#Tech Adoption

[anik211]

India’s Path to a $10 Trillion Economy: Unlocking Growth Through Financial Inclusion, Innovation, and Sustainability 🇮🇳💡🌱

India’s ambitious goal of becoming a $10 trillion economy by 2032 reflects its immense potential and aspirations. I view this target as both challenging and achievable, provided that strategic improvements are made across multiple sectors. Let’s explore the key areas that demand attention and assess their potential impact on India’s economic trajectory. 1. Financial Inclusion: The Catalyst for…

[hk-1989]

Overcoming Resistance: Strategies for Embracing Technology in Healthcare

In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare, the journey toward embracing technology is often met with challenges and barriers. However, by implementing innovation implementation strategies and tech integration strategies, healthcare organizations can overcome resistance and harness the full potential of technological advancement to improve patient care.

One of the primary hurdles in embracing technology is tech adoption. Healthcare professionals may be hesitant to embrace new tools and platforms due to concerns about usability, workflow disruptions, or lack of training. To address this, organizations must prioritize education and support, providing comprehensive training programs and ongoing guidance to ensure smooth tech adoption across all levels of the organization.

Furthermore, successful innovation implementation requires a holistic approach that goes beyond simply introducing new technologies. It involves digital solutions that align with the organization's goals and workflows, empowering healthcare professionals to deliver more efficient and effective care. Whether it's implementing electronic health records (EHRs), telemedicine platforms, or AI-driven diagnostic tools, the key is to focus on solutions that enhance patient outcomes and streamline processes.

Moreover, technological advancement in healthcare is not just about adopting the latest gadgets—it's about leveraging technology to drive meaningful change and improve patient outcomes. By embracing a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, healthcare organizations can stay at the forefront of technological advancement, constantly seeking new ways to enhance the delivery of care and meet the evolving needs of patients.

At the heart of these efforts lies the need for effective tech integration strategies. Integration is key to ensuring that disparate systems and technologies work together seamlessly, enabling data exchange, interoperability, and collaboration across departments and specialties. Whether it's through interoperable EHR systems, integrated telemedicine platforms, or data analytics tools, successful tech integration strategies pave the way for a more connected and efficient healthcare ecosystem.

In conclusion, embracing technology in healthcare requires a multifaceted approach that addresses tech adoption, innovation implementation, technological advancement, and tech integration strategies. By overcoming resistance and embracing technology, healthcare organizations can unlock new opportunities for improving patient care, driving efficiencies, and ultimately, transforming the future of healthcare.

[purplepixel]

I did the meme. The world is not ready for them

[warmfuzzyanimal]

wanna make your own idog? i threw together a base for 'em over on kofi! 🐾🎶

[archivewriter1ont]

I like to think this scene is the moment Crosshair decided they were keeping the reg (not Hunter -- Crosshair. Because he's the baby brother and he gets what he wants). Crosshair is highly skilled and extremely irritating at times but he values loyalty, competency, and valor, and I think he saw all three in Echo right off the bat.

Crosshair was kind of the one who stuck beside Echo and General Skywalker during this arc. (I would like to point out that he shot threats off of Mr. The-Chosen-One twice in these episodes, thus proving his cool factor and my belief that Anakin was always slightly overrated.) He got a front-row seat to watch this broken, malnourished POW get jerked straight out of cryo just to 1) goof off and snark to his captain and general, 2) jump on a living dragon thing and just wing it like "Sure I can fly this why not" and 3) start popping airborne droids with ZERO armor and a borrowed (stolen?) blaster.

Of course Crosshair looked at Echo, then to his brothers, then back to Echo and went "He's ours now, deal with it." Echo reminded him so much of himself and his squadmates that he imprinted on sight.

[salamanding]

i designed a new character!! one day i want to start streaming as a hobby and i’d want her to be my vtuber sona. she changes out the cartridges based on whether is a gaming, art, or just chatting stream!

[blackseafoam]

I was informed that today is Echo day

[redbean-nom]

cody's gaggle of adoptees

[here-comes-the-moose]

Crosshair: Thanks, Dad.

Hunter: …

Tech: …

Wrecker: …

Echo: …

Crosshair: Why is everyone staring at me?

Hunter: You just called Echo dad; you said thanks, dad.

Crosshair: What? No, I didn't. I said thanks, man.

Echo: Do you see me as a father figure, Cross?

Crosshair: No, if anything, I see you as a bother figure, 'cause you're always bothering me.

Wrecker: Hey! You show your father some respect!

