even ones that do vary a lot from one cancer to another
...they do a biopsy, pull the cell from your body, compare it to your body cell, and use that to construct a genetic marker... it literally tunes to that particular cancer, not to a generalized "we have a treatment for leukimia" cancer model. The treatment is custom-built for your particular illness.
Inkeeper is +100; inkeeper is then -100 (0), butcher is +100; butcher is then -100 (0), banker is +100; eventually, the Innkeper has to borrow money from the Banker, everyone is 100 euros richer (cleared their debt to 0), and the economy is somehow $300 euros richer and nobody understands why.
The most notable point is the European countries would not face such horrific economic crisis without a unified currency. Greece would be in crisis; the Kronor and Franc and DM and dollar and Pound and Piece would be strong; tourists would show up with pocket change, scraps to throw the Greeks, staying in lavish hotels and buying expensive trinkets and high-dollar food for cheap; the influx of money toward Greek tourism and Greek exports would help support and rebuild the Greek economy; the sudden access to cheap Greek imports would improve the wealth of neighbors (instead of weakening their economy) by the principle of comparative advantage (and its genesis principle, the unifying economic theory which I developed to explain how wealth works); and everyone--Greece and the other Euro neighbors--would experience much less pain (Greece by more rapid recovery thanks to the more dramatic shift in trade advantage; everyone else by sudden access to more import goods for the same outlay of money--a local increase in wealth).
Instead, Greece falters; its currency (Euro) becomes no weaker than any other currency (Euro); exports don't increase because the neighboring countries's currencies (Euro) don't have a higher value than the Greek currency (Euro); the Greek currency (Euro) becomes weaker; neighboring currencies (Euro) also become weaker, thanks to Greece's shitty economy; neighboring countries must raise taxes and outlay expenses to bail out Greece, with associated strain on their economy and no return on their investment (wealth destruction); and everyone's economy stumbles and struggles to get back up.
I found the first statement in the summary disturbing:
While the prognosis for these diseases has improved over the years — sometimes greatly — we still focus doggedly on the cure.
Homosexuals are intentionally contracting HIV so they can stop worrying about HIV. This was a big thing in the 90s, right down to people getting on TV to tell folks that HIV wasn't really a problem now because it's "a Managed Condition instead of a Disease". Do you know how horrifying that is? Contemplate that. Anyone you know may, in fact, think that the fucking plague is a managed condition. They might think, hey, so I got this skin condition that can jump to you if you hang around me, but leprosy is no longer fatal; a monthly injection will keep it from wrecking you, so I'll just be a babysitter and not tell people I have leprosy, because what's the worst that can happen?
They've got cures now that generate modified immune agents which target the cancer cells by genetic markers, making them universal. They're 100% effective.
...raping and murdering actually hurt other people...
You know, the person who commits rape? He forcefully inflicts rape on another person. This is different from, say, buttsex. Maybe buttsex should be illegal in a civilized society, because buttsex is gross and nasty and we should arrest people for having it.
If an Uber driver, for example, gets in a crash, it is the driver's own insurance that has to bail it out,
Except for the $1 million of insurance US Uber drivers have, and the various insurances they have in other countries. Uber has changed these claims, of course--instead of giving numbers anymore, they just say that they meet or exceed regulatory minimums for cab drivers.
Such a tired and old myth. Next, you'll tell me Mars is going to grow larger than the moon this August.
The real difference is just how you file taxes. It's even a stretch trying to say it's efficiency--it used to take 4 people of diverse skillsets to run a data center, but better management practices and software platforms have left us 80% idle, so we have 4 people contract out to 5 companies and replace 20 workers; but then you have contractor who work 40 hours each week at one desk at one business.
The IRS hires contractors this way. The IRS also defines, in IRS publications, what a contractor is. Do you not know what OIG is? It's the Office of Inspector General, the law enforcement branch of any government agency. Social Security has OIG, the IRS has its own OIG, your state unemployment agency has its own OIG. These are the people who show up at your house with guns when you lie on your forms and get money that doesn't belong to you.
The IRS, the agency which defines what a contractor is, hires contractors who must work on 6am-6pm flex time, straight 8 hours, with a half hour lunch--if you don't take a lunch, you must work 8.5 hours straight, and file it as 8 hours (you don't get paid that last half hour). They can also fire you, specifically, without eliminating your position. They also don't pay your benefits, because you're a contractor.
I don't work as a contractor anymore because the logistics are annoying.
Then more likely you weren't a contractor. You were an employee treated as a contractor.
It's why tax agencies are scrutinizing employment contracts because there are a bunch of differences between a contractor and an employee.
Well maybe the IRS should scrutinize itself, because guess who hires contractors who must come in between 6am-6pm, span 8 hours, take a half-hour lunch (and it MUST be taken--if you work straight with no lunch, you must stay 8.5 hours and file a 30 minute lunch, and it can't be taken within an hour of arriving or leaving), track your time using only the Deltek software, use their specific tools and software systems, attend sexual harassment training required by HR, attend yearly presentations by the agency's Office of the Inspector General about child pornography and fraud, etc... all while the agency carries no responsibility for your benefits, and has the ability to fire you?
