IMHO, net neutrality (always treating all internet traffic equal), sounds like obvious common sense, at first, but, is it really so?
Is all phone traffic is really equal, for example?
Yers. Just like it's been for about 100 (plus or minus a few) years.
If, a phone service provider company, notices/informed, that some people/company scamming all their customers, or, abusing their service in any way, should, the phone service provider company, be able to do absolutely nothing to stop it, because all phone traffic must be always absolutely treated equal?
Yes. Scammers get treated like they have always been: Catch'em and nail'em.
How about, if, an Internet service provider company, notices/informed, that some people/company scamming all their customers?
Due process. Well understood. ISPs are not, and should not be, enforcement agencies. Inform relevant agencies, then let due process take its course.
What if somebody using their internet service to run a ransomware system, or, a botnet to attack any targeted websites?
Due process, catch and prosecute anyone scamming people just like always.
What if somebody using their internet service to run any kind of DARK WEB websites to sell drugs etc? What if somebody using their internet service to let people download any/all kind(s) of illegal video/files?
Catch thieves, nail'em.
Should, the Internet service provider company, be able to do absolutely nothing to stop it, (to protect their customers & to serve common good of the public), because all Internet traffic must be always absolutely treated equal?
(But, one may think, what if a phone/internet service provider company itself is doing anything illegal?
Catch thieves, nail'em.
On the topic of "absolutely equal always equal" is a willfully bogus "argument": ISPs have ALWAYS been able to charge for bandwidth. More BPS, more dollars. You know that, and your use of this "argument" is either trolling or shilling.
Then realize that, all phone/internet service provider companies are always under close watch by their customers & government, already!)
That would be a good idea, but is currently inadequately policed.
Generally speaking, this society needs to get over the whole "...with a computer" trick. Stealing with a computer or comms is different from stealing with a getaway car, and clearly enforcement needs updated forensic methods and tools. Anyone fucking over someone else illegally should be caught and nailed under the auspices of law enforcement agencies, and always under the rules of due process.
Which means they pay more in taxes. And will pay more for about 50 years.
That would be my school chums and me. BSEE 1977 @ the Ohio State University. Fully employed and paying taxes on a comfortable embedded developer's income (and for some of my friends a *very* comfortable income...) for all of those 42 years.
From the article, which apparently nobody has read: Two years.
At Lambda, students pay nothing upfront. But they are required to pay 17 percent of their salary to Lambda for two years if they get a job that pays more than $50,000. (Lambda says 83 percent of its students get a job with a median salary of $70,000 within six months of graduating.) If they don’t get a job, or their salary is lower, they pay nothing. Payments are capped at $30,000, so a highly paid student isn’t penalized for success, and if a student loses a job, the payments pause.
I'm wondering whether you would be willing to comment on the idea of "coopetition" in the TLA world. Having heard of the value of occasional human judgment in certain situations (Cuban missile crisis, a few launch warnings in the '80s, etc.)
I am curious about whether the operators were generally trying to hold the shit together without going too badly sideways, or was the competition among the on-the-ground operators much more hard-played?
1) Lots of ads for computers and laptops after buying my first one in five years, and won't be buying another until this one is also no longer supported.
2) Tons of ads for cars, despite my wife and me buying two cars in the last year, knowing that we may not be buying another (we're both over 60 and our cars last for >= 15 years...)
3) I am somewhat badly addicted to inexpensive single-board computers, SSDs and D-I-Y electronic supplies and purchase these things regularly. I see surprisingly few ads for these product categories, though I often click through in case there's something new in the marketplace.
Though cash can be stolen, it is way more difficult for "authorities" or whoever to revoke remotely. Plastic, charge cards, debit cards are all revocable. I am *very* wary of a shift to mechanisms that can produce financial disability by remote control.
It's been increasingly true for large purchases, but this changeover to plastic for small purchases (as in "food", etc.) is comfortably convenient and OK until it's not.
