partial_accumen

Thanks for spelling HIPAA correctly, so many people get it wrong.

I always confuse what the HIP stands for, but always remember the last two are “Accountability Act” so “AA” at the end is easy to remember.

Do HIPAA protections still exist after the person is dead?

We already have instructions to follow after the President dies. Its all laid out in the US Constitution. trump doesn’t get to decide what the nation does once he’s no longer President.

it’s already enshittified with many customers reporting consistently double the ping and half the download speeds from their original experience.

I don’t think that is an example of enshitification in this case. In the technical world there are measurements for this call SLAs (Service Level Agreements). This means that if you pay for a specific service with contractually delivered performance. The service needs to deliver at least that level of performance, or you are entitled to refunds/credits/resitution for the service provider not meeting their obligations.

Now, just because a service provider is required to deliver a minimum of service, they can (and frequently do) provide even better service than they are obligated to. This is pretty typical of technology services where a new platform is being built out and there is lots of spare capacity as users are just being onboarded. I have no doubt that there were Starlink users that got fantastic performance when only a fraction of the network was in use by others. If this is their baseline, then from their perspective, they are getting less than they did before. If the performance still meets what was sold to them contractually, then they’re still getting what they paid for they’re just not getting a whole bunch more they never paid for.

It’s not the idea of a truly globally accessible internet that makes it worthless, it is the fact it is being done by a for-profit publicly-traded company owned by a trillionaire. Any one of those three things would mean the product is guaranteed to get worse eventually, all three mean it is guaranteed to get worse as quickly as possible.

That’s … a pretty questionable definition of “objectively worthless” then. By that definition all products or services from non-government owned companies would meet that definition of “objectively worthless”. I’m confident that moves the definition from “objectively worthless” to “subjectively worthless”.

You’re very welcome to hold that opinion, but I think the majority of its subscribers would disagree with you.

objectively worthless pet project

Regardless that Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole, lots of folks in working class rural regions around the world would disagree with calling it worthless. As an example, I visited southern Alaska recently and Starlink is very much in use there on working class small homes.

It depends on what you mean by robotic mowers. If you mean motors that drive the wheels and you don’t have to walk behind them (or sit on them), yes, these exist without any cloud service. However, if you mean autonomous, then I don’t think those are here yet. The non-cloud robot mowers use human held remote controls.

I can think of one that is autonomous and doesn’t require the cloud for operation, but does require the cloud for the inital setup and mapping. Once it has the map loaded in, it doesn’t need an internet connection.

That pretty well describes 1st generation robo mowers: lawn roombas.

Thankfully they’ve evolved significantly since then and are on 4th generation tech now.

I’m not optimistic enough to assume that Trump didn’t get what he wanted out of this

I know its yet another flip flop on a trump campaign promise which in itself should cause him to lose favor with his supporters, but we’ve all been around long enough to know how much they forgive him for screwing all of us. I will say that I live in a fairly red area and for months after the election many people around here left up their trump campaign garbage (flags, posters, yard signs, etc). However since the Iran war began almost off of that is gone now.

I’m hoping this will be costly to trump in the midterm elections and that we can get a congress that actually acts as a check on executive power instead of a “blank check” for anything on trump’s horrible xmas list.

“Green technologies” won’t solve it when a lot of them aren’t green,

Sure, I’m not talking about greenwashing products though.

the profit motive still rules humanity.

This is perfect example supporting my argument. Solar power is cheaper than any fossil fuel. The profit motive, in this case, is for the green tech.

You’re free to hold your own model, but I’d question some of yours.

I’d say we haven’t so much turned around as veered off to skirt along the edge until we’re about to hit the next one. There is a real chance we’re going to end up not being able to diverge and actually go over the edge.

That’s a different edge in a different direction. There’s certainly an element of inertia to large, extinction level events, but not all extinction level events share that same inertia. As an example, nuclear war and climate change don’t share the same path of humanities destruction.

If it when that will happen is impossible to predict before it’s too late though.

Humanity is pretty good and being able to predict things which will negatively effect us. We’re just not great at stopping doing those things that cause those negative things.

As a child in the 70s, I was sure we were going to wipe ourselves out in global thermal nuclear war. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty instead took the nuclear cores from thousands of American and Russian missiles and consumed it in civilian nuclear power plants for electricity. If you had told my 10 year old self my game console would be running on decommissioned Russian nukes, I wouldn’t have believed you.

The rapid technological advancement of green technologies (especially them being financially cheaper than fossil fuels) gives me hope humanity (and most of the species of Earth) will survive climate change.

So, yes, we might indeed still wipe ourselves out, but we have on many occasions, as a species, stopped at the brink and turned around to go back to safety.

Compared to trump? Absolutely.

But picking one specific even to try to define an administration isn’t very helpful. By your same measure you could define Carter as a right wing extremist for overthrowing the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1979.

I’m not following you. Are you saying Bill Clinton was a left extremist?

Both Republicans and Democrats would run to the center for success. Bush Senior and Bush Junior were also centrist. It wasn’t just a Democrat thing.

Yeah it was always lies.

It wasn’t always lies. The game changed when the other side started electing their extremists, but worse, those more in the center have done fuck-all with what power they do have to act as a check on those other elected extremists.

I think the reason progressives are winning now is that voters have nothing to lose. Far right extremists will fuck them. Most of those closest to the center won’t help them, and there’s now a precedent of voting in extremists (currently far right) into high office.

If anything I think the elected far right extremists were the best argument for voting for those farther left. There’s also the Overton window. 2008’s Obama championing the ACA and the 2015 Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision looks quite progressive compared to today’s centerists.

DenverCoder9 strikes again?

When Wahlberg assaulted people when he as 15 and 16 years old. That doesn’t excuse the behavior, but 15/16 year olds aren’t adults with fully formed brains. Wahlberg also went to the police and claimed responsibility for the attack. He then plead guilty in court and served time. It still bothers me how racially motivated it was and for that I would personally always have disdain for Wahlberg.

Cosby was 28 years old for his first time of rape allegations. There would be more than a dozen other women that came forward with reports. The most recent was Feb of 2000 when Cosby was then 63 years old. Cosby was a fully formed adult doing these horrible acts to women he had power over, and he used that power to abuse them.

Spacy and Weinstein also did their horrible acts as fully formed adults and had a repeated pattern of doing them again and again to people they had power over.

Careful, you mind end up like this:

I can see the advertising campaign for that one already: “Get on the fucking train, Shinji”

Harp, who is in her mid-30s, brings the president stacks of printed-out drafts of social media posts—many of them recycling content from other accounts—for Trump to approve, sources told the Journal.

…and…

"The platform allows Trump to ‘offer’ his unfiltered and direct thoughts to the American people, without the biased media taking him out of context,” he added.

Apparently not direct thoughts then. Its Natalie Harp’s direct thoughts she filters and presents to trump for him to have indirect thought on. That is the opposite of unfiltered and direct thoughts. She’s actively fomenting dissent and chaos in the USA. I have no idea what she gains by doing this. Anyone check to see if she’s getting a separate paycheck from Russia?