#Knowledge of rights

[drchristophedelongsblog]

Baby boomers are likely to be more demanding medically than their elders.

Several factors converge towards this trend

Level of education and information

Baby boomers are generally more educated and informed than previous generations.

They have better access to medical information and are more likely to seek quality care.

They are more likely to ask questions, challenge diagnoses, and seek alternative treatment options.

High expectations for quality of life

Baby boomers grew up in a period of prosperity and have high expectations for quality of life.

They are less willing to accept age-related limitations and are more likely to seek solutions to maintain their autonomy and well-being.

They have a proactive approach to their health, they want to continue being active for as long as possible.

Familiarity with technology

Baby boomers are more comfortable with technology than previous generations.

They are more likely to use digital tools to monitor their health, search for medical information and communicate with healthcare professionals.

They are more likely to use telemedicine tools or medical monitoring applications.

Awareness of patients' rights

Baby boomers are more aware of their rights as patients.

They are more likely to hold healthcare professionals accountable and seek recourse if something goes wrong.

The financial aspect

Baby boomers often have better financial situations than their elders, which allows them to have access to more expensive care.

Potential consequences

This increased requirement could lead to an increase in demand for health services, which could put a strain on health systems.

It could also stimulate innovation in the healthcare sector, with the development of new technologies and new approaches to care.

In conclusion, it is likely that baby boomers will be more demanding in terms of medical care than their elders, which will have important implications for health systems.

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[eddiegayass]

[chloesimaginationthings]

Vanessa is about rich as hell in FNAF

[cedriiii]

that one dynamic meme

[egophiliac]

can't believe that skeleman has turned on us, and Halloween Prom is tomorrow.

(what a top-tier UM...we are about to be just totally obliterated in the absolute silliest way. what possible use could this power have outside of bringing us to the brink of utter holiday disaster.)

[hkthatgffan]

ALEX! YOU CAN'T JUST DROP MAJOR LOST GRAVITY FALLS MEDIA LORE ON ME LIKE THIS AND GET AWAY WITH IT?! 😭

Link to Alex's tweet...

He also asked fans to record their own version of the Stan lines here and also gave advice on how to do it, lmao

[noirecheris3]

wolverine and batman enders #truth

clean ver.

[otaku553]

I am going to be So Insufferable about this man in 2 days.

[just-a-little-kreature]

the most unbelievable things from TGR (in no particular order)

- Coach Rhemann secret husband

- Jean thought that Xavier had heart surgery because HE DIDN’T KNOW XAVIER WAS TRANS

- Jeremy apparently napped in a Museum Cafe??

- Other spots Jeremy has napped include: a locker room bench, outdoors on campus, Jean’s business class he was forced to sit through, in his car WHILE DRIVING (3-4 times??)(seriously though where HASN’T this guy napped???）

- Jean didn’t know about the Fourth of July

- JEAN DIDN’T KNOW HIS OWN BIRTHDAY????

- Neil almost got straight-up murdered during a game against Ravens FOR THE SECOND TIME

- ANDREW MINYARD QUIT SMOKING BECAUSE JEAN TOLD HIM THAT ‘NEXT TIME SOMEONE TAKES A SWING AT NEIL ANDREW AND HIS BRISKET LUNGS WOULD HAVE TO WATCH HIM DIE’

- Jean understands capitalism…in THEORY

- If you put together Jeremy, Laila and Cat’s favorite colors you get the bisexual flag

- Jean’s favorite color is brown…LIKE JEREMY’S FUCKING EYES

- Jabberwocky Moreau

[arabdoll]

It’s a privilege to study, many women around the world are barred from this human right: to read, write and learn. Be grateful anytime your pen touches paper, or you are learning theorems developed by intelligent, hardworking men and women from ages ago.

It’s a pleasure and a privilege to learn. Not only is it a privilege to study, but you should be aiming and striving to take science, medicine, law, philosophy, art further than the marker we have reached. It’s a comforting thought to think, from your work generations of humanity down the line will benefit.

How many brilliant women were in the shadows of amazing feats of science and technology and life changing patents? Contribute while you can. If you pour into knowledge - it will pour back into you.

[purplepri]

It's been running around my head the idea of Eddie and Wayne inheriting a house from like, a distant aunt or something, and then they move to a distant small town

It's nothing fancy, actually pretty much the opposite, what with it being abandoned for some time. The lawn is overgrown, the roof is falling, the plumbing is shit, but it's theirs and nobody can take it away from them.

They start working pronto, with Wayne assessing what they'd need to make it somewhat liveable until they could make it a true home. He sends Eddie on his way to the hardware store, where two bored employees were behind the counter.

Eddie nods at them, and grabs everything Wayne put on the list that he can find, then goes to the cashier to pay.

He smiles at the guy, who's looking at him a little wide eyed. Maybe he's never seen a metalhead before. He eyes the name tag pinned to his (very form fitting, very flattering) shirt.

"So, Steve. There's some stuff I couldn't find in store, where could I buy them?"

The guy clears his throat.

"Can I see what you're missing?" Eddie gives him the list, some of it crossed out. "Yeah, we can order it for you, but it may be a while until it's here ."

"Eh, I don't mind. My uncle and I just moved in, we're fixing up a great-great aunt's house, just down the street. I think it's okay for now, with what I have. I'll just order in and pay for what I already got."

Steve rings him up, throwing some discreet looks at him, then turning away and blushing lightly. Eddie finds him adorable.

"So, that house looks a lot run down, do you guys need a hand?" Steve says while giving Eddie his receipt. Eddie smiles.

"We certainly wouldn't mind a little help. Look, here's my number." He pulls Steve's hand closer to his, snatches a pen from the holder and scribbles down his number. "Bye, Stevie."

Eddie winks before walking to the door. He doesn't hear Steve answering a trembling bye, nor Robin's (his co-worker and best friend) slapping his shoulder.

"Steve."

"I know, Robin."

"Steve!"

"I know, Robin!"

"You're a disaster with any type of construction work!"

"I fucking know, Robin!"

She looks at him.

"You're a lost cause, doofus."

"... I know, Robin..."

[reality-detective]

“We’re all involved in spiritual warfare” RFK Jr

This generation’s failure to keep the children safe will be remembered well into the future. We have a chance now to redeem ourselves and do something to protect their mental and physical health.

Bobbie is right, we need to stop focusing on what divides us and “that’s only going to happen when we start loving our children more than we hate each other.”

I AM remaining hopeful 🙏 that "We The People" as a whole unified revolution will do the right thing 🤔

[m4g0hun]

lost child

[bluerosefox]

Uncle Damian Mode ACTIVATE

Twins Danny and Damian but! They both know where the other is (Damian going to Bruce and Danny being sent to the Fentons on a mission at a young age), has kept in touch and all that.

They just...never got around to telling anyone about the other.

That is until Danny comes interrupting Damian on patrol one night in a panic, pushes a bundle into his arms and hurriedly says "Read our texts! It'll explain! I gotta go, got a fruitloop on my tail! Be back when I can!"

And rushes off. When Damian looks down at the bundle in his arm, ignoring the yelling on comms and Nightwing rushing over, he is stunned to see a almost identical face to that of his brother staring back at him, only he can tell its female from the more delicate features.

When he later reads the texts his brother sent during his patrol... well he's tempted to go fruitloop hunting but he has a niece to take of... and inform his father of his granddaughter he's currently holding.

[softmxf]

side by side comparison of the different versions of Queer (2024), changes start around 2:12

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en