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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2024

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  • ___@l.djw.litoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldSeriously, where do I go?
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    5 months ago

    Central Illinois - basically everything within 50-75 miles of I-74 across the state. Doesn’t get bitter cold, not overrun with MAGA asshats (among the reasons we left another Midwest state), cost of living isn’t terrible, and easy access to Chicago, St Louis, and beyond.




  • Ironically, there are two newer formulations and the older soon to be authorised generic. My PBM in their infinite wisdom doesn’t want to cover the cheaper one. My doc has yet to get a PA approved for anyone for the newest version, so I’m stuck with the version they foisted upon us as soon as original exclusivity expired “because sodium raises BP,” and the newer one is salts with other metals.

    Funny how they didn’t figure that out years ago……



  • I’m mildly curious to see what happens in the next month or two, as I’m about to hit my OOP max. Never ran into that combo of scenarios before.

    The one I’m thinking of has a couple months “bridge” program for uninsured/just started new job/etc, but very time limited and an even bigger hassle as they’ll only send out two weeks instead of a month supply with each shipment.

    IIRC, if I had insurance and it explicitly excluded the drug, the card would cover it, but it’s been a couple years since I left that job so memory isn’t clear.


  • None of is trustworthy. Mine is $$$$, and they know damn well insurance won’t pay it all. Of course, if the FDA didn’t require a single source pharmacy to ship it with all the infrastructure that entails, it would help, but only marginally.

    Nightmare of a system even for relatively healthy folks. The older I get, the angrier I get because the people who most need the help are the ones either in enough pain they can’t nav the system, or old enough they don’t know where to start




  • As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.

    “I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”

    “Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”

    “See above, and prioritise things that matter.”



  • If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.

    No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.

    Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.

    YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.

    Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.

    Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.

    I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.




  • I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms

    The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.

    They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.

    Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier

    Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.



  • I’m just now unravelling the last of the truly important bits of my life that are in their clutches, for that and other reasons.

    Two phone numbers, a handful of documents I’ve shared over the years that probably don’t matter anyway, and a couple email addresses that I’ve been actively monitoring for months for anything important, and searches my password mgr for….

    I should be free by 1 July at the outside, possibly a few days early if I don’t delay the actual deletion process. Feels fuckin great.