Just an FYI for those in the US with insurance issues
Important information! Insurance coverage decisions are made by medically ignorant bean-counters. Until we can dismantle the whole shitty system, know how to scare them into submission.
This is like that procedure Mr. Incredible told that old lady
having executive dysfunction, ADHD and just a complete lack of any conception of the workings and passage of time means that i consistently roll a critical fail in punctuality
me: okay so i have to be there at 9 so i’ll get up at 7, actually get up at 7:30, get off my phone and into the shower at 7:45, finish dressing at 8, stop reading my news feed and make breakfast at 8:15, clean my teeth and leave at 8:30 with 10 minutes extra time to spare if shit goes sideways. there’s no way i can possibly be late.
me, still in my pyjamas in bed, scrolling through twitter at 08:59: motherfucker i did it again
my brain with every passing second drawing towards a rapidly approaching deadline:
my last, chronically overworked, almost entirely nonfunctional brain cell: read @ 11:59 PM ✔️✔️
tl;dr my country is literally on fire and the politicians refuse to help
I know there’s a lot going on in the world, but you probably haven’t heard about what’s happening in Australia.
we’re on fire.
approximately ¼ of australia’s population is in catastrophic fire danger. A catastrophic fire level means your only chance of surviving is leaving before it’s too late.
it’s Spring in Australia, and rainforests aren’t meant to be dry enough to burn, yet at the time of writing this (11/11/19) there are 71 active fires in NSW (43 out of control), and 51 active fires in Queensland - not including those that have already burned before now, and there are more in other states. Sydney is already rated “catastrophic”, the first time this rating has ever been used there since its creation in 2009. That’s right, we had to add yet another level of destructiveness, because “high”, “very high”, “severe”, and “extreme” were no longer adequate. To quote the Fire Danger Ratings, “for your survival, leaving early is the only option”. conditions tomorrow will be the worst they have been, and people are evacuating as we speak. the fire fighters are preparing as best they can.
This isn’t just about people losing their homes; people have died and will die, countless animals have already lost their lives and many more will still perish. our land, our lives, and our hope is up in flames and will soon be nothing but ash. the annual fire season has not even begun yet. this is only the beginning. my native land is burning, and there is nothing i can do to stop it.
the government refuses to acknowledge that we are in a climate crisis. the fires have never been this bad. we have been in severe drought for more than a year which has only contributed to the force of these fires. the Prime Minister Scott Morrison has done nothing but send his “thoughts and prayers”. He will not accept aid from other countries because he is too egotistical to admit that we need it. All the while the people of this land are suffering. Climate change needs radical human change to be combated. we are already seeing the results of years of indifference, and this is barely the beginning of something that will only get worse the longer government’s and big companies refuse to act to counteract climate change.
Our government has also cut funding to Fire and Rescue NSW by 35.4%, the Rural Fire Service by 75.2%, and QLD Rural Fire Service by 26.42%, resulting in closures of services; they don’t have the resources to cope. We are fighting a losing battle against the results of climate change. and this is only the beginning.
So I’ve probably mentioned that work has been kind of a shit show over the past few months. Some of it was just timing and schedule juggling but there’s more stuff that happened since then and someone (not me) went public with this shit, so I’m gonna share it here. Please note that per minute equals per audio minute and not how long it takes to actual transcribe a thing. If you think I can caption a whole 60 minute file in 60 real time minutes, uh… No.
Here is a thread by someone way braver than I am, and more willing to toe the line of the NDA than I am. This is my only income so no, I can’t see myself doing the thing.
And if you wanna see this all summed up in video form, here you go.
So yeah, I’m concerned. Transcription folks are working for like 4.50 an hour in some cases. I don’t work on that side much because I prefer to caption. But a lot of changes have happened and I’m concerned for my fellow freelancers and what this means for the future.
Also, there are a lot more companies out there that use us than you probably think. Y'all have definitely seen my captions in the wild, though I can’t tell you which ones are which, because of the NDA.
Anyways, there’s a petition if you wanna sign it in solidarity with us.