These issues are separate from the question of how many entities get to "participate in", as in "charge a fee for" all transactions, outside the ability of the actual paying customers to affect those decisions.
Mod parent up, particularly the point about asymmetrical information.
Compounding this problem is the fact that patients rarely pay for their care directly.
A minor quibble: I'll stipulate that patients rarely pay directly for the expected services. Increasingly though, patients do in fact find themselves stuck paying for services they didn't know would be billed, and when they do they pay dramatically inflated prices.
...And it shows. My wife and I have similar difficulties with our providers. The doctor (a well respected professor of Internal Medicine at our university) will prescribe reasonable tests to verify our health at our annual physical exam (we're both > 60 years old). We are fortunate and have no major issues, so we wait to comment about being a bit fatigued or whatever at the next exam (we assume it's a minor vitamin deficiency, but we make sure she knows just in case there's something real there...) The insurance company does not cover those tests for the annual exam.
So the Corporate "Healthcare Provider" charges us 23+ times the insurance-paid rate for the tests. (For insurance: $44 total, for us: $1020.00).
Providers these days have a powerful financial incentive to charge for services specifically to NOT be covered by insurance.
Steven Brill's report in Time a few years ago mentioned a different but related scam: For a procedure, we sign a contract promising to pay for all services rendered. It's an open-ended "contract": We cannot know up front what those services will be. The provider brings in all sorts of additional "expert consultants" that we the patient/customer have no idea are involved until it's too late and we're on the hook for big bucks worth of all those facility and consulting charges.
You are welcome to take facebook comments with a grain of salt. Good on ya. I also avoid it, for the same reason.
There are plenty of people who look for messages that confirm their own perspectives and amplify those messages, independent of the original sources. Those original sources hide their identities and interests while simultaneously using substantial resources to craft messages and target those messages to the people most vulnerable to their effects.
Anonymous cowards, as it were. If only those anonymous cowards were merely uninformed losers we would not be in the fix we're in now. The information battle is being waged in many cases by well-funded experts who are near the top of their societies in IQ, education and practice both in producing the most effective propaganda, and in aiming it to the most receptive audience.
I'm assuming that because you are smart enough to comment (anonymously _of course_) on this site, you know very well that your position is fully supportive of the forces working against normal people who are either too busy or for other reasons, are unable to protect themselves intellectually from this warfare.
My responsibility is to choose between attending to or to discounting "information" provided by a given source, based on a reasonable estimation of credibility of that source. That would be true for friends on Facebook, news organizations, or propaganda outlets supported by nation-states or non-state assholes.
Facebook's responsibility is to ensure that I have that sourcing information. I believe that in some cases organizations (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) have access to credible knowledge that particular sources have a near-perfect record of waging information warfare, and lose the privilege of access to the ears and eyes of readers until they straighten up. The assholes spreading disinformation and propaganda are well-funded and consistently successful in lying about who they are or w.hose interests they represent.
Anyone advocating for a process that prevents people from knowing the source of information supports the lying and misinformation business.
It is theoretically and practically impossible to teach the magical ability for someone to determine the interests of sources when the source's identities and interests are hidden.
...And I remember with some fondness the scene in "The Hammer of God" (A.C. Clarke, of course...) when one of the protagonists buried volumes I and II in his backyard to help with the recovery process after the Event.
I cannot determine whether your comment is snark, sarcasm, or uninformed. That said...
Having read a few of the comments and arguments in LKML over the last few decades about preserving cache residency, page table management in the VM and VFS layers, networking and other subsystems, I think many of the kernel guys are not only working at a level way below ring 0, they are quite good at it. Based on various performance measures (which admittedly move backward on occasion), it seems to me that they are doing it rather effectively.
I also know that many many other practitioners are working there too. With few exceptions, everyone who works in high performance and/or hard realtime in the embedded microcontroller world is reminded regularly of the underlying components and concepts. This "reminding" is something I encounter all the time until resolving the bugs..:-) For us, "ring 0" is considered to be high level programming.
