Notices by MarjorieR (marjolica@social.linux.pizza)

"A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones"

Well us Brits have always been amazed at how white and pearly American teeth are but dentistry is the US has clearly gone down the same oligopolistic and #enshittification rabbithole that the rest of American medicine has - as already documented by #pluralistic.

"Many dental clinics that offer implants have consolidated into chains owned by private equity firms that have bought out much of implant dentistry. In health care, private equity investment is sometimes criticized for overtreatment and prioritizing short-term profit over patients."

In the UK dentistry is increasingly privatised and our new Health Minister has been well bribed by the (often American) health companies to move even more of our health care to private sector contractors who will obviously take their cut. This will not end well.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/11/more-dentists-are-pulling-healthy-teeth-to-sell-pricy-implants-experts-warn/#gsc.tab=0

@jwildeboer no doubt they are mostly spam however as a small family email server I'm not seeing any emails from either TLD. so for me not worth screening out.

At the moment I'm rejecting about 16% (737) and including 4.7.1 try again later of the 3861 message received over a 4 week period. Only about 2% (25) ended up in my users spam folders.
What is more annoying is the 9396 smtpd warnings (authentication failures or DNS fails through fail2ban blocks). Seems lots of spammers are trying to guess my user passwords and get a relay.

@Helenisenough @ChrisMayLA6 seems there is a database:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details

I understand that the slave owners got their blood money at the time, the 2015 date is when the loans to finance it were eventually fully repaid. Money was also made by numerous individuals and institutions on the loans:

https://historyguild.org/slavery-reparations-who-got-paid/

@goatsarah are you actually going to spend £2000 on a new phone?
I'm a bit chary of upgrading my 2 year old £400 Android phone as camera wise the newer versions have gone from 3 to 2 lenses and probably added even more AI trickery to the imaging.
They have also added a more powerful processor which simply means the battery would be dead more quickly: this one is fast enough for my needs and currently runs for up to 5 days. And it has both phone socket and SD drawer.
And phones have now become phablets - they no longer fit it anyone's pockets or handbags so people end up hanging them round their necks.
As it is my previous, now 7 year old, phone, which I keep in a drawer, does still work but the OS no longer gets updates and it wont 'see' 5G towers.

@neo @Ozwel @GossiTheDog what are the computer resource implications of this?
A screenshot every 5 minutes, even with OCR might not be too terrible, but does it have to re-run AI learning on it, and everything previous, every time it gets that 5 minutes update?
ChatGPT was well known for not knowing about anything recent because it was so expensive to run.

@urlyman I read Limits to Growth when I was studying at University. As a BA Technological Economist I found it's feedback model approach pretty persuasive. It predicted that with exponential growth we would start to run out of (economically extractable) resources within my lifetime. It's big ommision was fossil fuelled CO2 emissions and the consequent feedback cycle screwing with climate. Needless to say I was being sponsored at Uni by BP and then joined the NCB when I graduated. Slow learner.

@urlyman in mitigation I did spend my last 6 years (2009-15) working at DECC trying to improve the UK's response to climate change: I was modelling the UK's energy and emissions and how these could be reduced by policy. Needless to say soon after I retired and with the 2015 Tory election victory the department was abolished and a lot of the good policies initiatives (home insulation, Zero carbon new homes) were then also minimised or postponed.

@gerrymcgovern A new water-wasting data centre design where?
In this Uruguay?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/15/drought-leaves-millions-in-uruguay-without-tap-water-fit-for-drinking

@inanimatecarbongod @hildabast there are another set of standards for this - the EL Reg units.
However for celestial bodies the largest volume unit the 'Olympic swimming pool' is still a bit small so I expect we would need to invoke k, m, g and t multipliers as well.
They also have walnuts, grapefruit, chicken's eggs and footballs.
The weight measures are a bit more exotic: badgers, great white sharks, skateboarding rhinos, Australian trams and LINQ hotel recycling.

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

@techghoul @mekkaokereke great that she'e got tenure. Just wish it wasn't so difficult for black women to get parity.

Can you tell us more about how it came about she had such a bad landing in the #fediverse?

What needs to be done to ensure it never happens again?

@goatsarah @helenczerski @tinaquilts flying within the UK can seem cheaper and faster: if you ignore the cost and time of getting to the nearest airport and the time to check-in, load and take-off.
Al least most train stations are in the centres of town and cities.

@goatsarah @helenczerski @tinaquilts
talking about the perceived rationale for building HS2.

10 years or so ago I was trying (for another government department, DECC) to get DfT and HS2 to tell me how much carbon they expected HS2 to save by displacing other means of transport such as road and air. They didn't know.
So presumably their CBA didn't account for the potential fuel savings.

@goatsarah @helenczerski @tinaquilts thinking London-Edinburgh there's also the real costs of doing the trip by air (which in money terms is cheaper).
Note our deranged gov't recently abolished the APD levy on domestic flights while elsewhere the French have banned their short haul flights.

"Carbon emissions from UK rail travel lower than previously thought"

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/30/carbon-emissions-from-uk-rail-travel-lower-than-previously-thought

"France bans short-haul flights to cut carbon emissions"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65687665