Just buy a container and convert it. Steel floor, walls, roof, doors. Paint it distinctive colors, (maybe a rainbow) and should someone try to swipe it, it will stick out like a sore thumb.
And my tagline reflects what a lot of us are saying - you have a problem with it, that's not my problem. Maybe if you were less of a know-ot-all on that topic and instead found out how others feel, you might not be so irritated.
Some things are pretty black-and-white. This is one of them.
So your solution to being depressed because you're in a shit-hole is to show people that there are people worse off? That definitely won't work. Depressed people know that others are better off than them, if only because others aren't depressed and fighting suicide.
The real problem is that people always get the government they deserve. You weren't vigilant enough over the last 40 years and look what it got you. It's a self-limiting problem though, because eventually enough people will be angry enough to take action to force change.
Also, drugs that have a longer half-life in the blood stream you have to take longer than 1 day to let the amount in the body to build up. Taking a massive dose to get it up immediately is a dumb idea. You also want to have time to judge both the efficacy and the side effects so you can decide to increase the dose or discontinue it.
It's not weird - it's pretty common knowledge for anyone who has been prescribed an anti-depressant, and there are lots of people on that list. And SSRIs don't create much of a (if any) dependency (physical or mental) if you're taking them for depression, and not for recreational use.
What freaks in prison do is of no consequence - they also try to shoot up with peanut butter if someone tells them it gives a sugar high and huff aerosols. It's simply not open to widespread abuse.
Let's take a look at your solutions. I agree with most of them, but right now there's no way to get from here to there in the USA.
#1 - improving availability of education - is less effective as time goes by. Just ask all the 30-somethings with several degrees who are working part-time at the minimum wage.
#2 - Relax or eliminate victimless-crime statutes - already done in some countries, and others are following. However, that won't make the world less of a shit-hole.
#3 - Social safety net - losing a job should not be life or family-threatening - I totally agree. Suicides are rising for one group - white middle-aged men - because of the crappy job market. Sure, employment is rising, but going from a wel-paying job to stock clerk part-time is going to hit anyone hard unless they already have enough $$$ in the bank that they are just working to have something to do.
#4 - Medical safety net - it's insane not to have this. It saves money. People can't afford to take care of a problem when it's small, so they later end up in emergency with a more serious condition that could have been prevented. And since it's more serious, it's more likely to interfere with their work, or even get them fired because they can no longer do the job, so society at large ends up paying for it anyway.
#5 - Sorry, can't stop creating conflicts in other parts of the world to support the military-industrial complex.
#6 - I once worked 6 years with 0 vacation, even though it's mandatory here. Needed to get the work done. IT sucks. Quitting was such a relief.
#7 - Enforce labour laws - this is slashdot - the crazies will come out and say that working conditions should just be between employer and employee, not realizing the imbalance in negotiating positions. And they think the same thing about wages and hate the minimum wage because it "kills jobs." If they had their way, they'd put it down as close to zero as possible and kill their workers instead.
Your "logic" is flawed because it assumes that people aren't worth even the minimum wage. Would you work for $0.50 an hour? Even if you wanted to, you couldn't because you wouldn't be able to put in enough hours to make enough to have a place to sleep and food to eat.
One of the reasons to prescribe medication is to get the person to a state where they are not overwhelmed by their problems, are open to therapy, and can look at their problems in a different way with outside help.
A person who can't sleep, can't work, can't concentrate because they are in a serious depression and they have continuous intrusive thoughts of suicide, and you want them to learn enough cognitive behavioral therapy so they can work out how their thinking is distorted before resorting to medication? Therapy takes a few months - what do they do in the meantime? Kill themselves? Someone in a crisis doesn't have the luxury of taking months and months of therapy once a week. And they would be too distracted by their illness to benefit from it.
Every person's brain is different. Some people react well to one medicine but not another. Others need a combination, and lots of work to get the dose right - and there's no guarantee that the illness won't deteriorate with time.
The side effects for any individual can't be predicted in advance, same as any other medicine.
YOU are the one showing a complete lack of understanding of mental health.
When society isnt a shit heap, people actually do tend to be happier. Cause you know.... there's less to get depressed about?
And how do you propose to fix society so it's not a "shit heap?" Extra points if you can also figure out what we should do with people with mental disorders until you "fix society?" How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying?
