A sample size of one is all that is needed if it works for that one person, especially of the desired result is something like "happiness".
You can do what you want to yourself, it just doesn't give you the right to start pontificating about how simple it is to cure depression, especially when it appears that most people here are using "depression" in the general, loose sense of "feeling unhappy" rather than the medical one of "unable to function correctly and in danger of committing suicide" (roughly).
My anecdote: there is a history of mental illness in my family, but because I drink alcohol so regularly, I've managed to avoid being hospitalised so far in my life.
I'm not even that far north, but in December by about 4:30pm it's dark, so in the winter months it's not uncommon for someone to drive to work in the dark, and drive home in the dark
So you don't have lunch breaks? Windows? Weekends off?
I think it's the excessive workload and unpleasant working conditions rather than lack of sunlight that's making you feel ill.
I think living in an office year round has really taken its toll on my health. Vitamin D fixed all the mental health symptoms I had.
Now if I could just get off my fat ass and exercise to fix the rest of me...
Unless you live in the Arctic circle (or Scotland) just walking around outside for a bit each day and eating sensibly should give you enough Vitamin D.
If curing serious depression was as simple as taking a Vitamin pill each day, do you really not think we'd have eradicated it entirely as a problem by now?
there seems to be correlation between intelligence and tendency for depression
Yes, you only have to look at a list like this to see that out of the billions of people who have lived in the last two hundred or so years, literally hundreds of famous people (many of whom I have actually heard of) have suffered from depression. That's closer to proof than correlation in my book.
Laughter and joking are not inappropriate responses to depression and mental health issues if you can get those affected to laugh with you. It's only lame jokes that are evil.
There is a difference between laughing with someone, and laughing at them.
Unless you use email only to send Christmas greetings to aunt Jane, you have private and/or business data that should not be viewable by third parties.
If you send emails without encryption, you should certainly limit them to not much more than Christmas greetings to aunt Jane. I assume that any email I send is as secure as a letter, since I can't be arsed with encryption. My bank wouldn't send me a new PIN on a postcard, but it certainly would in an envelope.
Convenience. Plus most people don't give a shit if the government reads all their emails anyway. I realise this isn't sufficiently paranoid for slashdot, but it's how the vast majority of people behave. How many people bother to encrypt their emails for instance?
Also, if I was planning to overthrow the government, stage an armed robbery or even (if I was a public figure) conduct an extra-marital affair, I certainly wouldn't use email to exchange details with anyone about it.
Some varieties of grapes, vegetables, etc. have a very short harvesting window. A day or two either way and you lose a lot of flavour and you won't fetch top dollar at the market.
If you're growing produce for sale, it's unlikely you're going to piss off on holiday and forget to water the fucking things. We all know that this kit is for people growing marijuana, so I expect it will come complete with a hidden transmitter straight to the government if it detects any pot.
Correct. Our economy is controlled party by the federal government, and partly by a huge federally-controlled corporation, yet when things are bad it's blamed on "capitalism".
Right, Apple, Google, Exxon Mobil, Goldman Sachs and the rest are No True Capitalists.
anybody with a master degree or higher can easily immigrate to the EU
Indeed, and so can anyone with a few hundred thousand euros in the bank. What precisely does that have to do with reality?
Unlike the US, where a first degree is apparently about as hard to get as a money-off voucher from McDonalds, the bulk of people in Europe don't have a "master degree or higher".
Also, it is far harder to emigrate to the US from Europe than you seem to think, although quite why anyone would choose to do so anyway is beyond me.
in terms of finances and freedom, it's messed up.
Where taxes are high in Europe, public services generally are too. Most of us prefer it that way. As for freedoms, apart from being able to own an unlimited number of guns and swear racial obscenities at people in the street, Europe is far more free than the US. For a start, you don't have to be a fucking Christian.
We can be civil and civilized without being forced into paying taxes under threat of guns at the hands of our government.
We should be, perhaps, but we're not.
In a truly civilized world, eveyone would share everything equally, I agree with that. The problem is that the ones with all the power and money don't seem to be able to do it voluntarily.
Corporate income taxes are the worst, because they push jobs overseas, divert resources toward accountants and lawyers, and collect very little revenue. It would be far better to eliminate them, and tax the individual shareholders instead.
This could work if corporations were legally obliged to distribute all their yearly profit as taxable income to the shareholders. But that's about as likely as me finding a time machine that lets me travel forward a few thousand years so that I can use their new science and technology to create a time machine and send it back to the present.
He didn't say we should have no taxes at all, Captain Straw Man.
It's not a straw man. If you believe, like the OP, that raising taxes inevitably results in LESS tax being collected, the reductio ad absurdum is that if you reduce taxes you will collect more tax, and presumably at a zero tax rate you will collect most of all.
It's a rhetorical device to express how stupid the initial idea is, but because you presumablt agree with it, and want taxes lowered, you can't see that.
