Cicilearns-businesses - Tumblr Posts
so i’m checking the news and there’s this article about apple i want to read and
here’s what happens if you click on it
i guess they mad but also like… censorship…
if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in the midwest, this is it.
Many chronic pain patients already know how difficult it is to find a new doctor. In PNN’s recent survey of nearly 6,000 pain patients, nearly three out of four (72%) said it is harder to find a doctor willing to treat their chronic pain.
“Two doctors refused to see me. I have no quality of life and I’m confined to bed. No one will help me,” one patient told us.
“It’s to the point mentioning you need pain relief makes health care professionals look at you as an addict. Hell, when I have tried to get help for my pain and told the doctor I don’t want opioids I still get a suspicious look,” another patient said.
Over a third of patients (34%) in our survey said they’ve been abandoned by doctors and 15 percent said they haven’t been able to find a doctor at all.
A novel study by researchers at the University of Michigan confirms many of our findings. Using a “secret shopper” method, researchers posing as the adult children of patients taking the opioid Percocet called primary care clinics in Michigan to see if they could schedule an appointment for their parent. The callers also said their “parent” was taking medications for high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
79 of the 194 clinics that were called – about 40 percent – said they would not accept a new patient who was taking opioids, no matter what kind of health insurance they had.
Less than half of the clinics (41%) were willing to schedule an initial appointment and 17 percent said they needed more information before making a decision. (Read more at link)
Abled Person: Hey man, can you hold this wad of $2,000 and this one penny for me while I open my wallet?
Disabled Person: YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FOOL!
The United States Government:
(Watch how many people don’t get this.)
yall look at this shit ad*be is tryna pull now on ppl who have outdated software:
(note for context: i’m all for piracy, but in this case my copy of CS6 was downloaded years ago when they were giving it away to students. i got it totally legally.)
the wrong amazon is burning and the wrong ice is melting
ok so here are some tips for pirating and torrenting.
BASICS YOU NEED. these are non-negotionable.
1. a good VPN, paid for.
I know I know to start a piracy post with “you have to pay for the first step” IS a bad look but free VPNs are worse than no VPNs, don’t ever torrent or even go on a pirating site without one. (+ on public wifi you are also very much in danger of getting your info stolen) you should already have a VPN, I have nordvpn and a LOT of YouTubers can give you discounts in their videos too, so be on the lookout for that.
2. Get a good anti-virus software.
This is a “worst-case scenario” type deal where you got a little bit too cocky and downloaded stuff you shouldn’t have. no worries though! I do think that there are some decent anti-virus software out there, I personally use Bitdefender, but there are many out there and you should really consider having one.
3. Adblock
speaks for itself
Sites, recourses, ect
1. Now, Pirating.
Here are the two Reddit threads I use (piracy for gaming has good tips on torrents and what to avoid to start out) (and r/piracy for when you’re ready to start diving into general stuff) I’ve tested out a lot of the links and such, and while some are dead and deleted threads most are in use. BTW Thepiratebay is used a lot for torrenting and is safe as far as I know. I use it for a lot of my pirating tbh and I haven’t had problems with it. check the comments of a torrent if you’re suspicious.
go fourth and never pay for stupid streaming sites or shitty anime pirating sites with too many ads!
Thomas Piketty's new book uses data to trace how inequality changes ideology
French economist Thomas Piketty changed the world in 2014 with his magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book that reported out an incredibly ambitious project to map out three centuries’ worth of capital flows, and from that, to derive an empirical answer about whether markets are a machine for finding smart people and allocating capital to them so that they can invent things that make us all better off (“meritocracy”), or whether they simply make the people who happened to get rich (possibly by inventing something, more often by inheriting wealth or by being a sociopathic looter) even richer (spoiler: r>g, which means that markets’ long-run function is to increase inequality by allocating ever-larger pools of capital to rich people who don’t do much that’s socially beneficial with it).
Here’s an example of how markets – even ones with lots of growth – are much better at enriching the rich than making us all richer, from the 2014 edition:
All large fortunes, whether inherited or entrepreneurial in origin, grow at extremely high rates, regardless of whether the owner of the fortune works or not. To be sure, one should be careful not to overestimate the precision of the conclusions one can draw from these data, which are based on a small number of observations and collected in a somewhat careless and piecemeal fashion. The fact is nevertheless interesting.
Take a particularly clear example at the very top of the global wealth hierarchy. Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates – the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years – increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt – the heiress of L'Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau’s success with perfume a century earlier – increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes.
In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working. Once a fortune is established, the capital grows according to a dynamic of its own, and it can continue to grow at a rapid pace for decades simply because of its size. Note, in particular, that once a fortune passes a certain threshold, size effects due to economies of scale in the management of the portfolio and opportunities for risk are reinforced by the fact that nearly all the income on this capital can be plowed back into investment. An individual with this level of wealth can easily live magnificently on an amount equivalent to only a few tenths of percent of his capital each year, and he can therefore reinvest nearly all of his income. This is a basic but important economic mechanism, with dramatic consequences for the long-term dynamics of accumulation and distribution of wealth. Money tends to reproduce itself.
One of the corollaries of this rich-get-richer phenomenon is that it breeds a belief in “hereditary meritocracy,” whose argument goes like this: “I deserve my riches because I did something special. My kids inherited my riches (because rich people have dismantled any mechanisms for preventing intergenerational wealth transfers by the super-wealthy), and they’re rich too, even though, objectively, they have not done anything great. But we live in a meritocracy! Otherwise my wealth might be illegitimate. If we live in a meritocracy and my kids are rich despite not having done anything great, it must be because they are great. That is, in addition to inheriting the money I got from doing something great, they also inherited my capacity for greatness. My money doesn’t just prove that I did something amazing, it proves that I have amazing blood, which I have passed on, and which the market has recognized by allocating all that capital to my kids.”
