Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
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Then you start off fresh going “this time it’s going to be different” but the same fucking things happen and you end up cramming that project in 3 weeks.
In the news this week: https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/NERL Major Incident Investigation Preliminary Report.pdf
This is unprecedented since, well, January: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_FAA_system_outage
Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.
(Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)
My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.
My dad had to stay in his office with a satellite phone over new years in case shit hit the fan.
My dad still believes the entire Y2K problem was a scam. How do I convince him?
Well my dad does too and he worked his ass off to prevent it. Baby boomers are just stupid as shit, there’s not really much you can do.
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Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and OSX have all already switched to 64 bit time.
Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.
Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.
So they have a year 202020 bug then
I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:
The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.
A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.
That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it’s 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us “only” about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I’d expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven’t managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.
Omg we are in same epoch as the butlarian crusade.
Butlarian crusade
Butlerian Jihad, my dude. Hate to correct you, but the spice must flow.
Im just glad you got that reference
If you’re going to correct people about Dune quotes, at least use one from the book! “The spice must flow” doesn’t appear in any of them, it’s a Lynch addition.
an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
I can’t wait to retire when I’m 208 years old.
How many UNIX machines in production are still running on machines with 32-bit words, or using a 32-bit time_t?
How much software is still running 32 bit binaries that won’t be recompiled because the source code has been lost together with the build instructions, the compiler, and the guy who knew how it worked?
How much software is using int32 instead of time_t, then casting/converting in various creative ways?
How many protocols, serialization formats and structs have 32 bit fields?
Irrelevant. The question you should ask instead is: how many of those things will still be in use in 15 years.
What is the basis for the 2038 problem?
The most common date format used internally is “seconds since January 1st, 1970”.
In early 2038, the number of seconds will reach 2^31 which is the biggest number that fits in a certain (also very common) data type. Numbers bigger than that will be interpreted as negative, so instead of January 2038 it will be in December 1901 or so.
Huh interesting. Why 2^31? I thought it was done in things like 2^32. We could have pushed this to 2106.
Signed integers. The number indeed goes to 2^32 but the second half is reserved for negative numbers.
With 8 bit numbers for simplicity:
0 means 0.
127 means 127 (last number before 2^(7)).
128 means -128.
255 means -1.Why not just use unsigned int rather than signed int? We rarely have to store times before 1970 in computers and when we do we can just use a different format.
so instead of January 2038 it will be in December 1901…
Maybe this is just a big elaborate time travel experiment 68 years in the making?
Are there currently any that are showing signs of imminent collapse? (Twitter, maybe?).
Or what are the signs to look for those who are untrained in this field?
Is a website running on WordPress? That’s a system built on failed practices and is constantly attacked. It needs a serious overhauling and possibly replacement, but the software runs a huge majority of websites.
While most instances of WordPress you we’ll find in the wild are insecure and nothing more than bloated garbage. The CMS is actually fairly secure with minimal intervention if you properly configure it on setup and maintain software updates as they continually roll out patches for vulnerabilities as they are discovered.
If you turn off comments and the ability for new users to self-register and throw it on PHP 8.2 with a WAF and enable file write protection it’s actually very robust.
At least when WordPress breaks you have WP-CLI to troubleshoot it
I work for a web hosting company. So many WP sites are out of date with plugins and core. I’ve dealt with many compromised sites. Granted there are auto updates on the WP side and the hosts service, it’s still pretty often.
I also work for a WH. Yeah most idiots don’t do basic maintenance which is why I just rename the dir as xxx.old make a new folder install core and then delete the blank wp-content an copy over the wp-content DB and wp-config.php from the borked install. Takes 10 min rather than 30 to update and fix. I call that the “Doctor Frankenstein” method
Mostly tge first sign is something like all old .doc files can no longer be opened. So some thing like.
Package management is impossible. When a big enough package pushes an update the house of cards eill fall. This causes project packages with greatly outdated versions to exist in production because there is no budget to diagnose and replace packages that are no longer available when a dependency requires a change.
Examples: adminJs or admin bro… one of them. Switched the package used to render rich text fields.
React-scripts or is it create react app, I don’t recall. Back end packages no long work as is on the front end. Or something like that? On huge projects, who’s got the budget to address this to get the project up to date?
This has to be a world wide thing. There is way to many moving targets for every company to have all packages up to date.
It’s only a matter of time before an exploit of some sort is found and who knows what happens from there.
I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
Donate my body to the worst medical student in the
collagecollege. I’ll definitely be an F level carcass.I did my cadaver dissection last year in medical school, and you’ll probably be a better cadaver than you think. The worst one to deal with in the class was in the tank next to ours. The cadaver was 102 years old at time of death without a scrap of fat anywhere. The muscles dried out and fell apart almost immediately on dissection, and started growing mold over the winter break. The lab manager had to keep removing portions of the cadaver to try to limit the spread of the mold until all that group was left with was a head in a bucket of formaldehyde. The head, neck, and brain were the last dissections we did, so it worked out okay-ish, but I will never forget the absurdity of them ending up like a Futurama president.
That’s the beauty of micro-plastics, my corpse will have a great shelf life
You’re saying lean people make bad cadavers?
If they are very lean, yeah, it can be a problem. Having a bit of adipose to absorb some of the formaldehyde and retain some moisture helps to keep the tissues from drying out. Once the body tissues dry out, they’re basically mummified and dissecting them would be about as useful and easy as dissecting jerky.
LMAO! This comment is so much better because you misspelled college. Made my day. 😂😂😂
I did no such thing.
Not so fun story:
One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.
As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.
After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.
After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.
On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.
I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.
I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.
I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.
I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.
I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.
The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn’t listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.
Their practices are so scummy, I’m surprised they’re still allowed to operate at all in Canada. Glad they can’t do their worst in Ontario, that’s a small win.
You’re right about their abhorrent manipulation – I still have binders in storage from my sales training; I should dig them up and post some of it. It’s still, 35 years later, the most disgusting emotional manipulation I’ve ever seen. After all these years, it’s only got worse in the US from what I hear.
