Well, sure is hard to be happy without money. [...] Money is the one thing that allows me to buy and do things I enjoy in life.
It is not noticeably easier to be happy with a lot of money, and may be harder. I have met monks that are happy with almost nothing. I have met financial traders who made several hundred thousand dollars a year and were miserable people. International surveys show that money doesn't buy happiness, and stories of lottery winners back that up.
They say money doesn't buy you happiness? Well, it sure makes misery a whole lot easier to live with I can tell ya.
Yes, money can buy you distraction. It seems the most pure form of that is drug use. Troubled? A drink, a toke, a sniff will set you right. But it seems weird to say that if I can afford to be high all the time, I'm the happiest guy on earth.
Compared to a back laid open beatings and AK rounds through the meat of the legs, a few gut punches and a black eye looks pretty damn good.
Either we're there as the world's policemen or we're there for a little empire-building. I was thinking it was the former, which makes your abuse far from "pretty damn good", as one can't simultaneously break and uphold the law. Crime by cops isn't better than crime by ordinary criminals; it's worse. But is sounds like you're saying that as unaccountable overlords go, you couldn't ask for a better tyrrany than one run by the US. In which case, what's a little abuse?
Perhaps you can connect the dots on this one. If somebody tried to conquer the US, I'd be out there building IEDs, and I'd bet you would be, too.
Being able to laugh at your own misfortune, even along with others, is quite different from laughing at the pain of others when they themselves quite likely don't think it funny. Specifically, different in a sociopathic kind of way. It is sad that this has to be explained.
Wait, I'm confused. Is it ok for me to laugh at your sanctimony? Or perhaps your hyperbole?
If my PDA or phone is silent while I work with it, then why is it a distraction?
Monkey see, monkey do. And we're all primates.
Another way to look at it: Being part of a live audience makes a good show better. One thing that makes people excited is other people being excited. If you're off in your own little world, you're a dead spot in the audience.
With any of those options, and such a small number of books, why not just organize the shelves. Seperate the shelves by category and then organize each shelf by author. [...] The technical aspects of this are just pure unnecessary geekery.
I agree. I only have circa 1500 books, but this system works fine for me. Except for fiction, I don't even organize by author; scanning through a shelf or two for a particular book is easier than being meticulous about sorting.
Re:Sudo is only useful when there are lots of admi
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 1
For a single-user system, sudo is pointless. Nearly everyone is just going to sudo into a shell to do anything where root is needed on their own personal box anyway.
Wrong!
I vary rarely run a shell from sudo. Even on my own boxes, I use sudo for perhaps 95% of my root activity. Why? Because then I have a complete log of everything I've done as root.
ebay has got to be the posterchild for "first mover advantage."
More precisely, I think it's a great example of the Network Effect, where a product or service is more valuable because more people use it. But the two are certainly related; first-mover advantage in network-effect products can be very valuable.
They have since cleaned up their site . . . but they were using every type of outmoded, pseudo seo hacks - alt tag spamming, invisible #FFFFFF links at the bottom of their pages pointing to keyword spam duplicate pages ad nauseum
I was curious to see, so I went to archive.org and looked for stuff like that. I couldn't find any. Would you mind digging up a link or two?
Google still indexes over 25000 pages by them [...] They appear to be just a linkfarm.
Interesting. Given that Google is only around 40% of search engine traffic, it's odd that a Google demotion would remove 70% of KinderStart's traffic. That suggests that Google is just bringing KinderStart's ranking in line with other engines. And combined with your notion, that would make KinderStart a link-farm optimized for distorting Google.
You're probably best off going coop games. If you're going PC games, any MMOG would probably do the trick.
My girlfriend and I happily played a fair bit of Puzzle Pirates together. She's not a big gamer, but she loves puzzles and puzzle games like Tetris, and that sucked her in to the MMO aspect of the game. That was cooperative, and a lot of fun.
The other game we play together is Dance Dance Revolution. That's not so cooperative, but we're both at similar skill levels, so it's fun for all concerned.
So if I were to draw lessons from that, it would be to pick something that a) she likes, and b) she's at least as good ast.
In other news, scientists have just discovered that humans are just a big bag of meat and ichor, built around a convoluted tube that continuously turns wholesome food into shit.
Did you have a better suggestion? Or were you just carping?
My wife is concerned with throwing mail away and the thieves getting it there. Why would they bother to go through my trash and get dirty when they can get it fresh from my mailbox w/no one the wiser.
