I'm stuck in a Kafkaesque situation w/my insurance company (Anthem). I currently get infusions of a biologic for Crohn's. These are incredibly expensive as well as inconvenient. I'm lucky, in that my insurance company pays for almost all of this.
The same drug is now available in the form of a self-administered pen which is far less expensive and more convienient. However, that falls under the purview of CVS Caremark, who Anthem has designated as its pharmacy benefits manager. CVS Caremark is denying the pen, saying I have to try a whole host of other meds which do not work for me first.
I talked to Anthem yesterday, and they have no idea how to get this approved. Their best suggestion is that my doctor schedule a call with the CVS doctor to argue with them. My doctor is not motivated to do this, as I'm already getting a treatment that works for me.
So I'm stuck wasting hours every few weeks for an infusion that could be replaced by an injection I give myself. And the hilarious part is that the insurance company stands to benefit the most, as they would pay far less.
This is the kind of thing that, if we had actual socialized medicine, I might be able to appeal to a government official to fix. But how can you appeal corporate bureaucracy?
I just want to throw into the thread that a family member who was also getting injections had their Crohn's go into full remission after they started taking low dose naltrexone, which as a pill is both cheap and easy to self-administer even without insurance coverage. Maybe you've already explored in that direction, but if not, N=1 it appears to have been miraculous.
Send, via registered letter, a request for the following:
- the name, license #, and board-specialty of the physician making this determination
- copies of all materials used to make this determination
- proof the doctor making this determination has maintained registration in your specific state and documents proving they meet all their continuing education requirements
- the aggregate rate at which this specific condition is denied or approved by this specific doctor making your determination
Registered letter to CVS Caremark legal department. What they’re doing its blatantly illegal. You are entitled by law to this information and if they cannot provide it they must approve your treatment.
(YMMV, I haven’t had the opportunity to try this, though it comes highly recommended from a physician’s assistant who deals with this bullshit endlessly)
You are probably best off just not fighting it. Keep getting the infusions. Stop worrying about it. Let the insurance company make a decision if they think they can save money.
You must have missed the part where the other treatment isn't just cheaper but also notably better for their quality of life. Telling someone to just stop worrying about it is awful.
There are mushroom based gummies available in local smokeshops due to some loophole in the that this particular strain of shrooms is not explicitly illegal.
My gf just got into shrooms. She started getting them from her weed dealer. His shrooms were overpriced, and hit or miss quality. Then we ran into a girl with a shroom hat at a festival, and it turns out she's a great source. Selling shrooms is her primary source of income. She makes little vegan shroom "cookies" (which are more like fudge), and also sells raw shrooms. She's a licensed massage therapist, and seems to launder the income by charging you for a massage.
Psiloc(yb)in content varies a lot among fruiting bodies of the same batch, genome, flush, hell even within the same cluster (example papers [1][2]). So even for known/good sources I would suggest mixing at least a couple of fruiting bodies to have something known and repeatable. Since powder degenerates faster, honey is a good water/air/light free preservative.
I don't believe there's a loophole, if you're talking about the US. There are indeed mushroom products in smoke shops, but they're amanitas. The effects are much more mild.
Psylocybin and psylocin are Schedule I wherever they occur.
The only practical loophole is spores, which can be sold for research purposes, though not in all states, and are illegal to germinate anywhere. Still, many online outfits sell and ship liquid culture (mycelium suspended in liquid), which is illegal but it appears nobody cares too much.
Ukraine would be in substantially worse straits if NATO hadn't been helping with training the last few years, and providing thousands upon thousands of modern antitank and antiair missiles.
I don't think Ukraine would benefit from Russia and NATO coming to blows.
I wish NATO countries would send so many antitank and antiaircraft military equipment that the Ukrainians would push back and say "hold up we have enough for now" . Why are we being so slow to send them military equipment? It's a lot cheaper now than when Russia invades a NATO country and the gloves come off.
Ukraine would be in substantially better straits if NATO told upfront everyone (including Ukraine and Russia) the Ukraine will not be part of NATO. The biggest country in NATO does not want to enforce no-fly zone and does not want to give planes to Ukraine. When will Ukraine wise up that they will never be part of NATO? US is bleeding Russia as much as possible, Ukrainian suffering be damned. (Putin fell head-first into the biggest geo-political trap in the last 30 years. Similar in size with Vietnam and Afganistan traps).
> The biggest country in NATO does not want to enforce no-fly zone and does not want to give planes to Ukraine.