You were supposed to ask them to relive their most recent familial death experience under the guise of polite conversation, then hone in on whatever detail was the most unpleasant, and hammer home how if they didn’t buy a package, their children would go through worse. Have they considered how much emotional and financial pain they would cause if, god forbid, they died tomorrow? Don’t take time to think about the money you don’t have, because every hour of delay raises the chances your kids will be left with a financial mess when they’re grieving you. You’re basically heartless for doing that to them.
The graveside pitch was even worse. It’s so sad you lost your baby last month, but what if your six-year-old died tomorrow? Are you prepared for that? Like jesus, I can’t imagine the paranoia a grieving family faces after losing one child, constantly afraid for their remaining child. Let’s rub salt in that wound and scare the shit out of them for a few thousand dollars. It should be illegal everywhere.
What do you mean by “public funeral”? What’s the alternative? It sounds like you’d consider an event with only friends and family where there was a coffin in a room to be a “public funeral”. That seems to be what most people have, but it isn’t very public. Is a non-public funeral one where the family makes the coffin themselves and there’s no event where people see the dead person and the coffin?
The minimal services are essentially transportation, government documentation, and disposition (cremation, burial, entombment, etc). Some funeral homes won’t charge for a private viewing by immediate family, some charge a small fee. Typically there’s a cap on number of people and amount of time, something like 10 people total for 30 minutes.
Anything more than that will require you pay thousands of dollars extra. Hours of receiving guests, a published obituary, a mass or ceremony, musicians, clergy/celebrants, reception. All of those are pushed as “traditional” or expected but they’re incredibly expensive.
You didn’t talk about how coffins are sold for many thousands of dollars when they are just cheap plywood boxes that shouldn’t cost more than a hundred bucks and that serve no purpose other than to decay as quickly as possible.
While I do think expensive caskets are a waste of money, they’re actually one of the least marked up products sold at a funeral home! Typically, caskets and urns are sold for twice what they’re bought for wholesale. This is mostly because anyone can sell caskets and urns so they can’t have ridiculous markups or people will go elsewhere for them. Urns for example are almost always bought off Amazon instead of at a funeral home.
The products with the highest markups were insurance based. Estate Fraud insurance (if someone steals the dead person’s identity, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in correcting it) and Travel insurance (if you die on vacation, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in bringing the body home). Both of these insurance policies had real costs of about $10 or $20. They’re often sold for $300 to $500.
Truth
The past decade of the tech industry has felt very snakeoil-y.
INB4 “It always has been.”
If you’re good at building hype and have some connections, you can attract all sorts of investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.
Dan Olsen’s NFT video from a year ago summed it up well, I think (link). People with money to invest today want to repeat the insane growth in wealth brought about by computers, the internet, social media, etc. So they will basically gamble on any new ideas that have an air of plausibility to kick off the next boom.
I think it started with registry cleaners.
Those weren’t really pushed as a get-rich-quick scheme, which a lot of the hustle seems to be currently.
Oh, you’re thinking of crypto to junk. Nah, Fudge That.
What’s sad is there are plenty of actual problems out there that could be solved with software. Most of the time they’re not that ‘sexy’ and management is so blinded by greed that they throw away all the good opportunities.
Do you have any examples of problems currently lacking a (plausible) software solution?
Just say blockchain or AI and you’ve got the base of a startup these days
scared laughter
It is kind of hilarious that airplanes are seen as being safe and reliable, when if they were given the same factor of safety as most other consumer goods, they’d never get off the ground from being too heavy.
I do NOT recommend you do this, but if a ladder says it is designed for 300 lbs, then it should carry 1200 lbs. 4X is a fairly common factor of safety for things like ladders where people’s lives are in jeopardy. Most other items are usually 2X. (I want to point out that there are qualifications to this… static loading and dynamic loading are totally different things. Also a simple point load is not the same as a cantilevered loading condition. A new piece of equipment is not the same as one abused on the job for the last 10 years. All these things will dramatically affect safety ratings for things)
I’d say the difference is that every single part of an airline is carefully rated though. Everything that’s supplied for use on an airline is expensive because of all the regulations.
A ladder may be rated for 1200 pounds, but nobody inspects every single use-case for that ladder and ensures that the entire system always has 4x safety. Once you buy the ladder it’s up to you what you lean it up against, etc.
How online ads actually work.
Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it “put ads here, here and here”.
The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.
One of them goes “I know this guy, they’re an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I’ll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face”. Someone else yells “I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn’t bought one yet.”
The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.
That’s extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.
And how you’re tracked online. I’ve worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don’t see you,the user, and your data.
I just click “female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone” and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they’re super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.
And that’s advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won’t even get into the audience side of things and they’ll stick to keywords: they’ll show you an ad because you searched for “autumn home decor” and that’s all.
Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don’t have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don’t understand it, and it’s true, they don’t have time… so then Google takes your “autumn wreath” keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for “Christmas trees”, because they’re both seasons and they’re both plant related, right?
And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn’t interested and left right away.
My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn’t fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren’t there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.
It’s fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it’s bad for everyone except Google.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
It’s very frustrating watching it happen as someone who is old enough to remember when it wasn’t always this way. It used to be common business knowledge that if you help your customers, then your business will grow, and you’ll be successful. But now these companies are so enormous, with such little competition, that their philosophy is “squeeze everyone until they’re dead and then squeeze the new people who are forced to walk into your lair”. It’s not just the enshitification of the Internet, or the consumer market. These are companies that provide products and services so intertwined with our lives that it has become enshitification of the world, our very lives.
You’re absolutely right. From this side of the fence, Google are clearly focused on short term profits above all else. They used to run on the fact they could make you a profit easily, now they run on “you have no choice!”
The ad categories offered by various companies vary and I think adsense is nowhere near the closest-targetable network there is.
Try showing an ad to only Python software developers. Not IT repair shops. Not software developers writing exclusively C. I think you may be able to do that with keyword targeting on AdWords, once you avoid the bear traps you mentioned, but it’s hard.
OTOH, I bet there are ad companies that will help you target “30-40 years, single, lonely” for dating ads (that might be possible even with adsense), and definitely people with specific diseases to peddle medicine to them.
Occasionally someone posts a list of categories used by one or multiple networks and they can be the most specific, or far too broad (see: python dev).
