You should have a look at these guys, who bolted a single-photon microscope to a mouse spinal cord, in order to watch calcium transients in the awake, behaving animals. Mouse is small enough that they can image the full depth of the cord.
Everything you're talking about is focused on the electrical state of the cells, which is a tiny but easily measured part of their computational state. Even synaptic communication involves a mixture of neurotransmitters with other small molecule messengers and proteins that don't affect synaptic potential directly. Nevermind the more general diffusible factors. A neuron model that replicates only the electrical behavior of a neuron is going to miss most of the learning capacity.
I have about a dozen empty cottage cheese containers next to my front door each with a lettuce plant. This is enough to keep me in lettuce all summer and I spent literally zero dollars on the system and maybe five minutes combined over the last three months.
Sounds like you live in an area with plenty of natural rain. Some of us would have to pour water on those containers at least every other day. It may only be a couple of minutes, but it adds up over a couple of months, and you have to remember.
Political campaigns do not query the Do Not Call list. Since campaigns are not covered by the Do Not Call law, why would they?
Because the Do Not Call list is a large database of valid phone numbers connected to people willing to take personal action in support of their beliefs. These are exactly the people most politicians want to connect with.
However, for me, my cable is nearly always bundled with internet in a fashion that makes it nearly or as expensive to just have cable.
I have the exact opposite experience: I buy internet, and Comcast throws in cable for something between zero and negative $10/month. If the only thing I used my internet for was netflix, it would add $1/hour. If I use my internet like Nielsen claims people watch TV, it costs $0.35/hour.
Hell the biggest reason I have cable at all is for sports.
I suspect that sports explains the majority of the cable-netflix differences, both in the number of hours watched and the premium paid for those hours. Sport have an inherent immediacy: they're very valuable in real time, but hardly worth anything even an hour or two late. Movies, TV series...as long as you watch them within a day or two of your friends, it doesn't really matter.
The same argument is often made about lawyers, programmers, and a number of other jobs that pay a lot.
You can't really lump six-figure programmers and lawyers in with eight-figure CEOs. There are plenty of CEOs in the six-figure range, but those aren't the salaries that raise eyebrows or questions.
The thing is though, people ultimately get paid what somebody else thinks they're worth, usually in order to retain them as employees to prevent them from going elsewhere.
The argument from the executive suite has always been that an eight figure CEO earns his compensation in ways that are hard to quantify. This makes the salary itself a badge of competency. How do you know someone is a great CEO? They earn $10M/year. Anecdotes aside, this study suggests that high salary alone is not actually well correlated with performance. If you can find a similar study, that shows the highest paid lawyers lose more cases than those paid less; or that all of those $10M/year programmers produce worse, slower code than their $100k/year counterparts...
(now, presumably, it is only the largest companies that can afford an eight figure CEO, and so maybe their growth or performance is structurally limited)
Communism seems like a good idea in theory. However human instinct comes into play.
Same can be said of literally every governmental or economic structure. They're all based on everyone adhering to some idealized psychology that always has exceptions. Capitalism is based on the ideas that people will act rationally, in their own self-interest. This is great for selfish bastards, and selfish bastards tend to rise to the top in that system. Look at Washington and Wall Street, and tell me whether you think it's a good plan to put selfish bastards in charge.
You assume a modest lifestyle. Knowing he had such a bankroll and spending $1M more a year than his income would explain turning $150M into $100M over 50 years. You can not demonstrate business failure by accumulated wealth.
I don't care if his results are due to irresponsible business decisions or an extravagant, indulgent lifestyle. Neither of those are traits I want in a politician with the keys to my tax dollars.
You keep making this argument that he might be the great businessman he claims to be (except no one can ever know, because you need all kind of financial reports that he's not legally required to release), but that he's just really irresponsible in his personal life. You're not helping.
Snowden's data dump has been released piecemeal because Snowden and whats his name the journalist (Glen Greenwald?) knew that if all of it was released at once it would cause worldwide upheaval and the fall of multiple governments.
Snowden's data were released piecemeal because the public has a short attention span. If you tell them a shocking story today, there will be great outrage, it will be talked about on the Sunday talk shows, and then people move on to next week's outrage. To effect actual change, you need a drumbeat of outrage that burns for months without being so predictable to induce fatigue. The extended trickle has the side benefit of providing the reporters with a consistent stream of page views and repeat visitors.
