I am also NAL, but ownership of pictures is a little more involved than that, I'm pretty sure. Mugshots are already public, hence the mugshot photo sites remaining up. Ownership of pictures depends on the history of the picture. If you take, say, a dick shot of yourself, and send it to your girlfriend, she now legally owns the picture. At least in many states. Which is why the revenge porn laws, aimed at the people posting the photos, were passed, because otherwise posting pictures of your ex that you have legal ownership of is not against the law.
If, for instance, you take a topless photo of yourself, store it on your own computer, which is then hacked into, that's already illegal because of the hacking.
And apparently a lot of the pictures on these sites have been obtained through email hacking, and are therefore not revenge porn as such.
(On the Media covered this all in last week's show, and has an update on their site: http://www.onthemedia.org/
Oh, and as a side issue, on the media has decided to become a civil liberties clearing house, and currently has a little war on with DHS. Worth following.)
Heart rate, respiration, O2 blood saturation, skin conduction (okay, I'm not saying I know what I use it for, but it would be fun to play with - back in my teens this is one of the things we used for a biofeedback mouse...) I wonder if you could pull out a good proxy for hydration? You'd probably have to tune it to the individual... Blood pressure would be neat, but difficult, I think. (At least compared to how it is conventionally taken.)
I'd be tempted to build an MP3 player into while I was at it. Always a bit of a pain to haul tunes around while running. (Of course, really, I want data connectivity and maybe a little more brains, but that might be superfluous. Some of my sports bras already have a pocket for my phone.)
On a purely personal level, I have no lack of cup space - there were some weird hormone fluctuations during the whole spine injury thing, and at the end of things I lost the weight I'd gained, but not the extra cup sizes, and while they're kind of annoying not so much so that I've had them reduced, yet. (There are a lot of active women with larger breasts. And we spend a fortune on bras. Gods, you do not want to do spinning flying jump kicks without having your breasts constrained. Running is also especially fun, and it's pretty common to wear a compression style sports bra over an encapsulation style one.) But I don't think we're talking particularly high power consumption, and I don't think putting a battery in the cups would be my first choice. Give the bra a nice wide strap in the back - which will make it more comfortable anyway, and put a pocket for the battery there. Something along the lines of a cell phone battery should to it, and you have fewer nerve endings on your back and spines curve less backwards than forwards, so you're less likely to end up with it pinching. And you could easily fit two - and smaller separate batteries will be more comfortable than larger single ones.
Of course, there still is the question of whether we've talking about multiple bras that can take the sensors, or sensors in some kind of framework that easily and comfortably inserts or attaches to bras. The latter might be more difficult to do well, but I'd tend to prefer it.
There's a lot of variability in terms of what is expanding during breathing - I think one strain gauge, and figure you're not going to get a lot of data, or go to the other extreme and outfit a close fitting tank. I find myself with mixed feelings about an accelerometer - I do soft body biomechanics as part of my academic research, and while I'm not doing motion capture as such, a lot is done in my field, so I have an immediate response of - oh yeah, we'll find something to do with it! But then, I also do soft body modelling, and use community tools when I can (OMG, trying to model slug mouths in bullet blows up so very badly...) which means, of course, that I'm well aware of the vast amount of time and effort that has gone into beter modelling of breasts for the gaming market and... yeah, no. (I think, on the whole, the opportunity for movement analysis is worthwhile, and you'd have to include quite a few for breast modelling. But then, these days accelerometers are cheap.)
There is pressure for women to stay thin to please men. That's not the only source of pressure, and it is more complicated, especially since women now have other career options than marrying well (in which case women competed with eachother a lot, but with an end goal in large part of attracting the right kind of male attention). But it persists. Certainly it is generally assumed that a woman's primary source of attraction for a mate is her appearance in a way that is not nearly so true for men. And women's appearance tends to be randomly discussed even when not really relevant to the subject at hand....and in my experience, men are not a monolithic entity who all like the same thing, though, yes, the combination of being fairly fit but still having significant breasts and a higher hip to waist ratio seems to be a popular type.
(To be fair, my personal experience is that the more conventionally feminine I look, the more I get attention from random strangers who are often jerks. In that sense, when I was dealing with a spine injury and carrying some extra weight I enjoyed a measure of invisibility, and the people who were interested in me were usually pretty cool - and I've never been one to sit around passively and wait for someone to express interest, for that matter. I vastly prefer my leaner fitter self now, but dear gods, it appears that some men just see me and something in the back of their minds says "This one wil bear healthy children... who will never go hungry!" I've tried to adjust my presentation to deflect that kind of response, but the whole thing is pretty irritating.)
