Lies and Wishes

You are so, so, loved. (icon by mropheus)

[leviathan-supersystem]

weird that this is happening all across the usa at the same time. oh well. probably doesn't mean anything.

[expressions-of-nature]

Squamish-Lillooet, Canada by Paul

[landsccape]

[withdreamsofhereafter]

Snow Gums photographed in Tasmania by Geoff Murray

[pervocracy]

How to hack any hospital computer

-Use the password taped to the monitor

How to hack any hospital computer (L337 version for advanced security systems)

-Use the password taped to the back of the monitor

[dysgraphicprogrammer]

As a computer guy: This is what happens when you have too much security. It reaches a tipping point and then suddenly you have none. Security at the cost of convenience comes at the cost of security.  

[pervocracy]

This is true of so many things in healthcare.  Example: our software is designed to automatically alert the doctor if a patient’s vital signs are critically out of range.  If someone has a blood pressure of 200/130, the doc gets a pop-up box that they have to acknowledge before doing anything else.  It makes sense, in our setting.

But then some mega-genius upstairs realized something: the system was only alerting for critical vital signs, but not for all vital signs that could possibly be bad.  Like, yeah, 200/130 is potentially life-threatening, but 130/90 is above ideal and can have negative effects on health.  Should the doctors be allowed to just ignore something that could negatively affect a patient’s health?  Heavens no!

So now the system generates a pop-up for any vital signs that are even slightly abnormal.  A pressure of 120/80 (once considered textbook normal, now considered slightly high) will create the pop-up.  We have increased our vigilance!

Well, no, what we’ve actually done is train doctors to click through a constant bombardment of pop-ups without looking.  We’ve destroyed their vigilance and made it much easier for them to accidentally skim past life-threatening vital signs.

But you can’t tell that to management, because you’d have to confess that you are a flawed human with limited attention resources.  They’d tell you “well, all the other doctors take every abnormal vital sign seriously, it sounds like you’re being negligent.”  And if you’re smart, you back down before you start telling the big boss all about your habit of ignoring critical safety alerts.

The end result is exactly the same as if we had no alerts at all, except with more annoying clicking.

[softlyfiercely]

this here is an absolutely fascinating overview of how and why this happens

[that-house]

I had to mentally send myself a reaction image the other day. I ran up the stairs on all fours, said to myself “i’m such a locationpilled scampercel” and then perfectly envisioned this image

[that-house]

please i've already hurt so much

[expressions-of-nature]

Iguazu Falls, Brazil by Jaime Dantas

[awlwren]

[id: photographs of a set of huge waterfalls from different angles, showing the amazing width and height of both tiers, and the calmer water between them.]/end id.

[africanaquarian]

I thought I needed a new laptop but nope, youtube is slowing down your PC if you have adblock on on any open tab...

[astraltrickster]

To be very clear about this: CPUs aren't magical devices that can operate forever. They generate heat. They wear out over time. This happens faster when they're operating near capacity. This is not just an attempt to inconvenience you; this is an attempt to damage your property.

For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.

Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.

Fuck Google, and I hope they get sued into oblivion over this.

[fernwah-funzone]

i see everyone in the notes talking about newpipe but nobody's talking about youtube alternatives for desktop

IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS

https://invidious.io/

it is a free, open-source alternative YouTube front-end. in addition to not having ads, it has other great QoL features like a download button. try one of the several instances on that link up there ^^^^

[saintjosie]

so i was super pissed and concerned about this but i have just discovered that while this is true, it is apparently only true for google chrome users. i just tested this by having ten tabs open in firefox playing ten different youtube videos at the same time and my cpu usage spiked to 25% as the videos were loading and then dropped back down to 10% as they played.

if you ever needed another reason to switch to a different browser, this is it.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

You can’t Abstain your way to a Better World.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

The Burger still gets made, even if you go Vegan. If you don’t buy it, it just winds up in the trash. If you want to do something meaningful about waste, you need legislation: It must become a crime to waste food in those ways.

If you care about Animal Cruelty in Factory Farms, you need to get legislation passed. It must become a crime to mistreat animals in those ways, and when malfeasances occurs, the onus of responsibility for those crimes must fall upon wealthy shoulders. That, also, requires legislation. It requires regulations, and regulators.

The largest source of Microplastics is wear and tear on automobile tires. It doesn’t matter what brand of shampoo you buy. It doesn’t matter which company you support with your dollar. The issue of Public Transit is too large-scale to be handled at anything less than the municipal level.

It’s not enough to just not participate in society

If you want the world to Change, you must leverage the mechanisms of political power.

You need Government.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

STOP PROPOSING INDIVIDUAL SOLUTIONS TO COLLECTIVE PROBLEMS

[the-consistent-anti]

[kyidyl]

It's like the goddamnes straws.

[bitcoitus]

Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.

[bitcoitus]

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being." — Robert Anton Wilson

[quasi-normalcy]

[vriskarlmarx]

the thing about latinoamérica is that it's the most beautiful wonderful place on earth. there's a spinal cord of mountains running through, and at their feet you have everything from deserts to forests to jungles to glaciers. the lungs of the world are here, and so are the eyes into the sky. there are animals like axolotls and vicuñas and llamas and condors and jaguars. and the people are the most clever, the most resilient people in the world. you have cultures that are thousands of years old that have been resisting colonization for hundreds of years and in several cases successfully fighting back and even gaining territory. you have people who have lost their loved ones decades and decades ago who are still fighting for justice. you have a rich history of solidarity and struggle and you can sit with people in a circle passing a mate around and they will tell you of all the times they put everything on the line for a better world. there is an entire island that inspired revolutions around the world and that has been resisting a blockade for 60 years. there are communities building autonomous, revolutionary structures right now. and really it's not a surprise that there's so much grit and strength here because it would be inconceivable to be born and to live in this beautiful place without fighting for it.

[headspace-hotel]

Here's an idea about why kids are so anxious and depressed all the time...the environments kids are in most of the time are very stressful and don't fulfill their needs for play, rest, proper variety of foods, positive social opportunities, and freedom from fear pain punishment etc

[headspace-hotel]

Like everyone with any basic understanding of animal welfare knows that if you put an animal in an enclosure that is too crowded, without hiding spots, with no freedom to move around, no ability to avoid harsh and stressful stimuli, and scare it by shouting at it and punishing it, the animal will become stressed and start chewing its own fur off or hurting itself or become sick or unable to eat...

But we expect human children to grow up in these conditions and literally blame them when they develop the exact type of problems that any creature under those conditions would

[baybelletrist]

Americans Are Cutting Down Flock Cameras. The Company Calls Them Terrorists.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Become ungovernable.

[a-book-of-creatures]

The author must have been eating woodland salad, candied acorns, turnip pie, plum-cakes, bilberry tarts, arrowroot shortbread, and glazed maple shoots, and drinking flagons of October ale and raspberry cordial when they wrote this

[frontierpsychoanalyst]

Solarpunk is real punk because a) it makes people angry and b) it's lame

[pagewoman]

 Fairy Glen, Isle of Skye, Inner Hebrides, Scotland