I’ve never been a UMH customer, but about 7 months after the breach happened (November), I got a letter from the company handling customer complaints for Change Healthcare, telling me an unbeknown amount of my medical and or financial information was leaked to unknown parties via some unknown method. If I had questions, I could call the company handling customer complaints.
When I called to ask how Change came to be in possession of my medical data, that they then lost, and subsequently failed to inform me of the situation within my state’s statutory notification window for having your data hacked, the representative told me they didn’t know, and would not be able to find out what company had entrusted them with my data.

I know it’s a bishop, but I also can’t stop envisioning it as having thrown its head back dramatically while wailing about their woes.

This is my semi-lazy approach. I’m sure someone is going to tell me all the ways that I’m falling down on this front, but…

I switched over to iPhone in like 2019. I started getting ‘stealth’ ads in google maps while driving, and I just could not deal with it. It made me reconsider all of Google’s products, and I made an effort to get away from them. (The stealth ads were like “In a quarter mile, continue past the [name of store] on your right” on a perfectly straight road. At the time I was giving a lot of thought to dark patterns and how they influence our behavior, and I just could not see that occurrence as anything other than manipulation. Ironically, I’ve since learned it may have actually been due to GIS errors thinking the road curved when it didn’t, and Google not having a nearby street to use for reference, but like… I don’t know, and I don’t care.)
On my iPhone I set it up to never send advertising ID/opt out of ad personalization.
I don’t give apps permissions they don’t have a clear reason for needing - Your camera can give away your location because of photo geotagging. Network access can report on what devices you have on your network as well as your network information, which is something that’s trackable and geolocatable. In an extreme edge case, network access could be used to find file shares on your network and use those to gather information about you. Bluetooth for same reasons. There are advertising networks based on Bluetooth, since your hardware MAC is not changeable and is freely shared. It can be used to track your location within a store, or figure out where you’ve been. A device that connects your identity (email login or something) to your bluetooth MAC can be used to build profiles on where you’ve shop and what sections you loiter in stores. And obviously, location access. I semi-routinely audit which apps are on my phone, and remove ones I don’t use and restrict permissions that I may have granted for a good reason but no longer need the app to have.
I don’t use the same email for anything anymore. I use an email masking service to generate emails for different services.
I never give my last name to any site unless it’s for billing. And I often don’t give my real first name. I never give my real birthday to any site that isn’t engaged with money or the law. I’ve removed or made ambiguous my profile on almost all social media. I no longer post my face to the internet.
I have used (but am not currently using) a service to request to remove me from online marketing/info sites like spokeo or whatever.
I also use a network-wide advertising blocker on my home network, and while I do have smart devices, they are blocked from internet access, with an upcoming plan to completely put them on an offline and isolated network.
The other thing that I did (accidentally) was to buy a new car that does not share data with advertisers or insurance companies. (Yet/to the best of my knowledge.) I’ve also gone through and audited my old accounts and requested not just account deletions, but data deletions. This is especially important for services that may have health, financial, or purchasing data. When I move, I never file a change of address with USPS. First - I just know what’s important to me and update those addresses. But second, the USPS maintains a database of everyone in the U.S. called the National Change of Address (NCOA) Database, and that is more or less monitored by junk mail advertisers to track where people physically are and to send them junk mail. The only time I get junk mail that’s addressed to me is when my information is shared against my will from financial institutions under this stupid exception.

My next thing that I may wind up doing is seeing if I can start acquiring throwaway phone numbers to forward to my real number, so online services that require a phone number for delivery or whatever cannot use that piece of information consistently or well.

That all does sound like a lot, I guess. But it doesn’t feel like a lot. I just live my life and try not to leak my data.
Most of that (and the issue this article is about) would be moot if the U.S. would just pass consumer privacy protections, but noooo, we can’t have that. Instead they’re going to theatrically whine about other countries and pass laws to help Facebook and bolster U.S. controlled propaganda-outlets while not doing anything to actually solve the problem(s).

