If it's still in the original shrink wrap and all, it's new, and for all you know somebody's selling off an extra--this happens when your family is just aware enough that you're a gamer to buy you games, but not so together as to make sure that they don't all buy you the same game...or buy you a game you already own...or buy you a game you can't play because you don't own that particular system...or a game that you'd sooner play X-17 than this.
Not all preowned games are being sold by 'thieving parents,' either. Some are being sold because gamers are culling their collections, dispersing a dead gamer's collection, or the game just plain doesn't have enough replay value to justify not selling it off to make space for another game.
I'm sure Monsanto has lots of money to fund a study aiming to prove that glyphosate doesn't cause cancer.
You can never prove that something doesn't cause cancer. That's not how science works. All you can do is try to prove that it DOES cause cancer, and repeatedly fail. Which is what has happened every time anyone has tested it.
Except you're not likely to manage better than 'maybe' since you get cancer pretty much by failing to die of something else--all cancers are ultimately caused by errors in DNA copying not being caught and cleared out. The systems that handle this are actually very, very good, with very low error rates, but...well, try enough times and you will have cancerous cells managing to survive long enough to be detected, especially as we get better at detection.
So, given that pretty much 'is not dead' is a confounding factor, you're going to always have some of your sample get cancer. What you actually need is to be able to show that it causes no increase in cancer rates in the group, which requires the law of large numbers and good luck getting that put together.
Personally, I suspect that with something like glyphosate, you might also have a certain amount of the risks be due to applying on the theory that "If a little is good, LOTS is BETTER!" This also has hit on cancer research--there are some food safety studies that, when you calculate the dose/weight ratio, you end up getting something utterly absurd such as it having been the equivalent of a human eating a bathtub of the substance...daily. Given that anything in sufficient amounts is deadly...
Let's start with the simple one! NYT is not a scientific, peer-reviewed journal. It also has a bit of a history of being a lousy place to get your science news.
The IARC thing is two pages and doesn't include a single reference, citation, or smidgen of data. I'd not be able to use it as a citation for anything other than for it being considered a probable carcinogen by the IARC--it's remarkably free of statistics, and citations which is actually rather concerning, especially given how cancer actually works & why we have had the admission that most cancers are caused by...well...failing to die.
If you're trying to support a claim of 'causes cancer,' there's no substitute for quality peer-reviewed research when it comes to supporting the claims, especially since there's been some rather long-term problems with the quality of the research and how it gets interpreted.
The IARC paper places Roundup in group 2A, which it defines as:
Group 2A means that the agent is probably carcinogenic to humans. This category is used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals. Limited evidence means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (called chance, bias, or confounding) could not be ruled out. This category is also used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and strong data on how the agent causes cancer.
The translation for those not familiar with cancer research: "We need money for more research." You don't really get funding if you are wanting to show that something probably doesn't cause cancer...which is not something I'm comfortable with, so I pretty quickly figured out I want nothing to do with this field of research if I could help it.
You're assuming Wells Fargo is a well-run bank with competent bankers; the evidence suggests otherwise.
My guess is that they focused a bit too much on the 'pays lots of interest' to remember that modifications can help ensure they get their money back in the first place...and then didn't want to own up to the glitch existing and not being noticed and/or fixed for so long.
So, basically? My guess is that it's the kind of conspiracy that happens when you've got a bunch of people who are just competent enough to realize and try to cover up the obvious evidence of their incompetence.
It's not that it never works in humans, a rather significant number of drugs just never really make it to the market for various reasons--including things like not wanting to have to deal with lawsuits from idiots who didn't pay attention when told that this only sometimes worked/needed time to work/only worked on very specific cancers/any and all combinations thereof. It's expensive to do human testing, too, especially since having somebody drop dead while you're testing it may result in an auto-fail even if it's almost certainly not anything whatsoever to do with the drug.
Drug agencies tend to be rather paranoid about letting drugs onto the market...and pretty laid back once it has been, never mind that (especially in diverse countries) there are some side effects you just cannot expect to routinely and reliably catch in testing.
Welp, I'd only moderated a bit but...I'm not buying the article, so I'm going to have to stick to the abstract, which should have enough to answer the important questions.
The non-technical version is that it is targeting two specific genes that controls the copying of DNA--and to be honest it's not genes specific to cancer cells though mutations involving this gene can be a cause of cancer in many different cells. (Usually, however, you can and do denote as much.) It may be that the things they tested are not merely specific inhibitors of the genes they discuss but also only get the version that would be causing cancer, but it doesn't mention that in the abstract. Several of these things are the sort of information that I would hope Nature have insisted get mentioned in the abstract, actually, since it's rather important...but they're a pay-to-read so I guess sticking important information behind the paywall matters.
If people are really interested, I can snag a copy via other means and do a summary.