[minty364]

DPXDC Prompt #131

Danny started his new job at Wayne industries today and he was a little nervous about messing up. His adopted family the Fentons kicked him out after finding out he was Phantom. Danny was a little disappointed but it was better than how he thought they’d react. He knew he had other family and from what little cryptic Clockwork told him they lived in Gotham.

He gets to his new bosses office and knocks on his door. When he’s told to come in Danny does so but then comes face to face by what he can only assume is his twin and the CEO of the company, Tim Drake. Danny had about 5 seconds before he found himself pinned to the floor.

[thisischeri]

Apple Power Mac G4, Mirrored Drive Doors, 2002

instagram: cheri.png

[mostlysignssomeportents]

FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering

TOMORROW NIGHT (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Here's a tip for policymakers hoping to improve the lives of the most Americans with the least effort: help prisoners.

After all, America is the most prolific imprisoner of its own people of any country in world history. We lock up more people than Stalin, than Mao, more than Botha, de Klerk or any other Apartheid-era South African president. And it's not just America's vast army of the incarcerated who are afflicted by our passion for imprisonment: their families and friends suffer, too.

That familial suffering isn't merely the constant pain of life without a loved one, either. America's prison profiteers treat prisoners' families as ATMs who can be made to pay and pay and pay.

This may seem like a losing strategy. After all, prison sentences are strongly correlated with poverty, and even if your family wasn't desperate before the state kidnapped one of its number and locked them behind bars, that loved one's legal defense and the loss of their income is a reliable predictor of downward social mobility.

Decent people don't view poor people as a source of riches. But for a certain kind of depraved sadist, the poor are an irresistible target. Sure, poor people don't have much money, but what they lack even more is protection under the law ("conservativism consists of the principle that there is an in-group whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect" -Wilhoit). You can enjoy total impunity as you torment poor people, make them so miserable and afraid for their lives and safety that they will find some money, somewhere, and give it to you.

Mexican cartels understand this. They do a brisk trade in kidnapping asylum seekers whom the US has illegally forced to wait in Mexico to have their claims processed. The families of refugees – either in their home countries or in the USA – are typically badly off but they understand that Mexico will not lift a finger to protect a kidnapped refugee, and so when the kidnappers threaten the most grisly tortures as a means of extracting ransom, those desperate family members do whatever it takes to scrape up the blood-money.

What's more, the families of asylum seekers are not much better off than their kidnapped loved ones when it comes to seeking official protection. Family members who stayed behind in human rights hellholes like Bukele's El Salvador can't get their government to lodge official complaints with the Mexican ambassador, and family members who made it to the USA are in no position to get their Congressjerk to intercede with ICE or the Mexican consulate. This gives Mexico's crime syndicates total latitude to kidnap, torture, and grow rich by targeting the poorest, most desperate people in the world.

The private contractors that supply services to America's prisons are basically Mexican refugee-kidnappers with pretensions and shares listed on the NYSE. After decades of consolidation, the prison contracting sector has shrunk to two gigantic companies: Securus and Viapath (formerly Global Tellink). These private-equity backed behemoths dominate their sector, and have diversified, providing all kinds of services, from prison cafeteria meals to commissary, the prison stores where prisoners can buy food and other items.

If you're following closely, this is one of those places where the hair on the back of your neck starts to rise. These companies make money when prisoners buy food from the commissary, and they're also in charge of the quality of the food in the mess hall. If the food in the mess hall is adequate and nutritious, there's no reason to buy food from the commissary.

This is what economists call a "moral hazard." You can think of it as the reason that prison ramen costs 300% more than ramen in the free world:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

(Not just ramen: in America's sweltering prisons, an 8" fan costs $40, and the price of water went up in Texas prisons by 50% during last summer's heatwave.)

It's actually worse than that: if you get sick from eating bad prison food, the same company that poisoned you gets paid to operate the infirmary where you're treated:

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

Now, the scam of abusing prisoners to extract desperate pennies from their families is hardly new. There's written records of this stretching back to the middle ages. Nor is this pattern a unique one: making an unavoidable situation as miserable as possible and then upcharging people who have the ability to pay to get free of the torture is basically how the airlines work. Making coach as miserable as possible isn't merely about shaving pennies by shaving inches off your legroom: it's a way to "incentivize" anyone who can afford it to pay for an upgrade to business-class. The worse coach is, the more people you can convince to dip into their savings or fight with their boss to move classes. The torments visited upon everyone else in coach are economically valuable to the airlines: their groans and miseries translate directly into windfall profits, by convincing better-off passengers to pay not to have the same thing done to them.