Fashion... is special. I don't think the majority of women who are trying to be thin are trying to take it to that extreme... but really, I don't get it. (And this despite having friends involved in the fashion industry as photographers.)
I was a software engineer at Microsoft from 1995-2002. So while my comments are indeed biased (and really, the first four years were an awful lot of fun, even if I did have to work with windows, but it is not a work experience I would want to return to) they also reflect a fair bit of personal experience.
But more the point, the potential product, as presented, isn't useful to me. Might be to other people, can't speak for them. I find the idea of an instrumented bra interesting. (Or, rather, instruments that would attach to an existing bra. I'm picky about my bras, and they have to hold up to running and martial arts.) The app they're using it for? Not so much.
For me to be interested in it, I would want access to the raw data, and to be able to hack it. I don't pretend my case is likely to be that common. But without those features, meh. There are hackable heartrate monitors available, and that'll do more of what I care about.
The being assholes bit is presenting this in a way exclusively aimed at women when women already face a great deal more scrutiny over their physical appearances (and much higher rates of eating disorders and the like). The sensor suite isn't the problem. I can even see the bra-mount as being useful, because hey, men aren't already wearing a strap around their chests. (And as I said, it has struck me as kind of annoying that a heart rate monitor is an additional strap around my chest when I am already wearing at least one.)
But the presentation is hugely tone deaf, in that it plays into existing stereotypes in harmful ways. You remember being told that computers could be for women too - hey, I bet you could keep recipes on one, right? (Or perhaps that was before your time.) If you're going to make a product aimed at helping people not stress eat, for heaven's sake don't make it only for women. Especially considering all the pressure for women to stay thin specifically so they look good for men (as opposed to for reasons of health.) It might be assholery through cluelessness, but it's still assholery.
I'm actually pretty amused by the sensor rigged bra - heck, I wear a bra to run in anyway, way better than a separate heart rate monitor. Though no proprietary MS crap for me;-) (Can't imagine they provide decent support, y'know?)
But it seems horribly tone deaf to decide to put their sensors in a bra, and then make the whole thing be about dieting. Please folks, try not to be assholes.
Though it's worth noting that Microsoft has a history of being particularly inept in implementing encryption. Best intentions, sadly, does not make for secure code.
That all being said, going out and playing with some of the established tools, and reimplementing some classic models (or building models off of wet lab papers, or whatever) is going to build you up a great skill set, and make it a lot easier to find a lab position if you want to go that directon (either a paid one or a volunteer one, each has advantages).
I'm personally enough of a biologist to feel compelled to point out that a lot of what has been done in larger networks has diverged from biology in critical ways - some of it might be interesting in its own right, but it's not really neuroscience in any meaningful way.
Get a solid grounding in Neuroscience. (Kandell, Jessel and Schwartz, Principles of Neuronal Science, is the standard text, it's excellent, and highly torrented.) Please, please, please take some time to understand the variety and complexity of single neurons - they are way more complicated than many of the people who model systems with high numbers of neurons let on. Having a system with 100 billion simulated neurons means an awful lot less if the neurons themselves are shit.
Re-implement some classic systems from scratch. Yeah, I mean start with Hodgkin and Huxley, and build up from there. You will learn things from doing that yourself that you'll miss by just diving in with established tools. (And a lot of the established tools have issues.) Itzikevitch, Wilson, and Trautenburg are all favorites of mine off the top of my head. Strogatz is great as an introduction to dynamical systems.
You can do a lot on your own, and I personally don't see any reason why not to (unlikely a poster above, hey, if you write shitty code, I just won't use it - and it's not like there aren't plenty of neuroscientists writing shitty code because being a theorist doesn't make you a programmer.) But getting more exposure to other people's ideas and pointers to resources is going to do you a world of good. And you don't need much of a background if you have computer skills - people love volunteers.
I'd start looking at Itzekevich, and some of the more complex single neuron systems. (Partly because if you don't understand these, you're unlikely to understand a lot of the reasons why simpler neuron models with a lot more neurons are often a lot less useful than people want them to be.)
Have to run and teach a class, will try to get back to this later.
Actually, no. Even among people with health insurance, our outcomes are worse. Our tech is great. Our doctors are very well trained. That's not all that goes in to quality health care.
