> Edward Benjamin Zitron (born 1986 or 1987) is an English technology writer, podcaster, and public relations specialist. He is a critic of the technology industry, particularly of artificial intelligence companies and the 2020s AI boom.
> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are.
> There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one.
My spam folder constantly receiving new messages from political campaigns under new lists and org names begs to disagree. One donation in 2008 and I'm simply trapped in the system with no recourse.
Seems like the rules selectively don't apply to certain classes.
A lot of those big box retailers have long opened up their digital storefronts to the "marketplace" concept too. Best Buy, Home Depot, and Walmart are the first three that come to mind.
The Walmart one is particularly egregious because most of the marketplace is just "item that Walmart sells except 5x the price" designed to ensnare old people who click on the wrong thing.
As an aside, this website has one hundred and sixty seven trackers and loading them caused my CPU temperatures to spike so high that my fans kicked into high gear.
I lost a lot of weight on ketosis several years ago but could not maintain the diet and gained it all back shortly after. Since then I've found something that works better for my body that I can sustain which keeps some of the principles of keto.
I no longer limit my carbs, but when I eat carbs they come from rice and potatoes instead of wheat because I wore a CGM for two-week periods of time multiple times last year and the year prior and found that wheat was always the number one culprit spiking my blood sugar which would result in massive carb crashes, which overall affected my energy levels which snowball into negative second-order effects on my feelings of productivity and mood.
I'm envious of people who can realize these things about themselves. For me, I almost always need concrete data to make me stop and think about how I'm feeling and put two and two together. Otherwise my scatterbrain is thinking about anything and everything else.
I fired my local hospital earlier this year. I had to get a biopsy and I did not receive my results in a timely manner because my specialist's office decided they needed to play phone tag with me instead of just sending me the results through the godawful amalgamation known as Epic.
The biopsy was indeterminate, and instead of immediately sending it out for a second opinion or molecular testing they decided to wait until I could see my specialist before giving me the options. I immediately told them to go for the second opinion and to check about insurance approval for molecular testing.
They had no idea how to bill me for molecular testing because the pathologist for some reason never suggested it in their report (which I later learned from another peer specialist at another hospital that molecular testing would have been written on the report for insurance approval purposes).
My insurance adamantly insisted that it would be covered, and then turned around and told my hospital that I would have to pay nearly six thousand dollars out of pocket.
The second opinion took three weeks, which concurred with the original pathology report and finally put the magic words "recommend molecular testing" on paper which got insurance to approve it. But rather than push it through, my specialist decided to play phone tag with me for a couple more days to make sure I was okay with the fifty dollar copay.
This entire process, from start to finish, took six and a half weeks to learn that the biopsy sample was benign and nothing to worry about. Now imagine if this were a serious thing and that I needed to have surgery as soon as possible. A six and a half week feedback loop to begin scheduling surgery (every surgeon for this issue in my area was booked at least five weeks out) may as well be a death sentence.
I've come to the conclusion that in this country, even if you are extremely proactive and aggressive about advocating for your own health, it's still not enough. You have to supplement this with something proactive like a full body examination in a foreign country (i.e. Japan's Ningen Dock system), otherwise you risk dying from the apathy and bureaucracy of the American medical system.
Hello! I apologize for this being extremely out of context but five months ago on one of my comment threads you recommended Takayama Showa-Kan and I wanted to let you know that I visited it last month and loved it (and Takayama as a whole). Thanks again for the rec!
