Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Medicare pilot program will allow private companies to use artificial intelligence to review older Americans’ requests for certain medical care — and will reward the companies when they deny it.

In January, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will launch the
"Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction" (WISeR) Model to test
👉AI-powered prior authorizations on certain health services for Medicare patients in six states:
Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.
The program is scheduled to last through 2031.
❌The program effectively inserts one of private insurance’s most unpopular features
— prior authorization
— into traditional Medicare,
the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older and those with certain disabilities.
Prior authorization is the process by which patients and doctors must ask health insurers to approve medical procedures or drugs before proceeding.
https://stateline.org/2025/12/04/medicares-new-ai-experiment-sparks-alarm-among-doctors-lawmakers/

...and you're wasting even more of your life posting about your regrets at the Nazi bar. Still, they probably need to hear it most. Points for partial awakening. Hey, at least you made good money doing it, right?

"I wasted 8 years of my life in crypto"

"Over time however, I felt like I have lost my purpose in crypto. The initial siren songs of crypto’s transformative powers waned after working in the space full-time. I was disillusioned by my target customers and who I was really building for. I completely misunderstood what the actual users of crypto are v.s. just propaganda. Crypto purports that it helps decentralize the financial system, which I completely bought into, but in reality, it’s just a speculation and a gambling hyper-system that’s really just a mirror of what the economy is now."

"The reality hit me like a fucking truck. I am NOT building a new financial system. I built a casino. A casino that does not call itself a casino, but it is the biggest, online, multi-player 24/7 casino our generation has ever concocted. Some part of me wants me to feel proud that I contributed at least my 20s building this casino out. Another part of me literally feels like I wasted my entire 20s in this space. I wasted my life on this, but at least I made good money from it."

https://x.com/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640

via Hackernews. It really is comical the lengths to which companies will go to avoid being contacted by their customers.

What the fuck is a ‘fuck off contact page?’

"A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They are usually found on the websites of million or billion dollar companies, likely Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding the real support channels behind login walls. These companies tend to offer multiple tiers of support, with enterprise customers having a customer success manager who they can call on this ancient device we call phones, whereas the lower-paying customers may have to wrangle various in-app ticket mechanisms. If you solve your own problem by reading the knowledge base, then this is a win for the company. They don’t want to hear from you, they want you to fuck off."

https://www.nicchan.me/blog/the-f-off-contact-page/

Police surveil everyone driving in San Jose and search that data thousands of times per month without ever seeking a warrant. It’s an unchecked police power, an end run around the courts & a blatant privacy invasion, EFF’s Lisa Femia wrote for the Mercury News. https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/12/06/opinion-san-joses-vast-surveillance-network-is-watching-you-be-afraid/

We just publised Chapter 13 of Cooperative Enterprise and Market Economy, by @luisrazeto, tranlated by @Matt_Noyes
#cooperatives #economics #SolidarityEconomy

https://geo.coop/articles/cooperative-enterprise-and-market-economy-chapter-13

Follow-up to this morning's post about #AIslop.

@bookstardust @lefteristrip23 suggested I could turn off AI-gen image recommendations on #Pinterest. I did - thank you!

No more LEGO AI slop... but now my feed is 100% illustrations with the same style... and I don't know what to trust anymore.

I found an illustration of NYC really odd (Statue of Liberty in the middle of the city?!?), zoomed in and boom: complete gibberish on a store sign (aka surest sign of AI slop).

No more Pinterest for me 😭

It begins: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/581225/man-dumps-home-insurance-over-tower-insurance-s-sea-surge-assessment - people being unable to afford insurance for their homes due to climate-related risks they don't themselves understand. This is just the first domino.

