I liked The Possessed by Elif Batuman. I had read The Idiot in high school, a death march for a term paper. But I liked Batuman's reading of it better than mine (but not enough to re-read it).
The Stanford iTunesU classes have been truncated to a few seconds. So Susanna Braund's Aeneid course (which was brilliant) is gone. Same thing with their Hannibal course. I don't know that they're available elsewhere. Apple dropped iTunesU (2021?) and Stanford didn't have a backup.
It’s odd that the operator of the scam knew full stack level details of its implementation. To me, it seems like they were targeting the author, perhaps as something like privilege escalation, identity escalation perhaps.
Berkeley has the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond, CA for this very purpose. I’ve checked out books where they crackled as I opened them and it was clear I was the first to read them.
His death at the Siege of Leningrad sounds a lot like Archimedes death at the hands of a centurion during the fall of Syracuse to the Romans. That death was told by the always reliable Livy.
In fact, MA costs the government more per person than does TM. MA may have been lobbied for as a cost saving measure. It is, in fact, a profit center for insurance companies.
Medicare has a similar issue. When you sign up at 65, you have to make a first big decision, Traditional Medicare (yay!) or private Medicare Advantage (boo!).
Traditional Medicare consists of Part A (hospitals), Part B (doctors) and Part D (drugs). Part A+B don't cover everything so you have a Medigap plan. I have Plan G which has very little paperwork. All up, I spend about $400/mo and I'm very happy with A+B+G+D.
With Medicare Advantage you sign over your Medicare rights+benefits to a private insurer. This may save you some money, especially early on. In fairness, not really a lot and the $0/mo plans are a scam. With Medicare Advantage, you will then have to argue with an insurance company for the rest of your life. You'll have to deal with preauthorizations and a restricted network.
With Traditional Medicare, what's covered is spelled out pretty clearly ahead of time. Docs know it. You know it. There's literally an app for that. With Medicare Advantage, medically necessary is at the discretion of the private insurance company.
Here is the scenario from a relative: he had a heart event which ended up needing a stent. He had to argue with Kaiser while this was going on. Kaiser is 240,000 people. He is one.
Medicare Advantage is very profitable.
It is possible to switch back from MA to TM which really revolves around your Medigap plan. You are guaranteed issue for Medigap plans for about 3 months before/after you turn 65. After that, you will have to undergo medical underwriting.
I have a Tern Eclipse P18 24" folding bike which I like a lot. Tern and Dahon are related. Wasn't cheap and is hard to find. I literally drove to Vegas and met an IT sysadmin in a casino parking lot at 2am. He was coming off shift. It was legit (found it on EBay and he had the manuals) but it looked+felt like a drug deal.
I have upgraded the Tern. The original FSA crank would come loose and so I replaced it with a Shimano 105 part which required a Wheels Mfg 386 EVO Adaptor. I've never had a problem with it since. I also replaced the front derailleur with an SRAM Yaw which is just perfection.
It's great out to about 20 miles and you can't go up anything really steep because the shorter wheelbase just pops a wheelie. Tires and tubes are hard to find. But it's an awesome bike to have around.
For migraines, I take two CVS Migraine about every week to ten days. It's a cocktail of acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine which tallies to 500 mg of acetaminophen, well under then 4g limit. It's good for four hours but you can only take two per day.
I didn't know about this acetaminophen risk. So I'll be looking for alternatives. Ibuprofen is for inflammation and not headaches. Naproxen is a candidate.
You can also pass clubs. In fact, at my local juggling meetup (Castro Valley BART), it really breaks into two groups: passers and numbers. Passers get together and pass. It's quite social. Someone explains a group pattern and they work through it. OTOH, numbers jugglers can juggle 5 or more clubs+balls. They segregate themselves off and really only talk to each other. We're in the same place but numbers only talk to other numbers.
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...