And this is why it's important to understand that while biochar improves soil fertility, it is not fertilizer, and is a viable long term form of carbon sequestration.
Using biochar as a soil amendment does seem, at least in some environments* to sequester carbon for the long term. But I suspect that you are correct that whether this is carbon negative is largely a definitional thing.
* And maintaining soil fertility in tropical climes has historically been particularly difficult. Heck maintaining soil fertility anywhere has been problematic.
The points that aren't being stressed here is that the biochar sequesters a significant amount of carbon in the soil for the long term, and can significantly improves soil structure and nutrient availability. (It's not a fertilizer, though for a popular article I guess that might be a fine hair to split.) The terms to look up are biochar and terra preta.
I would still prefer to see their numbers, as whether they're "carbon" negative is almost certainly a matter of definition. My guess would be that they're sequestering more carbon than they're releasing into the atmosphere... which is at least arguable. Though only if they've made arrangments to dispose of their biochar in an appropriate way.
It's not exactly fertilizer, though I'd consider that an acceptable shorthand for a popular piece. Adding charcoal to soil can both improve nutrient availability and long term soil structure. (I'm including two link,s biochar being the general concept, and terra preta being a particularly interesting historical example.)
Not only is this statement sexist drivel, in fact, they have established she would... oh yeah, *write a blog post* for money. If he had named a price, and she had indicated it would be sufficient, further negotiations might be quibbling about the price. It didn't get even that far.
Considering that any time a woman is raped some men (and more occasionally women) have to jump up and say she was lying? Not impressed. I suspect this say more about you than anyone else.
(Yes, women occasionally lie about being raped. At about the same rate as people lie about being the victims of other crimes.)
Context is everything. What might be almost friendly on Reddit is a lot more problematic when coming from an editor of, yes, a blog, but a blog that at least pretends to be professional. And it becomes newsworthy when SciAm gets all "Ooo, can't talk about that!" Which really, is pretty lame and inconsistent with previous policy.
Though I wouldn't see those people as being more likely to be women and minorities, either.
I do suspect that is might be axiomatic that the more barriers there are to being considered for a job, the less likely the primary consideration will be the quality of work.
And I find it rather depressing that the preference for women, minorities and veterans are called out so much more frequently than all the other barriers.
Ah, I see I misunderstood your comment. (Sorry, home with a cold.)
So the question really is about how well the site estimates one's future tax credit. (Which is why there was all the encouragement to expand medicaid, for the people who don't make enough money for the tax credit to apply.) *shrug* I am not hugely concerned - it would seem to most likely be a problem in her case if her income changed greatly over the course of the year. Which isn't that unlikely, but then it's likely to go up. (I'll have to remind her to look at restructuring how she pays if it does go up significantly. But I'm not stressing - as long as she realizes it's a potential issue, she'll deal with it. She's poor because of her choice of profession, but she's also smart.)
I was also concerned on the tax credit vs. subsidy question. I don't know how it works in other states, but in Washington, she was given the option to have her subsidy applied up front to her monthly payment. I don't know how other states are handling this, and Washington built their own exchange and has an administration that is fairly committed to making this work, so they might not be typical. But the $5.62 a month is her upfront cost, not a refund she gets later. (She could have done it that way, but this clearly worked better for her.)
In this particular case, with this HMO, I'm not so worried on the limits, but then this is an area I'm pretty well versed in,* which is why she was calling me. There are things I'm not super thrilled about with this HMO - their limited formulary meant that I had my allergies poorly treated until I finished school and went into tech** - but they're pretty upfront about what is covered, and they're good at not screwing people financially. Which, yes, is often not the case. (I may seriously not miss working at Microsoft, but I do miss the insurance...)
* In my case, it's been all about the spine injury, mostly. ** This might not sound like that big a deal, but before my asthma was well controlled, it would tend to totally freak out if I got any kind of bronchial infection, and not only did this mean I was sick a lot, but I was ending up in the emergency room about once a year for years in there. This hasn't happened for almost two decades, now. And, like, I'm a runner and martial artist now. Better living through modern chemistry. (Yes, new drugs are part of this, but for most of the time this was a serious problem, the drugs were there, just not available to me until they were off patent.)
Slashdot Mirror
I am also NAL, but ownership of pictures is a little more involved than that, I'm pretty sure. Mugshots are already public, hence the mugshot photo sites remaining up. Ownership of pictures depends on the history of the picture. If you take, say, a dick shot of yourself, and send it to your girlfriend, she now legally owns the picture. At least in many states. Which is why the revenge porn laws, aimed at the people posting the photos, were passed, because otherwise posting pictures of your ex that you have legal ownership of is not against the law.