She's right to be concerned. Trash is easier to get. Mail is left out during the day; trash is left out at night. Mail is often delivered to the home; trash is put out by the curb.
The New York Times had an article last year about an identity theft ring that mainly worked with trash. Since most of the people were meth-heads, they would put back together shredded documents. Mind-numbing for normal people, it's apparently just the right speed for methamphetamine users.
Seems we're giving computers to people that would be happier with running water and fresh food. I think they'll play with the computer for a minute, see that it doesnt dispense food or water and it'll end up in the corner or sold somewhere.
There are many reasonable concerns about the $100 laptop effort, but this isn't even remotely one of them. The people who are doing this are smart and, unlike a number of the participants here, have actually given more than three seconds thought to the topic. It's not like they will just be airdropping laptops into refugee camps in lieu of food.
There is a large chunk of the world's poor that never shows up on a Sally Struthers TV commercial. Their lives are stable, they more or less have enough to eat, they're getting by. Think of them as the global working poor. The notion that they can benefit from better access to educational materials, reference materials, and market information isn't crazy. And unlike access to capital (another thing that keeps them poor), information is now nearly free to duplicate.
Negroponte may or may not be on the right trail for solving this problem, but it's undeniable that most computer manufacturers don't give a fuck about the low end of the market. By making noise and aggregating purchasing power, he can make them take notice. A $100 laptop isn't interesting to most manufacturers. But what if you're looking to make them in lots of ten million?
I would never fund anyone in another country, never again. When I was younger I funded some Ehtiopian charity group, and a few years later had the opportunity to visit Ethiopia. [...] The people the charity was meant to help received very little of the finance and support promised, and what little they did receive did not give them any hope for the future.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I was recently in India and visited the village operations of a microfinance organization. By giving small loans and providing support so that people can start their own businesses, microcredit is making a huge difference. Some charities are sad parasites; some are well-meaning dolts; some are changing lives for the better.
Anyway, the real culprit here is the game design. If Blizzard want their players to worship at the altar of the great Time Sink, then they can expect them to use things like this to make it less mind-numbingly tedious.
That's a fantastic point. I think games like Puzzle Pirates make a lot more sense. There, your skill in the game is determined by your real-world skill in playing various puzzle games. It seems like much more fun to me.
He should consider it a favor. Now he can go back to living his life.
No fooling. He mentions that he's spent three thousand hours on it. That's enough time to get a master's degree. It's a year and a half of a full time job. If he spent that time walking, he could have crossed the US and back, or twice done a London-to-Istanbul round trip.
Watching people play WOW gives me the creeps a bit. It's reminds me of going to Vegas and watching the slot machine zombies doing the same thing over and over and over and over.
lets see... for a year of 200gigs, that's $360 USD. couldn't I jut buy a new hard drive every year or burn hundreds of DVDs for far far less?
Yes, and then you'd have a lot of storage in the same place as your existing storage. A theft or a fire and your data's gone. Unless you carefully schlep the DVDs elsewhere and keep them up to date. Which most people never do.
A better comparison is getting a collocated server and using it for backups. Given that people are charging $360 a year for a modest slice of a virtual server with only 12 GB of disk, Amazon's price seems pretty decent.
And it's a smart use of Amazon's brand. People are very conservative with backups. I would never use a startup to host my critical data, as there's no reason to trust them. Amazon, though, won't just close up shop one night because the bank account is empty.
People happily pay $30 bucks a month for physical storage; there's no reason they won't pay for virtual storage, too.
It does, because, unlike hard-drives, the media and the reading mechanism separate components. If your read head drives on your hard-drive, it is difficult and expensive (but not impossible) to retrieve your data.
This is possibly a good argument for commercial situations, but I don't think it applies to casual users. I now have a variety of old tape and removable media items sitting around and no matching drives; they died or were never mine to begin with. But the old hard drives I have all still spin up.
I mean really, it's a website that lets you post pictures and make comments about them. A blog with pictures. The company that makes one of the most advanced search engines in the world could surely duplicate such software, and get it done quickly.
There's no particular reason to believe that. The kinds of software are very different, as are the skills needed to make them.
Flickr is pretty far from being merely "a blog with pictures". In two years, it has vaulted from a crazy idea to one of the top 50 web sites. If you need an oversimplistic description, "a community about pictures" is closer, but that still isn't enough to explain their massive growth.
