You actually turned off geminis ability to serve YOU. You never turned off Gemini itself. Google won’t allow that. It’s still running in the background send your data to Google and its advertising partners. Google has publicly stated this is the intended design and they will not allow turning that off.
- Posts
- 53
- Comments
- 1750
- Joined
- 8 mo. ago
- Posts
- 53
- Comments
- 1750
- Joined
- 8 mo. ago
Wha Google is enforcing for a lot of these things, including Gemini, is that you are only allowed to disable direct interaction from the user with the service. So in the case of Gemini, it’s still running in the background and sending out your data to Google and its advertising partners. You just turned off your ability to interact with it yourself.
That owl has been owling for 26 years and even he’s over 2025.
Just built a rig to give me enough raw power I move however I need yo when this all blows up. Went with a Ryzen 5000 series cpu and ddr4 ram and a godawful motherboard with an Intel B580 cpu. It’s cheap but I now have more options.
Too bad I couldn’t get the opnsense VM working properly so I’m stuck with keeping the firewalla running. But that may not matter as the Nazis want to kill the internet anyway. We may be forced to rely on wonky mixnets like reticulum.
Google has decided you cannot turn off Gemini in their newer versions of Android. You cannot install other roms that do either, Google is killing those too. But yea, Apple is the bad guy. Ignore the Google rug pull.
Well we used to need a way for work to be done centrally because powerful matches were expensive. So X11s idea was just do everything remotely and draw the results locally. Then machines go cheaper so X11 was modified to render more locally processed stuff.
Now, we have thin clients, Citrix, and Remote Desktop what are much less efficient than the old X11 approach.
There isn’t an approve button.
There’s a system that’s really fucking old but never ever breaks down so they absolutely refuse to upgrade it. It’s been modified to keep up with regulations over the years but it DOES NOT BREAK. I did some poking around and I think I have a decent idea of what this machine actually is and if I’m correct, it will outlast our patients, all employees, it will outlast their offspring, probably the damn company. It’s a bitch to use but it’s super reliable. It doesn’t get confused, it doesn’t do batshit insane things because an AI told it to. It doesn’t choke on windows updates or even run windows at all. It will survive the heat death of the universe. And we fucking hate using it. But the priority is patient care and this does that better than any of the modern shit so it stays and we suffer. It is rigid, inflexible, literal. It is brutally straightforward and that is the only thing I can truly appreciate about it. There’s no guessing why it rejects a claim. It tells you exactly what it’s pissed about and we can help you or your provider feed it what it wants within reason.
Generally it’s a matter of something was presented to it in a weird way legal wouldn’t like so it rejects it now rather than surprises people with lawsuits later. We actually catch a lot of things months before Medicare does. (If you are on Medicare, look out for catheters you never ordered from Florida. It’s a thing and our system is catching damn near all of them. Fuck these scammers.)
So rather than spend money on keeping up with everyone else, they spend the money on patient care and just brace for impact for the day all the developers of that old system die off. It’s a big priority here that we spend as much as possible on patient care, which leads to some annoying situations where some things get outsourced that really shouldn’t be, but less money spent here means more money spent on medical care.
That old system is the fastest piece of tech we have in the entire operation. It gets all the pampering and attention. And while that TUI is a bear it’s never been wrong. It’s battle tested. It basically says yay or nay based on how it’s been programmed to evaluate a claim. EVERY rule it uses to evaluate claims is in the documentation given to providers while they are signing contracts to go in network with us as well as the messages it tells us to relay to callers. It has no secrets. It has no magic approve button. It doesn’t need one. We know there are a lot of rules, that’s why both patients and providers can call us.
It’s the only damn thing that reliably works around here honestly. All the new shit bolted onto it sucks ass. We are changing the front ends used to access it to modernize but it’s a really broken Microsoft product trying to tie into this old IBM mainframe and it’s just awful at it. As janky as the old stuff is, it works. The new stuff is easier to use but broken in so many different ways we take forever boxing with it only to go back to the mainframe and ask it directly what it wants.
Could have been worse. They could have gone with Oracle.
Anyway to your situation. There are firm rules to these contracts. They are cold and lifeless. There is no humanity in them because we just can’t afford sympathy. We would approve everything that comes in. That’s why we have this system. It keeps things locked on to the terms of the contracts. But the contracts make things predictable, something our company can plan for and prepare for. While some companies can and do want to fuck you over to give your surgery money to some fucking shareholder, not everyone works that way, not even within those companies.
Fun bit of trivia you might appreciate: you know how insurance companies insist on physical therapy before certain surgeries? There’s actually a couple VERY good reasons for that.