I honestly hope Mauga’s “Tourist” gimmick is a thing that goes beyond the “What You Left Behind” story. I thought it was the most charming thing when he was looking at a tourist guidebook for the mansion they were about to storm. Like once he gets introduced he gets a little “snapshot, snapshot, selfie” or a “Check guidebook” emote or a setup line in Lijiang that’s like “It’s not too late to hit up one of the vendors right?” It would be such a good sense of dark humor that the guy who is fully willing to enjoy the space he’s in is well aware it may be in flames due to Talon within the hour. I mean one of my favorite things about Overwatch is that it’s a globetrotting story with unique maps all over the world, so it would be fun if you had a character who appreciated that too, and it would be a darkly funny twist if it were an antagonist.
Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jointly introduced The Loan Shark Prevention Act,
which will cap credit card interest rates at 15% (and closes the
loopholes that lets credit card issuers exceed their stated APRs with
the use of hidden fees) and which re-establishes American post-office
banking.
Critics of the bill say that it will put the payday lending industry out
of business and that this will harm poor people, who struggle to get
credit elsewhere. It’s a position that has been carefully cultivated by
the wildly profitable predatory lending industry, who spent lavishly on academic research to support the position, then used bots to flood regulatory proceedings that might have produced evidence to counter it. This has allowed for a modern return of usury, targeting the poorest and most desperate Americans, with out-and-out swindles going unpunished (naturally, Trump has dismantled any protections victims of the debt industry might have sought).
But capping interest rates at 15% won’t just benefit the desperate and
poor. Today, banks charge an average of 17% on their loans, but –
thanks to generous federal monetary policies and low fed interest rates
– they only pay 2.5% to access capital. That massive spread means that
banks are guaranteed massive profits – at taxpayer expense, and with
taxpayers pickup up the pieces when the banks’ usury destroys Americans’
lives.
America does have a problem with underserved and underbanked
poor households, and this has indeed created a thriving alternative
finance industry to serve these peopel. Underserved households with
annual incomes of $25,000 are spending an average of 9.5% of their
annual income ($2,412)/year on finance costs – a sum equal to the
average family’s grocery bill.
But the reason these people can’t get traditional loans is that they’re
bad credit risks, and the reason they’re bad credit risks is that
they’re grossly underpaid and literally can’t survive on the money they
earn, so they have to borrom just to keep from being evicted or
starving. There’s no reason that people working full time jobs should be
in debt traps: after all, corporate profits are commanding an all-time
high proportion of US GDP, meaning that companies have lots of
excess profits they could be transfering to their workers through higher
profits. If your business is profitable because its workforce is
desperate enough to accept sub-starvation wages, then your business
isn’t profitable, it’s an indirect welfare recipient, receiving a public
subsidy in the form of housing and food benefits, and socialized
bankruptcy costs that are inflicted on the whole of society.
Meanwhile, the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez bill has an alternative to both
traditional and subprime finance for poor people (and everyone else):
post office banking, a feature in most advanced nations, and once a
mainstay of American finance. Post office banks leverage the convenient
locations and long hours of post offices across the country, offering
services to the unbanked, and meanwhile shoring up the public mail
service against the monopolists who are trying to abolish public postal
services, like Fedex, UPS, and Amazon.
So, the nonprofit I work for has a policy arm that has been fighting payday lenders for years. I’ve heard the most heartbreaking stories from our people working on the project, of the folks they’ve talked to who were victimized by the predatory lending industry - and I do not use the word victimized lightly. Our direct services arm also tries to reach underbanked populations and offer better alternatives thru our services but it’s slow going - there’s a big trust barrier we’re working against.
This is a huge, HUGE mechanism by which class-based oppression is maintained, people being thrown into dire straits by poverty wages then sucked in by predatory financial services companies and bled dry til they’re in utter financial ruin. And it’s hard to come back from that, once your credit is trashed - the only way to rebuild your credit is to take on debt and pay it off, but the only people who will lend to you at that point are the predatory types, keeping you further trapped in that cycle as they put you into impossible-to-maintain lending products so instead of fixing your credit, it gets worse.
So please, everyone, do everything we can to support this bill. The Orange Menace will veto it, of course, but there’s another election coming, and gods willing the Menace will be out of office and we’d stand a chance at actually getting this through then.
