I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.
$40,000 per child: My healthcare nightmare as an entrepreneur
Why Am I Paying $40,000 for the Birth of My Child?Published on November 30, 2025 My third child arrives in a week. The cost? $40,000. Out of pocket. Cash. Not because something went wrong medically. That's just the price of admission for a self-employed entrepreneur who wants to grow a family while running a small business in America. $25,680 in annual premiums + $14,300 deductible = the privilege of bringing a new taxpayer into this world. I wrote about this because Michael Green's viral essay about the "$140,000 poverty line" struck a nerve. His core insight: the participation costs of American life have spiraled completely out of control. And there's no greater participation cost to civilization than reproduction itself. In the post, I break down:
The economists debunking Green have no answer for me. None. Because their charts don't reflect reality at the till. A society that makes it this hard to have children is a society that has decided it doesn't want a future. I'm fighting for mine anyway. |
Aaronontheweb
I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.
Software 2.0: Code is Cheap, Good Taste is Not Last week I shipped a feature that would have taken me ~4 days in about 45 minutes: 8 parallel solutions explored, 1 verified, reviewed, deployed. That's not vibe coding. It's a process. I'm calling it Software 2.0. Software 1.0 is software you specify. Software 2.0 is software you verify. I just published a long essay formalizing how I've been using LLMs to ship production software - not as a novelty, but as a disciplined engineering process...
Why Your Software Sucks: Inheritance Published on January 26, 2026 in 7 minutes to read “I have a great idea: let’s create a five-layer deep inheritance hierarchy with a universal base class that every domain object inherits from! That way, when requirements inevitably change, we’ll only need to touch… everything.” This is episode two of my Why Your Software Sucks video series, and today we’re talking about inheritance - specifically, how deep inheritance hierarchies turn your codebase into...
Stop Failing The `git clone && run` Test Published on October 17, 2025 in 10 minutes to read I’ve done a ton of consulting as part of my work at Petabridge over the past 10 years and I run into developer onboarding problems constantly with new clients. It takes much longer than it should to clone a customer’s application from source control and successfully run it. Continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD) get a ton of attention in the DevOps space, but improving the “first...