- Sometimes, people don’t need surgery at all after physical therapy. That means far fewer risks for our patients as therapy is much less risky.
- Patients who struggle through physical therapy, no matter how badly it goes, have dramatically better outcomes after surgery. They heal better. They recover faster. They have fewer complications. Yes it’s an asinine thing to ask and in some cases seems ridiculous but nobody wants to fix this because we’ve seen the data and these people do so MUCH better long term when they put in the effort beforehand.
That didn’t just help the patient either. The surgeons numbers look better, meaning they are less averse to performing the surgery in the first place. Some surgeons outright refuse surgery without PT happening first. They don’t care how much improvement you get out of physical therapy. It’s more about preparing your body to heal. That means we can send more people their way to get care. It costs less for us too because the outcomes are better so we spend less on the individual patients, so we can cover a greater number of total surgery patients. It slows the rate of healthcare costs increases.
Unless you have exceeded some cartoonishly high limit, we will NOT turn down physical therapy. It’s the cheapest, most effective, lowest risk way to dramatically improve health outcomes. Seriously, if you saw the numbers you would understand why we have conversations like ”we understand your knees feel like sandpaper but the physical therapy will help, please continue.” It DOES help, but sometimes the benefit shows up later.
So yes, we know you need the surgery. Yes we know the bureaucracy is annoying. But in some cases, like physical therapy, there is a very good reason we do not change it. If it isn’t actively killing you, people, just do the PT.
How does this relate to your case?
Well you tried a pharmaceutical approach. It works for the most part but it sounds like it’s not fixing a problem so much as trading it for a different set of problems. That’s not helping you. It’s not helping your insurance company either. The surgery is a one-time expense whereas medication has to keep being paid out until someone dies.
You ever watch Mike Holmes back in the pre-flatscreen TV days? He was a Canadian contractor who had a TV show where he fixed houses and he was strict about do it right or pay more to do it twice. That’s kind of what’s happening here. It costs less to get the surgery than to drug you up forever.
At the end of the day, remember this: health insurance companies are very good at math. They all agree on one thing. Dead people don’t pay premiums. The more people you keep alive and healthy, the more additional people you can serve the same way and the lower your risk. It’s in our best interest to keep you well because your death means missing revenue not just for you but for everyone else we have to care for. It’s literally in everyone’s best interest we take care of you. And since my company has no shareholders, I get to focus on doing just that. :)
Yea they don’t want to have to pay for IT people that know anything more than scripts.
Dell has a chance to do the funniest thing ever…
Well in a small country there’s not an incentive to raise prices endlessly for medical care. In America there is. So now you have the providers which always want more (don’t misunderstand this, it’s not always the doctor you are seeing that’s commanding a higher price. In fact, it rarely is. It’s the others down the line that want their cut for his work.) and insurers that need to pay for things but can’t just constantly demand more money themselves.
Enter the business majors.
They have decided the insurance companies just need to play chicken with the providers and deny paying for things they deem unreasonable. It does stop some scams, but it also backfires sometimes. So for things like insulin, we don’t have direct control over the price. So we will say “fuck them, if we start paying for insulin X, everyone’s prices go up, not just yours, and we won’t be able to covers everything. Get something more reasonably priced.” It doesn’t matter that insulin X would be perfect for you. Lots of other people need it too, and if we cover it, that money has to come from somewhere and people are financially strapped as is.
Drug companies don’t want to do us any favors. They price insulin like it’s a new fucking iPhone. Luxury insulin. It’s not a new thing. It’s been around forever. It’s settled. But they have the patent and the money to bribe congress critters to prevent regulating prices so here we are.
In other cases, like HIV medication, those drugs are incredibly expensive because they are ridiculously expensive to develop for. The drug company does have to recoup their costs. However they do offer patient assistance programs for a lot of those drugs where THEY will cover your copays. Plus in many countries they aren’t allowed to sell the drug there unless they agree on a reasonable price. And in India, their government said “fuck you” and just outright copied an HIV drug.
Then we get things like GLP-1 inhibitors. Those can be a blessing for diabetics that need them. But as many people as there are that legitimately need it, there are even more that can be sold to for insecurities in appearance and given it as a way to slim down. So guess who the drug companies market to? Demand surges and the price is high because they intentionally created a scarcity like they are selling the next PlayStation. And many insurance companies won’t cover it anymore. And the reason is surprising. Everybody wants this damn thing until they actually get it. Very few actually want to stay on it. They usually vomit constantly on it and they stop taking it. So that’s all that money getting spent on what’s basically TikTok marketing instead of patient care. And then for those that do stay on it, they have to stay on it forever. The longer they take it, the worse they are when they stop. All the weight lost comes back PLUS more. So they end up worse than they started and we paid for that instead of someone’s MRI.
