the part of the premium that comes out of your gross is a tax subsidy to me. but most of my employers have paid 90% or more of the premiums which is usually 5x or more what I'm paying. the corporation gets to deduct that from their corporate taxable income. that's tax revenue the govt is forgoing.

Looked up the numbers for this year's high deductible plan (employer cost and employee contribution) and the new plan is 7% higher premiums for marginally similar coverage. My employer decided to eat most of that increase (across all plans offered).

Lol. That is bizarre. If it had two lanes in the on ramp to eastbound i-90, then it would make slightly more sense. Note that for both south & north bound rainier traffic today there is only one lane of on ramp each, so having two coming from northbound rainier is just weird.

Yeah our employer pays a LOT. I think our out of pocket on premiums is "only" a few thousand for the year? But because it's a high deductible plan & since I have chronic conditions, I'll probably hit out of pocket max so likely at least another $10k for 2026 on top of premiums.

If this position seems extreme, consider that depending on where a person in car is driving to/from near these ramps, there is very likely another freeway ramp about the same time-distance away as we routinely impose on people walking or rolling during detours or when we want to use safe routes.

We are doing open enrollment right now and it stresses me out so much because I really can't not have health insurance but because I need health care I am routinely exposed to just how absurdly wasteful it is (in ways that don't seem to matter for patient care!)

To be ever so slightly fair to WSDOT, at least the "updated" model for SR18 didn't assume quite so high a growth in traffic. Of course, it still assumed growth and made no consideration of alternatives so .... not much changed.

This is particularly salient right now because the premiums on my employer provided health plan come to about $22k a year (a high deductible one for a family of 3!). The employer gets a major tax benefit for paying most of that cost (with the employee having lower pay).

Yep. See also the analysis we got out of data for SR18. Their models from 15+ years ago didn't turn out. But essentially same methods used to project dire consequences for 2045. No consideration of mode shift (or land use reform to discourage ex-urban housing development).

our local all dem dominant establishment politics has this conflict in spades. the older non-white "insider" politicians still play with respectability politics (with the enthusiastic support of white establishment dems) and are surprised when younger politicians don't (or less so) and breakthrough.

I feel like I need to go visit this sign and check the Braille. At least some of the signage update after Capitol Hill station opened mispelled some things. Is this petty? Yes, but also if they got the Braille wrong they'd have a reason to fix the signage for the full text.

RIGHT?! "ChatGPT[or other LLM product] says X" is about as useful as "The guy at the bar said ...". Maybe because it has a bigger corpus of data (stolen!) it might be right more often than the guy at the bar but not because the guy is less smart than the LLM!

Yeah fair. I walked kiddo through using wikipedia when we came into possession of a spare laptop (so not locked down like ipad or school laptop). She was SO THRILLED by the interlinking between pages and how it encourages citations to source pages (outside wikipedia). Wikipedia is rad.

A bit of a surprise! First time I've had insurance that had a major pharmacy chain out of network. But then with all the gamesmanship insurance and big providers go through negotiating every year or so, I suppose it's not surprising.

Yeah not sure I mind them being taught about all the things it can mean and be good for, but clearly from the way the CS teacher was talking (and some of this presentation) they clearly are pushing for kids to USE it. Can we teach them about wikipedia & critical research first??

Sustainability assurances that make no sense: intercom.help/magic-school...

The very name of this "product" tells me we shouldn't have it in any grade level.

omg just read thru it. other than tech trying to sell it, did they discuss ethics at all?! like copilot is built on mountains of theft that hasn't even been sorted out in the courts. also there is supposedly a state mandate?!?!

But probably will still be our backup option when we need something timely (or the Safeway, sigh).