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Cake day: 2023年6月7日

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  • Way back in 2001 when Adobe flash was the exciting new thing on the web, I was the network/firewall admin for the data-center hosting the company website. I didn’t get to argue about the site itself, since they had Microsoft in to do that. I did win the argument against the Microsoft engineers wanting to put the site outside the firewall for “performance”. Needless to say my ass was on the line if performance was impacted.

    Sure enough, the big launch day arrives, the Superbowl adds run, and the complaints all start coming in about how terribly the site was performing. They beat the hell out of it in the lab, so they knew with absolute certainty that the firewall was to blame. Lots of higher-ups were suddenly aware that I existed, which is never a good thing for a network admin.

    I dove into troubleshooting and had my answer in less than ten minutes. The front page was a monstrosity made entirely of flash that displayed nothing until the entire page loaded - graphics and all. That worked well enough on a high speed network but, back in 2001, most people at home were on dialup. A little quick math on the size of the download had it taking over 40 seconds to just see the front page.

    The site got a really rapid rewrite, and I was off the hook.




  • I didn’t claim otherwise, but your understanding of statistics is a little wonky. You can’t extrapolate from “white men” to my individual experience and say that minorities are getting it far worse. There are plenty of lucky minority members that never get a bad diagnosis in their life, and plenty of unlucky white men that are plagued by them.

    Ever had a sinus headache that lated a real long time? I’m in my 11th year of one nonstop headache, and I still don’t know why the fuck it’s happening - even after seeing over a dozen specialists all referring me elsewhere after their one or two guesses didn’t pan out. Every new referral takes 3-6 months for a first visit.

    This is my third such issue. I researched and diagnosed the second issue on my own and found out that my exact misdiagnoses was actually known to be incredibly common, but institutional inertia and specialist blindspots meant that it wasn’t being widely corrected despite being known for over 15 years.

    So no, being a white man does not offer protection from our shitty healthcare system. Every societal flaw has it’s victims, and it’s almost always true that minorities and the disenfranchised get it worse. That’s no reason to disregard the experiences of non-minorities - many of whom will have it just as bad individually.




  • I’m a white man and I promise you that it’s no protection from our shitty medical system. My adult life has been a misery for at least 15 of the past 20 years because of multiple rushed and incorrect diagnoses. There are literally thousands of conditions that the system is incapable of recognizing because they involve multiple specialties, fit between specialties, or are frequently referred to the wrong specialist who won’t look for causes outside their specialty.

    A lot of it comes down to the limited amount of time Doctors get with the patient. They have to come up with a conclusion in 10-15 minutes, then move on, then it’s usually several months before they see the patient again.