I know two people suffering from depression. One is a family member, the other is a friend whom I've known for about two years.
The former has worked longer than I've lived, but is currently unemployed because the job market sucks. Said family member is on meds, and would go back to work in a heartbeat despite the depression because a simple fact of life is that you need money to survive, and even though said family member has money in reserve, it's all going out, very little if anything is coming in.
The latter works despite the depression, is also on meds, and here's the real shocker: said friend uses me as a source of humor because I have an irritating habit of calling things exactly as I see them, even to my own detriment.
Neither of them feel happy on a regular basis, but both are forced to "suck it up" because the alternative is all the more depressing, and they want to get over it.
So to anyone that thinks I'm lacking in empathy, here's the kicker: I have a finite amount of it, and it's presently allocated to those I feel actually deserve it.
Seems like a damage control answer to me. They know it's disappointing, but it's the only answer they have and they don't want it to influence you away from them.
is it really fair behaviour to accuse every single depression claimant of being a fraud because you heard that some people have been frauds?
Look at this in context: she's been on disability leave for nearly two years for depression. How likely do you think it is that if she were really depressed, her doctor would've long ago found something, some drug or combination of drugs, or some other form of treatment, that could at very least enable her to go back to work, even if she's still got depression?
I wholeheartedly agree that terminating the disability insurance payments based on pictures posted to Facebook is ridiculous (if that's the sole reason, anyway, and the statement from the insurance provider seems to indicate that it isn't), but so is being on disability leave for so damn long without having found some means of adequately treating the problem. Never mind a fix, although if one could be found, great. You're right, the medical profession seems to generally agree that depression is a real condition. I have to figure that there are a plethora of drugs and other forms of treatment available, so is one and a half years not long enough to figure out some sort of treatment plan so she could go back to work?
My whole underlying point is that getting the disability leave canceled after so damn long is not at all surprising, to me at least. What really surprises me is how long they'd let something like this go on before actually conducting their own investigation in the first place. Am I seriously the only one that thinks one year of paid leave on disability is way too much time?
What would you propose as a solution when tax dollars fail to adequately sustain such a system? Raise taxes? Up to what point? As far as necessary to maintain a decent standard of good health?
See the problem with that approach is that there is nothing to fall back on if you drive the private insurers out of business such that everybody has to rely on the government for medical care, cuz who are you going to fall back on if the government gives up? Are you going to pay for it out of pocket? How would you, if the government not only has most of your money, but controls the medical services AND the flow and value of currency?
It has to balance out, at least. If peoples' health is prioritized over money, then a private insurer will spend itself out of business, and a public insurer... I don't really want to contemplate what would happen if the US government, as an example, just "gave up," even if it'd be a minarchist's dream come true.
The problem with China is that it's a country that is run like a corporation, with the party officials the management (and the executives), the citizens the employees, and the corporations both domestic and foreign as shareholders. And like any big corporation, they generally believe they're infallible, too big to fail, always right, etc. Questioning them is like telling your boss that you know more about how to do his job that he does. Imprisonment is akin to being transferred to a dead-end position in a department nobody knows or cares about, and terminations are rather quite literal.
So for China to be the one major polluter, sure, look in their general direction, but don't expect to change their minds anytime soon, since they're not beholden to you, or anybody for that matter, except their profit margins and their shareholders.
As for us, or more specifically the United States, it isn't as much "blaming ourselves for this mess" even if we're largely responsible for creating the initial conditions that snowballed into the present mess, as it is a form of preventative maintenance to try to stem the flow even as China fucks it up for everybody, and we can't really do anything about it because China has our governments by the balls and isn't planning on letting go anytime soon.
So...basically...we're all going to die, and take the planet with us, right?
It's certainly a given that we're all going to die, sometime. Hopefully not all at the same general time, but who knows.