What has changed since Snowden released the data he had? Pretty much nothing (in the US.)
Well, the PATRIOT act bulk metadata collection program ended. Of course, NSA has said it was ending anyway, and they didn't really need it, having already taken up a different strategy under different authority to get mostly the same information. Oh, and there's a 'public privacy advocate' supposed to argue against the NSA when they go before the FISC - a sort of public defender in the otherwise one-sided, kangaroo court.
An empty ballot is not an effective message. The least interested people will see "Winner took 51% of electoral college." Slightly more interest is required to get people to pay attention to "Winner took 51% of the popular vote." And we've all learned that electoral college is such that the winner can have a minority of the popular vote. Much more attention is required to get to the percentage of "undervotes." An actual vote for a 3rd party takes voting percentage away from the major candidates. "Winning" with 40% of the popular vote would be a pretty serious message.
Maybe if they see that they can't force you to supply a password, they won't "keep in you jail for a while." Please help refine this by pointing out shortcomings of this scheme.
You overestimate the stupidity of law enforcement. No one will believe you have data that you can not access or can not get access to.
You underestimate the patience of law enforcement. If they get to the point where they feel the need to compel you to divulge your encryption key, they'll get a court order. The current record for detention for refusing to comply with a court order is 14 years. Most people don't hold out that long. They start getting worried that their boss will fire them, or at least stop paying them, after a month or two. If you legitimately can't decrypt the data they want, then the court order is as good as a life sentence ("Life" sentences average about 8 years served).
In the UK they can detain you for hours on a whim.
Hours, you say... Whole hours and more than one of them? What a terrible inconvenience: that would probably go right through tea.
The US, outside of border crossings, can generally detain people for 2 days without specifying charges, although any detention without charges carries risk of civil retribution. If you decline to provide encryption keys, you may be held for months Not proven for years, yet, but 'contempt of court' is generally used to lock people up until they do what the judge asks (current record is 14 years). I see no reason why they wouldn't hold border-crossers, already subject to substantial rights exceptions, in just the same way. Contempt of court requires a judge's order, so ICE would have to go to a judge (presumably FISA) and explain why decrypting that specific device is an interest of justice/security, but I don't think anyone believes that would be very difficult.
Constitutional rights belong to citizens, not the turf. If the person is a US citizen, the US government is required to respect his rights whether he's on US soil or not.
At least for the bill of rights, constitutional rights belong to "the people" or anyone who happens to be interacting with the state or the courts. You don't have to be a citizen to earn your rights, you get them just for being human.
The bill of rights limits the government's power to exercise its authority over humans. There's some exception when the state interacts with foreigners on foreign soil, mostly because the government doesn't technically have any authority or jurisdiction in that space. eg, "extraordinary rendition" is basically kidnapping and CIA operatives have prosecuted for it.
That's not what he's saying. You must have a phone for business. Fine. We all get that. It doesn't have to be your phone. Even if your employer offers you perks in exchange for using a device you own. you always have the choice to buy and carry a second, personal phone for personal use, for things you don't want subject to corporate search, or for things you don't want to carry through border crossings.
We expect this behavior of our public officials: of course they conduct business using only 'official' devices, accounts, and servers, and of course they never use those devices for campaigning or personal business. Sure it's inconvenient, maybe even expensive, to carry two or three phones, but if your life spans multiple privacy domains, maybe that expense is justified.
Public support for nationalizing airport security in 2001 was based on the claim that private airport 'rent-a-cops' were inherently underpaid, under-trained, and effectively responsible to no one. Nationalizing airport security was based on the notion that making those people Federal Officers at higher salaries would attract higher quality workers, subject them to rigorous and closely supervised training programs, and make their leadership directly answerable to national security leadership.
Turns out that the government hasn't made them "officers," in the sense of secret service or FBI, doesn't actually pay them any better, and is really struggling to train them faster than they quit. They do seem to have better documentation of their failures, so I guess that's a win of sorts. The "small government" party, who controlled the presidency, senate, and house at the time, forgot that they don't believe in nationalizing private industries, and now they have a fine demonstration of why.
What are the odds such different technologies would cost exactly the same to the consumer?
The price is not a function of costs, as you mistakenly believe, but of the balance between supply and demand.
