A lot of of specialists will _only_ take patients by referral unless you can prove you have the condition. This was my struggle. I had to wait and wait until my doctor specifically referred me to that doctor. I called before he did and they wouldn't even give me the time of day without a diagnosis.
More common specialists you can just book with. I got an appointment with a cardiologist with no fuss.
The funny part is that our monopoly busting law that actual worked but we don't use anymore actually says that you must sell your product the same everywhere. It turns out a great way to kill monopolies to take out the part where they get a better deal because they're bigger. Making the price the same everywhere means that now companies have to compete on other things.
Even as someone who believes that the datacenter strikes reduced Russian propaganda traffic, I don't think this article does anything to support that idea. It has the known Yandex traffic drop. It has some conjecture about what might be lurking within that yandex traffic and then never gives us any evidence.
It mentions the r/conservative accounts, but tells us about a day they skipped a year ago when attacks happened. And the rest is the same. Nothing ties this to the current data center attacks. This is basically just propaganda in the direction I like. I hate it. Right now I basically have to back up my gut feeling about this current event with prior incidents.
This author seems content with that, but I'm not. Being content with that is a good way to be complacent and nod along to things that either aren't true or give your adversary more credit than they deserve.
I agree. Kudos for refusing to accept assertions which feel agreeable and directionally right yet are weakly supported. The vested interests gaming the news cycle and social media are growing increasingly sophisticated and now LLMs let them scale orders of magnitude at much lower cost.
Gleaning some semblance of nuanced, balanced reality has never been easy but in recent years it feels much harder. None of the handful political perspectives, media outlets or public policy institutions I felt I could usually trust are still reliably trustworthy. They've either been partially co-opted by special interests or have just grown muddled and conflicted on some issues. Even the ACLU, an org which for decades was so principled on free speech it marched in support of the KKK's right to speak, now feels some legal speech is too 'problematic' to be heard. Staying rigorously consistent now requires questioning everything, especially things specifically designed to appeal to my biases or emotional sensibilities.
I assume that shelf stable foods are easier for people who live in food deserts or have uneven incomes to maintain. If you live an hour away from a grocery store, fressh produce becomes less of a priority. Honestly having to shop less often than weekly, makes you consider shelf stable foods more. Being low income, makes you consider them just because it's cheaper and I think it's reasonable for the government to prefer to finance food that can last a long time since recipients of the food might not be able to acquire it often.
I also think people forget that there are several regions in the US where keeping a couple weeks of food on hand is not just a choice, it's a realistic smart decision because of the common occurrence of natural disasters.
The majority of people in the US live more than an hour away for a grocery store?
I think >90% of people live in an urban area where that is not the case so I don’t think it would make sense to massively shape policy for those few that live in the country.
Actually (again n=1) the people that I met that lived in the country had vastly better and cheaper access to unprocessed food than those in urban areas.
I reckon it’s more a culture thing than anything based on “cold logic”
Someone tried to make them lose the trademark. They kept it in court because people literally mean search on Google when they say Google. They don't mean search in general. And that's fair, I don't say Google as a verb now that I use Kagi for search.
I keep my phone until the security updates stop. I buy top of the line phones because cheaper one suck. I tried a cheap phone and it used to lock up all the time. These phones are crappier than my obsolete top of the line phone. There has got to be a middle ground between 1K flagship phones and cheap sub-$200 phones, but I swear I can't find it.
I just keep buying phones with way more features than I desire just so that having too many apps open at once or going to the wrong Javascript laden web page doesn't slow my phone to a crawl. I just tell myself that at least I only replace my phone every 5 to 7 years. If it wasn't for work, I'd keep them longer, but the OS has to be patched for work stuff to be on it.
> There has got to be a middle ground between 1K flagship phones and cheap sub-$200 phones, but I swear I can't find it.
The Pixel phones are precisely that, and they are the only phones supported by Graphene for now. The a-series is a particularly good value and I am posting from one.
I think because kids accounts literally exist and don't allow this. The did didn't set up a kid's account for his... kid. Google had safe guards and he used exactly none of them. I'd blame Google if the kid subverted the controls in some way, but doesn't sound like he did. Either the dad let the kid use the account, lied on account creation for the kid or turned the controls off because they were too annoying (this one I have seen a lot). At a certain point we have to be responsible for our own actions.
Okay but like... so what? Like does that even really pass the common-sense test that that is enough?
Like my bank would give me a phone call before I wired $20k oversees. Google should by default send you a sms confirmation on your first $10k+ purchase. This is the type of common-sense stuff that isn't an issue in-person, but somehow online we get the most barebones protections for consumers because "technically the EULA said so and so."
Basically if we make the corporations liable for it, we give them an incentive to prevent fraud, identity mistakes, etc. Whereas if they are not, we give them every incentive to avoid unintended purchases.
Yeah, if I use a credit card in person, isn't it merchant's responsibility to verify my identity to their satisfaction for each and every purchase, and they let someone else (that's not an authorized user) use my card, I'm not responsible for any spending?
As a parent, I would say yes. Anyone who has kids know they spend any money you give them access to. I daughter spent $100 on snacks in a week because it on her school swipe account. Kids are just like this. My kid has her own kids google account where all purchases have to be approved explicitly by me, the parent account. The dad could have done that, but he didn't. This is literally why kids accounts exist. There are many horror stories about kids spending their parents money going bad decades. Every parent has a story. There's no way the dad couldn't have considered this as a possibility. This is setting aside that he shouldn't have mixed his work cards with his personal accounts.
This is why after 2 good faith attempts, I just report them to the government. It turns out when you report a car insurance company to the state regulatory body, you suddenly know how to contact you. Nope, to bad. Deal with the government. Felt sweet to get a check in the mail from the IRS after resolution.
That was the most recent time, but I've done it a couple of times. I do everything digitally, so it's always easy to prove my case.
I'm American and I take 30 days of PTO a year. I get paid the national median for pay, but that still puts me in the top 10% of _household_ incomes for my state. I have good healthcare and benefits. Hell, I got sick last year and took 2 months off from work paid because my company has the policies to cover that and then I came back and it was fine.
Like, I find SV culture and living to be a cancer, but I'm just saying as someone who doesn't live in a top 10 city in the US with a MCOL, I struggle to think of how working as a software engineer in the EU would be better.
It's been over 10 years since that 2 weeks PTO nonsense applied to tech. I don't even have a fancy job. I work for a bank.
More common specialists you can just book with. I got an appointment with a cardiologist with no fuss.