luminadiffusion
luminadiffusion on Hacker News
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Pharma uses the windfall profits they make from delivering subpar health outcomes to buy cute TV slots about "ask your doctor if [INSERT DRUG NAME] is right for you" - while bribing your doctor with special "incentives" to prescribe their drug.
The insurance companies run a mob racket. The executives collude with the drug companies to make sure that [INSERT DRUG NAME] is added to their coverage list, even if it has mediocre or questionable performance. Don't worry though, their actuaries will balance it out by figuring out how to deny coverage and make cuts to necessary care to cover the difference. (AHEM, just happened with that new Alzheimers drug)
The for-profit clinics and hospitals specialize in lots of quick, profitable, and ineffective treatments and seem to extract their profits at the expense of the burn out in the doctors. US doctors spend an average of 12 minutes to see a patient in a 1 hour consult - because they spend an average of 25 minutes per visit filling out paperwork to justify their recommendations about why you actually need the care you've sought.
All of the players collude with the insurance industry to tell a story about how they somehow all need windfall profits to cover being the most advanced, innovative, healthcare system in the world. As if the "advanced" technology is somehow a substitute for positive health outcomes.
This whole entire industry is a huge Ponzi scheme. Our US Congressmen make laws to restrict Medicare from applying it's bargaining power to get good deals on drugs - so the whole damn industry is subsidized by massively overinflated prices that add trillions to our federal debt every single year.
Nauseatingly hypocritical Congressmen scream about fiscal responsibility while simultaneously passing Medicare bargaining restrictions and adding trillions to our federal debt each year. This process isn't just cynical, it should be criminal. This industry is literally driving the US government into bankruptcy and sacrificing the future of our nation - but none dare call it treason. Shame.
TLDR: The whole medical field justifies their excess profits as supporting the "free market" in "generating innovation". In reality: the market is anything BUT a free market; innovation is not a substitute for positive health outcomes; and, their excess profits are primarily used for propaganda and bribery purposes to justify their own existence. This whole system is maximizing profits for a limited number of players at the expense of our doctors, our patients, the fiscal health of our republic, and the future of our country. Welcome to 'Merica.
Physics:
1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman
2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Steven Hawking
Mathematics:
1. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by J.A. Paulos
2. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by D. Hofstadter
These books brilliantly illuminate the beauty in these fields. They show you that underneath all of that complex notation and "math speak" are beautiful ideas about life, the universe, and the nature of reality. These fueled me, even in to my PhD research. I still love them today.
It’s not all free speech or none. I don’t see Andy protesting that it is a crime to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there isn’t one. I also don’t see Andy protesting when that teenage girl was sent to prison for verbally abusing her boyfriend and verbally encouraging him to commit suicide - which he eventually did. Where are his protests? Where are the guardians of free speech here?
The thing is, there is speech for the purpose of communicating, speech for the purpose of convincing, and speech for the purpose of manipulating. The first two categories are always protected and should be under most conditions. The last has heavy restrictions. You are not allowed to use the platform someone else built to manipulate the audience they built if they do not want you to. Period.
Trumps endless lies aren’t speech. They are a blatant attempt at manipulation with a reckless disregard for the truth. That needs to be restricted urgently. We’ve seen too many minds manipulated by this category of non-speech.
That’s also the entire problem with the “conservatives” - especially under Trump. They abused platforms to manipulate people into following them because they didn’t actually have persuasive points. They abandoned their commitments to fidelity, fiscal responsibility, and morality. All they had were lies that they repeated until they became undistinguishable from the truth.
This isn’t about speech. It never was. It is about manipulation and one particular political segment trying to use our core values against us.
Stop trying to muddy the waters. This whole argument is a straw man.
Stop trying to pretend this was ever about speech.
Is there a site for this? Or app?
Here’s the problem: Free speech rights are intended to protect speech. They are not intended to protect propaganda. Nor would we want them to. Propaganda is relatively easy to identify and is not speech.
Take Trump, for example. He does not lie in an attempt to convince you of the truth of his perspective. He lies to show you who has power in the situation. He knows that you know that his excuses are shallow and dumb - that’s the whole point.
He is asserting that he can create his own reality and say whatever he wants and you cannot stop him. The majority of his supporters do the same thing. When they repeat his lies, they are not attempting to convince you of their truth. They are showing you their allegiance.
This is similar with QAnon and a myriad of other right wing groups. After repeating their lies over and over, their supporters begin to get confused about what is actually real. They originally bought in to the scheme to be part of the group, but the scheme took and and they lost their grasp on any truth. There is no truth once this takes over.
This is not speech. This is a caustic type of control that uses honest people to spread by confusing their sensibilities. They protect the exercise of these lies, in their quest for morality and justice, and allow its venom to spread. Soon, it kills both host and victim. Leaving all powerless to the purveyor of the propaganda.
This is easily identifiable. We must not protect this. It is not speech.
