Oh i didn’t think you were saying anything, just providing additional context to anyone looking at the pictures

Fwiw I would definitely get a color ereader again. It’s not the most incredible color but I think it’s worthwhile to have especially for the price to get color vs non color. But if you’re only reading text with no images (like my mom only ever reads novels on her kindle) I think the non color is the better option bc the contrast is higher

It’s a shame this is such a niche market to eink and that they’re so focused on signage. I get that’s a much larger market but it still sucks. The newest panels like the spectra have pretty amazing color but the refresh time is even worse than the acep/gallery3 panels, which were outright rejected by boox despite having more vibrant color bc of the slow refresh rate. A spectra panels performance with kaleido3 or better refresh would change the game and imo make color e ink readers/tablets way more viable for more people

the picture was taken indoors under warm lighting. I do keep the front light at about 30% or ideally off because it strains my eyes when reading a lot (which I do, I use this thing several hours a day)

but I think that’s fair because I do the majority of my reading in this scenario, indoors under warm lighting, and I’d imagine many are in the same boat

I also have a 7 year old phone that I used to take the picture, and that part may be unfair. I’m actually getting a better phone soon and can maybe take a new shot

Software does make a difference though and perhaps go is doing more. With the boox you can use adb and surfaceflinger to increase the color saturation, but this doesn’t persist through reboots and is finicky to tune so I haven’t done it recently

Also fwiw as mentioned the replacement panel was not of the best quality. I mentioned the dead pixels but what I didn’t mention is when I got it the panel overall seemed warmer/redder in hue. This could all be in my head because I didn’t have it for 2 months while they were repairing it, but it could also be that some panels are better than others. They’re basically all kaleido3 panels, I think there are only 2 acep panel readers and one was that bigme kickstarter that they never actually sold, only ship to backers then basically abandoned. But maybe the limited production capabilities and somewhat high demand for panels means they’re rushing them out? I got the device on release so the initial panel was an early one and the replacement was about 2 years later. But again this could all be my in head

I worked homeless outreach in a rural area. My job was to connect people to housing, assist with obtaining government benefits, and mental health services if necessary. They would spend the day at local hot spots, well trafficked convenience stores in the morning, well trafficked stores like the local grocery store for most of the rest of the day. A lot of them would hang out in the stores as long as possible to escape the heat/cold and many would also hit up strangers for money at these spots

They were often very hesitant or completely unwilling to share where they actually slept. Even though I worked for a nonprofit a lot of them saw me as a government employee and even the ones who didn’t still were very hesitant to trust me or any of my coworkers with that info. I’m pretty sure they were scared that I would call the cops or something. Some slept in wooded areas, some slept behind stores, some couch surfed, etc from the ones who did share and who I found (part of my job was being the point of contact for police and other emergency services who found people staying outside in dangerous weather and getting them emergency housing).

Even though it was probably like 2013 or so that I did this job the absolute cheapest room that would rent to the homeless was $700/mo. There were cheaper rooms around but they tended to require big deposits and would often refuse to rent to someone that didn’t already have a permanent address. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal but they would get around it usually by being vague and ghosting. “Oh so sorry someone else got the room”, stuff like that, and you’d see it was still available for 3 more months. I can’t even imagine what the rent is like now

Super depressing job. It’s very difficult to escape that cycle once you’re in it. It radicalized me a lot to work with people who were literally left on the street in a town with hundreds of vacant apartments. By our estimate there were maybe 20-40 homeless people in said town at any given point

Depends on how you read. I have 3tb of manga locally hosted and with android readers I can just stream the books directly to the device. With kindle or some others I’d have to copy the books to my computer and then to the kindle, which is a total chore because I read a lot

Kindle does win because of repairability though, if only because you can actually source panels for most of them due to their popularity. A handful of boox readers can have their panels sourced but most can’t, including the most expensive color ones. This is more the fault of e ink though, who literally would rather have a monopoly on the panels rather than increase supply and lower costs (or relax their patent nonsense and maybe get some more innovation in the space)

Color page on boox ultra tab c. They (and basically all manufacturers with kaleido3) do post processing on marketing images that make things look more vibrant. It’s fine for manga and I like it but it’s definitely underwhelming and washed out.

