1,008 karma · joined October 27, 2019
I’m all for right to repair and sticking it to John Deere for trying to squeeze farmers, but I don’t see the end goal. A suite of hacked Deere software with various troubleshooting modules? Or is it just going to be a bargaining chip to encourage Deere to further open up its platform?
Edit: meant why Google wouldn’t do this. I guess what I really mean, is what are the chances they don’t do this?
In other words, you will die literally from exhaustion.
They have their fingers in so many pies and realms of data that it seems like they are quickly becoming hegemonic data holders. They’re already expanding into healthcare, which chills me to my bone, beyond that they’ve basically covered every facet of the typical Westerner’s existence with no sign of stopping.
It’s high time for anti-trust laws on data, including the sharing and mass aggregation of data through and by intermediates.
Former PM Schröder is nearly solely responsible for hooking Germany on cheap Russian oil. Just look at who he works for now — he’s effectively a Russian oligarch at this point and defended Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine.
The Gaia Theory is a beautiful framework to understand humanity's outsized impact on the Earth and all of its lifeforms from fungi to insects to the trees and the critters who spend a lifetime in their canopies. The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't. It doesn't matter if you are the most cynical technologist or an optimist trying to change what you can -- that theory puts us in our place; we are so minuscule against the backdrop of planet, the solar system, the universe. Lovelock noticed that disproportionality a lot sooner than most.
The other important discovery he made was electron capture detector, which is a device capable of detecting man-made toxic chemicals in the wild. When I read Silent Spring and the testament to the frightening effects of DDT, it changed my life. Without that invention, Silent Spring might not have been written. Absolutely transformative for me.
I pulled the plug on Nord years ago and haven’t looked back.
Steady the course my friend.
Moreover, our bodies did not evolve to eliminate combustion products and micron-sized scraps of rubber and asphalt. In this case where evidence is absent, it is more than prudent to assume the worst case: no amount of pollution is good for us. In the same vein, we know that poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are carcinogenic, but does that mean we do not eat charbroiled steak? Of course not, but par for the course would be smoking a cigarette and introducing a shitload more carcinogens directly into our blood.
All of that is to say that we can probably tolerate and eliminate a low-level of exogenous pollutants entering our body, but sustained intake of pollution surely spells disaster. Then again, something's going to kill you, so pick your poison -- literally.
(Not exactly the damning evidence you're looking for, but the study below asserts causality between exogenous particulate matter infiltrating the CNS and neurological and behavioral disorders, including Alzheimer's-like symptoms and cognitive dysfunction in adults and children alike.)
You’re out of line.
I do kind of like diner coffee... endless mugs of black stuff that can be doctored with milk. But my ritual is brewing a V60 or Moccamaster of the good stuff each and every morning and slowly getting going.
Drink what you enjoy. Honestly, I couldn't care less. Just don't ever take an espresso in a paper cup to go.
No counselor on CTL will say it's wrong to end his/her life. That's because one of the core values is to treat each person without judgement (on any issue they bring up, from abuse, to self-image, to drama with parents, to rape).
For example, if someone says "I am having thoughts about suicide." No counselor would respond, "Oh that's awful, you shouldn't be having those. What's wrong with you?"
Or if someone says, "I just don't see the point in life anymore." No counselor would respond with, "Oh well life is sacrosanct and you're lucky to be here, so how could you possibly think about killing yourself? Your pain can't be that bad -- just think about your family who will be so sad."
These tropes are obviously harmful in a therapeutic setting, and the judgement is so counterproductive to keeping people engaged and finding solutions within themselves, which is key because we are not authorized to act in a medical capacity or advise people on what to do.
I have had many conversations with people who are clearly in lasting and profound pain and who just don't want to continue. Chats such as these are probably the hardest to endure because some people are just so resigned to their misery, and major depression just can't be treated by text. I'd give them a hug, but well...
I just want to end on a bitter note that while it seems like a lot of growth has happened in treating mental health, unfortunately many services have gotten a bad rap or are viewed suspiciously for the fact that previous generations of healthcare workers and society writ large did not give credit to the pain and difficulty in surmounting these conditions. It is a very dark morning in America, and we must be willing to listen to and validate each other's pain. CTL is one such location where that is possible.