That being said, flat taxes are good for things like Income. But consumption taxes are better for other things like fuel. The guy who buys a fuel efficient hatch or sedan shouldn't pay the same amount for road maintenance or pollution taxes as the guys who drive fuel guzzling SUV's or Sports cars. Tax fuel at the pump and you pay for what you use, far better than taking road maint costs from income tax or worse, fine revenue.
Except that, as with any flat rate sales tax, this is a regressive tax, which penalises poorer people, as they will pay a higher percentage of their income on fuel than someone rich.
Even if we somehow could make life perfectly fair for everyone, and we cannot, government is the very least trustworthy entity to bring this about.
That is the oldest right wing dodge in the book. "Because life isn't perfect, there's no point trying to make it better" was exactly what people said about abolishing slavery or giving women the vote.
And if democratically elected government can't bring about some forms of improvement through progressive taxation, who can? The Catholic Church? The Masons?
Demand theory fails to explain innovation, and that is why it is inadequate as an economic theory.
In economic terms, people innovate on the assumption that demand will be created. This is aside from the fact that much human endeavour is done for no particular economic end in sight (writing a poem, falling in love, discovering a new galaxy, running a marathon).
But the fact remains that without that demand subsequently being created, it doesn't matter how or what you innovate. If I invented the world's ultimate mousetrap tomorrow but didn't get the pricing or marketing or distribution right, it could flop completely.
Bills aren't paid by fairness. Bills are paid with sound fiscal policy, which many progressive tax systems do NOT have. Fairness is a completely different goal than paying the bills, and it'd be good for you to recognize that.
The point is that if you have bills to be paid that relate to society as a whole, it is both logical and ethical to ensure that everyone in that society contributes towards them.
Progressive tax systems require those with higher disposable income or superfluous assets to contribute proportionately more INTO society in the form of tax, on the basis that they have had proportionately more OUT of society already.
You conflated income with wealth. You compared $30k/yr to 1 billion in assets, which is like comparing a car traveling at 30 MPH to a car that has traveled 200k miles. What insight is that comparison supposed to reveal?
What a load of nonsense. I suppose you think Steve Jobs lived on his $1 a year salary?
Owning or controllingwealth while declaring minimal "income" is the basis of most individual tax avoidance in the Western world.
Slashdot Mirror
A sample size of one is all that is needed if it works for that one person, especially of the desired result is something like "happiness".
You can do what you want to yourself, it just doesn't give you the right to start pontificating about how simple it is to cure depression, especially when it appears that most people here are using "depression" in the general, loose sense of "feeling unhappy" rather than the medical one of "unable to function correctly and in danger of committing suicide" (roughly).
My anecdote: there is a history of mental illness in my family, but because I drink alcohol so regularly, I've managed to avoid being hospitalised so far in my life.
See how helpful that is?
I'm not even that far north, but in December by about 4:30pm it's dark, so in the winter months it's not uncommon for someone to drive to work in the dark, and drive home in the dark
So you don't have lunch breaks? Windows? Weekends off?
I think it's the excessive workload and unpleasant working conditions rather than lack of sunlight that's making you feel ill.
Seasonal Affective Disorder is not the same thing as clinical depression, if you want to get serious about it.
I think living in an office year round has really taken its toll on my health. Vitamin D fixed all the mental health symptoms I had.
Now if I could just get off my fat ass and exercise to fix the rest of me...
Unless you live in the Arctic circle (or Scotland) just walking around outside for a bit each day and eating sensibly should give you enough Vitamin D.
If curing serious depression was as simple as taking a Vitamin pill each day, do you really not think we'd have eradicated it entirely as a problem by now?
You sound like Ray Kurzweil with his immortality pills.
Let me guess, your misunderstood genius was the reason you did so badly at school and now work flipping burgers?
And poets tend to be bipolar.
Who says?
And remember van Gogh and his ear
One painter.
Anyway, you don't need to be unusually intelligent to be an artist: you need to be a good artist.
there seems to be correlation between intelligence and tendency for depression
Yes, you only have to look at a list like this to see that out of the billions of people who have lived in the last two hundred or so years, literally hundreds of famous people (many of whom I have actually heard of) have suffered from depression. That's closer to proof than correlation in my book.
Laughter and joking are not inappropriate responses to depression and mental health issues if you can get those affected to laugh with you. It's only lame jokes that are evil.
There is a difference between laughing with someone, and laughing at them.
Four weeks in the summer
Really? Which countries and what sort of jobs?
What makes you think there isn't another way? Oh right, you were indoctrinated with that fear. Such pretty little sheep.
Bonus twat points for not even getting "sheeple" right.
Unless you use email only to send Christmas greetings to aunt Jane, you have private and/or business data that should not be viewable by third parties.
If you send emails without encryption, you should certainly limit them to not much more than Christmas greetings to aunt Jane. I assume that any email I send is as secure as a letter, since I can't be arsed with encryption. My bank wouldn't send me a new PIN on a postcard, but it certainly would in an envelope.
Who cares about email now anyway?
I do not understand why everyone prefers that.