My impression from this whole "climate change" thing is that coastline dwellers are screwed, as is anyone who lives on a floodplain (but that's usually an annual given), weather patterns are going to change dramatically enough that our capacity for predicting it will suffer (as if to say weathermen now have a bona-fide excuse for being shameless liars), and perhaps most importantly, regional "climate change," again from the change in weather patterns. What doesn't get flooded over with the melting of the ice caps will likely not bear much resemblance to what we know now. Deserts may become lush grasslands, while lush grasslands now might become deserts, simply due to changing weather patterns.
I can't claim to understand the specifics, but if a consensus of scientists are saying "we are fucked," then we are fucked, either because they're right, or because they're wrong and we'll base future decisions on faulty data and proclamations of doom.
The insurance companies always lose though. Or at least that's the perception. It's probably the reason why insurance costs so damn much if you opt to pay for it yourself.
The insurance companies want people healthy, but preventative maintenance tends to eat away, little by little, at their profits, all the while not doing anything to prevent Bad Things from happening that take much larger chunks out of their profits. Being perfectly healthy such that a doctor would testify that you've got another 40 years of good health in you won't save you from fate, and if you're fated to go to the hospital for major surgery, the insurance companies eat that cost and predictably raise your rates, even if you're simply struck with a case of bad luck. Or they simply cancel your coverage, if you've become too much of a liability to them. The profits of the pharmaceuticals, however, don't really "lose" anything in the process. Theirs isn't insurance, so they're not constantly paying out.
Of course they can't. That's not my point. You yourself argue that "frame of mind" is an abstract. My point is that insurance companies shouldn't be compelled to pay out large sums over abstracts like a person's "frame of mind," especially since it seems a rather prevailing notion is to treat depression as a "get out of work" card. It wouldn't be viewed and treated as such if so many people didn't do it, and again, I blame them for coloring my views on the subject.
You're quite right though. I do fail to grasp "depression" because I've never been depressed and I never intend to become depressed. Why? Because life is short, it's a bitch, and then you die, and I am not going to waste my life away feeling sorry for myself. I've got plenty of far more amusing things to waste my life away on. Like arguing on Slashdot.
He's confusing insurance companies with pharmaceutical companies. Insurance companies want you to stay as healthy as possible requiring as few doctor's visits, treatments and prescriptions as possible for them to stay profitable. Pharmaceutical companies want you to stay as sick as possible while only providing marginal, long-term treatment (almost never a flat-out "cure") for them to stay profitable.
Reality check: we're in a recession. Everyone's trying to save money. Even the heartless cold and evil big corporations. So what? This is not "healing someone because they are sick," this is throwing money at a problem until it fixes itself. How long has she been receiving treatment for "depression?" How long will she continue to be treated for "depression?" This is not something easily quantified because it's entirely reliant on the patient actually wanting to be treated, but if they do that, their claim is canceled and they have to go back to working for a living. Who wouldn't be "depressed" over facing that?
And it worked, she's having a good time, she's no longer depressed. Cancel the benefits for depression, she doesn't need them anymore, send her back to work.
Unless of course you argue that depression doesn't work that way. I'm of the mindset that claiming "depression" is basically a way of saying "I don't want to work, but I can't afford not to," and I blame everyone who has abused the definition of depression as a mental disorder to file false disability claims for coloring my view of the subject.
The difference being if you went with a publisher, they'd take their cut, and the brick-and-mortar stores take their cut as well. How much do you, as the developer, get per-sale from going the brick-and-mortar route with a third-party publisher as opposed to the direct-download route through Steam/Impulse?
Yeah, and the publisher often takes a hefty cut as well if the deal isn't crafted directly between the developer and the distributor. That's the advantage of going direct-download with an online distributor as opposed to signing with a third-party publisher for brick-and-mortar sales.
That's another thing with reviews: ignore the reviews from people who just received the item. They haven't had enough time to properly test it, both to see if it works out of the box, and to see if it works several weeks/months on down the line. I usually withhold my reviews until several months after the fact (much to the dismay of retailers spamming me with review requests) because I want to make damn well sure I'm near the bottom of the bathtub curve before I submit a review pertaining to a product's reliability.
