logjam

And no, people who think they are being "brutally honest" while forgetting compassion or even basic fucking manners are not doing so with others' best interests at heart.

They are just being assholes. There are bonafide reasons for that behavior, and they deserve a measure of compassion themselves while receiving that message, but don't try gilding the orifice's behavior.

This was a gutless, sexist, little shitfest in front of a tech audience in a supposedly professional forum, not someone sneaking a peak at a woman.

Do you and the rest of the geniuses who are unable to read the article and who are commenting below about "evolution" and other horseshit really, really not get this?

And to any other eternal 14 year olds out there who think there is anything "hilarious" about this, please understand that if you behave like the morons cited you will have an increasingly difficult time getting a job anywhere after a stunt like this. And many of us will make it our business to get in your face quite a bit more than that.

Even with your anecdotal assertions, do you really, really expect us to believe that you're unaware of the number of parents in this country who home-school their kids largely if not solely to prevent access to such dreaded concepts as, oh....evolution:

"Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83% of home-schooling parents want to give their children "religious or moral instruction. "The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians," said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. "Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program.""

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-03-08-home...

In what way is homeschooling to suit a parent's utter stupidity not a prison?

You know. Since, yeah, you not-so-disingenuously went ahead and grouped polygamy with homosexuality as both somehow innate "sexual orientations", as you groped toward analogy.

You are trying to suggest the really vapid idea (over and over and over) that because no "names" are being supplied by one side (in a realm where divulging names might be harmful in itself), then no harm was done.

Hey, I'm a big supporter of transparency and whistleblowing activites.

And I still say to people behaving like you - do you have any clue whatsoever how illogical you sound?

Oh. Then please provide the list asked for, and while you're at it, list the genes and loci you use to classify members of a "race".

I mean, if human "races" are not a matter of belief but are a matter of science, that should be really easy for you and the parent commenter.

Right?

Pedant alert: consider a beefy breaker bar or a torque wrench for that mechanical advantage. A pipe slipped on the end of a wrench has a habit of slipping off or breaking the wrench, and possibly causing injury to mechanism, mechanic, etc.

But yeah, I'm with ya. It's amazing the satisfaction we get from doing stuff ourselves and from the "working smarter" stuff our elders can teach us, if we'll only slow down, ask, and listen with care.

No. Biological theories of mental health and mental illness are very much established.

And yours is a complete mischaracterization of the work of Kirsch et al.

Their meta-analysis found that in ALL cases of depression, there is statistically significant improvement in quantitative measures of depression treated with SSRI. In moderate to severe cases of depression, the improvement was clinically significant (ie a clinician and patient clearly note the improvement). The meta-analysis done on clinical trials were overwhelmingly trials of 6 weeks of SSRI or less. Suicidal patients are almost all excluded from such trials. Treatment groups were treated with SSRIs via research protocols, and not usual clinical practice: there were no attempts made to match patients to an SSRI that would be most likely to help, to wait on a response, to use SSRIs that were helpful based on a family history; dose adjustments were typically prescribed by study protocol and not by patient response, patients were not switched to another SSRI when there was no response or if intolerable side effects developed, often no attempt to treat side effects with other agents were done, etc. In other words, none of the things any physician routinely does to optimize treatment were done in those trials, and yet there were STILL improvements in measures of depression across the board.

No reputable psychiatrist or physician will fail to recommend an SSRI in cases of moderate to severe depression. Therapy can also be helpful, but the evidence is overwhelming that SSRIs help in clinically significant ways in moderate to severe depression. There is no credible doubt about it.

Despite your assertions about what "people very much want to believe" - in my experience, people very much want to believe that the brain is somehow different - that something beyond biology is at work. Believing that somehow depressed or otherwise mentally ill people can just "snap out of it" or "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" is erroneous, unhelpful, but fits nicely into really completely shitty and cruel narratives about human beings.

But please. Perhaps you'd like to advance a theory on how an organ like the brain differs from every other organ and does its work in ways not explainable by biology, chemistry, physics, etc.

1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society

1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship ("genius grant")

1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)."

1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology

1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award

1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award

2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being (武田研究奨励賞)

2001: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow

2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership

2003: Honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel

2004: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Nacional de Salta.

2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.

2007: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

2007: First Premio Internacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre

2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote.

2007: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Pavia

2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru

2009: Honorary doctorate, from Lakehead University

2011: Honorary doctorate, from National University of Córdoba.

