Part of the problem is competition.

Paradoxically, the individual mandate under the ACA creates a situation where you don't actually need to deliver better service to get customers. For those who correctly point out that the ACA individual mandate was removed as of 2019 ( https://www.healthinsurance.or... ), there are those of us in states that enacted their own mandates who are subject to similar provisions (minimum $900 or 2.5% of your yearly income penalty in California. Good luck if you just become unemployed and are facing nosebleed level prices for policies - you're going to get taken one way or another.)

To me, part of the problem lies with government for enacting these "best intention" laws without actually providing a credible alternative as a deterrent to bad actors. It's like requiring everybody to get high speed internet without a credible low-cost alternative to prevent the likes of Spectrum and Verizon from doing a land grab and jacking up prices for a captive audience, and claiming it as "increased costs to serve a larger population".

How much more expensive would it be to offer a hospitalization only policy through the state equivalent of medicare/medicaid, especially for people who are currently unemployed, in order to give them an option? I don't know, but I'd sure like to see someone do the math of how low you can go if the entire group of currently unemployed workers in a state constitutes the insurable pool.

From the standpoint of most of the rest of the developed world, the US medical system is... weird.

TL;DR - we have doctors in places that make it easier to get high end medical care but much more difficult to get routine medical care, and a system that incentivizes people not to spend money, to the benefit of the insurer. The supply shortage is not getting better (due to the long lead time to training medical professionals), and there's a lot of friction that makes it more advantageous to get paid more to do specialist care for the same amount of time worked, because the overhead involved makes it much harder and much less rewarding to do basic care, beyond the issue with paying back student loans.

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First, let us look at cost. The US has a reputation of having really good specialist care - so good that apparently well heeled people from other countries regularly come here to have cutting edge procedures done, or to do routine scans that are booked up in their home country.

"These hospitals and clinics are offering inbound medical tourism services to patients who come to the U.S. for higher quality than they can receive in their home country, access to procedures that are not available in their country’s healthcare facilities, freedom from long wait times or the rationing of procedures because of national governmental regulations, because of the ability to combine tourism opportunities in the U.S., and/or (believe it or not!) because the price differential- paying for services in cash in the U.S. may be less expensive than in their home country."

https://www.magazine.medicalto...

"For many Canadians, the prospect of enduring prolonged wait times for medical imaging, such as MRI scans, prompts them to explore alternative avenues. This has led to a growing trend of Canadians venturing south of the border to the United States to secure expedited MRI appointments."

https://www.cmimri.ca/navigati...

Paradoxically though, we have the opposite happening within the US, where some patients resort having procedures done overseas. We also have long lines in order to get seen by general practitioners. In other cases, US citizens forego basic care due to cost.

"Medical tourism is a worldwide, multibillion-dollar market that continues to grow with the rising globalization of health care. Surveillance data indicate that millions of US residents travel internationally for medical care each year. Medical tourism destinations for US residents include Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Germany, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Singapore, and Thailand. Categories of procedures that US medical tourists pursue include cancer treatment, dental care, fertility treatments, organ and tissue transplantation, and various forms of surgery, including bariatric, cosmetic, and non-cosmetic (e.g., orthopedic)."

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/y...

"Opponents of universal health care often predict it would lead to long waits to see a doctor, but patients in the U.S. already face unacceptable delays in getting routine care.

Jam-packed appointment schedules have endured for years. Check out this Business Week story from 2007: “The Doctor Will See You—In Three Months.” However, the lack of a national reporting system to track and disclose wait times to the public — a feature in some other countries — has largely obscured the problem here.

With no comprehensive data, journalists rely on a hodgepodge of studies that suggest patients often wait a month or more for a slot on a doctor’s schedule."

https://healthjournalism.org/b...

"In 2023, 27% of American adults skipped some form of medical treatment because they couldn’t afford it, according to the Federal Reserve. This is lower than the 32% who avoided care in 2013, when data collection began, but ties with 2015 and 2017 as the fourth-highest year on record.

The probability of declining medical care seems to correlate with income: 42% of people with a family income under $25,000 skipped some medical treatment in 2023, compared to 12% of people with incomes over $100,000."

https://usafacts.org/articles/...

This seems to indicate that in the US, we're prioritizing patients who can pay, over patients who can't. If you can pay in cash, jump to the front of the line. If you don't either get in line, or get out. This ties into health care as a limited resource - not enough general practitioners specifically, but insufficient medical staff generally:

"The AAMC reports that physician shortages hamper efforts to remove barriers to care. If populations that are underserved by the health system had health care-use patterns similar to populations with fewer access barriers, the U.S. would be short between 102,400 and 180,400 physicians."

https://www.ama-assn.org/pract...

"One reason for the expected shortage is that some 20 percent of clinical physicians are aged 65 years or older, putting organizations in the position to soon lose a substantial number of physicians to retirement.4 The expanding gap in the physician workforce is particularly consequential given the projected growth in patient demand: the number of people aged 65 and up—an inherently higher-need patient group—is expected to rise to 23 percent of the population, from 17 percent, by 2050.5"

https://www.mckinsey.com/indus...

