New dryer will cost $600. Will not pay over $200 to fix this one. Can have it delivered tomorrow.
Dryers are really easy to fix btw, as long as the motor itself isn’t shot. It’s a big metal drum that sits on some rollers and spins, attached to a motor pully by a big belt that wraps around the whole thing. Belts wear out, rollers wear out, all easy to fix. Electric heating elements are also easy to replace (mine seem to go out every 4 years).
Yup.
A pen got dropped into the lint screen hole.
$300 total.
Better than $500, plus delivery plus installation. I guess I could pick it up myself from the local Lowe’s and install it.
I find the best solutions to these problems is my Facebook friends. They have been pretty good with recommending local people with good service and reasonable prices.
Still working on this. Here’s the breakdown. I thought I was dealing with our carrier, CareFirst Administrators (CFA). Turns out CareFirst split in 2025, so for 2024 I have to call CareFirst BCBS, for 2025-2026 it’s CFA. It appears one of the larger issues is related to EOB forms, my provider says a lot of claims are being denied for no EOB. Now, she submits claims to the local BCBS KS. So I wondered if maybe they weren’t passing the EOBs along somehow, so I call BCBS KS.
And then I get back on the phone with CareFirst BCBS, and I finally get escalated to a supervisor who actually reviewed some stuff, it seems. She says it’s a problem with how the EOBs are arriving from Aetna, and I need to call them. So now I’m up to four insurance companies I’m dealing with. Holy shit.
And now I’m on with Aetna, and I don’t know if I can believe it, but it gets worse. They sub-contracted work for these particular kind of claims to United. It’s just one giant Gordian knot here, I don’t know if I will ever get anything done because the buck never seems to stop anywhere.
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Dammit, I’m drawing a blank, and it’s annoying me.
Can someone smarter/funnier than me abuse the XKCD 2501 generator for actuarial purposes? I need to be entertained!
I started with credibility theory, but I struggled on where to go with it. Thank-you.
Interesting thought. In Canada, the whole claims payment thing is completely collapsed to doctor-govt. The doctor either submits a list of eligible claims to the gov’t and gets paid, or I think what happens now is that if they choose, the doctors can get paid a flat fee per patient. My doctor is on the second plan, which makes things real easy for billing.
Previously I tried to be sensitive not to load a bunch of problems all into one meeting under the assumption that if I went in for condition A and asked about condition B, they didn’t get paid for condition B (I don’t know if that was true or not). Now, I can ask about anything. And in practice, a ton of stuff we do now through email.
Which would maybe imply that this type of billing lightens the load on costs for billing admin, and lightens the load on actual doctor implementation since they can just sit there and fire off emails - which my doctor does routinely.
Oh and of course, all that nightmare you’re experiencing, that never happens because there is no ‘bill’.
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We call that capitation. It can work well for providers, they get a set payment per member, per month, to cover all services. And sure, some people come in more often than expected, and some come in less. The nice thing for providers is that it’s steady income, which is great if your office rent payment is fixed, it’s good to have very predictable income.
The system here in the US does some things well, but it’s being enshittified all to hell. I really shouldn’t even be involved here, but we really like our provider and she isn’t being paid. Yesterday, I got bounced around to a few folks at Aetna, and two at Optum, and one of them kind of got smart with me and said I should have known that bills should be sent to Optum. One, I shouldn’t know where any bills go, I’m not the one billing. Two, the insurance card says Aetna right on the front, Optum isn’t on there. Three, if you all are so smart, once my provider sent a bill to Aetna, shouldn’t Aetna maybe tell us that’s wrong, instead of sending us an EOB?
Some brighter led headlights came up on Amazon vine and actually fit one of our cars. Ffs, had to take the bumper about halfway off to replace them. Then of course, one falls into an impossible to reach crevice behind the washer fluid tank. 5 minutes my ass.
Fortunately i could barely spot the one that fell and i had a metal grabber to reach back and caught it on the first try. About the only thing that went right.
Cars got new headlights though. And I’m unreasonably sore from it all.
So you’re now among the folks making roads unsafe after dark due to glare inflicted upon oncoming drivers?
(Many of those LED headlights are hazardous. The feds are only now just starting to think about regulating them, even though incandescent headlights have been regulated for decades.)
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Here’s a graph showing how much more dangerous night time driving has become since 2019. Glare is mentioned as a problem. Something to remember is that far less miles are driven at night, so if it was per mile driven, the difference would be much more.
The darkness fatalities is almost certainly another factor given the spike happened in daylight fatalities at the same time and is dropping back. You would have divergence if new light technology was driving that.
I saved the originals in case we get people flashing us suddenly. I did have the thought, but the original headlights were awful.
Annoyed is a mild adjective for this pathetic pursuit.
When a Social Media Mob Came for Cornell’s Jane Doe
The hoops I needed to jump thru to read that “free” article, which I eventually abandoned rather than give them a credit card that they would begin charging if I didn’t cancel within 7 days. Annoyed at NYT not you
Another annoying “Chicago” ad from, I think, Pfizer. “Remember the Immaculate Reception? (audio of the play). Remember The Catch? (again audio) Remember the Fog Bowl? (audio of “the conditions are sloppy out there”).”
No. The Fog Bowl was not played in sloppy conditions. It was a bright, sunny day before the fog rolled in (and a bright sunny day immediately after the game ended). And it was played on artificial turf. Conditions were good other than you couldn’t see a thing. That’s part of what made it totally weird (that, and there was no fog in the rest of the city. it was just a cloud of fog directly over Soldier Field)
Also, not really the point, but what does the Fog Bowl have to do with their covid vaccine?
Sorry about that.
The NY Times must have recently changed their policy on their “gift” articles. There used to be no problem opening them but DTNF also had problems yesterday on one of my gifts. I just copied and pasted that one as it was short. However this one is very long.
Basically this one detailed the extensive efforts many folks have made to unmask the Cornell woman who brought the charges. This excerpt from the intro says a lot.
“The online campaign to unmask Jane Doe began with pleas on X.
“Please help me discover the Cornell girl,” Aidan Thompson, a 23-year-old man who regularly praises Hitler and disparages women on the social media platform, wrote in one of the first posts. “I have a good lead, but I need your help.”
Within hours of Mr. Thompson’s post, another user had offered a bounty of $5,000 for the name and photos of the woman who had sued Cornell University under the pseudonym, claiming she had been gang raped at a fraternity party. Within a day, commenters were circulating a woman’s name and images of her from a social media account.
On the fringes of the internet, bigots, attention-seekers and trolls have long seized on polarizing legal cases to air anger and disgust at women — and boost their following.
Now they were coming for Jane Doe.
A little more than a week after Mr. Thompson’s post about the former Cornell student, more than 11,000 accounts had made almost 25,000 posts that purported to name her, according to an analysis by an online analytics company, Gudea, conducted at the request of The New York Times.
Could they flood the zone? If those 25,000 posts named somebody, what if there was a total of 1000 different names? How would they know which one was correct?
Opening a link from a Yahoo email. It opens no problem. But sometimes they email you a code and you cannot go back into your email to retrieve it without closing the ‘browser’ within the app.