Yeah, I use NewEgg primarily for getting part numbers to search for on Amazon. Reason being: NewEgg and Amazon are about equal in terms of product pricing, but I don't have to pay Los Angeles county sales tax nor shipping charges with most orders on Amazon (due to the stuff being Prime), whereas NewEgg has a listing of certain states, California included, where sales tax applies. I generally don't have a problem paying for shipping, but if I can get away with not paying sales tax, then I'll go with whoever isn't charging sales tax.
In reality, they'll end up making more money off whatever big whitebox maker picks their low-end business class cards for their cheap desktops than their cutting edge products.
Which is why I'll be very surprised, and unpleasantly so, if nVidia comes out ahead of any situation better than filing for bankruptcy protection, seeing as they burned many of the bridges they had with OEMs and their suppliers back during the whole bumpgate scandal with TSMC, Dell and HP. Especially with a cheap competitor like ATI, nVidia needs them more than they need nVidia.
After going through three months of bullshit involving one GTX 285 and two 8800GTs both coughing up black screens due to shoddy engineering and shoddy driver development, plus an HP laptop with an nVidia GPU taking a shit barely a year prior, I want to see nVidia fail, but for some very specific and legitimate reasons. As in I generally can't understand how hype and brand loyalty can sustain a company through multiple fuckups with nobody to blame but themselves. Even the Republican Party has fallen on hard times since proving to everyone, even themselves, that they are no better than the Democrats and are in many ways much worse.
I mean as opposed to a company like GM, whom I want to see crash and burn because it's been too damn long in coming and it would be hilarious, despite never having been personally burned by ever owning a GM product in my life.
I would also expect people to have long-enough memories to remember when nvidia was blaming OEMs and users for what amounted to nvidia's single defining royal fuckup - anyone remember Bumpgate?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, cuz it's missing an apostrophe and needs a few words cut out. It's actually not that bad of a statement, contextually. It gets the point across.
I know two people suffering from depression. One is a family member, the other is a friend whom I've known for about two years.
The former has worked longer than I've lived, but is currently unemployed because the job market sucks. Said family member is on meds, and would go back to work in a heartbeat despite the depression because a simple fact of life is that you need money to survive, and even though said family member has money in reserve, it's all going out, very little if anything is coming in.
The latter works despite the depression, is also on meds, and here's the real shocker: said friend uses me as a source of humor because I have an irritating habit of calling things exactly as I see them, even to my own detriment.
Neither of them feel happy on a regular basis, but both are forced to "suck it up" because the alternative is all the more depressing, and they want to get over it.
So to anyone that thinks I'm lacking in empathy, here's the kicker: I have a finite amount of it, and it's presently allocated to those I feel actually deserve it.
Seems like a damage control answer to me. They know it's disappointing, but it's the only answer they have and they don't want it to influence you away from them.
Look at this in context: she's been on disability leave for nearly two years for depression. How likely do you think it is that if she were really depressed, her doctor would've long ago found something, some drug or combination of drugs, or some other form of treatment, that could at very least enable her to go back to work, even if she's still got depression?
I wholeheartedly agree that terminating the disability insurance payments based on pictures posted to Facebook is ridiculous (if that's the sole reason, anyway, and the statement from the insurance provider seems to indicate that it isn't), but so is being on disability leave for so damn long without having found some means of adequately treating the problem. Never mind a fix, although if one could be found, great. You're right, the medical profession seems to generally agree that depression is a real condition. I have to figure that there are a plethora of drugs and other forms of treatment available, so is one and a half years not long enough to figure out some sort of treatment plan so she could go back to work?
My whole underlying point is that getting the disability leave canceled after so damn long is not at all surprising, to me at least. What really surprises me is how long they'd let something like this go on before actually conducting their own investigation in the first place. Am I seriously the only one that thinks one year of paid leave on disability is way too much time?
With tax dollars hmm?
