Notices by Kee Hinckley (nazgul@infosec.exchange)

Happy sun dog. #DogsOfMastodon

❝ But what happens in the Industrial Revolution is that human effort gets embedded in a set of institutions — legal institutions, market institutions — that commodify it so that every hour of wage labor is equal to every other hour of wage labor and then sold on a market for a price.

And that’s an enormous transformation in the human experience — a total transformation in all social relations, political relations, economic relations and also, crucially, the subjective experience of being alive in the world.

I think something similar is happening with attention. And it started a while ago — the same way that the industrial revolution actually started earlier than we think. But we’re reaching a crescendo where attention is now this market commodity that’s extracted and sold. ❞

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html

https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html

I keep telling myself that cars were lighter then, but...

Does anyone recognize this lighthouse?

Amazon removes section on LGBTQ+ rights from its policy page - LGBTQ Nation https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/01/amazon-removes-section-on-lgbtq-rights-from-its-policy-page/

It all makes sense now.

Washington State peeps.

Do any of the non-DeltaDental ACA plans cover crowns?
I didn't spend a lot of time comparing, because no matter where I've lived or worked, DeltaDental was the standard insurance.
But it turns out the plan they offer doesn't cover crowns at all. And even if they did, the maximum they will pay for a year is $1000, which kes less than a new crown.

wahealthcarefinder.org would let me search for this, but only if I'm picking a new plan. There's no way to compare once you've picked a plan. (Why why why? I'm tempted to set up a dummy account just to find out. 🙄)

@Rycaut Yeah. Last year I gathered data from our health insurance expenses and used that to adjust our plan. Looks like this year I'll do the same for dental. We didn't have a plan last year because we were spending a few months in Mexico and that was far cheaper than anything we could do here.

❝ There is a clash going on in Britain between two fundamentally irreconcilable ideologies.

The NHS, DHSC, and many other official institutions like courts view transition as a response to a medical problem they call ‘gender dysphoria’ or ‘gender incongruence.’ From this starting point it seems appropriate that trans people have to get permission to transition: transness is a medical matter with inherent risks that ought to be controlled by “specialists.” Sometimes those specialists delay or deny permission, but that’s just part of the job. It also makes sense to ask which treatments are “most effective at treating dysphoria” and explore alternative treatments through trials, reviews, consultations, etc. I call this view ‘Pathologization.’

According to Pathologization, past treatments like electric shocks simply failed to alleviate patients’ dysphoria. These days we have more effective methods, and one day we might discover a cheap way of treating it without transition- a silver bullet conversion therapy. Doctors and managers will determine when and whether adjustments to the system are needed. Ideally they’ll engage with trans people in “stakeholder groups” but if those groups don’t get what they want that’s not a dealbreaker. Patients who suffer or die waiting are unfortunate but hey, the NHS can’t save everyone.

On the other hand, the view of an increasing number- especially young people and trans people ourselves- is that transition is a bit like pregnancy. It’s a process that may require professional assistance to bring to the happiest possible conclusion (whether completion or termination), and for this reason it is appropriate and necessary that the NHS is involved. But whether, how, and when to do it should be up to you. From this starting point there should be as few obstacles as possible: the role of doctors and managers is to facilitate and advise but never delay or deny. Prompt, reliable access to transition is a civil rights matter. I call this view ‘Freedom of Sex,’ a term borrowed from American writer Andrea Long Chu. ❞

My Doctor Emailed Me Back - Trans Writes https://transwrites.world/my-doctor-emailed-me-back/

I have moved my news reading habits back to the old web model, which is much less disruptive. Any time I see a site I'm interested in reading I add it to my RSS reader. Which I never open.

@skinnylatte Weirdly I've been getting lots of ads from a place that sells dresses that they claim (in videos) can hold a giant Stanley thermos in a pocket.

Take a selfie in NYC using any street cam.
Oddly, the police are not fond of this use case.
https://www.404media.co/traffic-cam-photobooth-cease-and-desist/

Want!

Saw a FB post on United Healthcare and how, aside from employee of more doctors than anyone else, and processing claims for most of the country, and clearly being a vertical monopoly, they also (it claimed) deny more coverage than any other insurer (32%).

And someone replied....

"All thoughts and prayers require prior authorization, unfortunately."

More seriously, between the Orca attacks, other incidents, and this, I don't think I've ever seen so many people celebrating attacks on the rich, and so few calling them out. The one thing the right and left have in common now is a belief that the system is seriously broken and it's going to take something major to change it. I think that's true. But I also think it's seriously unhealthy.

@mekkaokereke My entire career has been centered around being the person people came to to figure out how something worked. If it's not in my wheelhouse, I'll find the person who knows it. That's how I met my first wife, she'd just started at our company and when she had questions, even about her own side of the org (she was in compilers, I was in UI), her coworkers would say, "Ask Kee, he's right across from your office. He'll know."

When I joined Meta's Integrity team (aka trust and safety elsewhere), I made it clear to the person who hired me that my leadership style was to understand the system and be a facilitator who found the people with good ideas and helped them be successful. Unfortunately, when I started, the org had changed. When I told me new boss that my leadership style was to facilitate success for others, he said "We'll have to do something about that".

It was a disaster. Some of that was other issues I was having, but it was very clear that in a company that prides (?) itself on rewarding people based only on measurable progress, someone who helps other people succeed was not going to be valued.

It even extended to entire groups. I pointed out that the team that built the tools for new groups to integrate content moderation was swamped supporting new teams rather than writing software. "Why," I asked, "Don't we create a team whose sole job is onboarding other groups?"

The answer was, "We tried that, but we can't keep the team staffed unless we just use contractors, because there's no way to get promoted in a team like that."

If Meta can't put a dollar value on something, they don't think it's important.

@aral If I wanted to be generous, it could be that their activity pub implementation doesn't yet have the ability to respond to things like deletion requests from users or something else required in the EU.
Or the team that reviews features for GDPR compliance hasn't signed off yet.

Tl;dr Rural counties went redder, but they got outnumbered by the blue ones going bluer.
I'll take what I can get, but I think it's going to get messy.

https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2024/11/12/washington-state-election-blue-shift

❝ The study found that just having a first-class section on an airplane quadrupled the chance of an air rage incident and that loading economy passengers through first class doubles that again. "We advance an alternative view: the modern airplane reflects a social microcosm of class-based society, making inequality salient to passengers through both the physical design of the plane (the presence of a first class cabin) and, more subtly, the boarding procedure (whether economy passengers must pass through the first class cabin)," the preamble of the study reads. ❞

Class 'Inequity' Fuels Air Rage - AVweb https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/class-inequity-fuels-air-rage/

It’s going to be a very exciting decade for anyone interested in Greek history and mythology. This is amazing.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00346-8

@anildash I like rereading this every time you post it.