The current Republican "party", which bears little resemblance to the real Republican party of years gone by, has been lying to their base for years.
I live in central Ohio, grew up in southeastern Ohio, and watched with dismay the destruction of families resulting from the steady decline in coal mining employment in the 1970's.
Coal employment has been dropping steadily and almost linearly for decades as the mine operators have increased mechanization and automation, while coal output was steady or slightly increasing until about recently. In a quick search, I found this graph from the St Louis Federal Reserve, which only dates back to 1985. I remember a graph that showed employment and production back to the first half of the 20th century but lost the link.
In a rational world, individual words should not have the power to break people who have confidence in themselves. But I have been near people who, having been targets of violence, could not break free of those earlier experiences.
Out in the public sphere, particular words delivered in particular contexts are capable of inciting violence. The words themselves may not break bones, but the manipulation of attitudes in those who are predisposed to believe the worst almost inevitably produces violence. Generally the violence is perpetrated against those least able to defend themselves, arises rapidly enough to catch the targets unprepared, or is perpetrated against groups that have a history of being weakened by structural impediments.
OK, apparently it was not MY "withdrawal", I can accept that. I'll stay the hell off that shit because my own side effects include the itchiness.
I stand by the basic analogy though: Opiates were prescribed too frequently based on willfully inadequate warnings. It's still irresponsible to label the patients as irresponsible who as often as not, start down the road while in recovery from accidents, or operations, or whatever distracting experiences caused the pain in the first place. Imagine someone who was given that stuff in the delirium after an operation, getting out their laptop and doing a well-informed literature search. I can see how well that advice works. or not. That was in fact nearly my situation: Badly busted up, in recovery, thinking about the busted up and not so much the drugs that were legitimately prescribed.
That is part of the overall problem with medical treatment: Being a well informed shopper when you're well or only mildly inconvenienced is a reasonable expectation. It is not reasonable to expect someone who cannot even remember how old he is (the day of my accident, I couldn't compute my age...) to do your literature search on the effects of the prescribed treatments.
My original comment was based on the idea that addiction (whether from short term use or not) is such a serious problem that it should have been reported as such. Having full and correct information on which to base a rational decision is required, and based on my reading at the time, that information was being willfully withheld.
It looks like the itching is a common side effect (good to know, I didn't know that before looking it up), and the researchers are working to *reduce* it not *cause* it.
If the manufacturers and developers had been honest with prescribers, making it clear to the prescribers and in turn the potential patients that addiction is a real possibility and must be managed as carefully as the originating pain condition, then the whole discussion would have been far different. Opiates are a powerful tool but have important downsides which ${evil_actor_with_catchy_name} worked diligently and to a large extent, successfully, to hide.
Life would be quite a bit better if "big pharma" were managed by responsible people rather than evil actors.
I for damn sure do not claim high ground whether it was an allergic reaction of a bit of withdrawal. I was describing a small "taste" of the challenges people could face. Based on that experience, I grant some room for difficulties to those who experience the real thing, particularly recognizing that "personal responsibility" turns to bullshit when the patient is experiencing the real challenges of withdrawal.
Saying "personal responsibility" is so much easier than Doing personal responsibility. Particularly when being lied to about the consequences of following doctor's orders.
Some commenters upthread think I may have been an allergic reaction, which is a good point. It is also the case that I am nearly pathologically cynical about drugs and one bad experience was plenty to turn me off of them, so I believe I was lucky. (I'm also lucky in being less emotionally affected by pain than most...) The point I wanted to make in the original comment is that opioids are way more negatively powerful than the industry portrayed them as being, and under the assumption that my reaction gave me a small taste of what what withdrawal feels like, I believe that anyone experiencing withdrawal would be extremely challenged to escape it.
