Even the guy who invented them can’t figure them out. — US health insurance is a dismal swamp of scams and opacity, a system whose patient outcomes are in freefall and whose patient costs are screaming upwards on a line that it asymptotic to infinity. As bad as the whole health insurance system is, drug plans are worse. It is literally…

Your boss? Not so much. — What makes someone “good at technology?” In part, it’s an understanding of the underlying technical principles and industry conventions — what a “power on” icon looks like, say. I have a lot of that. But there’s another component, one that’s often invisible to people like me: the extent to which…

2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. — #20yrsago The annotated ETCON http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/etcon/notes #15yrsago Fair(y) Use Tale: AMAZING video cuts up Disney to explain copyright https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2007/03/fairy-use-tale #15yrsago How the right to attach can keep spectrum free https://web.archive.org/web/20070531165646/http://www.timwu.org/log/archives/134 #10yrsago TSA frisks actual (but likely harmless) mass murdering serial bomber http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/05/tsa-gropes-kissinger.html

2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. — #15yrsago Why AACS keys will leak faster than they can be patched https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2007/05/18/aacs-updated-broken-again/ #15yrsago Saturday Evening Post poster for Silver Snail comics’s birthday https://memex.craphound.com/2007/05/18/saturday-evening-post-poster-for-silver-snail-comicss-birthday/ #10yrsago Associate editor of Elsevier’s Genomics resigns, vows to devote energies to open access https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research

Millions for front groups who insist that only Mark Zuckerberg can save us from Xi Jinping. — Have you noticed some extremely normal ads from extremely normal “grassroots activists” who are really, really worried that if we break up Facebook, China will destroy America and that is why Congress must absolutely stop trying to regulate America’s tech giants, the bristling colossi that stand guard to defend us…

Analysis from UCSF’s “Opioid Industry Documents” repository. — I have complex chronic pain, and I’ve seen a lot of specialists. One of them prescribed long-term opioids for me. I dodged a bullet there, I think. Here’s a little story about how hard it is to know whether to trust your doctor when you have a pain condition. One…

2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. — #20yrsago Kottke on ETCON https://web.archive.org/web/20020603082103/http://www.kottke.org/02/05/index.html #15yrsago Image-search isn’t a copyright violation (Perfect 10)https://web.archive.org/web/20070519084149/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005259.php #15yrsago Rudy Rucker, Terry Bisson and me reading/talking in SF https://ia802708.us.archive.org/26/items/SFinSF_Cory_Doctorow_and_Rudy_Rucker/SFinSF_1_Cory_Doctorow_256.mp3

You are not an ambulatory wallet. — As theories of change go, consumerism has a lot going for it. “Voting with your dollars” cuts out the middleman: rather than voting for a politician and hoping that they do the right thing, you can just reward good companies directly by buying their products (and punish bad companies by…

Forthcoming in the May, 2022 issue of Locus Magazine. — We’re all trapped on a bus. The bus is barreling towards a cliff. Beyond the cliff is a canyon plunge any of us will be lucky to survive. Even if we survive, none of us know how we’ll climb out of that deep canyon. Some of us want to yank…