Convenience. Plus most people don't give a shit if the government reads all their emails anyway. I realise this isn't sufficiently paranoid for slashdot, but it's how the vast majority of people behave. How many people bother to encrypt their emails for instance?
Also, if I was planning to overthrow the government, stage an armed robbery or even (if I was a public figure) conduct an extra-marital affair, I certainly wouldn't use email to exchange details with anyone about it.
Some varieties of grapes, vegetables, etc. have a very short harvesting window. A day or two either way and you lose a lot of flavour and you won't fetch top dollar at the market.
If you're growing produce for sale, it's unlikely you're going to piss off on holiday and forget to water the fucking things. We all know that this kit is for people growing marijuana, so I expect it will come complete with a hidden transmitter straight to the government if it detects any pot.
Correct. Our economy is controlled party by the federal government, and partly by a huge federally-controlled corporation, yet when things are bad it's blamed on "capitalism".
Right, Apple, Google, Exxon Mobil, Goldman Sachs and the rest are No True Capitalists.
anybody with a master degree or higher can easily immigrate to the EU
Indeed, and so can anyone with a few hundred thousand euros in the bank. What precisely does that have to do with reality?
Unlike the US, where a first degree is apparently about as hard to get as a money-off voucher from McDonalds, the bulk of people in Europe don't have a "master degree or higher".
Also, it is far harder to emigrate to the US from Europe than you seem to think, although quite why anyone would choose to do so anyway is beyond me.
in terms of finances and freedom, it's messed up.
Where taxes are high in Europe, public services generally are too. Most of us prefer it that way. As for freedoms, apart from being able to own an unlimited number of guns and swear racial obscenities at people in the street, Europe is far more free than the US. For a start, you don't have to be a fucking Christian.
We can be civil and civilized without being forced into paying taxes under threat of guns at the hands of our government.
We should be, perhaps, but we're not.
In a truly civilized world, eveyone would share everything equally, I agree with that. The problem is that the ones with all the power and money don't seem to be able to do it voluntarily.
Corporate income taxes are the worst, because they push jobs overseas, divert resources toward accountants and lawyers, and collect very little revenue. It would be far better to eliminate them, and tax the individual shareholders instead.
This could work if corporations were legally obliged to distribute all their yearly profit as taxable income to the shareholders. But that's about as likely as me finding a time machine that lets me travel forward a few thousand years so that I can use their new science and technology to create a time machine and send it back to the present.
He didn't say we should have no taxes at all, Captain Straw Man.
It's not a straw man. If you believe, like the OP, that raising taxes inevitably results in LESS tax being collected, the reductio ad absurdum is that if you reduce taxes you will collect more tax, and presumably at a zero tax rate you will collect most of all.
It's a rhetorical device to express how stupid the initial idea is, but because you presumablt agree with it, and want taxes lowered, you can't see that.
That being said, flat taxes are good for things like Income. But consumption taxes are better for other things like fuel. The guy who buys a fuel efficient hatch or sedan shouldn't pay the same amount for road maintenance or pollution taxes as the guys who drive fuel guzzling SUV's or Sports cars. Tax fuel at the pump and you pay for what you use, far better than taking road maint costs from income tax or worse, fine revenue.
Except that, as with any flat rate sales tax, this is a regressive tax, which penalises poorer people, as they will pay a higher percentage of their income on fuel than someone rich.
Yeah, I know, it serves you right for being poor.
Even if we somehow could make life perfectly fair for everyone, and we cannot, government is the very least trustworthy entity to bring this about.
That is the oldest right wing dodge in the book. "Because life isn't perfect, there's no point trying to make it better" was exactly what people said about abolishing slavery or giving women the vote.
And if democratically elected government can't bring about some forms of improvement through progressive taxation, who can? The Catholic Church? The Masons?
Demand theory fails to explain innovation, and that is why it is inadequate as an economic theory.
In economic terms, people innovate on the assumption that demand will be created. This is aside from the fact that much human endeavour is done for no particular economic end in sight (writing a poem, falling in love, discovering a new galaxy, running a marathon).
But the fact remains that without that demand subsequently being created, it doesn't matter how or what you innovate. If I invented the world's ultimate mousetrap tomorrow but didn't get the pricing or marketing or distribution right, it could flop completely.
Bills aren't paid by fairness. Bills are paid with sound fiscal policy, which many progressive tax systems do NOT have. Fairness is a completely different goal than paying the bills, and it'd be good for you to recognize that.
The point is that if you have bills to be paid that relate to society as a whole, it is both logical and ethical to ensure that everyone in that society contributes towards them.
Progressive tax systems require those with higher disposable income or superfluous assets to contribute proportionately more INTO society in the form of tax, on the basis that they have had proportionately more OUT of society already.
You conflated income with wealth. You compared $30k/yr to 1 billion in assets, which is like comparing a car traveling at 30 MPH to a car that has traveled 200k miles. What insight is that comparison supposed to reveal?
What a load of nonsense. I suppose you think Steve Jobs lived on his $1 a year salary?
Owning or controllingwealth while declaring minimal "income" is the basis of most individual tax avoidance in the Western world.