“While employers pay most of the costs of coverage, according to the survey, workers’ average contribution is now $6,000 for a family plan. That’s just their share of upfront premiums, and doesn’t include co-payments, deductibles and other forms of cost-sharing once they need care.” —That’s if you have an employer. If you’re self-employed you either pick a catastrophic plan, a bronze plan, neither of which cover very much, or pay a LOT more for Silver or Gold. Even then with Silver and Gold most things aren’t covered and you run into that deductible.
Here’s what I don’t get: places like Canada their health care costs are a tenth of what ours are for the same or better care. The US ranks around 20th in the world for quality of health care, so that idea republicans have that we have the best care simply isn’t true. How you “feel” doesn’t reflect reality. Like we all think our education is the best in the world, and that isn’t true, either. Both are very good, but how do countries with much longer life expectancies, with higher qualities of life, and more satisfaction manage to do it? Higher taxes. I don’t know, for me the trade-off is worth it. Americans are so greedy it’s sad. Instead of having the most people in the developed world die who could’ve been saved we choose profit. Instead of rehabilitating people who run afoul of our laws we choose to piss away tax dollars to lock them up. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world and with many prisons being for profit, you can see why. And those people are statistically more likely to hit that revolving door because we’d rather spend tax money to give to for profit prisons because it “feels better” to punish people, than to divert them to programs that are proven to work and end those cycles.
Mr. Medal of Freedom, Rush Limbaugh is a great example of that. He’s a hardliner when it comes to drug abuse. He says we should “put them in jail and throw away the key”. But having means, when he himself became addicted and got busted with illegal prescriptions wanted our compassion and understanding, then bought his way out of trouble. He now has no sympathy for other people without means in the same boat and still thinks we should lock them up and throw away the key. He’s a hypocrite. Especially when we know the programs he benefited from can actually work for other people, too, if they want the help. But, yeah, let’s keep pissing away tax dollars on things that don’t work to avoid spending them on things that do.
And Trump’s latest plan to gut the ACA further than he has, and to dismantle Social Security and Medicare to pay for his tax cuts to the top will only make the situation much worse. Everyone over 65 reading this probably gets one or both of those programs. If they go away completely you’d be fine? If so, why are you using either right now?
Using tax dollars in ways that make sense isn’t Socialism. Not even that Socialism is a dirty word. Republicans love using Venezuela as the ONLY example of what will happen to the United States if we take care of the poor, if we have decent free education, and make sure everyone has food, and medicine when they need it. It’s funny how you never use countries like Norway in your examples. Or New Zealand. Or Canada. Or Japan. Japan has one of the longest life expectancies on Earth, the lowest murder rate in the world, and somehow the people manage to make a decent living, and have pretty decent lives. But, yeah, let’s keep saying the US can only turn out to be like Venezuela. That assumes the majority of Americans are too stupid to go in any other direction. That sounds like a red state problem to me. The life expectancy in the United States is longer in Blue states with Connecticut having the longest life expectancy in America. Blue states also have lower crime rates, lower health problems, lower amounts of suicide, higher test scores, less teen pregnancy, less abortion, more college graduates, higher per capita GDP. We can do it if we all work together.
We just need to eliminate greed, and be willing to compromise and use some common sense,
I’m not sure what happened, but one day a few weeks ago I got an email saying my account was permanently deactivated. I appealed the decision and they said I had to submit a photo ID. I didn’t want to do that since I’d used it already to change my name on my backup account. So just for giggles I sent them a meme making fun of Trump. Somehow they knew from that it was me and my account was unlocked like a day later.
One of the first things I did was add my phone number back, then I set up 2FA on the account so this nonsense hopefully never happens again. My backup account is growing nicely, though. Up to like 1200 friends on that one, My original is just shy of 5,000 friends with like 1500 followers.