I’m extremely surprised that I haven’t seen ad companies offering specifically to advertise to people working at specific companies. I’m sure it exists, just haven’t seen it. This would be incredibly valuable both for job ads, industry specific ads (this would benefit from breaking down by department), and also criminals and spies trying to get people from specific companies infected with malware.
What’s also important to understand is that these categories don’t need to be accurate. “This person has a 80% chance to be in category X” is more than good enough. Hell, 10% would probably already work.
The right ads pay really well. A life insurance click can be worth tens of dollars, because the conversion is worth thousands. So if there is a 10% chance you’re interested in buying life insurance, bombarding you with those ads makes sense.
Absolutely, I always thought Google ads categories were a little creepy… until I saw the Facebook categories, they’re a lot more invasive and detailed.!
Yeah for Python devs it’ll be targeting keywords, with bonus points for certain demographics. I don’t think we get categories that detailed. I’ll have a look when I’m in the office tomorrow 😅
It’s very rare that I would target anything other than keywords, as it’s pointless being so broad that you show to someone who’s uninterested, it wastes everyone’s time and money.
For me, the categories are just there to A) watch, and see if there are any interesting correlations (weirdly the people who most click the autumnal home decor are also into extreme sports?!) And to B) say you’ll pay a percentage extra for people with relevant interests ( like, apparently extreme sports)
Google used to have really robust tools for keyword research. They were even useful for finding overlooked niche subjects that paid well as an AdSense publisher. But as far as I can tell, they’ve completely removed those tools, instead pushing ignorance and “trust us” messages.
I’d be interested in the amount of electricity that gets wasted on this
My guess is that it’s a couple watts while you’re actively using the internet, mostly due to the extra CPU load a few bad ads cause when they’re on your screen. Without having done the math I expect all the servers, data transfer etc. to be negligible, on a per-user basis, because they serve so many users.
That’s another interesting thing btw. Most of the “internet thing X uses Y amount of electricity” are utter bullshit and massively exaggerating. What uses most power on desktop/TV is the screen. The second biggest consumer is likely your router (which is on whether you use it or not, but the studies usually ascribe all of the standby usage to your active usage - this makes sense if you try to look at “how much CO2 does all our digital stuff including ‘having an Internet connection’ cause” but not if you’re trying to look at “how much extra CO2 does activity X cause, assuming I already have an internet connection because I’m not gonna live in a cave”).
Don’t the fans use a lot of power? And wouldn’t a datacentre or server need a lot of cooling?
The server uses a kilowatt of power or more (most of it in the CPU). But if the server is serving 1000 active users concurrently, and only 5% of the time you spend online is spent fetching ads, 20000 people staring at their screens get their ads from let’s say 2 kW of server power usage, plus another 2 kW for all the equipment to get the data there… for a total of 0.4 watts per user.
These are completely eyeballed numbers, and could easily be off by an order of magnitude.
But your on premise gear (screen, computer, router) are likely by far the biggest factor.
One easy way to cross-check power usage claims is cost. It will only catch the most egregious bullshit, but it’s easy. A random page I found claims that “According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy it takes 5.12 kWh of electricity per gigabyte of transferred data.”
A Steam game with 50 GB would thus consume 256 kWh. Even if your 300 watt idle gaming rig, 50 Watt Router and 150 watt screen to watch the progress bar spends 2 hours downloading that, that’s 1 kWh. Even at 8 cents per kWh, that means just downloading the game would cost someone (not you) over $20. Do you think steam would let you delete and redownload that game that you bought on sale for $10 as much as you want if between them and your ISP someone had to pay for $20 just in electricity, each time? Not the game rights, not the servers, not the connection, just power.
I’d be interested in finding out why some of the ads I see (mostly in Android games I play where I voluntarily watch the ads for in game rewards) are so badly matched to me. I’ll get ads in Spanish when I only speak English. I’ll get ads for dating sites when I’ve been married for over 20 years.
Very few of the ads seem to be anything I’d even remotely consider. Not that I mind too much. I ignore the ads (sometimes even muting them) and do other things until they stop playing and I can get my rewards. Still, those very mismatched ads seem to be badly placed. Is it just that nobody else is bidding for this ad spot so “let’s play this Spanish ad for toilet paper” wins the rights to advertise to me?
That’s one possibility. It’s also possible that you have decent privacy settings keeping them from knowing too much about you, or they simply use a shitty ad network that’s bad at targeting. Even the major ones are impressively bad.
There also aren’t many advertisers interested in these ad slots since they know people watch them only for the reward, and games are also a frequent source of ad fraud (I think), so serious advertisers avoid them.
Also, mobile gamers are likely not the most attractive audience for the high paying stuff.
It’s usually terrible advertisers. They’ve got their account set to show to everyone in a super broad range. Like “uses a phone, under 50, in country X” and that’s all they’re going by.
This is combined with Google’s shitty “we’ll tell you how much to spend and who to spend it on, trust us!” Automation and dark patterns, which just spaffs all your money in places you don’t want to. Such as mobile apps! Which used to be one click to disable but now its 200+! Or location, which now defaults to “people who have shown interest in your country” when it used to just show ads to people in the country. Or keyword matching which used to be a lot more strict, but now they keep broadening things. (One headphone company we worked with spent thousands on “telephone” keywords, that they never entered into their account)
I heard that (at least on YouTube) it isn’t only how high people bid but how likely someone is to click on your ad. Like if you have an ad they’re likely to click on you may get shown even if you bid less. You probably know more about it, I’m just sharing this because it sounded fascinating when I heard about it.
Those are different models. Ads can be sold pay per view, pay per click, or even pay per conversion (the store reports when the customer buys something and only pays for that).
These can be converted by multiplying with the estimated probabilities. For example, if the scammer is willing to pay $1 for the click, and the probability that the user will click is estimated to be one-in-500, the view would be worth 0.2 cents.
If the scammer is willing to pay $20 for the conversion (because it means they successfully scammed someone out of $30), they’d need to succeed scamming one in 20 users that clicked for this to work out.
