418 karma · joined December 16, 2014
Disney doesn't have many characters with that much lasting appeal between age demographics, it links the older generation of Disney with the new.
I don't think it's right to punish a pub for all problems caused by alcohol intoxication, but I do think punishing a pub for serving alcohol negligently is okay.
My understanding is one of the main reasons methamphetamines are so widely used and sold is because meth is cheap and easy to make compared to safer possible alternatives. That indicates to me that this seems like a market that needs regulation, not prohibition.
I'm not saying meth should be legal, I'm saying the drug market can be regulated to reduce harm. If that regulation means disallowing certain substances that do cause excessive harm, that's a good thing too.
Many large companies have tried to skirt around these consumer rights, like Steam and E.A who both rejected the notion that they even do business in Australia, all to prevent issuing refunds. It's absurd. Telling a consumer they have no right to a refund when they do is even against the law here, yet Apple do it all the time.
Eventually I got to a senior representitve and they openly stated to me while denying my claim "I don't know why you expect me to know the laws in Australia". They bloody well should, though. Australia's consumer rights watchdog even forced Apple to display a notice on their website to prevent people being misled by Apple.
There has to be more research conducted for this (and sleep disorders in general, really) because if there is a link that's the only way forward to managing it through your healthcare provider. At the moment I haven't found many doctors willing to be so speculative which makes sense - they don't know what to test for or how to treat it; so there's nothing they could really do anyway.
Personally I have found modafinil[1] to be extremely helpful in combating sleep and fatigue, one of it's on label uses is for people with narcolepsy so it's possible your doctor might be willing to prescribe it for you off-label. I buy it off the internet which is technically illegal where I live but it's way cheaper.
After your comment I did a really quick search for any information and found this paper[2] from 2018. It has some pretty big limitations, but I think it's worth doing more research.
I'm not intentionally trying to sound hyperbolic. Are you? They are literally classified as invasive procedures. It is by definition unnecessary. There are going to be false-positives in these screenings and these false-positives can be harmful. Early detection + cancer = good. Early detection + no cancer = bad. So we must balance these two. I agree detecting cancer early is a good thing, but that's not what I was saying.
What's the deal, do you think there's no false positives, do you think over detection has no harms?
If you want something more recent, here's one published February 2020:
"...A further contributor is overdiagnosis, or the diagnosis of cancer in people who would never have experienced symptoms or harm had the cancer remained undetected and untreated. Overdiagnosis of certain screen‐detected cancers is common including 20–50% of prostate cancer and 11–19% of breast cancer diagnoses.
Cancer can also be overdiagnosed outside screening programs. Overdiagnosis of thyroid cancer is attributable to incidental detection during investigations of unrelated problems; overdiagnosis of renal cancer and melanoma is less well investigated.
Overdiagnosis is important because of the associated iatrogenic harms and costs. Harms include the psychosocial impact of unnecessary cancer diagnoses, such as the increased suicide risk for men after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. Cancer treatments such as surgery, radiotherapy, endocrine therapy, and chemotherapy can cause physical harm, but the risks are considered acceptable if diagnosis is appropriate. When someone is unnecessarily diagnosed with cancer, however, they can only be harmed by treatment, not helped."
...
"Overdiagnosis of breast cancers is largely attributable to the national screening program, that of prostate cancers and melanoma to opportunistic but extensive screening in Australia. Renal cancer overdiagnosis appears to be largely linked with cancers detected as incidental findings during abdominal imaging for an unrelated reason (incidentalomas). Overdiagnosis of thyroid cancer is related to both incidentalomas and to excessive investigation of thyroid function test abnormalities"
https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/212_04/mja250455....
I'm not saying this because I think we should never investigate or search for cancer, I'm just stating that it's not as clear as 'mammogram always good'. We must weigh the risks with the benefits and we cannot just ignore the harm because we're scared of the possibility of death.
So if we spend more money on these and we do them more often yet they don't actually improve mortality, is it worth it? There's a trade up there which your doctor should be making.
This is similar to how some people view the law as being a moral compass for right or wrong. While a lot of people do tend to view doing something illegal as doing something wrong, it's not actually true that just because you're doing something illegal you are doing something wrong.
So what you said is true in that people see it that way, not in that it actually is that way, or ought to be that way. I think your comment sort of conflates this disinction whether intentionally or unintentionally, hence the downvotes.
Try not to presume people are so quick to judge, rather that people are just feeling whatever they feel instinctively, and it is what it is. They probably don't even know why they feel what they do, it's just bad intuition not ignorance.
Regardless, I'm no expert on this matter, and it would be nice if people stated this more often than defer to which ever thing they heard as being correct, which I think is what people are doing when they say it's 'just a flu'.
Ideally we should prepare for the worst of possible outcomes, hope for the best of possible outcomes, and expect the actual outcome to be in the middle. Those possible outcomes change as more information gets released.