What would you propose as a solution when tax dollars fail to adequately sustain such a system? Raise taxes? Up to what point? As far as necessary to maintain a decent standard of good health?
See the problem with that approach is that there is nothing to fall back on if you drive the private insurers out of business such that everybody has to rely on the government for medical care, cuz who are you going to fall back on if the government gives up? Are you going to pay for it out of pocket? How would you, if the government not only has most of your money, but controls the medical services AND the flow and value of currency?
It has to balance out, at least. If peoples' health is prioritized over money, then a private insurer will spend itself out of business, and a public insurer... I don't really want to contemplate what would happen if the US government, as an example, just "gave up," even if it'd be a minarchist's dream come true.
The problem with China is that it's a country that is run like a corporation, with the party officials the management (and the executives), the citizens the employees, and the corporations both domestic and foreign as shareholders. And like any big corporation, they generally believe they're infallible, too big to fail, always right, etc. Questioning them is like telling your boss that you know more about how to do his job that he does. Imprisonment is akin to being transferred to a dead-end position in a department nobody knows or cares about, and terminations are rather quite literal.
So for China to be the one major polluter, sure, look in their general direction, but don't expect to change their minds anytime soon, since they're not beholden to you, or anybody for that matter, except their profit margins and their shareholders.
As for us, or more specifically the United States, it isn't as much "blaming ourselves for this mess" even if we're largely responsible for creating the initial conditions that snowballed into the present mess, as it is a form of preventative maintenance to try to stem the flow even as China fucks it up for everybody, and we can't really do anything about it because China has our governments by the balls and isn't planning on letting go anytime soon.
It's certainly a given that we're all going to die, sometime. Hopefully not all at the same general time, but who knows.
My impression from this whole "climate change" thing is that coastline dwellers are screwed, as is anyone who lives on a floodplain (but that's usually an annual given), weather patterns are going to change dramatically enough that our capacity for predicting it will suffer (as if to say weathermen now have a bona-fide excuse for being shameless liars), and perhaps most importantly, regional "climate change," again from the change in weather patterns. What doesn't get flooded over with the melting of the ice caps will likely not bear much resemblance to what we know now. Deserts may become lush grasslands, while lush grasslands now might become deserts, simply due to changing weather patterns.
I can't claim to understand the specifics, but if a consensus of scientists are saying "we are fucked," then we are fucked, either because they're right, or because they're wrong and we'll base future decisions on faulty data and proclamations of doom.
The insurance companies always lose though. Or at least that's the perception. It's probably the reason why insurance costs so damn much if you opt to pay for it yourself.
The insurance companies want people healthy, but preventative maintenance tends to eat away, little by little, at their profits, all the while not doing anything to prevent Bad Things from happening that take much larger chunks out of their profits. Being perfectly healthy such that a doctor would testify that you've got another 40 years of good health in you won't save you from fate, and if you're fated to go to the hospital for major surgery, the insurance companies eat that cost and predictably raise your rates, even if you're simply struck with a case of bad luck. Or they simply cancel your coverage, if you've become too much of a liability to them. The profits of the pharmaceuticals, however, don't really "lose" anything in the process. Theirs isn't insurance, so they're not constantly paying out.
Of course they can't. That's not my point. You yourself argue that "frame of mind" is an abstract. My point is that insurance companies shouldn't be compelled to pay out large sums over abstracts like a person's "frame of mind," especially since it seems a rather prevailing notion is to treat depression as a "get out of work" card. It wouldn't be viewed and treated as such if so many people didn't do it, and again, I blame them for coloring my views on the subject.
You're quite right though. I do fail to grasp "depression" because I've never been depressed and I never intend to become depressed. Why? Because life is short, it's a bitch, and then you die, and I am not going to waste my life away feeling sorry for myself. I've got plenty of far more amusing things to waste my life away on. Like arguing on Slashdot.
Ooh, ad hominems from an anonymous fuckwad. I'll be sure to stay up nights fretting about this!