Additionally the color filter lowers the contrast of the display and makes the image overall dimmer. Like op I think it looks best with no front light but this one is so dim i often have it on unless I’m under intense light (reading outside for example). I can’t upload a second image with my app but it looks good, just dim

The color also increases ghosting. This is remedied by refreshing the screen fully on page turns but this eats up battery. Heavy reading (like 10+ hours a day) gets me 2 days at most. If I read more typically, like 2-3 hours a day, I get 4-5 days. The huge battery makes it heavy

Also fwiw boox is a mixed bag. The device itself is nice but their customer service is dogshit. I broke the panel, which is very easy. Mine broke from a roughly 1 foot drop onto carpet. The panels are much more fragile. Getting it fixed was expensive, over 50% of the cost of the device. That’s not their fault, of course, but then on top of that I had to pay shipping to them. Again, smaller company, but also a $600 tablet. Then the repair literally took 8 weeks and they gave me replacement panel with 5 dead pixels and 3 pixels “stuck on” that are super distracting, but they only define dead pixels as a problem if it’s in a small box that is the dead center. They don’t have enough panels, which is why the repair took so long, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are okaying shit panels because they are scarce. They also broke the fingerprint reader during the repair. They did offer to fix what they broke for free but I still had to pay to ship to them again (its like $30) and wouldn’t have the device for god knows how long again. I just use it without a fingerprint to unlock but typing the passcode (or anything) is a pain because of the latency for the screen to update.

On the other hand their software team is great. The software has some rough edges but it runs mihon fine and when the software has issues I report them and often get an update on how to fix and occasionally have gotten feature suggestions implemented even.

You can also use komf alongside komga/kavita to just scrape metadata automatically upon import. A bit finnicky to get going (a tampermonkey script is required to give it accessible setting on the komga page) but works very well and even has a gui for identifying results and selecting the correct option if the auto scrape fails similar to jellyfin

For the actual reader part I just use komga as a server and read through Mihon (one of the tachiyomi forks) on my ereader mostly. occasionally I’ll use paperback on my iphone (although recently I’ve been trying Tachimanga, which is basically an iOS tachiyomi fork). Loads library, can sort by tag/library/date added, reads most things very well, can sync read status with the komga server (and/or manga updates or whatever), etc.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702620921341 - the bigger takeaway from this one is that trigger warnings reinforce trauma as a central part of the traumatized individuals identity but they did find some incidence of drawback/harm

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21677026231186625 meta finding no benefit and actually can cause an anticipatory reaction making the person more engaged with the material

There are others, this is just what grabbed from 30 seconds on google scholar. Its been a bit since I’ve done more serious lit review and it’s not like I keep a directory of papers I’ve read

The issue is the culture surrounding trigger warnings. Let’s be real here, people looking for trigger warnings are generally (perhaps overwhelmingly) not looking for material to help with their exposure therapy. They are looking for a “warning” to help them screen material to avoid. The issue is that this creates an unrealistic expectation that is incompatible with the real world. You can avoid suicide, sexual assault, eating disorders, or whatever in your media (maybe) but real life won’t sanitize itself or warn you. You will encounter these topics, whether through the news, careless speech from friends, or even intrusive thoughts of your own. Research continues to show that avoidance of upsetting topics can worsen anxiety and ptsd symptoms

To your final point the idea of it helping to create a choice isn’t even as clear cut as you describe

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21677026221097618 content warnings actually increase the likelihood someone will view problematic content. This point is further reinforced by similar findings in the meta linked above

So you have a system that ultimately makes creators feel like they’re doing something noble, that is likely at best useless and potentially harmful. Said system increases the likelihood that a person will view the problematic content but also enables the reality that a person will simply avoid the things that provoke their anxiety which again is more strongly established as harmful

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0005796712001064 - ptsd worsens with avoidance

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962184904000290 - anxiety disorders do the same