Of course, with rare exceptions (flying to get an organ transplant, say) plane tickets are typically discretionary. Housing, on the other hand, is a human right and a prerequisite for human thriving. The worse things are for tenants, the more debt and privation people will endure to become home-owners, so it follows that making renters worse off makes homeowners richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

For Securus and Viapath, the path to profitability is to lobby for mandatory, long prison sentences and then make things inside the prison as miserable as possible. Any prisoner whose family can find the funds can escape the worst of it, and all the prisoners who can't afford it serve the economically important function of showing the prisoners whose families can afford it how bad things will be if they don't pay.

If you're thinking that prisoners might pay Securus, Viapath and their competitors out of their own prison earnings, forget it. These companies have decided that the can make more by pocketing the difference between the vast sums paid by third parties for prisoners' labor and the pennies the prisoners get from their work. Remember, the 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of incarcerated people! Six states ban paying prisoners at all. North Carolina caps prisoners' wages at one dollar per day. The national average prison wage is $0.52/hour. Prisoners' labor produces $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

Forced labor and extortion are a long and dishonorable tradition in incarceration, but this century saw the introduction of a novel, exciting way of extracting wealth from prisoners and their families. It started when private telcos took over prison telephones and raised the price of a prison phone call. These phone companies found willing collaborators in local jail and prison systems: all they had to do was offer to split the take with the jailers.

With the advent of the internet, things got far worse. Digitalization meant that prisons could replace the library, adult educations, commissary accounts, letter-mail, parcels, in-person visits and phone calls with a single tablet. These cheaply made tablets were offered for free to prisoners, who lost access to everything from their kids' handmade birthday cards to in-person visits with those kids.

In their place, prisoners' families had to pay huge premiums to have their letters scanned so that prisoners could pay (again) to view those scans on their tablets. Instead of in-person visits, prisoners families had to pay $3-10/minute for a janky, postage-stamp sized video. Perversely, jails and prisons replaced their in-person visitation rooms with rooms filled with shitty tablets where family members could sit and videoconference with their incarcerated loved ones who were just a few feet away:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Capitalists hate capitalism. The capital classes are on a relentless search for markets with captive customers and no competitors. The prison-tech industry was catnip for private equity funds, who bought and "rolled" up prison contractors, concentrating the sector into a duopoly of debt-laden companies whose ability to pay off their leveraged buyouts was contingent on their ability to terrorize prisoners' families into paying for their overpriced, low-quality products and services.

One particularly awful consequence of these rollups was the way that prisoners could lose access to their data when their prison's service-provider was merged with a rival. When that happened, the IT systems would be consolidated, with the frequent outcome that all prisoners' data was lost. Imagine working for two weeks to pay for a song or a book, or a scan of your child's handmade Father's Day card, only to have the file deleted in an IT merger. Now imagine that you're stuck inside for another 20 years.

This is a subject I've followed off and on for years. It's such a perfect bit of end-stage capitalist cruelty, combining mass incarceration with monopolies. Even if you're not imprisoned, this story is haunting, because on the one hand, America keeps thinking of new reasons to put more people behind bars, and on the other hand, every technological nightmare we dream up for prisoners eventually works its way out to the rest of us in a process I call the "shitty technology adoption curve." As William Gibson says, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" – but the future sure pools up thick and dystopian around America's prisoners:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

My background interest in the subject got sharper a few years ago when I started working on The Bezzle, my 2023 high-tech crime thriller about prison-tech grifters:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

One of the things that was on my mind when I got to work on that book was the 2017 court-case that killed the FCC's rules limit interstate prison-call gouging. The FCC could have won that case, but Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, dropped it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/prisoners-lose-again-as-court-wipes-out-inmate-calling-price-caps/

With that bad precedent on the books, the only hope prisoners had for relief from the FCC was for Congress to enact legislation specifically granting the agency the power to regulate prison telephony. Incredibly, Congress did just that, with Biden signing the "Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act" in early 2023:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1541/text

With the new law in place, it fell to the FCC use those newfound powers. Compared to agencies like the FTC and the NLRB, Biden's FCC has been relatively weak, thanks in large part to the Biden administration's refusal to defend its FCC nomination for Gigi Sohn, a brilliant and accomplished telecoms expert. You can tell that Sohn would have been a brilliant FCC commissioner because of the way that America's telco monopolists and their allies in the senate (mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too) went on an all-out offensive against her, using the fact that she is gay to smear her and ultimately defeat her nomination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

But even without Sohn, the FCC has managed to do something genuinely great for America's army of the imprisoned. This week, the FCC voted in price-caps on prison calls, so that call rates will drop from $11.35 for 15 minutes to just $0.90. Both interstate and intrastate calls will be capped at $0.06-0.12/minute, with a phased rollout starting in January:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/fcc-closes-final-loopholes-that-keep-prison-phone-prices-exorbitantly-high/

It's hard to imagine a policy that will get more bang for a regulator's buck than this one. Not only does this represent a huge savings for prisoners and their families, those savings are even larger in proportion to their desperate, meager finances.