Works the same for legit businesses of course, where the business will consider total lifetime value (not just the current sale - you might also subscribe to something and keep paying for 2 years, or come back to buy again). Advertising / customer acquisition costs are a huge part of many businesses, which is why running online ad platforms is so obscenely profitable.
In this case, I don’t know who in the chain will do the conversion - if the bid will be for a click and the ad platform will estimate how likely you are to click, or if the bidder makes the guess and bids based on that. The bidder in this case would be another ad platform of course, acting on behalf of the actual advertiser, and nobody in this “ecosystem” trusts each other. It’s full of companies trying to scam each other or companies offering services to validate that the data someone is feeding you is real.
::hugs my PiHole::
It’s a good start but you absolutely want in-browser ad blockers too. Not all crap is served from dedicated garbage serving hostnames.
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IT in the EU:
Due to some EU laws, there has to be a “cookie consent” dialog on every website that uses cookies. I would estimate that more than 50% (probably too low) of these popups are cosmetic only and it doesn’t actually matter if you click accept or reject.
Wow that suck. I always spend time turning off every legitimate consent button. So I get cookies anyway?
You could set your browser to clear all cookies when you close it. That does mean you have to keep logging into sites every time you open the browser again, but with a password manager that’s not really a problem.
gdpr is a different thing than the cookie law, refusing consent is a real thing that everyone in the industry spent a hell of a lot of time and effort implementing to the letter because the fines for companies are way too large for anyone to ignore
There’s plugins that will do it for you (with the max privacy settings so you don’t have to worry about getting tricked by phrasing).
I even have one on my mobile browser.
Is there one for iOS browsers? I mostly use firefox on ios
No, it’s only for regular Firefox, and Firefox on iOS is just reskinned safari (so no plugins).
What’s it called, friendo?
Ghostery is what I use on my phone (alongside other stuff like uBlock origin)
Yeah probably.
Most of these consent pop ups are designed to be insanely annoying to the point where you just click accept all on a long list of cookies for individual things and they are not even grouped
it’s illegal, there should be a “continue without accepting” link everytime, and in the selection of choice, all non essential should be disabled, but yeah, there’s still some website not playing the game correctly, hopefully UE will give sanction at some point?
90% of the time^1 there’s at least a Cancel or Reject button. Sometimes you even get to pick which categories right there without it being two or three levels deep.
1 based on my highly scientific method of pulling numbers outa mah butt
That doesn’t sound realistic. There are real fines for non compliance and it’s trivial to find out what cookies you have.
You usually first get an injunction with some time to fix the issue, little risk of immediate fines.
So there is little reason to implement a working consent dialog unless you get a legal notice to do so. When the law came out we got a lot of such notices over the lack of the dialog, but after a usless dialog was implemented, it stopped.
Guess lawyers aren’t that tech savy or have better things to do.
If anyone is interested in a good read about the active changes coming to Cookie Law in the future: https://www.itpro.com/network-internet/web-browser/369894/the-cookie-law-is-finally-crumbling-good-riddance
Security theater.
EU, can you just make that shit go away? I am so goddamn tired of clicking cookie dialogs I could puke. kthxbye
50% seems conservative lol
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you should easily be able to give a few sources
I have plenty, like close to 100 pages where I personally implemented the useless dialoge. But I’m sure not going to taddle on them.
But if you want to go hunting for it yourself: try small wordpress sites or other small self-hosted blogs.
This obviously won’t be true for websites of major corporations.
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Aww you, stop it.
Can you not at least rat out the major sites? Surely you don’t have any moral qualms with that
I really don’t want to, I think it’s a rather stupid law that is both annoying and ineffective.
Most “bigger” offenders I found in the wild were medium sized local news sites and I really don’t want to cause them any legal trouble.
But as someone else said, it’s rather trivial to find. You really just need a browser with dev-tools.
You know you could just report them yourself right
Yes indeed. I just don’t want to. It’s a silly law.
I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.
I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.
No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.
Sounds like they didn’t spend any money on Cyber security’s team to properly implement it then…data exfil %100 would have been picked up by any real DLP solution and even barebones heuristics based EDR would have thrown a red flag as well.
Haha, please. You’re talking about machine learning when the best any business is using is antivirus. You forget, Boomers are still running big business and IT departments are running security.
It’s perfect world vs. real world my dude, and real world puts out tender for the cheapest solution.
It sounds like you’ve been working for Mom and pop shops then, and they’re not having audits done. Companies with millions of customers will usually either have in house secops or an mssp handle everything. Point being is, without audits then insurance usually will not be approved for PII loss or they flat out will not work with the company at all. It even more so with HIPAA laws.
I’m with the above commenter. I’ve worked at many companies of various sizes, from small local shops up to international corporations, including at least one contractor for the US military.
Every one of them had rules and policies and training on security, to varying degrees. But at every one of them, I’d find some vulnerability, or instance where someone was neglecting security. Each time, I’d bring it to the attention of someone in management. Each time (with one company as exception), those warnings would be “heard” and “passed up the chain”, and then nothing would happen. Only one company in 20 years of work actually fixed a security issue I found. And no company I’ve ever worked for was leak proof.
In my experience, until it threatens to cost a company much more money in losses than it would cost to fix the problem, but said problem will not get fixed. That’s profit motive. And often it seems they’d rather roll the dice until a loss occurs, and then (maybe) fix the issue.
I’ve worked at plenty of companies with exfil protection and people still did this. One has 100 devs and 500 total employees
Sounds like the company doesn’t have a clue about cyber security then. Tens of thousands is a piddling infosec budget for anything but a tiny company. Insider threats, malicious or otherwise, should always be on an infosec professional’s radar.
Companies not giving a shit about cyber security is probably not a secret but it is still pretty common, I think, so nobody should be surprised when there are major breaches.
Infosec is usually seen as an expense that cuts into profits. Assuming top level management and the board give a shit about security that’s great but often the risk isn’t fully appreciated at the top or is managed poorly.
Adequate infosec requires a company to have very mature processes across the board in IT (and likely beyond) and required. C level “buy in” isn’t enough. If the C level management and board doesn’t actively demand it, infosec will lose out to myriad other priorities every time.