I do not have a large social network so the sample size of my personally-known contacts who have experienced the effects of opioids is small. Several of my social contacts have had great difficulty with the addictive properties of opioids, having begun taking them under medical supervision.
I claim that people who do not specialize in the subtleties of medical research papers are stuck with trusting those they know or those who prescribe medications. I do not accept the argument that "personal responsibility" is the whole answer. The information sources most people have access to are manipulated to the point of incoherence, resulting in an inability to come to a rational conclusion.
The hypothetical idea that a competent patient can do proper research to produce a rational conclusion depends on accurate information, and my citing of the Scientific American article exists to exemplify the challenge that most people have in finding accurate information on which to base their choices. I also believe that even intelligent, disciplined people can be driven to choices that the rest of us would find irrational, when they are faced with unbearable pain and with no other treatment option offered.
I believed the essential point being made in the SciAm article, and failed to warn a particular close friend off the opioids 15 years ago. The result was dependency, increasingly potent formulations, desperate seeking respite, the depression that comes with such dependency, the fact that his pain could no longer be controlled effectively, and other physical effects of opioid use. His end came after years of struggle and was likely unnecessary. I do not know how representative that situation was, but such experiences, even when not personally felt, are strong teachers.
After a relatively serious motorcycle accident (36 years ago, it's all good since...), I received a prescription for percodan. I resisted the temptation to try it for a while, but one night I caved and took the pill.
*Never Again.*
I don't know whether it was a reaction to the drug, or a small taste of withdrawal. But every cubic millimeter of my body was uncontrollably itchy, for about a day and a half. EVERYTHING was itchy. Inside and out.
Pain is nothing compared to that experience.
That said... A guy making billions peddling that shit, then patenting a drug to treat the consequences of having taken the original known-addicting drug is magically, cosmically evil.
Some bullshit slashdot commenter talking about "personal responsibility" is almost as evil. I remember the Scientific American article written about opioids back in the '90's, in which the authors declared that opioids are not really addictive for patients in real pain. I don't remember whether there were any disclaimers. Now we know they were lying. Now we know that these "trusted sources" with money to be made were fucking over their customers.
And now we have shitheads commenting with such glibness about personal responsibility. To which I reply: Piss off boy. If you are lucky enough never to have experienced it, or possibly lucky enough to have experienced it and gotten past it, that's all fine. You are the exception. But that does not give you the privilege of dismissing the effects of such executive lying on other people who for one reason or another fell victim to the Royal Scam.
Wait. I got it. Paper ballots make it harder to tabulate votes and catch voter fraud.
Bull shit.
The processes for catching voter fraud are in the registration and checking-in before being authorized to even start the actual voting.
But I am confident that you know that and are simply being a disengenuous troll.
Or perhaps you simply cannot read the many comments in this thread where several commenters report that their communities use modern tools like scanners to provide early returns for those interested in seeing them.
Oh, wait, I get it. In Alabama, bussing of voters so they can vote multiple times is not a problem so therefore it is not a problem in any state.
Provide evidence.
I provide experiential description of the statistically tiny effect of photo ID in majority minority precincts. That experience is repeated all over my state (Ohio, not one of your big blue states). That's the statistics all over the country, especially in "blue" states. Interestingly, the blue states that you so casually describe as not requiring photo ID also tend to be the most technogically advanced and tend to have a far smaller fractional population of limited-resource people.
The "semi-truck" rejoinder is cute. It is however simultaneously and obviously unresponsive. And galactically stupid. Countries with a functioning police force are generally characterized by having far more resources for ensuring a stable social environment which is the main reason for lower crime rates.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, net neutrality (always treating all internet traffic equal), sounds like obvious common sense, at first, but, is it really so?
Is all phone traffic is really equal, for example?
Yers. Just like it's been for about 100 (plus or minus a few) years.
If, a phone service provider company, notices/informed, that some people/company scamming all their customers, or, abusing their service in any way, should, the phone service provider company, be able to do absolutely nothing to stop it, because all phone traffic must be always absolutely treated equal?