He's confusing insurance companies with pharmaceutical companies. Insurance companies want you to stay as healthy as possible requiring as few doctor's visits, treatments and prescriptions as possible for them to stay profitable. Pharmaceutical companies want you to stay as sick as possible while only providing marginal, long-term treatment (almost never a flat-out "cure") for them to stay profitable.
Reality check: we're in a recession. Everyone's trying to save money. Even the heartless cold and evil big corporations. So what? This is not "healing someone because they are sick," this is throwing money at a problem until it fixes itself. How long has she been receiving treatment for "depression?" How long will she continue to be treated for "depression?" This is not something easily quantified because it's entirely reliant on the patient actually wanting to be treated, but if they do that, their claim is canceled and they have to go back to working for a living. Who wouldn't be "depressed" over facing that?
And it worked, she's having a good time, she's no longer depressed. Cancel the benefits for depression, she doesn't need them anymore, send her back to work.
Unless of course you argue that depression doesn't work that way. I'm of the mindset that claiming "depression" is basically a way of saying "I don't want to work, but I can't afford not to," and I blame everyone who has abused the definition of depression as a mental disorder to file false disability claims for coloring my view of the subject.
By all rights, she should be facing a charge of insurance fraud for receiving benefits based on a false claim.
Simple. There are enough dumber people out there financing his operations.
The difference being if you went with a publisher, they'd take their cut, and the brick-and-mortar stores take their cut as well. How much do you, as the developer, get per-sale from going the brick-and-mortar route with a third-party publisher as opposed to the direct-download route through Steam/Impulse?
Yeah, and the publisher often takes a hefty cut as well if the deal isn't crafted directly between the developer and the distributor. That's the advantage of going direct-download with an online distributor as opposed to signing with a third-party publisher for brick-and-mortar sales.
That's another thing with reviews: ignore the reviews from people who just received the item. They haven't had enough time to properly test it, both to see if it works out of the box, and to see if it works several weeks/months on down the line. I usually withhold my reviews until several months after the fact (much to the dismay of retailers spamming me with review requests) because I want to make damn well sure I'm near the bottom of the bathtub curve before I submit a review pertaining to a product's reliability.
Yeah, they should screen out negative reviews where the reviewer is an obvious dumbass.
Yeah, I use NewEgg primarily for getting part numbers to search for on Amazon. Reason being: NewEgg and Amazon are about equal in terms of product pricing, but I don't have to pay Los Angeles county sales tax nor shipping charges with most orders on Amazon (due to the stuff being Prime), whereas NewEgg has a listing of certain states, California included, where sales tax applies. I generally don't have a problem paying for shipping, but if I can get away with not paying sales tax, then I'll go with whoever isn't charging sales tax.
There are adverts all over it? Where?
Oh, you mean to tell me you don't use ABP and NoScript? Shame on you.
Which is why I'll be very surprised, and unpleasantly so, if nVidia comes out ahead of any situation better than filing for bankruptcy protection, seeing as they burned many of the bridges they had with OEMs and their suppliers back during the whole bumpgate scandal with TSMC, Dell and HP. Especially with a cheap competitor like ATI, nVidia needs them more than they need nVidia.
After going through three months of bullshit involving one GTX 285 and two 8800GTs both coughing up black screens due to shoddy engineering and shoddy driver development, plus an HP laptop with an nVidia GPU taking a shit barely a year prior, I want to see nVidia fail, but for some very specific and legitimate reasons. As in I generally can't understand how hype and brand loyalty can sustain a company through multiple fuckups with nobody to blame but themselves. Even the Republican Party has fallen on hard times since proving to everyone, even themselves, that they are no better than the Democrats and are in many ways much worse.
I mean as opposed to a company like GM, whom I want to see crash and burn because it's been too damn long in coming and it would be hilarious, despite never having been personally burned by ever owning a GM product in my life.
I would also expect people to have long-enough memories to remember when nvidia was blaming OEMs and users for what amounted to nvidia's single defining royal fuckup - anyone remember Bumpgate?