“I think there is a real chance this is a very bad moment for us – ‘Facebook lies about its user #s to get record profits.'” <- Facebook employee.

You can see (familiar) how they strategize spin 1) captured advertising clients lobbying for them, 2) small business!!! etc etc /5

One finds an uncommon freedom at the Farm, in the company of Peter and Kevin, as well as a certain grief, realizing what we’ve habitually missed, and what it’s cost us. If we ignore those who don’t talk, we fail to develop beyond our words.

To succeed, get other people to pay you; to become wealthy, help other people to succeed.

Publishers like The Guardian become conscientious FLoC objectors, as The New York Times and others open to testing the controversial tech

Separating rumor from fact on Covid-19’s origin

An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git

The Rise and Fall of a Double Agent

Where Did the Other Dollar Go, Jeff?

The popular cooking website will not publish new beef recipes over concerns about climate change. “We think of this decision as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet,” an article said.

An Ohio Town Grapples With Tearing Down a Plant From the Cold War}

Everything That’s Ever Gone Wrong on My Camping Trips

Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins on the Past and Future of Space Exploration

These are complex decisions that trade off privacy, ease of use and competition, and they might be made by lawyers.

Among the simple programs Chuck Geschke wrote that summer was a way of printing envelopes for the announcement of his daughter’s birth.

That year we anchored in Greece for the summer and spent winter in a Sicilian marina with a good discount.

In short: Don’t wait for the government to fix privacy. Any attempt to curtail and reverse the growing power of surveillance capitalism will have to start from us — the people — through grassroots mobilization. Pass it on.

Your Car Is About To Be a Software Platform, Subscriptions and All

Toilet to table: Michigan farmers feed crops with ‘toxic brew’ of human and industrial waste

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam lashes out at Western powers for ‘double standards, hypocrisy and lies’

Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

(From a physician friend: “The flu is gone because everyone is sticking to the rules but COVID is rising because no one is sticking to the rules.”)

Singapore develops new standard for cross-border verification of COVID-19 test results

Epic systems employee climate

I chased the American dream. It brought me back to my father’s deathbed in China.

Xinjiang investigation

Facebook & Privacy

Notes On the Slate Star Codex Controversy

Their goal is to become entrepreneurs. But instead of building products, they create content. Or even worse, they do research and take courses on how to create content.

The Whole Web Pays For Google And Facebook To Be “Free”

Toyota Develops Packaged Fuel Cell System Module to Promote the Hydrogen Utilization toward the Achievement of Carbon Neutrality

TSMC at the head of history’s tide: two high walls and one sharp knife

EVs Could Make Dealerships a Thing of the Past, Too

The Brown M&M’s Principle: How Small Details Can Help Discover Big Issues

India’s new intermediary liability and digital media regulations will harm the open internet

Stupid lessons: It turns out that selecting all objects and changing storage class doesn’t change storage class on all objects. Instead, you have to create a lifecycle rule to transition objects, and tell the lifecycle rule to clear multipart uploads. Otherwise, many objects (in our case, most of them) won’t transition.

This tool lets you confuse Google’s ad network, and a test shows it works

How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

The Factual: Best Covid-19 News Sources of 2020

Health Experts Are Telling Healthy People Not to Wear Face Masks for Coronavirus. So Why Are So Many Doing It?

‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’: Chaos Strikes Global Shipping

How Did Absentee Voting Affect the 2020 U.S. Election?

BMW CFO Brushes Off Apple Car Threat: ‘I Sleep Very Peacefully’

Imogen Heap: Decentralising the music industry with blockchain

First flight nears for Berlin Airlift Foundation’s replacement airplane

Jeremy Grantham:

The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.

These great bubbles are where fortunes are made and lost – and where investors truly prove their mettle. For positioning a portfolio to avoid the worst pain of a major bubble breaking is likely the most difficult part. Every career incentive in the industry and every fault of individual human psychology will work toward sucking investors in.

But this bubble will burst in due time, no matter how hard the Fed tries to support it, with consequent damaging effects on the economy and on portfolios. Make no mistake – for the majority of investors today, this could very well be the most important event of your investing lives. Speaking as an old student and historian of markets, it is intellectually exciting and terrifying at the same time. It is a privilege to ride through a market like this one more time.

“The one reality that you can never change is that a higher-priced asset will produce a lower return than a lower-priced asset. You can’t have your cake and eat it. You can enjoy it now, or you can enjoy it steadily in the distant future, but not both – and the price we pay for having this market go higher and higher is a lower 10-year return from the peak.”1

Fabius Maximus:

Joe goes on like this for quite a while. For a more rational report of this news, turn to the NY Times: “N.Y.C. Death Toll Soars Past 10,000 in Revised Virus Count.”

