corporate overlords? These are the state governments selling your data. The call is coming from inside the house. The sooner we realize that government is comprised of the same slithering slime of human greed and laziness, the more realistic discussions we can have.

It's not even remotely the same scale. At least the government ostensibly has its incentives aligned with the public. False equivance gets us further from where we need to by focusing people on the wrong problems.

"Ostensibly" is the mistake in your formula. Current events are replete with examples to the contrary. It's not equivocating to recognize that governments are organizations of humans, subject to the same limitations - the larger they get, the harder they are to manage well; talent is incredibly important to success in mission; leadership is incredibly important to integrity, ethics, and strategy; lower oversight and mediocre control structures lead to abuse. You can see the challenges that government as an organization has there. And as to scale..? Son. At least you can "ostensibly" choose whether or not to interact with corporations unless they are colluding with... government.

Consider the bulk of your comment to be directed similarly as criticism to corporations, minus effective correction mechanism, plus direct incentive to extract as much wealth as possible by providing as little value as possible.

Which isn’t to say government is bad as an institution.. just to say that we regard it with an assumption of good faith at our collective peril - it’s track record counsels the opposite.

It would be comical hear this as if you think it contrasts with companies if I didn't know you believed it. The very "slime" that leads to the government doing these things accumulates at the behest of the entities you're defending.

Narrator: "But it did neither."

Honestly, we're better off with it than without it, speaking as someone with exposure to that industry's internals. That act drives a lot of good security practice within the organizations (mostly liability shifting, but still good). Specifically, the fear it instills of ruinous penalties from regulators drives good practice adoption, IME.

Further, multiple crappy patient portals across providers is a crummy experience, but it's an improvement over the world where providers held the data hostage and had zero interest in accommodating your requests for it, or even the idea that you owned it.

You would prefer emotional and impassioned hyperbole? Arm waving and hand-wringing? Self-flagellation? Navel-gazing? Struggle sessions?

All of those are preferable to the United States losing hegemonic global status to China, yes. Sue me for preferring honesty over euphemism.

Classic Scorpion and the Frog tale, or the older Farmer and the Snake. https://read.gov/aesop/094.html

Good for California's budget as well.

Is this due to CA's high gas tax? That is a fixed value per gallon, so higher gas prices will not affect this right?

$0.60 + 2.25%.

The excise tax is a fixed .60+ per gallon, going up July 1. The sales tax is 2.25%, and local sales tax some additional percentage.

And all the oil companies - CRC and Chevron are huge.

Drink some clarit with the valit over a good filit.

"Clothes make the man", as the idiom says. Clothes don't impugn your character, but they define you in the eyes of others.

Having been a long-haired holey jeans-wearing guy in my past, I was naively surprised when I cut my hair and noticed that people treated me very differently in business settings. When I started wearing nicer clothes on top of that, it was night and day - the kind of reception you get in banks, anything like that. It sucks that humans are built to judge and filter on appearances, but it's just the reality. You can use it to your advantage.

Honestly, I trust these systems more than humans to do the same work. While we're all talking anecdotes, this one time at Walmart (how all good stories start) many years ago I was in the music section and these two in-store security guys approached me, saying they had told me to never come back in the store, etc., making a big scene. I so rarely go to Walmart and found the situation kind of humorous and wanted to see where it would go (knowing I had not done anything wrong now or in the past). They had seen me on video evidently and thought I was somebody else - serial shoplifter or public urinator or who knows what. Anyway, I tell them I've never been told to leave prior to this visit, didn't know what they were talking about. They were adamant that I was in the wrong, asked me to come back to the office while they looked into things. I was like, "sure!", more entertained than upset. So there I am sitting in the office while some guy combs through video footage. A guy of authority comes in, tired demeanor, asks these guys - well, did you match his ID? "No", says he. Checks ID, realizes I'm not their guy. Many stressful apologies on their behalf. But that's humans for you.

Have you ever tried milking a moose?

There was an article about a year ago concerning the students' using AI to complete work, and teachers using AI tools to detect if AI tools were being used to complete the work, so (even a year ago) you found this absurd scenario where it was just robots checking the work of other robots. Did a quick search for said article but couldn't find it. Anyway, humorous. Coupled with the WaPo article today about people "speed-running" their degrees, it's wacky, wacky world for "education". https://archive.is/bPi82