Price is a function of supply and demand, so if you artificially restrict the supply, then you can raise price arbitrarily high without affecting the cost. This is how you profit. In an actual, free market, a large difference between market price and cost of service should attract new businesses until the market price is close to the cost of service. This is known as an efficient market. The US telecom market is horribly inefficient, as witnessed by cable providers gross profit margin of 97%.
To be fair, the tax code is a complex document with some 4000 pages of specific and detailed rules. By comparison, the human body is a construction of some 40 trillion cells, the functions and rules for which science is still trying to work out.
My doctor types in what I am there fore, print outs the prescriptions (so they are readable) and papers for the insurance. If he would have a scribe, I would ask that scribe to leave.
If you imagine that your records are only seen by people who are in the room at the time the diagnosis is presented to you, then either you have a very small, backwards and inefficient doctor, or you're very naive. The part of his office that collects payments from the insurance company and matches them with payments will see your name, diagnosis, and treatments. The part of the insurance company that receives your paperwork will see your name, diagnosis, and treatments. If you're happy to pay your doctor $150/hour to fill out insurance forms for you, good on you, I guess. I'd rather pay the $150/hr doc for medical care and let a $20/hr transcriptionist do the paperwork.
So, the US spends 18% of its GDP on healthcare, but that only covers part of the population. Meanwhile those countries who only spend 6-9% of GDP on healthcare manage to cover everyone. So, that 18-6 cost disparity is actually understated
This is your argument that quality of care in the US is actually the best in the world?
I'm not really sure I care that a US millionaire can get outstanding care, if he can only do so at the cost of forcing the rest of the country to get 3rd-world quality care. I'm sure appropriately rich people in those other countries also get better than local average care. It's ridiculous to compare the quality of care available to the few Americans who can afford it to the quality of care available to an average 'socialized' medicine citizen.
I didn't ask for it, I want the gov't the H out of the healthcare inner workings. I'm just fine with written paper records, and see no advantage to having them in a computer - just lots of disadvantages including malware such as ransomware as well as data entry errors, which had me supposedly taking a drug I've never heard the name of before, as well as the wrong dosage of a drug that I am taking.
Believe it or not, de facto standardization of medical records to meet government/medicare rules is a big benefit to healthcare providers. For a while, every insurance company had different forms that had to be filled out, often by the patient, in order to get reimbursed. Better doctors/hospitals employed people whose only job was to learn the differences between Blue Cross and Cigna forms and language and to either fill out or help their patients fill out those forms. Spend your 15 minutes in the exam room, then go spend 30 minutes with the billing specialist.
You might think there would be some natural pressure to open standards in diagnostic descriptions. You would be forgetting that insurance companies have a vested interest in not paying claims. If they can get you to fill out the form wrong, or to claim treatment for a diagnosis that isn't covered, then they're perfectly justified in denying. If you don't like it, you can go somewhere else - that's also in the company interest, as only ~5% of their customers actually file claims. Fewer claims, more profit.
This 1 minute talk, it takes that long to login..if the system is polite, then to open the chart, then to find the actual note, then to load the CT scan...
There are multiple hard studies that show 33% reduction in efficiency that cannot be recouped.
The software is not written for the docs. The software is written for the administrators. It makes sure all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed so that insurance and medicare make timely payments (or at least lack valid excuses for delaying payment).
Docs used to 1) make hand-written notes during an exam 2) quickly dictate a more elaborate summary of the exam/consult by phone or tape 3) let a transcriptionist convert those notes to a permanent record. (maybe 0: have patient history handed to them by PA) Nobody trusted a doc to know how to type or to waste his time figuring out how to fill in some insurance company form. Put those forms in a web-interface, though, and all of a sudden it's something the doc can do. Fire the transcriptionist: doc is making his own records now. Even better, if the doc himself checks a box, the hospital can use it as certification that specific observation was made and that specific treatment or care was delivered. Legal proof that either the individual doc committed fraud or that the insurance company owes them $X.
You'd think that there would be a market for software written to make the docs' jobs easier - to automate the back-end of the old process, leaving the responsibility for converting doctors' verbal notes into insurance company codes to back-office transcriptionists - but the big purchasing decisions are made by administrators is organizations that are too big for the admins to actively practice medicine. So, you end up with healthcare software written for accountants.
No doctor can review a medical file in one minute.
I watched my doctor do exactly this with a real folder filled with paper just two weeks ago.