“New York City, already a world epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, sharply increased its death toll by more than 3,700 victims on Tuesday, after officials said they were now including people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it. …

“The city and the state have at times differed in their counts of the dead in New York City. As of Monday, the state said that 7,349 had died of the virus in the city. City officials have complained that they are at the whim of the state, which has been slow to share the data it receives from hospitals and nursing homes. The state Health Department explained on its website that the discrepancy is caused by the city and state using ‘different data systems.’”

Fun fact! The NYC numbers were increased on April 14, a city of 8 million increasing its count of fatalities by “more than 3700.” On April 17, China increased its fatality count by 1,290 for a city of 11 million – a proportionally smaller increase. But the journalists reporting the story about China had amnesia about the NYC news from three days ago, although that gives important context for the NYC story.

Also note the effect of the large, complex, and often conflicting reporting systems in China and America. When this causes confusion (or chaos) in the US, it is business as usual. When it happens in China, conservatives growl about those untrustworthy yellow people.

Extremists undermining our society

The final numbers for employment and GDP take over a year to produce in the US, with its vast and expensive accounting apparatus. Expect only unreliable numbers during a pandemic by doctors trying to save lives (including their own), with accounting a lower priority.

Complex phenomena are not counted like apples – whether CPI, GDP, or deaths from COVID-19. The definitions and accounting systems for all of these are constantly in motion, changed to reflect new knowledge and new collection systems. Before test kits were widely available (January in China, April in the US), clinical data was used to distinguish COVID-19 from the flu. Shifting to test kits changed the nature of the numbers.

Wu Feng:

It was late at night on Jan. 24, the day after Wuhan went into lockdown, when I boarded a plane bound for the city as part of a 128-member medical support team sent from the southern Guangdong province to the epicenter of China’s COVID-19 epidemic. We received a brief training session the next day, and on Jan. 26, we were taken to the hospital ward where we would spend the next 54 days.

I’ve been a doctor in an intensive care unit for 12 years, and during that time I’ve dealt with all manner of serious diseases. But stepping into that ward was the most terrifying moment of my life.

The cleaning staff and security guards hired by the hospital — most of them contractors — were gone, and the hallways were covered in garbage bags and contaminated medical waste. The ward was staffed by a total of two ophthalmologists and two nurses who were expected to care for 85 critically ill patients in varying degrees of respiratory distress.

Most of these patients should have been in an ICU, not a converted inpatient clinic. That first day, we watched as one of the doctors did their best to save a patient near death. It was no use: The hospital didn’t have enough oxygen left.

Jaron Lanier & E. Glen Weyl:

The spread of the novel coronavirus and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have provided a powerful test of social and governance systems. Neither of the world’s two leading powers, China and the United States, has been particularly distinguished in responding. In China, an initial bout of political denial allowed the virus to spread for weeks, first domestically and then globally, before a set of forceful measures proved reasonably effective. (The Chinese government also should have been better prepared, given that viruses have jumped from animal hosts to humans within its territory on multiple occasions in the past.) The United States underwent its own bout of political denial before adopting social-distancing policies; even now, its lack of investment in public health leaves it ill-equipped for this sort of emergency.

The response of the bureaucratic and often technophobic European Union may prove even worse: Italy, although far from the epicenter of the outbreak, has four times the per capita rate of cases as China does, and even famously orderly Germany is already at half China’s rate. Nations in other parts of the world, such as information-manipulating Iran, provide worse examples yet.

Taiwan’s success has rested on a fusion of technology, activism, and civic participation. A small but technologically cutting-edge democracy, living in the shadow of the superpower across the strait, Taiwan has in recent years developed one of the world’s most vibrant political cultures by making technology work to democracy’s advantage rather than detriment. This culture of civic technology has proved to be the country’s strongest immune response to the new coronavirus.

TECH FOR DEMOCRACY

The value of Taiwan’s tech-enabled civic culture has become abundantly clear in the current crisis. Bottom-up information sharing, public-private partnerships, “hacktivism” (activism through the building of quick-and-dirty but effective proofs of concept for online public services), and participatory collective action have been central to the country’s success in coordinating a consensual and transparent set of responses to the coronavirus. A recent report from the Stanford University School of Medicine documents 124 distinct interventions that Taiwan implemented with remarkable speed. Many of these interventions bubbled into the public sector through community initiatives, hackathons, and digital deliberation on the vTaiwan digital democracy platform, on which almost half the country’s population participates. (The platform enables large-scale hacktivism, civic deliberation, and scaling up of initiatives in an orderly and largely consensual manner.) A decentralized community of participants used tools such as Slack and HackMD to refine successful projects. (Much of our analysis is based on open interviews through these tools with leaders in the g0v community of civic hackers.)

