I definitely didn't feel respected during covid. There was a mask rule, standard for the time, fine. But then they give out drinks, okay. They were extremely strict, you must sip your drink and have your mask on again within less than a second. Long sips, unacceptable. Pause in your sip, unacceptable, there needs to then be two sips with an intermediate remasking. The air staff were quite 1930s Germany as far as the rigor of their enforcement of this rule. This has all the charm and beside manner of a driver laying on their horn 200ms after the red light turns green. Quite bizarre, the mask fetish, when most passengers were vaccinated and there's this huge vector of spreading the disease called touching things with pathogens on their surface aka fomites.

A lot of the laws are at first pass related to psych - "harm to self or others". That earns you a free non-voluntary trip to the hospital. The part where it gets nasty is when words get twisted, when ulterior motives exist, when the accuser possesses some authority - such that an "unsafe to self or others" argument is put forth. Situations where the person needs help, but perhaps won't seek it out on their own, thus the state must intervene. In this narrative, our police officers said, "harm to self, drugs in digestive tract, may rupture and cause death, not willing to seek medical care for fear of losing drug transport and/or prosecution, please treat so they don't rupture"

The victim of such a crime now has a choice - pay a bunch of money to the hospital to clear the bill, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to get the police to pony up responsibility. It's happened to me too along the lines of "the government made big mistake and caused problems for you, you can take ownership of the false accusations, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to have them wiped". Often in our society there's the suffering of being a victim, then the victim tax on top of that

Transcribing all spoken text and sending it home, sure, not feasible.

What if we have 256 keywords, or 65536 keywords, maybe preconfigured for particular products or product classes. Some basic linear predictive coding mechanism ( you know, what powered those '80s chips Stephen Hawking style, speak and spell, etc) - very very low computational overhead. When the word is triggered, queue a message back home at the next reasonable opportunity - user id, timestamp, word. It will only take a couple bytes. It can be slipped in anywhere and obfuscated by any means by nature of being so small, data-wise, even as a watermark of some sort. By using a timestamp and waiting until the next opportunity, maybe minutes, hours, or days away, no time correlation detection is possible either.

People say big tech is ethical, fine. Maybe some ad company is sponsoring some free app or game for the phone, and slipping this in there. Now the developer can pay their rent and food costs. Maybe the ad company is then selling that data back to big tech who washes their hands of any wrongdoing. Maybe it's all legal because the fine print of the EULA allows for this.

Seems to me though this can be figured out empirically, just have a voice play something like "need to buy adult diapers" or "new tires" etc next to a device, enumerate every device, look for ads on whatever very specific topic, minding along the way to tell nobody and never enter it in any internet-connected keyboard.

Some governments and regulators attempt to enumerate every possible conceivable bad thing and outlaw it. Problem is it's not enumerable, there will always be dozens of missed loopholes, which the regulations will steer people into. Parallels the warping and skewing of trying to fix an economy through proclamation versus distributed capitalism.

-Osama Bin Laden

An arms race is afoot

TLDR: The NCCN surely has a clean pretty database of these algorithms. They output these junky pdfs for free. Want cleaner "templates" data? Pay the toll please.

What we have here is a walled garden. Want the treatment algorithm? Here muck through this huge disaster of 999 page pdfs. Oh you want the underlying data? Well, well, it's going to cost you.

What we have here is not so much different than the paywalls of an academic journal. Some company running a core service to an altruistic industry and skimming a price. OP is just writing an algorithm to unskim it. And nobody can really use it without making the thing bulletproof lest a physician mistreat a cancer.

To my sentiment this is yet another unethical topic in healthcare. These clunky algorithms, if a physician uses them, slows the process and introduces a potential source of error, ultimately harming patients. Harming patients for increased revenue. The physicians writing and maintaining the guidelines look the other way given they get a paycheck off it, plus the prestige of it all, similar to some scenarios in medicine itself.

The natural thing to do is crack open the database and let algorithms utilize it. This whole thing of dumping data in an obstruse and machine-challenging format, then a rube goldberg machine to reverse the transformation, it's not right.

Anyway I mention this because there seems to be a thought of "these pdfs are messy lets clean them" without looking at what's really going on here.

It seems to me what's happening is a "Streisand Effect" where the whole attitude of "go away, nothing to see here" is in fact maximizing attention and defeating the purpose of hiding this away.

If it were me I'd put a band-aid on a drone, fly it to a person, and say, "we are testing military capabilities to render first aid to our soldiers" or something similar. It's not a lie, it's good optics, adversaries can worry about it... then put whatever it is on ice for a while until the heat dies down

You have hormone release factories such as the liver, the adrenals, and the sex organs such as ovaries and testisatchels

Then you have a feedback control loop, the manager of these factories, the pituitary. But we're not done yet! The hypothalamus in fact is another feedback loop controlling the pituitaries which controls the hormones. So in fact with things like transgender it is things like the hypothalamus-pituitary link that is interfered with to shut down endogenous sex hormone production

As such the hypothalamus seems a physiometabolic control center. This makes me think the mechanism is less to do with a direct pathway and perhaps is more indirect

There is a great counterexample that is Kaiser. They are a private health insurance org that provides massive savings by simultaneously also running a network of hospitals and outpatient facilities. Notably they are not-for-profit. So that's perhaps what we're shooting for "all the goodwill of government, without the mucuousy bureaucratic slop in any government institution"

If only all the private sector orgs were Kaiser, not for profit and for the well being of humanity. Kaisers of the world are a flash in the pan, "don't be evil" googles only to become "be evil" googles.

I would simply recommend to look at how Singapore does things and copy that, after all, that's what China did and look how well they have done economically.

On one extreme the jury carefully reviews the law as written and makes a judgement focused on the law. Whether they agree or disagree with the law itself is inconsequential, they must apply it.

On the other extreme (jury nullification) the jury might ignore the law and decide for themselves, then and there, what is right and what is wrong.

In many jurisdictions the jury is encouraged to adhere to the law as written, in some it is "illegal" for the jury to willfully ignore the law but there is no punishment for doing so. The concept of "Jury Nullification" is meant to be a checks & balances if some law exists that is insane or unreasonable or would be morally bankrupt to apply in a particular situation, extreme cases. So the pressure to not apply jury nullification in general is because if it were used in every case, not extreme cases, literally the jury then becomes the congress, the makers of law, and of course everything becomes kind of random and unfair depending on whatever jury you got.

I will also mention talk of managers getting PIPped, she reports that indeed her manager got PIPed by the director above.

I agree the ideal manager who is a good communicator with a genuinely incompetent employee ought to make a soft touch. If they're really bad, ideally let them know they can look for a job if they wish, offer a neutral recommendation, etc. Let them know a PIP might be coming etc since legal basis must be covered.

Problem with a poor manager, even with a soft touch, is maybe their expectations actually are bad (especially a pointy haired boss who doesn't have a conception of the labor needed). Maybe they have OCD and see all work as bad, in the same way someone might consider Scarlett Johansen extremely ugly because of that one single freckle ruining the whole thing. I've seen this too. That's all to say if a manager comes in with the sweetest gentlest informal approach and complains to Scarlett Johansen about how awful the freckle is, well, even the soft touch won't help much there.

I would imagine in most real world cases we can see both, and we can see mixes, where it's a so-so employee who might be great under a strong manager, but is weaker under a OCD manager who puts the magnifying glass on the weaknesses. And of course sometimes managers will put the magnifying glass on the weaknesses because they want to eliminate this employee for various external reasons.