"...We are trained to risk assess each and every texter, irrespective of our intuition about their mental state. That means I treat someone testing the system like I would someone who has been flagged as an imminent suicide risk.
Supervisors monitor this evolution of the conversation closely.
The assessment is important because ultimately the decision to call emergency services comes after that rigorous assessment of the person's suicidal ideation, followed by their plan and access to means, as well as their timeline. If all those criteria are met, I contact my supervisor, and then we work on separation from means. If those criteria are not met, we continue the conversation accordingly.
I have personally walked numerous people back from the edge simply by talking to them and hearing them out; often times, texters deemed imminent risks are capable of staying safe that night after we have come up with a safety plan for them together. Calling EMS is truly a last resort and not an attempt to cast off responsibility.
In the cases when we do call emergency services, it is after we have exhausted all other options. It should be noted that access to geolocation is strictly limited to these supervisors, and in all likelihood is limited to a texter's phone number alone. It's not like they have a backdoor into AT&T, and the supervisor must make a call to emergency services directly. From what I can tell, very little information is given back to CTL. On occasion, I can see a timeline that EMS was dispatched but rarely do I ever learn about the outcome.
The success of the platform is that we can work with people to find them their own solutions. CTL was not a viable intermediary for calling 911."
I've volunteered nearly 300 hours, most of those were dead of night EST. I've spoken to several hundred people, and maybe a couple dozen have been flagged as imminent risk. Of those flags, I can count on one hand those who have required a call to EMS. Mostly, I'm able to come up with a safety plan with them and get them through the night.
For example, resident physicians are known for being pushed to work 80+ hour weeks. Would any of them ever officially admit to having mental health issues? Hell no, and that's a problem from an ethics perspective and a declining level of healthcare, not to mention tragically ironic to boot.
Hi, CTL volunteer here. I have some gripes with a few of your assertions.
It's true that CTL was caught sharing data. They have retracted that policy, and it remains unclear to me how much of the data was being shared to which level of granularity. Since then, data can be manually deleted after a conversation is concluded. I have seen this happen, and I welcome you to try again if you would like to test the system. That is welcomed.
Each counselor is required to treat each texter with empathy and the gravity that a mental health crisis requires. I do not know of anyone on the platform who would disparage a texter because his/her/their crisis isn't significant enough. If you text CTL, it is for a reason, and we want to help you through that moment no matter your background.
Another important distinction is that we are trained to risk assess each and every texter, irrespective of our intuition about their mental state. That means I treat someone testing the system like I would someone who has been flagged as an imminent suicide risk.
Supervisors monitor this evolution of the conversation closely.
The assessment is important because ultimately the decision to call emergency services comes after that rigorous assessment of the person's suicidal ideation, followed by their plan and access to means, as well as their timeline. If all those criteria are met, I contact my supervisor, and then we work on separation from means. If those criteria are not met, we continue the conversation accordingly.
I have personally walked numerous people back from the edge simply by talking to them and hearing them out; often times, texters deemed imminent risks are capable of staying safe that night after we have come up with a safety plan for them together. Calling EMS is truly a last resort and not an attempt to cast off responsibility.
In the cases when we do call emergency services, it is after we have exhausted all other options. It should be noted that access to geolocation is strictly limited to these supervisors, and in all likelihood is limited to a texter's phone number alone. It's not like they have a backdoor into AT&T, and the supervisor must make a call to emergency services directly. From what I can tell, very little information is given back to CTL. On occasion, I can see a timeline that EMS was dispatched but rarely do I ever learn about the outcome.
The success of the platform is that we can work with people to find them their own solutions. CTL was not a viable intermediary for calling 911.
All in all, I recommend other readers to treat the post above with a grain of salt. Please be aware that platforms such as CTL are frequently volunteer-staffed, and, while we all do receive 20 hours of mandatory training, we aren't psychologists and we are not allowed to act in a medical capacity in the slightest. Each counselor is expected to work within a strict purview with clear objectives. Lots of well-intentioned people are there for whoever needs support. As far as volunteering goes, this is some of the most emotionally-involved I've ever had to do, and it pains me to read reviews of CTL that paint it is a data profiteering lab of pseudo-psychologists and dismissive blowhards.
