Silly from the point of most buyers. I'm not ready to get an EV yet either, but I'm as far as you can get from an early adopter at home. Into the future at work, stay in the past at home. Do you think I should switch to central heating?
The question is important though from the POV of whether this is a tech worth encouraging, affluent greenies can rightly feel smug for driving one, etc.
What the cynic in me hears: "For whatever reason, we can't manipulate the tallies this year (was Diebold's bid too expensive?) so we have to go back to old-fashioned vote-counting fraud."
That's what I hear too. The old lever machines were supposedly pretty easy to rig, and I've saw no problems when we switched from lever machines to scantrons.
Rhode Island Population: 1.05 Million
New York Population: 19.47 Million
This New Yorker claims that's irrelevant. A bigger area just means more polling places. A larger population just means more machines per polling place. However you do it people are supposed to vote one at a time. Some things scale just fine.
the rest of the world has collectively been shaking its head and wondering why the US doesn't adopt the system that almost everyone else uses successfully: Paper and pens.
A poster above said that in Canada (or at least his part of it) they use the "fill in the circle w/ a pencil", which is then electronically scanned. A paper trail is also kept for recounts. That's exactly the system used in New York. I live on Long Island, not the city, but we have the same voting machines and they work fine.
In the US (AFAICT), they tend to have all of their election on one day in November: municipal, state, federal.
Correct. First Tuesday in November (IIRC unless Nov. 1 is a Tuesday, then using following Tuesday). The only exception I know of is the local school districts.
There's also the fact that in the US people vote for judges, sherifs, criminal prosectures, etc.
Some of it is silly. Whether judges are elected depends on the state and county (federal judges are always appointed). Voting for them is kind of silly because nobody knows who they are. I usually leave it blank or just vote for whichever party doesn't run my county.
Sheriff can be different. A few years back we elected a sheriff who was a big improvement. I don't think it's as bad as you say. If we had more than one election day we'd probably have an even lower turnout than we do now.
last election, we had lines around the block to get into get your ballot, and with the levers, I never had more than 5 people in front of me
That doesn't jibe with my experience. On Long Island we used to have the lever machines, and switched to the electronically scanned paper ballots a few years back (I'm almost certain they're the same as in NYC). No problems whatsoever that I saw.
Translation: I don't care if they're right or wrong.
Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.
Wake me when the Flat Earth Society disbands. You're never going to convince the "skeptics", and if by some miracle you did, they wouldn't be skeptics anymore.
Facts don't deter FUD. Glad somebody has, for the two billionth time, debunked the "electric cars cause more pollution than my 3 ton 5 mpg SUV", but it's not going to stop stop the True Believers (True Disbelievers?) from spreading the same old FUD. You'd think they'd be embarrassed by it, but you'd be wrong. I don't get it either.
The headline reads "Iran-Venezuela ties deep-seated: Iran FM". Are you going to take the word of an Iranian politician? Do they speak more truthfully than American politicians? This is not like the USSR-Cuba relationship. There's nothing more to it than Venezuela giving the US the finger.
Thank you for a good rebuttal. I'd just like to add that this nonsense about vaccines causing autism distracts from real research into the causes. This has been studied to death and there is no relation between vaccines and autism.
in general we find that the "severe" problem isn't autism per se, except sometimes maybe it is
The problem is that autism, like most things in the DSM, is not well defined. They're defined in terms of symptoms rather than causes, which is the opposite of how physical disorders are usually defined. It's a reflection of ignorance. Once upon a time physical problems were defined the same way, until the underlying physical causes were discovered.
There are many things associated with autism for unknown reasons. Intellectual handicaps may or may not be caused by the same mechanism but there is such a frequent association that it's suspected that, whether or not you consider them co-morbidities, they caused by the same mechanism. Or maybe the mechanism that causes autism simply makes one more vulnerable to it, or a hundred other possibilities. Nobody knows. For that matter why are allergies frequently associated with autism? That's a surprising thing. A Nobel Prize to the first person who can explain that.
