I won't call clickbait on this as it is a personal site and the headline is accurate. I saw another article recently with the same issues.
He is dead from a heart attack. If dispatch, EMS, hospitals, etc. didn't exist doesn't mean he would be alive. They didn't kill him, they failed to save him.
The other article I saw was how the hospital "killed" a drowning victim. Water was never mentioned.
There are many failures in our systems. There will always be exceptions to rules. It is a heart-breaking story but at the same time it is impressive. Maybe the system failed on this call but the fact that their is a system with this many resources is amazing. Hit 3 digits on the phone and LEO, EMS, Fire are all alerted 24/7 us pretty impressive to me.
But you are going to imply it by bringing it up at all.
> They didn't kill him, they failed to save him.
The post does not say otherwise.
Please give this, of all topics, the respect it deserves, respond to the article as it is actually written, and don't use this, of all things, as an opportunity to get on your high horse about some other article you have problems with.
It isn't all about getting somebody TO the hospital but getting them INTO the hospital/ED/ER. EMS in an ambulance who are alerting a hospital of an MI enroute will get their attention, a walk-in will have to wait unless there are obvious signs.
Calling 911 will normally get LEO on scene that know CPR and can do radio communications. A lot of dispatchers are EMDs (emergency medical dispatchers) that can start helping immediately. You may have off duty EMTs nearby that are scanning the radio. Finding a fixed target it much easier than finding a moving target (white car headed towards hospital), you are on your own if you get stuck in traffic. Statistically, 911/EMS is the best outcome. I agree with another commenter, exceptions do exist.
I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things.
-their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG
-they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base
-DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally
-ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own platform
Anecdote (why I think it is a scam)-
I had a FB account, I needed it for a previous job but didn't want it. I set up a random email address at a host I had never used, had a made-up FB name, and used a password generator for both the email address and FB accounts. My FB account had almost no activity besides viewing company posts. FB was only used from a single desktop computer. Passwords were stored in my (local only desktop) password manager.
After a couple years, FB emailed me and claimed my account was hacked. The "hacker" changed my profile picture (was a blank avatar icon) to an AI photo of a random guy. Facebook says it is hacked but they keep it visible, my two friends are still friends with the old account (they know it was hacked). FYI - I didn't care enough to send them a copy of my ID, nor did my ID match my user name, so I couldn't reclaim my account.
How would a hacker combine a random username, with a random email (has not been pwnd) only used for FB, guess a ~20 character random password, etc? And why, to steal an account with no followers and to do nothing with the account? That is a lot of work and criminal charges for nothing.
I am fine with FB saying the account was hacked and closing it. It has been years and the account is still live. Is it "active" and counted towards their users? They have a HUGE financial incentive to keep and count all accounts, and they have no oversite to verify accounts since it is all calculated internally with opaque algorithms.
> I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble.
I imagine almost none of it. Social networks solve connectivity problems that people want solved. Talk to some "casuals" who aren't in tech about how they find out about new restaurants, social trends, arts and crafts, places to go visit, etc. and the answer is Instagram or TikTok. And FB does the same but for older generations.
Ads are also a fundamental revenue pillar in this world. You can layer in relevance ads for a product to anyone, at any time, for any topic. If something exists and people pay attention to it, there's a way to make money advertising around it.
There's ... certainly deeper questions to be had about if this stuff is actually good for us, but in the mean time, it's very real and worth a lot of money.
Meta's security team seemingly does not care. My mom had her long-time Facebook account taken over during the summer. It was a credentials stuffing attack (she's now using a password manager with random passwords), and the bad actor immediately put on 2fa TOTP and signed up for some advanced security so the account couldn't be recovered without the 2fa.
We spent weeks trying to recover the account, but recovery codes weren't being sent through to her email or phone, the email and phone that has been on the account for 10+ years. The bad actor started making posts that she had cars to sell and to message her if they wanted to buy (also claiming that her sister was sick and she needed the money which is why she was selling the cars, completely untrue) Tens of her friends including her son reported the account as taken over and the posts as fraudulent. All responses from Facebook saying there was no indication of anything violating the guidelines, which is insane because all this behavior taken together screams account takeover.
