My Limit

I’ve seen about 18 doctors in the past 3 years. I’ve honestly lost track. Every single visit was about one thing: I’m in constant, extreme pain. Yet every single doctor has refused to prescribe me ANYTHING to help with the pain. Not one. Not one time.

I just saw 2 pain specialists today, and they wouldn’t do it either. I was told that it would interfere with treatments. First, I can NOT take pain meds when we do procedures, you know. I mean, we all understand that, right? Second, it’s taken me THREE MONTHS just to get that appointment because of our stupid insurance system, and now it’s going to be ANOTHER month before I come back for the first treatment. Can I not get something for this next month of waiting around? No, go home and suffer in silence until you’re summoned again.

I’m just so utterly exhausted and angry and worn out. I’m LIVID. I’ve been LIVID for HOURS now. I understand that doctors not wanting to prescribe pain meds is a giant overreaction to too many opiates in treatments, but of all the situations where pain meds might be called for, this seems to be the TEXTBOOK case, and I get NOTHING. For over 3 years now. Endless, constant pain, and all the mental anguish that implies, but I’m just supposed to see counselors and pray.

I’m sorry, I don’t have magical powers. Whatever mental, emotional, or spiritual reserves I could have used to simply “deal with it” were exhausted a LOOOONG time ago. I’m sitting here at an 8 this evening, and I want to throw things through walls, break windows, and trash my stuff like I was a drug-abusing rock star in a hotel room in the 80’s. The Bible says God won’t put more on you than you can bear. I’m declaring I’ve officially hit my limit. Your move, God.

Well, Crap; There Goes another $110

Meet the new C64 Edition from the 8BitDo Keyboard line. Packed with programmable keys and an intuitive control panel.. Compatible with Windows and Android.

This hits all the right notes for me. I recently bought a full set of SA Retro keycaps for my WASD CODE v2 (in blues), on my Mac. While pricey, I love them. I get warm fuzzies every time I sit down at it. I use this board on my Mac, and out of a dozen mech’s I’ve tried, I just don’t think it gets any better than a WASD.

The article also mentions new buckling spring boards. I have a Mini M from Unicomp on my work computer. The action doesn’t seem as crisp as I remember on actual Model M’s from back in the 80’s, but given that it’s supposed to be the same internals, made on the original tool dies, I have to chalk it up to memory. I like it too.

For “just” $110, I will probably buy one of these. I don’t have a Kailh-based board, though I’ve liked the feel of that brand of switches in various testers I have.

Sigh.

<gets out wallet>

Baldur’s Gate 3 boss blasts publisher “greed” behind layoffs | Eurogamer.net

“It’s always the quarterly profits,” he continued, “the only thing that matters are the numbers, and then you fire everybody and then next year you say ‘shit I’m out of developers’ and then you start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it’s just broken… “You don’t have to,” Vincke went on. “You can make reserves. Just slow down a bit. Slow down on the greed. Be resilient, take care of the people, don’t lose the institutional knowledge that’s been built up in the people you lose every single time, so you have to go through the same cycle over and over and over. It really pisses me off.”

Source: Baldur’s Gate 3 boss blasts publisher “greed” behind layoffs | Eurogamer.net

This isn’t unique to the gaming industry. This is the same problem all corporations have had since the 80’s. The problem is tying executive compensation to stock options. The “number must go up,” no matter what, so that the charade of the stock price being tied to news about the company’s financial position can continue, and thus everyone in management and the Wall Street banks makes money. Until this loop is broken, this short-term thinking will continue, in every industry and every large company in the US. (And as private equity continues its death march from coast to coast, there won’t be any small companies soon, anyway.)

Introducing Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business | Microsoft Devices Blog

AI-powered PCs built for a new era of work We are excited to announce the first Surface AI PCs built exclusively for business: Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business. These new PCs re

Source: Introducing Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business | Microsoft Devices Blog

I just love how Microsoft sticks “FOR BIZNESSSSSSS!” on the end of things. “Skype FOR BIZNESSSSSSSS!” “Teams FOR BIDNESS!” “Outlook FOR BIZNAAAAAS!” Sigh. How can you take this stuff seriously? Anyway.

Windows stays because Microsoft caters to corporations which abuse the poor, defenseless OS into doing things like locking users out of changing the desktop background and the sleep timeout. Until Apple offers power-hungry corporate IT middle managers the same level of user-hostile malfeasance in the name of “security,” Microsoft will hold the high ground in corporate deployments.

This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of not-so-micro-aggressions, as it continues to skew all the Microsoft-bought-and-paid-for Gartner polls that show how much more prevalent Windows is over OSX, and self-justify corporate America that they’re doing the right thing. This, in turn, leads to an entire sub-industry of corporate “security” software which must be installed on Windows, because, bought-and-paid-for auditors told them they had to.

Thus, I wind up with a corporate laptop with something like 3 or 4 different “endpoint” security products installed on it, and something like 30-40 different scripts and checks that run almost by the hour to make sure that the inherent weaknesses of Windows hasn’t compromised our precious meeting PPT’s, which corporate IT considers as sensitive as the US nuclear arsenal codes.

Apple offers an alternative to this madness, and I’m very glad they do. I would rather they stay as they are rather than corrupt their ecosystem in this way to make some corporate sales, and I will happily continue to use my personal MBP to do as much of my work as I can.

Heartland

Heartland, by The The, from the album, Infected. As poignant today as it was in 1986.