My point to F'Nok is that it's not desirable for him or any one person to re-define autism, however poor (vague) the DSM definition is. When the mechanisms are better understood the diagnostic categories will almost certainly change, and his theory that "low functioning" autism and intellectual disability are distinct co-morbidities may or may not turn out to be true. In the meantime re-defining words is counterproductive. The DSM is bad enough - let's not confuse it further.
The real use of the claim isn't in treatment. It's political. It's a way for our anonymous coward to, safely protected from any criticism or reflection on the rest of his life, try to get all the people who have actual hands-on experience of what we are talking about silenced, by saying we don't count, and we aren't real, and we aren't what's being talked about.
I think you're over-reacting, though I admit his point was crudely expressed. The reaction of many people who have personal experience with (what I will continue to call low functioning ala the DSM) autism to the the idea that all autism is just "different" is often strong. That idea can also be used for political purposes, by suggesting that nobody with autism needs treatment, or even that no special allowance (e.g. in teaching) need be made for autistic people. The ugliest version of that is the idiots who say autism is just a diagnostic fantasy, and the kid banging his head on the ground out of frustration "just wasn't brought up right".
Anyone who is autistic and can communicate is not entitled to an opinion on whether being autistic sucks.
No, I said almost the exact opposite. Anyone who is autistic and can communicate can decide whether they want to be "treated" for their "condition".
I know someone who worked with some autistic kids. Non-verbal, "severe" autism, all that. They got a computer in the classroom, and she discovered: One of the kids could quite consistently enter "y" or "n" to answer questions. He had never demonstrated any ability to communicate before, and suddenly she could get clear information from him. So she showed this to the supervisor of the class, who said it was just chance events, and the kid couldn't communicate, and stop wasting my time.
You're citing one example of an incompetent teacher. My nephew exhibited similar types of behavior and was encouraged to use it and any other type of communication he was capable of.
"Oh you can communicate with NT people, you are so high functioning."
No, that you can communicate with anybody, NT or not, means that you are higher functioning than somebody who cannot.
Even if he had the other difficulties you mention, I would still love to be able to have a debate on this level with my nephew. It would be an enormous improvement on his current condition, and his difficulty in communicating frustrates him more than it does anyone else.
You have not seen severe executive dysfunction until you've met me. Coupled with severe anxiety problems, and a long history of bad experiences due to misunderstandings and just making sure I have food in the pantry can sometimes be a gold star worthy task for me.
According to your theory that many of the problems often associated with autism (e.g. mental disability) are actually co-morbidities, the anxiety and other things you describe may have little to do with you being autistic. There are many non-autistic people who suffer from anxiety disorders.
Functional labels hurt the 'low functioning' by assuming they cannot do things that they could do, if they were taught different ways, given different environments or provided alternatives.
Judging by my nephew's education/therapy (which I've occasionally assisted with) that is exactly what they try to do. Can't talk? Try sign language (he actually started with that). Point, draw a picture, do anything that will work. He can now speak somewhat, and does even better in writing. That's great, but he has trouble forming a full sentence let alone having a debate whether what is normally called a neurological disorder should be considered a disorder.
Considering the number of places in the world that people still kill female babies because they want a boy, I would guess the answer is "probably not".
Let me know when somebody suggests killing autistic babies, and I'll help imprison them.
Who is trying to "break them", and how are they doing it? Trying to teach people to overcome or work around their difficulties is called "therapy" or "teaching". At worst sometimes they don't want the lessons at some particular time, but there are also kids that don't want to do their math homework. Big deal. You act as if Dr. Evil were pointing some mind control ray at these kids.
"Different isn't necessarily good" is also so broad and obvious that it's meaningless.
Obviously, so I'm glad I didn't say it.
People who have a limb amputated aren't suddenly a different person.