While Facebook doesn’t owe us anything, they do get a lot of data from us and make it virtually impossible to stop that. Like location. You can disable every location tracking setting and according to at least one article I read tonight, Facebook doesn’t care and tracks you anyway, and uses that data to target you with ads. If all this data is worth money to them, we <i>are</i> worth something to them. I had a Facebook account hacked. Their solution was to leave it active, but remove my phone number, not give me the option to add it back, leaving me with no way to verify who I am (they require a phone number for the sms codes). Filling out the locked accounts form doesn’t work, because it’s not locked. Trusted contacts won’t work, because you can’t add the phone back. Nothing works. 14 years if Facebook killed by a hacker who they give more rights to than rightful account owners. I’ve though about giving it up altogether a few times. My wife says all I do is argue with people on it, but it’s still a way to keep in touch with people you might not have otherwise, and much easier. As for sending nudes, one would think in private messages that would be okay. Hell, years ago I did that and never got banned. I got a few warnings. They’re very ambiguous about their rules. Any article that makes fun of Trump, even written by Time gets flagged as spam. I’ve had pictures flagged that weren’t nude or vulgar in any way. One guy posted a picture of an Oreo getting dunked in milk and was banned for life for posting sexually explicit material, with no way to appeal it. Like what’s that about? I saw the picture: it was an Oreo getting dunked in milk. Nothing weird about it at all, but he lost his account for life because Facebook says it’s too kinky.
What they <i>should</i> do for account holders who haven’t violated any rules is monetize support. It’d be a good revenue stream and people would happily pay $20 or more to get a resolution. Some people were smart enough to set up multiple accounts years ago “just in case”. But we shouldn’t have to resort to that just because Facebook is ambiguous, or simply doesn’t care. Hypothetically, if everyone decided they had enough and Billions voluntarily deleted their accounts, where would they be? No one young likes it to begin with. It could wind up going the way of Myspace. Why push people who want to be on it out the door?
So, I thought I had all my old posts from that website someone pointed out, but, nope. So I still lost like a year’s worth of posts. Godaddy still won’t give me a copy of the site backup even if I pay them, so fuck Godaddy. Don’t host with them. The service quality sucks. If I have to be honest I do like the themes better, but that’s about it. I don’t spend enough time devoted to this site for it to really matter, anyway. The nice thing here is I have complete access to my website back end. If I need to inject code I can. Godaddy doesn’t allow that. One for reason to say fuck Godaddy,.
Okay, so I’m not sure if I should really qualify it as starting any more than I would posting here that I’m going to get better at updating this blog. I’m not. Don’t believe me if I write that. My life is hectic. I’m married, for one, so half my time I’m doing stuff with my wife. I also wok crazy hours doing the Uber thing. I should probably be out right now, but I really hate being out early. I hate the sun right now. A little after 12, when it starts heading the other direction, I can deal with it. Till 5 or 6 when it seems to be right in your face driving. So, my wife went to Peru for two weeks and a few days recently. She just got back last Tuesday. So in that time I did a lot of cleaning, paid some bills, took a lot of time off for myself, and one night, I sat down and started the first chapter of my book. I get distracted really easily, so I probably wrote about 2,000 words and stopped. And, depending on the time of day, I can’t really type for some reason. Like right now. I think I’m doing about 40wpm. I just woke up an hour ago, and I’m still tired. I usually type between 100 and 150 wpm. Yeah, fast. I can actually one hand type about 40wpm. I’m doing it right now. Okay, now I’m back to two hands for not much improvement.
So my goal today is to do Door Dash and Uber. I need to do DD every so often to keep my account active. Uber I do all the time. I did some car repairs. New spark plugs, I put in new calipers in the back myself. New discs and pads all around, new tries, I put new headlights in so I could have projectors. That may have been a mistake. I don’t know. The lED headlights I have I got for free to try them out. I had been using them as fog lights. My new housing unit uses the same size for low beams so that’s where they are right now. But they’re really dim and I had to create an adapter on my own to go from 9006 make to h11 female. That was fun. I just ordered new bright LEDs. If that doesn’t work I’ll switch to HIDs again for my low beams. See? I just got distracted again. I was looking up prices, posting an add for my old headlight assemblies free, checking emails, and now I think I’m gonna go eat something 😛
I probably should have backed up the work I did the last few months. That was really brilliant of me to forget to do. I have a backup of my blog, but it’s from November, somehow. So, I’m back on Godaddy. They’re not the cheapest, they don’t have the best service, they don’t have the best features, but it’s comfortable, and their tech support is 24/7 and always fixes my issues. I like that. I just installed like 50 plugins, so I have to go through all of those at some point and make sure the settings play nice with each other, and delete the crap I don’t use. I’ve been blogging since 2009, but, quite honestly, I haven’t been paying much attention to what the plugins can do. The biggest thing that annoys me is prior to moving to 1&1,I had like 30,000 visitors a month. My page was ranked pretty high, and it wa worth some money. Switching lost me all of my traffic. Switching back lost me traffic again. So I’m staying with Godaddy. My wife thinks it’s a waste of money, but I like blogging.