No, you watched a doctor scan a folder filled with paper for specific pieces of information. He did this first by recognizing the sheets of paper in order to identify ones that might have a diagnosis or prescription, then looking for the specific lines where that diagnosis should be written. If you think he absorbed the history of your blood pressure, weight, or all of the test results that might be relevant to your current condition, you're deifying a person just because his job is complicated.
Medical charts are like syslogs. You can read through them, and with some practice get pretty good at recognizing 'important' messages, or messages that fit with your personal expectation of how systems fail, but it's much faster and more accurate to have grep do it. This was, in fact, one of the big reasons to digitize those records. Software will miss a lot less than a human doctor who's been awake for 20 hours and is seeing his 25th patient of the morning. Let software compile and prioritize past diagnoses and prescriptions. Let software build a graph of body weight, blood pressure, and blood glucose going back for years. Let software summarize all that data and present it in a compact summary that's easy to absorb and easy to drill into more detail on the bits that turn up.
That's generally not what they have. What they have is record-keeping software that satisfies the bureaucratic requirements of the insurance companies and medicare. Its purpose is less for diagnostics and care; more for billing. It's what you get when you let accountants practice medicine.
The vast majority of people don't care about commercials or ads. Only 15-20% of users even bother to run adblockers, and that's under pressure of both advertising and security. Ads are just another routine thing - chance to get another beer; chance to talk about the last scene; discontinuity to wake yourself up for a moment.
The people who do care tend to be very passionate. They tend to be a bit more technically savvy and willing to use that technology to bypass ads. Early and passionate adopters of Netflix. Some people even saw Netflix streaming as a political message to, please, please, please let us pay for us legal ways to conveniently access content. They're a niche market and only going to get niche content, because there are teeming hordes of people willing to watch a few minutes of commercials, a network watermark, and even a scrolling ticker to save a couple of bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
You should have a look at these guys, who bolted a single-photon microscope to a mouse spinal cord, in order to watch calcium transients in the awake, behaving animals. Mouse is small enough that they can image the full depth of the cord.
Everything you're talking about is focused on the electrical state of the cells, which is a tiny but easily measured part of their computational state. Even synaptic communication involves a mixture of neurotransmitters with other small molecule messengers and proteins that don't affect synaptic potential directly. Nevermind the more general diffusible factors. A neuron model that replicates only the electrical behavior of a neuron is going to miss most of the learning capacity.
I have about a dozen empty cottage cheese containers next to my front door each with a lettuce plant. This is enough to keep me in lettuce all summer and I spent literally zero dollars on the system and maybe five minutes combined over the last three months.
Sounds like you live in an area with plenty of natural rain. Some of us would have to pour water on those containers at least every other day. It may only be a couple of minutes, but it adds up over a couple of months, and you have to remember.
Political campaigns do not query the Do Not Call list. Since campaigns are not covered by the Do Not Call law, why would they?
Because the Do Not Call list is a large database of valid phone numbers connected to people willing to take personal action in support of their beliefs. These are exactly the people most politicians want to connect with.
However, for me, my cable is nearly always bundled with internet in a fashion that makes it nearly or as expensive to just have cable.
I have the exact opposite experience: I buy internet, and Comcast throws in cable for something between zero and negative $10/month. If the only thing I used my internet for was netflix, it would add $1/hour. If I use my internet like Nielsen claims people watch TV, it costs $0.35/hour.
Hell the biggest reason I have cable at all is for sports.
I suspect that sports explains the majority of the cable-netflix differences, both in the number of hours watched and the premium paid for those hours. Sport have an inherent immediacy: they're very valuable in real time, but hardly worth anything even an hour or two late. Movies, TV series...as long as you watch them within a day or two of your friends, it doesn't really matter.
You can't BUY knowledge...
This is not true: the Encyclopedia Britannica is only $29.95, and if that's not buying knowledge, I don't know what is.
If Money can buy Knowledge, how is it that Trump/Drumpf is so ignorant???
No one has packaged a gold-plated, diamond crusted encyclopedia yet. <--Free business plan! I require no royalties for use of this idea.
The same argument is often made about lawyers, programmers, and a number of other jobs that pay a lot.
You can't really lump six-figure programmers and lawyers in with eight-figure CEOs. There are plenty of CEOs in the six-figure range, but those aren't the salaries that raise eyebrows or questions.