Try reading what you are replying to, unless you consider somehow not benefiting (directly, anyway) from the system to undermine the voluntary nature of contributing to it? I was describing one where if you put in nothing, you get nothing--not one where you benefit regardless. You can even have there be a minimum contribution you have to make to 'buy in,' and it'll still be voluntary--and it might also be overall beneficial for the effectiveness and efficiency of the systems to make them have to convince people to contribute to them, specifically, for the particular benefits they're offering instead of letting them just send out thugs to threaten to cause harm to you if you fail to give them money.
Oh, might I suggest you learn a little about philosophy?:-) Objecting to coersion and the state's use of force is not limited to people who like companies. Some of us just don't really feel the state can be trusted either--that it's just not really that different.
And, well... You're Canadian, you should know about the residential schools, one of Canada's excellent examples of a benefits program whose 'beneficiaries' would really, really rather not have been forced to participate. (For those who don't know: tl;dr is Boarding schools for 'forcibly civilizing' Indigenous children, effectively cultural genocide that covered up the abuse outside of the fully-intentional psychological abuse. It was, incidentally, meant to help its victims.)
The tech companies have made the decision that providing lunch is a bennie and it keeps people inside the bubble longer. If San Fransisco passes the "no cafeteria" regs, expect the corporate offices to rent food trucks on a rotation to stop in front of their office, seven days a week. The press on the local food establishments will be insane. People don't want to integrate into the community, they want to work and go home. Forcing them to go out for take out just annoys them.
Yeah, forcing people to integrate into a community tends to turn people off and be generally offensive, though also incredibly ironic in some ways. SF might be better off encouraging corps to do things like make a habit of having local food trucks come by...and, well, actually making a point of allowing more housing to be built so those working in the offices actually will be in SF for more than just lunch. If you want them to integrate into the community, make sure they can live there.
My admittedly brief personal experience with SF and what I've heard about it, that probably is accurate for a rather unfortunate number of the local laws.
That's a valid concern. However, given the numbers people are throwing around for UBI, such as $500 a month, it's going to take many decades for it to get anywhere close to luxury even if had popular support. It's much faster to simply get off your ass and work for it. Besides, the last thing people on UBI want is for the system to collapse. They depend on it for their livelihoods after all.
It won't take many decades, all it'll take is it managing to gain a critical mass among politicians who can get themselves elected. I also don't really expect the lack of desire for the system collapsing to translate into not taking actions that are likely to cause it; have you seen the kinds of answers people give when asked about where the government will get the money for whatever expensive program is being proposed? All it'll take is there being too many people who, deep down, believe that it's all funded with money harvested from the government's hidden forest of money trees, who won't realize that money is a limited resource.
"I tried this 'Linux' thing and now of of my programs work!"
If you're going to say "well the average person just uses it for Facebook and Email", then they'd more likely go to ChromeOS, which I guess, is technically linux, but is just as locked down as Windows by design.
No, but a surprising number of programs can be gotten for Linux now, and something like this is probably going to accelerate it--the market share of Windows has been slowly dropping, at least since they had the brilliant idea of Win10, and the main reason Windows manages its ubiquity is that it owns the OEM market.
Microsoft probably has spent too much time with only the Enterprise customers being the closest they get to having to sell to the users themselves, and are forgetting that the OEM market is going to have to sell the computers with the OS. I don't know if you could actually sell DaaS systems to the average person--regardless of what the average person uses their desktop for, I think in general they are not want it to be just a really expensive paperweight without payment of a monthly fee & working internet connection. Do you really think computer manufacturers are going to risk having their sales torpedoed by an OS that may drive customers to nope straight to Apple if a Chromebook won't do what they need? (And while ChromeOS is getting better...because it's so locked down, if it doesn't already do what you need then that's pretty much it.)
Honestly, this is likely to end in some rather horrific PR nightmares for Microsoft, probably legal testing of just how much a XaaS contract can actually waive liability in practice (plus the law changing, not in XaaS's favor), and Microsoft exiting the desktop market in a ball of sewage-scented flames with parts of upper management finding themselves forced out, possibly without golden parachutes.
Perhaps it will *finally* be the year of the Linux desktop. Yeah right!
If Microsoft goes ahead with this? That's likely--a lot of people use MS pretty much because it's the OS their computer came with. I don't think DaaS systems will sell to anybody who isn't a large business--meaning that the OEM market may decide to go with a Linux flavor instead--and odds are that any small business started after Microsoft makes this brilliant move will stay with either Linux or macOS if they get big, so basically Microsoft is betting that its current Enterprise customers will stay forever...or they just don't see the OS market as one they care to stay with.
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to play a computer game. Let me help you with that. Oh wait, you mean you don't want me to send every frame of a game across your internet connection? (Do you realize how laggy that would be? LOL....)
PC gamers are about to be pissed off or extinct.
There's already migration among PC gamers to Linux. Honestly, this whole thing comes off as painfully tone-deaf and likely to cause mass migration to other OSes outside of businesses which could possibly write the increased costs off on their taxes.
This is a problem for people who learned to copy-paste from StackOverflow instead of learning to read documentation.