So since July, I’ve been driving for Uber. I like it. I also do some of the other services like DoorDash, which I might do tonight. In the summer I was making about $50 an hour doing this. I kind of burned myself out and got lazy. I’ve mostly been doing UberEats, the food delivery side, just to avoid people. But I’m going to get back into the passenger side of it. And I’ll focus on cities closer to NYC so I get those good airport trips and Manhattan rides. Those pay $60-$100 depending on the distance and time. Plus, I get to walk around Manhattan when I go into the city. I can’t pick up there since I don’t live in NY unless I get the taxi license. That’s way too much hassle, so I’m not doing it. I went out for a few hours for lunch doing Eats, and I’ll go back out in a little bit doing more of that, then more passengers later. Right now, I think I’m going to watch a show, so I’ll ttyl. Soon, though, I promise for real this time.
Yeah, been doing that since July. I had to quit that pizza place, working 50 hours a week to make $500 is just nuts. Then you deduct gas and everything else and it’s like “what the hell am I thinking?”. Granted, if you’re at a really busy restaurant it’s not a bad gig. You can make $200 a day if you work all day. But I can make that in 4 hours now, so why work the extra 8 hours doing that nonsense?
So Thanksgiving Eve I made some mistakes. I took a few surging at 2.2 when I was in an area surging at 5.5 because I’m way too quick to hit the accept button. I need to focus more. I also need to learn to sleep more so I don’t get tired while I’m out. And I have bad habits like playing with my tablet while I’m in the car. I need to learn to drive. When I do drive it’s much easier to focus and the day goes by quick. I meet a lot of cool people doing this job. Anyway, I was really just editing some script on here, so I’ll try to remember to post tomorrow.
I quit working at the pizza place I was working t in Trumbull. Now I’m doing ridesharing. Yaaaaay! The pay is much better, but it’s really hard to be disciplined, and it’s hard dealing with drunks and ungrateful people all the time. The stupid score we have to maintain is just nuts. College students and drunks think four stars is a good rating, but what they don’t realize is four stars is low enough to get you fired. You need above a 4.6 or you get deactivated. Every time I take college students I regret it. I started out a 4.86 tonight and now I’m back to 4.83 because of asshole college students who want to feel powerful. And that power comes at the price of people’s jobs, and longer wait times for them. It’s stupid. They pay a third of what they would with a taxi and should be grateful, but are entitled assholes instead. The safest time to do the job is early in the day, like 5am-2pm. You can get all the same volume, all the same distances, with none of the shitty ratings. It’s amazing these companies don’t realize they’re penalizing drivers for making them money late at night.
I’ve looked EVERYWHERE and I can’t find a single site backup from before. Other than the one from 2017. I don’t know which is more likely, that I was just lazy and stupid about it, or misplaced it. I suppose the xml file could exist under another name, but I question what I would’ve renamed it. I checked everywhere, and I even looked at my emails. i sometimes send files to myself as a way to back them up.
Godaddy is still basically saying “Fuck You” as far as a site backup goes. They claim they only keep a backup for 30 days. I’m calling bullshit on that. I bet if it were a law enforcement issue they’d somehow “find” the backup. They’re doing it out of spite for not wanting to pay $15 a month for a non-monetized wordpress site. I should’ve stuck with these guys here or maybe even 000. It just seems really petty and spiteful.
So, in case you’re wondering: NO, I do not recommend GoDadday for hosting.
So Godaddy tells me yesterday that despite what they said in my BBB complaint that they do not actually have a site backup for me. So they lied, and all that work I failed to update is gone. I really don’t know what happened to it. I thought I made manual copies but so far all the ones I checked all seem to be missing the whole last year. Not to mention the fact that I can’t seem to get the xml file to load the right way and it looks like shit on here. I’m going to have to ask these guys how to get it to install the right way, but either way, it looks like all that work is gone. I’m beyond frustrated by it. I had dozens of posts. I am really bad at making regular posts to my site, so losing those is a huge blow to me. I keep saying I’m going to do this more, but i get distracted so easily. I ague with trolls on Facebook and Twitter, I’m looking at porn, I’m playing online games, I’m downloading tv shows: II’m doing everything but writing. The good news is I work for Uber and Lyft so I have lots of new stories to post about. But right now I need to go out and work. I do have a camera, now, too, so maybe I can post some of the videos.