Google's main superpowers are simplicity and scale. Some of their newer apps are starting to show some nice UI improvements, but they are still worlds apart from Flickr. Their closest thing to this is Orkut which, frankly, sucks and has sucked for a long time.
I think the difference is that Google's approach is to put passionate, high-powered engineers in charge and let them do what they want, whereas Flickr had a similarly passionate and high-powered team that was cross-functional.
Google can't yet do Flickr for the same reason that you missed why Flickr succeeded: the things that made the difference for Flickr are things that engineers don't normally notice or value.
It disappoints me that you ignore my major point, which is that you are making bold medical judgments just as dramatic as the doctors you revile, but on the basis of much less evidence and training. Their arrogance does not excuse yours.
Setting that aside, I'll press on with your points.
You just got through telling me here, that you used to take the drug, then stopped, and now you're just fine anyway. [...] I've known people with various kinds of depression, obsessive-cumpulsive, even the odd schitzophrenic. With all of them, meds=better; without meds=worse.
Good doctors prefer non-medication approaches to coping with diseases. For example, type-2 diabetes, panic disorders, depression, and seasonal affective disorder all have major non-drug components to the treatment. Some people need to stay on the drugs their whole lives; some don't.
But in my case, I never said I was fine; I said I found ways to cope. I've carefully built a life that suits my short attention span. I was lucky, and many people don't have the options I did. For certain environments, like returning to full-time traditional school, I would absolutely go back to a psychiatrist specializing in adult ADD to talk over medication.
Little kids who have to take it don't get your choices.
Little kids who, like me, underachieved in school don't have a choice if we a priori decide that medication is never appropriate for them. I agree completely that it's something that should be approached very carefully and as a last resort. I also agree that the knee-jerk overprescription is callous malpractice. But I insist that you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Now *add* to that the 90,000 hits I get from Google typing "ADHD hoax".
I'm glad that you are questioning the problem that you see. I think overdiagnosis of ADD is a real problem, and I think medication of children should be a last resort.
However, if I have to choose between trained medical professionals and an apparently hysterical random person on the internet who thinks a handful of anecdotes and a Google search is sufficient evidence to make medical decisions, forgive me if I pick the person who can actually spell the diseases he's talking about.
That's the f**king problem, everyone fits. I've checked some of those "are you ADD?" tests, and yes, I fit too. As does everyone I know.
For me, the problem was one of relative performance. Matched on an IQ-score or SAT-score basis, my peers were accomplishing a lot more. It was frustrating and stressful.
As to the "everybody I know fits" bit, it's worth remembering that we have a lot of influence over what sort of people we know.
We've graduated from electic torture and slicing the brain into chunks - now I say it's time we did away with chemical lobotomy as well.
Although you may have a point about ADD, freaking out about some imagined "chemical lobotomy" isn't helping your case. I and several people in my family have tried Ritalin, although none currently take it. Its effects last just hours, and are moderate. When you consider the cost of a lifetime of unnecessary failure in school and work, if it's effective I think it can be a reasonable choice.
As an aside it turns out that electroshock therapy, however ugly and abused in the past, is still useful in treating some otherwise untreatable depression. I have seen it restore to normal functioning people that seemed hopelessly lost in permanent black despair. I look forward to the day we don't need it, but until that day comes it would be great if you could not stigmatize the treatment unnecessarily.
There's gotta be some room for skepticism, here. I'm sorry if this makes you sad, but you, too, were probably hoaxed - unless you were taking it for your own kicks, in which case I say "More power to you!"
Hoaxed?
I was having trouble in college. My youngest brother was diagnosed with ADD; when we looked at the criteria, all of us fit. After testing, I was diagnosed as well. I tried the Ritalin; it helped some, although I never liked the side effects much. Eventually I figured out other ways to cope, and don't use it anymore.
I agree that there are big issues with overprescription, and that it's not clear that ADD really fits well in the "disease" model that most of our medicine is built around. These are problems that have very little to do with ADD, and a lot to do with the history of western medicine and our broader cultural context.
So I'm not sad, particularly. I just think you telling me what happened to me on the basis of a short post on Slashdot is laughable. Bitch all you want about doctors rushing to diagnose ADD, but you're rushing even faster to diagnose the problem you've decided exists.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sure is hard to be happy without money. [...] Money is the one thing that allows me to buy and do things I enjoy in life.
It is not noticeably easier to be happy with a lot of money, and may be harder. I have met monks that are happy with almost nothing. I have met financial traders who made several hundred thousand dollars a year and were miserable people. International surveys show that money doesn't buy happiness, and stories of lottery winners back that up.