Of course, it's also a problem of programmers not knowing how to create a proper interface.
Sometimes you'll run across programmers also not knowing how to write documentation. Protip: If somebody's looking up a man page, they want to know what it does, and how to use it. They do not want pornographic explanations of how it works in the most obtuse and esoteric language you can manage.
Of course if no one contributes, the system will fall apart.
But why would no-one contribute? After all, the contributions benefit the contributor as well as every one else. And having every one else benefit is an additional benefit to me.
Now if contributions were optional, as is the Libertarian utopia, you might have a tragedy of the commons problem. Bu that's not the case.
You ask why no-one would contribute, but then suggest that it is necessary that contributing be required instead of optional. That doesn't follow, logically: If it's so obviously good, people will opt in...especially if that's the base requirement to also getting to benefit.
Having all parts of the system have to convince people that they will, in fact, benefit from participation--which is actually almost certain in a Libertarian utopia--has benefits in ensuring no part of the system assumes that they will be contributed to regardless of if the benefit is, in point of fact, delivered. I'd suggest not even requiring people wait for the current version of any part of the system collapse completely before they can start a new version that actually meets their needs--why wait for the schools to finish imploding, if they're providing a shit education? It takes time to set up new. Get it started before the old system's gone, and you can at least cut down on the lag time.
Now that's not to say it would be a nice place to live with 90% of the people on UBI, but in reality that won't happen. Most people don't want to merely survive, they want to live in luxury.
And how many would prefer to push for UBI to be raised as opposed to actually work to get that, and possibly more importantly, how likely is it that they will be put up with? Even if it's merely a vocal minority, it cannot be an acceptable view if you want to ensure that it will stay as basic as it would need to be in order have a chance of being sustainable.
While I'd like to see Google held accountable for their anticompetitive behavior, the best solution is still for someone else to spin up a video streaming site. There's enough people who want an alternative to Youtube for it to work out. But it has to be at least as friendly to uploaders as Youtube...
They're steadily working on making that an easier hurdle to clear.
Amphetamine psychosis? How about providing any study that shows this being an issue when treating ADHD? I can't find anything but my search skills may be lacking. It is an issue when abusing amphetamines however ADHD is treated with much lower doses than is required to provide recreational effects.
As far as I know, there no study checking it at all, which is actually a problem because drug-induced psychosis on the whole is definitely not dose-dependent--it's not as simple as high dose=psychosis, especially since with drugs in the family it seems to be something which will happen if you take it for long enough regardless of how careful you have been about the dose...and some people never get symptoms while others it seems to just be one day they pulled the trigger and got the loaded chamber, so to speak. I have seen several case studies of people on theraputic doses for ADHD having psychosis turn up after they'd been on the meds for a while, however.
Honestly, the whole thing could be vastly better studied, but I doubt that'll happen until some drug finally starts inducing it with noticeable reliability while trying to get approved by the FDA.
Ritalin is not an amphetamine damm you people are pharmaco-ignorant
Methylphenidate is close enough that it appears to work very much like dextroamphetamine. It is considered to be in the amphetamine family, typically, and may be* subject to the same laws as amphetamines--right down to the same legal issues if you try to take any with you when crossing the border, even if you obtained it perfectly legally and have the medical documentation to prove it.
* I am not a lawyer, nor employed in any field that requires I know the logistics of obtaining controlled substances or taking them across international borders beyond those very specific cases I have had to know. Do your own research before you go--especially since laws can change--and do not expect it to be necessarily easily found, and the ease of access can and does vary between countries. That said, Ritalin is under the same rules as other drugs considered amphetamines in all countries I've had reason to know the details of; if you cannot function without Ritalin or Adderall, don't visit Japan.
riiight... walk it off... does that work on heart attacks and cancers, too?
It's unfortunately not walk it off: The ADHD problem that'd go away is one of misdiagnosis. A lot of places are using outright dismal diagnostic methods--poor accuracy and poor validity combining to produce a false positive rate that ought to be unacceptable for anything commonly perceived as a mental health issue and/or treated with drugs that can have serious side effects.
It'd be rather like diagnosing any and all pains in the chest as a heart attack, even when you've got a knife sticking out of the patient. Sometimes you'll be right, but...
What I just described is, depressingly enough, taken from multiple case studies and basic awareness of how you're actually supposed to handle psychiatric medications--if you're on them and nobody's taken the time to tell you, fuckups with your meds can make your mental health problems worse and yes, you should keep track of & mention side effects. This is something your doctors are supposed to tell you, especially since sometimes it can get weird, such as one patient with bipolar who had a psychotic episode because of energy drinks.
I've known people who were fucked over by doctors who...didn't, both personally and through case studies. What I described is actually a common pattern I've seen in case studies of ADHD patients--specifically, ones who had psychotic breaks. That's...more or less to be expected if you mix Ritalin or Adderall with sleeping pills, and with uppers--stimulants--in general there is always a risk. (This includes at least one case caffeine psychosis--the one I managed to hear the details of, the woman managed to drink a very impressive amount of coffee in a very short period of time, and then tried to kill a friend.)