It’s the scarcity that drives up the prices. More money coming in from single payer systems kills the scarcity, and the prices are forced to come down because they have to compete with eachother. But rich people are just business majors with hoarding issues. They always need more. They will never be happy. And they will make us all suffer over their endless persist to bleed the country dry.
We do what we can. This really is the responsibility of a larger entity with more resources than we have, like a fucking government, but they figured out all they have to do keep resources scare to keep us fighting amongst eachother. Add shareholders and you get cartoon villain evil shit like United Health Care. All the while tax dollars go in and do nothing but blame us for trying to make this losing game work.
Imagine your heath insurance just being part of your taxes. You pay them that way. Now imagine that that health insurance tax is less than a third of what you are paying for health insurance now to get better coverage. Thats the absurdity of it. We have a government that doesn’t want to do its job, so business majors swoop in and screw us all.
I hate it here.
Agreed. But the fact is there is a lot of money in paying for medical expenses that keep going higher and not a lot of money going to the pot that pays it out. Single payer would address all of that instantly but the rich would be unhappy so we basically have to pay a survival tax to insurance companies every month.
I hate it here.
There are those of us in n this industry that want that changed but we don’t have as much power as the bigger companies do so the best we can do is play by their rules. :(
Yes. Everything is a fight against the rich.
Single payer means more people are in the group, diluting risk further. There’s no way to compete with that. The costs are impossible to beat.
I work the other side of this. We do everything we are legally permitted to do to get this shit paid but there are limits. A big one is while we can tell a provider what’s wrong with a claim and why it denied, we can’t tell them how to bill. It’s illegal. We have to be very careful how we tell them to correct a claim.
This process is inefficient and we hate it. But it’s so much worse when they hire overseas call centers to process their billing for them. I have no doubt there are many intelligent Indian people who can do this but a big local hospital in my area goes out of their way to avoid hiring them. So they fuck up a claim. We tell them, as much as we are legally permitted to, how to fix it. They either do not understand the language we are speaking (not a racist remark, a literal statement. Some of them can speak English but cannot understand it spoken to them.) or refused to follow directions and just keep telling us to do it again.
I get it. I work for the devil. But the overseas reps (and now AI bots) make this so much worse. Nobody is saving any money by doing it this way.
Please please please legislate us into obsolescence people. If I hear one more old lady tell me she can’t afford insulin anymore I’m buying a noose.
I didn’t build this fucking hellscape. I was born into it and I’m doing my best. Unless all the boomers and billionaires die off, we are trapped like this.
So this sucks but you can avoid this with a simple trick. Call your insurance company first with the CPT codes for what you need done and where you plan to get it done. Your doctors office can give you the codes. They aren’t a trade secret or anything. Get diagnoses codes too if you can. Have the insurance company run the codes for you before you go. This does a couple things:
- You verify everyone involved is in network (be wary of anesthesiologists)
- You are getting a quote on a recorded line. The end price won’t be exact (especially is if the claim involves a hospital, fuck them, go to smaller providers whenever you can)
- if you get sticker shock anyway, you can call the insurance company back on that same recorded line and say the word “misquote”. This triggers an investigation that can strengthen your appeal.
- You now have evidence you can file internally with a quality of care/quality of service complaint if the provider did something shady with the billing, or with your state’s department of insurance if your insurance company is being bitchy.
Ideally, we would have single payer insurance, but we instead have a government that pays itself to make private enterprise do its job, then the shareholders in that private enterprise make sure nothing ever gets changed. -sigh-
In the mean time, if you really want to fuck them over, consider switching to health insurance company that does not have shareholders. In many states, they are legally mandated to refund any profit they make over a certain percentage at the end of the year and without shareholders, it’s harder to hide the money, which puts much more pressure on them to spend it on patient care.
United Health Care want you to believe their way is the only way to do this. They are wrong. A shareholder-free insurer still isn’t perfect but the pressures are different without the parasites.
Basically X11 lets everything it does talk to everything else it does. There’s minimal isolation and there’s not a clean way to do that in x11 without fundamentally changing how it works and breaking compatibility. There were also other issues to were too messy to solve without breaking things. So it was better to just start over. And now we have Wayland.
One example of this is you could have Firefox and a terminal window up in an x11 environment and Firefox could theoretically see everything you are typing in the terminal window.
They don’t vote for this either. Stop trying to press the idea of you are with us or against us. That shit is exactly what got us into this mess!
Nope, it’s still running in the background. You just turned off its ability to interact with you but can and does still interact with others.