If you like I can direct you to wards full of people who don't believe that or can't accept it. Nevertheless amputation was a poor analogy.
The rest of the body is what you have; the brain is who you are. I think people are entitled to a vote in whether they want to exist or not.
If you were cured of claustrophobia would you suddenly cease to exist as you? Autism is not a personality. As for voting, how is that applicable to people who can't communicate what they want, or understand your attempt to communicate the question to them? At one point in public places (where he didn't know where the bathroom was) my nephew would sometimes piss in his pants because he didn't know how to say he needed to go. You could ameliorate it by taking him frequently, but sometimes ordinary human beings would forget or wouldn't factor in that he'd had more orange juice for breakfast than usual. Now he can say "go bathroom", which makes him and everybody else happier. AFAIK he hasn't ceased to exist because of the evil mind control experiments that were imposed on him to make this breakthrough.
Fine, play philosopher. I already said I don't care about that. Maybe wanting to "help" certain people so that they can dress themselves or use the bathroom unaided is "imposing my standards".
You are making the deeply flawed assumption that just because I can communicate I must be 'high functioning'.
It's not an assumption. Anyone who can communicate as well as you clearly is high functioning in at least one very important way. I would be thrilled if I could have a debate like this with my nephew.
Alright, but my point was that there is no way to say that that's an objectively wrong way to live.
Screw objective, I'm not into philosophy anyway. If someone can't take care of themselves as an adult, then they have a disability that it would be better to cure or at least ameliorate. If they can take care of themselves and don't want to change how they are, then they're eccentric. I'm all for eccentricity - Charles Dickens complained about its decline.
The people you are talking about usually have one of many severe debilitating conditions that are not autism in addition to being autistic, and yet people like you go around saying that their problem is they are autistic.
You're trying to define away the idea that severe autism can be debilitating. Basically "if it's a fundamental problem, then it isn't part of autism". Yes autism, like almost everything else in DSM N, is very far from being well defined. However, by playing games with words and categories, you're making that worse. DSM N may suck, but one way to look at it is that it's a dictionary (yes, I know there are many ramifications beyond that). As such it provides a widely accepted definition for terms. By re-defining autism you add to the confusion. If you want to use your own term then make something up.
There are many things where a certain amount just makes you different, but too much can be debilitating. For example, what's difference between being moody and being manic-depressive? Degree. Some would argue otherwise, but since the etiology is unknown, I think that's nonsense.
Intellectual disability is not autism, but can happen in people that are autistic - there's likely an increased incidence as well.
"Likely an increased incidence" is a vast understatement. Moreover the intellectual disabilities that severely autistic people display are often different in nature from those seen in non-autistic people. For example, people with autism usually have much greater difficulties with language than non-autistic but mentally disabled people who function at the same level on non-verbal tasks (alternatively you could say that the autistic people with the same degree of language difficulty perform much better at non-verbal tasks).
Facilitated communication has been proving that non-verbal autistics can communicate perfectly well with non-verbal tools. Such as by typing!
Some non-verbal autistics. There is a difference between verbal and language difficulties. For those who only have the former, typing is great. For the latter, not as much. There are also those in-between. For example, my nephew can speak and understand verbal language, but does better with written language. Unfortunately he's still far from communicating fluently even in writing.
That you as a non-autistic know more about autism that I do, as an autistic.
While probably not true of anyone on Slashdot, there are almost certainly people who know more about autism in a clinical and neurological sense than you do. What you know better than anyone who is not autistic is the experience of being autistic. Undoubtedly you've also learned a great deal about the other aspects. However, saying that you know more about it than non-autistics is like saying a tall person knows more about being tall than an endocrinologist.
Slashdot Mirror
Silly from the point of most buyers. I'm not ready to get an EV yet either, but I'm as far as you can get from an early adopter at home. Into the future at work, stay in the past at home. Do you think I should switch to central heating?