Getting pulled into a quasi-logical debate where this is confused with speech is exactly what the purveyors want. They want us to confuse this with speech so it can be protected while it erodes the minds of its consumers.
We are wildly less safe worldwide in every possible way. Climate change was neglected. All environmental standards became toilet paper. Iran now has nukes. North Korea has nukes. Russia is seizing neighboring countries with the blessing of Trump. China has gone rogue. And the US is locking up children in cages. Which part of that sounds like resounding peace?
If Assange were American, I’d nominate him for treason.
All because this critical infrastructure lost $6B last year?!?!
The DoD’s base annual budget for 2020 was $633B - and they will spend every single penny of it.
The USPS spends less than 1% of our base DoD budget to deliver timely mail to every single registered household in the US.
Oh, by the way, this corrupt administration PLANNED TO LOSE $1.06T BEFORE THE PANDEMIC.
And, taxes collected from individual citizens make up approximately 60% of our Federal budget. Taxes on corporations make up just 7%. The rest is a smattering of funds that come from trade, interest from the Fed, and other sources.
If you ever wondered who this American government works for... it is not “We the People”.
The citizens are not treated like they directly pay for more than half of government expenses. They don’t even matter enough to support consistent communication infrastructure.
Your elderly grandparents can’t have your medicine on time because it costs the postal service an average of $0.033 above their collected revenue to mail each item...
...while each Javelin missile we fire at some poor goat herder in Afghanistan costs the same as a small house in the suburbs of a major US city.
The level of corruption in this administration and this entire government is more than nauseating - and the fact that they are doing with my tax dollars adds insult to injury. The shock is wearing off - and below it is nothing but rage.
I think they are confusing correlation with causation.
It’s strange to me that people read something like this and infer the absolute inverse of the actual situation. That is definitely a “thinking fast” reaction.
I’ve used AESCrypt for a while. Open source and no major bugs found under a third-party audit.
“The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.”
- Benjamin Disraeli
I favor the approach of understanding the dynamics of machine learning. The mathematics are then easily distilled from the nature of the process.
This is a very clear description of that process. Thank you for it!
Why is this administration an such incredible engine for useless ideas?
Cubesats are within reach of almost any country. We a decade away from every country in the world being able to have access to unbreakable comms.
>
> I am sorry to inform you that you do not have a PhD in
> online commenting and therefor are not a domain expert in
> online communication. For that reason your comment and
> opinions in the previous reply are invalid and should be
> de-platformed.
>
> Yours truly,
>
> Hypocrisy
Oooooooh. This comment is so deliciously stupid that I am going to quote it verbatim in case you delete it. I would hate deprive future readers of the ability to marvel in the grandeur of its laughable dimwitted glory.
These doctors did not have proper training the statistics they horrifically misrepresented. They also made it sound like they had substantial knowledge in the field of Epidemiology. They don't.
Both of these doctors are now going before the California Medical Board because they got the facts wrong and they were wrong to give this advice. They misrepresented their data and exaggerated - because their urgent care is having a low patient turnout and they want to end the lockdown.
> This idea that only narrow set of domain experts can speak up about something is blatantly insane.
Your couple of hours on Google is not equivalent to a medical degree. When we are talking about medicine, you do not get a seat at the table because you think you are smart.
A standard Medical School only includes 1 semester in Virology and 1 more semester in Microbiology. An Epidemiologist goes through 4 YEARS of detailed training in Statistics, Microbiology, and Biochem. This is before years of experience in the field.
Those are NOT equivalent bases of knowledge.
> You are not an epidemiologist either...
What the fuck do you know? My degrees are in Mathematics with a specialization in Statistics. So, yeah, I know A LOT more than they do in this area.
> If credibility is a function of imbued institutional authority...
Doctors have to demonstrate their skills by getting licensed for the areas of their practice. We have a licensure process for a reason - to demonstrate competence in a field. These guys are going to lose theirs.
End of story.
> epidemiologists are not statisticians
You don't know a single fact that you are talking about. You are the fucking problem - along with everyone else who thinks their Google search is as good as a medical degree.
1. Convert PDF -> multiple individual SVG files. (I probably used Cairo)
2. Use Inkscape to set your fields and name them like Django template variables.
3. Store these prepared SVGs in the file system of your app.
4. Call them when needed and fill them in with the Django Template rendering engine.
4a. Works with including images too if you convert them to base64 encoded PNG, then insert them into the SVG.
5. Convert individual SVGs -> individual PDFs. (Cairo)
6. Merge individual PDFs into a single combined PDF. (Cairo)
7. Deliver finished merged PDF.
After the initial step of preparing your SVG, which can take a bit of time to get right, it only takes about 2-3s to produce a fully compiled PDF and gives you all of the necessary functionality out of them - sans all of these chaotic intervening libraries.
I can't tell you how many months it took me to figure that out. It was a while though. When the system was operational, we were sending 10,000 multipage PDFs per day on a single Django instance on a T2 medium AWS instance.