Documenting Life

“Three Republican judges, two appointed by Trump, ruled that hospital emergency rooms don’t have to perform life-saving abortions in states that have passed antiabortion laws.

After the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services reminded hospitals that accept Medicare money that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), they had to provide care to stabilize patients in a medical emergency, including abortion care, regardless of state law.

Texas sued, and the Fifth Circuit has agreed, saying that the EMTALA does not preempt Texas law”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-3-2023-56e

“Huynh said he had dreamed of becoming a TikTok star since high school. He took on a part-time gig with Be when he was in college; after he graduated with a degree in information technology, he joined the company full-time. Soon, he realized his job as a ride-hailing driver would make for good TikTok content. He began saving money from his earnings, and bought a secondhand camera for 2 million dong ($83).

Huynh’s workday can go on for over 12 hours. In the afternoon, he stops to rest at a fast food restaurant, where he knows the manager. He records his rides by day and edits the videos on his phone at night”

https://restofworld.org/2023/life-of-a-gig-worker-vietnam-tiktok-driver/

“Basically, I’ve started making music for the first time since I was 21. Not regularly, but enough that I bought a tiny mid-keyboard to make it a bit easier. There’s about 6 or so tracks that were finished enough to lob at various friends for their amusement. And I do mean amusement – they’re terrible, but the other thing about art this year is me thinking about the power of just doing art. I still mean to write about AI stuff eventually, but part of the core is that – creating art is just good for you. Its quality really doesn’t matter. What matters is the process of creation, and that’s why it’s good for our spirits.

That said, the experience has also reminded me how I am not wired to be a real musician. I get earworms, so any time I am working on a song, it will inevitably get stuck in my head. There is literally nothing worse that a song that is genuinely awful which is also your song going around and around and around your head at 3am”

https://buttondown.email/KieronGillen/archive/273-im-going-to-tell-my-children-that-this-is/

“They are also preparing to impeach Mayorkas on the grounds that he has failed to meet the requirements of the Secure Fence Act, “which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country.” As Brooks and Beitsch point out, “not a single secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-2-2024

“By a few years later, though, I’d largely lost that hope, convinced that the battle had been won by the people who had made the internet a tool for maniupulation and undermining ordinary people’s power. I didn’t count on them being such sore winners, though. And I should never have underestimated the passion and resilience of the people who create the good internet, those who never stopped making things just for the love of the medium”

https://www.anildash.com/2024/01/03/human-web-renaissance/