BirdieNZ

I wasn't drugged in childhood (other than paracetamol?) and ADHD made adult life incredibly difficult until I started medication. Now it feels like adult life is easy, and I can't believe it is so easy for other people. N=1 but not being drugged didn't prevent ADHD for me.

> It seems incorrect to refer to this as "brain damage"?

Some people have car crashes or other traumatic head injuries and receive an ADHD diagnosis after the event, so it is usually from childhood but sometimes from brain damage.

Ritalin's been used to treat ADHD for about 70 years. Also, we know that ADHD results in reduced life expectancy, so ADHD medication just has to improve that number for it to be pretty good. If your life expectancy due to taking ADHD meds improves by a couple years because you're less likely to crash your car or overdose on recreational drugs then ADHD meds are a far preferable option to not taking them.

If someone owned all the water in the world, then "fair market price" is whatever they choose to set the price at. That doesn't mean that as a society we should be comfortable with allowing one person to own all the water in the world.

Desirable locations are finite, though. People want to live near jobs, infrastructure, amenities, their friends and family. There is limited supply of locations that are near to those things, so land functions as a monopoly.

Land rent works very differently than most other markets because land is of limited supply. "Fair market price" is determined by what people who live in an area can afford to pay, rather than primarily supply and demand. Add to that restrictive zoning laws and you end up with a situation where most landlords are extracting significant economic rents from their tenants without needing to provide any extra service or quality of good to earn that rent.

> Yeah, ADHD is a difference to non-ADHD, but that doesn't make it a disability. It's just a different mode of thought,

It's a great theory but I consider it a disability that I have to wrestle with myself _every single night_ to force myself to start doing the dishes, which I want to do but my ADHD brain doesn't find interesting enough to start doing. I can spend several minutes just physically pacing and trying to hype myself up to start on something that I _want_ to do, and it is every day, for basically every task that my brain doesn't find interesting, and it doesn't get easier.

Also, brainscans of ADHD-diagnosed individuals clearly show certain parts of the brain are under-developed compared to normal.

> how would you describe to someone who is not diagnosed ?

Certain abilities that normal people mature in are stuck at the level of a fifteen-year-old for me and will be perpetually. Some of them are:

Ability to "feel" the nearness of the future, and plan and act accordingly

Ability to choose to do one task over another, and particularly an uninteresting task over an interesting one

Ability to stop an interesting task to change to another important task

Ability to stay on a single topic in thoughts and conversations

Many people with ADHD also have the emotional regulation of a ~15 year old, perpetually.

Most people can approximately remember how difficult those different abilities were when they were fifteen so there can be some level of empathy. When you were fifteen, university most likely "felt" very far away, and preparing for it "felt" not very important compared to your day-to-day. In hindsight, 15 is not far away from 18 and starting university, and there are many things you can do at 15 to make entering a good university easier.

You can do whatever you want, but most of us don't try to operate in a system where the only knowledge that can exist is that which is verified by the scientific method. In fact, inherent to the scientific method is an underlying philosophy of science which does not come from science, nor could it without being at best circular reasoning.

Science and the scientific method is basically the best means by which we can understand the physical world, but it doesn't help us determine the nature of truth, ethics, or the nature of science. It works on various assumptions (e.g. physical matter actually exists, it is possible to gain knowledge about physical matter, there is such a thing as time, logic is a valid aapproach to determining truth) that it cannot validate.

> They haven't even tried

This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was considered (and tried even!) and rejected as unworkable.

In other words, you are certainly not the first person to think "what if we just had more hospital beds and staff and throw heaps of money at it to make it happen". The reason no country (that I know of) has done this is because it is impractical. The alternative is a grand conspiracy involving collusion in hundreds of countries and states and their leaders, including all the departments of health and the various officials, in democratic countries, communist countries, authoritarian countries and so on, some of whom are literally at war with each other.

The statement doesn't claim to be a scientific statement. It isn't contradicting itself.

A verbal contract is still a contract, including amendments to it. Being on salary vs paid hourly also doesn't mean anything about whether there is a contract.

You should learn a bit about adult ADHD and see if it sounds like you, and perhaps get a psychiatrist to see if you match an ADHD diagnosis. It changed my life to find out I was ADHD, and what you said has some correlation.

Decreased* risk of heart inflammation compared to catching Covid without the vaccine.

Why not both? It's not entirely clear that either solution is going to magically make life wonderful by itself but both are going to have very positive effects on society and have some overlap in effect.

I believe the next article in the series will explain it, but you can search google for "tax incidence land value tax" to find an explanation as to why. The short answer is that if you pass on the lvt to the tenant that means you just increased the land rent, so the land value goes up and then the land valye tax goes up. You can't repeat that into perpetuity because the tenant is already paying as much as they can afford (in aggregate). So you lose your tenant if you try to pass it onto them.

