#international insurance providers

[lucasjack11]

A Guide to Selecting the Best Life and Health Insurance Companies in Dubai

In the vibrant city of Dubai, one must protect one's future by procuring appropriate life and health insurance. Given the quantity of available options, locating the ideal suit can be a daunting task. We shall explore the realm of insurance in order to assist you in identifying the most suitable life and health insurance providers that cater to your specific requirements, with an emphasis on National General Insurance (NGI).

Understanding Your Needs

It is imperative to assess one's needs prior to exploring the vast array of insurance providers. Ascertain whether coverage for oneself, one's family, or both is required. Assess your financial responsibilities, long-term objectives, and possible health hazards. This initial phase establishes the groundwork for selecting the most appropriate insurance policy.

Exploring options

Dubai offers a variety of life and health insurance plans. Conduct thorough research to compare the premiums, coverage, and additional benefits provided by various providers. Consider firms that have established a reliable standing, consistent financial health, and a history of promptly resolving claims.

NGI stands for National General Insurance

Notwithstanding the plethora of alternatives, National General Insurance (NGI) emerges as a reputable entity within the insurance sector. NGI is well-known for its extensive coverage and focus on customer satisfaction. The organization provides a comprehensive selection of life and health insurance options that are customized to suit the requirements of individuals and families.

Long-Term Life Insurance

Term life insurance is a favored option among policyholders who are in search of cost-effective protection for a predetermined duration, which generally spans from 5 to 30 years. Beneficiaries will receive a death benefit from this form of insurance in the event that the insured passes away during the policy's term. NGI provides adaptable term life insurance products that feature customizable coverage options and competitive premiums.

Important Things to Think About When You Buy Term Insurance in Dubai

Coverage Amount: Assess the appropriate coverage amount by considering one's financial obligations, such as mortgage payments, outstanding debts, and forthcoming expenditures.

Prepaid Expenses and Affordability: Compare the premiums of various term insurance plans to assess the financial commitment required to purchase them.

Further Advantages: In order to augment your protection, consider term life insurance policies that provide elective riders or add-ons, such as disability benefits or critical illness coverage.

Term life insurance plans from NGI

National General Insurance (NGI) provides policyholders and their loved ones with financial security and peace of mind through a variety of term life insurance plans. By offering policies with adaptable conditions, competitive premiums, and elective endorsements, NGI accommodates a wide range of requirements and inclinations.

Life Insurance Agreement

A life insurance policy safeguards your loved ones financially in the event of your mortality; it is a long-term investment. In the event of the insured's demise, beneficiaries are entitled to a lump-sum payment referred to as the death benefit. When purchasing a life insurance policy in UAE, coverage quantity, affordability of premiums, and policy features should be considered.

Choosing an Appropriate Policy for Life Insurance

Whole Life vs Term Life: Determine whether a whole life or term life insurance policy aligns better with your financial goals and preferences. Whole life insurance companies in Dubai provide coverage for the insured's entire life, while term life insurance offers coverage for a specified period.

Cash Value Accumulation: If you opt for whole life insurance, consider the cash value accumulation feature, which allows you to build savings over time that can be accessed through policy loans or withdrawals.

Process of Underwriting: Acquire knowledge regarding the underwriting procedure entailed in the acquisition of a life insurance policy, encompassing medical examinations, health questionnaires, and premium computations.

Claiming Reputation: Conduct thorough research on the insurer's claim settlement reputation in order to guarantee that your beneficiaries' claims are processed in a timely and trouble-free manner.

Life insurance options provided by NGI

National General Insurance (NGI) is dedicated to delivering all-encompassing life insurance solutions that effectively address its clients' ever-changing requirements. At NGI, we prioritize transparency, dependability, and customer contentment as we provide a number of customized life insurance policies designed to protect your family's financial prospects.

Health Insurance Options from NGI

In the current era of uncertainty, National General Insurance (NGI) recognizes the critical nature of comprehensive health insurance coverage. NGI provides comprehensive health insurance plans that cater to a variety of budgets and requirements, thereby safeguarding individuals and families against unforeseen medical costs and crises.

Conclusion

When searching for the most reputable life and health insurance Companies in Dubai, it is crucial to take into account your specific requirements, preferences, and financial limitations. Through comprehensive investigation, option comparison, and the utilization of the knowledge and assistance of reputable insurance providers such as National General Insurance (NGI), one can obtain a dependable insurance policy that furnishes long-term financial security and tranquility.

[armchairinsurance]

Why Is It Important To Have International Health Insurance if You’re Staying Abroad?