Perhaps it should! What matter of reasoning is it that you don't like a behavior, and so others shouldn't be allowed to engage in said behavior? Before you know it, we'll live in homes we buy outright, but our neighbors will tell us what color to paint the door and what type of mailbox to install!
If you ALSO want me to behave like an employee, controlling my hours, sitting through useless HR presentations, and acting like an agent of a corporation, then I'm an employee and I want the full benefit package
Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.
Just because you came up with a new way to run things doesn't mean that the rest of it like it or agree that's the way the world should work.
Yes, but you can fuck off, anyway. The employees like it, the customers like it, and nobody who didn't voluntarily put themselves in this situation is affected by it, save for the raw dynamics of business (i.e. some other company is capturing your market better than you, so you're losing business and they're gaining business; this is why the RIAA wants rights-enforcement jurisdiction over RIAA-independent artists, not just those who sign with one of the RIAA labels). Complaining that you don't agree with how it should work is literally the same as complaining that some people have gay sex or study Marx: it's not your business.
Agreed. A "dependent contractor" is by definition an employee
No, it's not, really. It's a bullshit term made up by morons. You have C2C contractors--an employee of CockSux Corp farmed out to a desk at MonSuckto Inc--and you have independent contractors. If you hire on directly, you have an employee. CockSux Corp may supply an independent contractor or an employee to fulfill their C2C contract obligation.
The term "Dependent Contractor" stems from some drooling suit banging his head into his desk while looking for his chinstrap, and immediately deciding an independent contractor we want to call something else should be called a "dependent" contractor because, hey, independent, dependent, you know.... It's not really a descriptive term; it's a mangling of English with stupidity.
I'm like 30. Most people are just stupid; I'll fix that one day, too, and it'll probably be more piecemeal than solving poverty. After that, people will find more inclination to adapt to novel situations, instead of just shitting their pants and forgetting to wear their helmets. Human intellect is, fortunately, completely mutable.
Depression and laziness are in your head; sleep requirements are in your fucking biology. You can treat your depression and laziness with cognitive therapy; you can treat your sleep requirements with drugs, maybe, and that's not proven yet.
I'm experimenting. I sleep 6-9 and 2-6, or try to; I'm a late chronotype, which means those 10pm-2am hours are fantastic and otherworldly, but those early morning hours... let's just say I am fucked up as hell if I stay up until 1am and sleep until 6am, but can stay up until 5am and sleep until 10 and feel refreshed and god-like. I tend to sleep 6-10 and then want to sleep 2-10 anyway.
Shortening that first sleeping span seems possible, if I can get more REM. I've seen strategies of napping 20-30 minutes 3 times for REM and taking a 3 hour deep sleep segment; I've also considered trying to take 2-3 solid hours of sleep, and then throw some cholinergics and a deep sleep suppressor for the 4 hour segment, in order to buffer more REM into the second span.
The activity is abuse; the images are evidence. Looking at pictures in your basement is a victimless crime; producing such images is a crime with a victim.
For many workers "inefficiency" takes the form of overtime pay from corporations too stupid to schedule correctly.
1,000 workers making 260,000 chairs, pay them $10/hr. Each chair costs $80. Chairs are terribly made, and last one year before replacement. Every consumer buys 4 chairs, $320/year.
Build an assembly line. Same workers, more efficient construction method. Takes 500 workers to make 260,000 chairs; fire the other 500. It's now only 4 labor-hours, not 8, to build a chair. $40. Every consumer now spends $160/year, and so has $160/year of residual cash. You fire those other 500 workers.
You now find consumers--about 65,000 consumers, minus the 500 fired--have $160/year in their pockets. You figure you can make chair cushions in 4 labor-hours of production effort, so hire those 500 workers back (eventually) after you've created a chair cushion market. Consumers once again spend all $320/year, but now they spend it on a chair with a cushion.
Food, medical care, fuel, raw materials, clean water. All of these things cost money, because they all involve human labor. A coal mine surrenders 100 tonnes of coal per 100 hours of human labor; if the next best mine surrenders 50 tonnes of coal (mixed with 50 tonnes of rock) per 100 hours of human labor, then your supply of coal at 1 labor-hour per 1 tonne is limited to what's produced now (and, of course, you can raise prices with impunity up to the cost of that next mine, since any new competitor can't match your price). If a competitor owning a mine 3/4 as efficient as yours finds a way to extract 100 tonnes of raw material (which is 75 tonnes of coal in his mine) in half the time, his 100 tonnes of coal only requires 75 labor-hours (time required to extract 1.5 tonnes raw material), and he can undercut your prices.
An entire class of people--a large class--can't afford food, or shelter. When you improve efficiency, you reduce the labor required to produce fuel and farm tools, which reduces the cost of these things, reducing the cost of food. Those floundering below-middle-class people, as well, find costs of necessary goods--which involve human labor to produce, which you reduce--coming down; that means a chunk of them can suddenly afford to eat every day, instead of every other day.