You can replace "enforce a no-fly zone" with "declare actual war on Russia". A no-fly zone either involves striking targets in Russia and Belarus, or hands the initiative to Russia if/when an air war starts. It is a very bad idea, to put it mildly.
I guess my point was not clear. I meant to say this:
1. Ukraine will never join NATO, and NATO knew this
2. NATO encouraged Ukraine to ask for NATO integration knowing (since Dec 2021) Russia will not stand for it,
3. Russia invades Ukraine and US supports Ukraine with weapons,
4. Russia will spend money, lives, international standing, etc...;
5. US will profit (your enemy's loss is your profit);
6. Ukraine will be burned to the ground.
If NATO told Ukraine from the onset they will never join NATO steps 2 and 3 would not have happened. Which means step 6 would not have happened.
[edit - a typo in the numbers in events sequence. Sorry about that]
> Russia does not get to tell other countries they aren’t permitted to ally with each other.
Logically, no - they don’t. In the real world, it does not work that way. Hence, the US has the Monroe Doctrine. It’s also the reason why US has invaded Latin American countries and many other ones. “Might is right” is an unfair unfortunate realty in international military situations.
Americans have superpower bias. They think that every country can ally and antagonize any other country they want. When you're a buffer state, you don't have that privilege. If Mexico started talking about a military alliance with Russia, they would have some American freedom missiles delivered very shortly. Ukraine is Russia's Mexico.
It goes back way earlier than that. Russia has repeatedly expressed in no uncertain terms that Ukraine is the single one red line that they will never accept joining NATO. A very insightful article on FP on the topic:
It's totally nonsensical and does not map to Putin's writings on the essential unity of Ukraine and Russia or myriad other geographic, demographic, and resource-based practicalities of why Putin wants this war.
Please see my earlier comments for why this but-NATO! argument is the opium toked by demagogues and their acolytes.
The entire Ukraine joining NATO thing is such Russian garbage. Ukraine would not have been allowed NATO membership precisely because they have a "unresolved external territorial disputes", which is exactly why Putin invaded both Georgia and Ukraine (e.g. Crimea) in the first place. Putin wants to make another Belarus plain and simple.
Putin was going to invade in either case. He didn't invade because Ukraine was courting NATO, he invaded because things were looking up for Ukraine and Russia has been languishing for a couple decades now and he didn't want an up and coming democracy beside him, he wanted a Soviet style puppet state than he could dominate. It also gives him an excuse to push foreign countries out of Russia so he can tighten his fist around the throats of Russians even tighter and blame it on the West
Russian soldiers have been helping rebels and openly fighting in east Ukraine for years as well. Let's not act like Russia didn't start the need for this.
I suggest reading back your own past comments for a quick reality check:
> There is basically no escalation from Russia. [...].
It is just convenient (Biden's domestic issues/Nordstream 2/other unknown reasons) to claim imminent invasion and the media is incentivised to fuel that narrative since it seems to have captured the attention of the populace at large (perhaps based on the Russophobia that is prevalent in mainstream media).
Maybe it's time to be extra aware of your own biases against Russia, NATO, mainstream media...
I was wrong. I admit that. I spoke from a position of superficial knowledge at the time as I ignored the wider context of the situation and was commenting from a position of received wisdom as I was unaware of what a parent post mentioned regarding a widely known fact that NATO was in Ukraine providing thousands of weapons, I was not aware of that and was only commenting on the basis of "received wisdom" on a particular situation.
I have examined my bias against mainstream media and still find them completely warranted, thank you.
No, I am saying that I had not taken Russia's threat model into account. Given that threat model, Ukraine is an existential issue for them and the resolution of the uncertainty that has been in place since 2004 was just a matter of time.
It’s safe to say Ukraine is an existential threat to Putin. Russia as a nation shouldn’t care that Ukraine is democratic and integrating with Europe, except to ask why they couldn’t also.
I don't see how Ukraine being democratic is an existential threat to Putin in any meaningful way. This situation has been almost 14 years in the reckoning since April 2008.
The NATO-US acting from Ukraine possibly attempting to foment "color" revolutions in Russia, NATO missiles on Ukraine soil, an increasingly belligerent leader in Ukraine renewing the push to join NATO and NATO-US arming and training Ukraine troops. These seem to be more likely factors in the invasion.
Given that the "West" has been frothing around the mouth for his ouster (he did once ask to join NATO btw), one could conclude that "He who goes first wins" was a viable strategy for him.
Not pushing the world really close to a nuclear war also counts, in the eyes of those who think that a direct involvement of NATO would trigger the MAD scenario.
