From this meme redraw :]
One time my dad came to family dinner all excited “you know that show Sherlock? I hear fans are writing whole new stories for it online”
And in perfect unison my sister and I yelled “DAD NO!” So vehemently he stopped in his tracks.
Then a look of dawning comprehension on his face.
“Oh, this is like Kirk and Spock, isn’t it”
And I died right then and there.
can’t find the post that’s already circulating about this now but there really is no medical privacy in star trek whatsoever. imagine if a stranger walked into your doctor’s appointment and asked for your medical details, your doctor obliged without question, and then the stranger demanded you be killed. bonkers
the rest of this scene is hilarious btw
Futuristic insurance provider
Other people have already pointed this out in the notes, but this show was released from 1987-1991 and HIPAA, the federal law that establishes doctor/patient confidentiality, only passed in 1996.
Doctor patient confidentiality did not exist when this show aired.
So many of the rights you think of as sacred and fundamental and universal and permanent are younger than the average millennial. So many of your legal protections are tacked together with the legal system’s equivalent of tissue paper and elmer’s glue.
Still remember when a homo- and transphobic acquaintance tried to bring up JKR’s views on trans people in conversation and I shut it down with «oh yeah she’s been saying a lot of dumb shit on Twitter after she finished writing Harry Potter, like when she claimed Dumbledore was gay, just to be politically correct», which made it absolutely impossible for him to admit that he agreed with anything JKR had ever said. Sometimes you just have to weaponise people’s homophobia against their transphobia.
Other ways to stop family members/acquaintances from going on bigoted rants:
- «Isn’t this all a bit silly? I mean, I’m more concerned about the economy/the war in Ukraine/covid/my job» - weaponised whataboutism
- «Do you work with a lot of trans people? Because it seems like this is a problem you frequently encounter in everyday life from the way you talk about it» and when they say they don’t, follow up with «well then I don’t see what you’re making such a fuss about»
- «Idk, I haven’t been much on social media lately, I think Twitter is a waste of time» - make them feel like they’re the ones who are terminally online
- «Idk, I’m not that concernced with other people’s genitals and sex lives» - creep shaming
The point is that I’ve used all of these in various contexts and they’ve saved a good number of dinner table conversations from derailing into pointless debating. You don’t de-radicalise friends and family members by entering into political discussions they initiate just to stir up shit. You de-radicalise them by shifting the focus away from their shitty opinions and onto the things you have in common and the practical everyday stuff that exists outside their internet echo chambers.
The really hilariously ill-conceived part of the Twitter rate limiting thing is that comments and retweets are the same kind of entity as tweets in the back-end database, they're just "parented" to whatever tweet they're commenting on or retweeting, and the rate limit they've placed on the API simply counts how many of those entities you've requested without checking a. whether they're the children of another entity or not, nor b. whether you've already seen that particular entity today.
Thus, the limit isn't really "600 tweets". A tweet, each comment on that tweet, and each retweet of that tweet all count against the limit as you view them. For example, if a quote-retweet crosses your dashboard, the quote-retweet itself and the little preview of what it's responding to that appears above it each count separately against the limit. Click into that quote-retweet to read the comments? They both get counted against your limit a second time, as does each individual comment you read – and heaven help you if any of those comments were themselves commented upon!
The upshot is that if your account isn't verified, using Twitter in the manner that its own monetisation model assumes – and, indeed demands – it will be used can easily exhaust your entire daily allocation of tweet views in as little as a couple dozen engagements.
so that’s why i ran out in like two hours
If anything, two hours reflects a very restrained usage pattern. Owing to the way that tweet views are counted, somebody who's using the site the way its user experience "wants" it to be used might readily burn through their daily 600 views in five to ten minutes!
Wait, wait, wait, so, Twitter now works like those mobile games that give you free "lives" and once you're out, sorry! Wait til tomorrow... or pay!
It's a bit worse than that, because the verified limit is only 6000 views, and there's presently no way to increase it beyond that. That might feel like a big number, but for the reasons outlined above, even a paying user with an ideal usage pattern will be able to use site for perhaps 60 minutes a day before they get put on hold, too.