This is why pre-industrial-revolution shirts required 479 labor-hours--$3,500 at $7.25/hr--to produce, while shirts today cost $25. The total income keeps going up, but the percent of total income spent on various classes of goods continues to drop; other goods get better (a $7000 Camaro in 1970? With inflation that's like $35,000; $32,000 will get you a brand new modern Camaro with stuff like built-in GPS navigation, electronic stability control, etc...), like our chairs (same price; now with cushion!).
In 1950, our welfare system as-is cost 1.5% of our total income, while a Citizen's Dividend that would end all homelessness and hunger would have required a dedicated income tax of 120%-135% (i.e. more money than existed). Today, our welfare system costs 17%, and a Citizen's Dividend of the same poverty-eliminating effect would cost 17%. We've gotten more wealthy, to the point that we can trivially solve poverty. Efficiency brings this; and a Citizen's Dividend would make the economy even more efficient, raising the pace of the labor cycle and protecting the laborer from more major disruptions like the coming tide of automation (instant 47% unemployment--industrial revolution problems).
That's why the job that paid $80K a year in 2000 now pays $65K (NOT inflation adjusted)
That's actually from convincing everyone to go to college, then having 55 applicants for every job, and so suppressing their salaries. Since they go from place to place begging for employment, they'll take whatever scraps you throw them.
People see this situation and scream, "THEN COLLEGE SHOULD BE FREE!" The truth is college should be the responsibility of the market: since few could self-attend, businesses would run the labor pools dry real quick, and have to pay higher salaries--until they started hiring entrants, training them, and paying for their college. Rather than rolling the dice, thinking, "Hmmm! Computer programmers make $150k/year! I'm going to be a programmer!" just like everyone else, then coming into a market with 5 million programmers and 100,000 programming jobs, where employers suddenly pay $50k, it would be the businesses going, "Dammit, we need programmers!", hiring an entrant for $40k, paying their education, then raising their salary so the next employer doesn't just feed off their hard-wrought talent. Employees are suddenly worth raising, training, and retaining, instead of chewing up and spitting out and trampling.
What we are really doing is canning the old timers (30 somthings) who know that their salaries have been stagnating.
The whole mechanism of economic growth is to minimize the human labor involved in creating a product. You get 1,000 people making 250,000 units of product each year; then, you build a different assembly line, get 500 people making 250,000 units of product each year, and fire the other 500. If the unit costs increase with production scale-up (e.g. you can mine solid blocks of iron from this mine, but chunks of 50% iron and 50% rock from that mine, so get half the iron for the same labor), then you can raise sale price as high as your next competitor's costs without the next guy being able to enter the market; otherwise competition pushes prices down toward cost, and whoever manages to push the cost down can cut their prices down and start consuming their competitors.
Once you cut out the cost of the human labor, consumers--the people who are still employed--can buy the same products cheaper. A $100 product becomes a $50 product, and a consumer has $50 of residual cash to spend. You then find a new product the consumer wants (or start producing more of another product the consumer wants more of), and scale up production of new goods and services until you've invested the whole cost of the displaced labor force: that $50 per consumer was enough to pay those 500 workers, and so whatever those 500 workers can produce that fits the demands of the consumer base will have an exact cost of that $50 extra spending cash.
Market dynamics cause weird behaviors in profit margins--supply and demand, for example, is explained above, as when it requires more labor to produce the last units of a product than it does to provide the first, thus a new supplier can't enter the market and provide competition pressure (that's the restriction on supply: if people are only willing to pay $20, and you can produce 1,000,000 units for $20 each, but unit 1,000,001 and beyond cost $30 to produce, then the supply is 1,000,000, and the demand can push the price up as high as $30). Even so, if you sell a $5,000 air conditioner and make $1,000 profit, suddenly learning to build air conditioners for $1,000 means you can sell it for $2,000, undercut your competition, ship three times as many units, and make three times the profit at the same $1,000 profit per unit.
Our real problems are things like rapid job replacement. Think about the turn-over from the industrial revolution, or from upcoming automation: 47% of jobs will disappear in linearly-scaling sectors. Information management doesn't scale linearly: when you have twice as many contracts, you may need three times as many clerks; when you
This is a good meta-study, diving into guesswork and hypothesis on mechanisms of depression. Here's some science. TL;DR: pills, long-term (24 month), have over a 3/4 relapse rate; cognitive therapy, discontinued after 4 months, show just over 50% relapse in total after 24 months. Initially, PILLS ARE EXACTLY AS EFFECTIVE, IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY, AS COGNITIVE THERAPY. Exactly as effective. You can do absolutely no worse without drug therapy than you can by just talking to depressed people to make them feel better, and you do far better by talking to them and telling them how to get over it.
In a more recent CT -ADM placebo-controlled comparison, 240 severely depressed patients were randomized to ADM (n=120), CT (n=60) or a (pill) placebo control (n=60) treatment.
Big, randomized trial of people with ungodly hell depression (monopolar).
At the end of the 16-week treatment phase of the study, there were no differences in outcome between ADM and CT, with 58% of patients in both treatment groups meeting the criteria for ‘response’. Curiously, there was no indication that the two treatments affected different symptom clusters of depression: patients treated with either ADM or CT showed comparable rates of change of both cognitive and vegetative symptoms of depression.
