Monday Mood [DOT 27/5/24]

27/5/24 MegMegMcGee 20

I hope everyone has a safe and nice Memorial Day weekend! Try not to miss me too much!

Whoa

At least 18 people are dead after tornado-spawning storms strike the central US on Memorial Day weekend
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/26/weather/memorial-day-weekend-forecast-sunday/index.html

This article is wild. I’m going to assume CPS will be stopping by soon.

America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/25/american-pronatalists-malcolm-and-simone-collins

Sprots, Sad Sprots

The Stonk Market is closed today

The ACCURACY

Baby Moose

Have a great week!

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20 Comments

  1. I cannot tell you how accurate that South Park American Healthcare System clip is. Although we probably all know this, we’re not children. The health care portals. The preregistering for appointments (which, really, the only thing the bots look at is whether your insurance info is up to date, and what medications you’re taking is just window dressing.)

    I think my favorite run-in occurred maybe four years ago. There was some nonsense form that I needed to fill out, but I didn’t want to shlep back to the hospital from whence it came.

    “Oh, you can just fax it to us. Do you have a pen? Our fax number is—”

    “I work from home. I haven’t seen a fax machine in 25 years. I’ll scan it and email it to you.”

    “Oh, I’m sorry, our system isn’t set up to accept emails…”

    What’s also fun is that my local practice is affiliated with a hospital system that is made up of five hospitals that were acquired over the years. There is absolutely no communication among them because they all use different, crude, computer systems. And if an employee, everyone from the doctor who’s the chief of the department down to the part-time desk person who wants to tell you what to do to prepare for your appointment, needs to contact you they will call from their personal cellphones because the internal switchboards are overwhelmed. Which is fine, but if you’re me, you get a lot of scammy phone calls, so if “Unknown Number” pops up you let it go to voicemail. Only days later do you realize that it was your cardiologist just calling to check in and now might suspect you are dead. I guess I should become one of those people who are glued to their always-charged phones but no, not today, Satan.

    • …this rings a bell…so I probably previously said something about it being possible to swap things between a computer & a fax machine directly…or certainly used to be since I remember helping someone with doing exactly that some years ago…not unlike how the print function can treat send-to-printer the same as save-as-PDF

      …forget if that was true & now isn’t or if there’s anything you wouldn’t assume to be present on the computer end it depends on…windows has probably broken it out into toggles in three different control panels to make it more intuitive for users or something…but if it might be useful I believe it’s possible?

      • Or, when it comes to our hideously broken American Health Care System, you can just ignore it and rest assured no one will ever ask again because the issue/need was dissolved in the miasma of bureaucratic inertia and incompetence.

        I should say that while my insurance is very expensive (I don’t pay for it; BH and his company do) it’s very good. I can’t imagine how much I’ve racked up in bills and I’ve basically paid nothing. Most insurance plans (like my dog’s) milk you dry, that was the point of Joe Lieberman (D/I-Cigna/Aetna) being in the Senate and putting the kibosh on the Obamacare public option, but I am milking mine dry. Another year of this and the lights are going to go out in Hartford and it’s all going to be my fault!

      • I probably backed you up. It’s possible to use a scanner as a fax machine. There’s a bit of finagling required but I’ve done it. The precise machinations are lost to the mists of time (and I’ve changed scanners twice since then). Google shows various apps that allow it from phones and mobile devices too.

        That said, there’s really no excuse whatsoever for not having an email option. And honestly, that’s antiquated (sorry, Matthew). My health care providers all have portals where I can upload PDFs.

        • New York, the Greatest City in the World™. The city where all the institutions spend about $200 a year on tech maintenance and innovation. Every time I read about the physical architecture and operation of the subways the hair on the back of my neck stands up, and this despite the billions and billions of dollars flushed down the sewer annually in what is known as the MTA Capital Budget.

          I’m still envious of my (late) brother. He had an original AOL account that was random alpha-numeric. I think it was. It’s been a while. Apparently those are worth money.

    • The fax document system our clinic used until recently was called Updocs.  It led to me shutting down my wife’s constant complaints about the program with my bad dad joke “what’s up docs?”  She never thought it was as funny as Bugs Bunny.  Insurance companies don’t just screw patients, they make it really hard to get paid by them too.  We have to resubmit multiple times, follow up & often just give up getting paid.  They can also just give providers a fraction of what is billed because???  They can!  Our system is a joke.

    • Just wait until the AI ghouls get their hooks in.

      Unfathomable levels of bias is going to sink in, along with explicit errors.

      I’m sure the prople who really understand AI can point out a million ways you do not want it doing even simple tasks like booking appointments for bloodwork. But there’s going to be a gold rush by execs to get their foot in the door for the simple things before they move into the even more dangerous parts of the business where their incompetence will do vastly more harm.

      • I have been predicting for awhile that Amazon & Google will soon be offering an AI generated “doc in the box” telemed as a primary provider option.  They will say it is monitored by a “real” doctor.  They will be able to do simple diagnosis and prescribe medication without any real oversight.  Insurance companies are already using AI to deny claims.

        • There are going to be huge litigation nightmares because the medical industry is much more tightly regulated than most other industries, but outsider execs won’t internalize it.

          You can easily see a situation where some developer runs tests on a planned rollout and notices HIPAA violations, but an exec with a background in something like supply chain logistics where a 3% failure rate is acceptable is going to blow them off.

          I think the 7-dimension chess brains think their endgame is to just find rightwing judges who will back a legal doctrine that exempts AI from laws, but I seriously doubt they have any capacity to understand where that is going.

  2. Did you see or read about the beheaded baby and numerous charred bodies in a Rafah “safe zone” last night? They dropped bombs on tents. A tented area that Palestinians were concentrated into by the IDF was set ablaze last night by the IDF.

    Does anyone here follow journalists in/from Gaza? At the very least Motaz?

    On days after new massacres have been revealed all over social media, the silence makes me wonder.

    • Those idiots don’t understand that with the rapid changes of weather accelerated by man generated CO2, feeding the old or young is going to be difficult.

      You can have 20 kids but how many can you afford to feed?

    • Talk about the movement really should always include a mention of the Duggars, and the role the TLC network played in the monster.

      The Duggars weren’t just passive participants in the ideology either. Josh Duggar ran the political arm of the Family Research Council and his parents were top level activists.

      But you know, let’s just do some soft focus about getting the chores done.

  4. I am shocked that Libertarians don’t attract the ladies.

    I may look like one (2/3s of balding, bespectacled but not beer bellied) but even I know it is the worst kind of sausage fest.

    • “Libertarians” are just Republicans who are too embarrassed to admit it. I’ve got a friend like this. Loves to crow about how he’s a libertarian but his stances are Republican Party line bullshit all the way.

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