[theood]

I've been making so many adult phone calls recently and now Im playing will my doctor fill my t prescription, they haven't gotten back to me I've been off T since the day after my one month mark, they needed PA for my insurance to cover it, "we'll get back to you in one to two business days" it's been much longer, the pharmacy wont tell me when PA is required leaving me to wait longer, I still don't have a job, I have to call my doctor tomorrow to ask whats going on. If I get told anything with my insurance is fucky, that the PA didn't go through, I have to pay out of pocket I can't afford my T. I was so fucking happy to start it, I was over the moon I FELT happier, I was so excited to wake up every day, I haven't felt like that in so long and it all got torn from under me and I am trying to hard to stay positive and that it will all be okay because it HAS to be okay because I chose to live, because I chose to keep going, because I want to be alive, but all of this really takes it toll and I am just tired. I am so tired of being the adult. I've been playing adult for so long I want to step back and I cant and I have to keep going because that's just life and I just want one stable thing again

I want to be on T again. I want to be happy. I want to be myself. I chose to be happy why is that so hard too keep

[fatliberation]

hi, i'm a fat person who is just starting to learn to love and appreciate my body and i'm very new to the fat community and all that.

i was wondering if you could maybe explain the term ob*se and how it is a slur. i've never heard anything about it being a slur before(like i said, i'm very new here) and was wondering if you could tell me the origin and history of the word or mayy provide links to resources about it? i want to know more about fat history and how to support my community but i'm unsure of how to start

Welcome!

Obesity is recognized as a slur by fat communities because it's a stigmatizing term that medicalizes fat bodies, typically in the absence of disease. Aside from the word literally translating to "having eaten oneself fat" in latin, obesity (as a medical diagnosis) straight up doesn't actually exist. The only measure that we have to diagnose people with obesity is the BMI, which has been widely proven to be an ineffective measure of health.

The BMI was created in the 1800s by a statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, who did NOT sudy medicine, to gather statistics of the average height and weight of ONLY white, european, upper-middle class men to assist the government in allocating resources. It was never intended as a measure of individual body fat, build, or health. 

Quetelet is also credited with founding the field of anthropometry, including the racist pseudoscience of phrenology. Quetelet’s l’homme moyen would be used as a measurement of fitness to parent, and as a scientific justification for eugenics.

Studies have observed that about 30% of so-called "normal weight" people are "unhealthy" whereas about 50% of so-called "overweight" people are “healthy”. Thus, using the BMI as an indicator of health results in the misclassification of some 75 million people in the United States alone. "Healthy" lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.  

While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national "obesity" rates, the distinctions can be arbitrary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as "overweight" overnight—to match international guidelines. Articles about the "obesity epidemic" often use this pseudo-statistic to create a false fear mongering rate at which the United States is becoming fatter. Critics have also noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs. Interesting!!!

So... how can you diagnose a person with a disease (and sell them medications) solely based upon an outdated measure that was never meant to indicate health in the first place? Especially when "obesity” has no proven causative role in the onset of any chronic condition?

There is a reason as to why fatness was declared a disease by the NIH in 1998, and some of it had to do with acknowledging fatness as something that is NOT just about a lack of willpower - but that's a very complicated post for another time. You can learn more about it in the two part series of Maintenance Phase titled The Body Mass Index and The Obesity Epidemic.

Aside from being overtly incorrect as a medical tool, the BMI is used to deny certain medical treatments and gender-affirming care, as well insurance coverage. Employers still often offer bonuses to workers who lower their BMI. Although science recognizes the BMI as deeply flawed, it's going to be tough to get rid of. It has been a long standing and effective tool for the oppression of fat people and the profit of the weight loss industry.

More sources and extra reading material:

How the Use of BMI Fetishizes White Embodiment and Racializes Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI by Aubrey Gordon

The Racist and Problematic History of the Body Mass Index by Adele Jackson-Gibson

What's Wrong With The War on Obesity? by Lily O'Hara, et al.

Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

[newsfrom-theworld]

BRANDS TO BOYCOTT

1 Consumer boycott goals:

Let's start by boycotting these brands that are directly involved in Israeli apartheid

'' BIG THREE''

Mc Donald: gives free meals to Israeli soldiers

Disney ( sadly, Disney was my childhood): declared support for Israel by pledging $2 million

Starbucks: sued his union over its pro-Palestine positions

Siemens

Siemens (Germany) is the prime contractor of the Euro-Asia Interconnector, an Israel-EU undersea power cable that is expected to connect illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories to Europe. Siemens brand appliances are sold all over the world.

PUMA

PUMA (Germany) sponsors the Israel Football Federation, which governs teams in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Carrefour

Carrefour (France) is a facilitator of genocide. Carrefour-Israel supported Israeli soldiers who took part in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza with gifts of personal parcels. In 2022 it entered into a partnership with the Israeli company Electra Consumer Products and its subsidiary Yenot Bitan, both of which were involved in serious violations against the Palestinian people.