Two people can be in identical circumstances, one gets depressed, the other doesn't. Same with PTSD and other anxiety disorders - some people are more susceptible than others. It's not as simple as you seem to think it is. And if you tell someone to "just pull yourself out of it", you deserve it when they punch you in the face.
But the drugs just takes care of the symptoms to some extent. Not the cause. We need to dig deeper.
Kind of hard to dig deeper if the person is overwhelmed by the symptoms. If someone wants to kill themselves today, you don't want to risk taking 3 months of therapy to try to get to the bottom of their problems. Also, finding the cause doesn't necessarily fix everything. The brain is plastic. Every time a person goes through a bout of depression, it increases the odds of another bout irrespective of the cause.
Can't you even read past your preconceptions? It's not the health care system in Britain that is driving people to suicide. It's the cutting of benefits to those who need them the most.
And as for your "as a crook, you ought to know yourself", coming from an Anonymous Coward, that's Apple-style "courageous." I have no criminal record whatsoever. That's a matter of public record, since you can't serve on a jury if you have a criminal record or are charged with a criminal offence. You can't say the same.
You miss my point that the US could have a strong leader without descending into fascism. The only problem is that there is going to be resistance to a fair economic arrangement with the 99% because of vested interests. Fix campaign funding and you'll have a chance. Otherwise, all your leaders will be weak, finding excuses to justify not rocking the economic boat.
Until you fix campaign financing you will continue to have an oligarchy, as Jimmy Carter admits, same as Russia.
If the product is known to have more holes than a slice of swiss cheese, why not an outright ban? Once manufacturers learn the hard way that customers are going to avoid their crappier products and demand refunds, they'll either get out of the business or fix the problems in future products. Either way, problem solved.
That's supposed to be how the invisible hand of the market is supposed to work.
Well, maybe you don't have electrical meters that allow for it, and offer it as a customer option, like we do here. A reduced rate all summer and whenever the outside temperature is above -12C, and a (much) higher rate when the outside temperature goes below -12C. People shift doing their laundry (hot water, electric dryer) to take advantage of off-peak rates. After all, who wants to pay double or more when they can delay it until the daytime when it gets warm enough for the rate to go down?
By the same token, people lower the heat at night because it saves $$$ if you're on the dual-energy rate plan. Maybe you just need to get to where we were 2-3 decades ago.
Let's look at one example - remote managing of a tank farm. It's been proven that all you need to do to take the complex over is a device plugged into the local network. Since there's nobody around to see suspicious activity (and don't start with the whole IP TV cameras bs - even if you saw someone doing something, the response time would be a lot longer than someone on site, so inherently not a deterrent.) So, take control of one of the pumps, fill up a tanker, disconnect and drive off. All the remote location would see is that one pump is down, schedule a maintenance call.
It's the same with home monitoring systems. You know that if you break in you have a delay during which the owner is supposed to enter a code, and only then is an alert sent to the monitoring station, who then has to call the home to verify that it wasn't a false alarm before calling the police (municipalities got fed up with responding to false alarms, so big fines, disconnects, and refusals to respond to ANY call from the monitoring company ensured compliance). So you have a couple of minutes before the cops are notified. There are videos of people stealing the whole camera setup, including the dvr connected to the internet. Even a dog is a better deterrent, because the cops take time to get there once the local monitoring company calls them, and it's not a high-priority call because the cops know that the thieves will be gone by the time they get there, and no lives are in danger. In two minutes, they've got your big screen tv removed from the wall mount and they're gone, leaving behind a damaged door and wall. With a dog, you're more likely to still have your tv, your door and wall.
Nothing replaces a set of ears and eyeballs on the ground. Plus, a human can call the police directly, and the cops will respond quicker, not only because of the lack of time wasted by the monitoring company, but because there's a person potentially at risk.
Just ask the London police how ineffective their CCTV cameras and 2-way speakers are in stopping a crime in progress.
You don't. Ban all contributions to electoral campaigns except by individuals, with an annual limit of $3,000.00 total per year. Remove all tax breaks for total donations over $100.00. Remove anonymous contributions.
The problem then, funnily enough, would be that you can only have self-funded megalomaniacs that can run - point in case, Trump.