2012: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad César Vallejo de Trujillo, in Peru

2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Latinoamericana Cima de Tacna, in Peru

2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad José Faustino Sanchez Carrió, in Peru.

Source: Wikipedia

But here on Hacker News (of all places), let's instead criticize his personal preferences on fucking ties.

In an HN thread commenting on a scientific study, our top comment is an N=1 report, followed immediately by the commenter peddling the book of a self-described fitness expert who praises "ultra-high calorie diets", followed downthread by the same commenter peddling some "supplement" called "Pre-Exercise CNS-Carnosine-ATP Augmentor".

Really, HN?

And downthread you're all exercised about agenda while completely giving Disney a pass on pushing an agenda?

We get it. The "ethics" you're advocating argues for giving kids plates of sparkly sugar for dinner because it will "test better" and gross more.

When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.

"You’re going to have to shim those out," I said.

"What’s shim?"

"It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."

"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"

"I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.

He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"

"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."

I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.

But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

Ach, du lieber!

Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it. You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why. I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.

In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.

For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice.

Then he would have gone gaga over it.

-- Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Lessons in better tactics ain't the most important learning to draw from that reading, General.

I mean, with the quality and depth of those kinds of comments, why would anyone ever even think to speculate about motivation and/or character here?

You mean "finance discussions" from people who owed their income to the finance industry...and yet who want us to believe they are unbiased on the topic of the finance industry...this despite their well-thought out "discussion" in this thread of a criticism of the financial industry consisting not of any factual arguments, but only of completely unsupported horseshit like...wait for it... "Taibbi routinely lies..."?

I mean how could anyone even consider the idea "shill", is that what you're saying?

"Good vs evil"?

Go figure. Yeah, go fucking figure.

This rough time will pass, most probably in a matter of a few more weeks. You will increasingly be able to cope. Do keep consulting with your pediatrician with any questions - it's ok to ask as many questions as you have. None of us are born knowing how to care for a new baby. If your baby's weight is on target, don't worry so much about occasional feeding difficulties.

If you can afford, absolutely get someone to help with household tasks - the cleaning, shopping, cooking. Talk to the people at work and rearrange some things temporarily - most all of us understand the stress of a new baby - can you shift your work hours? Can you work from home temporarily? Can you work three or four days a week instead of five, etc? Can you take some paternity leave?

Postpartum blues are common and will pass quickly, but have a low threshold for either of you to get an evaluation from MD if depression develops. Keep talking to friends and family and let people know what you're going through.

Humor is a strong and highly mature defense. If in 10 years you're going to laugh about today's 4AM emergency diaper change, you might as well just start laughing now.

Next up: criminals are not really responsible for crime, since "government entities" like municipal police forces supposedly "strictly enforce" criminal conduct.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume you've never had anything whatsoever to do with a clinical trial, because the modern FDA has almost nothing to do with the way a clinical trial is conducted.

A pharma company (the capitalists) writes the protocol the way they want, and hires a university/researcher to run the study. They file a simple two page form with the FDA to apply for an "indication" to study a treatment. The university/researcher gets the university IRB to sign off on the study protocol. Sometimes, if the IRB is any good at all, they'll tweak the protocol to try to protect the research subjects. But guess who picks the IRB members? The university/researcher making money off the capitalist pharma company. Guess how that influences an IRB.

The FDA has no input. There is no supervision in any meaningful sense by the FDA. The capitalists - researcher and sponsor - run every aspect of the study. Each decision is theirs.

The decisions spelled out in the article were made by the capitalists - the pharma company and researchers.

Barring some complete misstep like all the active arm study patients suddenly dropping dead, the FDA will eventually (read: years after the study is completed) examine the data (typically highly massaged by the capitalists) from the study to make a determination on whether to approve a medication for sale.

But pretending that the FDA (especially after years of being stripped of regulatory powers by, you guessed it, capitalists who buy and sell legislators) has much of anything to do with the way a clinical trial is conducted is complete bullshit.

Flagged.

Oh. My. Lie. Speaking of sleazy, do tell us more about your oddly worded little insinuation, when the article you linked goes on to say:

"First, the category of 'false accusations' does not distinguish between accusers who lie and those who are honestly mistaken. Nor does it indicate that a rape did not occur, merely that the specific accused is innocent....Third, the 1-in-4 figure has 'fuzzy' aspects that could influence the results. For example, Neufeld and Scheck mention only sexual assault cases that were "referred to the FBI where results could be obtained."

Cooperation, symbiosis, or whatever you want to call it, is a higher good than competition.