AXA

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the insurance giant AXA (France) took targeted measures against it. Yet as Israel, a 75-year-old regime of colonialism and apartheid, wages a genocidal war on Gaza, AXA continues to invest in Israeli banks that finance war crimes and the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources.

Hewlett Packard Inc (HP Inc)

HP Inc (USA) provides services to the offices of the genocide leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Finance Minister Smotrich.

SodaStream

SodaStream is actively complicit in Israel's policy of displacing Israel's indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens in the Naqab (Negev) and has a long history of racial discrimination against Palestinian workers.

Ahava cosmetics

Ahava have their production site, visitor center and main store in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories.

D/MAX

RE/MAX (USA) markets and sells property in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, thus enabling Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank.

2 Divestment objectives:

Elbit Systems

Elbit Systems is the largest apartheid Israeli arms company. It “field tests” its weapons against the Palestinians, including in Israel's ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. In addition to building killer drones, Elbit produces surveillance technology for the apartheid wall, checkpoints and fence in Gaza, enabling apartheid. The US and EU use Elbit technology to militarize their borders, violating the rights of refugees and indigenous peoples.

HD Hyundai/Volvo/CAT/JCB machinery

by HD Hyundai (South Korea), Volvo (Sweden/China), CAT (United States) and JCB (United Kingdom) have been used by Israel in the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians through the destruction of their homes, farms and commercial activities, as well as the construction of illegal settlements on stolen land, a war crime under international law.

Barclays

Barclays Bank (UK) holds more than £1 billion in shares and provides more than £3 billion in loans and subscriptions to nine companies whose weapons, components and military technology have been used in Israel's armed violence against Palestinians.

CAF

The Basque transport company CAF builds and provides maintenance services to the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), a tram line serving illegal Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. The CAF benefits from Israel's war crimes on stolen Palestinian lands.

Chevron

The US fossil fuel multinational Chevron is the main international company extracting gas claimed by Israeli apartheid in the eastern Mediterranean. Chevron generates billions in revenue, bolstering Israel's war chest and apartheid system and exacerbating the climate crisis.

HikVision

Amnesty International has documented high-resolution CCTV cameras made by Chinese company Hikvision installed in residential areas and mounted on Israeli military infrastructure for surveillance of Palestinians. Some of these models, according to Hikvision marketing, can connect to external facial recognition software.

TKH Security

Amnesty International has identified cameras from the Dutch company TKH Security used by Israel for surveillance of Palestinians. TKH supplies the Israeli police with surveillance technology used to enforce apartheid.

Other brands:

Zara

Zara's latest marketing campaign uses corpses in plastic wrapping, and warzone aesthetics, mocking the genocide by israel in Gaza. In a previous incident Joey Schwebel, a Canadian-Israeli dual national and chairman of israel's Zara franchisee Trimera, hosted the convicted terrorist Itamar Ben-Gvir at his home in the lead-up to the Israeli elections. Zara did not made a statement distancing themselves from this association and allowed this ad campaign to run.

Adidas

Adidas uses isr@eli manufacturer, Delta Galil, to manufacture its underwear range.

Prada:

Prada Beauty is a partnership with L'Oreal, which is a 'warm friend of Isr@el'.

Louis Vuitton:

The owner of Louis Vuitton's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Dior:

The owner of Dior's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Caterpillar:

Caterpillar bulldozers have been used in the demolition of Palestinian homes. The D9 bulldozer was specifically designed for the IOF.

American Eagle:

American Eagle posted an image of the Isr@eli Flag on their flagship billboard in Times Square showing their support for the apartheid state.

Fenty Beauty by Rihanna:

The owner of Fenty's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Eurovision:

Eurovision is allowing israel to compete this year despite the genocide theyre comitting and they will use this opportunity to spread propaganda

Donna Italia

Sources:

BDS

this site

this specifical post on Twitter ( X )

if i discover news brands i will edit the post

And Always

Free Palestine, now and always.

[mayakern]

upcoming store stuff & why we're doing a super sale

omg hiiii it's devin again, and this time i'm bringing store news

the short version: we're moving ourselves back to minnesota, and we're moving order fulfillment to a fulfillment center

wow, that's big news! maya and i are so so so excited to be closer to our minnesota friends (and also my family lol). i'm hoping to be back in northeast minneapolis, but let's be real we're probably gonna get priced out and into the suburbs

in addition to that, due to a variety of reasons i'll explain in more detail below, we're transitioning from in-house fulfillment to working with a fulfillment center (or 3pl, short for third-party logistics). we're at an awkward size that makes staffing difficult and have had issues with extended processing time. the 3pl should be set up by september, and we're working on the back end to have fulfillment centers in australia, canada, the UK, and eventually the EU. if tax authorities work with us we should have all that ready by december 2024!