Yes. Scammers get treated like they have always been: Catch'em and nail'em.
How about, if, an Internet service provider company, notices/informed, that some people/company scamming all their customers?
Due process. Well understood. ISPs are not, and should not be, enforcement agencies. Inform relevant agencies, then let due process take its course.
What if somebody using their internet service to run a ransomware system, or, a botnet to attack any targeted websites?
Due process, catch and prosecute anyone scamming people just like always.
What if somebody using their internet service to run any kind of DARK WEB websites to sell drugs etc?
What if somebody using their internet service to let people download any/all kind(s) of illegal video/files?
Catch thieves, nail'em.
Should, the Internet service provider company, be able to do absolutely nothing to stop it, (to protect their customers & to serve common good of the public), because all Internet traffic must be always absolutely treated equal?
(But, one may think, what if a phone/internet service provider company itself is doing anything illegal?
Catch thieves, nail'em.
On the topic of "absolutely equal always equal" is a willfully bogus "argument": ISPs have ALWAYS been able to charge for bandwidth. More BPS, more dollars. You know that, and your use of this "argument" is either trolling or shilling.
Then realize that, all phone/internet service provider companies are always under close watch by their customers & government, already!)
That would be a good idea, but is currently inadequately policed.
Generally speaking, this society needs to get over the whole "...with a computer" trick. Stealing with a computer or comms is different from stealing with a getaway car, and clearly enforcement needs updated forensic methods and tools. Anyone fucking over someone else illegally should be caught and nailed under the auspices of law enforcement agencies, and always under the rules of due process.
Which means they pay more in taxes. And will pay more for about 50 years.
That would be my school chums and me. BSEE 1977 @ the Ohio State University. Fully employed and paying taxes on a comfortable embedded developer's income (and for some of my friends a *very* comfortable income...) for all of those 42 years.
From the article, which apparently nobody has read: Two years.
At Lambda, students pay nothing upfront. But they are required to pay 17 percent of their salary to Lambda for two years if they get a job that pays more than $50,000. (Lambda says 83 percent of its students get a job with a median salary of $70,000 within six months of graduating.) If they don’t get a job, or their salary is lower, they pay nothing. Payments are capped at $30,000, so a highly paid student isn’t penalized for success, and if a student loses a job, the payments pause.
Yet another way the balance of power shifts in a cashless society.
I'm wondering whether you would be willing to comment on the idea of "coopetition" in the TLA world. Having heard of the value of occasional human judgment in certain situations (Cuban missile crisis, a few launch warnings in the '80s, etc.)
I am curious about whether the operators were generally trying to hold the shit together without going too badly sideways, or was the competition among the on-the-ground operators much more hard-played?
This.
1) Lots of ads for computers and laptops after buying my first one in five years, and won't be buying another until this one is also no longer supported.
2) Tons of ads for cars, despite my wife and me buying two cars in the last year, knowing that we may not be buying another (we're both over 60 and our cars last for >= 15 years...)
3) I am somewhat badly addicted to inexpensive single-board computers, SSDs and D-I-Y electronic supplies and purchase these things regularly. I see surprisingly few ads for these product categories, though I often click through in case there's something new in the marketplace.
The algorithms have some catching up to do.
Though cash can be stolen, it is way more difficult for "authorities" or whoever to revoke remotely. Plastic, charge cards, debit cards are all revocable. I am *very* wary of a shift to mechanisms that can produce financial disability by remote control.
It's been increasingly true for large purchases, but this changeover to plastic for small purchases (as in "food", etc.) is comfortably convenient and OK until it's not.
These issues are separate from the question of how many entities get to "participate in", as in "charge a fee for" all transactions, outside the ability of the actual paying customers to affect those decisions.
Mod parent up, particularly the point about asymmetrical information.