Federal electronic medical record data sharing rules have been released, many years after the $38B+ federal taxpayer backdoor subsidy, which promised “interoperability”.

David Wahlberg:

Rick Pollack, CEO of the American Hospital Association, said in a statement Monday that the final ONC rule fails to protect patient information. “The rule lacks the necessary guardrails to protect consumers from actors such as third-party apps that are not required to meet the same stringent privacy and security requirements as hospitals,” he said.



Nick Hatt, a product designer at Madison-based health care data-sharing company Redox and a former Epic employee, said Epic “didn’t really get very much in the final (ONC) rule. The content did not change substantially, so it was kind of a win for the patient-access side.”

The rule requires full exports of patient data, beginning in three years, to patients or hospitals if requested, Hatt said. “You’re being asked to develop something that helps your customers switch from your software to someone else,” he said.

Also, screen shots of electronic medical records will become more public, which Epic didn’t want, Hatt said. “They really don’t want to have screen shots of their software out on the internet, and now essentially it’s illegal for them to put those kinds of clauses in their contracts,” he said.

But the scope of data that must be shared will be limited for two years, and companies such as Epic will be able to warn patients about the dangers of sharing data with third-party apps — changes that were in Epic’s favor, Hatt said.

The rules apply to scenarios such as patients wanting to share clinical data and check lab results with Apple’s Health app, Hatt said.



Epic has said the proposed ONC rule could threaten patient privacy and intellectual property, and increase health care costs. CEO Judy Faulkner urged customers to support a letter in opposition to the rule. More than 60 health system CEOs, including those at UW Health, UnityPoint Health-Meriter and Gundersen Health System, signed the letter sent in February to HHS Secretary Alex Azar.

Related:

1. Paying – Repeatedly – for Epic’s Walled Garden

2. Airdrop trumps $40B Taxpayer Medical Record Subsidies.

3. Madison’s Property Tax Base Growth; $38B+ Federal Taxpayer EMR Subsidy.

4. $37,920,077,070 in Taxpayer Electronic Medical Record Subsidies: 2009 – January 2018

5. Epic Electronic Medical Record Implementation: $100,000,000 for Stanford Hospital in 2005.

6. Epic Systems Clearing Storm Landscape Images.

7. A failed 2007 attempt to use Wisconsin taxpayer funds for electronic medical record subsidies.

7. More notes and links on Epic Systems and its founder: Judy Faulkner

8. Federal electronic medical record data sharing rules: 474 page pdf.

I recently compiled a bit of long term, personal medical history along with an image or two prior to meeting a new physician. I sought to share this digital information efficiently, and save everyone time, if not money.

However and unfortunately, Epic Systems’ My Chart app (Madison, WI based UW Health implementation) lacks the ability to ingest and share patient sourced images or documents…..

A few days later, in clinic, I used iOS’s AirDrop to share the text and graphics to the physician’s iPhone. While helpful, the lack of patient sharing tools meant that a clinic visit was required along with ever increasing deductibles.

Many healthcare providers share personal medical record data via the iPhone’s health app.

However and unfortunately, $3.65B UW Health’s Epic medical records cannot be shared to my iOS health app.

We continue to pay more for less.

The lack of interoperability is a reminder that US taxpayer’s now $40B back door electronic medical record subsidy has been a failure. Costs have exploded and we citizens lack data portability, despite the legislation’s requirement:

The HITECH Act set meaningful use of interoperable EHR adoption in the health care system as a critical national goal and incentivized EHR adoption.[7][8] The “goal is not adoption alone but ‘meaningful use’ of EHRs—that is, their use by providers to achieve significant improvements in care.”[9]

There are pockets of innovation. One Medical’s app supports video visits:

Thankfully, the visit was of no consequence, other than time and money.

Additional reading:

Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong

Madison’s Property Tax Base Growth; $38B+ Federal Taxpayer EMR Subsidy

Stillborn 2007 Wisconsin $30M EMR subsidy.

Cringely:

A reader asked me to write tonight about the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, which is about as far from something I would like to write about as I can imagine, but this is a full service blog so what the heck. The idea behind the law is laudable — standardized and accessible electronic health records to allow any doctor to know what they need to know in order to treat you. There’s even money to pay for it — $30 billion from the 2009 economic stimulus that you’d think would have been spent back in 2009, right? Silly us. Now here’s the problem: we’re going to go through that $30 billion and end up with nothing useful. There has to be a better way. And I’m going to tell you what it is.

Russ Britt:

The costly flaws in U.S. digital health-data plan