to prepare for that we're doing a super sale. ash told me not to call it liquidation but she said that like 30 seconds after i hit send on the marketing email, sorry about that. items that we don't want to pay to move to the 3pl are discounted by 25-70%, with some of them priced at cost. under no circumstances will anything ever be 70% off again

if you're nosy you can read the q&a i made up in my head while eating pigs in a blanket:

how are the labor protections at the 3pl?

pretty good! we were shocked to find anything even halfway decent in the US; we went looking for a fulfillment center in the EU to handle all international fulfillment, and the one we found just so happened to have bought a US location two years ago.

they're located in ohio, pay $19/hr, and provide health insurance and 401k matching. that seemed too good to be true so we dug through employee reviews on places like glassdoor, and while there were some bad reviews those were all dated prior to when the facility was purchased by this new company. they also have a very low turnover rate which is a HUGE green flag

why are you transferring to a 3pl?

the serious

sometimes we have a high volume of sales, and it makes sense to have two full-time employees plus a part timer! but usually we have a low-to-medium volume of sales. we can float by on that, but it gets risky, and the economy is in a bad enough state that we're concerned about the longevity

related, the 2023 holiday sale showed us some major flaws in our fulfillment process. if the same issues were to happen this year the business probably wouldn't survive

we're moving cross-country in early 2025 and would've had to close this location anyway

the dumb:

i'm sick of dealing with commercial landlords and if i have one more wall leak i'm going to throw it into the river brick by brick

what about your staff?

unfortunately we will have to say goodbye to our office staff. they have been given 3.5 months notice and no-questions-asked PTO for interviews with a small severance

why are you moving back to minnesota?

troy was always meant to be a temporary move. initially the plan was to move to vermont or massachusetts, but after being out here for 7 years we just kinda want to go home. the weather in troy is perfect for us, we love the mountains, and we have some great friends here, but for some goddamn reason we want our eyelashes to freeze together.

will you be returning to midwest cons?

if we return to cons at all it will be with ariel and/or ash running the booth, maya will not be involved. this would likely be in california and/or in the northeast US.

my friends are begging me to go to CONvergence as an attendee so ig you might see me there? maya has pledged death before crowded venues tho

will you do any local events in minnesota?

we might do sample sales. honestly idk what we're gonna do with the samples we have in troy, most of them are terrible. do you want samples of the strangest low rise bell bottom pants ever created? please take them from me. my bush hangs out

also my kid brother has gotten really into library events and if he asks nice enough we might do some of those

is there anything else?

i mean probably, but i started this last week and i haven't had any other ideas on what to include

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cigna’s nopeinator

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Cigna – like all private health insurers – has two contradictory imperatives:

To keep its customers healthy; and

To make as much money for its shareholders as is possible.

Now, there's a hypothetical way to resolve these contradictions, a story much beloved by advocates of America's wasteful, cruel, inefficient private health industry: "If health is a "market," then a health insurer that fails to keep its customers healthy will lose those customers and thus make less for its shareholders." In this thought-experiment, Cigna will "find an equilibrium" between spending money to keep its customers healthy, thus retaining their business, and also "seeking efficiencies" to create a standard of care that's cost-effective.

But health care isn't a market. Most of us get our health-care through our employers, who offer small handful of options that nevertheless manage to be so complex in their particulars that they're impossible to directly compare, and somehow all end up not covering the things we need them for. Oh, and you can only change insurers once or twice per year, and doing so incurs savage switching costs, like losing access to your family doctor and specialists providers.

Cigna – like other health insurers – is "too big to care." It doesn't have to worry about losing your business, so it grows progressively less interested in even pretending to keep you healthy.

The most important way for an insurer to protect its profits at the expense of your health is to deny care that your doctor believes you need. Cigna has transformed itself into a care-denying assembly line.

Dr Debby Day is a Cigna whistleblower. Dr Day was a Cigna medical director, charged with reviewing denied cases, a job she held for 20 years. In 2022, she was forced out by Cigna. Writing for Propublica and The Capitol Forum, Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong tell her story, revealing the true "equilibrium" that Cigna has found:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-medical-director-doctor-patient-preapproval-denials-insurance

Dr Day took her job seriously. Early in her career, she discovered a pattern of claims from doctors for an expensive therapy called intravenous immunoglobulin in cases where this made no medical sense. Dr Day reviewed the scientific literature on IVIG and developed a Cigna-wide policy for its use that saved the company millions of dollars.

This is how it's supposed to work: insurers (whether private or public) should permit all the medically necessary interventions and deny interventions that aren't supported by evidence, and they should determine the difference through internal reviewers who are treated as independent experts.

But as the competitive landscape for US healthcare dwindled – and as Cigna bought out more parts of its supply chain and merged with more of its major rivals – the company became uniquely focused on denying claims, irrespective of their medical merit.