They say money doesn't buy you happiness? Well, it sure makes misery a whole lot easier to live with I can tell ya.
Yes, money can buy you distraction. It seems the most pure form of that is drug use. Troubled? A drink, a toke, a sniff will set you right. But it seems weird to say that if I can afford to be high all the time, I'm the happiest guy on earth.
Compared to a back laid open beatings and AK rounds through the meat of the legs, a few gut punches and a black eye looks pretty damn good.
Either we're there as the world's policemen or we're there for a little empire-building. I was thinking it was the former, which makes your abuse far from "pretty damn good", as one can't simultaneously break and uphold the law. Crime by cops isn't better than crime by ordinary criminals; it's worse. But is sounds like you're saying that as unaccountable overlords go, you couldn't ask for a better tyrrany than one run by the US. In which case, what's a little abuse?
Perhaps you can connect the dots on this one. If somebody tried to conquer the US, I'd be out there building IEDs, and I'd bet you would be, too.
Being able to laugh at your own misfortune, even along with others, is quite different from laughing at the pain of others when they themselves quite likely don't think it funny. Specifically, different in a sociopathic kind of way. It is sad that this has to be explained.
Wait, I'm confused. Is it ok for me to laugh at your sanctimony? Or perhaps your hyperbole?
If my PDA or phone is silent while I work with it, then why is it a distraction?
Monkey see, monkey do. And we're all primates.
Another way to look at it: Being part of a live audience makes a good show better. One thing that makes people excited is other people being excited. If you're off in your own little world, you're a dead spot in the audience.
With any of those options, and such a small number of books, why not just organize the shelves. Seperate the shelves by category and then organize each shelf by author. [...] The technical aspects of this are just pure unnecessary geekery.
I agree. I only have circa 1500 books, but this system works fine for me. Except for fiction, I don't even organize by author; scanning through a shelf or two for a particular book is easier than being meticulous about sorting.
For a single-user system, sudo is pointless. Nearly everyone is just going to sudo into a shell to do anything where root is needed on their own personal box anyway.
Wrong!
I vary rarely run a shell from sudo. Even on my own boxes, I use sudo for perhaps 95% of my root activity. Why? Because then I have a complete log of everything I've done as root.
ebay has got to be the posterchild for "first mover advantage."
More precisely, I think it's a great example of the Network Effect, where a product or service is more valuable because more people use it. But the two are certainly related; first-mover advantage in network-effect products can be very valuable.
in the tyrannical covert-government-torturing Norwegian regime
Hi! I'm in the States. Could you get them to torture our covert government when they're done over there?
They have since cleaned up their site . . . but they were using every type of outmoded, pseudo seo hacks - alt tag spamming, invisible #FFFFFF links at the bottom of their pages pointing to keyword spam duplicate pages ad nauseum
I was curious to see, so I went to archive.org and looked for stuff like that. I couldn't find any. Would you mind digging up a link or two?
Google still indexes over 25000 pages by them [...] They appear to be just a linkfarm.
Interesting. Given that Google is only around 40% of search engine traffic, it's odd that a Google demotion would remove 70% of KinderStart's traffic. That suggests that Google is just bringing KinderStart's ranking in line with other engines. And combined with your notion, that would make KinderStart a link-farm optimized for distorting Google.
No wonder Google nailed them.
You're probably best off going coop games. If you're going PC games, any MMOG would probably do the trick.
My girlfriend and I happily played a fair bit of Puzzle Pirates together. She's not a big gamer, but she loves puzzles and puzzle games like Tetris, and that sucked her in to the MMO aspect of the game. That was cooperative, and a lot of fun.
The other game we play together is Dance Dance Revolution. That's not so cooperative, but we're both at similar skill levels, so it's fun for all concerned.
So if I were to draw lessons from that, it would be to pick something that a) she likes, and b) she's at least as good ast.
"money" [...] collusion [...] thin air [...] fake
In other news, scientists have just discovered that humans are just a big bag of meat and ichor, built around a convoluted tube that continuously turns wholesome food into shit.
Did you have a better suggestion? Or were you just carping?
My wife is concerned with throwing mail away and the thieves getting it there. Why would they bother to go through my trash and get dirty when they can get it fresh from my mailbox w/no one the wiser.
She's right to be concerned. Trash is easier to get. Mail is left out during the day; trash is left out at night. Mail is often delivered to the home; trash is put out by the curb.