There’s evidence that trigger warnings actually worsen anxiety and are counterproductive

The way to treat anxiety is to face the source of anxiety to try and change your relationship and reaction. The best way to do this is via controlled access that exposes one to the trigger gradually in a context that has no risk of harm (eg a media depiction, discussing the concept, building up to discussing the source of trauma that led to the phobic response if applicable)

Trigger warnings enable active avoidance. This sensitizes one to the aversive stimuli and makes the phobic response stronger. As a result when one encounters the stimulus (eg a friend, family, celebrity etc commits suicide, suffers an eating disorder, etc) your resilience to the trigger is now even lower and the response is more likely to be more significant than it was before.

That said education on access to resources like 988 or other warm lines can lower suicide rates, maybe. Research is more mixed here because it’s difficult to prove causation

a virus perpetuates and replicates itself infecting other executables with its code, thus the name “virus”.

this is just shitty code that crashes hard. it’s not even particularly malicious, it doesn’t destroy anything

that’s not what a virus is

am a mental health provider, am listed in several insurance directories that I either no longer take or never took to begin with

It’s linked to another article but they describe why therapists stop taking insurance as a matter of complexity. This is true but another aspect is that some insurances simply pay significantly less than others. It’s a difficult thing to discuss because the low ones typically still pay like $60-80 an hour and on a surface level that sounds like a lot (because it is). But the reality is that doing therapy is complex. For one I typically lose about 30-50% of the good rates just to overhead (lower side is telehealth or home office, higher side is if you rent an office and can go even higher). More so if you’re actually planning for retirement and sick time, which a lot of therapists just ignore. Then you have to figure that we only get that rate for billable hours, which is 20-30 hours a week depending on how good you are. The rest of the time is admin bullshit, case collabs, screening new clients, etc all of which is unpaid.

So I can take the $70/hr insurance that barely covers my day to day, or I can limit myself to private pay and the ones that pay $100-140/hr. Even with the 100-140/hr ones I’m still probably making 60-70k on average because of stuff like no shows and cancellations (which is why more and more therapists are charging very high cancel fees)

But their main point of the complexity is a big one too. In my experience the insurances that pay low are the ones that are most likely to give me grief over payment. They’ll pay me very late (but if I submit billing 10 seconds late they’ll deny), they’ll clawback payments for the dumbest reasons and be the most aggressive about clawbacks (potentially meaning that I’ll suddenly get a note from them that I have to return $1000+ because they decided after paying me they shouldn’t have), and they’ll have the worst systems for submitting billing (requiring me to have hours of wasted time on hold with their shitty customer service)

It’s terrible that this person died and it’s worse that they spent almost $400/month for care that was never able to be delivered. It’s worse that this will probably result in no changes whatsoever. Even if harris’ Medicare for all prop passes it will take ages and the design is that there will still be a “two lane” system, where private supplementary insurance is still available for the rich. This will likely result in tons of providers that don’t bother taking Medicare because it’s more of a pain in the ass and pays less. So the government will finally give you insurance if you have none but it will be functionally useless like this article describes. End commercial insurance altogether

The important takeaway from this is that “supplements” have 0 oversight. The CBD, probiotics, vitamin d, etc that you buy could just be capsules of vegetable oil that does nothing at all. Or they could be asbestos and cyanide for all you know (that probably would lead to an investigation though). There’s also no safety regarding packing and handling, so it might literally be a guy with unwashed hands who just picked his butt loading your gelcaps in a dirty bathroom that someone just took a massive shit in. No one checks and verifies any of this and that’s why shills and hucksters jump onto this shit, it’s a completely unregulated market where can cut corners everywhere and say whatever you want as long as you include *not intended to treat any diseases and not evaluated by the fda

A $1200 thing you buy on instagram that sends “good waves” to your brain? Supplement. The cbd you buy at the gas station? Supplement. Doterra oils? Supplement. No regulation, no oversight, just robbing people based on their desperation to fix chronic pain and mental illness

