Grad student & fellow Texan signs up using Healthcare-dot-gov for pennies

plan

Click the image fore details on the total cost on a Silver Plan when s/he was done …. three cents a month! S/he’s also in the same boat I am: if the diarist makes just a tiny bit less than what s/he estimated for 2014, they will not qualify for a private policy and there is no Medicaid expansion option.

With my eligibility confirmed, I was ready to select an actual plan. I already knew basically what was available and basically what plan I was going to pick, because I had done a bit of research over the past month or two. Two really useful websites I found are Value Penguin and The Health Sherpa, which both have good estimators of the costs of Obamacare plans.

Sen Ted Cruz (R-sociopath) is afraid we commoners might get “addicted to the sugar,” like some poor child eating their way to ADHD down at the local candy store. Except the “sugar” is, you know, having a shot at beating cancer or other inopportune diseases and injuries …

 

Judgement Day for Healthcare dot gov

HealthSherpa

Health Sherpa

The Affordable Care Act will have its usual detractors and promoters this week, but today is a deadline, the first of December. Sure, make merry, as the second leg of the glorious Winter holiday season looms. But for the usual suspects, today will also be a special day to better lie, cheat, insult, obfuscate and otherwise misinform the American public, the land of the free and the home of the uninsured; almost 50 million citizens lack healthcare coverage of any sort and millions more are under insured on junky policies. A huge number of the uncovered are also mired in poverty, exacerbating that dismal metric. Obamacare can address a lot of it, although millions will be left naked again, at least this year and most often next too, at least until saner heads prevail, in those red states where ledges or governors have chosen to withhold free healthcare from the least fortunate. That’s a sad commentary on the wealthy-political axis; forever in pursuit of any thing smacking of indecency or inhumanity, provided there’s so much as a tiny chance it may sway the news cycle against Barack Obama for a single morning. [Read more…]

Tech update: the system that FTB built

On the PC thread below this one, boy, did I get a great response in comments and via email! I’m leaning toward going with this CPU and this MoBo that I linked last night, and scavenging the rest as I can. It would be good for me to catch up on technology, plus I have some nephews now that are old enough that they need to learn how to put a basic box together lest the tech world forever intimidate them.

I’m open on the OS, [Read more…]

Updated: tech PC windows question

Updated: see new thread … so a reader/friend has offered to give me this CPU and this MoBo. Which looks to my unprofessional eye like the start of a system that could exceed my wildest dreams. I have two monitors and a couple of keyboards and mice. What else would I need to assemble the “system that FTB built”? A box shell with a power supply, a video card, and an OS right? Anything else?

In the spirit of Black Friday, if I make enough or bleg enough in December, I’m going to get a new desktop PC. But when you’re as poor as I am, new is relative. Refurbished or used with a limited one year warranty is more like it. I can maybe spend up to 200 bucks on the box. I’d like a reliable PC with a reliable OS. Does anyone have any suggestions? Ebay or store, Dell or HP, AMD vs Intel, Windows 7 vs Windows 8?

It’s probably not realistic, but I happen to have two decent flat screen monitors. Having side-by-side dual monitors on one box would be ideal for writing and blogging. What does that entail these days? Feel to free to email me at DarkSydOthemoon at aol or leave a comment below, thanks!

ISON: something may have survived!

ison_soho_nov28_2036UTC.jpg.CROP.original-original

The streak at about ten o’clock

 

By this time yesterday I was absolutely certain ISON was cooked, literally. It was tiny to start with, even by comet nucleus standards, and within a million miles of the sun for hours where insolation would heat any normal material to several thousand degrees by any scale, plenty hot enough to boil most metals. Let alone ices and bits of rock. But right now it appears that something might — and we have to stress might — have survived that will slingshot back into cooler solar climes and be visible in December with a small scope.

One can almost picture the spirit of Engineer Scotty working to pull off the miraculous. Oh, and the UFO-alien conspiracy theorists are being oddly quiet, which is fine. Let’s not disturb them.

 

Comet ISON still alive & moving at about 200 miles/sec

ISON entering the sun’s outer plasma atmosphere on 27 Nov 2013 as seen by NASA’s SoHo spacecraft.
Reports of Comet ISON’s suicide by sun have been premature. The plucky little nucleus, now thought to be less than a mile across, is streaking closer to its perihelion tomorrow at about 1:37 EDT. The next two days are the time of greatest danger for ISON. If it survives there’s a chance residents in the northern hemisphere will have a clear view of the comet in the first half of December, stretching across as much as a degree or two of arc, as it passes above the earth’s orbital plane at warp speed on its way out of the solar system forever: [Read more…]

Supreme Court to decide on corporate personhood

You’ve probably read by now the US Supreme Court will hear a case with far reaching consequences for the power of a religious few over the diverse many. The case that will be soon be before the nation’s highest court pits a narrow sect of fundamentalist beliefs about birth control against the health and well being of millions. But it doesn’t stop at birth control. At issue is if a for-profit corporation can violate laws at will and inflict their views on employees and their families merely by claiming the law violates the religious beliefs of a single large shareholder or owner. If that doesn’t scare you enough, take a look at the healthcare … theology, of one of the clowns behind the scenes in this trainwreck: [Read more…]

IT/edu/developer question

I need some crowdsourcing-esque comments. You know how many companies, schools, etc., today provide online modules for teaching new stuff to employees or students? Everything from workplace harassment to upcoming new products? And they usually have a software package they use to present the info, graphics, and follow up with a knowledge check?

Does anyone know a little about the current state of that field from a developer or user angle and is it OK to contact you offline?