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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
The American illness profit system is the most expensive in the world and one of the worst in the developed world in terms of social outcome data. Now it is getting even more expensive as this article describes. Because the bribery of politicians is legal in this country none of the Congressional whores who benefit from this bribery are willing to do anything to transform this greedy approach to a universal birthright single-payer healthcare system. And you peasant cow being milked. Look at what your insurance costs, or if you are on Medicare what the supplemental you have to have now costs. And God help you if you are caught up in Medicare Advantage.
Illustration: Guardian Design
Hospitals are gobbling up doctor’s offices – and they’re bringing higher prices to patients when they do, even if a patient never sets foot on a hospital campus.
Enter the “hospital facility fee”: a charge hospitals can add to bills from doctors’ offices, outpatient surgical clinics and diagnostics centers that they own, rebranding them as “outpatient hospital departments”, even if the facility is miles from a hospital campus.
“It’s one of the most egregious examples of hospital financing at the expense of consumers,” said Liz Hagan, director of policy solutions at the United States of Care, a non-profit advocacy group that released a new report on the practice.
The report, “Behind the Bill” argues that “hospitals are at the center of a massive market failure”, where consolidation is driving price hikes for patients.
There is no data on how often people are hit with the charges. But it’s widespread enough that one of US of Care’s own staff members was charged while writing the report – a facility fee of $154.52 was added to a bill for a flu test.
AI generating police reports for law enforcement, as this article describes. What could possibly go wrong? Everything, and it will be incredibly racist. AI is slowly taking over the structure of our culture, and nothing good is going to come of this.
Image by Axon / Futurism
Taser maker and police contractor Axon has announced a new product called “Draft One,” an AI that can generate police reports from body cam audio.
As Forbes reports, it’s a brazen and worrying use of the tech that could easily lead to the furthering of institutional ills like racial bias in the hands of police departments. That’s not to mention the propensity of AI models to “hallucinate” facts, which could easily lead to chaos and baseless accusations.
“It’s kind of a nightmare,” Electronic Frontier Foundation surveillance technologies investigations director Dave Maass told Forbes. “Police, who aren’t specialists in AI, and aren’t going to be specialists in recognizing the problems with AI, are going to use these systems to generate language that could affect millions of people in their involvement with the criminal justice system.”
“What could go wrong?” he pondered.
Axon claims its new AI, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, can help cops spend less time writing up reports.
Abortion is illegal statewide in Texas, but residents in the city of Amarillo want to go a step further — banning even the use of the city’s roads by people seeking the procedure elsewhere. Texas, a state that already has anti-abortion laws with no exception for rape or incest, has towns such as Amarillo that want to take the control of women still further, as this report explains. They don’t want a woman seeking an abortion to drive on their roads. It isn’t clear to anyone how this would be enforced. Will fertile girls and women in that city be forced to register their menstrual cycle and check in each month by sending a bloody tampon to Amarillo’s mayor? One thing is clear. If you get pregnant in Texas, you better keep it a secret, particularly if you want to terminate. Of course, if you are pregnant and something goes wrong, your doctor will have to know, and they will next compel him to report you.
The Amarillo City Council is considering a new ban on using local roads to seek an abortion, despite the procedure already being outlawed across Texas Credit: Moisés ÁVILA / AFP
Abortion is illegal statewide in Texas, but residents in the city of Amarillo want to go a step further — banning even the use of the city’s roads by people seeking the procedure elsewhere.
Dismissed as grandstanding and extremist by critics, such laws are legally dubious and almost impossible to enforce — yet that hasn’t stopped their proliferation across conservative locales in the United States.
The highways passing through Amarillo connect Republican-led Texas with New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas, where abortion is still legal.
“We’re experiencing all these horrors, like abortion trafficking,” Mark Lee Dickson, the founder of the group Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn, told AFP.
The term “sanctuary city” typically refers to liberal towns that offer certain protections for undocumented immigrants — but is increasingly being used by conservatives seeking to restrict abortion rights at the local level.
Some cities have voted to outlaw abortion within city limits, […]
Do you get information from the Fox propaganda channel? If you do you are being lied to constantly, and continuously, and it is the cause of the Great Schism Trend. Thom Hartmann presents the best explanation I have seen explaining how villains like Rupert Murdoch, his Fox propaganda organization, and the oligarchs who align with him, have reawakened racism in the United States. Murdoch and his corporations are evil incarnate and, I think, should be outlawed. They are not exercising free speech, they are trying to turn the United States into a racist male-dominant christofascist pseudo-democracy.
Credit:Frank Okay / Unsplash
The GOP and rightwing hate media have turned racism into both a political weapon and a machine to generate billions in annual profits. Today’s “school choice” movement, racial and anti-immigrant hatred, and the MAGA movement all have the same roots.
America’s media and the GOP try to pretend that the primary animating force of Trump’s MAGA movement isn’t race, but it absolutely is. And it’s been both politically and financially profitable for those willing to join him.