Bleed in my ass

those bass drum hertas tho

It hasn’t seen a release yet, code is here:

https://github.com/arjpar/WebShield-staging/tree/ldev

I’m not endorsing it, never heard of it before this post, but this was literally the second line of the readme

“massaging tartrazine solution into hairless mouse skin over the course of a few minutes or using microneedling achieves “complete optical transparency in the red region of the visible spectrum”

I know it didn’t happen this way but I like to believe it was someone having their unwashed dorito fingers after lunch, decided to massage a mouse for several minutes, and figuring this out

Then if you’ve met your deductible the big question is if you have a coinsurance after the deductible is met and an out of pocket maximum.

If your coinsurance is 60% or 80% or whatever, you won’t be responsible for the full bill but only that percentage of it.

If you have no coinsurance (a no charge after deductible plan) the service should be covered 100%

If you have coinsurance you should have an out of pocket max, which once hit should end the coinsurance and make services covered 100%. OOP max is typically quite a bit higher than deductible, sometimes 5-7x as much, but not always. It’s plan specific.

If your employer pays 50% that is an arrangement they have worked out and the specifics will be tied to your companies contract. This could mean they would pay 50% of any bill (unlikely as this is not a fixed cost they can plan for. Maybe if you’re like a ceo or some shit) or it could mean that up to your deductible they’ll pay 50%.

Also keep in mind even if you’re in a “covered 100%” scenario there are some instances in which you would still get billed:

Differential vs contracted rates - if the hospital charges $5000 for your procedure but your insurance only pays $4600 the hospital can sometimes bill you for the difference. This is not always the case; some contracts require the servicer (doctor) to accept the contracted rates and not charge more. Most common reason you’d get a bill in the above 100% scenarios and also the reason the math might not work out in coinsurance scenarios. Eg in the above surgery example your bill would probably be $1320. It should be 920 as that is 20% of the $4600 paid, or even $1000 as that is 20% of the 5k billed, but you pay the 920 as 20% of what your insurance paid plus the $400 difference, so $1320

Out of network providers - these can often have a separate deductible and sometimes in hospitals a provider can be out of network even though the hospital itself is in network

Non covered services - if the procedure involves a service that isn’t covered (uncommon)

Billing errors: if a bill looks wrong contest it and if your insurance isn’t reimbursing providers properly complain to them. Sometimes a medical office gets your info wrong and assumes your deductible or coinsurance is active when it shouldn’t be. Sometimes your insurance makes similar mistakes.

one of the most frustrating aspects of being a therapist in america in the past 10 years is the hand waving of the ethics involved in the financial renumeration of our relationship with those we serve

I would say a significant stressor for the overwhelming majority of the clients I have is financial woes. And because the system is backwards, those with high paying jobs well into their career tend to have the fancy PPO plans with no deductible where seeing me (or anyone) is only $10 despite the fact that they could much more easily afford a 5-10k deductible. Meanwhile the people who are making 20-50k a year on the other end of the spectrum almost always have those high deductible plans with sometimes massive deductibles and rarely have employer funded hsa.

I’m not an idiot, I run my own practice and I do the books for it. I can do the math to figure out how much take home pay someone has with those salaries. I can also conceptualize the cost of housing, food, phone, transportation, etc because I am also paying these things. So when I meet someone here and their appointments are $140 per meeting I am in a tough spot. I am asking them to take on a burden of $560 per month (assuming weekly sessions). That’s immense. And if the deductible is 5k, 7.5k, 10k, it will take ages to meet especially if they’re younger and not really making contact with many other medical providers.

I am contractually obligated to charge what your insurance pays me in these instances. If your insurance pays me $140 for the hour I have to charge you that until you hit the deductible. I could be dropped from the network if I modify this for you and get caught.

I can ask you to skip using your insurance and charge a lower out of pocket rate but this is complex. For one, many therapists can’t adjust their rate much lower. I have flexibility here because my practice is entirely telehealth so my overheads are much lower. But if you see them in an office? They are paying about 40-50% of that just in rent most places.

