Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)

Take it or leave it. I am long past believing that anybody would care to try to learn from people like me: kids who grew up without any access at all to all your information, not even your schools, and *still changed.* Have your nihilism, that's fine. I was a child and got several of my siblings *and* my mom and multiple close friends out of those communities and no one ever cares how we do it, or asks. But if you asked I'd say yeah, think about how many of these people have kids.

All that and I never voted Republican, not one single time. What did I do in my first election?

I didn't vote at all. Because I was terrified, and for good reason. I don't blame that brave, kind, terrified girl, not one bit for that. But it would've been cool to see another option.

The thing is voting narratives aren't just about the characters in ads. They're about imagined futures. Reaching the children of these people matter, but ads can't show persuading children against their families.

I'm a queer woman who was raised in a hard right community like most people here couldn't imagine and was threatened with physical violence about how I voted -- the people around me literally bought out the ammunition from gun stores around elections, I want you to take a moment to truly imagine being a teenager in the closet and seeing guns in the hands of people who regularly threaten you -- and I'm reading that ad about Republican women voting very differently than 99% of the posts on here

A general PSA is that if you don't like criticism, you shouldn't claim to be doing science or engaging with scientists. It's who we are and it's what we do.

The literal entire point of doing science is that we can get better together by scrutinizing evidence together. No one, absolutely no one, gets to be an authority simply by virtue of who they ARE versus the data they are attempting to get you to believe. It is, in the end, what we have.

I have been blocked from getting incredibly critical medication for over a month -- medication that helps me breath right now.

Want to know why? An egregious UI error on an insurance website that simply defaults to telling providers that things don't require prior auth when they do. They know about it, they just don't care to fix it.

You know what this insurance place is advertising these days? An investment in "AI" for prior authorization, the very thing they currently maintain a completely erroneous interface for, that is conveying the wrong information (again, known and on purpose) to providers.

I've been in a lot of pain -- and sometimes, a lot of fear, as my existing meds do not work to counteract the difficult airway reactivity issues that covid gifted me with.

Want to know how many "futurists" and "innovative in tech" awards I can turn up about this insurance place in just a little bit of looking? Quite a handful.

I am reminded (as I am reading California Burning and thinking about the state of our systems) that we have created a system that rewards organizations for "innovations" but not for maintenance, stability, security, or safety. Or for all of us in this pandemic, the privilege of our very breath.

This paradoxical contrast -- our utterly bereft maintenance and basic infrastructure, the agony of people who actually WANT to maintain and build safe and reliable things or do public health or innovate in science, contrasted against the "innovation", the seemingly bottomless investments ready for anything called "AI" -- I cannot stop thinking about it. It will continue to define the future if we don't break free of this system.