Posts tagged “insurance”
- Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
- I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
- A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
- Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
- Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
- Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
- On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.
Running to Stand Still
In which I suspect I was infected
Health Insurance Fun
Healthcare in America Is Broken
The only people who don’t think the entire health insurance system in these United States is irreparably, tragically, insultingly broken are the incredibly healthy and the absurdly wealthy.
Everyone else is screwed, and we know it. And yet nothing changes because the incredibly wealthy make the rules.
Four legs good, two legs better.
What bothers me the most about the recent cyber-hack of the Anthem BlueCross system is not that a company that large and that profitable — one tasked with the care of the most personal data of millions of Americans — did not have adequate security in place to prevent such a thing from happening. That’s
What You Don’t Know About Obamacare Will Surprise You
Obamacare is really, really difficult to understand. So here is a really, really good explanation to help. If you are a person who is alive, you should read it. (And, no, it’s actually not biased! It’s just a straightforward explanation!)
Misdirection and Contraception: On Hobby Lobby
Imagine yourself in a bar where a pickpocket takes money out of your wallet and with it buys you a glass of chardonnay. Although you would have preferred a pinot noir, you decide not to look that gift horse in the mouth and thank the stranger profusely for the kindness, assuming he paid for it. You might feel differently, of course, if you knew that you actually had paid for it yourself.
Daily David
Here are some interesting links for you.
AIG Has $182 Billion of Your Money
Looking for outrage