Compounding this problem is the fact that patients rarely pay for their care directly.
A minor quibble: I'll stipulate that patients rarely pay directly for the expected services. Increasingly though, patients do in fact find themselves stuck paying for services they didn't know would be billed, and when they do they pay dramatically inflated prices.
...And it shows. My wife and I have similar difficulties with our providers. The doctor (a well respected professor of Internal Medicine at our university) will prescribe reasonable tests to verify our health at our annual physical exam (we're both > 60 years old). We are fortunate and have no major issues, so we wait to comment about being a bit fatigued or whatever at the next exam (we assume it's a minor vitamin deficiency, but we make sure she knows just in case there's something real there...) The insurance company does not cover those tests for the annual exam.
So the Corporate "Healthcare Provider" charges us 23+ times the insurance-paid rate for the tests. (For insurance: $44 total, for us: $1020.00).
Providers these days have a powerful financial incentive to charge for services specifically to NOT be covered by insurance.
Steven Brill's report in Time a few years ago mentioned a different but related scam: For a procedure, we sign a contract promising to pay for all services rendered. It's an open-ended "contract": We cannot know up front what those services will be. The provider brings in all sorts of additional "expert consultants" that we the patient/customer have no idea are involved until it's too late and we're on the hook for big bucks worth of all those facility and consulting charges.
Unresponsive.
You are welcome to take facebook comments with a grain of salt. Good on ya. I also avoid it, for the same reason.
There are plenty of people who look for messages that confirm their own perspectives and amplify those messages, independent of the original sources. Those original sources hide their identities and interests while simultaneously using substantial resources to craft messages and target those messages to the people most vulnerable to their effects.
Anonymous cowards, as it were. If only those anonymous cowards were merely uninformed losers we would not be in the fix we're in now. The information battle is being waged in many cases by well-funded experts who are near the top of their societies in IQ, education and practice both in producing the most effective propaganda, and in aiming it to the most receptive audience.
I'm assuming that because you are smart enough to comment (anonymously _of course_) on this site, you know very well that your position is fully supportive of the forces working against normal people who are either too busy or for other reasons, are unable to protect themselves intellectually from this warfare.
My responsibility is to choose between attending to or to discounting "information" provided by a given source, based on a reasonable estimation of credibility of that source. That would be true for friends on Facebook, news organizations, or propaganda outlets supported by nation-states or non-state assholes.
Facebook's responsibility is to ensure that I have that sourcing information. I believe that in some cases organizations (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) have access to credible knowledge that particular sources have a near-perfect record of waging information warfare, and lose the privilege of access to the ears and eyes of readers until they straighten up. The assholes spreading disinformation and propaganda are well-funded and consistently successful in lying about who they are or w.hose interests they represent.
Anyone advocating for a process that prevents people from knowing the source of information supports the lying and misinformation business.
It is theoretically and practically impossible to teach the magical ability for someone to determine the interests of sources when the source's identities and interests are hidden.
...And I remember with some fondness the scene in "The Hammer of God" (A.C. Clarke, of course...) when one of the protagonists buried volumes I and II in his backyard to help with the recovery process after the Event.
I cannot determine whether your comment is snark, sarcasm, or uninformed. That said...
Having read a few of the comments and arguments in LKML over the last few decades about preserving cache residency, page table management in the VM and VFS layers, networking and other subsystems, I think many of the kernel guys are not only working at a level way below ring 0, they are quite good at it. Based on various performance measures (which admittedly move backward on occasion), it seems to me that they are doing it rather effectively.
I also know that many many other practitioners are working there too. With few exceptions, everyone who works in high performance and/or hard realtime in the embedded microcontroller world is reminded regularly of the underlying components and concepts. This "reminding" is something I encounter all the time until resolving the bugs.. :-) For us, "ring 0" is considered to be high level programming.
The current Republican "party", which bears little resemblance to the real Republican party of years gone by, has been lying to their base for years.