Cognitive therapy (therapist nicely telling you how to get over it) is about exactly as effective in exactly the same way as taking pills. YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT!
In the continuation phase of the recent CT versus ADM study, patients who responded to 16 weeks of ADM were randomly assigned to either continue the treatment or change to a (pill) placebo condition. Patients who responded to 16 weeks of CT were withdrawn from treatment and allowed no more than three booster sessions (never more than one per month) during the first year of the follow-up period.
We took their meds away, and kicked all the therapy people out of therapy. Kept half the pill-heads on pills as a control, switched the other half to sugar pills, and didn't tell anyone.
As shown in FIG. 2, 76% of the ADM responders relapsed following medication withdrawal, compared with only 31% of the patients who had been treated with CT. Patients who continued ADM also fared better than patients who were assigned to the placebo treatment, with a relapse rate of 47% (which did not differ significantly from the 31% relapse rate in the CT group). After the continuation phase had ended, the patients who had not relapsed while on ADM were withdrawn from medication. Of these patients, 54% experienced a recurrence (the onset of a new depressive episode), compared with only 17% of the patients who had previously been given CT.
Like 3/4 of the pill-heads became severely depressed once we took the pills away; about 1/3 of the CT people had the same trouble. Half the people who stayed on pills relapsed, although in this study that's roughly equivalent (i.e. assume 47% == 31%): STAYING ON PILLS IS THE SAME AS QUITTING YOUR THERAPY AFTER 4 MONTHS. Of the pill users who didn't relapse, half of them relapsed after we took their meds away
Overall, just a hair under 50% of the patients who had CT for 4 months and then quit were, at 24 months, still cured. Just under 25% of patients who had drugs for 12 months came out of the 24 month period without having another depressive episode. Just under 10% of sugar pill patients were doing fine, no drugs and no therapy.
Drugs are facilitating: they provide you a baseline of feeling, which can help retrain your brain to behave in this new way by restricting its undesirable behavior. That can help; in the most extreme cases, drugs are *required*, because you simply can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if your h
Ugh, then you are the worst kind of clinical depression sufferer. You found an out and you still don't have empathy for the others who haven't.
I found a pattern, I found others following the same pattern, and I found international research showing that the pattern is known to science. I've also found that the scientific understanding of depression and its treatments are in the same class as the scientific understanding of global warming: while science has less than perfect understanding of either, it is those with a vested interest in denial who wholesale deny such things could possibly be real, in the face of all evidence and scientific consensus. They look outside and say, "See, it is cold! Climate change is not real!" and they say, "See, I feel bad! You must simply not understand how I feel!"
Bullshit. Some do, others detest feeling helpless. I think this is a mantra you tell yourself to enhance your own self worth.
It is a piece of scientifically-well-known psychiatric behavior. You will find respected medical literature at the heart of what has been called "Psychic illness in the need for attention and love"--how outdated a term, "Psychic"--to what is now explained as "Psychosomatic illness as a subconscious behavior to fill the need of self-importance". All humans require a feeling of self-worth to survive; all humans will become clinically depressed without a defining feeling of importance.
The mind can manifest physical illness, just as electromagnetic transmission antennas cause certain people to develop rashes, digestive problems, respiratory diseases, headaches, and other independently-observable symptoms of real, tangible nature, even though the transmitter is an unpowered hunk of metal producing no electromagnetic radiation. We have long studied this as a manifestation of the human need for attention, and refined that, eventually, into a need for an individual sense of importance; yet it becomes an opaque leap of logic to say a person may feel bad due to anxiety over a need for attention, a need to feel important.
It seems more logical to assume that a person may develop mental illnesses in response to a great injury of the psyche, damaging their sense of self-importance. Psychiatric literature has notated many defects in the operating brain when dealing with insanity; yet still observes that a great bulk of the insane show no physical trauma--that their mental state is wholly self-inflicted, a concoction of the mind causing changes in the brain's production of neurotransmitters purely by function of the brain, not by damage. The greatest proportion of the patently insane have developed delusions to comfort themselves in the face of extreme emotional trauma. What nonsense, then, is it to claim that such emotional issues would not cause lesser mental defects?
A human who suffers anxiety must come to terms with that anxiety. Persons with depression lash out at those around them for claiming it's all in their heads, fighting against the very idea that it may be their own fault; and why not? If it were their own fault, they would have to feel bad about it. They may not want to look helpless in the eyes of their peers, but they certainly want to feel that they've not brought this terrible suffering upon themselves by concocting an imaginative fantasy within the bosoms of their minds. They want to feel the weight of a terrible burden that was placed upon them, not of their own actions which they may remediate at any time.
you denigrate those who can't muscle their way out of depression like you did
It is simple technique, not brute force. You draw a stylized illustration in which a person's powerful brain--my great, super-genius-level intellect--hammers its way through the blockages and stands victorious upon the rubble of those things which thought laughably to impede it. The truth is the difficulties are an annoyance and nothing more: a person must first install a self-monitoring
Slashdot Mirror
even ones that do vary a lot from one cancer to another
Inkeeper is +100; inkeeper is then -100 (0), butcher is +100; butcher is then -100 (0), banker is +100; eventually, the Innkeper has to borrow money from the Banker, everyone is 100 euros richer (cleared their debt to 0), and the economy is somehow $300 euros richer and nobody understands why.
