A UW student found success, and answers about her father’s addiction | Hacker News Reader

A UW student found success, and answers about her father’s addiction

seattletimes.com

34 pointswallflower11 comments

This article has the typical dichotomy of a piece discussing the medical aspect of addiction: after waxing on for paragraphs about the medical nature of addiction, and how the rats she studies are helpless to avoid relapse, it then ends on a moral note, stating that "the choice [to maintain sobriety] is his".

Well, if addiction is in fact a medical problem, then the choice is not entirely his, is it?

For people like the father, I'd strongly recommend getting on and staying on methadone. It's not easy, but it's a real of a lot better than going to prison and destroying one's family.

That may be the one choice he does have.

There's a reason that addiction is called "the only disease you get yelled at for having."

The Seattle Times is fairly conservative and I'm somehow not surprised its journalists would say such things.

Seattle Times loads a blank page without Javascript. Here's a helpful mirror:

http://archive.is/4q80f

I always thought of "UW" as the university of waterloo

Given that the article is in a Seattle newspaper, I'm guessing a large portion of it's readers understood the abbreviation. But yes, in general abbreviations for colleges tend to overlap quite a bit due to common initials.

In 2018, given the world audience news sites have, there should be clear cut definitions of acronyms and abbreviations used in posts/articles.

Taking note of the context within which an acronym or abbreviation is used is part of being an informed reader. In this case, one does not even have to go to the link to get a clue as the URL is right here on HN.

In an article, I agree, but headlines are space-constrained, so I don't see it as an issue that they use a slightly ambiguous abbreviation

It gets even more confusing when there are two universities with the same name, like Victoria University in Wellington, and Victoria University in Melbourne.

just for future reference, it's pronounced "You-Dub" here.

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