I live in central Ohio, grew up in southeastern Ohio, and watched with dismay the destruction of families resulting from the steady decline in coal mining employment in the 1970's.
Coal employment has been dropping steadily and almost linearly for decades as the mine operators have increased mechanization and automation, while coal output was steady or slightly increasing until about recently. In a quick search, I found this graph from the St Louis Federal Reserve, which only dates back to 1985. I remember a graph that showed employment and production back to the first half of the 20th century but lost the link.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/pub...
The executives and other partisans have been lying for decades.
In a rational world, individual words should not have the power to break people who have confidence in themselves. But I have been near people who, having been targets of violence, could not break free of those earlier experiences.
Out in the public sphere, particular words delivered in particular contexts are capable of inciting violence. The words themselves may not break bones, but the manipulation of attitudes in those who are predisposed to believe the worst almost inevitably produces violence. Generally the violence is perpetrated against those least able to defend themselves, arises rapidly enough to catch the targets unprepared, or is perpetrated against groups that have a history of being weakened by structural impediments.
OK, apparently it was not MY "withdrawal", I can accept that. I'll stay the hell off that shit because my own side effects include the itchiness.
I stand by the basic analogy though: Opiates were prescribed too frequently based on willfully inadequate warnings. It's still irresponsible to label the patients as irresponsible who as often as not, start down the road while in recovery from accidents, or operations, or whatever distracting experiences caused the pain in the first place. Imagine someone who was given that stuff in the delirium after an operation, getting out their laptop and doing a well-informed literature search. I can see how well that advice works. or not. That was in fact nearly my situation: Badly busted up, in recovery, thinking about the busted up and not so much the drugs that were legitimately prescribed.
That is part of the overall problem with medical treatment: Being a well informed shopper when you're well or only mildly inconvenienced is a reasonable expectation. It is not reasonable to expect someone who cannot even remember how old he is (the day of my accident, I couldn't compute my age...) to do your literature search on the effects of the prescribed treatments.
My original comment was based on the idea that addiction (whether from short term use or not) is such a serious problem that it should have been reported as such. Having full and correct information on which to base a rational decision is required, and based on my reading at the time, that information was being willfully withheld.
Interesting ideas, but I''m OK with simple boring self-centeredness carried to extremes by people with too much power and not enough accountability.
Then again, there are days where rationality seems to be in such short supply that maybe supernatural forces might be a useful explanation... :-)
...That's an interesting idea, so I did a quick search. That produced this link:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
It looks like the itching is a common side effect (good to know, I didn't know that before looking it up), and the researchers are working to *reduce* it not *cause* it.
If the manufacturers and developers had been honest with prescribers, making it clear to the prescribers and in turn the potential patients that addiction is a real possibility and must be managed as carefully as the originating pain condition, then the whole discussion would have been far different. Opiates are a powerful tool but have important downsides which ${evil_actor_with_catchy_name} worked diligently and to a large extent, successfully, to hide.
Life would be quite a bit better if "big pharma" were managed by responsible people rather than evil actors.
I was young, money was very tight and the feeling of riding through the curves of southeastern Ohio (and other places) was wonderful then...
I gave up on the powered kind. I still benefit from the muscle-powered kind, from which I still receive major health benefits.
I for damn sure do not claim high ground whether it was an allergic reaction of a bit of withdrawal. I was describing a small "taste" of the challenges people could face. Based on that experience, I grant some room for difficulties to those who experience the real thing, particularly recognizing that "personal responsibility" turns to bullshit when the patient is experiencing the real challenges of withdrawal.
Saying "personal responsibility" is so much easier than Doing personal responsibility. Particularly when being lied to about the consequences of following doctor's orders.
