cyrodill

I’ve completely ignored achievements in Elder Scrolls Online up till now. There are so many, it’s overwhelming. But coming back to the game after over a year, I notice that I “already” have about half the “points” in the game, without even thinking about it, so I’ve started paying more attention.

Finally managed to get all achievements. It was a long run but finished.

Source: I have finished the game. — Elder Scrolls Online

This guy “finished” the game on PC. In the comments, he says the new command in the game \played says he has 1,000 days in the game. That’s 24,000 hours.

I finally completed 100% achievements (59,465 points)

Source: I finally completed 100% achievements (59,465 points)

This guy “finished” the game on Playstation. He figured he has 18,000 hours in the game.

What I’ve discovered is that, after a couple thousand hours in the game, I have a whole bunch of achievements which are almost done, just by nature of having played the game, and finishing them just needs a couple more things to be done. I’ll admit, it’s been its own kind of fun doing them. Most unlock new titles or colors to use in the dye stations, which are so esoteric and unimportant, they become special in their own right.

I “ran” all of the delves in Cyrodiil a long time ago, to farm their skyshards, but in the achievement tracker, I noticed that I had not killed the secondary bosses in a half dozen of them. I ran to the far corners of the map to complete the achievement, and then thought, hey, why not keep running the vast landscape to at least discover the dolmens, so that I could see which one was active on the map, so that I could come back, and eventually do all of them too.

Came up on one, and saw that it was actually running! Great! Except I saw that there was an enemy player doing it… He was on the last boss… and it looked like he didn’t have full health… What the heck!? A dude so weak that he’s half dead fighting a dolmen boss? I immediately overcome my reticence, jump in, and basically stab him in the back. He dies easily. I finish the boss, and get the chest.

My heart is POUNDING. I’m out of breath. I run to the next closest dolmen. It’s running. He’s there. On the last boss again. I kill him again.

I can see that one of the dolmens I recently discovered is running now. I run all the way over to it. Yup! Again, he’s there, and, again, on the last boss.

I “stole” 3 dolmens on the last boss from this poor guy in 15 minutes.

I felt a little bad.

Then I ran into a ditch and died from lava, and quit while I was ahead.

Honestly, there is NOTHING in this world that makes me so nervous as PVP in ESO.

It’s kind of sad to say, but, at least in a way, I never felt more alive than getting the skyshards in the enemy bases in Cyrodill, running away from a dude trying to chase me in my “speed gear” to get the very last one.

Of course, chasing down the easy-to-complete achievements will just lead me to the ones that need a whole lot of work, and then to the trial trifectas. Where do I cut it off, and do other things? I don’t know. But again, the recent additions to the game that allow “marginal” people like me to access “the whole game” make it fun to at least explore, and see where that line lies for me.

Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband | Techdirt

On the other hand, they’ve convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs.

Source: Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband | Techdirt

For 25 years, I’ve been saying that every house needs to have a fiber drop, owned by the city, just like electricity, water, and sewer, through which the resident can contract with service providers to get whatever digital services they want. Looks like this may be exactly what’s happening in Cleveland. Finally.