Beneath the old iron bridges, across the Victorian parks
And all the frightened people running home before dark
Past the Saturday morning cinema that lies crumbling to the ground
And the piss-stinking shopping centre in the new side of town
I’ve come to smell the seasons change, and watch the city as the sun goes down again

Here comes another winter of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter, waitin’ for utopia
Waitin’ for hell to freeze over

This is the land where nothing changes
The land of red buses and blue-blooded babies
This is the place where pensioners are raped
And their hearts are being cut from the welfare state
Let the poor drink the milk while the rich eat the honey
Let the bums count their blessings while they count their money

So many people can’t express what’s on their minds
Nobody knows them and nobody ever will
Until their backs are broken and their dreams are stolen
And they can’t get what they want, then they’re gonna get angry!
Well it ain’t written in the papers, but it’s written on the walls
The way this country is divided to fall
So the cranes are moving on the skyline
Trying to knock down this town
But the stains on the heartland can never be removed
From this country that’s sick, sad, and confused

Here comes another winter of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter, waitin’ for utopia
Waitin’ for hell to freeze over

The ammunition’s been passed and the Lord’s been praised
But the wars on the televisions will never be explained
All the bankers gettin’ sweaty beneath their white collars
As the pound in our pocket turns into a dollar

This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state–

You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

Source: You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online.  But you almost certainly don’t how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you — individually– angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks’ goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners — especially young ones — to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don’t realize how well it’s working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it’s much scarier than you think.

The best part? The very best part? Reddit is one of the biggest parts of the problem, and I don’t see anyone in the comments with either that realization, or the guts to say it. The site got used like a 3-dollar whore in the run-up to the 2016 election, in favor of Trump. Then they “fixed” that algorithm problem, and now the entire front page is almost always filled with posts about people being awful to one another, in various forms. It’s ALL hatred towards “others.” It’s ALL moral superiority over someone else. Just zoom out and look at it without being logged in. It’s kind of like junior high, but way, way worse.

You’ll Own Nothing, and Be Happy

If you’re wondering why house prices have DOUBLED in the past few years, this is why: private equity. That is, large investment groups, like Blackrock and Vanguard, which own substantial stakes in nearly EVERY US corporation.
 
These firms are buying up single-family homes, to turn around and rent back to us, paying WAY over asking price to snap them up. This lady points out that we knew it was happening, we just didn’t know how fast. And it’s bad. Really bad. TWICE as bad as we thought. In less than a dozen years, an average family will simply not be able to buy a house. Period.
 
“You’ll own nothing, and be happy,” say people at the World Economic Forum.
 
I blame private equity for just about everything bad happening now, but I’ll save the full rant for another time.
 
@tiffanycianci

Replying to @Gumie35 #greenscreen #PrivateEquity has acquired as much is 44% of all single-family homes in the United States in the last year, and we are on track to have a full-blown #monopoly of all single-family #housing in the next two years! And the politicians we trust have been taking donations from the same firms that are forcing out #workingclass #Americans from homes and rentals all across the US! This has exacerbated the #housingcrisis and the #wealthgap while all but ensuring they have the donations they need to get reelected and keep their donors happy!!! #lobbyists#lobbying#corruption#monopolies#ImFeelingFrench#boycottkelloggs#LetThemEatCake#eattherich#boycott#housing#housingcrisis#housingmarket#realestaterealestateinvesting@@OpenAI#blackstone#blackrock#vanguard#hedgefundkennedy24@@Robert F. Kennedy Jr#jeffjackson adamsmith@@cancelthisclothingcompany@@Tony@@Real Wicked Witch of the West

♬ original sound – TiffanyCianci

Pluralistic: You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly (05 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

That’s why the only serious competitor to Google is Bing, another Big Tech company (Bing is also the primary source of results on Duckduckgo, which is why DDG sometimes makes exceptions for Microsoft’s privacy-invading tracking):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Controversies

Google tells us that the quid-pro-quo of search monopolization is search excellence. The hundreds of billions it makes every year through monopoly control gives it the resources it needs to fight spammers and maintain search result quality. Anyone who’s paid attention recently knows that this is bullshit: Google search quality is in free-fall, across all its products:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

But Google doesn’t seem to think it has a problem. Rather than devoting all its available resources to fighting botshit, spam and scams, the company set $80 billion dollars alight last year with a stock buyback that was swiftly followed with 12,000 layoffs, followed by multiple subsequent rounds of layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Source: Pluralistic: You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly (05 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

If you want to know why everything sucks, that was it, in a nutshell. Corporations are colluding to get to 2 or 3 per market, so as to avoid the strictest definition of a “monopoly,” so they settle for duopolies and triopolies. And then they work together to take ALL the profit out of the entire ecosystem, and do things like use that money to buy back stocks and then sell their options and put that money in their pocket. Good for the people at the top, with those options, I guess. Everyone else? In the entire world? Suck it.

An Extra 5 Weeks of Pain

Jumping into the middle of the story, I tried cortisone injections to help with my chronic pain, but they only seem to have made things worse. A friend at church gave me a whole new approach to try, but I needed a referral from my primary care physician.

My PCP wouldn’t do the referral over email. She insisted that I needed to make an appointment, and that it had to be a 30-minute one. Because of the length of the appointment, I couldn’t get on her schedule for FIVE WEEKS. But I thought, hey, I have other requests. Maybe because I’m seeing her, she’ll address them.

I just had the appointment. She was 15 minutes late to a 30-minute appointment, and only used 10 minutes of the time. She told me she wouldn’t address my other concerns, and pushed them on the referral. She agreed that this was a good next step, but added 5 weeks of unnecessary extra time to my journey.

Obviously, I’m in a bad mood, and there’s just literally no comfort or rest to be found. Excuse me while I order a pizza, and stick my head inside a video game until I’m exhausted enough to go to sleep.