This shortage of medical staffing leads the US to brain drain other countries for doctors, nurses, etc., which negatively impacts health outcomes in their home nations, but provides an important source of hard currency.

"We should be equally concerned with the invisible ripples, both in ASEAN and in the global north. In general terms, the ASEAN private sector is increasingly assertive in training doctors and nurses with the express intention (or more accurately, sales proposition) of exporting them upon graduation. For example, just two Filipino medical schools trained as many as 6,100 physicians now working in the United States. "

https://www.thinkglobalhealth....

Further... in the USA, the high cost of becoming a licensed medical professional (financed with debt) means that graduates need to find high paying jobs... which means taking a specialization instead of becoming a general practitioner.

"A recent New York Times editorial entitled “Student Debt and the Crushing of the American Dream” states that “robust higher education, with healthy public support, was once the linchpin in a system that promised opportunity for dedicated students of any means[but now] the wealthiest are assured a spot, and the rest are compelled to take a gamble on huge debts, with no guarantee of a payoff” [3]. In higher education, educational debt is choking off opportunities for the latest generation of college graduates. In medicine, educational debt is driving medical school graduates away from practicing in underserved communities and entering primary care specialties—what our country will sorely need in the coming years."

https://journalofethics.ama-as...

Normally, in this situation - economics would dictate that general practitioners, in short supply should get paid more, and things should balance out. In fact, you'd think that insurance companies, desiring lower cost, would have a vested interest in encouraging more people to become medical professionals. However, in practice, I think what is happening instead is that people are just being discouraged from seeing the doctor instead, or being forced to pay in cash to avoid using insurance.

After all... medical insurance wins if you never claim, or if your claim is denied. To ensure you don't claim, high deductible plans exist, with the idea that patients with "skin in the game" will be less likely to "frivolously" use medical services.

There was also a bump in residual weirdness starting about 15 years ago due to electronic health record (EHR) requirements:

"At the time, that poll noted that many healthcare leaders had informal efforts and discussions to monitor and address burnout among physician and staff, while others looked specifically at the issue of their organizations’ EHRs and investing in adding functionalities specific to their specialties to make them more intuitive and less cumbersome for physicians and other clinicians to use.

Studies prior to COVID-19 also link higher levels of clinician burnout to dissatisfaction with the EHRs they use: A 2019 study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings showed a strong relationship between the odds of burnout and EHR usability — and the usability of EHR systems at the time received an “F” grade from physician users.

A recent American Medical Association (AMA) playbook for saving time within a physician practice highlights the ongoing need to eliminate “stupid stuff” from the workflows of physicians and others, based on a program from Hawaii Pacific Health that highlighted more than 300 time-wasting EHR activities that could be removed."

https://www.mgma.com/mgma-stat...

The requirement to adopt EHRs basically drove most small practices out of business - forcing early retirements, or sale to larger organizations that could staff an IT department to handle the intricacies of dealing with sensitive patient information stored in digital format. This also did not help with maintaining the supply of general practitioners, or keeping prices low (since now you have the overhead of having to maintain an IT department and associated capital spending.) The idea from the government's point of view was EHRs were supposed to liberate patients - by allowing their medical information to be portable, they could better pick and choose who to go to, get better quality of treatment by making sure records could flow back and forth, and take charge of their own medical information. The reality has been a lot more liability from an expanded attack surface.

If you're using an TOTP based auth (and to my knowledge, most of the authentication apps are built on top of TOTP) you should be able to get the secret as a string instead of a QR code, and save the secret somewhere else.

With that said, I agree - you need a backup for the authentication app. Whether it is a list of one-time recovery codes, the ability to register a second authentication app and/or hardware keys.

Otherwise what they're really saying is they'll go along with the appearance of supporting higher security, but if that fails either you're SOL or they'll just default back to a less secure authentication method like phone, e-mail, or text message... which renders using TOTP for authentication meaningless if it can be bypassed.

Yep. These "revelations" about SS7 vulnerabilities should be no surprise. This has less to do about deliberately engineered backdoors and more about longstanding vulnerabilities associated with maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy standards.

It's like forcing HTTPS traffic to be downgraded to HTTP when going over certain network paths for compatibility reasons (well, except for the fact that the phone carriers aren't even using encryption...). My understanding is that everybody's unencrypted phone traffic is subject to spoofing, interception, tracking, etc. because the carriers registered in the global network are assumed to be trusted by default.

https://github.com/simplerhack...

"Lack of Authentication and Sec SS7 trusts all network nodes implicitly, assuming they are legitimate. This trust model is problematic in interconnected networks where access is not tightly controlled.

Insufficient Encryption Messages in SS7 are typically transmitted in plaintext within the network, exposing sensitive information to interception.