I've been diagnosed with ADHD since I was a child, and use medication selectively today, adjusting my dosage depending on the demands of the day & how I'm feeling (I only take my full dosage on "bad" days).
Your description is fairly spot on. Anecdotally however, I'm not sure the medication actually has much of a direct affect on memory, it simply helps in maintaining focus on the right things, which in turn helps you record the right things.
Working memory is distinct from short-term and long-term memory--the things people normally think of as memory. Those are more like the write buffer to the hard drive & the hard drive itself.
That said, you might want to look into flow--hyperfocus is when you find your attention stuck on something and it's not something you want to be paying attention to exclusively, flow is the state of attention you're in when you hit the zone. I've lost days that way. ADHD actually makes it easier to reach these states--it's not that you don't have any attention span, it's that most things won't hold it well...but what holds it will do so really well. (Anecdotally: Music works for me for reaching flow easily. I use endless repeats and long playlists--radio only if there's next to no interruptions to the music--and sometimes I have to have really strangely precise matches between music and what I'm trying to focus on.)
which Adderall and Ritalin are. To be specific, they're amphetamines...
Take a look at the chemical formulas for Adderall and meth sometime.
I wandered into neuroscience from biochemistry, and actually am thinking of seeing if I can get a copy of this study to read, even though it is kinda stating the obvious.
I think a lot of ADHD problems would go away if we just let kids run around some more. I've known a fair number of people who've been put into that bucket and physical exertion does a lot to mitigate the effects. Extra PE time might also help with the obesity epidemic as well.
I can assure you that a lot of it is, in fact, due to cutting back on the time kids get to actually exercise--that, and schools get extra money for each student diagnosed. A lot of the diagnosis is also somewhere around the 'people should be at least sued for this' end of half-assed, too--I've heard of diagnosis being basically done on the word of a school counselor who is mostly relying on teachers' complaints with the medication tossed on their word by a general practitioner. Most teachers go off of how much attention a student is paying--and don't necessarily consider such possibilities as the student being bored to death, needing to have time to indulge in physical activity, or suffers from a physical condition commonly known as 'being male' when it gets really stupidly bad.
This is not how you should be diagnosing neurological issues--and yes, it is one. You also don't see the behavioral help that's pretty much required (because the drugs have no measurable effect after ~2 years) put in because that's hard and would require one of the parties spend money on the problem instead of just give the kid pills--which, once again, are amphetamines and people with ADHD aren't that different neurologically. Amphetamine side effects and problems are still going to be there, including amphetamine psychosis and the fun that happens when the idiot doctor prescribes sleeping pills because 24/7 amphetamines do screw with your sleep, who knew?
ADHD definitely exists--but the sheer incompetence, lack of required skills, and perverse incentives here all combine to make it unfortunately very likely that most people who have been diagnosed with it...probably don't actually have it.
FYI: Working memory is basically the RAM of the brain--it's short-term holding for stuff you're processing and using, which is why it's called working memory. One of the things you check for if somebody who should be doing well in school but isn't? Is if their working memory is functioning correctly.
Focus and attention aren't anywhere near as important. You can only be vaguely paying attention and still retain a surprising amount of information, but you need your working memory to remember the start of a paragraph when you reach its end, and other things rather important to the ability to reason and make good choices.
So it's not just that it didn't make anybody 'smarter,' it actually managed to hose something you direly need working to be smart. Though, if amphetamines in general screw with the working memory, that explains so much about the life choices of amphetamine addicts...
I've had a lot of teachers whose specialty was in this area, and honestly this is kind of the equivalent of 'We checked, water is wet.' ADHD is basically a bandwidth problem--people with attention deficit disorders (there's several) lack the standard suite of preprocessing filters on their incoming data. These normally are present to basically try to get you to stick with what (the filters judge to be) the important stuff in the incoming data is--without these filters, you're attempting to drink from the proverbial firehose. Hyperactivity is the most common method by which the brain attempts to cope--"Maybe if we move really really really fast we can get all this sorted!"
There's other strategies, too, such as 'shut down' and 'increase processing power' which have their own relative issues and your attention is still going to be not working like what is classed as 'normal'--in some populations, ADD is normal, because assumptions about what is/isn't important in your environment tended to get selected against instead of heavily agricultural populations where we strongly selected for the ability to not be too bothered by spending many hours staring at the hind end of a draft animal... It's not shot; you can get hyperfocus and flow, where your attention is very tightly focused on doing a task, vastly more easily than the normal population.
There is, however, one thing about this that's surprising--and that's that you get the same kind of effects in normal people. One of the old methods for confirming an ADD diagnosis is that you had an atypical reaction to stimulants...which Adderall and Ritalin are. To be specific, they're amphetamines...
