levinb

As someone who disdains hyperbolic, motivated framings of everything in the news cycle, I normally don't like to use words like that. But, it was interesting to see the news discuss the "first time since world war two" component of this event, that by WWII standards, would have been seen as a cowardly violation of the rules of war.

The were in allied water, on a regularly scheduled drill, unarmed.

A different model of war and Empire.

Yes brutal, for the defenders of the castles and fortified cities they conquered.

But again, very targeted at key sites so as to assert an Imperial-vassal relationship. Not to really to metamorph the populace, and run the day to day, which was left to local leadership.

Their point was to demonstratively subjugate for the purposes of control and tribute, not to kill, replace, or even miscegenate. They were the mob-bosses of Eurasia, not the crusaders or jihadis.

They had a very kludgy, homegrown, but generally well-liked and cost effective EMR calls Vista.

The fact that it was cost effective, but required internal expertise was exactly what led the Trump administration to kill it.

Now they are transitioning to Cerner, the worse of the two major commerical EMRs by a fair margin, for many billions of dollars to the Kansas-based company, now owned by Oracle.

You can fill in the details of why this is happening by looking at where the CMS appointees at the time have landed in their post-government careers.

I am trying to use more neutral language when I comment, so that the underlying assertion of facts are more likely to resonate with someone who may disagree with me.

I agree with your characterization, but I just wanted the parent comment to look up the ILWU, where they would probably see some of those facts for themselves and be more likely to understand my position.

As the human internet dies, I feel like it's more important for those of us that want some of it to survive to participate constructively.

Much more frequent conflicts, yes.

Much less total death and dying as well, though. Battles were short and small scale until the Civil War (maybe the Napoleonic Wars prior? Debatable). The largest battles of history prior to the industrial revolution were in the thousands, 10s of thousands of people. Forces were usually broken and defeated or fled after brief engagements. Brutal in experience, but smaller in scale.

It was that perception of war as personal, intimate, chivalric, by old men that let to the peak atrocity period (PAP? Did I coin a term?) of ~1850-1950. WWI was really the first modern reckoning of industrialized, globalized war, that led to the staggering scale of suffering. Incomprehensible to the men that commanded it, as they were born and acculturated in pre-modern war era culture.

But then the epoch-defining tool of the atom came along, and war has gone back to smaller scale, focused, targeted, "precision".

So here we sit, straddling two eras again. Pre-drone and post drone. We have not fully reckoned with what the new era means. But it will come quickly, like most modern tool-culture cycles.

Stryker holds monopoly supplier positions for a number of medical products, esp including surgical implants and associated OR tools.

If Stryker stays down, supplies of some things will run out soon and many people will find themselves without medical procedures available.

The ILWU controls labor at all west coast ports, including LALB, which is responsible for a majority of consumer imports from the Pacific. It has bargained effectively to block developing container handling automation systems.

I've been telling people for 15y that a phone is just "A TV that watches you back"

And at last, the market has finally caught up with me :)

Lot's of good thought here but I will reiterate; helping others doing something you enjoy or are good at is almost always the way.

Remember, the Cerner acquisition enabled an essentially permanent beachhead for Oracle in the VA. It will pay off over time in 'we already run Oracle' across many dimensions of government.

See the career of Seema Verma from last DT admin.

Cue bandwidth conversation.

human.

Yes.

I bought the last two units left at any HD for a few hundred miles; drove them up there Monday.

Apparently my friend had to drive in and out of his (utterly destroyed) neighborhood in Swannanoa because it required the app and cell service to set up. And when they returned home it wouldn't work. Took multiple trips back and forth to get it usable in the area where it was actually needed.

Then of course the Helene intro deal requires an extensive form to fill out, so he just paid for it.

And, incrementally, we all give our money to another publicly funded, government protected, privately held monopoly. And yet... it's charity.

Anyway, the entire neighborhood is using it to coordinate resources to dig out their holler. So hey, she'll do for now.

