Interesting Links for 27-05-2025

[andrewducker]

1. The US health system is now overseen by vaccine deniers. The effects are entirely predictable

(tags:disease pandemic usa vaccines doom )

2. Hong Kong children urged to get Covid jabs as 'whole paediatric ward full'

(tags:pandemic HongKong china children doom vaccination )

3. An Oral History of 'Lilo & Stitch' (the original)

(tags:animation movies Disney Hawaii history )

4. German court rules cookie banners must offer "reject all" button (if they have an "accept all" button)

(tags:cookies surveillance germany dataprotection GoodNews )

5. It makes no sense to cut funding to mental health services when that costs you money in the long run.

(tags:mentalhealth money edinburgh )

6. How much energy does AI use?

(tags:ai electricity )

7. Owls! in! Towels!

(tags:owls cute photos )

8. Explaining a 31-month sentence for a tweet

(tags:racism riots uk law )

Comments

[toothycat]

5. "It makes no sense to cut funding to mental health services when that costs you money in the long run" - sadly, the incentives don't work out that way:

* cost-cutting today means "savings" that you can claim credit for today

* long-term fallout will happen under a future government, who will take the blame - any pushback they might make on that will be lost in the general "everything bad is the fault of a previous government" rhetoric that previous governments flooded us with and so taught us to ignore

[reverancepavane]

Also in bureaucracies it often simply a matter of shifting the costs off your desk. It doesn't matter if the nett result to society as a whole is greater, it's no longer being paid by your department and you have achieved considerable cost-savings within your department. Well done!

Of course this means that [eventually] someone else will have to to pick up the slack, but that's not your problem. Or it gets placed back on your desk and you claim you don't have the funding for it, so you will need supplemental grants to administer the scheme.

[hilarita]

Indeed - this is how we can spend more and more on healthcare, because running down preventative, early intervention, and/or GP care saves money in the short term, and we can watch the soaring cost of secondary care. (See also; cutting social care budget for similar consequences... and cutting Sure Start...)

It's really really depressing.