It shows you how important a competent, qualified regulator is. When it comes to political differences between Republicans and Democrats, regulatory competence is a grossly underrated trait. Trump's FCC Chair Ajit Pai handed out tens of billions of dollars in public money to monopoly carriers to improve telephone networks in underserved areas, but did so without first making accurate maps to tell him where the carriers should invest. As a result, that money was devoured by executive bonuses and publicly financed dividends and millions of Americans entered the pandemic lockdowns with broadband that couldn't support work-from-home or Zoom school. When Biden's FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel took over, one of her first official acts was to commission a national study and survey of broadband quality. Republicans howled in outrage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

The telecoms sector has been a rent-seeking, monopolizing monster since the days of Samuel Morse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care

Combine telecoms and prisons, and you get a kind of supermonster, the meth-gator of American neofeudalism:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

The sector is dirty beyond words, and it corrupts everything it touches – bribing prison officials to throw out all the books in the prison library and replace them with DRM-locked, high-priced ebooks that prisoners must toil for weeks to afford, and that vanish from their devices whenever a prison-tech company merges with a rival:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

The Biden presidency has been fatally marred by the president's avid support of genocide, and nothing will change that. But for millions of Americans, the Biden administration's policies on telecoms, monopoly, and corporate crime have been a source of profound, lasting improvements.

It's not just presidents who can make this difference. Millions of America's prisoners are rotting in state and county jails, and as California has shown, state governments have broad latitude to kick out prison profiteers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

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

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

--

Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

--

kgbo (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suncorp_Bank_ATM.jpg

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

[alienglowgarden]

Im bad at writing coherent things but I need to get this concept out of my head so it stops haunting me.

I had this idea for another fic called The Undine Colony.

The setting would be the second colony by the sea- started when Sol is in their forties- the story taking place an unknown time after that.

It starts with the alarm that the original Stratospheric colony has gone silent. Collapsed all its networks, killed every signal, spirited away every colonist. As it still houses much of humanity's most advanced tech, like the servers for their holonet, essential parts of the power grid, this is an issue of extreme urgency.

And who better to turn to in their moment of need than Sol? So here they are suddenly jolted into wakefulness.

Their first thought is that they cannot feel their body. They quickly learn they are not in fact the real Sol, but only an AI copy made of their brain-scan from many decades ago. Though they cannot access the future vision as an ephemeral bit of software, they have superior computing on their side.

The gist of it being that AI Sol is now in charge of the 2nd colony to replace the hole left by Congruence, all while being tasked to figure out whats happening to the og colony & trying to reestablish contact. Aaand trying to piece together their own existence on top of it. Trying to find out what even happened to the original Sol. If they have something to do with this blackout.

So yeah, itd be slowly unfurling that mystery, piecing together the gap in their memory & issues of personhood.

[al-luviec]

compiled whatever this is (and I run out of tag space)

meh HoT gifs (3/?)

[warmfuzzyanimal]

anybody still deeply enjoy the aesthetics of early 2000's tech? this pup certainly does!

🫧🐠♻️ 💙 SB - $70 💙 MI - $5 💙 AB - TBA

- comment to bid! - winner will get transparent moodboard, anthro idog, chibi idog gif, and the image above, unwatermarked. - payment due 48 hours after last bid placed - feel free to DM me any questions!

SOLD!

[archivewriter1ont]

Clone Wars Incorrect Quotes

Rex: So Hunter kind of freaked me out when I first met him and he was just sniffing the air and dirt -- and when he growled at me and jumped on the Keeradak and all -- but I've come to the conclusion that he's really just a lost puppy with sharp teeth and social issues. Also I am keeping him.

Cody: I resent that you stole him but I am so glad he's not just my issue now.

Cody: Next time we have to fill out a report on these idiots, ori'vod Rex gets to sign off on it and find a way to benignly word what our little sergeant helped his brothers blow up, destroy, or otherwise do wrong.

Rex: *aghast* What could he ever do wrong? Look at him, Cody -- he's harmless!

Hunter: *paying selective attention because he is too busy sharpening his 87 knives* I am NOT little. *growls*

Cody: Mmhmm. Harmless, huh??

Rex: He...likes shiny things.