The big tell is the org structure. If the CISO reports to the CEO, great. If they’re reporting to the CIO, CFO, etc., that can cause conflicts of interest. It can still work. If there is no CISO or they are the same person as the CIO, or if infosec reports several levels down in the org–beware!
Lol same here. Some for ecomm, but the most egregious was underwriting PPP loans. There was a database none of us could access after the loans were underwritten and sent to processing. But most of those documents came in thru the portal and we had to download that package and combine it with anything we got in email… Tax forms, IDs, and all the most sensitive personal info as a lot of businesses that applied were sole proprietors. All those documents say on my local HDD and I catalogued them in case they were needed again.
None of that was handled securely, it was on my home network with no VPN, and after the project was over very suddenly I sat on that laptop for 6 months until they sent a return label. I was a good worker but it was a mass hire and not a lot of vetting that happened.
That sounds highly illegal depending on what’s on the databases.
Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.
Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.
The English language version often don’t even translate, they write their own version, calling it “creative liberty”. This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.
That’s why claims of people of having “learnt Japanese from anime” are dubious in the best of cases.
Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I’m also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.
The flip side of this is the Samurai Pizza Cats, where they completely rewrote the dialogue to make the English version way more entertaining.
Well that just sucks. So if you’re a die hard fan of [anime name] and happen to be European how would you find something close to the source material?
I noticed that “creative liberty” first with the Dragonball series. I grew up watching the dubbed versions then one day discovered a little import store that sold tapes of the series with the original dialogue subtitled into English. There were a noticeable amount of differences in the story and it was slightly mind blowing to me at the time.
It’s not exactly what you’re looking for but the website https://animelon.com lets you use English and Japanese subtitles at the same time. And you can look at definitions of individual words. It is probably only useful if you are beyond a beginner level though.
I think using Japanese subtitles would be the way to go in general assuming you can read them but have trouble with listening.
So I’m old as fuck… did the horriblesubs scene die? They were a bunch of die hard fans encoding subs with direct translations. I appreciated them so much for Knocking on Heavens Door and the complete Cowboy Bebop series 🥹
All HorribleSubs did was rip directly from Crunchyroll, they didn’t do any encoding or translations themselves. And yes they shutdown a few years ago but were immediately replaced by SubsPlease who do the same thing.
Well shit TIL… thanks for the intel friend 🙏🏾
I’m currently learning Japanese at the moment and if I could tell my younger self that it’s stupidity learn Japanese from English substitutes then I would
Do you have any tips on learning languages?
One of my friends who is really good at learning languages watches a lot of crappy daytime TV in the language they are trying to learn. He tells me that those shows present a lot of bullshit situations that you can understand with your eyes while you can try and put together with the dialog. I have heard of more then one person learning english by watching TV game shows
- Be very young
- Be so young that you don’t understand you’re learning a language, you’re just making sounds with grandma
- Be exposed to unique sounds like the German “ü”, the French “r” and the Dutch “ch” and try to imitate them when you’re 3 years old and your brain, tongue and throat are still flexible
If you’ve fucked up 1 to 3, plug away at it for a long time, then at some point, before you think you’re ready, live somewhere where you’ll have no choice but to use that language.
Shout out to Banjo Kazooie, an older platformer from the Nintendo 64 game era, where the antagonist always speaks in silly rhymes. So the translators needed to translate and also make it rhyme while also keeping the context and humor intact. They took creative freedom of course because there simply isn’t a good match but it actually enhances the game in a way. So if you played the game in French before and now switch to English you’ll get a fresh set of jokes and rhymes.
This also applies to a lot of subtitling in general. Shows that are in a different language than English are usually first translated into English, and then that file is used as a template for the other languages it’s translated into. It’s easier and cheaper.
This pertains to the US:
A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don’t really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you’ve got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it’s been so strained ever since covid…
The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.
Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source
If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.
Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don’t be afraid to reach out for support. If you don’t have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don’t give up hope.
Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
I’m not sure I understand what happened here. Was this all just because the receptionist didn’t want to ask for approval because it seemed like a hassle?
Yep… at least that was my guess. Didn’t want to pull the specialist back out of what she was then doing/didn’t want the hassle. But I was adamant that we weren’t going anywhere until she checked.
Some people are just finicky and I can’t really say for sure what her deal was, but her demeanor was just rude and like she didn’t have the time of day to give us…
What a fucking bizarre attitude to have when working in healthcare. Laziness in that area can cause deaths.
It’s more prevalent in the industry than you’d like to think… Burnout is often linked with lack of empathy.
I worked exclusively with adults whose illness was severe enough that they were residing in various residential care facilities (RCFs) and assisted living facilities (ALFs) in my region.
I was a 3rd party and a mandated reporter and I can’t tell you how many times I hotlined facilities and did internal/DMH/DHSS reporting/assistance with investigations. Misallocation of Client funds was a common problem (especially at specific RCFs), medication errors/stealing Residents’ meds, neglect of facilities/cleaning, improper nutrition, and abuse and neglect were all too common…
At first I thought the same thing when I started that position, wondering why someone like that would even take those positions. But people are complicated and often shitty. Some people like to power trip, some people want to take advantage of the disadvantaged, some people’s self-care is so neglected by being over-worked that they no longer have the capacity, and some people are just assholes…
This just makes me sad. :(
There’s so much wrong with the system and so much that could done to improve it, but I don’t want to frame it here in a hopeless sort of way. Our treatment options and accessibility continue to improve, social stigma of mental illness has improved tremously in the last decade or two, and there’s no reason to think further advancement won’t continue. But acknowledging the current shortcomings and feeling sad and angry about it are important to drive that positive change.
I’m in total agreement. What we need is fully nationalised healthcare, with direct political participation from the people.
Reduced mental function definitely includes dementia; my mom had Parkinson’s disease and definitely needed my help and advocacy and memory.
Restaurant manager here, been doing this for a few decades. You do not want to know just how much leeway we get with basic sanitation. Seriously, be very thankful that you have an immune system.
The worms in those strawberries are just some extra protein.
Not worried about that as much as things that scurry. Barf.
If you want to feel the thrill of hunting some scurrying critters for extra protein, you can get the protein activity package. It’s normally only 17.99 €, but if you also bring a friend, you get a -50% discount.