Slashdot Mirror
If it's still in the original shrink wrap and all, it's new, and for all you know somebody's selling off an extra--this happens when your family is just aware enough that you're a gamer to buy you games, but not so together as to make sure that they don't all buy you the same game...or buy you a game you already own...or buy you a game you can't play because you don't own that particular system...or a game that you'd sooner play X-17 than this.
Not all preowned games are being sold by 'thieving parents,' either. Some are being sold because gamers are culling their collections, dispersing a dead gamer's collection, or the game just plain doesn't have enough replay value to justify not selling it off to make space for another game.
I'm sure Monsanto has lots of money to fund a study aiming to prove that glyphosate doesn't cause cancer.
You can never prove that something doesn't cause cancer. That's not how science works. All you can do is try to prove that it DOES cause cancer, and repeatedly fail. Which is what has happened every time anyone has tested it.
Except you're not likely to manage better than 'maybe' since you get cancer pretty much by failing to die of something else--all cancers are ultimately caused by errors in DNA copying not being caught and cleared out. The systems that handle this are actually very, very good, with very low error rates, but...well, try enough times and you will have cancerous cells managing to survive long enough to be detected, especially as we get better at detection.
So, given that pretty much 'is not dead' is a confounding factor, you're going to always have some of your sample get cancer. What you actually need is to be able to show that it causes no increase in cancer rates in the group, which requires the law of large numbers and good luck getting that put together.
Personally, I suspect that with something like glyphosate, you might also have a certain amount of the risks be due to applying on the theory that "If a little is good, LOTS is BETTER!" This also has hit on cancer research--there are some food safety studies that, when you calculate the dose/weight ratio, you end up getting something utterly absurd such as it having been the equivalent of a human eating a bathtub of the substance...daily. Given that anything in sufficient amounts is deadly...
FTFA: http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-ce... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Let's start with the simple one! NYT is not a scientific, peer-reviewed journal. It also has a bit of a history of being a lousy place to get your science news.
The IARC thing is two pages and doesn't include a single reference, citation, or smidgen of data. I'd not be able to use it as a citation for anything other than for it being considered a probable carcinogen by the IARC--it's remarkably free of statistics, and citations which is actually rather concerning, especially given how cancer actually works & why we have had the admission that most cancers are caused by...well...failing to die.
If you're trying to support a claim of 'causes cancer,' there's no substitute for quality peer-reviewed research when it comes to supporting the claims, especially since there's been some rather long-term problems with the quality of the research and how it gets interpreted.
The IARC paper places Roundup in group 2A, which it defines as:
Group 2A means that the agent is probably carcinogenic to humans. This category is used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals. Limited evidence means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (called chance, bias, or confounding) could not be ruled out. This category is also used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and strong data on how the agent causes cancer.
The translation for those not familiar with cancer research: "We need money for more research." You don't really get funding if you are wanting to show that something probably doesn't cause cancer...which is not something I'm comfortable with, so I pretty quickly figured out I want nothing to do with this field of research if I could help it.
You're assuming Wells Fargo is a well-run bank with competent bankers; the evidence suggests otherwise.
My guess is that they focused a bit too much on the 'pays lots of interest' to remember that modifications can help ensure they get their money back in the first place...and then didn't want to own up to the glitch existing and not being noticed and/or fixed for so long.
So, basically? My guess is that it's the kind of conspiracy that happens when you've got a bunch of people who are just competent enough to realize and try to cover up the obvious evidence of their incompetence.
It's not that it never works in humans, a rather significant number of drugs just never really make it to the market for various reasons--including things like not wanting to have to deal with lawsuits from idiots who didn't pay attention when told that this only sometimes worked/needed time to work/only worked on very specific cancers/any and all combinations thereof. It's expensive to do human testing, too, especially since having somebody drop dead while you're testing it may result in an auto-fail even if it's almost certainly not anything whatsoever to do with the drug.
Drug agencies tend to be rather paranoid about letting drugs onto the market...and pretty laid back once it has been, never mind that (especially in diverse countries) there are some side effects you just cannot expect to routinely and reliably catch in testing.
Welp, I'd only moderated a bit but...I'm not buying the article, so I'm going to have to stick to the abstract, which should have enough to answer the important questions.
The non-technical version is that it is targeting two specific genes that controls the copying of DNA--and to be honest it's not genes specific to cancer cells though mutations involving this gene can be a cause of cancer in many different cells. (Usually, however, you can and do denote as much.) It may be that the things they tested are not merely specific inhibitors of the genes they discuss but also only get the version that would be causing cancer, but it doesn't mention that in the abstract. Several of these things are the sort of information that I would hope Nature have insisted get mentioned in the abstract, actually, since it's rather important...but they're a pay-to-read so I guess sticking important information behind the paywall matters.
If people are really interested, I can snag a copy via other means and do a summary.
