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I currently live on SSDI due to unfortunate medical problems that made driving impossible. Three doctors independently looked at a particular lab result and sai

by pdkl95 9y ago

I currently live on SSDI due to unfortunate medical problems that made driving impossible. Three doctors independently looked at a particular lab result and said, "How are you still alive?". (Previously I had a decent engineering salary writing embedded firmware) SSDI pays very close to the federal poverty level. Even with the benefit of receiving Medicare, the monthly cost of very-necessary medication plus very frugal living expenses usually leaves me with up to ~$(40 +/- 40) each month in "discretionary spending" that I can use to buy anything beyond rent/medication/food. (e.g. clothes, household cleaning/repair/etc, very rarely travel expenses) I'm lucky that my interest has always involved computers, which I can use for free for many different purposes. Well, as long as nothing happens to my old desktop (Core 2 Quad Q9650, nForce 790i, RAID-1 of ancient SATA disks). An extra $300/yr would would mean buying new boots and some new shirts. Paying that would mean dropping on of my medications (maybe fatal in the short term, defiantly fatal within a year or two), or skipping a few months of food. For the record, I'm fine living frugally. I simply suggest that it's important to avoid falling victim to a filter bubble or survivor bias[1], because there are a lot of people - even engineers in Silicon Valley - that have an even worse[2] situation that mine. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w [2] I'm fortunate to have the privilege of being male and white. My friends without those privileges have only recently been able to start leaning math/software/etc. They are hackers at heart, but a math/CS/engineering education and SV startup opportunities were not available to black women in the 80s/90s.

hycaria 9y ago
Is it not possible to work without driving ?
- pdkl95 9y ago
  That's not the only problem, unfortunately. The results that prompted that comment from 3 different doctors was the results from two sleep studies at different locations that indicated an AHI[1] of 152 an 148. Hypoxia and no stage 3/4/REM sleep for >10 years does bad things too your heart, endocrine system, memory (and other conative functions), etc. (Don't sit at desk ~100% of the time for multiple decades, and get minor problems checked out before they accumulate damage and become major problems) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index ( >30 is usually "severe" apnea. 150 is "how did you survive the severe drops in blood O2 every night?!". The hospital delivered emergency O2 to my house within hours of reading the results of that sleep study)
  - hycaria 9y ago
    Are you overweight ?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
__blockcipher__ 9y ago
[Note: This comment is not related to the current discussion thread] hi pdkl95, I'm somewhat new to HN, so sorry if this is bad form, but I couldn't find a way to send a private message. I've been doing a lot of research on systemd because a lot of the developer practices behind it frankly scare the shit out of me. I thought you had some excellent comments (these were threads from like 2015/2016) - is there anywhere we could discuss the current state of systemd if you're okay with that? Basically I want to see if any of your opinions have changed, or if systemd still seems like a giant ugly tightly-coupled octopus that attempts to subsume too many features. tl;dr: I've been playing around with arch linux and I've been loving it, but something about systemd rubs me the wrong way and it feels like an obvious target for security compromise if I were the NSA or [insert evil org] since systemd is present on so many linux distros

by pdkl95 9y ago

hycaria 9y ago

Is it not possible to work without driving ?

pdkl95 9y ago
That's not the only problem, unfortunately. The results that prompted that comment from 3 different doctors was the results from two sleep studies at different locations that indicated an AHI[1] of 152 an 148. Hypoxia and no stage 3/4/REM sleep for >10 years does bad things too your heart, endocrine system, memory (and other conative functions), etc. (Don't sit at desk ~100% of the time for multiple decades, and get minor problems checked out before they accumulate damage and become major problems) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index ( >30 is usually "severe" apnea. 150 is "how did you survive the severe drops in blood O2 every night?!". The hospital delivered emergency O2 to my house within hours of reading the results of that sleep study)
- hycaria 9y ago
  Are you overweight ?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

__blockcipher__ 9y ago

[Note: This comment is not related to the current discussion thread] hi pdkl95, I'm somewhat new to HN, so sorry if this is bad form, but I couldn't find a way to send a private message. I've been doing a lot of research on systemd because a lot of the developer practices behind it frankly scare the shit out of me. I thought you had some excellent comments (these were threads from like 2015/2016) - is there anywhere we could discuss the current state of systemd if you're okay with that? Basically I want to see if any of your opinions have changed, or if systemd still seems like a giant ugly tightly-coupled octopus that attempts to subsume too many features. tl;dr: I've been playing around with arch linux and I've been loving it, but something about systemd rubs me the wrong way and it feels like an obvious target for security compromise if I were the NSA or [insert evil org] since systemd is present on so many linux distros