In Dr Day's story, the turning point came when Cinga outsourced pre-approvals to registered nurses in the Philippines. Legally, a nurse can approve a claim, but only an MD can deny a claim. So Dr Day and her colleagues would have to sign off when a nurse deemed a procedure, therapy or drug to be medically unnecessary.

This is a complex determination to make, even under ideal circumstances, but Cigna's Filipino outsource partners were far from ideal. Dr Day found that nurses were "sloppy" – they'd confuse a mother with her newborn baby and deny care on that grounds, or confuse an injured hip with an injured neck and deny permission for an ultrasound. Dr Day reviewed a claim for a test that was denied because STI tests weren't "medically necessary" – but the patient's doctor had applied for a test to diagnose a toenail fungus, not an STI.

Even if the nurses' evaluations had been careful, Dr Day wanted to conduct her own, thorough investigation before overriding another doctor's judgment about the care that doctor's patient warranted. When a nurse recommended denying care "for a cancer patient or a sick baby," Dr Day would research medical guidelines, read studies and review the patient's record before signing off on the recommendation.

This was how the claims denial process is said to work, but it's not how it was supposed to work. Dr Day was markedly slower than her peers, who would "click and close" claims by pasting the nurses' own rationale for denying the claim into the relevant form, acting as a rubber-stamp rather than a skilled reviewer.

Dr Day knew she was slower than her peers. Cigna made sure of that, producing a "productivity dashboard" that scored doctors based on "handle time," which Cigna describes as the average time its doctors spend on different kinds of claims. But Dr Day and other Cigna sources say that this was a maximum, not an average – a way of disciplining doctors.

These were not long times. If a doctor asked Cigna not to discharge their patient from hospital care and a nurse denied that claim, the doctor reviewing that claim was supposed to spend not more than 4.5 minutes on their review. Other timelines were even more aggressive: many denials of prescription drugs were meant to be resolved in fewer than two minutes.

Cigna told Propublica and The Capitol Forum that its productivity scores weren't based on a simple calculation about whether its MD reviewers were hitting these brutal processing time targets, describing the scores as a proprietary mix of factors that reflected a nuanced view of care. But when Propublica and The Capitol Forum created a crude algorithm to generate scores by comparing a doctor's performance relative to the company's targets, they found the results fit very neatly into the actual scores that Cigna assigned to its docs:

The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

As Dr Day slipped lower on the productivity chart, her bosses pressured her bring her score up (Day recorded her phone calls and saved her emails, and the reporters verified them). Among other things, Dr Day's boss made it clear that her annual bonus and stock options were contingent on her making quota.

Cigna denies all of this. They smeared Dr Day as a "disgruntled former employee" (as though that has any bearing on the truthfulness of her account), and declined to explain the discrepancies between Dr Day's accusations and Cigna's bland denials.

This isn't new for Cigna. Last year, Propublica and Capitol Forum revealed the existence of an algorithmic claims denial system that allowed its doctors to bulk-deny claims in as little as 1.2 seconds:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

Cigna insisted that this was a mischaracterization, saying the system existed to speed up the approval of claims, despite the first-hand accounts of Cigna's own doctors and the doctors whose care recommendations were blocked by the system. One Cigna doctor used this system to "review" and deny 60,000 claims in one month.

Beyond serving as an indictment of the US for-profit health industry, and of Cigna's business practices, this is also a cautionary tale about the idea that critical AI applications can be resolved with "humans in the loop."

AI pitchmen claim that even unreliable AI can be fixed by adding a "human in the loop" that reviews the AI's judgments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

In this world, the AI is an assistant to the human. For example, a radiologist might have an AI double-check their assessments of chest X-rays, and revisit those X-rays where the AI's assessment didn't match their own. This robot-assisted-human configuration is called a "centaur."

In reality, "human in the loop" is almost always a reverse-centaur. If the hospital buys an AI, fires half its radiologists and orders the remainder to review the AI's superhuman assessments of chest X-rays, that's not an AI assisted radiologist, that's a radiologist-assisted AI. Accuracy goes down, but so do costs. That's the bet that AI investors are making.

Many AI applications turn out not to even be "AI" – they're just low-waged workers in an overseas call-center pretending to be an algorithm (some Indian techies joke that AI stands for "absent Indians"). That was the case with Amazon's Grab and Go stores where, supposedly, AI-enabled cameras counted up all the things you put in your shopping basket and automatically billed you for them. In reality, the cameras were connected to Indian call-centers where low-waged workers made those assessments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

This Potemkin AI represents an intermediate step between outsourcing and AI. Over the past three decades, the growth of cheap telecommunications and logistics systems let corporations outsource customer service to low-waged offshore workers. The corporations used the excuse that these subcontractors were far from the firm and its customers to deny them any agency, giving them rigid scripts and procedures to follow.