Wow on sale! Sign me u— waitaminit…
And that is why the Snozzberries taste like Snozzberries!
IMO, for the average, healthy customer, the sanitation requirements are overkill. But not every customer is, so the rules help protect the less healthy customers.
The biggest thing about food, is most of it is pasteurized by the cooking. Raw foods like salads are the ones that need a much higher standard.
I can guarantee you that many of the rules keep even healthy guests with solid immune systems from getting sick or even dying. The FDA Food Code is like 700 pages. There are A LOT of rules. Many seem overkill from a layman’s perspective, but they protect against unlikely but serious consequences. There are a ton of ways that contamination can occur, even after the food has already been cooked.
That you don’t notice is just a good sign that you’re eating at safe places.
Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.
At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).
It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.
Accounting is a goddamn mess. There’s lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we’re supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world’s audit, tax, and consulting needs. They’re supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You’re worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.
And the only reason it continues to work is society’s social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don’t have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we’re all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It’s bonkers.
I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I’m in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.
So basically, everyone is full of bullshit and lying to keep the system working.
Why am I not surprised?
Social security would be a ponzi scheme if it wasn’t done by the government. System only works because new younger people are “convinced” to put in money to pay the old in hopes that new younger people will pay them in the future.
The social security liability is currently 23 trillion. If no new people started paying in and everyone wanted to cash out, they couldn’t get a dime.
We are 33 trillion dollars in debt. 33 trillion.
If we as a country ever tried to cut spending and save money to pay that down, our economy would collapse so fast.
Social security was designed to be that way, it’s not a secret or anything. It’s how the system was set up and it’s how it is supposed to work. Today’s workers fund today’s retirees.
Except it was built with the assumption that everyone would continue to have 2.5 kids, and skilled immigrants would keep making the US home, and the economy would keep growing and growing forever, and retirees would die off a couple of years after they retired.
All the base assumptions on which the system were built were shaky. People are having fewer kids, so there’s less money coming in. Retirees are living longer so they need more benefits. People who paid hundreds of thousands into the system during their lifetimes are requiring millions in benefits at the end of their lives. But, people are having fewer kids and so the bottom of the pyramid is shrinking.
More immigration would help, but we’re just too damn racist
Bro this is the fucking world! It’s just smoke and mirrors. Like the commercials. Everyone at McDonald’s smiling and happy and loving their job. Then look at reality.
That’s every job, every field. It’s just held together by duct tape and bubble gum.
It’s just held together by duct tape and bubble gum.
🔥 Hot take: Applies to the mainstream tech industry too in my eyes… an abundance of unstable implementations and hacks that can break at a moment’s notice - all prettied up with a fresh coat of paint so it “looks and feels new” to sell a new license each year or give the user a reason to keep paying that subscription. No value added whatsoever.
Fintech, construction (Solidworks, Autodesk), media & design (Adobe CC), Microsoft (Windows, office), the whole lot
Ehh, so a counterargument is we now have “control audits” aka soc1 type2 audits that test whether management fix their stuff without external eyes. That hasGREATLY increased the fidelity of all public companies. Yeah mistakes happen, but the controls get pretty robust after only a few years.
Accounting, just like economics, likes to pretend it is a hard science when in reality is it close to reading tea leaves.
I am a researcher studying diseases. You have no idea how many mice get killed without generating any data. There’s a rule in place whenever you want to work with animals that you need to plan ahead and only use as few animals as you need to get the data that you’re looking for. But things in research basically never happen according to plan. It could be due to a variety of factors: unexpected failures, overlooked factors, technical errors, or just simple negligence when performing an experiment. A lot of data and samples obtained from killed mice are discarded for one or more of the above reasons.
I get that mouse experiments are important to prove that our findings can translate to actual living animals, but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the “useful data per mouse” ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.
I was in the field for years. A lot of the mice we had were maintained with one copy of the gene of interest and crossbred to produce experimental litters (there are a lot of reasons for it, some technical, some practical). But OMG the numbers of mice we went through just to maintain the lines. Forget about failed experiments etc.
While you didn’t get the data you were looking for, at least in many of those cases you mentioned you did identify a flaw or failure and learned how to design an experiment that does.
I wouldn’t consider those mice as dieing without teaching you something. It might be a failed experiment, but you learned something.
I may be misreading them but it sounds like they’re describing avoidable problems.
Like when we were doing “oral” vaccinations with a oral gavage needle (ball tip) and going through the mouth and dosing in the stomach. We had a vial of 70% alcohol to clean the tip. Accidentally drew the alcohol up instead of the vaccine. By the time we finished the cage (6 mice, I think) the first one fell over.
but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the “useful data per mouse” ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.
Are there any alternatives you work with, or do you abstain completely from those kinds of experiments?
Good question. You may be surprised to hear that my stance isn’t that uncommon in research. If I recall correctly, somewhere around 50% of researchers personally will not use mice in their experiments. In these cases, we would either use a lower lifeform (fish or fruit flies), or use immortalized cells. Immortalized cells are aggressive cancer cells that happen to retain some of their cell properties. For instance, immortalized lung cells tend to act somewhat like actual lung cells. It’s not a perfect model, since you’re experimenting on cancer cells instead of actual cells, but the ease and low cost of growing and using them makes them extremely valuable for a lot of grindwork experiments, where you just need to burn through tons of different hypotheses quickly.
For me, I prefer to use immortalized cells. It works out for me anyways, since I prefer to focus on the mechanism of disease (which tends to be easier on immortalized cells) rather than practical effects of disease (which tends to require animals).
Private mental health providers in the US are pretty unsupervised and have a conflict of interest in that they make more money by keeping their patients/clients unwell, which can lead to negligence and abuse. The only thing keeping in line is the possibility of someone informed and insightful enough to report them to the licensing board or pressing a lawsuit.
For example, if a provider has poor integrity, it is in their best interest to not treat depression, but rather help the patient/client feel good for the moment. What the patient/client experiences is that they feel better when they see their provider, so they become dependent on their provider. This ensures the provider a reliable source of revenue.