Lastly, should data privacy be a cornerstone to these services? Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. But I am glad that this service exists, and we should not miss the forest for the trees. Many of our colleagues, friends, relatives, and countrywomen are suffering right now more than ever. We should not profit on their misery, but we have an opportunity to connect with them and change their lives. To my mind, that is worth every byte of data.
There will be all out panic and irrational behavior will predominate. Things will break with nobody to fix them. Services we take for granted will suddenly trap us or kill us indirectly. No communication will be easy or quick.
Moreover, the long term effects on the environment from massive nuclear detonations and debris lingering in the atmosphere would make the country live in something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Abandon all hope even if you are rich enough to have a bunker; life just simply won’t be worth living once there’s a first strike.
Also… any words of wisdom for someone about to enter med school?
Don’t take for granted the status quo. It’s already yesterday, and the systems we’ve been depending on to tolerate and supply us with viral services haven’t been respected. What happens when the next famine hits India? What happens when South Africa has no water left? It might not be the spark on another regional conflict, but it certainly adds lots of potential for another conflict.
On the sites with more heavy tracking —- chegg comes to mind or some different clothing stores with lots of media, payment service scripts, and heavy ad tracking like tentree — the plug-ins definitely interfere to the point where I will sometimes use a second browser so that the website operates as intended. NoScript seems to be the culprit in most cases, and I suspect the interface doesn’t adequately display all the scripts attempting to load after the initial render.
I’ve had some trouble with sites which communicate between themselves too. (Airlines do this a lot).
All in all, I’d say my browsing experience is normal to the extent that I don’t do a lot of browsing to new sites. I’ve got a good running list for noscript, but any new sites with lots of dependencies and media to load usually requires a couple refreshed after an updated rule list.
In other words, is this truly necessary?
Our bodies just aren't meant to digest this much sugar. It's starting to transcend food groups too. I swear certain meat products are replete with carbs because large-scale hog and cattle operations are feeding their animals almost exclusively with corn or other grains, and I'm not sure they can digest all those carbs either, so it is passed on via bioaccumulation to us when we eat it. (I might be totally off the mark here.)
The cynical part of me isn't surprised that the USDA doesn't care. Sugar is a huge business for American farms. To the extent that we subsidize billions of dollars in corn, wheat, and beets, it's not surprising that the cycle continues because the economy relies on the energy these staples condense into processed and cheap foods. It's an externality that we're taking out on our bodies and has profound implications for underserved communities.
Organics are important not because GMOs are the enemy but rather because the land use change is inherently bad for all life in that area. GMOs don't have to lead to monoculture crops that span acres or rampant neonicotinoid insecticides, but they often do, and it's precisely at that point we can see drastic changes in a biome's stability and therefore the health of bees among many other pollinators. That's why we need to be talking about insect numbers at large and not only bees.
The study of biodiversity has an extremely difficult time modeling these kinds of changes, and that's probably why many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species. It takes so much time to collect data to analyze before we even get an inkling of the interplay. We understand so little about the microscale interactions and how it fits into our larger understanding of agriculture and land development.
For those who think this is all overblown and alarmist, go sit on the grass -- if you can find a patch -- and stare at a spot until it comes alive. Things are moving around and teeming with a multitude of species of plants and insects. The reality you see escapes unnoticed until you stop to think about the ecological systems that underpin our fragile existence. Our health depends on a functional biosphere. If we cannot figure out how to share the earth with its other inhabitants, what the fuck are we doing going to Mars?
Worth mentioning is that the city has grown in population. That was designed by previous mayoral campaigns to bring in industry. Lots of suburban folks also started moving back into the city too in the 2010s, so demographically the city was ripe to see more cycling. There’s also just a better culture for exercise and outdoor activity in Minneapolis. It used to be one of the fittest cities.
I’m not sure this could work everywhere. Minneapolis has different planning than most cities I’ve seen. There’s a lot of residential space (that’s now being re-zoned), which means more room to build on and options in case bike paths reroute traffic. The streets are generally larger and there are lots of parallel avenues and boulevards that facilitate partitioning of cyclists and cars. Personally, I find this to be ideal for commuting, and Minneapolis began to experiment with closing streets to cyclists a long time ago. I’ll stop myself from ranting about the budget for interstates and road maintenance compared to the cost of 76mi bike lanes though.