The most notable point is the European countries would not face such horrific economic crisis without a unified currency. Greece would be in crisis; the Kronor and Franc and DM and dollar and Pound and Piece would be strong; tourists would show up with pocket change, scraps to throw the Greeks, staying in lavish hotels and buying expensive trinkets and high-dollar food for cheap; the influx of money toward Greek tourism and Greek exports would help support and rebuild the Greek economy; the sudden access to cheap Greek imports would improve the wealth of neighbors (instead of weakening their economy) by the principle of comparative advantage (and its genesis principle, the unifying economic theory which I developed to explain how wealth works); and everyone--Greece and the other Euro neighbors--would experience much less pain (Greece by more rapid recovery thanks to the more dramatic shift in trade advantage; everyone else by sudden access to more import goods for the same outlay of money--a local increase in wealth).
Instead, Greece falters; its currency (Euro) becomes no weaker than any other currency (Euro); exports don't increase because the neighboring countries's currencies (Euro) don't have a higher value than the Greek currency (Euro); the Greek currency (Euro) becomes weaker; neighboring currencies (Euro) also become weaker, thanks to Greece's shitty economy; neighboring countries must raise taxes and outlay expenses to bail out Greece, with associated strain on their economy and no return on their investment (wealth destruction); and everyone's economy stumbles and struggles to get back up.
I found the first statement in the summary disturbing:
While the prognosis for these diseases has improved over the years — sometimes greatly — we still focus doggedly on the cure.
Homosexuals are intentionally contracting HIV so they can stop worrying about HIV. This was a big thing in the 90s, right down to people getting on TV to tell folks that HIV wasn't really a problem now because it's "a Managed Condition instead of a Disease". Do you know how horrifying that is? Contemplate that. Anyone you know may, in fact, think that the fucking plague is a managed condition. They might think, hey, so I got this skin condition that can jump to you if you hang around me, but leprosy is no longer fatal; a monthly injection will keep it from wrecking you, so I'll just be a babysitter and not tell people I have leprosy, because what's the worst that can happen?
They've got cures now that generate modified immune agents which target the cancer cells by genetic markers, making them universal. They're 100% effective.
Economy and psychology have real, reproduceable results.
You know, the person who commits rape? He forcefully inflicts rape on another person. This is different from, say, buttsex. Maybe buttsex should be illegal in a civilized society, because buttsex is gross and nasty and we should arrest people for having it.
If an Uber driver, for example, gets in a crash, it is the driver's own insurance that has to bail it out,
Except for the $1 million of insurance US Uber drivers have, and the various insurances they have in other countries. Uber has changed these claims, of course--instead of giving numbers anymore, they just say that they meet or exceed regulatory minimums for cab drivers.
Such a tired and old myth. Next, you'll tell me Mars is going to grow larger than the moon this August.
The real difference is just how you file taxes. It's even a stretch trying to say it's efficiency--it used to take 4 people of diverse skillsets to run a data center, but better management practices and software platforms have left us 80% idle, so we have 4 people contract out to 5 companies and replace 20 workers; but then you have contractor who work 40 hours each week at one desk at one business.
The IRS hires contractors this way. The IRS also defines, in IRS publications, what a contractor is. Do you not know what OIG is? It's the Office of Inspector General, the law enforcement branch of any government agency. Social Security has OIG, the IRS has its own OIG, your state unemployment agency has its own OIG. These are the people who show up at your house with guns when you lie on your forms and get money that doesn't belong to you.
The IRS, the agency which defines what a contractor is, hires contractors who must work on 6am-6pm flex time, straight 8 hours, with a half hour lunch--if you don't take a lunch, you must work 8.5 hours straight, and file it as 8 hours (you don't get paid that last half hour). They can also fire you, specifically, without eliminating your position. They also don't pay your benefits, because you're a contractor.
I don't work as a contractor anymore because the logistics are annoying.
Then more likely you weren't a contractor. You were an employee treated as a contractor.
It's why tax agencies are scrutinizing employment contracts because there are a bunch of differences between a contractor and an employee.
Well maybe the IRS should scrutinize itself, because guess who hires contractors who must come in between 6am-6pm, span 8 hours, take a half-hour lunch (and it MUST be taken--if you work straight with no lunch, you must stay 8.5 hours and file a 30 minute lunch, and it can't be taken within an hour of arriving or leaving), track your time using only the Deltek software, use their specific tools and software systems, attend sexual harassment training required by HR, attend yearly presentations by the agency's Office of the Inspector General about child pornography and fraud, etc... all while the agency carries no responsibility for your benefits, and has the ability to fire you?
Perhaps it should! What matter of reasoning is it that you don't like a behavior, and so others shouldn't be allowed to engage in said behavior? Before you know it, we'll live in homes we buy outright, but our neighbors will tell us what color to paint the door and what type of mailbox to install!