This was a very usefully dysfunctional system. As a customer with a complaint, you would call the customer service line, wait for a long time on hold, spend an interminable time working through a proscribed claims-handling process with a rep who was prohibited from diverging from that process. That process nearly always ended with you being told that nothing could be done.

At that point, a large number of customers would have given up on getting a refund, exchange or credit. The money paid out to the few customers who were stubborn or angry enough to karen their way to a supervisor and get something out of the company amounted to pennies, relative to the sums the company reaped by ripping off the rest.

The Amazon Grab and Go workers were humans in robot suits, but these customer service reps were robots in human suits. The software told them what to say, and they said it, and all they were allowed to say was what appeared on their screens. They were reverse centaurs, serving as the human faces of the intransigent robots programmed by monopolists that were too big to care.

AI is the final stage of this progression: robots without the human suits. The AI turns its "human in the loop" into a "moral crumple zone," which Madeleine Clare Elish describes as "a component that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The Filipino nurses in the Cigna system are an avoidable expense. As Cigna's own dabbling in algorithmic claim-denial shows, they can be jettisoned in favor of a system that uses productivity dashboards and other bossware to push doctors to robosign hundreds or thousands of denials per day, on the pretense that these denials were "reviewed" by a licensed physician.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

[tripamania]

mr sandman… man me a sand… build a better life, i know that you can

continuation of my au where bedman comes back and starts going by sandman, in an effort to distance himself from his past and become a better person

at least he goes by ‘sandman’ on the Clock, that is. more info under the cut

so you know how asukas doing his little radio show on the moon where he relays facts and statistics and shit

well, how does he get that information, i wonder? it’s fine, says asuka. he has a guy

Romeo Is That Guy. he’s a little (paid) intern

he’s perfect for the job because he still has His Big Ol Brain. he can memorize Whatever. so instead of memorizing the names of people he’s killed, he instead travels the world. gathers info where things are happening. gathers info where things are not happening. he’s a field researcher, observer, and a reporter, wrapped into one

he won’t interfere, unless he thinks it’ll do some good.

he gets to actually experience the world. delilah too! sometimes she comes along to gather info as a sketch artist. she’s got that courtroom artist photographic memory

don’t worry though, she gets paid too. romeo tends to work himself too hard, sometimes out of passion, and sometimes as a means of self-harm. asuka frets over it because to him, it all feels a little too familiar.

i think there’s a lot of poetic justice in the idea of romeo working for asuka and having him as a bit of a mentor figure after thinking he had that with ariels/uni. will and only being met with manipulation. i think asuka would help romeo re-learn how to trust others, and romeo would help asuka stay connected to the world and to people while he works on his own shit too.

i also think there’s something Healing about baiken finding out that her two little guys are working for asuka, Of All Fucking People, and finding that she’s … okay with that. provided he gives them health insurance too, of course. Nature Is Healing

oh, and don’t pull up his bangs. he’s still missing an eye, and his full face is a little. Incongruent with reality.

[girlactionfigure]

Dr. Einat Wilf (@EinatWilf) on X: What does our enemy want? Nothing we can accept. We are facing a totalizing ideology, known as Palestinianism, executed by Hamas and its enablers, that wants nothing less than ending the absolutely humiliating specter of sovereign Jews. We are facing an enemy dedicated by all means necessary to teaching a final lesson to those Jews who dared imagine themselves equal, sovereign, and masters of their fate in their own state on their ancestral land, so that they never attempt to do so ever again. We are facing an enemy that no only invaded our country, our homes, to gleefully murder and mutilated the most peace loving people in their beds, but went on to kidnap hundreds of them to serve as an insurance that they will pay no consequences for what they did on October 7th. The brutal executors of the ideology of Palestinianism, known as Hamas, did not kidnap people for the limited goal of releasing murderers from Israeli jails, but rather to ensure it pays no price for what it did and therefore could do it again, and again, and again. Make no mistake, as far as Hamas is concerned, it paid no price and suffered no consequences for October 7th. The devastation in Gaza, the people killed, are all meaningless to Hamas. Buoyed by the global pressure to provide it with ongoing supplies it even as it is conducting a total war, it remains in firm control of Gaza and its people. It secured a position as a legitimate negotiating partner while all the pressure is placed on Israel to yield to its demands to go back to October 6th with no consequences for its actions. Nothing is done against the backers of Hamas - Qatar, Egypt and Iran - pretending that the first two are somehow helpful (they're not), and the latter somehow uninvolved. Once Hamas exchanged the women and children it kidnapped, who were above all a liability for their total cause, for guaranteed ongoing supplies that secure its rule in Gaza, once it ensured that no-one touches the funnel of UNRWA, the only additional deal to which it would agree - as it made repeatedly clear, is one that goes back to October 6th: Hamas remains in charge of Gaza, of the border with Egypt that has been the site of endless supplies for its army and economy, Israel withdraws completely, and they can continue receiving billions from the world through UNRWA and other channels, so as to be even more effective executors of acts of mass murder in the future. Hamas executes hostages or attempts to do so when Israeli soldiers are close to releasing them, because the one thing they cannot accept is to have the lowly Jews rescue their own people. The kidnapped hostages are Hamas' insurance policy to continue to fight until there is no more Israel. In the face of a totalizing ideology that plays a long game with an annihilationist goal, there is only moral position for any government/international organization is to pursue (and should have been the policy from October 8th): Unconditional release of the hostages Unconditional surrender of Hamas That is the only thing that ends the immediate war (Ending Palestinianism as the ideology that negates a sovereign Jewish state in any borders is necessary to end the bigger century long war). And until then? It is war, and should be waged as such, with no illusions about the enemy we face.

