onfocus

"For generations, members of the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, have used Christian faith to sell health coverage to more than a hundred thousand people like Martin. Instead they delivered pain, debt and financial ruin, according to an investigation by ProPublica based on leaked internal documents, land records, court files and interviews. They have done this not once but twice and have faced few consequences."

Another side effect of our broken US health care system is evil people like these using people's faith and right wing media diet against them to steal money.

"One of the more scary themes in the TV show is that fungi communicate through long filaments. This is true. Fungi communicate by sending electrical impulses underground through thread-like structures (called hyphae). These can expand to form a network. In fact, scientists have found that fungi have at least 50 unique “words.” If we had a fungal pandemic, it could be highly coordinated."

Enjoying this show but not really enjoying learning fungus facts because sometimes I chanterelle the difference between fiction and real life.

"In 2006, when scientists discovered that H5N1 had not spread easily among humans because it settles deep in their lungs, Kuiken of Erasmus University Medical Center warned that if the virus evolved to bind to receptors in the upper respiratory tract — from which it could become more easily airborne — the risk of a pandemic among humans would rise substantially. The mink outbreak in Spain is a signal that we might be moving along exactly that path."

So this is happening. I really appreciate Zeynep Tufekci's reporting.

"We have plenty of shower space and time. The metered commodity here is water."

Fascinating slice of life from the land of polar bears.

"And that’s fair because this is new—not just the drug, but the idea of the drug. There’s no API or software to download, but this is nonetheless a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old—and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection."

Paul Ford shares his experience and anxieties taking a newly approved drug that removes hunger.

"Concerns are, indeed, growing. A regular reader of the Times might conclude that the paper itself is cultivating those concerns—even when the “data is sparse.” With the story about social transitioning in schools, in the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast."

NYT continues to be awful and push a harmful agenda.

"But the need for humans to label data for AI systems remains, at least for now. 'They’re impressive, but ChatGPT and other generative models are not magic – they rely on massive supply chains of human labor and scraped data, much of which is unattributed and used without consent,' Andrew Strait, an AI ethicist, recently wrote on Twitter. 'These are serious, foundational problems that I do not see OpenAI addressing.'"

Warning: this article is disturbing. Companies shouldn't be able to cause people psychological damage to get funding.

"It was just so frustrating to be dealing with something so traumatic, and then just gamble with the outcome of Amanda's life unnecessarily,” says Josh.

Awful result of a long campaign to take health care options away from people and Republicans are campaigning on expanding this suffering.

Listeners of You're Wrong About call in with their abortion stories. As with so many of this show’s episodes it’s the context I wish the media was regularly providing for important stories.

If you're in Oregon this is something simple you can do to help put gun safety on the November ballot.

"During the 1960s, for example, it seemed impossible to change tobacco use. The tobacco industry had one of the strongest lobbies in history, smoking was part of our every day lives, and people were addicted. But it needed to change. We were getting more and more evidence that tobacco causes lung cancer, and we started unpacking the dangers of second-hand smoking. So we treated it like a public health issue. And we did this not by banning tobacco, but through a consistent and coordinated effort of approaching the public health problem from multiple angles."

Such a great point. We should address gun violence as a public health problem.