If, for instance, you take a topless photo of yourself, store it on your own computer, which is then hacked into, that's already illegal because of the hacking.
And apparently a lot of the pictures on these sites have been obtained through email hacking, and are therefore not revenge porn as such.
(On the Media covered this all in last week's show, and has an update on their site: http://www.onthemedia.org/
Oh, and as a side issue, on the media has decided to become a civil liberties clearing house, and currently has a little war on with DHS. Worth following.)
Heart rate, respiration, O2 blood saturation, skin conduction (okay, I'm not saying I know what I use it for, but it would be fun to play with - back in my teens this is one of the things we used for a biofeedback mouse...) I wonder if you could pull out a good proxy for hydration? You'd probably have to tune it to the individual... Blood pressure would be neat, but difficult, I think. (At least compared to how it is conventionally taken.)
I'd be tempted to build an MP3 player into while I was at it. Always a bit of a pain to haul tunes around while running. (Of course, really, I want data connectivity and maybe a little more brains, but that might be superfluous. Some of my sports bras already have a pocket for my phone.)
On a purely personal level, I have no lack of cup space - there were some weird hormone fluctuations during the whole spine injury thing, and at the end of things I lost the weight I'd gained, but not the extra cup sizes, and while they're kind of annoying not so much so that I've had them reduced, yet. (There are a lot of active women with larger breasts. And we spend a fortune on bras. Gods, you do not want to do spinning flying jump kicks without having your breasts constrained. Running is also especially fun, and it's pretty common to wear a compression style sports bra over an encapsulation style one.) But I don't think we're talking particularly high power consumption, and I don't think putting a battery in the cups would be my first choice. Give the bra a nice wide strap in the back - which will make it more comfortable anyway, and put a pocket for the battery there. Something along the lines of a cell phone battery should to it, and you have fewer nerve endings on your back and spines curve less backwards than forwards, so you're less likely to end up with it pinching. And you could easily fit two - and smaller separate batteries will be more comfortable than larger single ones.
Of course, there still is the question of whether we've talking about multiple bras that can take the sensors, or sensors in some kind of framework that easily and comfortably inserts or attaches to bras. The latter might be more difficult to do well, but I'd tend to prefer it.
There's a lot of variability in terms of what is expanding during breathing - I think one strain gauge, and figure you're not going to get a lot of data, or go to the other extreme and outfit a close fitting tank. I find myself with mixed feelings about an accelerometer - I do soft body biomechanics as part of my academic research, and while I'm not doing motion capture as such, a lot is done in my field, so I have an immediate response of - oh yeah, we'll find something to do with it! But then, I also do soft body modelling, and use community tools when I can (OMG, trying to model slug mouths in bullet blows up so very badly...) which means, of course, that I'm well aware of the vast amount of time and effort that has gone into beter modelling of breasts for the gaming market and... yeah, no. (I think, on the whole, the opportunity for movement analysis is worthwhile, and you'd have to include quite a few for breast modelling. But then, these days accelerometers are cheap.)
There is pressure for women to stay thin to please men. That's not the only source of pressure, and it is more complicated, especially since women now have other career options than marrying well (in which case women competed with eachother a lot, but with an end goal in large part of attracting the right kind of male attention). But it persists. Certainly it is generally assumed that a woman's primary source of attraction for a mate is her appearance in a way that is not nearly so true for men. And women's appearance tends to be randomly discussed even when not really relevant to the subject at hand. ...and in my experience, men are not a monolithic entity who all like the same thing, though, yes, the combination of being fairly fit but still having significant breasts and a higher hip to waist ratio seems to be a popular type.
(To be fair, my personal experience is that the more conventionally feminine I look, the more I get attention from random strangers who are often jerks. In that sense, when I was dealing with a spine injury and carrying some extra weight I enjoyed a measure of invisibility, and the people who were interested in me were usually pretty cool - and I've never been one to sit around passively and wait for someone to express interest, for that matter. I vastly prefer my leaner fitter self now, but dear gods, it appears that some men just see me and something in the back of their minds says "This one wil bear healthy children... who will never go hungry!" I've tried to adjust my presentation to deflect that kind of response, but the whole thing is pretty irritating.)
Fashion... is special. I don't think the majority of women who are trying to be thin are trying to take it to that extreme... but really, I don't get it. (And this despite having friends involved in the fashion industry as photographers.)
