Can’t tell if we’re agreeing or disagreeing. Companies should totally be able to hire on short-term contracts. But it should be clear that it is a temporary contract from the start, not a bait-and-switch from long-term employment to hire-and-fire.

I mean if the only way they’re gonna have jobs is through predatory hiring practices that could leave them fired and without severance, then yeah. Because if the company is planning on hiring these younger workers for the long-haul, then this shouldn’t be a significant change. I think overall national policy should discourage unnecessary high-turnover and predatory hiring. I’m sure there will be situations this is still unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean we have to endorse it by way of law/policy.

I’m going to digress from the economics a tad and focus on the ethics of this. I feel like companies should be on the hook for this. You should invest in capital (including human labor) based on your confidence in its expected return. Companies should not be able to hire a myriad of workers for funzies and not have to meaningfully consider if that person will be necessary in 6 months. If it is a legitimate business venture, then the cost of potential severance for new hires should be folded into the economics of the decision to pursue that venture. Larger severance pay/worker protections encourage employers to not utilize exploitative hiring practices.

It depends on the half life of the element in question. The most comparable concrete thing we can compare this to with real numbers because we know it works is an RTG. RTGs are solid-state generators, but people could colloquially refer to them as “batteries” and not be terribly wrong. They take a quantity of a radioactive material and allow it to decay, using the heat given off to establish a thermal gradient which is then converted to electricity via thermocouples. Most of these are “fueled” with Pu-238 (at least the ones for spacecraft), which has a half life of 87.7 years. That means in 87.7 years, if you started with 4kg of Pu when you built it, you’d have only 2kg of Plutonium left. If the Pu decayed only into stable isotopes (it doesn’t) then your radioactive emissions/decay would also be exactly halved at this time. If the electrical system is perfectly efficient this would also halve the electrical power produced.

I provide this all as background because to answer your question you have to know three key factors about the device to determine the lifetime of the battery. The half-life of the isotope used, the minimum electrical requirements of the device you’re powering, and the amount of radioactive material in the initial battery. The battery’s lifetime is determined by when decay will decrease the ongoing energy output below the minimum current and voltage requirements needed by the battery. The longer the half life of the isotope, the slower this decrease is and the less initial overpowering that is required.

Ex. If you use an isotope with a 12.5 year half life for a “50-year” battery, you would need to start with 8 times the material needed for your minimum power output requirements. If you use an isotope with a 200 year half life, you only need 19% more starting mass than you minimum requirement. The first battery will produce 8x the power at the very beginning, while the second will only produce 18% more.

I know, which is why my example was about providing the patient’s name over the radio.

EMS communication over unencrypted channels is limited by HIPAA, patient information must be kept vague to protect patient privacy. In the event that, say, an individuals name needs to be given to the receiving facility to facilitate review of records prior to arrival by the ER physician, some other method of communication has to be used.

I self host a lot of shit, but after almost a year of using Obsidian I finally paid for their sync feature for one reason: iCloud sync to iOS is painfully slow.

I was sometimes waiting 30-45 seconds to jot down a note just waiting on the app to open with iCloud sync as my backend. Now, with Obsidian sync, the app is ready-to-go in seconds.

Now if you’re only going to be using on desktop, I would definitely consider a git-repository based sync, but if you’re gonna use mobile I’d recommend you at least consider Obsidian Sync

Yes, but most DRM has been circumvented in one way or another. DRM primarily continues to keep law-abiding citizens from easily acquiring a copy of media they rightfully own as opposed to preventing piracy.

Though if institutions insist on utilizing DRM for prevention of privacy, I do think that DRM should be built to fail after a meaningful timeframe, at worst the expiry of the copyright for the material. Unfortunately many pieces of media, particularly video games, are abandoned and unsupported long before their copywriter expires. Abandonware in general is not well handled by modern copywrite law.

I think the point is more so why are digital purchased DRM’ed and prohibited from local storage in so many ways. The historical argument is “well you’re not buying it, you’re buying a license to use it for as long as we wish to provide it”, but why does it necessarily need to be that way. And more generally, from the standpoint of artistic/media preservation, as BluRay releases continue to decrease and console video game releases become continually more digital-only, these non-archivable or locked-without-server-license-validation media results in IP that at some point in time, this media could be permanently lost.

Personally, I feel this is unacceptable. The media we consume forms a huge portion of our culture, and is just as much an example of artistic expression as painting. While I thoroughly believe artists/companies should be able to charge for these properties, I do not believe that when it is no longer profitable for them to support the system, that these pieces of media should simply be discarded with no method for future recovery and preservation.

That’s not true. HIPAA covers anyone handling protected health information in a professional manner. If some office clerk at the VA is mailing out copies of HIPAA-protected information, they’re bound by HIPAA. If a consulting IT firm has access to a hospital’s servers as they’re changing something about the EHR, they’re bound by HIPAA. Protected information cannot make its way from a “covered entity” to a non-covered entity like a totally unrelated bakery who would not have an obligation to protect your information without either: 1) violating the law, 2) you personally disclosing the information to the non-protected party, or 3) you or someone authorized on your behalf signing a disclosure waiver permitting the covered entity to disclose