Nope. The candidates would also be barred from exceeding the total contribution limit, and that would also include "in kind" donations of space, printing, etc. If other countries can do it, why can't you? Oh, right - for the same reason that you can't hold an election with a proper audit trail. Those juicy contracts to Diebold for election voting machines would be gone. Can't have that, can you.
Doesn't change the reality - Podesta's email was not hacked. As for stirring up the China-Taiwan situation, it should be. China is going to have a larger military than the US at some point, so either stand by your allies now, or you'll end up with even less credibility, same as Obama kept drawing "big red lines" that shouldn't be crossed, and when the barrel bombs and the chemical warfare started, did absolutely NOTHING.
As for Sanders scaring people to the republicans, give me a break. Polls showed Sanders with a 20 point lead over Trump. The only reason many people voted for Trump was because they couldn't bring themselves to vote Clinton. Look at the 3rd party votes - how many of them would Sanders have scooped up?
Certainly hypocritical for a candidate who said they would fight for campaign financing reform and undo Citizen's United.
And we have yet to see any proof that Russia interfered. However, given that Clinton herself admitted that she tried to interfere with Putin's election, stop being so damn hypocritical. The US has interfered in elections in many countries, including it's allies. Why not look at how the CIA undermined ally Japan's election as just one of over 50 examples since ww2. Or go back further and look at the origins of the term "banana republic".
It's stuff like this that has nobody believing anything the government says without ironclad proof. All we've heard is people citing other people's opinions. Opinions are like assholes - everybody has one, and they tend to be full of shit on a regular basis.
People will not work for $0.00 so that you can make money. It's called "a piece of the pie." So no, the minimum wage is never zero. Of $0.00, they'll work for themselves doing the work you want them to do for $0.00, and charge less than you (because after all, you are charging enough to make a profit for yourself), so you're cut out of the loop. As well you should be.
"wage slave" wasn't supposed to be a job description.
Slashdot Mirror
Just buy a container and convert it. Steel floor, walls, roof, doors. Paint it distinctive colors, (maybe a rainbow) and should someone try to swipe it, it will stick out like a sore thumb.
Some things are pretty black-and-white. This is one of them.
So your solution to being depressed because you're in a shit-hole is to show people that there are people worse off? That definitely won't work. Depressed people know that others are better off than them, if only because others aren't depressed and fighting suicide.
The real problem is that people always get the government they deserve. You weren't vigilant enough over the last 40 years and look what it got you. It's a self-limiting problem though, because eventually enough people will be angry enough to take action to force change.
Also, drugs that have a longer half-life in the blood stream you have to take longer than 1 day to let the amount in the body to build up. Taking a massive dose to get it up immediately is a dumb idea. You also want to have time to judge both the efficacy and the side effects so you can decide to increase the dose or discontinue it.
It's not weird - it's pretty common knowledge for anyone who has been prescribed an anti-depressant, and there are lots of people on that list. And SSRIs don't create much of a (if any) dependency (physical or mental) if you're taking them for depression, and not for recreational use.
Not banned, but scheduled 4-5. (i.e. banned for most poor people.)
.
The National Library of Medicine (National Institutes of Health) lists bupropion as not being a controlled substance. .Here is a Justice Department's list of all controlled substances.. Bupropion, aka Wellbutrin, is nowhere to be found.
What freaks in prison do is of no consequence - they also try to shoot up with peanut butter if someone tells them it gives a sugar high and huff aerosols. It's simply not open to widespread abuse.
Oh, and I'd be dead long ago if I didn't live in a place with universal health care and drug coverage.
Let's take a look at your solutions. I agree with most of them, but right now there's no way to get from here to there in the USA.
#1 - improving availability of education - is less effective as time goes by. Just ask all the 30-somethings with several degrees who are working part-time at the minimum wage.
#2 - Relax or eliminate victimless-crime statutes - already done in some countries, and others are following. However, that won't make the world less of a shit-hole.
#3 - Social safety net - losing a job should not be life or family-threatening - I totally agree. Suicides are rising for one group - white middle-aged men - because of the crappy job market. Sure, employment is rising, but going from a wel-paying job to stock clerk part-time is going to hit anyone hard unless they already have enough $$$ in the bank that they are just working to have something to do.
