mulderc

Kaiser is by far my best experience with healthcare in the US that wasn’t just a government run plan.

It isn’t as hopeless as it looks. Places like Oregon have been long experimenting with things like coordinated care organizations to better manage healthcare. Also health system like Kaiser Permanente compare more favorably to national healthcare systems than you might think.

Yes the US could save a ton with a more efficient healthcare system. Additionally we have shockingly high costs for basic infrastructure as compared to other developed nations which could also provide savings if we could streamline that.

For the economic impact of austerity there has been a lot of good scholarship about this recently. Check out Austerity in Crisis?: A Narrative Review of Its Economic, Social, and Political Effects in Times of Crisis https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10449

Targeting "entitlements" as a universal fix ignores both the fiscal math and the human costs. Healthcare makes up the lion's share of that spending; cutting it just shifts uncompensated care burdens onto hospitals and inflates private premiums. Cutting programs like SNAP and WIC means pulling food support from children, which causes long-term economic damage.

If the goal is deficit reduction through spending cuts, policy needs to evaluate actual economic ROI. Programs like nutritional and income supports have positive fiscal multipliers, which is why blunt austerity measures trigger negative feedback loops and contract growth.

Spending cuts have a place, but treating entitlements as a slush fund without accounting for the economic return or impact on people isn’t a productive policy proposal.

You should give something like the Amazon Kindle Scribe a go. If you are just reading then it should be fine. My issue is more when it is an android tablet using an e-ink screen. When software isn't specifically made for e-ink, it is sort of awful to use.

“This isn’t flying, this is falling with style.” - Buzz

This is just going to depend on the person. Personally I find the lower resolution and contrast to be unacceptable.

True, although I do think people have generally thought the colorsoft was a bit better viewing experience than the Kobo color options. The QA seems to always be a bit off with amazon and I would always recommend waiting a bit before buying from them.

I feel like amazon tends to wait a couple of years before using whatever the latest e-ink screen is and claim to do a lot of customization and calibration as compared to their competitors.

In theory they should be amazing. Full color, looks like paper, basically an interactive magazine!

In practice the color isn't great, the screens are slow to refresh in an annoying way, and the resolution is a noticeably worse than an iPad. I also find that apps not explicitly made for e-ink are generally garbage when used on an e-ink device.

So far I have personally been incredibly disappointed with e-ink devices outside of e-readers. I want them to be good but the experience is just so much worse than an iPad.

More that the services they were using might have been related to some part of the infrastructure that went offline. Like slack going down.

I haven’t seen any, but the people that would have access to that data are probably too busy to care. For example, Political Wire noticed a significant decrease in the right-wing trolls, with one longtime nuisance disappearing completely and the general discussion just being way less divisive. The site is basically run by one guy, and he doesn’t have the time or expertise to do some sort of analysis on this. Also, we aren’t talking about some huge number of people here. It only takes a couple of trolls to ruin an online forum, so if the strikes knocked out only a couple dozen trolls, it could make a noticeable difference in the online discourse while being virtually unnoticeable in the overall data.

I am in a couple political discussion groups and it was really curious how the traditional right-wing posters sort of disappeared right around the same time. There are several that people had suspected of being some type of plant that just were suddenly not posting any more and still haven't come back. No idea if it was related but the timing was so close that it raised a few eyebrows.

Everyone agrees and wants a healthier world and for people to be healthier. What RFK has been spouting for as long as I can remember would be the opposite of that. His stance on vaccines has always been clearly crazy and not based on the best available evidence.

That type of screening doesn't require AI. It would just be a form with a bunch of if/else statements.

Isotretinoin is a common acne medication and a bit of a breakthrough that also has potentially serious side effects. My take is more that if the medication is safe enough to be given out by an AI then maybe it should just be over the counter.

dear god no

Telnet sounds cooler.

Telnet is just a better name though.

Based on what has been reported, I don’t think it was all that tough a call to axe it. What to do after that has hard but cancelling Copeland was an obvious decision to make.

I tell everyone to set it to what you find comfortable and then adjust it up a notch.

One thing I do with my students is show them how to adjust text size and have them try out larger sizes. I think a surprisingly large number of people have never even attempted to change the text size on their devices and many can benefit from something different than the defaults.

I feel like if you are really want to have a minimal phone, you can just use a smart watch now.

I have tried this in the past and it wasn’t nearly sharp enough but I guess I see people using 1080p screens at work and those make me want to rip my eyeballs out.

Maybe it is different elsewhere but I have seen little reason to use X at all and none of the public services or institutions seems to use it all that much. If they do post to it, they are also posting to all the other major social media services.

All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.

I have used Siri for years and turning on and off lights has never been an issue.

Same, Julia really does just feel right to me. Which makes sense since I mostly program in R.

Apple doesn't generally make products that are for 100% of the market and focuses on specific market segments that it thinks it can make a compelling product. The $800 watch actually does more than what the $1200 Garmin does once you look at all the features available and has enough battery life to cover doing a 100-mile race.

In the end, what I am arguing is that Apple provides a different set of features and provides battery life in the Ultra that covers the needs of most people going outdoors for multiple days. For everyone else, there are plenty of other options available.

Few people do those types of races and The ultra 4 can handle the times you are describing.

From apple website: Apple Watch Ultra Workout

Up to 18 hours workout tracking Up to 25 hours Extended Workout tracking Up to 45 hours Max Extended Workout tracking

My experience with the none ultra is that the battery life estimates are spot on.

Few people spend a week or more living out of a backpack. The ultra 4 is rated to do 84 hours in low power mode and 45 in workout mode. Few people are going to max that out and those people probably aren’t interested in an Apple Watch and have other priorities.