They absolutely do this. And AmCare isn't a new-model. Company clinics have been around forever. They patch you up, they return you to work, and you just get hurt again. Then the company says "pre-existing problem", denies you any work injury benefits, and you lose your job for failure to perform. Old story.

Practicing Workers Comp attorney here, many of my clients work for Amazon (public record) and some of them have been treated at AmCare. My personal review of the medical records shows that they are sloppy, poorly made, and at least when they involve a claim of injury, were altered after the fact to provide the best possible coverage for Amazon.

Even if Amazon isn't pushing them to falsify documents, there is an intrinsic bias in company employees to do something favorable to the company and to be critical of coworkers that get in the way of work flow. Add that to a poorly managed system of record keeping and you get records that are only kept in a way that doesn't favor the patient, but instead favors the employer.

Absolutely. And many private individuals and companies buy into these databases as well.

I personally do not currently have a membership to one of those databases, but I have asked my boss to subscribe our office. Several of my clients use them, so I do have second hand access.

As to the people worrying that the city would amass a database of which church or which gay bar you go to: Private corporations already do, and guys like me buy access. Going to your mistresses apartment every thursday during your "poker game"? You wife's divorce attorney knows. Etc. Etc.

So - the big discussion ought to be this: If people with money are buying into this, why should we prevent cops from doing the same? Because that is the literal meaning of privilege.

Instead, lets have a discussion of when the data should be dumped to the public cloud, and when the data should be subject to subpoena.

A discussion about surveillance and no one has said "Sousveillance"? Or mentioned David Brin?

As a purchaser of surveillance data, I can tell you that the answer to the question of the original post is a resounding: No.

A previous poster mentioned his license plate being tracked by the civil authorities. Well, I can tell you that corporations do that too. Tow trucks now come with cameras to read your plate to see if there is a repossession order out for your car. And when they OCR your car, they dump it into a database with a geotag, and then they SELL that data. To people like me. I won't tell you what I do with it, but it's to your economic detriment.

So, yes, people with power, the government, the corporations, the wealthy, are all going to use information to try to rule you. What are you going to do about it? Complain about tech un-savvy idiots? Hide like discrete rams among the sheep? Or are you going to stand up and look back?!

There's a lot of smug above this in the comments, so if you are really so much better than everyone else: Prove It. If you've got the Talent, pick up the tools and fight for what you think is right.

Yes! I was hoping someone would make the connection. It's a rare day in life when you get to say that an idea in Terry Pratchett's fiction is scientifically validated!

The idea in the book was that there were little gnomes that lived around/among us but were so small that they lived their lives on a different time frame. They were so fast and so discrete that regular humans rarely noticed them.

Per Wikipedia there is a movie on the way.

Absolutely. I thru hiked the AT between work and law school. I made good friends I am in touch with 10 years later, and a set of memories I will never be able to surpass.

Standard start dates are around now for an August/September finish, so you might have to settle for a long section hike instead of a thru hike (2000 miles).

Agree with all the above trail cam/deer cam people.

Personal recommendation for the Wingscapes Bird camera. I set one up with an eye-fi memory card for my mother a few years ago, worked great.

Vlm -

I know it is ridiculous, but a personal anecdote:

I was hiking in Virginia, somewhere along the Appalachian Trail. I was up on top of a ridgeline when I saw some junked tires near the trail but in the woods. It took me another 30 minutes of downhill walking to get to the next road crossing. Now it is possible that there was a closer road that I (a non-local) did not know about, but I would like to point out that it was still up-hill. Someone had hauled tires up hill just to throw them in the woods.

People apparently are quite willing to spend time and effort on this kind of crap.

Pity. Thanks for the review.

I haven't read it in a long while but Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains isn't necessarily pessimistic, but it is very melancholy. I found that most of the Martian Chronicles were similarly melancholy. The basic premise of that period was always that nuclear war was inevitable and Bradbury used the Martians as a good foil to expose the folly of the Humans in his stories. Even then the Martian societies weren't very joyous, they were more mellow and resigned.

The whole story line has stayed with me for many years, but none as well as Soft Rains.