If you ALSO want me to behave like an employee, controlling my hours, sitting through useless HR presentations, and acting like an agent of a corporation, then I'm an employee and I want the full benefit package
Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.
Just because you came up with a new way to run things doesn't mean that the rest of it like it or agree that's the way the world should work.
Yes, but you can fuck off, anyway. The employees like it, the customers like it, and nobody who didn't voluntarily put themselves in this situation is affected by it, save for the raw dynamics of business (i.e. some other company is capturing your market better than you, so you're losing business and they're gaining business; this is why the RIAA wants rights-enforcement jurisdiction over RIAA-independent artists, not just those who sign with one of the RIAA labels). Complaining that you don't agree with how it should work is literally the same as complaining that some people have gay sex or study Marx: it's not your business.
Agreed. A "dependent contractor" is by definition an employee
No, it's not, really. It's a bullshit term made up by morons. You have C2C contractors--an employee of CockSux Corp farmed out to a desk at MonSuckto Inc--and you have independent contractors. If you hire on directly, you have an employee. CockSux Corp may supply an independent contractor or an employee to fulfill their C2C contract obligation.
The term "Dependent Contractor" stems from some drooling suit banging his head into his desk while looking for his chinstrap, and immediately deciding an independent contractor we want to call something else should be called a "dependent" contractor because, hey, independent, dependent, you know.... It's not really a descriptive term; it's a mangling of English with stupidity.
I'm like 30. Most people are just stupid; I'll fix that one day, too, and it'll probably be more piecemeal than solving poverty. After that, people will find more inclination to adapt to novel situations, instead of just shitting their pants and forgetting to wear their helmets. Human intellect is, fortunately, completely mutable.
Depression and laziness are in your head; sleep requirements are in your fucking biology. You can treat your depression and laziness with cognitive therapy; you can treat your sleep requirements with drugs, maybe, and that's not proven yet.
I'm experimenting. I sleep 6-9 and 2-6, or try to; I'm a late chronotype, which means those 10pm-2am hours are fantastic and otherworldly, but those early morning hours... let's just say I am fucked up as hell if I stay up until 1am and sleep until 6am, but can stay up until 5am and sleep until 10 and feel refreshed and god-like. I tend to sleep 6-10 and then want to sleep 2-10 anyway.
Shortening that first sleeping span seems possible, if I can get more REM. I've seen strategies of napping 20-30 minutes 3 times for REM and taking a 3 hour deep sleep segment; I've also considered trying to take 2-3 solid hours of sleep, and then throw some cholinergics and a deep sleep suppressor for the 4 hour segment, in order to buffer more REM into the second span.
The activity is abuse; the images are evidence. Looking at pictures in your basement is a victimless crime; producing such images is a crime with a victim.
For many workers "inefficiency" takes the form of overtime pay from corporations too stupid to schedule correctly.
1,000 workers making 260,000 chairs, pay them $10/hr. Each chair costs $80. Chairs are terribly made, and last one year before replacement. Every consumer buys 4 chairs, $320/year.
Build an assembly line. Same workers, more efficient construction method. Takes 500 workers to make 260,000 chairs; fire the other 500. It's now only 4 labor-hours, not 8, to build a chair. $40. Every consumer now spends $160/year, and so has $160/year of residual cash. You fire those other 500 workers.
You now find consumers--about 65,000 consumers, minus the 500 fired--have $160/year in their pockets. You figure you can make chair cushions in 4 labor-hours of production effort, so hire those 500 workers back (eventually) after you've created a chair cushion market. Consumers once again spend all $320/year, but now they spend it on a chair with a cushion.
Food, medical care, fuel, raw materials, clean water. All of these things cost money, because they all involve human labor. A coal mine surrenders 100 tonnes of coal per 100 hours of human labor; if the next best mine surrenders 50 tonnes of coal (mixed with 50 tonnes of rock) per 100 hours of human labor, then your supply of coal at 1 labor-hour per 1 tonne is limited to what's produced now (and, of course, you can raise prices with impunity up to the cost of that next mine, since any new competitor can't match your price). If a competitor owning a mine 3/4 as efficient as yours finds a way to extract 100 tonnes of raw material (which is 75 tonnes of coal in his mine) in half the time, his 100 tonnes of coal only requires 75 labor-hours (time required to extract 1.5 tonnes raw material), and he can undercut your prices.
An entire class of people--a large class--can't afford food, or shelter. When you improve efficiency, you reduce the labor required to produce fuel and farm tools, which reduces the cost of these things, reducing the cost of food. Those floundering below-middle-class people, as well, find costs of necessary goods--which involve human labor to produce, which you reduce--coming down; that means a chunk of them can suddenly afford to eat every day, instead of every other day.
This is why pre-industrial-revolution shirts required 479 labor-hours--$3,500 at $7.25/hr--to produce, while shirts today cost $25. The total income keeps going up, but the percent of total income spent on various classes of goods continues to drop; other goods get better (a $7000 Camaro in 1970? With inflation that's like $35,000; $32,000 will get you a brand new modern Camaro with stuff like built-in GPS navigation, electronic stability control, etc...), like our chairs (same price; now with cushion!).