Try reading what you are replying to, unless you consider somehow not benefiting (directly, anyway) from the system to undermine the voluntary nature of contributing to it? I was describing one where if you put in nothing, you get nothing--not one where you benefit regardless. You can even have there be a minimum contribution you have to make to 'buy in,' and it'll still be voluntary--and it might also be overall beneficial for the effectiveness and efficiency of the systems to make them have to convince people to contribute to them, specifically, for the particular benefits they're offering instead of letting them just send out thugs to threaten to cause harm to you if you fail to give them money.
Oh, might I suggest you learn a little about philosophy? :-) Objecting to coersion and the state's use of force is not limited to people who like companies. Some of us just don't really feel the state can be trusted either--that it's just not really that different.
And, well... You're Canadian, you should know about the residential schools, one of Canada's excellent examples of a benefits program whose 'beneficiaries' would really, really rather not have been forced to participate. (For those who don't know: tl;dr is Boarding schools for 'forcibly civilizing' Indigenous children, effectively cultural genocide that covered up the abuse outside of the fully-intentional psychological abuse. It was, incidentally, meant to help its victims.)
The tech companies have made the decision that providing lunch is a bennie and it keeps people inside the bubble longer. If San Fransisco passes the "no cafeteria" regs, expect the corporate offices to rent food trucks on a rotation to stop in front of their office, seven days a week. The press on the local food establishments will be insane. People don't want to integrate into the community, they want to work and go home. Forcing them to go out for take out just annoys them.
Yeah, forcing people to integrate into a community tends to turn people off and be generally offensive, though also incredibly ironic in some ways. SF might be better off encouraging corps to do things like make a habit of having local food trucks come by...and, well, actually making a point of allowing more housing to be built so those working in the offices actually will be in SF for more than just lunch. If you want them to integrate into the community, make sure they can live there.
Stupid laws have stupid unintended effects.
My admittedly brief personal experience with SF and what I've heard about it, that probably is accurate for a rather unfortunate number of the local laws.
That's a valid concern. However, given the numbers people are throwing around for UBI, such as $500 a month, it's going to take many decades for it to get anywhere close to luxury even if had popular support. It's much faster to simply get off your ass and work for it. Besides, the last thing people on UBI want is for the system to collapse. They depend on it for their livelihoods after all.
It won't take many decades, all it'll take is it managing to gain a critical mass among politicians who can get themselves elected. I also don't really expect the lack of desire for the system collapsing to translate into not taking actions that are likely to cause it; have you seen the kinds of answers people give when asked about where the government will get the money for whatever expensive program is being proposed? All it'll take is there being too many people who, deep down, believe that it's all funded with money harvested from the government's hidden forest of money trees, who won't realize that money is a limited resource.
"I tried this 'Linux' thing and now of of my programs work!" If you're going to say "well the average person just uses it for Facebook and Email", then they'd more likely go to ChromeOS, which I guess, is technically linux, but is just as locked down as Windows by design.
No, but a surprising number of programs can be gotten for Linux now, and something like this is probably going to accelerate it--the market share of Windows has been slowly dropping, at least since they had the brilliant idea of Win10, and the main reason Windows manages its ubiquity is that it owns the OEM market.
Microsoft probably has spent too much time with only the Enterprise customers being the closest they get to having to sell to the users themselves, and are forgetting that the OEM market is going to have to sell the computers with the OS. I don't know if you could actually sell DaaS systems to the average person--regardless of what the average person uses their desktop for, I think in general they are not want it to be just a really expensive paperweight without payment of a monthly fee & working internet connection. Do you really think computer manufacturers are going to risk having their sales torpedoed by an OS that may drive customers to nope straight to Apple if a Chromebook won't do what they need? (And while ChromeOS is getting better...because it's so locked down, if it doesn't already do what you need then that's pretty much it.)
Honestly, this is likely to end in some rather horrific PR nightmares for Microsoft, probably legal testing of just how much a XaaS contract can actually waive liability in practice (plus the law changing, not in XaaS's favor), and Microsoft exiting the desktop market in a ball of sewage-scented flames with parts of upper management finding themselves forced out, possibly without golden parachutes.
Perhaps it will *finally* be the year of the Linux desktop. Yeah right!
If Microsoft goes ahead with this? That's likely--a lot of people use MS pretty much because it's the OS their computer came with. I don't think DaaS systems will sell to anybody who isn't a large business--meaning that the OEM market may decide to go with a Linux flavor instead--and odds are that any small business started after Microsoft makes this brilliant move will stay with either Linux or macOS if they get big, so basically Microsoft is betting that its current Enterprise customers will stay forever...or they just don't see the OS market as one they care to stay with.
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to play a computer game. Let me help you with that. Oh wait, you mean you don't want me to send every frame of a game across your internet connection? (Do you realize how laggy that would be? LOL....)
PC gamers are about to be pissed off or extinct.
There's already migration among PC gamers to Linux. Honestly, this whole thing comes off as painfully tone-deaf and likely to cause mass migration to other OSes outside of businesses which could possibly write the increased costs off on their taxes.
Proof: How many man pages actually have examples.