The thing is though, people ultimately get paid what somebody else thinks they're worth, usually in order to retain them as employees to prevent them from going elsewhere.
The argument from the executive suite has always been that an eight figure CEO earns his compensation in ways that are hard to quantify. This makes the salary itself a badge of competency. How do you know someone is a great CEO? They earn $10M/year. Anecdotes aside, this study suggests that high salary alone is not actually well correlated with performance. If you can find a similar study, that shows the highest paid lawyers lose more cases than those paid less; or that all of those $10M/year programmers produce worse, slower code than their $100k/year counterparts...
(now, presumably, it is only the largest companies that can afford an eight figure CEO, and so maybe their growth or performance is structurally limited)
Communism seems like a good idea in theory. However human instinct comes into play.
Same can be said of literally every governmental or economic structure. They're all based on everyone adhering to some idealized psychology that always has exceptions. Capitalism is based on the ideas that people will act rationally, in their own self-interest. This is great for selfish bastards, and selfish bastards tend to rise to the top in that system. Look at Washington and Wall Street, and tell me whether you think it's a good plan to put selfish bastards in charge.
You assume a modest lifestyle. Knowing he had such a bankroll and spending $1M more a year than his income would explain turning $150M into $100M over 50 years. You can not demonstrate business failure by accumulated wealth.
I don't care if his results are due to irresponsible business decisions or an extravagant, indulgent lifestyle. Neither of those are traits I want in a politician with the keys to my tax dollars.
You keep making this argument that he might be the great businessman he claims to be (except no one can ever know, because you need all kind of financial reports that he's not legally required to release), but that he's just really irresponsible in his personal life. You're not helping.
Snowden's data dump has been released piecemeal because Snowden and whats his name the journalist (Glen Greenwald?) knew that if all of it was released at once it would cause worldwide upheaval and the fall of multiple governments.
Snowden's data were released piecemeal because the public has a short attention span. If you tell them a shocking story today, there will be great outrage, it will be talked about on the Sunday talk shows, and then people move on to next week's outrage. To effect actual change, you need a drumbeat of outrage that burns for months without being so predictable to induce fatigue. The extended trickle has the side benefit of providing the reporters with a consistent stream of page views and repeat visitors.
What has changed since Snowden released the data he had? Pretty much nothing (in the US.)
Well, the PATRIOT act bulk metadata collection program ended. Of course, NSA has said it was ending anyway, and they didn't really need it, having already taken up a different strategy under different authority to get mostly the same information. Oh, and there's a 'public privacy advocate' supposed to argue against the NSA when they go before the FISC - a sort of public defender in the otherwise one-sided, kangaroo court.
An empty ballot is not an effective message. The least interested people will see "Winner took 51% of electoral college." Slightly more interest is required to get people to pay attention to "Winner took 51% of the popular vote." And we've all learned that electoral college is such that the winner can have a minority of the popular vote. Much more attention is required to get to the percentage of "undervotes." An actual vote for a 3rd party takes voting percentage away from the major candidates. "Winning" with 40% of the popular vote would be a pretty serious message.
Maybe if they see that they can't force you to supply a password, they won't "keep in you jail for a while."
Please help refine this by pointing out shortcomings of this scheme.
You overestimate the stupidity of law enforcement. No one will believe you have data that you can not access or can not get access to.
You underestimate the patience of law enforcement. If they get to the point where they feel the need to compel you to divulge your encryption key, they'll get a court order. The current record for detention for refusing to comply with a court order is 14 years. Most people don't hold out that long. They start getting worried that their boss will fire them, or at least stop paying them, after a month or two. If you legitimately can't decrypt the data they want, then the court order is as good as a life sentence ("Life" sentences average about 8 years served).
In the UK they can detain you for hours on a whim.
Hours, you say... Whole hours and more than one of them? What a terrible inconvenience: that would probably go right through tea.
The US, outside of border crossings, can generally detain people for 2 days without specifying charges, although any detention without charges carries risk of civil retribution. If you decline to provide encryption keys, you may be held for months Not proven for years, yet, but 'contempt of court' is generally used to lock people up until they do what the judge asks (current record is 14 years). I see no reason why they wouldn't hold border-crossers, already subject to substantial rights exceptions, in just the same way. Contempt of court requires a judge's order, so ICE would have to go to a judge (presumably FISA) and explain why decrypting that specific device is an interest of justice/security, but I don't think anyone believes that would be very difficult.