Isn't increased density good for the environment? Georgism/LVT would encourage increased density, which means fewer roads, more compact cities, and probably less driving.

> at the cost of suburban homes.

Suburban homes have a much larger footprint than urban homes, so it would reduce urban sprawl if you have fewer suburban homes and more urban homes.

How can I go about contacting you if I were interested in your service?

> nd what - if any - role their openness to a certain anti-parasitic, protease inhibiting drug has played in their success.

There's a trial study currently in progress in Japan to investigate this, but all the evidence we have points to ivermectin being of no benefit to Covid patients unless they have parasitic worms. See, for example: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...

It's not an unanswered question, in other words. Ivermectin doesn't help against Covid.

Car washes are low maintenance, so it's an easy way to make a little cashflow whipe primarily owning the land for landbanking purposes. With the land freed up for something more productive, other businesses will be set up which are higher effort but higher returns.

Basically car washes are the slightly-harder version of land banking, but there is still enough value in the land that if the land was put up for sale, some other business would purchase it and utilise the land better.

If the car wash owner wanted to maximize returns they could set up a more profitable business today, sure. It's just more effort than they can be bothered with.

> Real estate is predicated on the concept that adding value to the land increases its value. So... what exactly become the merit of taxing land over property? If you tax property, the value of the land is included in that tax.

Check out Henry George; given it's HN, check out Scott Alexander's blog on Henry George: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...

If the lots are of value then someone will buy them and develop them to return a profit. Under a land value tax you expect land to be used more efficiently, not less.

This is why it is sometimes referred to as "location value" rather than land value. The dirt is approximately worthless, but the location is worth a lot due to the surroundings (usually, because of human development of the surroundings).

Advocates of a land value tax therefore often call it a location value tax, or a site value tax, because it is the location and the society around the location that has value, not the dirt itself.

Both you and the GP are correct, in different ways. Investing in housing development results in houses being built, but investing in land does not. Land values going up are the real problem here, not so much house values. Houses generally depreciate in value, as they deteriorate. In general, no one is opposed to investors who build new dwellings or improve and maintain existing dwellings. The issue is that land ownership is a monopoly which results in land-owners being able to extract economic rents from society without doing anything to improve or maintain or add value to society.

Land-lording and economic, monopoly rents are bad, housing developments and rentals being hired out are good.

> it confuses me because isn’t inflation supposed to be the increase of price of everything due to something other than practical, on-the-ground market problems?

No, inflation can be caused by practical, on-the-ground market problems too.

> Inflation is the term used to describe a rise of average prices through the economy. It means that money is losing its value.

> The underlying cause is usually that too much money is available to purchase too few goods and services, or that demand in the economy is outpacing supply. In general, this situation occurs when an economy is so buoyant that there are widespread shortages of labour and materials. People can charge higher prices for the same goods or services.

> Inflation can also be caused by a rise in the prices of imported commodities, such as oil. However, this sort of inflation is usually transient, and less crucial than the structural inflation caused by an over-supply of money.

> Your marriage could end at any point. You just live naively thinking it won’t

Oh, I'm quite aware that it could end (whether due to death or divorce). I choose not to spend my time dwelling on the possibility, because that would be like living in hopelessness. There are a lot of bad things that might happen to us in the future, and some are even likely, but living in constant dread for the future is joylessness.

It would be a fallacy to say "this argument is necessarily true because an authority claimed it was so", but it isn't a fallacy to say "this authority in this subject claimed it was so and it far more probable that they know what they are talking about than you, who are not an authority in this subject."

I am sincerely grieved for you and your situation, and wish you find joy and perhaps re-discover trust for women in the future.

Hopefully it is not poor taste, but I do disagree with your advice. Yes, marriage comes with a great deal of risk, because it is codifying your love. Love itself is risk, though. As C.S. Lewis said:

> To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Yes, marriage opens yourself up to a great deal of potential financial damage. It also opens yourself up to a secure romance and friendship, where you can build a future based on commitment to one another. I far prefer to give my wife not just my love and companionship, but also my commitment, my future, and yes, my money. She does the same for me, and it is far more secure and stable than just a dating relationship which could end at any time for any reason. Divorce is way harder to go through than a simple breakup, for either party. Just the sheer effort of a divorce gives you stability, regardless of social, legal, and cultural implications.

The real pro-tip here is that basically everything you read on HN for which you are not an expert has the appearance of expertise and authenticity. Once you see those same people speaking on a subject which you know a lot about, you realise that HN is only actually high-expertise on tech and entrepreneurship. The users here (myself included!) are probably quite good at programming, business, and maybe project management, which gives us false confidence in our abilities in every other field that exists.