Nick D Blog

Insurance is a simple question with a complicated answer:

How can an insurance company pay the minimal amount while still retaining employers as customers?

Hospitals (and the providers of which they’re composed) have a similar question:

How can I charge the most that enough insurance companies and patients will pay to be profitable?

This battle happens on the other side of the curtain and patients know virtually nothing until they receive their bill submitted through insurance automatically. This provider-insurance battle is well reported on and results in the wild differences in costs of procedures. A safe guess is just “thousands of dollars”. I’ve experienced this and so has anyone else with the misfortune of requiring medical services. No procedures done and a CT resulted in a $5000 bill right when I was switching employers.

UPDATE

TurboTax has now pulled Coinbase from the list of providers for CSV uploading. While less confusing, the workaround I created no longer allows us to “spoof” a proper CSV. You can still use the output from this blog to enter into TurboTax… but unfortunately it’s gotta be manual.

Crypto grows up

This year in TurboTax, the paywall maze willed into existance by lobbying, a question will pop up asking if you’ve sold or received cryptocurrency in 2020. If you decided to get off the crypto rollercoaster this past year, you will wind up being cornered into paying for TurboTax Premier; for “cryptocurrency support”.

I will never forget the first time I killed the music in a local coffee shop.

Struggling to teach myself “machine learning”, I decided to download large dataset from the internet. As is typical with these types of workloads, the download size was well over 100 GB. When I clicked download, Google Drive split the file into several chunks available to download simultaneously.

The competing music streaming device yeilded immediately, and acoustic pop covers were replaced with 4'33" on repeat until I realized what I’d done.

Interview Season

Doctors have it rough. After graduating medical school, they enter a period of indentured servitude known as residency. It is not uncommon to hear of over 80 hour weeks, 12 hour shifts and DOMA’s. DOMA stands for “Day Off, My Ass” which describes the period of time between a night shift, letting out at 7am, and a day shift starting at 7am. Technically 24 hours, but most of it is spent asleep. In between these brutal shifts, a resident very near and dear to my heart has begun interviewing for a fellowship. A fellowship is a brief extension to residency that allows a doctor to focus on a specific area within their field of medicine. One example is ultrasound. This is a rapidly developing subspecialty of emergency medicine because it provides a quick, noninvasive view of a patient’s internal state.

Beautiful Soup

Does it bother anyone else to think about how we can’t completely describe complicated things? Most of us have heard of the Uncertainty principle describing that a more accurate measurement of position of a particle sacrifies the momentum accuracy. Here breadth, by principle, is sacrificed for depth. On a larger scale, we probably do not have enough compute on planet earth to describe a cold front, let alone weather, in a way that yeilds complete confidence in weather reports. Instead, we’d like to know generally if it will rain. This is us sacrificing depth, by lack of resources, for beadth.