You seriously misunderstand how hard it is to have sex reassignment surgery.
Even in states where beginning an HRT regimen is based on informed consent, there are many steps one must go through before having this procedure done. Multiple letters of recommendation from licensed therapists and having been on hormones for years. Not to mention the exorbitant costs even with insurance.
Your suggestion that one could Uber to another city and have SRS performed is a gross mischaracterization of the reality trans people face.
The article provides examples of clinics offering very few steps to treatment, and discusses doctors who bias in favor of treatment. It paints a picture supporting the conclusion that it would have been easy.
The gulf between the availability of specialist surgeons and pharmaceuticals is incredibly vast. If the article gave you the impression that you can just walk in and get your SRS did on a whim, perhaps you should reconsider its veracity or at least your understanding of the situation.
I don't have a any understanding of this situation or a horse in this race, was just pointing out that ancestor comment was justified based on the article, which also addressed availability of pharmaceuticals, btw.
It'd be nice to have literature or deeper investigation on this.
"Treatment" involves a number of different options, of varying permanence. It isn't "Okay, surgery scheduled for Tuesday" at every patient's first consulation.
I wouldn't be surprised if for most girls, treatment starts with wearing a binder, which is clothing.
The article is written from experience in one paediatric centre, when the pratice between different centres - and laws in different states - differ vastly.
Information about people seeking gender affirming care in different places and stages of transition is not refutable based on this article.
And it is anecdata - how many patients had positive outcomes? Article doesn’t tell you. What did the (brand new) centre learn from these cases with negative outcomes? What protocols was it using? Are they the same now? Are they common elsewhere?
That’s reassuring. She did say that the doctor she found was like the only one in California, maybe even the whole country, that would treat people with mental health comorbidity. So even back then it wasn’t a widespread thing, just this one trailblazing doctor in the very lgbtqi2 friendly city of San Francisco. And it sort of makes sense. Why couldn’t someone have both schizophrenia and gender dysphoria? Shouldn’t the mentally ill be able to address other health problems like gender dysphoria? It’s very difficult thinking through the medical ethics involved.
I betcha it's https://gristleking.com, he's been advocating for paragliders to use LoRaWAN for a tertiary emergency communications network (primary being Garmin's Iridium network, then cell or perhaps iOS 14's GPS SOS).
The idea is to have multiple means of calling for help + tracking location when free-flying.
I don't think iOS's SOS feature is feasible from a paraglider. You have to point it at a specific direction for a while to get a message out. An air band radio at 121.500 (emergency frequency) would make more sense (with the required permits of course)
InReach should work well though from a paraglider as a primary SOS.
From a paraglider: we are definitely paying attention to the new iphone SOS feature, many of us who fly over wilderness areas carry a spot or in-reach. We never activate in the air (no point), so having to point it in a specific direction is not an issue. Being blocked by limbs or terrain would be an issue.
Some people carry air-band radios, but largely we use the ham frequencies. Air band would be of limited utility for emergencies since we would just be using an aircraft as a relay to ATC to SAR. Satellite trackers have one button that does all of that without having to deal with air-band.
Ok I've never flown paragliders, but I have flown regular gliders. We did have air band radios on board anyway - not just for emergencies but also to communicate with other air traffic of course. Today they even have to carry ADS-B transponders, but when I did it that rule was not in place yet.
I'm surprised you use the ham frequencies, I'm also a ham but if I wasn't it would be a bit annoying having to study for the ham exam just because I would want to paraglide. For the air band there is another procedural exam here in Europe but that's ok because you really need to know how to behave on that band. But the ham exam is really focused on building your own radios which a paraglider would have no need for.
So he accomplishes it by covertly installing thousands of dollars of hardware on PUBLIC land and opening himself up to thousands more dollars in recovery fees? Not likely.
I'd like a feature that reminds me of a particular piece of information at a logarithmic cadence so I can commit it to memory better by being reminded a few times within a few weeks/months, but then a nudge 6 months down the line, etc.
I built a tool to address that problem with Anki as the back-end[1], Idea being an always-on spaced repetition system can help us review the cards asynchronously.
It has been a huge quality of life improvement for me after I started using it, But I guess Anki and the HW requirements creates friction for a decent adoption of this system.
It's laughable this was published citing: "the storage capacity effectively comes free of charge" when the whole mess we're in is the tragedy of the commons.
Just a guess: given that LoRa operates on line of sight, when trying to update a gateways with sensor status (e.g. GPS position of tracked item) the operator won't be able to get realtime reports if the gateway isn't positioned at a high enough altitude relative to the sensor.
You can mitigate this by having many gateway/collectors at high points on buildings/hills, but bouncing signals off the moon seems like an interesting alternative for connectivity in low coverage locations...
Perhaps this is clear to you I'm just trying to think it through out loud.
This is a cool stunt, but it's not at all practical for IoT communications. For one thing, it requires a big dish and a huge amount of transmission power to get a barely-distinguishable reflected signal.
The other big issue is that it doesn't scale, because there's no directionality: the reflected signal will be scattered off the moon and received everywhere on the hemisphere of earth where the moon is above the horizon. So every single device that tried to use this strategy would have to contend for the same chunk of bandwidth.
The fact they used a 35m radio telescope as the receiver station here, and transmission powers way over legal limits for normal LoRa-like applications is a pretty good hint. You lose a crazy amount of signal with moonbounce, the effort is always easier to put into different methods instead. AFAIK it's only non-experimental use predates human-made satellites (US military, as a further channel to reach far-away war ships even if terrestrial propagation conditions are bad). If you can't use satellites, and can't have a receiver station within a few thousand miles of your transmitter, then it maybe is sort-of an option, but that's not really a situation you have anymore.
Amateur radio operators still do it, and with purpose-made codecs and really slow speeds it's not that out of reach (i.e. at least for those you don't need a radio telescope dish), but that's just because it's an interesting challenge.
Background noise - that's one way to put it! The path loss is around 250 dB, so a practical amateur moonbounce station makes use of a very powerful RF amplifier feeding an array of yagi antennas, all mounted on an altitude/azimuth rotator - in other words, it's a radio telescope, and the receiving side hopefully has something similar. You can do a google image search for "moonbounce," the setups are kind of amazing. A lot of investment mostly to exchange morse and specialized low-bandwidth digital modes.
The upshot is that you can communicate with any station that can also see the moon - somebody on the other side of the planet, 12,000km away. Plus there is the unique experience of hearing your own transmission echo, two seconds after you cease.
This kind of setup is well within reach for a commercial enterprise but will never be practical for IoT owing to the laws of physics. On the other hand, there is SNOTEL, a system that bounces snowpack telemetry off of the ionized trails left by meteors...
Because the moon is 238,900 mi away. Nor does it stay locked in position. Nor is it perfectly reflective (albeit quite a high albedo) nor a perfect sphere.
LoRa doesn't have to be LOS, it depends on the carrier frequency you use. 900MHz LoRa is used for building penetration of control signals for racing drones, for example, with the open source ExpressLRS system.
I have a bunch of (low powered, runs for 24+_hrs on a single 18650 cell) 433MHz Lora/Meshtastic nodes - I can get 10km or so range with simple 1/4 wave dipoles indoors in urban environments. Hills kill it a bot, but I've got one shot that gets 3.3km non line of sight with a hill between the nodes.
I haven’t read the article but I find the hyperbolic headline pretty distasteful.
Some countries are experiencing degraded supply chain performance which impacts affordability of goods, and availability as well. The arbitrary, instant gratification SLA that some have come to expect is showing cracks but we certainly haven’t run out of everything.