Constitutional rights belong to citizens, not the turf. If the person is a US citizen, the US government is required to respect his rights whether he's on US soil or not.
At least for the bill of rights, constitutional rights belong to "the people" or anyone who happens to be interacting with the state or the courts. You don't have to be a citizen to earn your rights, you get them just for being human.
The bill of rights limits the government's power to exercise its authority over humans. There's some exception when the state interacts with foreigners on foreign soil, mostly because the government doesn't technically have any authority or jurisdiction in that space. eg, "extraordinary rendition" is basically kidnapping and CIA operatives have prosecuted for it.
You post on slashdot and you don't know the difference between having a private email account and having a private email server?
Pretty sure he knows.
Are you posting on slashdot that you think a hotmail or yahoo account is more secure than hosting your own server?
That's not what he's saying. You must have a phone for business. Fine. We all get that. It doesn't have to be your phone. Even if your employer offers you perks in exchange for using a device you own. you always have the choice to buy and carry a second, personal phone for personal use, for things you don't want subject to corporate search, or for things you don't want to carry through border crossings.
We expect this behavior of our public officials: of course they conduct business using only 'official' devices, accounts, and servers, and of course they never use those devices for campaigning or personal business. Sure it's inconvenient, maybe even expensive, to carry two or three phones, but if your life spans multiple privacy domains, maybe that expense is justified.
Public support for nationalizing airport security in 2001 was based on the claim that private airport 'rent-a-cops' were inherently underpaid, under-trained, and effectively responsible to no one. Nationalizing airport security was based on the notion that making those people Federal Officers at higher salaries would attract higher quality workers, subject them to rigorous and closely supervised training programs, and make their leadership directly answerable to national security leadership.
Turns out that the government hasn't made them "officers," in the sense of secret service or FBI, doesn't actually pay them any better, and is really struggling to train them faster than they quit. They do seem to have better documentation of their failures, so I guess that's a win of sorts. The "small government" party, who controlled the presidency, senate, and house at the time, forgot that they don't believe in nationalizing private industries, and now they have a fine demonstration of why.
What are the odds such different technologies would cost exactly the same to the consumer?
The price is not a function of costs, as you mistakenly believe, but of the balance between supply and demand.
Price is a function of supply and demand, so if you artificially restrict the supply, then you can raise price arbitrarily high without affecting the cost. This is how you profit. In an actual, free market, a large difference between market price and cost of service should attract new businesses until the market price is close to the cost of service. This is known as an efficient market. The US telecom market is horribly inefficient, as witnessed by cable providers gross profit margin of 97%.
To be fair, the tax code is a complex document with some 4000 pages of specific and detailed rules. By comparison, the human body is a construction of some 40 trillion cells, the functions and rules for which science is still trying to work out.
Tax accountancy is not brain surgery.
My doctor types in what I am there fore, print outs the prescriptions (so they are readable) and papers for the insurance. If he would have a scribe, I would ask that scribe to leave.
If you imagine that your records are only seen by people who are in the room at the time the diagnosis is presented to you, then either you have a very small, backwards and inefficient doctor, or you're very naive. The part of his office that collects payments from the insurance company and matches them with payments will see your name, diagnosis, and treatments. The part of the insurance company that receives your paperwork will see your name, diagnosis, and treatments. If you're happy to pay your doctor $150/hour to fill out insurance forms for you, good on you, I guess. I'd rather pay the $150/hr doc for medical care and let a $20/hr transcriptionist do the paperwork.
So, the US spends 18% of its GDP on healthcare, but that only covers part of the population. Meanwhile those countries who only spend 6-9% of GDP on healthcare manage to cover everyone. So, that 18-6 cost disparity is actually understated
This is your argument that quality of care in the US is actually the best in the world?
I'm not really sure I care that a US millionaire can get outstanding care, if he can only do so at the cost of forcing the rest of the country to get 3rd-world quality care. I'm sure appropriately rich people in those other countries also get better than local average care. It's ridiculous to compare the quality of care available to the few Americans who can afford it to the quality of care available to an average 'socialized' medicine citizen.