Another issue is that masters level therapists, while capable of providing treatment for simple cases such as a clear depressive episode, are not properly trained to conduct thorough assessments for complex cases, meaning they can misdiagnose quite easily. Complex cases would be better treated by a well-trained psychologist that can conduct thorough psychometric assessments that are quite sophisticated and take lots of time to analyze. These services are costly and the vast majority of insurance policies won’t cover them.
Relevantly, yet another issue is insurance for mental health. Most insurance policies that pay for mental health services pay low, so the care you receive can be substandard since the more effective providers are charging what they’re worth in a market economy. One example that comes to mind is Better Help. They pay providers insultingly low, like around $30/hour, while effective providers are charging ~$150/hr out-of-pocket. That means that when someone uses Better Help to obtain care, they’re getting the bottom of the barrel therapist.
Lastly, the majority of family and marriage therapists aren’t properly trained in narcissistic emotional abuse. This can mean that therapy would not only be a waste of time, but can make things much worse as they can help the narcissist abuse the victim even further. Narcissistic abuse is quite complicated and requires a relationship therapist that specializes in that to properly assess and help the victim escape.
Tips: If you have been seeing a therapist for 12 sessions, and you haven’t realized any considerable long-term changes, find another therapist. Also, if your therapist doesn’t call you out on your bullshit, let’s you ramble about tangential matters, or focuses on helping you overcome specific weekly struggles, rather than helping you develop skills and restructure deep cognitive matters to address them yourself, find another therapist. An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.
Note: I am not a therapist. I have just worked in the mental health field and have friends that are therapists.
An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.
This is a great point and true for non-therapists as well. A good measure of whether or not someone helping you is providing you value is if you are progressively improving in measurable ways.
True for doctors, meds, physical therapists, coaches, you name it
Part of the problem with this is no clear treatment plan works consistently for everybody. Insanity is as diverse as cancer, and even the DSM is used as a rough guess as to what is going on, based on what mix-and-match set of symptoms.
Each psych med takes a month to start, get stabilized and see if that’s an improvement. If it doesn’t work right (typical) then the options are to add another drug (and then more drugs to counter side-effects) and test it as a cocktail, or get the patient off the first drug (usually two weeks to get sober, during which they’re symptomatic) and another month to start something new. I went through over a dozen SSRI combinations and for a while had to settle on a cocktail that wasn’t terrible and was slightly less bad than going sober.
Then there’s a matter that we often cannot escape the toxic situations we’re in, whether we can’t move out of a situation with contentious roommates or are working for a company with cruel middle management and scary toilets and stinks of insecticide. I’d think any physician might argue that someone with a lung condition should be moved out of the moldy house they live in, but when it comes to environments that are psychologically unhealthy, we’re all expected to just deal.
And this informs my job in the psychiatric sector which is as a peer councilor. When patients are stressed out and their professionals aren’t doing it for them, they come to me, and the first think I ask is are you safe? Most of the time, they are – as with the rest of the US population – in precarity, sometimes not even knowing where their next meal is coming from or if they’ll have a place to live next week. But scary parents, scary roommates and scary bosses are also super common, and we’re not really going to be able to treat or even manage the crazy when people are fearing for their survival.
One example that comes to mind is Better Help
During the pandemic, this company was heavily advertised across Twitch. Not surprised they pay shit wages. Wonder if they originally paid 2-3X market rate during the hype, but slowly clawed back the teaser rates in favor of the dog shit rates.
I heard all the bad shit about better help. But I had been interested in therapy so I tried to find a therapist from a local person instead. Found out my bill was nearly $200 a session. And since therapy isn’t something like an annual doctor visit or a twice a year dentist visit, I noped out of that.
So I more than understand why people choose Better Help. It’s often actually affordable.
You nailed it. 💯
This is very accurate. I worked 5 years in a BH Insurance company. We saw shitty providers all the time, and we were constantly having to play the game of deciding how much we (and our members) could tolerate before cutting the providers out of the network. Cutting too many providers doesn’t correct bad actors or replace providers for people who need them and can cause backlogs if other providers aren’t available to take on their patients.
The only thing we were able to do to correct many providers by changing their pay to a value based model, so providers would get paid more for better outcomes (and sometimes only paid when patients improve). It would increase pay a lot over standard rates. But providers fought that big time. They just wanted to do things their way and cash a check of a set amount with little or no oversight.
Better help is used by providers as a way to supplement their income, and they typically pay a bit less than conventional appointments because of the digital channels. However, Ive heard they have some issues with data security on their platform and their matching system is pretty flawed due to their network being somewhat ephemeral.
If you do want to seek therapy, remember you have multiple ways to get it covered. Your health insurance probably has some coverage, and your employer (in the US) likely has an EAP program which will have coverage for therapy for at least a few sessions (typically 3-12) sessions. It’s worth looking into that before paying out of pocket.
I have lifelong major depression, and got myself integrated into the mental health system of San Francisco (one of the better municipal systems available in the States). Since my insurance was government or state, it typically meant that I’d see interns for a year before they graduated and started their own practice. A friend of mine and I would joke that we were trainers in that our life drama was severe enough to convey to our trainees that life shit is real and that sometimes there are real risks (suicide, stalkers, toxic violent parents, etc.) but we personally were not likely to become a danger to ourselves or others short of natural disasters.
I also got to crush egos because it’s not like the movies where the patient has a good cry and then is better. I’ve done a lot of crying and I’m still depressed as ever (more so as the world is literally burning, which limits my hope for a better future). I can manage my symptoms more or less, but I’m never going to be a happy self-sustaining good little citizen. And curiously, some of them see that as an end goal: You get Will Hunting to have a good cry and he’s fixed. Not so much.
