As I get older I’m starting to learn about Medicare and the add-on products like Medi-gap (aka Medicare Supplement Insurance) or Medicare Advantage (aka Medicare Part C). All the names look kind of similar, but their are drastic differences between them.

When I was young I had always thought the dream of Medicare was: as soon as you are eligible for Medicare you get it, and its free, and you don’t have to pay for healthcare again. It is not that AT ALL.

Its certainly better and cheaper health insurance than anything most of us has access to under the age of 65, but its still insurance with different percentages it pays for different medical services and leaves you with a substantial portion to pay out-of-pocket after Medicare has paid its bit. Everyone aged 65 and older can buy Medicare as your health insurance, and you should! Its a great deal!

However, understand medical costs don’t end when you’re paying your monthly Medicare premium payments. This is where Medi-gap or Medicare Advantage comes in. If you can afford it pay for Medi-gap. If you can’t afford Medi-gap, you might consider Medicare Advantage, but just understand you’ll likely have lots of difficulty getting medical coverage because its essentially a private company HMO model, but worse.

I am disappointed Costco is putting their name on a Medicare Advantage product. I won’t touch Medicare Advantage with a 10 foot poll, but I also recognize I have the luxury of affording Medi-gap instead and many don’t.

Granted this was 10 years ago, so it’d probably be worse now, but it was shockingly only ~15% inflation. That’s high, but not hyperinflation high.

Did the Econ professor also talk about the knock-on consequences if we did this? “Printing money” devalues the currency. Yes, we’d be honoring our debt holders by paying them back in the same number of dollars we borrowed, but our actions in doing this would be handing them back dollars worth significantly less than the dollars they handed us initially. We’d be financially burning every US Bond holder in the entire world (and many of those being US citizens holding government debt).

No one in the entire world would ever lend us money again at the cheap rates we get today. That would cost us trillions of dollars in additional interest we’d have to pay on future debt because the risk of us firing up the money printer would be priced into the very high interest rates investors would demand to buy US debt after that.

I suppose if San Diego County supervisors wanted to go nuclear, they could close the entire training facility, then contract with another facility only for county sheriffs. This way the county would still be providing facilities for sheriffs, but the sheriffs would have no control over who else would be let in.

Even if you own the money printer, you can effectively default if you print too much money. The result of overprinting devalues your own currency so much that it reaches insolvency.

Exhibit A:

In 2008 the government of Zimbabwe experience hyperinflation when the country tried to print piles of money to pay back its debts. Each subsequent printing devalued the currency even more until they were printing 1 Billion dollar notes.

Exhibit B:

Germany’s Weimar Republic in 1923, saddled by WWI payback debt, ran the money printer full blast devaluing the Reichsmark currency to the point of it being worthless. It included them printing the 500 million mark notes:

Fair enough. I admit, as someone who can’t drive IRL, I like things like Slow Roads too, or other driving sims that are generally not fantasy - just ‘cozy’ experiences.

When I was forming my original question, I did consider an audience this might appeal to for those that couldn’t drive (for whatever reason). I appreciate you sharing your POV on this.

I always considered Rideshare driving as the opposite of relaxing because of the physical dangers to drivers as well as the stress the drivers have from trying to make their money against rising fuel costs, insurance costs, and competion from platforms forcing down fare rates. Perhaps the Rideshare game masks all of these elements of the actual rideshare business and simply presents it as a task/goal game with a social aspect which would be far more appealing.

Crazy Taxi (and Simpsons: Road Rage") were largely about driving poorly, crashing into things, and performing automobile jumps that would be considered suicidal if done for real. It was a fantasy driving game with the taxi business as the thinnest excuse to be driving. Unless I’ve drastically mistaken what Rideshare Simulator is, I don’t think Crazy Taxi example is applicable.

Fifteen years before Crazy Taxi, we had Space Taxi for the Commodore 64:

I’d say Space Taxi and Crazy Taxi had equal amounts of relevance to the taxi industry in the sense that they were an excuse to fly/drive in fantasy settings instead of an actual business simulator.

I read the article just to confirm this wasn’t a The Onion article. I understand there are games that simulate work like farming and even powerwashing. Even though I don’t play those, I can mildly see the appeal as you’re creating something (farming) or making something better than it was before (powerwashing). However, I see zero appeal for a game that simulates gig work like ridesharing. Can someone explain it to me, or have I reach a pivotal “too old” moment in my life?

For me grey is a nice utility color. Black cars show dirt easy as do white cars. Grey cars, not as much.