Re your father; wow, what a life. Thanks for documenting that for us.

My grandfather became a Navy navigator, B25s I think, right as the war ended. Chased hurricanes in the Pacific. I was the only person in the family to ever get much out of him about it in the last years before he passed.

Even in peacetime operations, he watched many colleagues die in storms, fog, and from accidents. I think everyone who served then saw how arbitrary death could be, and how the entire service was designed to operate around the necessary assumption that lives would vanish for nothing - and that everything else had to keep humming along.

Provides a very different perspective than the modern era.

Just chiming in to say your link led me to the document. The introduction is fantastic. I'm in the middle of an enormous woodworking undertaking and I am gonna have to hit pause and read this book. Completely nerd-sniped; other lurkers beware this rabbit hole.

I won't belabor points I've made below, but I do want to agree with you about 3rd party doctrine in general; the modern world makes it almost impossible to live a normal life without non-consensually making your self available for full time monitoring by everyone within eyesight of you.

I think the point of this article is actually being elided over some by the conversation here though; it appears that these agencies are largely following the law. The question is, how broad should the reach of LE go given their legitimate authority?

In the current scenario, should a LEO from Idaho be allowed to see prescription records from a pharmacy in California? Should they have the right to get data from CVS about things that didn't happen in Idaho? Every prescription ever? Every doctors note?

The law as it stands allows states to determine the reproductive rights of their citizens and investigate violations thereof (note that I don't agree with the law, or the Supreme Court here). I think the question being raised by this letter is, what breadth of access should some Sheriff have over your medical records, and really, what the heck is even going on with this now?

The Dobbs case has opened up a new frontier of potential abuse, and I think the letter and article are appropriately exploring that frontier.

I guess that's the point I was trying to make - in our case we were not conducting a criminal investigation. And if we were headed that way (which only happened every once in a while) then yes, we'd have to go in to Criminal Mode rather than Public Safety mode, and 4th and 5th Amendment obligations where back on.

Out of charity, I'll assume the former. But to be honest, every time I've spoken at length about this with LEOs, it's inevitably turned out to be the latter.

I am sure this is often true at the local LE level. But remember, they deal almost entirely with criminal investigations about individuals for things that do not present a broader risk to the public (beyond their continued individual behavior).

In our case, we are not reifying 'the drug menace' to a public level; we are trying to find out if a barge is full of vegetable oil or an explosive polymerization agent. And in those cases, no, I don't think your rights to privacy supersede our obligation to understand if there's a major threat to other people.

That doesn't matter. You're still talking about accessing private, sensitive data about an individual.

This is true and I can assure you I know quite a bit about what can be in people medical records (I am a MD who has worked extensively in medical records exchange and machine learning). I don't think accessing this kind of data should be possible without genuine need.

Yes, and that's exactly why warrants exist.

In our case at least, warrants wouldn't even make sense. We were not conducting criminal investigations and asking for access to pursue a person against their will, in response to a crime. We were trying to find out about near-term threats to other people.

I think you and I probably agree on the spirit here - it's just that in our case (and cases like the NTSB or FAA) there are compelling public interests that supersede someones right to privacy. Finding out if you were prescribed benzos so I can charge you for some garbage possession misdemeanor is not one; finding out if there's 30,000 barrels of explosive leaking under a highway is.

No?

Just because it made your job easier doesn't mean that it was legitimate.

So, I suppose that the main point. In these cases, we weren't investigating the individual as a suspect, we were trying to understand the nature of an incident that could affect the safety of others in a relatively linear fashion.

Imagine it's 20 years ago, there's no cameras everywhere, GPS is limited to multi-meter precision - did the 50-barge tow coming down the Mississipi river with millions of tons of cargo hit the interstate bridge broadside or did it just scrape it? There's a big pylon-shaped dent in the side of a naptha barge with cement dust on it, but the captain swears he just glanced it with the grain barge at the head of the tow. It's ancient and looks like it's battered 100 docks in the past year.