Some commenters upthread think I may have been an allergic reaction, which is a good point. It is also the case that I am nearly pathologically cynical about drugs and one bad experience was plenty to turn me off of them, so I believe I was lucky. (I'm also lucky in being less emotionally affected by pain than most...) The point I wanted to make in the original comment is that opioids are way more negatively powerful than the industry portrayed them as being, and under the assumption that my reaction gave me a small taste of what what withdrawal feels like, I believe that anyone experiencing withdrawal would be extremely challenged to escape it.
I do not have a large social network so the sample size of my personally-known contacts who have experienced the effects of opioids is small. Several of my social contacts have had great difficulty with the addictive properties of opioids, having begun taking them under medical supervision.
I claim that people who do not specialize in the subtleties of medical research papers are stuck with trusting those they know or those who prescribe medications. I do not accept the argument that "personal responsibility" is the whole answer. The information sources most people have access to are manipulated to the point of incoherence, resulting in an inability to come to a rational conclusion.
The hypothetical idea that a competent patient can do proper research to produce a rational conclusion depends on accurate information, and my citing of the Scientific American article exists to exemplify the challenge that most people have in finding accurate information on which to base their choices. I also believe that even intelligent, disciplined people can be driven to choices that the rest of us would find irrational, when they are faced with unbearable pain and with no other treatment option offered.
I believed the essential point being made in the SciAm article, and failed to warn a particular close friend off the opioids 15 years ago. The result was dependency, increasingly potent formulations, desperate seeking respite, the depression that comes with such dependency, the fact that his pain could no longer be controlled effectively, and other physical effects of opioid use. His end came after years of struggle and was likely unnecessary. I do not know how representative that situation was, but such experiences, even when not personally felt, are strong teachers.
After a relatively serious motorcycle accident (36 years ago, it's all good since...), I received a prescription for percodan. I resisted the temptation to try it for a while, but one night I caved and took the pill.
*Never Again.*
I don't know whether it was a reaction to the drug, or a small taste of withdrawal. But every cubic millimeter of my body was uncontrollably itchy, for about a day and a half. EVERYTHING was itchy. Inside and out.
Pain is nothing compared to that experience.
That said... A guy making billions peddling that shit, then patenting a drug to treat the consequences of having taken the original known-addicting drug is magically, cosmically evil.
Some bullshit slashdot commenter talking about "personal responsibility" is almost as evil. I remember the Scientific American article written about opioids back in the '90's, in which the authors declared that opioids are not really addictive for patients in real pain. I don't remember whether there were any disclaimers. Now we know they were lying. Now we know that these "trusted sources" with money to be made were fucking over their customers.
And now we have shitheads commenting with such glibness about personal responsibility. To which I reply: Piss off boy. If you are lucky enough never to have experienced it, or possibly lucky enough to have experienced it and gotten past it, that's all fine. You are the exception. But that does not give you the privilege of dismissing the effects of such executive lying on other people who for one reason or another fell victim to the Royal Scam.
Wait. I got it. Paper ballots make it harder to tabulate votes and catch voter fraud.
Bull shit.
The processes for catching voter fraud are in the registration and checking-in before being authorized to even start the actual voting.
But I am confident that you know that and are simply being a disengenuous troll.
Or perhaps you simply cannot read the many comments in this thread where several commenters report that their communities use modern tools like scanners to provide early returns for those interested in seeing them.
Oh, wait, I get it. In Alabama, bussing of voters so they can vote multiple times is not a problem so therefore it is not a problem in any state.
Provide evidence.
I provide experiential description of the statistically tiny effect of photo ID in majority minority precincts. That experience is repeated all over my state (Ohio, not one of your big blue states). That's the statistics all over the country, especially in "blue" states. Interestingly, the blue states that you so casually describe as not requiring photo ID also tend to be the most technogically advanced and tend to have a far smaller fractional population of limited-resource people.
The "semi-truck" rejoinder is cute. It is however simultaneously and obviously unresponsive. And galactically stupid. Countries with a functioning police force are generally characterized by having far more resources for ensuring a stable social environment which is the main reason for lower crime rates.