I quit working at the pizza place I was working t in Trumbull. Now I’m doing ridesharing. Yaaaaay! The pay is much better, but it’s really hard to be disciplined, and it’s hard dealing with drunks and ungrateful people all the time. The stupid score we have to maintain is just nuts. College students and drunks think four stars is a good rating, but what they don’t realize is four stars is low enough to get you fired. You need above a 4.6 or you get deactivated. Every time I take college students I regret it. I started out a 4.86 tonight and now I’m back to 4.83 because of asshole college students who want to feel powerful. And that power comes at the price of people’s jobs, and longer wait times for them. It’s stupid. They pay a third of what they would with a taxi and should be grateful, but are entitled assholes instead. The safest time to do the job is early in the day, like 5am-2pm. You can get all the same volume, all the same distances, with none of the shitty ratings. It’s amazing these companies don’t realize they’re penalizing drivers for making them money late at night.
When I started this blog I had really good intentions with writing something new every day since every day I’d have a story from work. But life got in the way. I do have stories every day from work, but some of them wound up in my notes for the book I’ve still never written, and some of them wound up being the reason I didn’t want to write anything when I got home. They’re all just excuses at the end of the day, though. I should’ve made time.
In the last 7 months, I moved to Stamford for what was a great job, had a nice place on the water, and for a little while I was doing really well. I was working 12 hours a day every day for a few weeks, and when it tapered off, I still had a schedule that was around 65 hours a week. I was loving it. Just salary alone I made about $600 a week. My tips roughly doubled that number. So for a few weeks I was making $1,000 or more. Then they wanted me to start going home during the afternoon from 2-5. That lost me about $150 in pay and a little more in tips and about $100 a week in tips Suddenly I was making $750 a week. NOt bad, but not as good as a thousand. Then they stopped advertising and it got really slow in the mornings. I’d average 1-3 deliveries and about $20 in tips. It wasn’t worth it to me to stay mornings when I could be looking for something else during the day. So I told them I needed to stop working mornings. It was slow enough they could do it. So my pay shrank another $150 and my tips dropped another $100 or so. Down to $500 a week. Then nights started getting slow. Friday and Saturday they’d get slammed but the rest of the week sucked. So I quit. I got a job at a place in NY just across the Stamford line at another pizza place. That didn’t work out either. I made it 7 months at Tomato Tomato, I made it one week at this place. The owner was too high strung. He’s one of those, “No talking! If you’re leaning you’re cleaning!” types. I’m sorry, but I’m risking my life in this shitty weather to deliver your pizza. Shut the fuck up about talking to my fellow employees.
Later that night I saw an add for a Mexican place near where I lived (I never give the name of where I currently work). So I went to it on the way home and filled out an app. The next day I stopped by, met the owner and he said to come back after 5 and talk to his manager. So I did, and I was hired on the spot =) I have pretty good luck getting in the door places. BUT, since then, I got married!!!!!!!!!!!!! I met a beautiful girl named Mercedes, we dated for a while and it just felt right. Neither one of us had a lot of money so we did something very small that may as well have been eloping. My sisters and their husbands were there, and her best friend (our current roommate) was there. We spent the “honeymoon” at her family’s in Virginia. Again, no money. Lol, I owe her a nice honeymoon, or at least a much better time. Afterward, we moved from Stamford back to Bridgeport where it’s much less expensive. Our place is nice, first floor, by the water, but we both really miss Stamford. It’s SO expensive out there, but so much to do.
So now my dilemma is how to find a job out here. Jobs out there are plentiful, but I don’t want to keep driving back and forth, and during inclement weather it’s an issue. Plus, I figured I’m spending about $600 a month in gas thanks to the Jeep I now have. I miss my Rav4. Never ever trade a Toyota for a Jeep. Really bad move on my part. So I’m hopeful I can find something out here because as much as I like the people I work with, it’s costing too much and I don’t have enough hours. I can always go visit them, but I need a job out here. That’s it for now. ~
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