The New York Times had an article last year about an identity theft ring that mainly worked with trash. Since most of the people were meth-heads, they would put back together shredded documents. Mind-numbing for normal people, it's apparently just the right speed for methamphetamine users.
Seems we're giving computers to people that would be happier with running water and fresh food. I think they'll play with the computer for a minute, see that it doesnt dispense food or water and it'll end up in the corner or sold somewhere.
There are many reasonable concerns about the $100 laptop effort, but this isn't even remotely one of them. The people who are doing this are smart and, unlike a number of the participants here, have actually given more than three seconds thought to the topic. It's not like they will just be airdropping laptops into refugee camps in lieu of food.
There is a large chunk of the world's poor that never shows up on a Sally Struthers TV commercial. Their lives are stable, they more or less have enough to eat, they're getting by. Think of them as the global working poor. The notion that they can benefit from better access to educational materials, reference materials, and market information isn't crazy. And unlike access to capital (another thing that keeps them poor), information is now nearly free to duplicate.
Negroponte may or may not be on the right trail for solving this problem, but it's undeniable that most computer manufacturers don't give a fuck about the low end of the market. By making noise and aggregating purchasing power, he can make them take notice. A $100 laptop isn't interesting to most manufacturers. But what if you're looking to make them in lots of ten million?
I would never fund anyone in another country, never again. When I was younger I funded some Ehtiopian charity group, and a few years later had the opportunity to visit Ethiopia. [...] The people the charity was meant to help received very little of the finance and support promised, and what little they did receive did not give them any hope for the future.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I was recently in India and visited the village operations of a microfinance organization. By giving small loans and providing support so that people can start their own businesses, microcredit is making a huge difference. Some charities are sad parasites; some are well-meaning dolts; some are changing lives for the better.
Anyway, the real culprit here is the game design. If Blizzard want their players to worship at the altar of the great Time Sink, then they can expect them to use things like this to make it less mind-numbingly tedious.
That's a fantastic point. I think games like Puzzle Pirates make a lot more sense. There, your skill in the game is determined by your real-world skill in playing various puzzle games. It seems like much more fun to me.
Anybody happy with others that follow that model?
I wonder what it's like to make so much money you can give a dedicated customer a high handed heave-ho.
It can't be as good as you'd think. The people at the phone company never sound like they're having fun.
He should consider it a favor. Now he can go back to living his life.
No fooling. He mentions that he's spent three thousand hours on it. That's enough time to get a master's degree. It's a year and a half of a full time job. If he spent that time walking, he could have crossed the US and back, or twice done a London-to-Istanbul round trip.
Watching people play WOW gives me the creeps a bit. It's reminds me of going to Vegas and watching the slot machine zombies doing the same thing over and over and over and over.
lets see... for a year of 200gigs, that's $360 USD. couldn't I jut buy a new hard drive every year or burn hundreds of DVDs for far far less?
Yes, and then you'd have a lot of storage in the same place as your existing storage. A theft or a fire and your data's gone. Unless you carefully schlep the DVDs elsewhere and keep them up to date. Which most people never do.
A better comparison is getting a collocated server and using it for backups. Given that people are charging $360 a year for a modest slice of a virtual server with only 12 GB of disk, Amazon's price seems pretty decent.
And it's a smart use of Amazon's brand. People are very conservative with backups. I would never use a startup to host my critical data, as there's no reason to trust them. Amazon, though, won't just close up shop one night because the bank account is empty.
People happily pay $30 bucks a month for physical storage; there's no reason they won't pay for virtual storage, too.
It does, because, unlike hard-drives, the media and the reading mechanism separate components. If your read head drives on your hard-drive, it is difficult and expensive (but not impossible) to retrieve your data.
This is possibly a good argument for commercial situations, but I don't think it applies to casual users. I now have a variety of old tape and removable media items sitting around and no matching drives; they died or were never mine to begin with. But the old hard drives I have all still spin up.
I mean really, it's a website that lets you post pictures and make comments about them. A blog with pictures. The company that makes one of the most advanced search engines in the world could surely duplicate such software, and get it done quickly.
There's no particular reason to believe that. The kinds of software are very different, as are the skills needed to make them.
Flickr is pretty far from being merely "a blog with pictures". In two years, it has vaulted from a crazy idea to one of the top 50 web sites. If you need an oversimplistic description, "a community about pictures" is closer, but that still isn't enough to explain their massive growth.
