According to BMI calculations, I am at the high end of healthy weight range and could still be healthy if I weighed up to 25 pounds less. That seems nuts to me.
Making the case for municipal broadband - Cory Doctorow
The Koch network is pushing for an end to covid lockdown and social distancing, while sending its own workers home to ensure their health and safety. - Cory Doctorow.
The group previously pushed to slash the CDC, contributing to US unpreparedness for the pandemic.
Lax antitrust regulations killed a plan to stockpile ventilators
13 years ago, the US Dept of HHS awarded a contract to design low-cost, reliable ventilators to Newport Medical Instrument of Costa Mesa, CA. The ventilators would cost <$3k, allowing the US to procure a shit-ton of them against future pandemics.
This was a problem for existing med-tech giants, who charged >$10K for competing ventilators…
So Covidien, a med-tech giant, paid $100 million to buy Newport and killed the project.
Covidien is now a division of Medtronic.
Medtronic has been leading the fight to kill off an open artificial pancreas, which could free people with diabetes from dependence on meds. These people become “ambulatory inkjet printers, dependent on manufacturers for overpriced consumables to keep their fucking organs working.”
Medtronic pacemakers and defibrillators “can be wirelessly hacked to kill you where you stand.”
And Medtronic has worked with other companies to kill state Right to Repair bills, which is one big reason hospitals are now struggling to keep lifesaving equipment going during the pandemic.
Philips now has a contract to deliver artificial ventilators. It hasn’t shipped.
Pandemic surveillance will be abused
Our failure to contain coronavirus has nothing to do with failure of “invasive surveillance,” Blue says. It’s because autocrats in China and the wannabe autocrat in the White House refused to take coronavirus seriously in the beginning.
Surveillance advocates are trotting out the old canard of privacy vs. safety. But it’s not a “vs.” – privacy is a form of safety. When we have less privacy, we are less safe, from overreaching police, unscrupulous big business, terrorists and stalkers.
Israel and China are going full 1984.
On the other hand, countries like South Korea and Taiwan are balancing surveillance with privacy protection. Even Singapore, which otherwise ranks low on civil liberties and privacy protections, understand that it needs to protect privacy during the pandemic.
Singapore “clearly gets that if you treat your people’s privacy and data the same way Facebook does (or China, or Zoom for that matter), your problems are going to breed problems like tribbles,” Blue says.
These data collection tools were not built to save lives in emergencies: they were purpose-built for exploitation and abuse.
The only way to repurpose them safely and effectively is to treat them like they’re radioactive: we must proceed with the certainty that all virus tracking and tracing tech will be abused.
Violet Blue also outlines privacy problems with Zoom. It’s a privacy nightmare. I’m going to look for alternatives.
Big tech conferences could be a COVID-19 casualty
Lindsay Clark at the Register predicts smaller, fewer tech conferences post-COVID-19.
My first was CA World in New Orleans in 1998. In front of an audience of thousands, then Computer Associates CEO Charles Wang wandered across the stage pontificating as a chorus of children danced about him (no, really) and I knew I had indeed entered a whole new world of weird.
A chorus of children dancing around the CEO is actually not particularly unusual for a tech conference for a billion-dollar company. You see some weird-ass shit for entertainment at conference keynotes.
Already pre-COVID-19 we saw the big vendor-neutral tech conferences dry up. Remember COMDEX? Remember Interop? And there were always rumors that the gargantuan Mobile World Congress was struggling to break even.
These were replaced by events sponsored by individual vendors, including Amazon Web Services, Google, Cisco, VMware, etc., with attendance in the tens of thousands, as well as smaller, focused multivendor events with attendance in the hundreds.
I prefer the smaller, focused events myself; easier to find people to talk with who are useful professionally.
At the bigger events, sheer navigation becomes a challenge. Some years, my commute to and from Mobile World Congress was 30-60 minutes on public transit, like a regular job. Though part of me actually enjoyed that; it made me feel cosmopolitan and worldly. Like I lived in Barcelona.
Salespeople love conferences because it helps them generate leads and make deals. Engineers get a rare opportunity for face-to-face networking. And everybody loves the parties.
Or, rather, everybody except me loves the parties. As an introvert who went to one or two conferences per month, I looked forward to the opportunity to go back to my hotel room and decompress.
Big conferences give CEOs and senior executives the opportunity to bask in front of a wildly cheering crowd of thousands. They get to be rock stars for a day. Don’t overlook that as a driver keeping big conferences in business.
Julie took this photo of Minnie saying good morning to her. My legs at the right. 📷
Julie took this marvelous photo of a mallard swimming in the pond in our backyard. 📷
Julie took these outstanding photos of Vivvie. 📷