Eventually, I reached out to a friend who worked at Meta who filed an internal report and we were hopeful that might actually fix it, but nothing ever came of it and when I reached out to the friend a month later he said the report was closed and he couldn't see any more details (for security reasons). If my mom meeting me in person, and me reaching out to my former teammate on a live phone call and proving my identity, and that teammate filing a report with the security team can't get it fixed, what can?
At this point, we think the original account is still up (we can't see, since the bad actor has blocked the entire family) and every new account she makes gets deleted for being a sockpuppet / ban evader.
She's devastated that someone ruined her online life like this, and that she was in Facebook groups for her career that she no longer has access to, she can no longer keep up with her friends and family. So many local businesses post their events and updates on Facebook and she has no ability to see these anymore.
We don't know what to do next. I'm so thoroughly disappointed with how Meta handled the situation. It's clearly an account takeover if someone looked at the account and the indicators. I think our next step is to write a letter to Meta legal alleging gross neglect after being presented with evidence of identity theft. Maybe that finally would get someone's attention. I'm nearly to the point where I would potentially spend thousands of dollars of my own money for a lawyer just to prove a point.
My two cents of info as mildly informed. I am a volunteer ff/emt.
My department is very well funded compared to the rest of our county. Compared to cities, it is laughably underfunded. We are 90 percent volunteer. We have zero paramedics, only EMTs (about 4).
An Engine not only has to run but has to pump. An engine may drive 3 miles but then run for 20 hours without moving but pumping water the entire time (using the transmission to do so). If the pump is not up to standards, FFs do not enter a building. No water, no entry. If the pump isn't compliant then it is not longer an "engine". Mileage is irrelevant. A low mileage engine (10k) might have a million other problems after 100k hours. Who fixes that in a volunteer department?
Ambulances are the same. The drive may be short but the engine never stops idling or charging the equipment on board. In the city the answer is always transport. If you have 1 ambulance and 6 hours round trip, you may stay on scene for a while to avoid a transport (assuming you don't risk the patient's life).
Most volunteer departments have 1-2 engines, and those are aging. If an engine goes out of service without a replacement, we stop responding.
This is not a city/rural problem. If you have ever taken a road trip, gone camping, visited relatives in "the country", then then you are relying on, and praying they have the equipment and staff to respond. Go outside the city for a rafting trip- swiftwater, rope rescue, EMS, traffic... all in the hands of volunteers with no resources.
Back to the article- we have one engine out of service. We can't buy 20x our tax revenue. Yes, everything has gone up in price. When EMS and Fire becomes unpurchaseable, there are (dire) consequences.
Thanks for the first hand feedback. It is helpful. When I read your post carefully ("laughably underfunded. We are 90 percent volunteer. We have zero paramedics"; "Who fixes that in a volunteer department?"), the first thing that crossed my mind is your tax revenue is just too low. You cannot have nice things with low taxes.
Another way to think about it: Are other highly developed nations seeing the same "crisis(es)" that you mention? (Think G-7 and close friends.) Hint: They do not.
We're definitely not undertaxed. A big problem is wholesale public corruption. We now pay inflated salaries for current public workers and for extremely-high retirement plans for past workers which was promised decades ago but not funded.
All this means we get taxed a lot more for ever fewer workers.
And this only scratches the surface. NFPA demanding all breakers be arc fault (add $1k+ to every home build), Seattle permitting being years backlog, governments don't have workers which know how things should be built so our construction costs are 10x other developed countries. We're living off legacy and have an ever-dropping standard of living.
it's usually both. things are not cost-effective, too many things happen at muni/county level, but of course at higher levels there's a huge backlog (due to lack of competence, due to low spend), plus the US is huge and sparse.
the "developed world" has a lot of problems with high costs (Baumol effect, extremely high standards, etc) and also the problem of low scale. China was able to roll out thousands of miles of high-speed rail at a very low relative cost, because of scale, a bit lower quality and lower standards (human rights, eminent domain, worker safety)
for example when it comes to policing the US pays comparatively less (given the rate of crime it has) even though it pays more than many other OECD countries
> Ambulances are the same. The drive may be short but the engine never stops idling or charging the equipment on board.