She didn’t see it until after work started, but gave it a “Haha” response and then asked if both the dogs pooped this morning.

My wife saw him in concert awhile back, but the concert was on a Wednesday, so now I refer to him as “The Wednesday,” and have for years. She finds it funny and annoying and tells me to shut up while giggling.

I sent her this meme. She’s going to be so annoyed when she wakes up.

I mean, look — If your kid can’t tell the difference between a merlot and a malbec by the time they’re ready to order from the adult menu, can you say you’ve succeeded in preparing them for adulthood?

I thought it was an Adidas reference, based on the logo.

I started playing No Man’s Sky again recently. My game from XBox didn’t transfer to Steam and I didn’t feel like trying to troubleshoot it, so I just started fresh. I’ll probably play that until my new character has unlocked everything.
I also picked up Stray and haven’t yet gotten into it much. I also recently bought Everspace, but haven’t even started the game yet. Soon, though.

Growing up, we just like, inherited each other’s old stuff, like clothes, stereos, and even cars.

Gonna be a weird time when kids these days grow up and tell stories about handing down or receiving handed-down body armor.

But now Reddit will know every subreddit you visit will be entirely your choice. Removing the random button improves the quality of user analytics.

It also allows for algorithms fined tuned to keep you engaged not to be waylaid by some random sub that gives you a “well, that’s enough internet for today” moment.
Purely speculation, but would not be surprised to learn that subs that don’t encourage more scrolling or interaction (subs that are reading heavy, or direct people off site and keep them there) are shown less frequently than others. A random button breathes life into subs like those, whereas an algorithm-driven feed would slowly strangle them.

I already can’t do half the things I’m trying to do on my network, now I gotta figure out DNS?!?

The cities also indexed their streets off of the same river, but at different places along the curving bank. As a result, traveling south in KCMO increments the street numbers, but in KCK, the numbers increment when you travel west.

For more hilarity, the cities to the south of KCK adopted the KCMO street number designations, so KCK is the odd city out.

My tin foil hat theory is that he was planning out another shooting and got interrupted.

Headline is a little silly. It didn’t ignite or stoke anything, really.

My issues with the health insurance system didn’t get worse as a result of this. I have just felt a sense of camaraderie that I haven’t felt in a long time. The discussion and shared consensus has been a good reminder that I’m not alone, and hopefully to other people, too, that they aren’t alone, either.

It’s not that folks suddenly realized they hated their health insurance. They’re just talking about the same thing for once, and generally have the same view about the industry. It’s a strange catalyst for discussion, but it is something universal that affects a lot of people in the U.S.

I would not have expected for a shooting to lead to that sort of unity, but I think it has. At least a little bit. My wife is on X and told me that even Ben Shapiro supporters were disagreeing with him when he said something political and divisive about the shooting. Just sort of shocking.

Do you remember those “That was Easy!” buttons that proliferated about … 20 years ago. (Yikes.)

In this flight of fancy, Biden has one of those placed on the Resolute desk and custom records audio for it, then goes on a wild spree of political edicts fulfilling everyone’s wildest dreams.

Forgiving all student loan debt. Done. Pardoning illegal immigrants. Done. Amnesty for everyone currently seeking asylum. Done. Full citizenship for DREAMers. Done. Removing the post office retirement Fund requirement. Done. Legalize Weed? Done. Nuke the whales? Believe it or not, done.
And after the scrawling of pen across paper has completed, the caps clicked safely back into place, another sound: cheap plastic clacking together, and Nixon’s disembodied voice emanating from the Easy Button’s tinny speaker “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal!”

A valid point.
It did not occur to me that those could be harnessed as byproducts of other processes. That eliminates any concerns I could have had.

I always check the comments, but I had incorrectly assumed that “foam” referred to something made from plastics.

Gave myself a good chuckle, both at how silly that would have been, and at how silly of an assumption that was.

My only concern is that they seemingly use the bones of cuttlefish in the foam. (Fig 1a.)

I have too many of each of those things, with more on the way. Literally, in the mail right now.