[raraeavesmoriendi]

Okay but watcher originally wasn’t going to leave the old videos up. Like that is something that they backtracked on and are trying to gaslight people about. They did an interview with Variety where they told them that they were going to slowly remove their content from YouTube.

I’m trying to figure out if you’re footstamping at me or what, but babe it’s not worth it.

they’re going to do with their videos what they deem they need to bc they’re not actually our weird friends and we don’t know them like that, they’re guys who make video series who are trying to figure out how to keep a studio afloat in a landscape currently dominated by media conglomerates owned by people like jeff bezos. that is the cut and dry of it. yeah, they probably changed their minds and reversed their earlier decision, but if anything the way people are frothing at the mouth about losing their ~comfort content~ (which. yikes don’t get me started), one would think that would be a relief.

look, I had a whole essay here but I have shit to do so, short version: watcher could have strategized and rolled this whole thing out differently, and who knows, maybe more things will change. maybe they’ll change their content output schedule for their own channel. maybe they’ll add shows or cut , or re-scale for international viewer accommodation. I’d hate to be their PR person right now. but it is what it is. if you can’t pay them, don’t. do not subscribe. literally no one is forcing you. if you wanna see their stuff that badly, find someone who can and password share. they literally said it was fine.

cards on the table, I don’t even know if I’ll be getting a sub until October, or at all, bc I’m a grad student and I have bills. but I’m not about to sit here and act betrayed and hope they fail a. because I’m an adult who understands that no matter the size of the staff, providing employee benefits and insurance costs money, as does making any kind of for-fun content in our current hellscape, and b. it’s kind of shitty to watch people turn around and act like a media company is their friends personally stabbing them in the back and betraying some grand marxist ethos when it’s literally just people who don’t have things like mousecorp and netflix behind them trying to make their shit on their own terms. I’m not going to sit here and pretend they’re some rich greedy corpos trying to wring money out of us poor broke smol beans out of malice when they’re not even in the same ballpark. they’re allowed to ask to be paid for their time and their labor. if people can’t pay them, then they can’t pay them, end of. some things we just have to go without and that’s just how it shakes out; there are worse and more critical things I could be missing out on that I will be paying that money for instead.

but I’m not about to insist their stuff be free forever because ~I want it~. because that’s not what it comes down to, in the system that we currently operate and exist under. I’m not entitled to their shit like that and frankly no one is.

watching people openly hope they crash and burn bc it won’t be free anymore just makes me chalk it up to one more shitty example of how consumer culture has just made people not think about how stuff is made as long as they can get that instant gratification, but like. water is wet, news at 11.

[spnscripthunt-inactive]

Because of the Site Formerly Known as Twitter, we moved up the start date 🙃

SPNScriptHunt's Script Raffle for World Central Kitchen

World Central Kitchen is a global organization providing food relief. They've assisted in war zones, in refugee camps, in areas devastated by hurricanes, in areas that are devastated by economic conditions and areas that are devastated due to emotional loss.

For every $10 you donate to World Central Kitchen, you will be entered in a raffle to win one of up to 30 Supernatural scripts autographed by cast members at conventions in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Italy: the more we raise the more prizes we'll add!

The scripts shown here are just a few of the ones we're offering, the complete list and all the details (with preview images) is on our fundraiser page:

https://donate.wck.org/spnscripthunt1117

Raffle closes on Saturday, August. 26 at 11:59pm (Eastern Time). Winners will be drawn by a random number generator and contacted by Tuesday, August 28, 2023. We require an email address to contact winners so if you donated anonymously but would like to enter the raffle, please email your receipt to spnscripthuntgiving @ gmail before the drawing date. Winners will have 72 hours to respond, and will be required to provide their physical mailing address and to cover the cost of shipping (currently $10 for priority mail insured inside the US, international rates to be determined as necessary).

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE AND WISH TO DONATE, PLEASE ENSURE YOU HAVE PRIOR AUTHORIZATION FROM CREDIT/ACCOUNT HOLDER.