Google's main superpowers are simplicity and scale. Some of their newer apps are starting to show some nice UI improvements, but they are still worlds apart from Flickr. Their closest thing to this is Orkut which, frankly, sucks and has sucked for a long time.
I think the difference is that Google's approach is to put passionate, high-powered engineers in charge and let them do what they want, whereas Flickr had a similarly passionate and high-powered team that was cross-functional.
Google can't yet do Flickr for the same reason that you missed why Flickr succeeded: the things that made the difference for Flickr are things that engineers don't normally notice or value.
Just because someone shows you a drivers license, you don't trust them with your house keys, do you?
What? The TSA guy at the airport told me that it was proof that I wasn't a terrorist. Why else would I need it to get on a plane?
It disappoints me that you ignore my major point, which is that you are making bold medical judgments just as dramatic as the doctors you revile, but on the basis of much less evidence and training. Their arrogance does not excuse yours.
Setting that aside, I'll press on with your points.
You just got through telling me here, that you used to take the drug, then stopped, and now you're just fine anyway. [...] I've known people with various kinds of depression, obsessive-cumpulsive, even the odd schitzophrenic. With all of them, meds=better; without meds=worse.
Good doctors prefer non-medication approaches to coping with diseases. For example, type-2 diabetes, panic disorders, depression, and seasonal affective disorder all have major non-drug components to the treatment. Some people need to stay on the drugs their whole lives; some don't.
But in my case, I never said I was fine; I said I found ways to cope. I've carefully built a life that suits my short attention span. I was lucky, and many people don't have the options I did. For certain environments, like returning to full-time traditional school, I would absolutely go back to a psychiatrist specializing in adult ADD to talk over medication.
Little kids who have to take it don't get your choices.
Little kids who, like me, underachieved in school don't have a choice if we a priori decide that medication is never appropriate for them. I agree completely that it's something that should be approached very carefully and as a last resort. I also agree that the knee-jerk overprescription is callous malpractice. But I insist that you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Now *add* to that the 90,000 hits I get from Google typing "ADHD hoax".
I'm glad that you are questioning the problem that you see. I think overdiagnosis of ADD is a real problem, and I think medication of children should be a last resort.
However, if I have to choose between trained medical professionals and an apparently hysterical random person on the internet who thinks a handful of anecdotes and a Google search is sufficient evidence to make medical decisions, forgive me if I pick the person who can actually spell the diseases he's talking about.
That's the f**king problem, everyone fits. I've checked some of those "are you ADD?" tests, and yes, I fit too. As does everyone I know.
For me, the problem was one of relative performance. Matched on an IQ-score or SAT-score basis, my peers were accomplishing a lot more. It was frustrating and stressful.
As to the "everybody I know fits" bit, it's worth remembering that we have a lot of influence over what sort of people we know.
We've graduated from electic torture and slicing the brain into chunks - now I say it's time we did away with chemical lobotomy as well.
Although you may have a point about ADD, freaking out about some imagined "chemical lobotomy" isn't helping your case. I and several people in my family have tried Ritalin, although none currently take it. Its effects last just hours, and are moderate. When you consider the cost of a lifetime of unnecessary failure in school and work, if it's effective I think it can be a reasonable choice.
As an aside it turns out that electroshock therapy, however ugly and abused in the past, is still useful in treating some otherwise untreatable depression. I have seen it restore to normal functioning people that seemed hopelessly lost in permanent black despair. I look forward to the day we don't need it, but until that day comes it would be great if you could not stigmatize the treatment unnecessarily.
There's gotta be some room for skepticism, here. I'm sorry if this makes you sad, but you, too, were probably hoaxed - unless you were taking it for your own kicks, in which case I say "More power to you!"
Hoaxed?
I was having trouble in college. My youngest brother was diagnosed with ADD; when we looked at the criteria, all of us fit. After testing, I was diagnosed as well. I tried the Ritalin; it helped some, although I never liked the side effects much. Eventually I figured out other ways to cope, and don't use it anymore.
I agree that there are big issues with overprescription, and that it's not clear that ADD really fits well in the "disease" model that most of our medicine is built around. These are problems that have very little to do with ADD, and a lot to do with the history of western medicine and our broader cultural context.
So I'm not sad, particularly. I just think you telling me what happened to me on the basis of a short post on Slashdot is laughable. Bitch all you want about doctors rushing to diagnose ADD, but you're rushing even faster to diagnose the problem you've decided exists.