Looking at these photos, I think we (NATO) should intervene with troops and air support. For all the cries of "never again", we just sit on our hands and watch a Hitler like dictator destroy a neighboring country in a territorial war. Its clear Russia's army is a paper tiger, and I doubt Putin has the balls to use nukes.
"Balls" have little to do with it. It looks to me like the invasion of Ukraine was the act of a desperate old man whose time is running out to achieve his ambitions, and a mistake based on wishful thinking rather than a sober assessment of relative military capability and popular sentiment of the two countries. This is not a man you can trust to be rational. We should assume he will continue to act out of pride and delusion. If he thinks he doesn't have anything left to lose, we should assume nukes are on the table.
Unfortunately with that logic then we will never push back against Russia. Putin invades Poland? “Oh we shouldn’t attack because Putin is irrational and might use Nukes, we’ll try appeasement first.” This interview with exiled Russian M. Khodorkovski (who used to be the richest guy in Russia until Putin jailed him for 10 years) is pretty convincing that this fear makes the “West” look weak to Putin and he’ll keep pushing until he’s stopped. https://youtu.be/OX6ISz0FotU
Poland is a NATO member, so invading it would trigger a really massive response of all treaty members to which NATO has been preparing since 1970s at least.
Ukraine is being beaten exactly because it is not a NATO member, but actively considered to become one.
Exactly, but then why doesn’t NATO just start a massive response now to save the lives of potentially tens of thousands of Ukrainians that may die in the next few weeks?
Yep. If we had any justification for military intervention in Ukraine, they wouldn't have been invaded in the first place. We kind of just have to hope this damages Putin's and/or Russia's power enough that they don't do it again. Signs are not entirely unfavorable on that front.
Just to write down a thought that nobody likes to express--maybe the best move is to let a nuclear aggressor take whatever they want. I think in retrospect it might seem like the best move if things take a turn for the worse.
It's one thing to shoot down a russian jet that was allegedly flying into turkish airspace (despite the kremlin claiming otherwise). It's a whole other thing to declare a no-fly zone above ukraine and actively shooting down jets.
Why Turkey can defend its airspace and Ukraine can't do the same together with its international partners, in a manner similar to EU airspace protection for example?
The main practical concern here is just that russia can launch planes and missiles from inside russia. If you want them to stop you're going to have to bomb some airbases.
Or you're going to honor the border I guess? Are they free to bomb civilians as long as it launches from their side? Even the best planes will get shot down if you give the other side enough chances, is nato going to allow that? Anyway where even is the border at 50k feet? How many conflicts have started because a pilot accidentally entered another country's airspace? Or at least that the other country claimed they had.
You're not arguing against an impartial observer. You're arguing against putin. You seriously think that putin is going to be persuaded by this type of lawyering? I think even to a layperson it's fairly obvious that the two represents two very different actions, and very different levels of escalation when it comes to their relations.
He is rational, just misinformed. Dude is scared shitless of losing and he knows he can’t win this game. He will pretend he’s willing to though, because it works.
Maybe, though it is still to be seen. One of the more "interesting" sub-games in the bigger war is how much support NATO is willing to give to Ukraine. The English sending MANPADS is apparently fine, even though Russia said beforehand that they would regard the delivery of weapons an act of war. The Polish jets were a step too far. USA sending over drones (sorry, "loitering munitions") and anti tank weapons is apparently still OK.
The same logic that works against the West has also been working against Putin: "what are you going to do about it; escalate into WW3?"
The problem with the Polish jets was apparently that they planned to fuel and load them from a German airbase. It wouldn't really matter that the planes only were flown by Ukraine pilots. The German airbase would still be a legitime military target.
And then NATO would have to respond when cruise missiles started flying into some of their member states.
The problem with the jets is that everyone involved thinks that they are a bad idea whose military utility isn't worth the degree of provocation no matter what route they are supplies through, but no one wanting to be the country to say no to Ukraine about it; all the maneuvering was about countries making it so someone else would have to be the one to say no.
The US finally said no to the specific plan, and put forth the general rationale for the more general no when it did so.
(OTOH, the tolerance for acts that might be seen as provocation by Russia among NATO countries—at least those on the Eastern flank—is going up rapidly, with Estonia and Lithuania calling for a NATO-enforces No Fly Zone, and Poland hold-my-beering them and calling for a NATO peacekeeping force in Ukraine.)
Except US was the initiator of the whole idea with Blinken doing press rounds for over a week telling everyone how he negotiated this deal with Polish gov.