This is a problem for people who learned to copy-paste from StackOverflow instead of learning to read documentation. Of course, it's also a problem of programmers not knowing how to create a proper interface.
Sometimes you'll run across programmers also not knowing how to write documentation. Protip: If somebody's looking up a man page, they want to know what it does, and how to use it. They do not want pornographic explanations of how it works in the most obtuse and esoteric language you can manage.
Of course if no one contributes, the system will fall apart.
But why would no-one contribute? After all, the contributions benefit the contributor as well as every one else. And having every one else benefit is an additional benefit to me.
Now if contributions were optional, as is the Libertarian utopia, you might have a tragedy of the commons problem. Bu that's not the case.
You ask why no-one would contribute, but then suggest that it is necessary that contributing be required instead of optional. That doesn't follow, logically: If it's so obviously good, people will opt in...especially if that's the base requirement to also getting to benefit.
Having all parts of the system have to convince people that they will, in fact, benefit from participation--which is actually almost certain in a Libertarian utopia--has benefits in ensuring no part of the system assumes that they will be contributed to regardless of if the benefit is, in point of fact, delivered. I'd suggest not even requiring people wait for the current version of any part of the system collapse completely before they can start a new version that actually meets their needs--why wait for the schools to finish imploding, if they're providing a shit education? It takes time to set up new. Get it started before the old system's gone, and you can at least cut down on the lag time.
Now that's not to say it would be a nice place to live with 90% of the people on UBI, but in reality that won't happen. Most people don't want to merely survive, they want to live in luxury.
And how many would prefer to push for UBI to be raised as opposed to actually work to get that, and possibly more importantly, how likely is it that they will be put up with? Even if it's merely a vocal minority, it cannot be an acceptable view if you want to ensure that it will stay as basic as it would need to be in order have a chance of being sustainable.
While I'd like to see Google held accountable for their anticompetitive behavior, the best solution is still for someone else to spin up a video streaming site. There's enough people who want an alternative to Youtube for it to work out. But it has to be at least as friendly to uploaders as Youtube...
They're steadily working on making that an easier hurdle to clear.
Amphetamine psychosis? How about providing any study that shows this being an issue when treating ADHD? I can't find anything but my search skills may be lacking. It is an issue when abusing amphetamines however ADHD is treated with much lower doses than is required to provide recreational effects.
As far as I know, there no study checking it at all, which is actually a problem because drug-induced psychosis on the whole is definitely not dose-dependent--it's not as simple as high dose=psychosis, especially since with drugs in the family it seems to be something which will happen if you take it for long enough regardless of how careful you have been about the dose...and some people never get symptoms while others it seems to just be one day they pulled the trigger and got the loaded chamber, so to speak. I have seen several case studies of people on theraputic doses for ADHD having psychosis turn up after they'd been on the meds for a while, however.
Honestly, the whole thing could be vastly better studied, but I doubt that'll happen until some drug finally starts inducing it with noticeable reliability while trying to get approved by the FDA.
Ritalin is not an amphetamine damm you people are pharmaco-ignorant
Methylphenidate is close enough that it appears to work very much like dextroamphetamine. It is considered to be in the amphetamine family, typically, and may be* subject to the same laws as amphetamines--right down to the same legal issues if you try to take any with you when crossing the border, even if you obtained it perfectly legally and have the medical documentation to prove it.
* I am not a lawyer, nor employed in any field that requires I know the logistics of obtaining controlled substances or taking them across international borders beyond those very specific cases I have had to know. Do your own research before you go--especially since laws can change--and do not expect it to be necessarily easily found, and the ease of access can and does vary between countries. That said, Ritalin is under the same rules as other drugs considered amphetamines in all countries I've had reason to know the details of; if you cannot function without Ritalin or Adderall, don't visit Japan.
riiight... walk it off... does that work on heart attacks and cancers, too?
It's unfortunately not walk it off: The ADHD problem that'd go away is one of misdiagnosis. A lot of places are using outright dismal diagnostic methods--poor accuracy and poor validity combining to produce a false positive rate that ought to be unacceptable for anything commonly perceived as a mental health issue and/or treated with drugs that can have serious side effects.
It'd be rather like diagnosing any and all pains in the chest as a heart attack, even when you've got a knife sticking out of the patient. Sometimes you'll be right, but...
What I just described is, depressingly enough, taken from multiple case studies and basic awareness of how you're actually supposed to handle psychiatric medications--if you're on them and nobody's taken the time to tell you, fuckups with your meds can make your mental health problems worse and yes, you should keep track of & mention side effects. This is something your doctors are supposed to tell you, especially since sometimes it can get weird, such as one patient with bipolar who had a psychotic episode because of energy drinks.
I've known people who were fucked over by doctors who...didn't, both personally and through case studies. What I described is actually a common pattern I've seen in case studies of ADHD patients--specifically, ones who had psychotic breaks. That's...more or less to be expected if you mix Ritalin or Adderall with sleeping pills, and with uppers--stimulants--in general there is always a risk. (This includes at least one case caffeine psychosis--the one I managed to hear the details of, the woman managed to drink a very impressive amount of coffee in a very short period of time, and then tried to kill a friend.)