#4 - Medical safety net - it's insane not to have this. It saves money. People can't afford to take care of a problem when it's small, so they later end up in emergency with a more serious condition that could have been prevented. And since it's more serious, it's more likely to interfere with their work, or even get them fired because they can no longer do the job, so society at large ends up paying for it anyway.
#5 - Sorry, can't stop creating conflicts in other parts of the world to support the military-industrial complex.
#6 - I once worked 6 years with 0 vacation, even though it's mandatory here. Needed to get the work done. IT sucks. Quitting was such a relief.
#7 - Enforce labour laws - this is slashdot - the crazies will come out and say that working conditions should just be between employer and employee, not realizing the imbalance in negotiating positions. And they think the same thing about wages and hate the minimum wage because it "kills jobs." If they had their way, they'd put it down as close to zero as possible and kill their workers instead.
Your "logic" is flawed because it assumes that people aren't worth even the minimum wage. Would you work for $0.50 an hour? Even if you wanted to, you couldn't because you wouldn't be able to put in enough hours to make enough to have a place to sleep and food to eat.
It's not like you can take the medication and build up to the desired level in one day.
BTW, antidepressants such as Wellbutrin are not controlled substances, not even schedule 5 (lowest classification).
One of the reasons to prescribe medication is to get the person to a state where they are not overwhelmed by their problems, are open to therapy, and can look at their problems in a different way with outside help.
A person who can't sleep, can't work, can't concentrate because they are in a serious depression and they have continuous intrusive thoughts of suicide, and you want them to learn enough cognitive behavioral therapy so they can work out how their thinking is distorted before resorting to medication? Therapy takes a few months - what do they do in the meantime? Kill themselves? Someone in a crisis doesn't have the luxury of taking months and months of therapy once a week. And they would be too distracted by their illness to benefit from it.
Every person's brain is different. Some people react well to one medicine but not another. Others need a combination, and lots of work to get the dose right - and there's no guarantee that the illness won't deteriorate with time.
The side effects for any individual can't be predicted in advance, same as any other medicine.
YOU are the one showing a complete lack of understanding of mental health.
When society isnt a shit heap, people actually do tend to be happier. Cause you know.... there's less to get depressed about?
And how do you propose to fix society so it's not a "shit heap?" Extra points if you can also figure out what we should do with people with mental disorders until you "fix society?" How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying?
Two people can be in identical circumstances, one gets depressed, the other doesn't. Same with PTSD and other anxiety disorders - some people are more susceptible than others. It's not as simple as you seem to think it is. And if you tell someone to "just pull yourself out of it", you deserve it when they punch you in the face.
But the drugs just takes care of the symptoms to some extent. Not the cause. We need to dig deeper.
Kind of hard to dig deeper if the person is overwhelmed by the symptoms. If someone wants to kill themselves today, you don't want to risk taking 3 months of therapy to try to get to the bottom of their problems. Also, finding the cause doesn't necessarily fix everything. The brain is plastic. Every time a person goes through a bout of depression, it increases the odds of another bout irrespective of the cause.
Can't you even read past your preconceptions? It's not the health care system in Britain that is driving people to suicide. It's the cutting of benefits to those who need them the most.
And as for your "as a crook, you ought to know yourself", coming from an Anonymous Coward, that's Apple-style "courageous." I have no criminal record whatsoever. That's a matter of public record, since you can't serve on a jury if you have a criminal record or are charged with a criminal offence. You can't say the same.
You miss my point that the US could have a strong leader without descending into fascism. The only problem is that there is going to be resistance to a fair economic arrangement with the 99% because of vested interests. Fix campaign funding and you'll have a chance. Otherwise, all your leaders will be weak, finding excuses to justify not rocking the economic boat.
Until you fix campaign financing you will continue to have an oligarchy, as Jimmy Carter admits, same as Russia.
You clapped your hands, which is why it was called "The Clapper." :-)
Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes and is a big fat hypocrite who lies all the time is hardly irrelevant.
If the product is known to have more holes than a slice of swiss cheese, why not an outright ban? Once manufacturers learn the hard way that customers are going to avoid their crappier products and demand refunds, they'll either get out of the business or fix the problems in future products. Either way, problem solved.
That's supposed to be how the invisible hand of the market is supposed to work.