We do lots of things wrong here, but our power bill is based on usage. If you only use this much, this is your rate and the more you use the higher your rate goes.

At the residential level that can exist too in the USA, but its not nearly that simple here in the USA, and I doubt its entirely that simple in your country either. Electricity isn’t like a tank of fuel that is drawn down and refilled. Besides maintaining the infrastructure for generation and delivery, electrical capacity at any given moment has to be built into the system, not just pure total consumption over time. So simply paying for electricity consumed doesn’t capture all of those costs in the system to make that electricity consumption possible to the consumer.

Commercial/Industrial customers in the USA don’t just pay for “amount consumed” but also “demand charges” which means “at any given point how much electricity will you be pulling from the grid?”. Its not uncommon that the demand charges for businesses can be larger than the charges for amount of electricity consumed. Additionally, some European governments give large breaks in electricity rates to incentivize certain industries. Germany for example gives 50% discounts on electricity for chemical production, glass producers, or semiconductor producers if those companies invest in decarbonization efforts.

Many European commercial/industrial electricity consumers have variations on what I described above in addition to wholesale electricity purchases for a given period which also breaks away from your described “pay for what you use with higher rates for more consumption”.

Can I ask you what country you’re in (or another country that you know uses your country’s same system)?

No I wasn’t suggested it be forced or companies be nationalized.

My mistake then. So in your proposed system private companies would continue to exist.

I was saying governments could provide incentives and support for workers to form worker owned companies.

If that’s the case, I’ll go back to my first statement then. Tech workers will likely choose the higher risk but higher reward private company rather than one that my only have a modest return. If the private companies exist along side the co-ops, the boom and bust cycles will still exist except the co-ops won’t be the beneficiary, but will certainly be on the losing side of cycles.

In order to transition to worker owned companies, it would be difficult as you mention, but governments could provide financial to help to get worker owned companies started.

Hang on. You’re proposing seizure of existing private companies and forcing the creation of the worker co-ops? Thats a very different thing. Should I assume your system would ban future private companies then?

I wouldn’t agree either of those approaches. Choice is important. Forcing people into co-ops because you think its better for them isn’t a system I’m interested in being inside.

Tech work can be highly volatile in the business environment. Maybe its different for new tech workers entering the work force, but for a worker owned company, this can mean large losses of revenue for months. I don’t know many tech workers that are willing to take a massive pay cut to continue to stay and commit to a worker owned company if they personally can find better paying work elsewhere.

From the article:

"The playful atmosphere of tech offices flush with investment, enjoying luxe catered lunches to attract programming talent, has been replaced by a looming fear that layoffs are just around the corner "

This boom-and-bust cycle of tech growth and devastation has happened three times during my IT career. Its even more frequent in specific IT niche industries.

How long ago did you get your mortgage? Even 5 years ago the interest rates were rock bottom. Wouldn’t refinancing today double your interest rate?

the transparency of a policy that allows the ICE director to restrict the public release of footage unless “it is in the best interests of the agency”.

Lets see how made up department policy stands up to a FOIA request in front of a federal judge.

How to punish Iran? Convince the people of Iran to elect trump as their president. The damage and destruction caused to the domestic economy would devastate Iran even further.

“We’re like a family here, in the sense that you’ll wear my mark literally on your skin for the rest of your life even long after I’m dead. We also do a pizza party in the office ever other Friday. So that’s fun!”

In the Baker case, he threatened the victim if she ever reported him according to the Muskingum Prosecutors Office. “I’m a retired cop,” he said. “I got pull in this town. If you don’t do what I say I’m [not] cancelling this eviction.”

He should be forced to wear his own quote in writing on his prison uniform for his 2 year sentence.

There are better targets for the anger for not paying enough taxes:

Alphabet (Google parent company) earned $132.17 billion in profits in 2025 and paid $26.656 billion in US taxes for an effective tax rate of 20.1%. Sure this could be, and historically was, higher before trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% in 2017.

Tesla, on the other hand at the same time in 2025, paid $0 in US taxes in 2025 on profits of $3.794 billion for an effective tax rate of 0%.

Google isn’t in financial trouble from this spending. Cash Flow Negative just means in a specific period they’re spending more than they bring for that period. Google and other tech giants have been sitting on mountains of unused cash at $242.5 billion for years. This is a rare time where they’re finally dipping into it to the tune of $5.9 billion.

All the charges against all of these folks seem to stem from this one act by one person:

One of the protesters was standing in the woods with an AR-15 and hit [a police officer] in the shoulder. The officer would survive.