I eventually got lucky, and was able to find one of my old interns and resume with her while she was working on her PHD. I was a case in her thesis and got an ASD diagnosis out of it in my late forties (it’s not helpful yet for navigating benefits, but is useful regarding directing my own symptom management). But most of my career as a patient is spending more than half a year getting my therapist familiar with my case and then the remaining months squeezing a bit of process out of it…
…Or just goofing off, since I absolutely have personal demons that don’t want to be closely scrutinized, so it becomes too tempting to let my therapist get distracted by details that are entertaining to them. (My history in the BDSM and my burgeoning queerness are fun topics, as are my awareness of issues like the climate crisis, the plastic crisis, the police state, the surveillance state, the transnational white power movement and its uprising and takeover – all of which were still commonly regarded as conspiracy theories / fringe hypotheses when I was in session.) Sometimes, we patients are so terrified of what our closeted shit says about us that we’re not ready to open those doors. And sometimes the therapist doesn’t want to look either, so we negotiate a diversion we can agree to distract us until later.
I stopped going to therapy shortly before the COVID-19 epidemic outbreak and lockdown so I get to start all over again in Sacramento. Hopefully, I’ll find a permanent therapist (and a good match) early, but I suspect I’ll be back to seeing interns again.
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However the Texas state Senate decided that arguing about where someone should be allowed to pee was more important than licensure for neurodiagnostics.
The avarege conservative’s monkey brain won’t vote for something that makes actual sense. They’ll only vote for some ideological religios bs no one else cares about.
Taking an ambulance to the ER does not ensure that you will be seen faster. A decent chunk of ambulance patients go right out to the lobby to wait like everyone else because everyone is triaged based on their illness or injury, not their mode of transportation.
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I mean I’ve gone to countless common cold and knee-pain gigs during my time as a responder. It’s insane from what people call help for and what they think ambulances do. One guy attacked us when we couldn’t cure his flu on the spot
17 years ago on a Saturday night, just before bedtime, my 4yo son was being a dufus and managed to break his collarbone. Before we knew it was broken (but knew something was obviously wrong) I took him to the emergency room. We were stuck waiting about 6 hours to be seen. The nurse that triaged us was extremely apologetic and literally stated “I’m so sorry you’ve had to wait so long, we’re stuck having to see the drunken scraped knees first just because they came in an ambulance.”
I’m assuming that if my son were bleeding out he would be seen faster, but I’ve assumed that in non-life threatening situations that ambulances receive priority.
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United States, medium sized hospital in the Chicago suburbs.
Where was this
Illinois, one of the Chicago suburbs.
Because I’ve literally been told that by hospital staff (in Germany). This may vary by country.
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Well see ambulance is faster than walking so you advance in the line faster. Makes sense
Wishful thinking? Entitlement? Main character syndrome? Some kind of nonsense.
Isn’t this just an expected correlation? Most people who take an ambulance to the E.R. will be seen quicker because most people who are in an ambulance have an emergency so they have a a reason to be seen quicker.
There are a lot of people who call ambulances for inane, non-emergency bullshit. I’ve seen people come in by ambulance for minor complaints that have been ongoing for months or even years.
Definitely not true.
It’s still strikes me as weird seeing billboards with live ER wait times advertised. It seems counterintuitive. And ER is for emergencies. If it’s an emergency it doesn’t matter what the wait time is. It’s not like you’re picking and choosing. But clearly people do. And then hospitals advertise their live ER wait times on a billboard, they want people to come to the emergency room now? I just don’t understand it
A broken arm sucks ass but an extra half an hour drive to get seen 2 hours sooner seems like a good trade.
I’ve worked in ERs where on a really busy night patients with chest pain and a cardiac history that came in by ambulance went out to the lobby because their EKG was mostly okay and literally the only room open was the resuscitation bay. We kept checking on him in the lobby and did repeat EKGs until a room was available, but if there’s not space and they’re not dying, they’ll just have to wait.
I don’t understand it either. I think it’s usually the corporate owned and run ERs that have those billboards and the community hospital ERs just triage people as they come and offer no guarantees about wait times.
Dad was a lab tech at a hospital that gad the wait time. The only people who cared where upper management since it is a good advertisements
In a true emergency, there is no wait time.
I have several medical family members. Yup thats right. Mister snow globe in the butt will have to have
This is fact. And to add to this, its actually better and you will be seen quicker if you drive/have someone drive you to the hospital if you are gunshot or have a major stab wound. The chances of survival are much better then waiting for an ambulance. And if you are in that situation, speed as fast as you safely can. IF you get pulled over make sure the cop knows the situation so they can escort you to the hospital.
This is VERY country specific. In some countries ambulances focus on fast transport with minimal care in the ambulance (IIRC this is the case in the US), elsewhere they can provide significant first aid while on the way. If it takes you 15 minutes to the hospital and the ambulance needs 10 to get to you and 10 to the hospital, you’ll be at the hospital 5 minutes later but will receive care 5 minutes sooner.
In Germany the ambulance will have what I think would be equivalent to one EMT-B and one paramedic, but a emergency physician may be brought to the scene with a separate car.
American ambulances are usually an EMT and a Paramedic that can start some pretty advanced care en route. Paramedics can intubate, defibrillate, and give medications on their own authority or with clearance from the EMS medical director.
Eh, for some significant trauma, the ambulance is better because they know which hospitals are equipped for the emergency in question and which hospitals have resuscitation or trauma bays open. They call ahead too which also allows for the ER staff to prepare and have people standing by to receive you.
(I worked at a #1 trauma center for 16 years)
I was just stating what is the “public secret” and there is a lot of studies to back it
https://hub.jhu.edu/2017/09/20/emergency-transport-survival-rates-study-hopkins/
I could provide more links but those are the first couple from sites that I would trust
I have also worked at a Level 1 Trauma hospital, and I think it depends on the distance from the hospital and the degree of specialty care needed. Also, since Covid, there have been more and more staffing and capacity problems in ERs. Taking a critical patient to an ER with no available resus bays that is also boarding ICU patients due to a lack of ICU staffing is going to be less effective and less safe than going the extra distance to a hospital that does have the capacity to care for the patient. Studies from before 2020 are just not relevant anymore.
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I used to work as a contractor for an environmental remediation firm. All the waterways that you joke about not swimming in are actually full of some awful carcinogen. Old industrial plants dumped awful chemicals for years and years. Some of these issues are being slowly addressed, but regulation is always well behind the science. But often, if the liability is significant enough, companies will spend millions of dollars a year to kick the can down the road doing studies and monitoring so that they can avoid what would be hundreds of millions to actually remediate the problem.