In 1950, our welfare system as-is cost 1.5% of our total income, while a Citizen's Dividend that would end all homelessness and hunger would have required a dedicated income tax of 120%-135% (i.e. more money than existed). Today, our welfare system costs 17%, and a Citizen's Dividend of the same poverty-eliminating effect would cost 17%. We've gotten more wealthy, to the point that we can trivially solve poverty. Efficiency brings this; and a Citizen's Dividend would make the economy even more efficient, raising the pace of the labor cycle and protecting the laborer from more major disruptions like the coming tide of automation (instant 47% unemployment--industrial revolution problems).
That's why the job that paid $80K a year in 2000 now pays $65K (NOT inflation adjusted)
That's actually from convincing everyone to go to college, then having 55 applicants for every job, and so suppressing their salaries. Since they go from place to place begging for employment, they'll take whatever scraps you throw them.
People see this situation and scream, "THEN COLLEGE SHOULD BE FREE!" The truth is college should be the responsibility of the market: since few could self-attend, businesses would run the labor pools dry real quick, and have to pay higher salaries--until they started hiring entrants, training them, and paying for their college. Rather than rolling the dice, thinking, "Hmmm! Computer programmers make $150k/year! I'm going to be a programmer!" just like everyone else, then coming into a market with 5 million programmers and 100,000 programming jobs, where employers suddenly pay $50k, it would be the businesses going, "Dammit, we need programmers!", hiring an entrant for $40k, paying their education, then raising their salary so the next employer doesn't just feed off their hard-wrought talent. Employees are suddenly worth raising, training, and retaining, instead of chewing up and spitting out and trampling.
What we are really doing is canning the old timers (30 somthings) who know that their salaries have been stagnating.
The whole mechanism of economic growth is to minimize the human labor involved in creating a product. You get 1,000 people making 250,000 units of product each year; then, you build a different assembly line, get 500 people making 250,000 units of product each year, and fire the other 500. If the unit costs increase with production scale-up (e.g. you can mine solid blocks of iron from this mine, but chunks of 50% iron and 50% rock from that mine, so get half the iron for the same labor), then you can raise sale price as high as your next competitor's costs without the next guy being able to enter the market; otherwise competition pushes prices down toward cost, and whoever manages to push the cost down can cut their prices down and start consuming their competitors.
Once you cut out the cost of the human labor, consumers--the people who are still employed--can buy the same products cheaper. A $100 product becomes a $50 product, and a consumer has $50 of residual cash to spend. You then find a new product the consumer wants (or start producing more of another product the consumer wants more of), and scale up production of new goods and services until you've invested the whole cost of the displaced labor force: that $50 per consumer was enough to pay those 500 workers, and so whatever those 500 workers can produce that fits the demands of the consumer base will have an exact cost of that $50 extra spending cash.
Market dynamics cause weird behaviors in profit margins--supply and demand, for example, is explained above, as when it requires more labor to produce the last units of a product than it does to provide the first, thus a new supplier can't enter the market and provide competition pressure (that's the restriction on supply: if people are only willing to pay $20, and you can produce 1,000,000 units for $20 each, but unit 1,000,001 and beyond cost $30 to produce, then the supply is 1,000,000, and the demand can push the price up as high as $30). Even so, if you sell a $5,000 air conditioner and make $1,000 profit, suddenly learning to build air conditioners for $1,000 means you can sell it for $2,000, undercut your competition, ship three times as many units, and make three times the profit at the same $1,000 profit per unit.
Our real problems are things like rapid job replacement. Think about the turn-over from the industrial revolution, or from upcoming automation: 47% of jobs will disappear in linearly-scaling sectors. Information management doesn't scale linearly: when you have twice as many contracts, you may need three times as many clerks; when you
That's actually a difficult question. Inefficiencies in an economy create human suffering and death.
I heard your IP address is uploaded to Slashdot every time you view their web site.
I'm glad you found something that works for you.
This is a good meta-study, diving into guesswork and hypothesis on mechanisms of depression. Here's some science. TL;DR: pills, long-term (24 month), have over a 3/4 relapse rate; cognitive therapy, discontinued after 4 months, show just over 50% relapse in total after 24 months. Initially, PILLS ARE EXACTLY AS EFFECTIVE, IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY, AS COGNITIVE THERAPY. Exactly as effective. You can do absolutely no worse without drug therapy than you can by just talking to depressed people to make them feel better, and you do far better by talking to them and telling them how to get over it.
In a more recent CT -ADM placebo-controlled comparison, 240 severely depressed patients were randomized to ADM (n=120), CT (n=60) or a (pill) placebo control (n=60) treatment.
Big, randomized trial of people with ungodly hell depression (monopolar).
At the end of the 16-week treatment phase of the study, there were no differences in outcome between ADM and CT, with 58% of patients in both treatment groups meeting the criteria for ‘response’. Curiously, there was no indication that the two treatments affected different symptom clusters of depression: patients treated with either ADM or CT showed comparable rates of change of both cognitive and vegetative symptoms of depression.