In the ultimate synthesis of things, I’m currently working on building a new bed frame/headboard. I’m building one that has flip down cushions at the headboard with storage behind them, and a shelf (or two) up top. It’ll have integrated sensors/buttons and lights for reading, viewing inside the storage area and adding mood lighting to the room. It’ll have a lot of available power inside the storage area, so we can keep our sex toys stored and charged there, and not in the bathroom where we have to wonder if we’ve hidden things appropriately before we have company, in totes (where they get forgotten) or like, on our bedside, where they wind up with dust or stolen by a pet that thinks it’s a chew toy. Oh, and it’ll have hard points, obviously.

This house used to be a duplex. It wasn’t built that way, and it’s not that way now, but there’s a patch of siding at the back of the house that’s the shape of a door. When I moved in, I had to pay the local utility company on two bills, because the electricity was being billed to my street address, and the water was billed to my street address, Fl 1. It was a huge pain in the rear, because the utility company just shrugged and said “Oh, you’re the landlord over both those units.” And set me up as a master account holder over them as if the floors of my house were rentals. (IT’s weird they saw that one that doesn’t get water, and one that doesn’t get electricity and just shrugged it off, but whatever.) I had to call the city to have them send a letter to the utility company to tell them that my house was a single family residence. They didn’t do anything, but I called a few months later to ask if they ever got the letter. They said they had, and about 9 more months after that, they started sending me a single bill. Mercifully. The utility company doesn’t bill on the same day each month. I don’t know what math they use, but it seems to shift. Maybe they bill every 4 weeks instead of every month, but as a landlord of the single family home that I solely inhabited, they enrolled me in paperless billing and didn’t send ‘the landlord’ any billing notifications, so paying the bill on time was contingent upon not just checking the site in accordance with the calendar I keep, but also randomly checking it, too, as the billing date moved around. Do you have any idea how hard that is for someone with ADHD?

Anyway - all that is to say this house is totally whack. The furnace is about 3x the size needed for the square footage, so the air coming out of the vents is like 20 degrees hotter than it should be, and the blower struggles to push the appropriate volume of air through the old, hodgepodge, and (in at least one case) improvised ductwork. Instead of cycling and like, circulating air properly, it just blasts the area around the vents with hot air, and leaves cold spots cold. The plus side is that our HVAC guy says he expects the heat exchanger to burn itself up any time now, and when that happens, I guess I’ll spend the money I’m saving up for a down payment on a new house to deal with it. Or take out a HELOC and hope that when the market turns we don’t lose that much equity. Then we’ll get a nice heat pump or something - you know, for the next person who lives here, because this house’s problems are many.
But for right now we’re just running the thing with the cheapest, crappiest air filters we can find so there isn’t much air impedance, and changing them often. Sometimes I feel like living here is like living on the Serenity.

My realtor really did me dirty with this one. I mean, I still bought in 2019 before the market went insane, but like, it was my first house, and I really needed him to do better.
Next time I house hunt, I have a plan. I already have topographic maps of the whole city saved on my computer to ensure I’m not buying a house at a low spot (water issues). The state government provides maps of noise and environmental pollution, so I won’t be dealing with train tracks I thought I wouldn’t hear, or a metal plating company 3/4 of a mile away that makes the neighborhood smell like hot metal sometimes. I also now have thermal imaging gear, boroscopes, all manner of outlet testing gear, and a ruthless determination to not have to worry about a house that clearly wants to fall down. I’m going to be an unholy terror of a traveling home inspection for any house we’re looking at next.

After having just deleted 3 paragraphs… uh. This one, I guess.

I just talk too much. Add too many details. And then realize that I am actually bored with what I’ve written, and it would be awful to subject others to that.

I could have a good ramble about just about anything. Just before this comment I wrote and deleted 3 paragraphs about what temperature I keep the house. Programmable thermostat. Different modes for different seasons. Special seasonal cycles for morning/evening. Old house, renovations done to it, and not a great HVAC system, so some choices made to work around that, etc. Just rambly stuff.