*laughs*
Do you know many women? I haven't noticed that we spend a particularly small amount of time with our minds in the gutter.
I was a software engineer at Microsoft from 1995-2002. So while my comments are indeed biased (and really, the first four years were an awful lot of fun, even if I did have to work with windows, but it is not a work experience I would want to return to) they also reflect a fair bit of personal experience.
But more the point, the potential product, as presented, isn't useful to me. Might be to other people, can't speak for them. I find the idea of an instrumented bra interesting. (Or, rather, instruments that would attach to an existing bra. I'm picky about my bras, and they have to hold up to running and martial arts.) The app they're using it for? Not so much.
For me to be interested in it, I would want access to the raw data, and to be able to hack it. I don't pretend my case is likely to be that common. But without those features, meh. There are hackable heartrate monitors available, and that'll do more of what I care about.
The being assholes bit is presenting this in a way exclusively aimed at women when women already face a great deal more scrutiny over their physical appearances (and much higher rates of eating disorders and the like). The sensor suite isn't the problem. I can even see the bra-mount as being useful, because hey, men aren't already wearing a strap around their chests. (And as I said, it has struck me as kind of annoying that a heart rate monitor is an additional strap around my chest when I am already wearing at least one.)
But the presentation is hugely tone deaf, in that it plays into existing stereotypes in harmful ways. You remember being told that computers could be for women too - hey, I bet you could keep recipes on one, right? (Or perhaps that was before your time.) If you're going to make a product aimed at helping people not stress eat, for heaven's sake don't make it only for women. Especially considering all the pressure for women to stay thin specifically so they look good for men (as opposed to for reasons of health.) It might be assholery through cluelessness, but it's still assholery.
I'm actually pretty amused by the sensor rigged bra - heck, I wear a bra to run in anyway, way better than a separate heart rate monitor. Though no proprietary MS crap for me ;-) (Can't imagine they provide decent support, y'know?)
But it seems horribly tone deaf to decide to put their sensors in a bra, and then make the whole thing be about dieting. Please folks, try not to be assholes.
Though it's worth noting that Microsoft has a history of being particularly inept in implementing encryption. Best intentions, sadly, does not make for secure code.
+1
That all being said, going out and playing with some of the established tools, and reimplementing some classic models (or building models off of wet lab papers, or whatever) is going to build you up a great skill set, and make it a lot easier to find a lab position if you want to go that directon (either a paid one or a volunteer one, each has advantages).
I'm personally enough of a biologist to feel compelled to point out that a lot of what has been done in larger networks has diverged from biology in critical ways - some of it might be interesting in its own right, but it's not really neuroscience in any meaningful way.
Get a solid grounding in Neuroscience. (Kandell, Jessel and Schwartz, Principles of Neuronal Science, is the standard text, it's excellent, and highly torrented.) Please, please, please take some time to understand the variety and complexity of single neurons - they are way more complicated than many of the people who model systems with high numbers of neurons let on. Having a system with 100 billion simulated neurons means an awful lot less if the neurons themselves are shit.
Re-implement some classic systems from scratch. Yeah, I mean start with Hodgkin and Huxley, and build up from there. You will learn things from doing that yourself that you'll miss by just diving in with established tools. (And a lot of the established tools have issues.) Itzikevitch, Wilson, and Trautenburg are all favorites of mine off the top of my head. Strogatz is great as an introduction to dynamical systems.
I gotta agree with this.
You can do a lot on your own, and I personally don't see any reason why not to (unlikely a poster above, hey, if you write shitty code, I just won't use it - and it's not like there aren't plenty of neuroscientists writing shitty code because being a theorist doesn't make you a programmer.) But getting more exposure to other people's ideas and pointers to resources is going to do you a world of good. And you don't need much of a background if you have computer skills - people love volunteers.
I'd start looking at Itzekevich, and some of the more complex single neuron systems. (Partly because if you don't understand these, you're unlikely to understand a lot of the reasons why simpler neuron models with a lot more neurons are often a lot less useful than people want them to be.)
Have to run and teach a class, will try to get back to this later.
Actually, no. Even among people with health insurance, our outcomes are worse. Our tech is great. Our doctors are very well trained. That's not all that goes in to quality health care.
...and our outcomes are worse.
And biochar is fertilizer *nods earnestly* (Though to be fair, for a popular article that bit at least might be a fine hair to split.)
My guess is the claim of carbon negativity is that they're sequestering more carbon than they're releasing. (I have no idea if this is true.)