The question is important though from the POV of whether this is a tech worth encouraging, affluent greenies can rightly feel smug for driving one, etc.
Yes. RTFA.
True that. All of it. Ok, I'm out of things to say.
What the cynic in me hears: "For whatever reason, we can't manipulate the tallies this year (was Diebold's bid too expensive?) so we have to go back to old-fashioned vote-counting fraud."
That's what I hear too. The old lever machines were supposedly pretty easy to rig, and I've saw no problems when we switched from lever machines to scantrons.
Rhode Island Population: 1.05 Million New York Population: 19.47 Million
This New Yorker claims that's irrelevant. A bigger area just means more polling places. A larger population just means more machines per polling place. However you do it people are supposed to vote one at a time. Some things scale just fine.
the rest of the world has collectively been shaking its head and wondering why the US doesn't adopt the system that almost everyone else uses successfully: Paper and pens.
A poster above said that in Canada (or at least his part of it) they use the "fill in the circle w/ a pencil", which is then electronically scanned. A paper trail is also kept for recounts. That's exactly the system used in New York. I live on Long Island, not the city, but we have the same voting machines and they work fine.
In the US (AFAICT), they tend to have all of their election on one day in November: municipal, state, federal.
Correct. First Tuesday in November (IIRC unless Nov. 1 is a Tuesday, then using following Tuesday). The only exception I know of is the local school districts.
There's also the fact that in the US people vote for judges, sherifs, criminal prosectures, etc.
Some of it is silly. Whether judges are elected depends on the state and county (federal judges are always appointed). Voting for them is kind of silly because nobody knows who they are. I usually leave it blank or just vote for whichever party doesn't run my county.
Sheriff can be different. A few years back we elected a sheriff who was a big improvement. I don't think it's as bad as you say. If we had more than one election day we'd probably have an even lower turnout than we do now.
last election, we had lines around the block to get into get your ballot, and with the levers, I never had more than 5 people in front of me
That doesn't jibe with my experience. On Long Island we used to have the lever machines, and switched to the electronically scanned paper ballots a few years back (I'm almost certain they're the same as in NYC). No problems whatsoever that I saw.
Regardless of the merits of their arguments ...
Translation: I don't care if they're right or wrong.
Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.
Wake me when the Flat Earth Society disbands. You're never going to convince the "skeptics", and if by some miracle you did, they wouldn't be skeptics anymore.
Facts don't deter FUD. Glad somebody has, for the two billionth time, debunked the "electric cars cause more pollution than my 3 ton 5 mpg SUV", but it's not going to stop stop the True Believers (True Disbelievers?) from spreading the same old FUD. You'd think they'd be embarrassed by it, but you'd be wrong. I don't get it either.
they're close friends with Venezuela
The headline reads "Iran-Venezuela ties deep-seated: Iran FM". Are you going to take the word of an Iranian politician? Do they speak more truthfully than American politicians? This is not like the USSR-Cuba relationship. There's nothing more to it than Venezuela giving the US the finger.
Thank you for a good rebuttal. I'd just like to add that this nonsense about vaccines causing autism distracts from real research into the causes. This has been studied to death and there is no relation between vaccines and autism.
Are there any brain scans to confirm autism in mildly-autistic adults?
Let me ask a question in all serious, why does it matter if the person you're concerned about can or cannot be officially called autistic?
in general we find that the "severe" problem isn't autism per se, except sometimes maybe it is
The problem is that autism, like most things in the DSM, is not well defined. They're defined in terms of symptoms rather than causes, which is the opposite of how physical disorders are usually defined. It's a reflection of ignorance. Once upon a time physical problems were defined the same way, until the underlying physical causes were discovered.
There are many things associated with autism for unknown reasons. Intellectual handicaps may or may not be caused by the same mechanism but there is such a frequent association that it's suspected that, whether or not you consider them co-morbidities, they caused by the same mechanism. Or maybe the mechanism that causes autism simply makes one more vulnerable to it, or a hundred other possibilities. Nobody knows. For that matter why are allergies frequently associated with autism? That's a surprising thing. A Nobel Prize to the first person who can explain that.