How much power are we talking about? 10-20 years ago, sure, using the engine and alternator for power made sense. Nowadays a hybrid has a several-kWh battery and plenty of power, along with an engine and generator optimized for much better charging performance. A PHEV is even better.
I wonder why there don’t seem to be PHEV van platforms. If someone made something like a Transit or Sprinter with a 50-100 kWh battery, an engine, and an option for a serious 120/240V system so that monstrous 12V wiring could be avoided, it seems that much nicer, more efficient and longer lasting ambulances could be built, not to mention camper vans and such.
This is exactly it. I'm also a volunteer for a small town, in a department that is decently funded. We have had the same two engines since 2009. We just (within the last month) received a new engine. It became extremely difficult to provide the level of service the community expects, and come up with money for a new engine. It's a major struggle.
Also something most folks don't know: about 70% of the firefighters in the US are volunteers. If you're in a big city you'll have 4 paid folks on an engine (maybe 3 and 1 intern) but as soon as you venture out of the city you'll see more engines 100% staffed by volunteers. And if you don't know the difference that's a good thing!
Fire departments run on budgets that would also shock you (how low they are).
The issue is that you're expecting trucks to go out in conditions like https://youtube.com/watch?v=7IFEiwNMrZ8, particularly if your volunteer brigade operates in a rural area, and they therefore have to keep crews alive in those conditions. This puts a minimum cost on each one.
Yeah, the minimum cost isn't $2M, but it's probably pretty close to $400k a truck. Then you add on urban rescue equipment if you're not in a rural area and things start to get very expensive.
Put a pump on a trailer. The problem with this country is we're not allowed to have "decent"; we are only allowed to buy the "best" and so we just hobble along with old shit while everything's breaking down and we're paying too much for the things we do buy.
In Australia that's either an ultralight tanker, which would cost around $100k USD today but with far lower 550L capacity and a lower throughput pump than a heavy tanker, or it's a command vehicle, and its modern equivalent would cost about $60k USD but have no pump or water tank. The ultralight tankers are mostly used for getting to fires faster when they're small, dealing with inaccessible terrain, or just being an extra vehicle during blacking out etc.
The problem you're always going to run into is that your truck needs to haul around 10 tonnes of water and protect its crew. You can stick a pump on the back of a hardened ute, but then you need to leave and find water 20x more frequently plus your pump is a dinky little water pistol, or you can drive a commercial water tanker into a bushfire, but then your driver needs to be unusually brave and no longer have much to live for.
I accept that firefighters are getting ripped off, but it feels like maybe 5% to 20% of the cost could be reduced, and then you're still dealing with unaffordable equipment.
Most fire engines in the US don't carry significant water, they're "pumper trucks" for boosting pressure from fire hydrants. 80% of US citizens live in urban areas with access to hydrants. They also carry lots of other gear too: https://rosenbaueramerica.com/fire-trucks/pumpers/
But you can do everything those do with an E-series cutaway ($200k fully outfitted?) and a pump pulled on a trailer. For a whole lot less than $2M.
Here in rural Western Australia there's a range of official vehicles, the local (wheatbelt area) farmers have supplemented them recently with an ex military unimog purchased at auction and fitted with an 8 (ish) tonne water tank (with anti slosh baffles) and extra cab insulation.
Not sure where specifically they sourced it, one of the military surplus auction houses like:
Is Covered California a government entity, for profit, non profit, other...? Not that it matters.
"Leak" is not the right term. By default a "website" is a 404. Throw some HTML on there and users can see something. Adding LinkedIn tracking is a deliberate choice. Calling the data "leaked" is like saying a raft sprung a "leak" when the person in the raft punctured it 60 times (number of trackers). The data was shared and pushed to LI, on purpose. They (Covered CA) installed LinkedIn's code on their site. The code did exactly what it was intended to do, send data to LinkedIn.
A leak is accidental, this was a choice by Covered CA.
I tried NextCloud + Memories but multiple hosts said the facial recognition app wouldn't work. Face recognition is important. I tried Librehost for Nextcloud, seemed great until face recognition didn't work and support said it wouldn't.
I can't self-host hardware, my home internet is shat.