Well, maybe you don't have electrical meters that allow for it, and offer it as a customer option, like we do here. A reduced rate all summer and whenever the outside temperature is above -12C, and a (much) higher rate when the outside temperature goes below -12C. People shift doing their laundry (hot water, electric dryer) to take advantage of off-peak rates. After all, who wants to pay double or more when they can delay it until the daytime when it gets warm enough for the rate to go down?
By the same token, people lower the heat at night because it saves $$$ if you're on the dual-energy rate plan. Maybe you just need to get to where we were 2-3 decades ago.
Let's look at one example - remote managing of a tank farm. It's been proven that all you need to do to take the complex over is a device plugged into the local network. Since there's nobody around to see suspicious activity (and don't start with the whole IP TV cameras bs - even if you saw someone doing something, the response time would be a lot longer than someone on site, so inherently not a deterrent.) So, take control of one of the pumps, fill up a tanker, disconnect and drive off. All the remote location would see is that one pump is down, schedule a maintenance call.
It's the same with home monitoring systems. You know that if you break in you have a delay during which the owner is supposed to enter a code, and only then is an alert sent to the monitoring station, who then has to call the home to verify that it wasn't a false alarm before calling the police (municipalities got fed up with responding to false alarms, so big fines, disconnects, and refusals to respond to ANY call from the monitoring company ensured compliance). So you have a couple of minutes before the cops are notified. There are videos of people stealing the whole camera setup, including the dvr connected to the internet. Even a dog is a better deterrent, because the cops take time to get there once the local monitoring company calls them, and it's not a high-priority call because the cops know that the thieves will be gone by the time they get there, and no lives are in danger. In two minutes, they've got your big screen tv removed from the wall mount and they're gone, leaving behind a damaged door and wall. With a dog, you're more likely to still have your tv, your door and wall.
Nothing replaces a set of ears and eyeballs on the ground. Plus, a human can call the police directly, and the cops will respond quicker, not only because of the lack of time wasted by the monitoring company, but because there's a person potentially at risk.
Just ask the London police how ineffective their CCTV cameras and 2-way speakers are in stopping a crime in progress.
You don't. Ban all contributions to electoral campaigns except by individuals, with an annual limit of $3,000.00 total per year. Remove all tax breaks for total donations over $100.00. Remove anonymous contributions.
The problem then, funnily enough, would be that you can only have self-funded megalomaniacs that can run - point in case, Trump.
Nope. The candidates would also be barred from exceeding the total contribution limit, and that would also include "in kind" donations of space, printing, etc. If other countries can do it, why can't you? Oh, right - for the same reason that you can't hold an election with a proper audit trail. Those juicy contracts to Diebold for election voting machines would be gone. Can't have that, can you.
Doesn't change the reality - Podesta's email was not hacked. As for stirring up the China-Taiwan situation, it should be. China is going to have a larger military than the US at some point, so either stand by your allies now, or you'll end up with even less credibility, same as Obama kept drawing "big red lines" that shouldn't be crossed, and when the barrel bombs and the chemical warfare started, did absolutely NOTHING.
And you're ignoring the facts if you claim that the DNC process wasn't rigged, you're being wilfully ignorant. resigned over it and was immediately hired by clinton. But first, she tried to muzzle MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski, demanding he resign after he complained about the DNC's bias against Sanders.
As for Sanders scaring people to the republicans, give me a break. Polls showed Sanders with a 20 point lead over Trump. The only reason many people voted for Trump was because they couldn't bring themselves to vote Clinton. Look at the 3rd party votes - how many of them would Sanders have scooped up?
Clinton was unelectable, even after the DNC diverted funds to support her campaign that were supposed to be shared with the state campaigns, reserving 99.5% to Hillary. And let's not forget the scam to get around FEC maximum donor contributions.
Certainly hypocritical for a candidate who said they would fight for campaign financing reform and undo Citizen's United.
And we have yet to see any proof that Russia interfered. However, given that Clinton herself admitted that she tried to interfere with Putin's election, stop being so damn hypocritical. The US has interfered in elections in many countries, including it's allies. Why not look at how the CIA undermined ally Japan's election as just one of over 50 examples since ww2. Or go back further and look at the origins of the term "banana republic".
It's stuff like this that has nobody believing anything the government says without ironclad proof. All we've heard is people citing other people's opinions. Opinions are like assholes - everybody has one, and they tend to be full of shit on a regular basis.
"wage slave" wasn't supposed to be a job description.