Additionally even with telehealth I have to be careful with adjusting rates. Insurance only pays me for specific timed and coded sessions. If you and I have a phone call for 25 minutes? Not covered. If you ask me to collaborate with your psychiatrist and I talk to them for 40 minutes? Not covered. The time I spend dealing with billing and this system, which works out to an average of 20-30 minutes per session? Not covered. So the 25% of my week doing billing shit and the overtime hours doing phone check ins, case collabs, etc. has to be covered by that.

This is why many therapists give fee schedules and charge you for all of these things. If you want paperwork from them it’s $1 a page, phone calls are $75/hr, etc. I can make it work without this because I’m not paying for office space but if I was I would need to do this to keep myself afloat.

This is also part of why many, many therapists simply don’t take insurance anymore. Just pay me the $140 directly. I can collect it via square or whatever and your billing is done. I no longer spend 5-10 hours a week on billing nonsense like fighting retracted payments, finding out why claims were denied, etc. You can submit receipts for out of network reimbursement and you deal with them.

I understand why my peers do what they do. But ethically it’s a mess. I signed up to help people and what I have become is a gigantic cash sink that puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the people I serve and is counterproductive to our work.

At the same time I deserve a fair salary for my work and this is the only way to get it. And if I protest the system by leaving it because it’s so broken then the end result is that there’s 1 less mental health provider who takes insurance. If I stop taking insurance altogether I alienate a ton of people with high need who can’t afford to pay out of pocket forever and/or don’t know how to navigate out of network reimbursement.

I cannot tell you how many times I do a screening call with someone and they say “this sounds like what I need”, they tentatively schedule, and then once I run their insurance and give them the actual numbers of what treatment will cost they simply ghost. It is a system that actively deters people from seeking assistance because it is so cost prohibitive

And the insurance lobby has its fingers so deep into the framework of america that this will simply never be fixed. It will only be changed. Look at Kamala Harris’ proposed Medicare for all: it still allows private plans. That will be a movement in the right direction because it will end the idea of someone being “uninsured”, which is great, but it will also create a two lane system in which many practitioners will do whatever they can to avoid taking basic Medicare patients in favor of the commercial plans. Commercial plans, at least in my area, simply pay more. Significantly more. Like $80/hr vs $140/hr. And in the end I will have the same problems because the unnecessarily complex private insurance system will still exist and be very powerful. I will just have one more insurer to add to the web of complexity. But no politician will ever remove the private health insurance industry. To do so would alleviate so much spending waste, so many wasted administrative dollars and man hours, but it would also result in layoffs of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of americans whose jobs rely on processing the complex bullshit of this system

Speed or mallrats depending on what kind of vibe you’re going for

edit: upon reflection I will change my Sandra bullock movie to “the net”. Terrible, but strong 90s vibes

your scenario is either worded incorrectly or very atypical (which is very possible, there are a lot of different insurance plans in the us

typically high deductible plans work in a way of “meet your deductible and then we cover x% after that”

eg I am a therapist, I bill your insurance $100 for an hour session. You have a $1000 deductible with 80% coinsurance.

Our first 10 sessions will cost you $100 out of pocket, which goes to me directly. I submit billing for these sessions but get no reimbursement from the insurer because you have already paid the full amount. However, my submission of billing indicates to the insurer that you paid $100 for a medical service on whatever date for whatever diagnosis.

After the $1000 deductible is met your insurance splits the bill with you 80/20. Now you pay me $20 per meeting and when I submit the billing the insurance (hopefully) pays the other $80 to give me the $100 per meeting I am owed.

This of course assumes no other medical spending goes on for the duration, otherwise you would hit your deductible faster. If you saw me 3x and then had a surgery that cost $5,000, you’d pay $700 for the surgery to settle your deductible plus an additional $860 (20% of the remaining $4300) and then sessions would be $20 under the 20% coinsurance.

You should also have an out of pocket max, this is kind of similar to a deductible but it is different. This is a tally of your total spending and once you hit it your coinsurance usually drops and you pay nothing.