My point to F'Nok is that it's not desirable for him or any one person to re-define autism, however poor (vague) the DSM definition is. When the mechanisms are better understood the diagnostic categories will almost certainly change, and his theory that "low functioning" autism and intellectual disability are distinct co-morbidities may or may not turn out to be true. In the meantime re-defining words is counterproductive. The DSM is bad enough - let's not confuse it further.
The real use of the claim isn't in treatment. It's political. It's a way for our anonymous coward to, safely protected from any criticism or reflection on the rest of his life, try to get all the people who have actual hands-on experience of what we are talking about silenced, by saying we don't count, and we aren't real, and we aren't what's being talked about.
I think you're over-reacting, though I admit his point was crudely expressed. The reaction of many people who have personal experience with (what I will continue to call low functioning ala the DSM) autism to the the idea that all autism is just "different" is often strong. That idea can also be used for political purposes, by suggesting that nobody with autism needs treatment, or even that no special allowance (e.g. in teaching) need be made for autistic people. The ugliest version of that is the idiots who say autism is just a diagnostic fantasy, and the kid banging his head on the ground out of frustration "just wasn't brought up right".
Anyone who is autistic and can communicate is not entitled to an opinion on whether being autistic sucks.
No, I said almost the exact opposite. Anyone who is autistic and can communicate can decide whether they want to be "treated" for their "condition".
I know someone who worked with some autistic kids. Non-verbal, "severe" autism, all that. They got a computer in the classroom, and she discovered: One of the kids could quite consistently enter "y" or "n" to answer questions. He had never demonstrated any ability to communicate before, and suddenly she could get clear information from him. So she showed this to the supervisor of the class, who said it was just chance events, and the kid couldn't communicate, and stop wasting my time.
You're citing one example of an incompetent teacher. My nephew exhibited similar types of behavior and was encouraged to use it and any other type of communication he was capable of.
"Oh you can communicate with NT people, you are so high functioning."
No, that you can communicate with anybody, NT or not, means that you are higher functioning than somebody who cannot.
Even if he had the other difficulties you mention, I would still love to be able to have a debate on this level with my nephew. It would be an enormous improvement on his current condition, and his difficulty in communicating frustrates him more than it does anyone else.
You have not seen severe executive dysfunction until you've met me. Coupled with severe anxiety problems, and a long history of bad experiences due to misunderstandings and just making sure I have food in the pantry can sometimes be a gold star worthy task for me.
According to your theory that many of the problems often associated with autism (e.g. mental disability) are actually co-morbidities, the anxiety and other things you describe may have little to do with you being autistic. There are many non-autistic people who suffer from anxiety disorders.
Functional labels hurt the 'low functioning' by assuming they cannot do things that they could do, if they were taught different ways, given different environments or provided alternatives.
Judging by my nephew's education/therapy (which I've occasionally assisted with) that is exactly what they try to do. Can't talk? Try sign language (he actually started with that). Point, draw a picture, do anything that will work. He can now speak somewhat, and does even better in writing. That's great, but he has trouble forming a full sentence let alone having a debate whether what is normally called a neurological disorder should be considered a disorder.
you assert that we aren't entitled to opinions if we can talk
I said the opposite.
Considering the number of places in the world that people still kill female babies because they want a boy, I would guess the answer is "probably not".
Let me know when somebody suggests killing autistic babies, and I'll help imprison them.
it's the people trying to break them
Who is trying to "break them", and how are they doing it? Trying to teach people to overcome or work around their difficulties is called "therapy" or "teaching". At worst sometimes they don't want the lessons at some particular time, but there are also kids that don't want to do their math homework. Big deal. You act as if Dr. Evil were pointing some mind control ray at these kids.
"Different isn't necessarily good" is also so broad and obvious that it's meaningless.