So, Mr. Deckhand, what hit the bridge?

In this scenario, he is not responsible for navigating the vessel, so we assume that it's unlikley that this would evolve into an investigation that would jeopardize him. And thus are free to issue a subpoenea if needed to find out if we need to shut down the only passage over the Mississippi for 100 miles.

I think it's fair that the public has the right to his honesty in this scenario.

Of course, these powers present the potential for abuse, and I'm sure it happens. Just not in the world I ever operated in; our powers and obligations were taken very seriously internally.

Hi, I'm a former Federal LEO that has gotten warrentless access to medical records - a long time ago.

I can't speak for every agency (there are more than 100 Federal agencies with sworn officers and arrest authority, and thousands of state and local agencies), but the few times I did this in the early 2000s, even most of the HN crowd would have thought it reasonable.

I was an officer in the Coast Guard and had LE powers under two different branches of law - one public safety and one criminal. When Bad Things happened on federal waterways, my job was to first investigate threats to public safety. This comes with the power to issue a subpoena. This means we can 'compel speech' and then if you lie to us, you are in trouble.

This has more to do with what you might think the NTSB or FAA might do following an accident. The government has the right under current law to understand threats to the public. If a shipping company is currently doing something that could dump a barge full of Xylene into the bayou next to an elementary school (this is not a made up scenario, and you should look up Xylene) then there is a public interest compelling enough that we can tell people they have to sit down and tell us the truth, and the 4th amendment is not a barrier.

However, if a public safety investigation moves past 'understanding if something is a risk to the public', and individual criminal culpability appears possible, we are then required to disclose to the individuals involved that we have moved to a criminal investigation. In this case, the 4th comes back in play and warrants are required.

For me, this really only came up a couple times with individuals involved in an accident that were either using medical prescriptions ("I missed my medications, I'm not drunk") to delay us investigating a scene. Or, for a couple of injured mariners who were in the hospital at the time we showed up. We needed to go to the hospital get their version of the story and to confirm an injury; grave injuries would increase the 'level' and thus mandatory resources involved in an investigation. Also, we would need to get a witness testimony from a deckhand or something that was on a boat or facility and saw what happened (did the boat really slam into the terminal coupling or did the guy just mess up attaching it because he wasn't an officially trained Tankerman who shouldn't have been operating the equipment).

Being in the hospital or at the doctors was an excuse used more than once my companies trying to slow down inquiry into their mistakes. And yes, I think for our use case, it was completely reasonable for us to be able to call the hospital and ask "was so and so admitted last night?", just for us to find out that they were not, and went back home to mom's house to hide under orders from their captain.

Anyway, with all that said, it seems unlikely these powers are not frequently abused, even if most of the LEO community is just trying to do their job. So, tin-hat away, friends.

Knew they existed, but had never seen one in the wild.

I am actually starting to think about using European services (Hetzner?) for some things just to have some sort of legal framework that offers plausible control of my data. I already use paid email.

I mostly trust that something running in a VM is not accessible or abused when I sign a contract - I just don't want to use 30 SaaS services that require me to allow data consumption from me and my customers.

Can you compare Proxmoc to just running small VMs or a container on a bare-metal hosting provider?

Yeah, I've hired great, average, and lousy devs before (and been one) - I will keep my hiring on this project to people who like to make, serve, and talk beer.

Hope is that I can do the heavy lifting of getting things up and have something stable enough for me to run and a manager to be able to log in and see, at most.

Second vote for that - I'll def check it out. If you've used anything else better or worse I'd be happy to hear experiences.

Putting money into a nerdy trivia night would have 100x the impact with 1% of the headaches.

I agree - we'll do a fair amount of that stuff. From trivia night to the knitting club, I'd like to be a 'Third Place' for people to have fun.