As a Friend of PM, you’ll get a package of our new books every month and 50% off our webstore until you tell us to stop. No strings. Just radical books for the fight ahead. Sign up this month, and get this scarf free!

https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=139

Weekly GNU-like #MobileLinux Update (49/2025): Modal boats

https://linmob.net/weekly-update-49-2025/

#LinuxMobile #Jolla #SailfishOS #UbuntuTouch #Phosh #postmarketOS #PlasmaMobile #FuriOS #Mobian #Droidian #Modal #dawndrums

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

https://www.americasundoing.com/p/the-system-has-no-reverse

Dear OSS community on Mastodon,

Every day I scroll through my feed and I see proud announcements like:

“First Alpha Relase of HyperTurboWidget available"

or

“Version 2.7.1 now with improved glorb handlers!”

or

“Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is out”

… and I sit there wondering if I should be excited, terrified, or calling a licensed electrician.

Don’t get me wrong, I love open source. I just have no idea what three quarters of these projects actually do. Are we talking about a web server? A file system? A middleware thingy that keeps the flux from overflowing into the space–time continuum?

So, dear OSS developers of the world: When you announce a new release, please give us (your adoring but slightly confused audience) just a tiny bit of context.

Tell us what your software does.
Tell us why this release is cool.
Tell us what it requires to work.

Example:

We are proud to announce Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is now avalaible. While it creates a nice wormhole to 1955, it requires an underlying gigawatt stack 1.21 to work reliably.

Because nobody wants to cheer enthusiastically for “v2.7.1” while secretly Googling “what is a glorb and why does it need handling”.

Yours truly,

*Someone who wants to celebrate your achievement*s

What's inside our big bozo president? https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2025/12/08

When the House and Senate marked up stablecoin legislation, we raised all of these concerns - their anonymity, their nearly perfect design for money laundering. All the barn doors were left wide open. It’s used for crime because that is its purpose. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/technology/how-a-cryptocurrency-helps-criminals-launder-money-and-evade-sanctions.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

If I had the attention span to write fiction longer than a page I'd write a near-future story where for RFK reasons it has become easier to get illegal recreational meth than ADHD drugs so the coop in Portland that makes the black market estrogen has a side gig buying street meth and converting it backward into Adderall

DoD buried this news by releasing it right before a holiday weekend: the U.S. Navy has canceled the planned Constellation-class frigate.

This is a big deal. The Navy has spent the last 25 years failing to deliver new ships on time and on budget. People are worried that they don't really know how to do it anymore.

The Constellation class was supposed to solve that problem by using an existing ship design, the European FREMM frigate. But it ran over schedule and budget anyway. The Navy screwed with the design of this "off-the-shelf ship" so much the first one was already three years behind schedule.

https://www.twz.com/sea/navy-sinks-the-constellation-class-frigate-program

It's that time again! Tomorrow evening, 20:00 NZST is our monthly FOSS/Libre catch up. Find us at https://meeting.iridescent.nz - all welcome! We'll be discussing relevant current events, sharing case studies, looking at new technologies, and how to make a living doing this stuff! Our meetings are directed by questions people bring, projects they want to spruik, or discussions they'd like to have! You can dip in and out as the mood strikes you.

Resale values of Teslas are in the depths for all kinds of reasons, but the central one -- apart from the taint of Musk -- is that the cars are ridiculously crappy and unreliable as they age. https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/old-teslas-falling-apart

Just one more reason to avoid this toxic brand at all costs.

We need more folks who understand POSSE and why it's crucial to a) personal sovereignty, b) functional open (democratic) societies, and c) a free and open Internet: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon

The more I hear about deliberative democracy, the more I think it's a better way of sounding out the popular will, as it stands *after* considering all the relevant information and ideas. Significantly better than either horse race elections or proportional representation elections.

So how do we make introducing more deliberative decision-making a vote-winner? So that political parties will make it policy to use it more, and embed it in our political institutions.

(3/3)

#DeliberativeDemocracy

Two browser extensions that work quietly in the background to find Mastodon accounts and blog posts that may appeal to you.

https://alexsci.com/blog/calm-tech-discover/

'I reject the dead Internet theory: I see a vibrant Internet full of humans sharing their experiences and seeking connection. Degradation of the engagement-driven web is well underway, accelerated by AI slop. But the independent web works on a different incentive structure and is resistant to this effect. Humans inherently create, connect, and share: we always have and we always will. If you choose software that works in your interest you’ll find that it’s possible to make meaningful online connections without mental hazard.'