Obviously, so I'm glad I didn't say it.
People who have a limb amputated aren't suddenly a different person.
If you like I can direct you to wards full of people who don't believe that or can't accept it. Nevertheless amputation was a poor analogy.
The rest of the body is what you have; the brain is who you are. I think people are entitled to a vote in whether they want to exist or not.
If you were cured of claustrophobia would you suddenly cease to exist as you? Autism is not a personality. As for voting, how is that applicable to people who can't communicate what they want, or understand your attempt to communicate the question to them? At one point in public places (where he didn't know where the bathroom was) my nephew would sometimes piss in his pants because he didn't know how to say he needed to go. You could ameliorate it by taking him frequently, but sometimes ordinary human beings would forget or wouldn't factor in that he'd had more orange juice for breakfast than usual. Now he can say "go bathroom", which makes him and everybody else happier. AFAIK he hasn't ceased to exist because of the evil mind control experiments that were imposed on him to make this breakthrough.
Whether it's better or not is subjective.
Fine, play philosopher. I already said I don't care about that. Maybe wanting to "help" certain people so that they can dress themselves or use the bathroom unaided is "imposing my standards".
You are making the deeply flawed assumption that just because I can communicate I must be 'high functioning'.
It's not an assumption. Anyone who can communicate as well as you clearly is high functioning in at least one very important way. I would be thrilled if I could have a debate like this with my nephew.
Alright, but my point was that there is no way to say that that's an objectively wrong way to live.
Screw objective, I'm not into philosophy anyway. If someone can't take care of themselves as an adult, then they have a disability that it would be better to cure or at least ameliorate. If they can take care of themselves and don't want to change how they are, then they're eccentric. I'm all for eccentricity - Charles Dickens complained about its decline.
In other words, the autism treatments don't work.
Only if your thinking is purely binary.
The people you are talking about usually have one of many severe debilitating conditions that are not autism in addition to being autistic, and yet people like you go around saying that their problem is they are autistic.
You're trying to define away the idea that severe autism can be debilitating. Basically "if it's a fundamental problem, then it isn't part of autism". Yes autism, like almost everything else in DSM N, is very far from being well defined. However, by playing games with words and categories, you're making that worse. DSM N may suck, but one way to look at it is that it's a dictionary (yes, I know there are many ramifications beyond that). As such it provides a widely accepted definition for terms. By re-defining autism you add to the confusion. If you want to use your own term then make something up.
There are many things where a certain amount just makes you different, but too much can be debilitating. For example, what's difference between being moody and being manic-depressive? Degree. Some would argue otherwise, but since the etiology is unknown, I think that's nonsense.
Intellectual disability is not autism, but can happen in people that are autistic - there's likely an increased incidence as well.
"Likely an increased incidence" is a vast understatement. Moreover the intellectual disabilities that severely autistic people display are often different in nature from those seen in non-autistic people. For example, people with autism usually have much greater difficulties with language than non-autistic but mentally disabled people who function at the same level on non-verbal tasks (alternatively you could say that the autistic people with the same degree of language difficulty perform much better at non-verbal tasks).
Facilitated communication has been proving that non-verbal autistics can communicate perfectly well with non-verbal tools. Such as by typing!
Some non-verbal autistics. There is a difference between verbal and language difficulties. For those who only have the former, typing is great. For the latter, not as much. There are also those in-between. For example, my nephew can speak and understand verbal language, but does better with written language. Unfortunately he's still far from communicating fluently even in writing.
That you as a non-autistic know more about autism that I do, as an autistic.
While probably not true of anyone on Slashdot, there are almost certainly people who know more about autism in a clinical and neurological sense than you do. What you know better than anyone who is not autistic is the experience of being autistic. Undoubtedly you've also learned a great deal about the other aspects. However, saying that you know more about it than non-autistics is like saying a tall person knows more about being tall than an endocrinologist.