I really want to run a managed-host instance of Immich (or NextCloud) but am struggling. This is for family photos shared by 3 siblings. 100GB+ of storage is ideal, cpu and connections isn't as important since at max it will be 3 users.
All these programs looks great and have easy Docker setups, but I can't figure out Docker storage. Docker seems to be more about running the app, not storage. If I install Immich on a Docker instance, do I have to connect it to external storage? If so who and how?
I'm more familiar with kubernetes for running production-grade apps and that's what I went with. I run ubuntu's microk8s, and the volume management is in kubernetes-land which I understand well. Finally helmfiles deploys my Postgres and immich helm charts. Perhaps "overkill" to some, but it's tooling I'm very familiar with, and feel comfortable running in "production" for my personal server.
Worth noting that immich itself recommends not using immich for the single source of your images and videos from how active development it is, so I also run nextcloud + crunchydata's postgres also inside microk8s/kubernetes.
Appreciate the response. Wow, not going to happen. I am a (self deprecating) script kiddy. This is overkill for me. Everything you said was over my head. On a positive note, I don't feel bad for failing to figure it out.
Business Idea- I would pay 10-15 dollars per month for a managed hosted Immich (or similar) instance. (I "own", you manage) Minimal processing, minimal sharing (no social), but big storage.
I love the war stories people are sharing. I am surprised nobody is addressing the main point of the article- the frustration of being blamed.
Mistakes and technical limitations are understandable, but why blame the customer? An automated error message was still written by a human. Human people decided the response to "invalid characters".
Subbing in a computer for a human doesn't create a valid excuse. Saying, "being nice doesn't scale", doesn't make things right.
My war story- tried to get a copy of my birth certificate. My mother doesn't have a middle name. Never did. First and last only. The county office required me to tell them her middle name. After much arguing they said her last name was her married name and her middle name was her maiden name. When I asked what her name was before marriage, I finally got it much to the dismay of the employees.
At least I had a human to look at. That eventually, with much work, used common sense over programmed logic.
The main navigation on my site is: Thoughts/Ideas/Stuff.
Thoughts- serve no purpose, brain dump so I can stop thinking about them.
Ideas- I wish I could make but can't.
Stuff- things I have made, mostly pointless and stupid
My mom said my website was fantastic. Other than her I doubt anyone has ever seen it and that is fine.
I had a recent experience with Venmo, owned by Paypal. Not sure if it is related but it was very frustrating.
I thought I already had Venmo so when I customer asked I said yes. Turns out I had a Zelle account. So I quickly set up Venmo. They did a business and personal account by default. I went through all the steps and Venmo said everything was working and ready.
The customer transferred me the money and boom, my account was frozen for "violating the ToS", no more explanation. They transferred money to an account Venmo said was fine. Transferring money IS their business so I thought it weird that this violated their ToS. Also weird that nothing violated the ToS until they had my money.
There is no phone number to call. Chat doesn't help.
Somewhat related- I am often disappointed and surprised at how many new houses are being marketed as "green". 4200 square feet, 3 bed 4 bath, 3 car garage- but it has solar panels, low-flow faucets, and "natural" granite counter tops.
New houses and neighborhoods are cookie-cutter to reduce costs. The land is flattened and natural vegetation removed. Three floor plans with tons of windows are repeated, regardless of orientation to the sun. Then concrete roads, lawns, ornamental plants are added.
Recycling addresses the symptoms but not the cause. Reducing addresses the cause.
There are probably national, regional, and local laws preventing this but why is property taxes not progressive? Ignoring lobbying, is there a legal reason why progressive property taxes can't be created? Is there a region that does this?
He is dead from a heart attack. If dispatch, EMS, hospitals, etc. didn't exist doesn't mean he would be alive. They didn't kill him, they failed to save him.
The other article I saw was how the hospital "killed" a drowning victim. Water was never mentioned.
There are many failures in our systems. There will always be exceptions to rules. It is a heart-breaking story but at the same time it is impressive. Maybe the system failed on this call but the fact that their is a system with this many resources is amazing. Hit 3 digits on the phone and LEO, EMS, Fire are all alerted 24/7 us pretty impressive to me.
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