When, in 1954, the then-moderate-dominated Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling and said that public schools must integrate, the response from the right was swift and certain. By the end of that decade public schools across the South had closed, leaving private school or no school as the only option. It continued into the 60s.
Prince Edward County, Virginia, for example, shut down all their public schools from 1959 to 1963. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, that school district closed the all-Black Summerton High School […]
You hardly hear, read, or see anything about this in the mainstream media but those who are focused on AI are becoming more and more alarmed. Here is one of the reasons, AI lies very well and convincingly. This is becoming a growing danger to our society.
Image by Getty
AI models are, apparently, getting better at lying on purpose.
In the PNAS paper, German AI ethicist Thilo Hagendorff goes so far as to say that sophisticated LLMs can be encouraged to elicit “Machiavellianism,” or intentional and amoral manipulativeness, which “can trigger misaligned deceptive behavior.”
“GPT- 4, for instance, exhibits deceptive behavior in simple test scenarios 99.16% of the time,” the University of Stuttgart researcher writes, citing his own experiments in quantifying various “maladaptive” traits in 10 different LLMs, most of which are different versions within OpenAI’s GPT family.
Billed as a human-level champion in the political strategy board game “Diplomacy,” Meta’s Cicero model was the subject of the Patterns study. As the disparate research group — comprised of a physicist, a philosopher, and two AI safety experts — found, the LLM got […]
I don’t know how anyone can see this as anything but a threat by criminal Trump to Judge Juan Merchan. A threat that he better not to put him in prison or, if Trump is elected, he will face severe retribution. We are watching one man get away, again and again, with actions, and words, that would result in the incarceration of anyone else. And it goes on day after day with nothing happening to him.
Criminal Trump will hold the judge responsible for how the sentence affects his campaign, his inner circle said. Credit: Composite: AP / Getty
Donald Trump is determined to avoid jail, but if he does get handed a prison sentence after his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York last week, the former president’s inner circle is certain he will lay the blame squarely at the judge’s feet, sources familiar with the matter said.
The precise way Trump might blame the judge, Juan Merchan, remains unclear because Trump has been avoidant of the issue and the matter was not resolved when he huddled with his top advisers at a Trump Tower meeting immediately after the verdict on Thursday, the sources said.
But Trump is likely to double down on his attacks against Merchan, directing his supporters at rallies and in Truth Social posts to take up their grievances with the judge, one of the sources added.
The consequences of Trump’s likely rhetoric are difficult to predict. Trump has been railing against Merchan for months as being unfair and in conspiracy cahoots with the […]
There was a time when the United States was considered to have the best public education system in the world. However, those days are long gone. The U.S. now has one of the worst public education systems in the developed world, and the American population as a result is the least literate, and the least numerate compared with populations in other developed nations. Like our healthcare system, our roads, bridges, and our railroads, our public education system is in steep decline. As a result, because we have one party that has little or no interest in fostering wellbeing through effective good governance the United States is a country in decline.
Florida public school classroom Credit: Getty
Florida’s public school enrollment rate is dropping, but experts are divided on how much its universal school choice program is to blame.
Multiple districts in the state are closing schools, as attendance falls while thousands of students flock to private school or homeschooling options.
Some experts believe the shift is the natural result of giving parents more options in schooling, while others say Florida’s “lack of transparency” in private school data is hiding a bigger story.
“I don’t think it would be a surprise, or that it should be surprise, that as school choice grows significantly, that it means people are often leaving public schools, and, as that occurs, public schools and public-school districts may have to change how they operate,” said Neal McCluskey, director for the Center for Educational Freedom at the CATO Institute. “That may mean some schools should shut down.”
“That is not a problem with choice because choice in this case — people are selecting something that they think works better for themselves. And that’s ultimately […]
Maria Ramirez Uribe and Amy Sherman, Staff Writers - Politifact
Stephan:
I got an email today from a woman who wrote asking me did I not understand “that the immigrants Biden is letting in are drug dealers, people from mental institutions, and criminals? You say you do trends, why aren’t you writing about this trend? It is destroying our country.” I know this is based on a Trump quote that President Biden “is letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions, drug dealers pour in.” I see this all over MAGAt media. Is it true? Well, let’s deal with some actual facts, as this report describes. Trump’s claim, like almost everything he says is, in fact, absolute crap.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump talks with Maj. Gen. Thomas Suelzer, Adjutant General for the State of Texas, at Shelby Park during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, Feb. 29, 2024, in Eagle Pass, Texas. Credit: AP
Former President Donald Trump, who has promised to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation” in U.S. history if reelected, says an enormous number of immigrants entering the country illegally are people with mental illnesses or criminal records.
President Joe Biden “is letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions, drug dealers pour in,” Trump told reporters May 29 in Manhattan during his falsified business records trial. “Venezuela, if you look at their crime statistics, they’ve gone down 72% in crime because they’re releasing all their criminals into our country because of this horrible president that we have.”
We fact-checked a similar statement by Trump about Venezuela and rated it False. Here, we will examine Trump’s statement that “millions” of immigrants are […]
