You probably know this, but for others who might not: MS is now allowing some/many/all (???) people to extend the security updates for Win10 for another year free of charge. You have to go into the Windows update area and click a button to accept. At least in the USA, this seems to be a somewhat newly available option, as it was there the last time someone asked me to look at their laptop to see if I could upgrade it to Win11.
An added layer to this shit storm is that the actual deadline for signing up is December 15th because that’s when open enrollment ends. After open enrollment, whatever plan you choose (or if you choose to go without), you’re stuck with until next year (caveat being that there are some qualifying events like divorce or job change where you’re allowed to alter your selection).
So, here we are 3 weeks (actually less than 3 weeks now) out from having to make a final decision, and we’re getting inconsistent as well as contradictory information from the federal government. These decisions take a lot of time for us to make, the rules made by the federal government should have been clear and in place well in advance of open enrollment season.
The monthly payment for my current plan is going up close to 50% (comparing non-subsidized price btw), but also comes with higher out-of-pocket expenses (copay, deductibles) and higher maximum out of pocket (lower is better). So, we’re getting much less while paying substantially higher rates. Keep in mind, I’m only comparing the unsubsidized cost of the plans, but many people on ACA plans are receiving tax credits (i.e. subsidies) that cover all or part of their current plans. So for those folks who won’t get that tax credit anymore, double the cost is probably understating how much more expensive it will be.
This unprecedented rise in expense means a lot of us are looking at the risk versus reward aspect of whether it makes sense to even have health insurance. That’s an extremely difficult decision to have to make, then on top of that, for those that decide to stick with an ACA plan, choosing a plan is itself a monumental task with all the considerations and variables you have to keep track of. It takes a lot of time, research, effort and now in the final days of open enrollment, we’re not even in a position to make these decisions based on a solid foundation of information – the rug could be pulled and a wrench thrown in at any moment.
Maybe I’m being overly negative, but it also won’t surprise me when these systems go down or have technical issues on the final day(s) because of extreme volume of use due to so many of us having to wait last minute.
One of many troubling issues with all this and the way it was handled is that these cuts were made too hastily. My former employer is a federal contractor whose income was some mix of federal, state, and private. Had there been sufficient time to reallocate staff and resources towards state and federal private funding, they/we would have had time to change our strategy and pursue those other lines of funding – likely avoiding the massive monthly layoffs that have been going on in 2025. But that takes time, which was not something anybody had with the sudden, drastic, and unprecedented cancellation of federal contracts that did not leave any room for a smooth transition It was just lost jobs and shattered lives with little to no benefit for working class people.
It may just be my circle, but my friends and colleagues who managed to keep their jobs pretty much all complain about how they’re dealing with burnout now because they have an untenable workload but also the work environment is so stressful because everybody’s still under threat of more layoffs. This is happening both in federal work as well as private industry.
It was a single PHP file containing upper tens of thousands of lines of code (i.e. probably 60k+ but I no longer recall the exact amount). And the horrors didn’t stop there. Function names and code formatting were haphazard, some functions were descriptive enough to be helpful(ish) like check_if_first_friday_of_month() but most were literally along the lines of function12() with no comments to indicate the purpose. A̸n̶d̷ ̴t̵h̵e̵ ̸h̷o̵r̶r̸o̷r̵s̸ ̸d̷i̸d̵n̷’̷t̶ ̵s̶t̴o̸p̸ ̷t̵h̶e̶r̵e̶.̴ This application was storing sensitive personal information in the database in plain text. And the horrors didn’t stop there.
Congrats to the developer, though. This project was the one that finally got him fired and he immediately pivoted into a management position at a big tech company (don’t recall which but it might’ve been Microsoft or IBM) making an order of magnitude more money.
Personally, I’ve been compiling a cache of datacentric interpolations of real-world metrics used to synergistically integrate human intelligence with the intersection of science, technology, mathematics, arts, and philosophy since the moment I was born, and let me tell you, this is what I was born for.
This is why I go out of my way quite a bit to poison the AI with my pointless boomer anecdotes, largely made up or confiscated. Plus, I rarely proof read my comments anymore, so apologies for the grammatical issues and the hard to believe and rarely either one way or the other but twice the times there’s another type of type that you can also quite not, right?
Being unemployed is very high the list of why I cut back, and my unemployment is directly caused by the Trump administration. Nearly everybody I know that is fully employed, across all kinds of different careers and industries, has had cutbacks/layoffs at work with threat of more to come, so they’re all very cautious about spending in general (not just holidays). Even self-employed folks in what are typically solid trades seem to be struggling more than I would have expected.
Personally, I’ve decided I’m not traveling to see family this year and I’m not buying any gifts, aside from a few toys for younger relatives. Since I don’t know how much longer I’ll be unemployed or if I’ll be able to find something with comparable pay and benefits to what I had, it doesn’t make sense to spend on gas, vehicle maintenance, stamps, etc for the foreseeable future.
As an aside, I ended up at Walmart this morning on Black Friday, though I wasn’t going for any of the sales stuff. I was dreading it. While I’m sure it was busier than a typical Friday morning, it was an “I’ve seen it busier on a random Tuesday night in April” kind of situation. I know that the situation at one Walmart I was in for 30 minutes or less on Black Friday doesn’t count for squat and there are a plethora of reasonable explanations as to why it didn’t seem particularly busy, but it does fit suspiciously into the general theme of a struggling economy with lots more people than normal cutting back due to concerns about their economic outlook. It will be interesting to see the official data, though with this administration it’s not like that will be particularly accurate or trustworthy.
Funny enough, on the way to the store I had a flashback to the days leading up to the 2024 election when the super basic yard signs were all over the place around here with slogans like “Trump low prices, Kamala high prices”. Of course, I knew it was absurd even back then, but now it just seems all the more ridiculous as I look back through my grocery expenditures and realize that even with all the cutbacks I’ve made this year, I’m still spending more while getting a lot less.