The problem with Polish MIGs was deferring the decisions entirely into US hands and exposing all talk and no will, at least when no profits are to be made by US arms manufacturers /1. All of a sudden something "obvious and imminent" became "complicated and untenable".
/1 Of the declared $800mil Anti armor launchers account for ~$400mil, then the other $400mil pays for some small arms, personal armor, ammo and 100 drones? Its pure mil complex walfare program.
AFAIK it was an American base in Germany. Americans were ok with Poland donating their planes to Ukraine, but not ok with Poland donating their planes to the US to donate to Ukraine.
Yes, because of a simple reason - NATO will only defend its members if they didn't "provoke" the other side to attack. Poland is in a far too precarious position to risk anything that could be read as provoking Russia and therefore losing the protection of NATO - Putin would happily take Poland next after Ukraine. Giving the jets to US and then US giving them to Ukraine would avoid that particular issue, but US decided against it.
The significance was that they needed to be based in a NATO country, and not in Ukraine. I agree that it wouldn’t make much of a difference if it was Poland or Germany.
>The same logic that works against the West has also been working against Putin: "what are you going to do about it; escalate into WW3?"
It's not so much that putin doesn't have the balls to escalate into WW3, it's that supplying weapons isn't considered very escalatory (for all sides involved), so putin is more likely to let it slide rather than escalate himself. It's not something that can universally extended (eg. to no fly zone or boots on the ground).
> It's not so much that putin doesn't have the balls to escalate into WW3, it's that supplying weapons isn't considered very escalatory
It wasn't seen as too likely to effect the conflict, but as the conflict drags out it becomes a greater irritant. Russia is recently openly threatening to attack “supply lines” of those arms if they continue; since anything in Ukraine is already clearly subject to attack this at least implicitly is a threat to potentially attack convoys and logistics points outside of Ukraine.
Hitler is reviled for the Holocaust, not merely invading another country in a war of conquest.
This whole situation is depressing and frustrating all around, but I don’t think anyone is being hypocritical.
War of conquest became taboo after WW2, written down in the UN chapter. The concept of "crimes against peace" itself was ironically invented by Soviets.
We might well be in 1939, when hitler had not yet done the holocaust. The comparison seems fair to me. Who knows what Putin would be capable of if he kept on going full tyrant for another 3 years…
I was specifically referring to Hitler's territorial expansion prior to WWII.
Putin's expansion into Crimea and Ukraine reminds me very much of Hitler's expansion into Austria and Czechoslovakia. Its my firm belief that we're at the "Peace in our time" phase, just before WWIII, and it would be better to nip it in the bud and take action now, rather than 2 years from now, when Putin has had more time to prepare, and he attempts to invade a country that we are obligated by treaty to defend.
Russia is not the USSR of old or Germany in the 30s. It's not a great economic power with an independent industrial base. Right now, Putin is throwing in all the conventional forces he can spare, but Ukraine – a smaller and poorer country - has managed to stop the attack with some material support from the West.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has not been idle. Europe is increasing military spending significantly. Unprecedented sanctions are in place, and their purpose is to destroy Russian economy and cut their access to many key technologies. If the sanctions remain in place, a large part of the Russian losses in Ukraine will be permanent.
The allies fought Germany because they had no choice - the Nazis basically declared war on the world. Yet the Holocaust is very much a post-facto justification. At the time, the allies did nothing to impede the Holocaust, and it played very little part in their justifications (just watch 'Why we fight' and check where it's mentioned - nowhere).
Only after WW2 the allies decided to remember the Holocaust existed, and justice still played a second fiddle to interests.
Hitler was reviled for everything he did, not just the Holocaust. The Allies didn't even know about the true extent of the Holocaust until they started liberating concentration camps in 1945.
Gladly its not you to decide that, as sad as the situation is. And also as sad as it is, the Hitler comparison is still inappropriate in both directions, please refrain for dignity.
Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and the international community did essentially nothing about it. It both emboldened him for further invasions, and provided him a huge manufacturing power to pump out tanks and armaments. If the international community said "Hell no, we're defending Czechoslovakia on principle because that invasion is BS", they would have fought a much weaker Germany and very likely prevented WWII (or at least one nearly as bad). Frankly I don't see how you can argue that's not an extremely apt comparison.
I think OP is referring to 1939 Hitler, i.e. invaded countries and clearly doesn’t care about killing civilians, but before the Holocaust. It’s clear from the last couple of weeks that Putin doesn’t even flinch at the thought of killing thousands of innocent civilians just to satisfy his own twisted reality.