And this is why it's important to understand that while biochar improves soil fertility, it is not fertilizer, and is a viable long term form of carbon sequestration.
Using biochar as a soil amendment does seem, at least in some environments* to sequester carbon for the long term. But I suspect that you are correct that whether this is carbon negative is largely a definitional thing.
* And maintaining soil fertility in tropical climes has historically been particularly difficult. Heck maintaining soil fertility anywhere has been problematic.
Well, modern, except that it seems to have been done widely in the Amazon in precolumbian times.
Slash and burn as practice more recently seems to be a more recent degraded form of the same, under pressure.
*laughs* I was just linking to those above, having not seen yours.
The points that aren't being stressed here is that the biochar sequesters a significant amount of carbon in the soil for the long term, and can significantly improves soil structure and nutrient availability. (It's not a fertilizer, though for a popular article I guess that might be a fine hair to split.) The terms to look up are biochar and terra preta.
I would still prefer to see their numbers, as whether they're "carbon" negative is almost certainly a matter of definition. My guess would be that they're sequestering more carbon than they're releasing into the atmosphere... which is at least arguable. Though only if they've made arrangments to dispose of their biochar in an appropriate way.
It's not exactly fertilizer, though I'd consider that an acceptable shorthand for a popular piece. Adding charcoal to soil can both improve nutrient availability and long term soil structure. (I'm including two link,s biochar being the general concept, and terra preta being a particularly interesting historical example.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
Not only is this statement sexist drivel, in fact, they have established she would... oh yeah, *write a blog post* for money. If he had named a price, and she had indicated it would be sufficient, further negotiations might be quibbling about the price. It didn't get even that far.
Considering that any time a woman is raped some men (and more occasionally women) have to jump up and say she was lying? Not impressed. I suspect this say more about you than anyone else.
(Yes, women occasionally lie about being raped. At about the same rate as people lie about being the victims of other crimes.)
Context is everything. What might be almost friendly on Reddit is a lot more problematic when coming from an editor of, yes, a blog, but a blog that at least pretends to be professional. And it becomes newsworthy when SciAm gets all "Ooo, can't talk about that!" Which really, is pretty lame and inconsistent with previous policy.
Though I wouldn't see those people as being more likely to be women and minorities, either.
I do suspect that is might be axiomatic that the more barriers there are to being considered for a job, the less likely the primary consideration will be the quality of work.
And I find it rather depressing that the preference for women, minorities and veterans are called out so much more frequently than all the other barriers.
Ah, I see I misunderstood your comment. (Sorry, home with a cold.)
So the question really is about how well the site estimates one's future tax credit. (Which is why there was all the encouragement to expand medicaid, for the people who don't make enough money for the tax credit to apply.) *shrug* I am not hugely concerned - it would seem to most likely be a problem in her case if her income changed greatly over the course of the year. Which isn't that unlikely, but then it's likely to go up. (I'll have to remind her to look at restructuring how she pays if it does go up significantly. But I'm not stressing - as long as she realizes it's a potential issue, she'll deal with it. She's poor because of her choice of profession, but she's also smart.)
I was also concerned on the tax credit vs. subsidy question. I don't know how it works in other states, but in Washington, she was given the option to have her subsidy applied up front to her monthly payment. I don't know how other states are handling this, and Washington built their own exchange and has an administration that is fairly committed to making this work, so they might not be typical. But the $5.62 a month is her upfront cost, not a refund she gets later. (She could have done it that way, but this clearly worked better for her.)
In this particular case, with this HMO, I'm not so worried on the limits, but then this is an area I'm pretty well versed in,* which is why she was calling me. There are things I'm not super thrilled about with this HMO - their limited formulary meant that I had my allergies poorly treated until I finished school and went into tech** - but they're pretty upfront about what is covered, and they're good at not screwing people financially. Which, yes, is often not the case. (I may seriously not miss working at Microsoft, but I do miss the insurance...)
* In my case, it's been all about the spine injury, mostly.
** This might not sound like that big a deal, but before my asthma was well controlled, it would tend to totally freak out if I got any kind of bronchial infection, and not only did this mean I was sick a lot, but I was ending up in the emergency room about once a year for years in there. This hasn't happened for almost two decades, now. And, like, I'm a runner and martial artist now. Better living through modern chemistry. (Yes, new drugs are part of this, but for most of the time this was a serious problem, the drugs were there, just not available to me until they were off patent.)