Kris Sargent, MD @kristofor@qoto.org

If you’re wondering why hospitals are facing dire staffing shortages, and having to transition to crisis standards of care, just look at how health care workers have been treated over the last 2 1/2 years.

So many of my close friends and colleagues are working on an exit plan for the next 5 years if they haven’t already left. Some are staying only because of student loans.

This is exactly what we have been warning about.

Both #Google and #Apple will soon be facing an uncomfortable and crucial inflection point, brought about by Elon's #Twitter.

The terms of service for both firms' mobile app stores prohibit hate speech and a variety of other kinds of toxic speech that are rapidly becoming the norm on Twitter under Musk, and that (judging from his continuing statements) could soon become the majority of posts on the platform.

While it is arguable how well both Apple and Google have handled apps up to now that catered to the far right end of the political spectrum from day one, Twitter is a different case, since it has had (at least up to now) a much broader spectrum of users who by and large are not as tolerant of the kinds of speech on which most users of those other platforms thrive. The same can be said of most advertisers, many of whom have already paused their Twitter ad buys out of concerns regarding Musk's behavior and actions. Yet another factor is EU regulations that specifically prohibit much of the kinds of speech that Musk is now gleefully inviting back onto the platform.

The situation is complicated by many firms and municipalities using Twitter for important announcements, but as Twitter skews toward catering to fascism these entities would be wise to plan for other communications channels as soon as possible.

More imminently, it is likely that both Google and Apple, along with various of Twitter's infrastructure providers (some of whom, reportedly, haven't been paid for bills that preceded Elon's coronation), will be under pressure to reassess their participation in an increasingly toxic Twitter ecosystem. In the cases of Apple and Google, the calls for them to enforce their Terms of Service as written can only be ignored at the firms' own peril over time.

This will be an ethical test on a grand scale. We will all be watching. -L

In case you missed it, here's last week's comic illustrating the history of #Twitter in four panels:

In 1959, police were called to a segregated library when a Black 9-year-old boy trying to check out books refused to leave, after being told the library was not for Black people.

The boy, Ronald McNair, went on to became an astronaut. The library is also now named after him

For a long time, when I'd read a comic with Lex Luthor in it, and he'd be... I dunno, conspiring with a guy who's super power is that he is mediocre at riddles, and maybe Solomon Grundy or someone like that, in order to launch their army of poison turtles into Metropolis, I'd scoff and say, "it's unrealistic that the world's richest man would waste his time and money on something that's only going to showcase to the world how incompetent he is."

I owe DC comics an apology.

Amazon Alexa is a colossal failure on pace to lose $10 billion for the company this year. Good. Couldn't have happened to a nicer product. Stop normalizing filling your house with always-on microphones controlled by billionaires.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/

I try to keep in mind Matt Levin of Bloomberg’s formulation about what’s happening in cryptocurrency and exchanges (paraphrased):

• A firm has a liquidity crisis if they have actually valuable assets backing their debts at some ratio but can’t readily liquidate those assets to meet their cash needs.

• A solvency crisis is when a company lacks substantial or any net assets with which to redeem debts (loan calls, etc.)

Because crypto has no underlying value, it’s all solvency.

Interesting explanation from a decently large Twitter advertiser on why they've paused their ad budget on Twitter after keeping it running for the past couple of weeks. https://www.teamblind.com/post/i-told-my-team-to-pause-our-750kmonth-twitter-ads-budget-last-week-4dnbo1Ft

A thread on transphobia.

I don't get what it's like to be trans. I am straight, white, cisgender. Upper middle class.

For a long time, I didn't say much in public. Because being trans was so foreign to me. It made me feel uncomfortable. I didn't want to speak for someone else. But over the last year I realized that had to change.

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The Fraudulent King - Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

https://ez.substack.com/p/the-fraudulent-king

Today is #TransDayofRemembrance when we honor and remember trans lives taken by violence. How horrifying that a deadly attack upon the LGBTQ+ community in Colorado Springs should occur right before this solemn day.
Hate isn’t born in us. It is taught. It must end.
This starts with our political leaders, who must cease their cynical attacks against our community before another attack occurs.
Call out the hate. Remind them of its consequences. Hold them to account.

In case you were curious about how things are going on the bird site, this is what’s listed in the News section now. No more articles from news sources or verified orgs. Just amplification for right-wing punditry and grievance politics.
#riptwitter

Twitter users are all like “I don’t know if I can trust a bunch of career sysadmins and network engineers to run their own Mastodon instances” — meanwhile Elon is just running around the Twitter data center going “what’s this button do?”

"A video posted on the right-wing site Rumble alleging to show evidence of election fraud in Dallas, Texas... was obtained by the Election Oversight Group, which is managed by a man who pled guilty to voyeurism charges after secretly filming people in his home bathroom."

Also, no voter fraud! The best people!

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/kevin-moncla-election-oversight-group/