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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I’ve worked in healthcare, and my immediate thought was training. When showing somebody the ropes, you often have to pull up some sort of sample, and if your business hasn’t set up a special account for that, it is often a real random account that is used for show.

    If you aren’t really thinking about it, it is easy to write in a famous name as a random sample, and then accidentally expose that person as a real patient.

    The privacy protections in HIPAA are horrible. Anybody sending a request with a fake letterhead from a hospital is likely to get all the records sent directly to them, no questions asked.





  • Until there is literally a smoking gun, I have no serious reason to believe that Carter is anything less than a man who has done his best to be good. He was also a human being, and I’m sure people can dig up a bad interaction if they look hard enough. Still, it doesn’t invalidate his lifetime of attempts at making a positive impact on the world.

    Carter ain’t no Cosby.


  • I just read his Wikipedia page. Under the conditions of his time, how was he a racist? The article says he opposed slavery, opposed “scientific racists” of the time who argued polygenism and that some races were “transitional” between animal and man, and he asserted that science could never excuse the atrocities of slave owners.

    He did have incomplete theories about a racial hierarchy of intelligence, which was a common idea at the time. The article doesn’t suggest that he was a primary champion of that theory, or that it heavily featured in most of his work.

    In my opinion, he seems like a man who was doing what he could to expand his understanding of his observations, even if he was limited and misled by the prevailing methods and attitudes of his lifetime. Perhaps he should be judged against his peers rather than modern sensitivities, particularly without any evidence of malice in his work.