My girlfriend is a "camgirl", and this behavior reminds me of the behavior of the lower tier, more shady cam / phone-sex sites.
The bigger sites that take a large percentage of the customer's money (40-50% goes to the site, not the model) also protect the models from chargebacks. Sites that take a lower percentage do not. One site she worked for ("cam model directory") has a spreadsheet of customers who are known to issue chargebacks that the models have to monitor before taking payment.
What is going to happen to cam sites, like MyFreeCams, Chaturbate, etc..?
I assume these rules will make accepting paymets impossible for any adult site with live-streaming, and for Cam sites, that's their core business.
Potential answers include a move to cryptocurrency to avoid payment processors, or a move to strictly non-explicit content to appease them.
In the near term, either would decimate these sites. In the long term, crypto might be better for performers, as the cam sites could take a far smaller cut of payments.
My friend is a camgirl and OF girl. I take most of her pics and vids on my iPhone. So I have thousands of nudes of her on my phone.
She's 24, but could pass for much younger. I'm paranoid that I'll get flagged.. Especially since all of her tik-toks with any skin shown, or any drinking get flagged.
It's the same as with parents photographing their naked babies in the bathtub. Those images won't be flagged because they aren't in the database provided to Apple. Only verified illegal photos should be in the database. So you and your girlfriend will be fine.
> Only verified illegal photos should be in the database.
Considering PhotoDNA, the source code of Apple's implementation, a 30-year Ph.D. level in cryptographic knowledge, and the processes by which neuralMatch actually run are unavailable to the OP, I think OP is justified in the minor paranoia of not wanting to be falsely accused of owning CSAM.
That's precisely the problem with Apple's announcement here. You can't apply common sense to an algorithm and dragnet-style surveillance.
I doubt even Apple specifically knows precisely how things will turn out with this system.
What if you take a picture of your naked baby in the bathtub or your child on the beach, and the picture is very similar to a known CSAM picture with a hash in the database, enough to pass the distance threshold they're using?
The picture would be sent for screening, the Apple screener would indeed say that's a naked baby/child, and soon enough you've got the FBI (or whatever is the equivalent in your country) knocking on your door and arresting you for pedophilia.
> Those images won't be flagged because they aren't in the database provided to Apple
This is not accurate. Apple is using perceptual hashes. If the features of an image are close enough to an image in the NCMEC database it may generate a matching hash.
Not defending the new tech by any means, but you'd have to have enough matches to exceed some hidden threshold, which would first trigger a manual review by Apple. It seems very unlikely to have your own family photo result trigger anything.
The lack of transparency and discoverability on OF is a pain for both subscribers and creators. And the creators do work really hard.
My ex-sugar gf is an OF creator. I was with her when she started (transitioned from MyFreeCams where I met her, and brought some of her members with her). She worked her ass off to claw her way to the top 3% which is where she was when I broke things off with her. She spent way, way more time on social media, promoting herself and her brand, than she did actually making content. There are groups of creators that promote each other's social media & content on twitter and ig, and its critical to get hooked into one of those groups to succeed if you're not already a major IG or Twitter star with millions of followers.
Even at 3%, she was not making a huge amount of $$. I wish OF had more transparency around how the percentages relate to actual income..
My SO is a camgirl with an onlyfans. She's transitioned from mostly live streaming on MFC to mostly doing shoots and vids for OnlyFans. OnlyFans has become a substantial part of her income.
I flew last week. Except for airline lounges being closed and a lack of beverage/snack service on the plane, it was one of the most pleasant trips I've taken.
There were no lines at security. Three of the 4 airplanes I was on were nearly empty, there was a minimum of crowding around the boarding area, and due to middle seats being blocked there was plenty of overhead bin space on the one flight I had that wasn't empty. All in all, it was fantastic.
The same drug is now available in the form of a self-administered pen which is far less expensive and more convienient. However, that falls under the purview of CVS Caremark, who Anthem has designated as its pharmacy benefits manager. CVS Caremark is denying the pen, saying I have to try a whole host of other meds which do not work for me first.
I talked to Anthem yesterday, and they have no idea how to get this approved. Their best suggestion is that my doctor schedule a call with the CVS doctor to argue with them. My doctor is not motivated to do this, as I'm already getting a treatment that works for me.
So I'm stuck wasting hours every few weeks for an infusion that could be replaced by an injection I give myself. And the hilarious part is that the insurance company stands to benefit the most, as they would pay far less.
This is the kind of thing that, if we had actual socialized medicine, I might be able to appeal to a government official to fix. But how can you appeal corporate bureaucracy?