In other words, inequality needs ideology to stabilize it. When you’re starving and someone’s useless kids are flaunting their third solid gold Bentley by driving through town, terrorizing you and your starving neighbors, the temptation to build guillotines begins to mount.
Rich people can offset the guillotine risk by buying guard labor, and they are, but this has diminishing returns (including the problem of hiring guards to protect you from your guards), and so the market finds more efficient ways to stabilize inequality.
The most important of these is ideology: inculcating a belief that the system is just. This is hard, and it’s a long-term project, but if you can convince people that they’re not poor, merely “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, you can get them to do their own guard-labor, in their heads, before they even go looking for lumber to build those guillotines.
The rich people of the world have spent lavishly, over decades, to promote the idea of markets as meritocratic, and, in so doing, have (at least partly inadvertently) kept alive the eugenic idea of “good blood” – which explains a lot about the rise of neo-aristocratic rich racists who find in Donald Trump (and his cohort around the world) a welcome fusion of racism and plutocratic policies.
Now, Piketty has penned a new book (currently available in France as “Capital et idéologie,” forthcoming in English as Capital and Ideology“) in which he uses the same data-driven econometric methods combined with history and sociology to build up an account of the relationship between inequality and ideas.
Over at Promarket, Branko Milanovic (previously) reviews Capital and Ideology, making it sound really exciting. In particular, Piketty focuses on the transformation of labor parties into liberal parties whose core constituency is the middle class – a really pressing issue as left wing parties around the world are riven by internal struggles between leftists and liberals.
I’m interested in the ways that inequality has given rise to conspiratorial thinking. It’s not like antivax arguments got better over 70 years: but they somehow got more convincing. There are people who worry about machine learning who attribute this to Big Tech’s ability to use targeted advertising and algorithms to change peoples’ minds, but I think it’s much more productive to look to the material circumstances of people who believe unconvincing ideas than it is to reinvent junk science like “neurolinguistic programming” (dressed up in machine learning hype) to explain how people ended up so distrustful of our states and institutions and their truth-seeking capacity that they’re willing to believe that the Earth is flat.
https://boingboing.net/2019/09/12/brahmin-left.html
Mozilla updates its "Privacy Not Included" gift guide for 2019
As with last year, the Mozilla Foundation’s privacy researchers have produced a guide to electronic gifts called “Privacy Not Included,” which rates gadgets on a “creepiness” scale, with devices like the Sonos One SL dumb “smart speaker” (Sonos ripped out all the junk that isn’t about playing music) getting top marks, and Ring Security Cams, Nest Cams, Amazon Echos, and other cam/mic-equipped gadgets coming in as “Super Creepy!” (the exclamation point is part of the rating).
These rankings are purely about privacy, so there’s plenty of stuff that’s extremely proprietary and hooked into app stores and other ecosystems that allow the manufacturers to control how you use your property after you buy it, as well as giving them the ability to censor the kinds of information you can receive. Many of these devices contain copyright locks (DRM) and onerous terms of service that would make it a potential felony to have them independently repaired, too, so the manufacturer gets to decide what can and can’t be fixed, and unilaterally declare that it’s time for your device to become e-waste in some distant landfill (Apple is notorious for this, and they led the charge that killed 20 state-level Right to Repair bills last year, and CEO Tim Cook started 2019 with an investor call last January that warned investors that Apple was facing a crisis because people were not replacing their devices as often as they used to, opting instead to repair them).
And this kind of thing also matters for privacy! If not for the independent repair sector, we’d have never found out that Google had made a “smart speaker” with a secret, hidden microphone, so if you were relying on the manufacturer’s specifications to evaluate the privacy dimension of a product, you could land in trouble. Likewise DRM: because security researchers face felony prosecution and massive civil liability if they reveal information that weakens a DRM system, devices with DRM (to ensure that you only use approved apps, parts or consumables) are less likely to be independently audited, and when they are, there’s a greater likelihood that the researchers will delay or bury their assessments. That means that security defects in DRM-equipped devices (many of which get top marks on privacy) can fester for longer and do more damage before coming to light.
https://boingboing.net/2019/11/27/creepiness-scale.html
I don’t hate the concept of ebooks per se but what bothers me is how our society is shifting from actually owning entertainment in tangible forms like books and CDs and DVDs and game discs, to having to download everything so basically we’ll get to the point where everything is intangible and all of our property can be taken away by a website crash.
fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals. protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.
Interrupting my most popular blog for one minute with something important for my fellow US peeps:
Who else in the USA would be interested in a spreadsheet organized by state & hospital that lists each hospital’s no-insurance, out-of-pocket costs for common procedures?
Because we could make that. We could literally crowdsource this info and put it together as a common resource.
Hospitals have tools online that list out those costs, but they are terrible. Absolutely fucking terrible and time-consuming to compare with other hospitals, which is absolutely on purpose.
But! if people filled this out together, everybody doing a little bit (like when you yourself are looking something up), we could make a communal resource that helps people in the USA compare costs for procedures between hospitals.
Here’s an example I made comparing the same procedure at 2 different hospitals in Oregon:
in case that’s hard to see, here’s just the costs:
that’s terrible!
imagine not knowing you had a choice that could save you $300!
we can make something better for each other, because our corrupt, for-profit capitalist healthcare system ain’t gonna do it for us!
Anyway, here’s the spreadsheet.
since microplastics have now been found in plACENTAS allow me to reiterate:
faux fur is plastic
pleather literally has plastic in the name
synthetic wool is plastic
stop implying that plastic is good for anything.
I think we're officially reaching a point where it isn't okay to support nintendo anymore.
WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I’ve had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it’s a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz