RE: https://newsie.social/@TheNeedling/117352264960656739

...mochacloaca...

Just a gosh darn minute. People who know about #USA medical #insurance and #medicalrecords and #legal stuff, I hope you will give some #advice. I'm trying to make an appointment with a dentist. They have a couple of pages of painfully repetitive forms to fill out online. At the end, they require a digital (like actual bitmap etc.) signature, and then they drop this. I can't make my appointment without signing and submitting this, and simultaneously agreeing to the stuff in this text.

Is this normal? I mean the signature part. have I missed this in previous medical forms? It is alarming to me that they are asking me to give them my signature to use as they wish, whenever they wish, no expiration date, and no restrictions except "insurance submissions." Why do they need MY signature if I'm not submitting the forms? Isn't this how insurance works: the provider submits things and they sign or whatever? Is this standard practice and I just haven't noticed?

Security/privacy bullshit: I have Delta Dental insurance, mostly because that's the only option available to me. And it's decent (for the US). I haven't logged into their site in years. I logged in now. These things happened:

1. When I put in my username & password it said I had to set up 2FA. OK, fine.
2. It said my previous email was [something I do not recognize]@gmail.com... um
3. "just enter a new email!" So I did that. Got the confirmation.
4. Then it said I absolutely had to also give it a phone number for I guess 3FA. Now it feels like they are just hoarding customer information. No option to skip, so I did that.

There is a lot riding on that one login I haven't used in at least 5 years. And I think they are building a database so they can make money on the side selling it to someone else or sending me targeted bullshit.

#security #privacy #DeltaDental

NPR Music has an interview with Sylvan Esso. They pulled their catalog from Spotify last year because of the CEO's ties to an #AI weapons manufacturing company. They just reversed that decision and they're back on #spotify. If you are interested in my thoughts, they are below. The interview is a good (if not always happy) listen, too.

• The band talked a lot about how the return decision wasn't just about the money; it was about the exposure, getting their #music out to fans, etc. Uncharitable view: I guess it was about the money and the fame, and they were turned back into a band that hadn't "made it."
• I don't have any strong judgments (despite thinking they were a bit weasely with their words). They're not fabulously wealthy (AFAIK), and only a few artists have taken this step at all. I admire them for doing this, even if it's disappointing that they reversed their decision.
• Leaving Spotify is a difficult, potentially career-ending decision for a #band or other artist. It's an incredibly simple decision for a listener. It's not fair to lay the moral weight of supporting an evil corporation on the artists.
• Their return to Spotify signals to others that Spotify won. Some people will see that as "Spotify's CEO's decisions are OK," but I think most people understand that Spotify simply has a lot more power.
• The artists explained that leaving Spotify hurt every aspect of their careers, not just streaming: concert ticket sales, CD/vinyl sales, purchases through their own sites, and their contact with fans and other artists.
• If this is what leaving Spotify does to "the last middle-class band in the world", then Spotify has anticompetitive market power and needs to be broken up--not into different services, but into multiple companies that directly compete with each other.
• Americans are, by and large, incredibly stupid about antitrust regulation.

It wasn't a triumphant or happy interview to hear, but I am left with a helpful message: It is easier for me to support my favorite artists doing the right thing than it is for them to do it alone.

Final thought: When asked if leaving Spotify led to conversations with other artists who had done the same, the answer was No. It sounds like nobody (read: much more wealthy and successful artists) was interested in support or even contact with other artists taking a similar risk for similar reasons.

#SylvanEsso #justice #activism #protest

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/117270957605896631

After ~3 years of this, I will never be convinced that AI corporation CEOs do anything for any reason except the most intense personal greed. Explain this to me in those terms and I'll find it convincing.

Just heard "AI will solve climate change". The fuck?
AI can, at best, generate knowledge. We have had the knowledge of what to do about climate change for 50+ years. We are ignoring that knowledge. Instead, we're building 10,000 new data centers that will make climate change worse.

#ai #climatechange #datacenters

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@DoomsdaysCW/117232339734925880

25 years ago I visited (as a prospective intern) a community mental health center in Salt Lake City, UT. I was blown away by what I learned: it seemed to be a financially solvent CMCH providing housing to almost all their clients who needed it. Most CMHCs are constantly struggling for cash, turning people away, and underpaying their staff who are a self-selecting group of -professionals willing to take a pay cut so they can serve the people who need to be helped.

The director told us that, several years earlier, they had hired a finance person who convinced the execs to take a risk: instead of renting apartments as needed for their unhoused clients, they bought some units. They saved money pretty quickly (possibly due to cultural/geographic factors difficult to replicate elsewhere; IDK) and bought more housing units. By the time I visited they owned several apartment buildings. They rented some of the apartments at market rates, which allowed them to give sliding-fee rents to clients who needed housing; apparently, plenty of clients got free housing. After a few years, he said, they were housing nearly all clients who needed it, and of course the treatment success rates went up, because not having to worry about housing is great for mental health, keeping jobs, childcare, etc. Many clients' incomes grew, so they started paying more rent and increasing the organization's ability to provide services, including more housing.

Someone in our applicant group asked something like "do you have some buildings for clients and others for non-client residents?" He said no, they were mixed, and (a) the non-client residents, who knew that many of their neighbors were struggling with mental health and substance use, seemed quite happy to live in the units; they were priced affordably in the market, for one thing; (b) the clients benefited by living in "normal housing" instead of being sequestered in "low-income" or "mentally ill" apartment complexes. Many people reportedly formed lasting friendships and the clients seemed to do better, overall, with mixed-income neighbors.

I think (? long time ago, hazy memory) he said they had become one of the larger real estate owners in the Salt Lake Valley, and the CMHC had a significant investment fund that they used for services most CMHCs can't afford.

I only know his spiel, so I only know the PR from 25 years ago (approximately 2003), but for a grad student working in a standard underfunded CMHC, damn was that ever impressive. I've often wondered (a) how much of the spiel was PR vs reality, and (b) how realistic this would be for other CMHCs. If even half of it was non-bullshit, it's deeply impressive.

I didn't get the SLC placement, sadly. The CMHC I worked at right then, in Columbus, Ohio, had two separate CEOs led out of the main offices in handcuffs within two years, allegedly for embezzling and other stuff. We were not the same.

Edit: conciseness

#housing #mentalhealth #funding #utah #saltlake

Talked on the first day to my students about externalization of motivation, or the overjustification effect: getting external rewards for something that we enjoy can reduce our enjoyment. When we are paid (in money or other commodities) to do something, we often shift our motivation from within ourselves to the reward system.

My general spiel is that students have been subjected to this for 12+ years in the form of grades. Kids are generally curious and delighted to learn. I'm convinced one reason why this changes into the dull-eyed stare in many college students is because they have been graded for demonstrating their learning for over a decade. Grading their academic work (among other dynamics) has shifted their intrinsic drive to learn toward grades instead of the learning itself.

It is very difficult, in this context, to keep one's love of learning alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

Edit: syntax & wording

#teaching #professor #highered #psychology

I won't say what ridiculous media prompted this, but I find myself wondering about the history of #individualism versus #collectivism in world cultures. I'm wondering about history going back to, and before, the agricultural revolution.

I can make some half-assed hypotheses, but I really don't know anything about this. I've studied the issue a little bit in contemporary cross-cultural psych terms, but I realize I know basically nothing about the temporal dimension.

#psychology #anthropology #history

What fresh hell is this

#ai #genAI #datacamp #WhatFreshHell

RE: https://social.coop/@tomstearns/117142107768082557

Wow. I saw the video on my phone but didn't hear the slow-mo audio until I put on my (admittedly bass-heavy) bluetooth headphones. I want to sample those bass beats for something-or-other. Holy deep lovely weird #bass

Hey, any #electronic or #noise #music people want some new (maybe) sounds? I could probably put a better mic on that and try that again, sometime.

Erin Mckeown: James! (listen for those horns; it is worth it)

Or anything by Brass Against, but that feels like cheating.

#FortnightFridayMusic #brass

#WritersCoffeeClub what's a mistake you see a lot of writers make when writing about people with your lived experience?

It's trendy to write American Christians (my background) as stereotypes of tin-pot authoritarianism, ignorance, and often repressed homsexuality.

In my experience, this described no more than, say, 15% of them.

Just got back from a quick jaunt to Canada this a.m. to mail my ex-wife the engagement ring she needs to propose to her girlfriend next week.

My life has become a bit strange.

#life #story #love

RE: https://flipboard.com/@dexerto/dexerto-uqa1502bz/-/a-idFgXT2ySIKSGAXtqT8joA%3Aa%3A3789966665-%2F0

OMG it was a Mormon (LDS) church, she started the fire with a tampon and and a shoplifted lighter, she lied about having a marriage license, and she was using an assumed name. This is the best story in the entire world today. I want to see the made-for-TV movie. :D

Edit: In Kaysville, UT. That detail is kind of hilarious, IDK why. Kaysville is in the running for the most bland, whitebread suburban city in North America.

This email from Linus is depressing. Classic (and deeply thoughtless) "Who cares where the tools came from or what their consequences are? I want to do my job in a fun way!" engineer rant.

I'm guessing that if the results of Nazi experiments on concentration camp victims boosted his efficiency at writing code, he'd be defending those.

Satire, obviously. Linus Torvalds' rant against people who oppose AI in the Linux kernel for "religious reasons" or because they are "social warriors."

I replaced mentions of AI with references to intelligence from the blood of children fed into meat grinders. You know, to demonstrate something.

Linus' original email is here.

h/t b@mrrp.place for pointing out the original email from Linus.

#linus #linux #kernel #ai #MissingThePoint #onpurpose

OK, the meme is really funny but hear me out: I lived it. Sort of. I did not fuck any buildings but (#story coming)

About 15 years ago I developed, with some excellent undergrad research assistants, a method of (we hoped) assessing sexual aggressiveness potential in straight men for future research studies. This isn't super special; there are many of these. I study sexual aggression (mostly).

Well, we needed a method of knowing how good the assessment system was. Our response: if we make a randomly-selected group of participants horny, they should have higher scores on our assessment compared to the non-horny group. Thus, I spent many nights hunting the web for public-domain or CC images of hot ladies in skimpy bathing suits. I found 20 or so photos, vetted by half a dozen undergrad men who agreed they were arousing.

Of course it's much more convincing if you have a control condition that is similar to the experimental condition in every way except the factor you're manipulating (i.e., horniness). Thus I spent many other nights hunting for public domain or CC-licensed photos of interesting architecture. Buildings. The experimental group would spend a few minutes looking at attractive women (and we hoped getting sexually aroused, at least a little), and the control group would do the same thing, but with interesting buildings.

We ran the study. We found fuck all for this manipulation check: there was no statistically significant difference in our sexual aggressiveness measure between the men who looked at boobs and those who looked at buildings.

I really should publish this someday.

i was feeling dejected about the lack of results one evening. My wife at the time heard my story and said,

"There's your problem. Those are some sexy buildings."

(edited for typos etc.)

#research #architecture #psychology #meme

My academic department was told to get an external evaluation to explain our "performance problems". The evaluators said we needed more resources and for administration to basically get out of our way and let us do our jobs. The Dean, Provost, and President ignore each annual report where we quote these things.

#leadership #management #professor #academia

[Sends audio message]
Is it safe to listen to that message? I'm at Waffle House.

New acronym: NSFW = Not Safe For Waffle house

#silly #sfw