But the economy and society can change suddenly. People denying anything is wrong keeps it going. Everything is fine until it isn't, then change can come suddenly. USSR I think is a good example of this.
The economy will run until the constraints make it fail. This already happens now sometimes. We just have the means and the methods to fix it, or prevent it. Global warming will cause those constraints and our abilities to change and the economy is not just magically going to keep going, unless climate change is deterred.
Lack of food, lack of money, lack of stable government, etc. I think these are all conditions for civilisation ending. I don't think it will go from the stability we have now to no stability over a very long period. It will be like a pendulum and it will oscilate until one thing becomes too many and it will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
I want to make it clear I'm saying this is only a possibility, and only if no change occurs. I don't think is the most likely outcome, merely that it's possible.
There's a lot of confusing mixed messages, not even from just random people, but from the WHO and different governments. They say they are fully prepared and it can be contained yet doctors and health advisors are saying that's just not true. I think there's a bit of play here between the negative effects from the virus, versus the perceived negative effects from panic (I suspect the economy plays a role in government's responses far more than people think).
So to me it seems there is a bit of a management or reaction to an over reaction. Yet, in face of a pandemic, being worried is probably sensible because it will lead you prepare and be conscious of good hygiene practises. Telling people everything is okay in the face of possible emergency or possible disaster is not good.
Are there people out there over reacting and over reaching with their analysis of this? Sure. But that doesn't mean there's nothing worth reacting over. This is a serious health issue, and calling it 'just the flu' could be considered reckless in my opinion.
We have to have a lot of inaction to get to that point from here, but it's possible.
So decreasing inhibitions so that you don't care about this, or increasing empathy so that you feel more trust in general can let people be much more truthful. For instance, alcohol or MDMA, or talking to a close friend compared to a stranger.
VCs are backed by large amounts of capital because most government policy has been to stimulate growth and the only way they know how is by giving away large loans at insanely cheap (in many cases even negative in real terms) interest. This means that VCs can actually lose out on money by not taking those loans and investing it, and that in turn drives a lot of speculatory investment, as well as inflates asset and stock prices which the government then uses to show how good it is.
This is why you correctly spotted that step 4 is not a requirement for start ups anymore, because so long as you are big enough to be speculated on, you're good for funding. Whether that means it's broken really depends upon your definition of working, as a lot of people believe it's fine because all seems to be going great. This is the gambler's fallacy. It's all fine, until it isn't.
For instance, imagine a hypothetical about whether or not it's safe to shoot someone in the chest, we wouldn't say it's safe simply because they could wear a bullet-proof vest, we would have to ask 'what are the odds that they are going to be wearing a bullet-proof vest'.
Personally I would assume that in technological terms stopping aging is somewhere below being able to harvest the large amount resources in space safely and efficiently. But I could be wrong.
It left me thinking about immortality from a normal human's perspective for a long time. He explains how it changed him, and where he started from. It's very compelling in my opinion.
If every human that ever lived could live forever, would we have been born? And today, would there be enough space, enough resources, to live a comfortable life worth living if forever? I'm not saying that it makes sense to kill people to create more comfortable life here (as some might take it), what I'm saying is there's an upper bounds to letting people live for a long long time without impacting any future life negatively. One person living forever is not really be a big deal. But everyone? At which point we have to ask, if people have that right to death, how does it impact other's right to life, right to shelter, right to clean water, and so on. They impact each other.
On a side note, there's a fantastic albeit cheaply made film called The Man From Earth that follows a conversation with someone who claims to have lived since the dawn of man. It's great concept, and I highly recommend a watch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth
If you have to say "dont be a jerk", rather than just do it, what does that really say?
This isn't always a bad thing, but on a whole, it does distort the market. At some point you have to weigh up if the good effects of this are worth the bad effects. If there were higher taxes, costs, or otherwise more risk for investing, it would limit that a lot.
The thing is I feel like maybe you get more out of those 15 minutes than me, or others who feel like it's too much time. Those telling people not to use social media are probably the ones that don't have good experiences with social media. To each their own, I suppose. It's important to remember different people are going to have different experiences and that is going to paint your feelings about it. As much as it seems that social media does have a general negative impact on people, I'm sure there are people for who it is fine. Should we chastise everyone to stop? Probably not, just let others know it could be affecting them and how to stop, etc.
It reminds me of people who get anxious on marijuana and then always go anti-drug on other people because they think "this stuff is terrible, no one should do this" yet for a lot of other people they had great experiences, and so the reverse is true "this stuff is great, everyone should try this". They're sort of both wrong there.
Either way personally, I don't get much out of social media and so I don't use it. If you feel like you're getting something out of it worth those few days a year spent on it, go for it, although just be mindful that it's something that feels good, but might not actually be good itself.