Also important point is that deductibles reset every plan year. This should have been made abundantly clear to you but I still encounter many who do not know this

Additionally your insurance may have certain services covered that don’t cost you anything or where the deductible doesn’t apply (eg you’d only pay 20% even if it’s the first appointment of the year). Typically this is preventative care, things like physicals and vaccinations

That is the most typical. But like I said it there are many plans and variations. It’s possible you have a plan that prior to meeting the deductible you pay 50% of billing and then have a 0% coinsurance. This would be really great insurance.

It’s also possible that you have a benefits package from your employer that is basically paying 50% of your deductible in a roundabout way. this is far more commonly done by the employer funding an hsa/fsa account which would be a payment card that you use on medical spending and not the insurer. However, I have encountered plans where the hsa and insurance were rolled together and joint companies, where the hsa would pay all or part of billing prior to deductible on the patients behalf

Using the same examples above you’d pay me $50 until you met your deductible, then nothing once the deductible is met. If you had a $1000 deductible, saw me twice, then had the 5k surgery you’d pay me $100 and $900 for the surgery. If you have one of the situations where the employer is covering 50% of the deductible it would be the same but the surgery would be $400 because ultimately you’re only paying $500 of the $1000 deductible and your employer is covering the other half. This is not a situation I’ve ever encountered

Another important point is that deductible status is dependent on your providers doing timely billing and your insurance processing said billing in a timely manner as well. This does not always happen. As a result you may meet your deductible but my billing verification shows that is not the case. The examples I used above were clean and easy but it’s never that simple. Most people have a deductible around $2500 (and many 2-4x this) and see several different healthcare services.

I submit my billing at the end of each day but some places are sloppy and will take weeks to submit. This can lead to situations where you are charged money because I was under the impression you had a deductible but you should not have been. Eventually the insurer will pay me once things sort out. If I am good at record keeping (I am great at it for this reason) I will catch the double payment and send you a refund. This is why it is important for you to keep track of deductibles and medical spending. Not all offices are managed well. I’ve personally had money stolen from me (because this is literally fraud, to not refund the double payment) and I don’t believe it was ever intentional, just offices with shitty management. Let your providers know if you’ve met your deductible. I will always hold off on charging you if you tell me this, submit billing, and see what the insurance reimburses. If they reimburse me in full then you were right. If they don’t I send you a bill and if that is incorrect you need to call your insurance to complain

You should be able to track deductible and out of pocket spending on your insurances consumer portal (eg go to Aetna.com or whatever and click “for subscribers” and make an account, if you haven’t already). This should also give you an explanation of plan details.

Most importantly you should be able to call the office of the place (or billing dept if it’s a larger health network) doing the procedure to have their office manager check what you will be expected to pay for the procedure both at time of service and expected cost total. This takes only a minute but be forewarned it is essentially an estimate and not a guarantee. Billing can change last minute depending on how the procedure goes (eg added complexity allowing them to add another cpt code for something)

There’s a lot more to it than this unfortunately. Some plans have tiered deductibles, sometimes a staff member in a hospital isn’t personally enrolled and then are considered “out of network”, which is a whole other thing, sometimes you are still responsible for a certain services that the provider requires but the insurance refuses to pay. That last point especially: every time you establish with a medical office or get a procedure you sign something that says you are financially responsible for services not covered by insurance (I guarantee this, every time). So if you get bloodwork with like 30 tests and 2 aren’t covered even if you’ve met your out of pocket max and have the best insurance in the world you’re getting a bill (and potentially a hefty one, some blood tests are extremely expensive)

Sorry this is very long and complex but that is kind of how insurance is? To boil it down to a “eli5” 2-3 sentence explanation would either require your specific plan information in much more detail or to overgeneralize and potentially mislead you.

I mean like running their hypothetical control software/framework within a docker on a local server. Is that illogical? I do the same for the software that runs my ip cameras with my home server, instead of them needing to connect to some external server.

You’re ultimately right though, when it comes to docker I am at the proficiency level of “can deploy other people’s images” and not so much on the “have bothered to make my own”