Global Accessibility (Belgium example) With the proliferation of inter-carrier connections and the advent of IP-based signaling (SIGTRAN), access to SS7 networks has become more widespread, increasing the attack surface."

https://www.theregister.com/20...

"At issue are the Signaling System Number 7 (SS7) and Diameter protocols, which are used by fixed and mobile network operators to enable interconnection between networks. They are part of the glue that holds today's telecommunications together.

According to the US watchdog and some lawmakers, both protocols include security weaknesses that leave folks vulnerable to unwanted snooping. SS7's problems have been known about for years and years, as far back as at least 2008, and we wrote about them in 2010 and 2014, for instance. Little has been done to address these exploitable shortcomings.

SS7, which was developed in the mid-1970s, can be potentially abused to track people's phones' locations; redirect calls and text messages so that info can be intercepted; and spy on users.

The Diameter protocol was developed in the late-1990s and includes support for network access and IP mobility in local and roaming calls and messages. It does not, however, encrypt originating IP addresses during transport, which makes it easier for miscreants to carry out network spoofing attacks."

A store is perfectly within their rights to display a sign saying what percentage of the price is taxes, or even split it up into how much goes to various things like defense or welfare. They can also split up how much goes to employees or rent or heat. I want to know what the total amount of money I will lose in exchange for the item and I really don't care where it goes for my purchasing decision. It also seems like competition between municipalities could be an incentive to lower taxes.

There's no shortage of YT content, Why synthesize more?
Why would creators want more competition in their area of interest, and provide it for free?

I guess it's to bleach out the copyright on someone else's work.

These captains of industry are lining up thinking that this time they will be the ones that will get the better of the insane sociopathic thief.
The joke will be on them when he launches his revenge nukes because he can't be King of the World. I give it to about the third week of February.

Correct. Doing some form of oral defense is the traditional filter, not only to prevent someone from just having someone else do the work for them, but to dynamically assess and probe areas of weakness that might be papered over or concealed with a written exam. (And for those pointing out that is disadvantages people who do badly in these scenarios - you could set up accommodations, but let's leave that aside for this example.)

Unfortunately this takes time and effort. Something that these "educational institutions" are apparently unable or unwilling to put in:

"They all agreed that a shift to different forms of teaching and assessment – one-to-one tuition, viva voces and the like – would make it far harder for students to use AI to do the heavy lifting. “That’s how we’d need to do it, if we’re serious about authentically assessing students and not just churning them through a £9,000-a-year course hoping they don’t complain,” one lecturer at a redbrick university told me. “But that would mean hiring staff, or reducing student numbers.”"

What is a degree really worth these days, if the educational institution granting it resembles the diploma mills of yore?

So... great, you have an algorithm going around blurring data it doesn't think you should look at.

It's not going to get everything right. Not even close. Not unless it bugs you to confirm when it does it.

So essentially it is built-in censoring of recall feature. So what happens when you legit have some information you need to pull out of the recall feature... and you find it has been flagged as sensitive and is blurred... and unrecoverable?

To give a real-life example, the algorithm Google uses to blur license plates in street view also blurs out street address numbers, street signs, etc. Things I might want to actually look at in street view that Google has decided to censor to err on the side of caution.

Could be they're using these projects as a proving ground for bots.

Consider that in most cases, people don't accept messages from random strangers. Bug reports would be an exception to this, and the bot generated content wouldn't immediately be recognizable as spam.

If the report is accepted and then closed with a fix, then there's provable evidence that the bot actually did something useful.

If humans argue with the bot, and the bot has to defend itself, then the captured back and forth output can be used as training material for future iterations of the bot.

In other words, it's the same as turning loose self driving cars on public streets. Even if they fuck up, it is useful training data, but the cost is borne by everybody else sharing the road with them.

The US constitution's copyright clause says "Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That is based on Queen Anne's Law from England, the worlds first copyright law, which was the ruling class' reaction to the Gutenberg press. That invention threatened their stranglehold over the flow of information. The original 1790 copyright law in the US allowed for a 14 year term renewable only once. They understood that this was locking up ideas as property, which is a form of censorship. That is why its length and scope were strictly limited. Now, it is nearly perpetual and covers all kinds of frivolous entertainment that is clearly not the useful arts. Popular Music, Hollywood movies and anything on the idiot box are only frivolous entertainment.

There will eventually be a new department in charge of controlling the runaway budget of the Department of Government Efficiency.

The proposal is to switch to DST all the time. The Chamber of Commerce should be happy as it will add daylight to the evenings of winter days and make no change to summer days.

As others have pointed out, it is totally legal to use standard time always. The sticking point appears to be that the law has been written so you can't use any other time always and everybody wants to fix the winter, not the summer.

Not a Trump fan, but I really don't see any reason they won't say that the time can be left up to the states.

I agree, Musk and Trump are going to run into some problem doing this. Both Democrats and Republicans are in favor of doing it, and have been for decades, but somehow it is impossible to get it done, and I don't think Musk has figured out a method.