cosmie

The other time was paying for a subscription to this[1] Thangs profile, which was more or less the same. I love making stuff using these techniques, and having access to all of his paid models really helped me get familiar with it using working examples. I mainly make my own designs now instead, but still pay for the subscription out of pure appreciation.

As the article notes, Tesla conveniently “fixed” their thermals and durability issue that caused by inventing a feature called cabin overheat protection and marketing it as for people/animals overheating and not for the non-automotive-spec electronics in the cabin.

If you can’t bring auto quality electronics to the car, just change the car so it avoids standard auto thermal conditions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I recently got a few to try out, and expressly chose them because they do motion and sound detection on device and also support microSD for local recording.

I've only had them a few weeks so can't speak to any slow-showing pain points, but so far both the video doorbell[1] and two inexpensive cameras I purchased[2][3] to test out have been awesome.

I set up an automation so they record continuously when I leave and when home to record on detection only (motion for all three and sound for the Kasa camera) to try to be economical on wearing out the SD cards. But for me personally knowing I'll likely have those go out on me and need replaced was an ok trade off for the convenience, and probably a wash financially because everything I wanted happens locally whereas I kept seeing them gated behind a subscription plan when looking at other options.

There's also an option in the app to enable them to speak stream locally to a NAS or NVR via RTSP if you want to do that with them. So I can eventually set that up for more reliability when the eventual SD burnout occurs, and scratch my tinkering itch with things like streaming it to Frigate and testing it out vs the native detection features, without any actual presasure to need to since it all just works as is.

The doorbell is what I was originally needing the continuous local recording and on-device object detection for. The two cameras were bonuses I threw in to grab a few of their inexpensive models to try out while I was at it. And so far for about $100 in total I've been impressed. Key word being so far – they're still recent enough I might be in my honeymoon phase with them and just don't know it yet.

A lot of tracking prevention mechanisms have started baking in CNAME uncloaking in the last few years precisely for that reason. Safari/WebKit[1], Brave[2], uBlock Origin (on Firefox only)[3], and NextDNS[4] just to name a few.

At this point the industry has moved onto straight up reverse proxying so it's all first party context. In milder instances it's in the form of server-side tagging[5] (which isn't a true reverse proxy, but can easily be used as one). But at least in those instances the website operators are the ones that typically own the server-side tagging process and have oversight/control/visibility into what they're putting in place.

But that has a high bar for implementation and relatively few companies have the resources or competence for that sort of thing. So it's much easier to persuade website operators to put a pure, dumb reverse proxy in place that gives them an endpoint under the first party domain to load resources from and send hits through[6]. Including being able to use HTTP set-cookie headers in the responses, while they're at it. Which is coincidentally the only long-lived cookie that still exists in Safari/WebKit, since things like "Keep me logged in" functionality would break if they started auto-purging those too.

If it's written in javascript, it's gone in 7 days even if it's first party. And if it's an HTTP header from a CNAME, it's also gone in 7 days. Only cookies set with an HTTP set-cookie header from a first party context are durable anymore. So that's exactly where advertisers are going into as an end-run in the game of cat and mouse - with surprisingly willing adoption from website operators, who are desperate to get their attribution back and don't quite understand the risk profile it exposes them to when they approve letting a third party operator masquarade so deeply as the website operator itself.

You do not buy a syringe for a 1000x markup. You stand up a group purchasing organization (GPO) as a subsidiary and spin off your entire procurement department to it. You have your negotiating team accept nominal trade discounts off catalog prices, and instead prioritize lump-sum off invoice rebates at various spending thresholds. So while you previously got a $50 syringe discounted to $25 from a supplier, now your group purchasing subsidiary is paying nominally less than ~$50 per syringe but recieving a lump sum rebate against accounts payable from a supplier equivalent to $25 per syringe based on your primary client's expected spending volume (which is pretty predictable considering your former procurement department turned subsidiary has been working with this supplier for ages).

The group purchasing subsidiary then adds a nominal markup of their supply catalog, say 20% or so. So that $50 syringe is sold to the hospital for $60. A 20% markup is considered fair and reasonable so your auditors give it their blessing. Suddenly the hosital is paying $35 more per syringe but the supplier is still getting the same $25 they always have. You also sign up another local hospital to join the GPO and negotiate even higher rebate thresholds. Both hospitals auditors and lawyers point to the industry wide practice of GPOs and their perceived benefits, making plausible enough defenses against both criminal and civil complaints. The executive team of the GPO that came over from their parent orgs and orchestrated this whole thing get generous (but fair market rate) employment contracts and benefits that just happen to absorb the maojrity of that $35 per syringe profit so very little ends up bubbling back up to the non-profit parent entities.

Do the same thing with selling your real estate to a real estate holding company, which leases it back to you at market rates (that just keep going up and up). Do the same with your nurses – spin up a nursing staffing company and contract all your nurse staffing through it. Same with physicians – spin off any directly employed physicians into a physician staffing company and conmtract with them for services.

As long as you follow the appropriate corporate formalities, you suddenly have a ton of knobs you can turn to engineer any particular operating margin you want your healthcare system to be perceived as having. This isn't limited to hospital systems, but with the prevalent level of inefficient middlemen entities that already exist in the US healthcare system and contribute to runaway costs, it's pretty damn easy to throw a few of your own into the mix in a manner that passes legal scrutinty around self-dealing. There are also plenty of liability-related reasons to justify such setups as well, so it's not purely a shift around profits from your tax-exempt non-profit entity.

And insurers don't actually care much at all about any of this. As they're required to pay out 80% of premiums as claims and only allowed 20% for administrative expenses and profits, the easiest way to increase profits is for claims to increase (and subsequently allowing the absolute value of that 20% piece to grow). If hospital charges go up across the board because of these sorts of shenanigans, that's as much a boon to the insurers paying out as it is to whatever lucky winners are siphoning off the profits from those related entity subsidiaries.