I just wonder, if I host the monthly Python meetup, will anyone care besides me? I personally don't shop or eat at places that don't accept cash, require an app, or only allow online takeout orders - but that's not everybody by a long shot.

I'd assume the average person, even one who cares about data privacy, would never expect a brewery to also be mindful of this stuff. I do wonder (hope, irrationally?) that some of the local (NC Triangle area) tech community will at least find it to be of some note.

Focus on the business - sure thing (thanks also philomath_mn).

Interestingly, the most common thing I have heard from folks who run (successful and failed) breweries is "no one can tell the difference between beers, build a place people want to drink beer".

I am doing that by starting with an awesome location - acquiring the building is the main reason I am doing this and it's pretty cool.

While the 'hacker' and 'privacy aware' crowds are pretty small, I would like to help be an inviting place for folks that share these interests. I am not sure how much I need to cater to that, but I'd like to be as good an actor as reasonable time tradeoffs will allow.

I am totally willing to put up with a learning curve, if that overhead can get me to a stable place that's better for data management than just saying 'I give up', in the face of a large ecosystem.

Re: Nextcloud - heard of it many times but never used it. Can a normal person (think bartender) log in and edit a document or respond to a calendar invite on a phone? What output does it generate (.odts, .caldav)?

Never heard of Odoo but thanks, I'll go down that rabbit hole.

That was the case here; 11pm, rainy night, after staying late to clean up after his daughter's birthday party.

Bing maps shows barriers, google shows a clear road. Apparently the barriers had been removed.

Normally I view these sorts of incidents with a lot of cynicism, but if you look at the road from street view, I can see how this would happen eventually.

Long ago, I was an officer in the Coast Guard, stationed on the Mississippi; these types of kids would occasionally make it a down the river to us in Baton Rouge.

Usually they ended (or really, only got started, like this) up mostly drifting down, because gas costs money and diesel is the only thing available on the river, and then only at terminals that are physically and culturally intimidating to the driftboat crowd.

Most of the time, if they made it as far as BR, they were able to formulate and execute plans with a reasonable degree of linearity, as there was a lot of river upstream to weed out the reckless and feckless.

However, once they got to Baton Rouge they were in for changing conditions. The Huey Long Bridge is the farthest upstream that oceangoing vessels can navigate on the Mississippi, and from there down the river becomes very busy with large marine vessels, barges, towboats, and service boats that keep the bulk materials industries moving. Hundreds of industrial terminals, and daily passage of multi-hundred foot vessels.

Travel for a homemade vessel, especially overnight, could easily be fatal.

We'd hear reports from rivermen on the radio that one of these things had made it down, and we'd go out to try to meet them. We'd inspect the vessel to make sure it was legal; if it wasn't we'd show them off the river and give them a ride to town to await whoever might come for them. If it was in legal order, we'd warn them about river conditions.

Interestingly, of the handful of these folks that made it down to us each year, our warning would usually suffice to have them moor up and call it a trip - they had started to notice the changing character of the river and decided the next couple hundred miles of dodging 1000ft barge tows and currents that could swallow a small boat would not be fun.

Only a few were both legal and chose to carry on. I never heard anything from New Orleans about them; I hope they made it to the City and spent the rest of their pennies on celebrating in the Quarter and sharing stories. They certainly earned it.

Hi; I built all of the contact tracing analytics for one of the Harvard hospitals during the pandemic. Also had a parent that was clin epi for 25 years.

The entire effort, using essentially every technology applied, was useless.

It was for many reasons, but primarily because the asymptomatic rate was very, very high, that there was no way to actually trace anything. Where or who you got Covid from was pure speculation for a majority of positive cases.

Scales and rates matter. With TB you have a very high fidelity, testable, slow spreading causal chain. Which is why TB tracing programs are effective, and good public health policy.

Our national Covid policies were ineffective, to say the least.

I got mine for MSRP, $75. Though I am sure even as things ease there will be resellers marking up.

The fields may not be fertile yet, but rain is on the horizon.