Cognitive therapy (therapist nicely telling you how to get over it) is about exactly as effective in exactly the same way as taking pills. YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT!
In the continuation phase of the recent CT versus ADM study, patients who responded to 16 weeks of ADM were randomly assigned to either continue the treatment or change to a (pill) placebo condition. Patients who responded to 16 weeks of CT were withdrawn from treatment and allowed no more than three booster sessions (never more than one per month) during the first year of the follow-up period.
We took their meds away, and kicked all the therapy people out of therapy. Kept half the pill-heads on pills as a control, switched the other half to sugar pills, and didn't tell anyone.
As shown in FIG. 2, 76% of the ADM responders relapsed following medication withdrawal, compared with only 31% of the patients who had been treated with CT. Patients who continued ADM also fared better than patients who were assigned to the placebo treatment, with a relapse rate of 47% (which did not differ significantly from the 31% relapse rate in the CT group). After the continuation phase had ended, the patients who had not relapsed while on ADM were withdrawn from medication. Of these patients, 54% experienced a recurrence (the onset of a new depressive episode), compared with only 17% of the patients who had previously been given CT.
Like 3/4 of the pill-heads became severely depressed once we took the pills away; about 1/3 of the CT people had the same trouble. Half the people who stayed on pills relapsed, although in this study that's roughly equivalent (i.e. assume 47% == 31%): STAYING ON PILLS IS THE SAME AS QUITTING YOUR THERAPY AFTER 4 MONTHS. Of the pill users who didn't relapse, half of them relapsed after we took their meds away
Overall, just a hair under 50% of the patients who had CT for 4 months and then quit were, at 24 months, still cured. Just under 25% of patients who had drugs for 12 months came out of the 24 month period without having another depressive episode. Just under 10% of sugar pill patients were doing fine, no drugs and no therapy.
Drugs are facilitating: they provide you a baseline of feeling, which can help retrain your brain to behave in this new way by restricting its undesirable behavior. That can help; in the most extreme cases, drugs are *required*, because you simply can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if your h
Ugh, then you are the worst kind of clinical depression sufferer. You found an out and you still don't have empathy for the others who haven't.
I found a pattern, I found others following the same pattern, and I found international research showing that the pattern is known to science. I've also found that the scientific understanding of depression and its treatments are in the same class as the scientific understanding of global warming: while science has less than perfect understanding of either, it is those with a vested interest in denial who wholesale deny such things could possibly be real, in the face of all evidence and scientific consensus. They look outside and say, "See, it is cold! Climate change is not real!" and they say, "See, I feel bad! You must simply not understand how I feel!"
Bullshit. Some do, others detest feeling helpless. I think this is a mantra you tell yourself to enhance your own self worth.
It is a piece of scientifically-well-known psychiatric behavior. You will find respected medical literature at the heart of what has been called "Psychic illness in the need for attention and love"--how outdated a term, "Psychic"--to what is now explained as "Psychosomatic illness as a subconscious behavior to fill the need of self-importance". All humans require a feeling of self-worth to survive; all humans will become clinically depressed without a defining feeling of importance.
The mind can manifest physical illness, just as electromagnetic transmission antennas cause certain people to develop rashes, digestive problems, respiratory diseases, headaches, and other independently-observable symptoms of real, tangible nature, even though the transmitter is an unpowered hunk of metal producing no electromagnetic radiation. We have long studied this as a manifestation of the human need for attention, and refined that, eventually, into a need for an individual sense of importance; yet it becomes an opaque leap of logic to say a person may feel bad due to anxiety over a need for attention, a need to feel important.
It seems more logical to assume that a person may develop mental illnesses in response to a great injury of the psyche, damaging their sense of self-importance. Psychiatric literature has notated many defects in the operating brain when dealing with insanity; yet still observes that a great bulk of the insane show no physical trauma--that their mental state is wholly self-inflicted, a concoction of the mind causing changes in the brain's production of neurotransmitters purely by function of the brain, not by damage. The greatest proportion of the patently insane have developed delusions to comfort themselves in the face of extreme emotional trauma. What nonsense, then, is it to claim that such emotional issues would not cause lesser mental defects?
A human who suffers anxiety must come to terms with that anxiety. Persons with depression lash out at those around them for claiming it's all in their heads, fighting against the very idea that it may be their own fault; and why not? If it were their own fault, they would have to feel bad about it. They may not want to look helpless in the eyes of their peers, but they certainly want to feel that they've not brought this terrible suffering upon themselves by concocting an imaginative fantasy within the bosoms of their minds. They want to feel the weight of a terrible burden that was placed upon them, not of their own actions which they may remediate at any time.
you denigrate those who can't muscle their way out of depression like you did
It is simple technique, not brute force. You draw a stylized illustration in which a person's powerful brain--my great, super-genius-level intellect--hammers its way through the blockages and stands victorious upon the rubble of those things which thought laughably to impede it. The truth is the difficulties are an annoyance and nothing more: a person must first install a self-monitoring