I didn't ask for it, I want the gov't the H out of the healthcare inner workings. I'm just fine with written paper records, and see no advantage to having them in a computer - just lots of disadvantages including malware such as ransomware as well as data entry errors, which had me supposedly taking a drug I've never heard the name of before, as well as the wrong dosage of a drug that I am taking.
Believe it or not, de facto standardization of medical records to meet government/medicare rules is a big benefit to healthcare providers. For a while, every insurance company had different forms that had to be filled out, often by the patient, in order to get reimbursed. Better doctors/hospitals employed people whose only job was to learn the differences between Blue Cross and Cigna forms and language and to either fill out or help their patients fill out those forms. Spend your 15 minutes in the exam room, then go spend 30 minutes with the billing specialist.
You might think there would be some natural pressure to open standards in diagnostic descriptions. You would be forgetting that insurance companies have a vested interest in not paying claims. If they can get you to fill out the form wrong, or to claim treatment for a diagnosis that isn't covered, then they're perfectly justified in denying. If you don't like it, you can go somewhere else - that's also in the company interest, as only ~5% of their customers actually file claims. Fewer claims, more profit.
This 1 minute talk, it takes that long to login..if the system is polite, then to open the chart, then to find the actual note, then to load the CT scan... There are multiple hard studies that show 33% reduction in efficiency that cannot be recouped.
The software is not written for the docs. The software is written for the administrators. It makes sure all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed so that insurance and medicare make timely payments (or at least lack valid excuses for delaying payment).
Docs used to 1) make hand-written notes during an exam 2) quickly dictate a more elaborate summary of the exam/consult by phone or tape 3) let a transcriptionist convert those notes to a permanent record. (maybe 0: have patient history handed to them by PA) Nobody trusted a doc to know how to type or to waste his time figuring out how to fill in some insurance company form. Put those forms in a web-interface, though, and all of a sudden it's something the doc can do. Fire the transcriptionist: doc is making his own records now. Even better, if the doc himself checks a box, the hospital can use it as certification that specific observation was made and that specific treatment or care was delivered. Legal proof that either the individual doc committed fraud or that the insurance company owes them $X.
You'd think that there would be a market for software written to make the docs' jobs easier - to automate the back-end of the old process, leaving the responsibility for converting doctors' verbal notes into insurance company codes to back-office transcriptionists - but the big purchasing decisions are made by administrators is organizations that are too big for the admins to actively practice medicine. So, you end up with healthcare software written for accountants.
No doctor can review a medical file in one minute.
I watched my doctor do exactly this with a real folder filled with paper just two weeks ago.
No, you watched a doctor scan a folder filled with paper for specific pieces of information. He did this first by recognizing the sheets of paper in order to identify ones that might have a diagnosis or prescription, then looking for the specific lines where that diagnosis should be written. If you think he absorbed the history of your blood pressure, weight, or all of the test results that might be relevant to your current condition, you're deifying a person just because his job is complicated.
Medical charts are like syslogs. You can read through them, and with some practice get pretty good at recognizing 'important' messages, or messages that fit with your personal expectation of how systems fail, but it's much faster and more accurate to have grep do it. This was, in fact, one of the big reasons to digitize those records. Software will miss a lot less than a human doctor who's been awake for 20 hours and is seeing his 25th patient of the morning. Let software compile and prioritize past diagnoses and prescriptions. Let software build a graph of body weight, blood pressure, and blood glucose going back for years. Let software summarize all that data and present it in a compact summary that's easy to absorb and easy to drill into more detail on the bits that turn up.
That's generally not what they have. What they have is record-keeping software that satisfies the bureaucratic requirements of the insurance companies and medicare. Its purpose is less for diagnostics and care; more for billing. It's what you get when you let accountants practice medicine.
The vast majority of people don't care about commercials or ads. Only 15-20% of users even bother to run adblockers, and that's under pressure of both advertising and security. Ads are just another routine thing - chance to get another beer; chance to talk about the last scene; discontinuity to wake yourself up for a moment.
The people who do care tend to be very passionate. They tend to be a bit more technically savvy and willing to use that technology to bypass ads. Early and passionate adopters of Netflix. Some people even saw Netflix streaming as a political message to, please, please, please let us pay for us legal ways to conveniently access content. They're a niche market and only going to get niche content, because there are teeming hordes of people willing to watch a few minutes of commercials, a network watermark, and even a scrolling ticker to save a couple of bucks.