Mastodon needs to be more user-friendly, or people will just continue going to the platforms supported by billionaires, despite evidence from Twitter and Facebook that those platforms aren’t great.
I want to like Mastodon, but it seems like work.
Donald G. McNeil Jr. cites many reasons why US pandemic response was disgracefully incompetent, and why it’s wrong to pin all the blame on Fauci, or make a saint out of him either.
Fauci is a courageous scientist and was a dutiful civil servant doing the best he could with little actual authority, trying to mitigate an ongoing disaster.
He was also the only powerful medical official with the stones to contradict Trump.
New York Times Magazine Interview With Dr. Fauci: Science Fiction
5G Not Enough? Telecom Companies Look to 5.5G (WSJ) This time it’ll succeed, because it goes to 11.
What Is Pleroma?. Like Mastodon, but different.
Gadgets I am tempted by:
This Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. I like the way it separates in two parts, with a trackball in the center. But it’s not worth $385 to me, so I’ll pass.
Also, this 4K 15.6-inch portable monitor would tempt me if I was still living the frequent business travel life.
And I’m STILL tempted, because I’ve been using laptop+external display for my desktop setup for most of the past 25+ years. But I never actually use the laptop display because it’s so much smaller than whatever external display I’m using. maybe a laptop + a smaller display, side-by-side.
But I’m not spending that money today.
Interesting: “Work is starting on a protocol bridge between ActivityPub and the AT protocol (the protocol that Bluesky uses).”. So BlueSky users would be able to connect with folks on Mastodon and other Fediverse services, and vice-versa?
Cory Doctorow:
The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends.
…
Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people – seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices [take] that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours' worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It’s just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.
…
This is absolute catnip for private equity – free government money, no obligations, no enforcement, and the people you harm are literally dying and can’t complain. What’s not to like?
One technique favored by corrupt hospices: Give the patients unlimited access to opioids, and when the cash fountain from the government runs dry, let the patients die of overdose. No autopsy when the victim dies in hospice care. Everybody wins!
This immature osprey was standing on the footpath at Lake Murray for a long time this morning; passers-by said he’d been there for hours. There’s an osprey nest on a utility pole high above the footpath. Probably the immature osprey fell out and could not fly up. Another osprey was standing just outside the nest, high above, watching. In the video, you can hear the immature bird call out plaintively.
I’ve been putting energy into Mastodon, but Bluesky looks interesting and may just lap Masto. I’ve been dismissive of Bluesky until now, but I just signed up for the private beta.
I keep wanting to read Nostr as “Nostril.”
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick looks at options post-twitter. Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options
35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now (The New York Times)
Why Your Family Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island (and One That Was). (The New York Public Library)
Dropbox is laying off 500 people and pivoting to AI (The Verge). Dropbox is done. Steve Jobs was right. It’s a feature, not a company.
Today I learned that Oxiclean does an amazing job cleaning years of coffee crust from the inside of my Hario insulated metal coffee server. It’s like new. Sadly, my coffee loses some flavor served from a clean container.
Ron DeSantis’s Disney Miscalculation: ‘Disney Is Playing the Long Game’. Even Florida Republicans are questioning DeSantis’s strategy. (WSJ)