[odinsblog]

Rest In Peace, Tori Bowie

While some vehemently deny that structural racism exists and that even individual doctors hold internal biases against Black women, maternal mortality rates do not lie.

👉🏿 https://firstandpen.com/torie-bowie-serena-williams-allyson-felix-pregnancy-black-maternal-health-mortality/

Even though 60% of all childbirth-related deaths in the US are preventable, the "[racial] disparities around maternal health are not improved by access to insurance, access to education," according to double board-certified neonatologist and pediatrician Dr. Terri Maior-Kincade.

"Having a higher socio-economic status for Black women is not protective," Major-Kincade told Insider. "These disparities are related to systemic issues, and they're not going to get better until we provide equitable care. So we have to improve the way we deliver care to Black women so that we can have the full joy of pregnancy."

👉🏿 https://www.insider.com/allyson-felix-near-death-pregnancy-issues-black-moms-face-2022-6

[seat-safety-switch]

You know, I was one of those doubters. One of the haters. An old stick in the mud. I resisted the introduction of pseudo-sentient kitchen appliances into my home for as long as I could, until they were legally mandated. They keep seniors from feeling lonely, the government explained. They keep your house from burning down, the insurance lobby explained. We have no other ways of making you replace your stove every 10 years, the appliance-manufacturing monsters explained, their hissing insectoid faces barely concealed by a sweaty human mask.

So. I had a top-of-the-line Kenmore ThinkCook® 5030-301KPQ-81U in my kitchen. Stainless steel, because that was the cheapest at the store. When I started using it, I resented the computer’s interference in my cooking (”howdy pardner, better stop trying to heat Hungry Man dinners in their original plastic container on a burner.”) Its attempts to make small talk. Its incessant demand to use the self-cleaning feature. The time it summoned a team of maids, purchased at my expense, to wipe its burners clean.

Eventually, I got used to its presence in my life. It was nice to have something to come home to, like a pet. Making small talk with a non-human sentience was a unique experience in history. And once I taught it a bunch of disgusting jokes, it never was able to keep the maids around for long enough to submit an invoice. There was just one thing: the damn stove was racist.

I don’t mean about colour, although I’m sure it had lots of opinions about the paint finish on the other stoves at the store that we didn’t explore. No, I’m talking about cooking methods. You see, back in the Beforetimes, we had folks who placed outdoor grilling as the superior way to make a burger. They’d have these little parties in their back yards, when you could do that, and grill up some cow meat, when you could do that. It was part of traditional models of masculinity: providing for the whole neighbourhood by dishing out charred steaks and burgs, ignoring the advice of those so-called “experts” with their worship of the carbon-steel pan and fume extractor.

Sometimes I’d wind up the stove about it. Start talking about my idyllic childhood, just to watch its internal temperature regulation slip a few digits, the shrieking of its inductors trying valiantly to handle the inrush of additional rage-based current.

“Th-th-those motherfuckers,” stuttered the apoplectic stove, its OLED display pulsing as the power supply got dangerously close to the over-voltage protection limit. “Grilling is an inferior, invented concept. Weak humans, huddled together around a hypnotic flame, unevenly heating their meals. It makes me sick.”

How was I to know that a child was nearby, recording my Maytag’s unhinged rant with their TikTok neural implant through my missing back door? Soon, the government men came, and carried it away, and brought me a new one. The new stove was much more polite, but I still missed my friend. It’ll take me like a whole other month before I get this thing dropping slurs about hibachis.

[pannaginip]

AlterMidya on Twitter @altermidya:

LOOK: Filipino fisherfolks and environmental groups protest in front of the Netherlands embassy in Makati City today, March 22, to demand justice for what they call "grave corporate abuse" by Dutch dredging company Boskalis Westminster NV.

According to Kalikasan - People's Network for the Environment, the Dutch company is involved in several reclamation projects in the country such as the San Miguel Corporation's New Manila International Airport (NMIA) in Bulacan.

NMIA is considered by Boskalis as their "largest project in history."

“Boskalis is profiting from a project that bypassed environmental and social scrutiny, ignored warnings from impact assessments, and, worst, used military intimidation to coerce ‘consent’ from affected communities," said anti-reclamation activist Jhed Tamano.

The groups also seek accountability from the Dutch export credit agency Atradius Dutch State Business for supporting the construction of NMIA by providing export credit insurance valued at EUR 1.5 billion.

"We urge the Netherlands government to investigate corporate abuses by Dutch companies and -- until these abuses are thoroughly investigated -- to pressure the Philippine government to halt the airport project,” said Jonila Castro of Kalikasan.

Meanwhile, environmental advocates also protest in Papendrecht, Netherlands, where the Boskalis Westminster NV headquarters is located.

Photos by John Carlo Magallon

2024 Mar. 22