I've been diagnosed with ADHD since I was a child, and use medication selectively today, adjusting my dosage depending on the demands of the day & how I'm feeling (I only take my full dosage on "bad" days).
Your description is fairly spot on. Anecdotally however, I'm not sure the medication actually has much of a direct affect on memory, it simply helps in maintaining focus on the right things, which in turn helps you record the right things.
Working memory is distinct from short-term and long-term memory--the things people normally think of as memory. Those are more like the write buffer to the hard drive & the hard drive itself.
That said, you might want to look into flow--hyperfocus is when you find your attention stuck on something and it's not something you want to be paying attention to exclusively, flow is the state of attention you're in when you hit the zone. I've lost days that way. ADHD actually makes it easier to reach these states--it's not that you don't have any attention span, it's that most things won't hold it well...but what holds it will do so really well. (Anecdotally: Music works for me for reaching flow easily. I use endless repeats and long playlists--radio only if there's next to no interruptions to the music--and sometimes I have to have really strangely precise matches between music and what I'm trying to focus on.)
which Adderall and Ritalin are. To be specific, they're amphetamines...
Take a look at the chemical formulas for Adderall and meth sometime.
I wandered into neuroscience from biochemistry, and actually am thinking of seeing if I can get a copy of this study to read, even though it is kinda stating the obvious.
I think a lot of ADHD problems would go away if we just let kids run around some more. I've known a fair number of people who've been put into that bucket and physical exertion does a lot to mitigate the effects. Extra PE time might also help with the obesity epidemic as well.
I can assure you that a lot of it is, in fact, due to cutting back on the time kids get to actually exercise--that, and schools get extra money for each student diagnosed. A lot of the diagnosis is also somewhere around the 'people should be at least sued for this' end of half-assed, too--I've heard of diagnosis being basically done on the word of a school counselor who is mostly relying on teachers' complaints with the medication tossed on their word by a general practitioner. Most teachers go off of how much attention a student is paying--and don't necessarily consider such possibilities as the student being bored to death, needing to have time to indulge in physical activity, or suffers from a physical condition commonly known as 'being male' when it gets really stupidly bad.
This is not how you should be diagnosing neurological issues--and yes, it is one. You also don't see the behavioral help that's pretty much required (because the drugs have no measurable effect after ~2 years) put in because that's hard and would require one of the parties spend money on the problem instead of just give the kid pills--which, once again, are amphetamines and people with ADHD aren't that different neurologically. Amphetamine side effects and problems are still going to be there, including amphetamine psychosis and the fun that happens when the idiot doctor prescribes sleeping pills because 24/7 amphetamines do screw with your sleep, who knew?
ADHD definitely exists--but the sheer incompetence, lack of required skills, and perverse incentives here all combine to make it unfortunately very likely that most people who have been diagnosed with it...probably don't actually have it.
FYI: Working memory is basically the RAM of the brain--it's short-term holding for stuff you're processing and using, which is why it's called working memory. One of the things you check for if somebody who should be doing well in school but isn't? Is if their working memory is functioning correctly.
Focus and attention aren't anywhere near as important. You can only be vaguely paying attention and still retain a surprising amount of information, but you need your working memory to remember the start of a paragraph when you reach its end, and other things rather important to the ability to reason and make good choices.
So it's not just that it didn't make anybody 'smarter,' it actually managed to hose something you direly need working to be smart. Though, if amphetamines in general screw with the working memory, that explains so much about the life choices of amphetamine addicts...
I've had a lot of teachers whose specialty was in this area, and honestly this is kind of the equivalent of 'We checked, water is wet.' ADHD is basically a bandwidth problem--people with attention deficit disorders (there's several) lack the standard suite of preprocessing filters on their incoming data. These normally are present to basically try to get you to stick with what (the filters judge to be) the important stuff in the incoming data is--without these filters, you're attempting to drink from the proverbial firehose. Hyperactivity is the most common method by which the brain attempts to cope--"Maybe if we move really really really fast we can get all this sorted!"
There's other strategies, too, such as 'shut down' and 'increase processing power' which have their own relative issues and your attention is still going to be not working like what is classed as 'normal'--in some populations, ADD is normal, because assumptions about what is/isn't important in your environment tended to get selected against instead of heavily agricultural populations where we strongly selected for the ability to not be too bothered by spending many hours staring at the hind end of a draft animal... It's not shot; you can get hyperfocus and flow, where your attention is very tightly focused on doing a task, vastly more easily than the normal population.
There is, however, one thing about this that's surprising--and that's that you get the same kind of effects in normal people. One of the old methods for confirming an ADD diagnosis is that you had an atypical reaction to stimulants...which Adderall and Ritalin are. To be specific, they're amphetamines...