Same. I would look at that every time I was in the bathroom and wonder how they died. Did they suffocate from toxic gasses while exploring a cave? Maybe it was more gruesome like falling into a hot spring and getting boiled to death...
> The feds doing this for airfare was the best thing to happen for consumers shopping for flights.
They need to redo it for airfare, because the airlines have figured out how to workaround it by splitting out things that used to be included (seat assignment, baggage, etc). Some airlines now have sliding rates for bags and so you have to know the exact flight to get the price for checked or carry-on bags. Even if it's split out from the total, all of those *potential* fees should be available up-front as well.
It's really a treatise on good leadership and management from the perspective of a showrunner.
There are a bunch of great quotes, but this bit from 4th Law (Make decisions early and often) really hit home for me:
> But you know what "nice people" and "good bosses" actually do? They rip off the Band-Aid early, make the case for their decision, hear out any remaining arguments to a reasonable degree, then shut down the discussion and send everyone off to get on with their work.
Even worse than making the wrong decision is not making a decision at all, that's true in any leadership position.
Other sources I've seen are blaming the dramatic heat during the summer of 2019. It "scrambled the broader marine ecosystem" causing die-offs and migrations for many species of fish. Snow Crabs are primarily deep water scavengers so they had plenty of food that year, but have struggled since.
Some people don't want to hear that because it's counter to their world-view. Earth isn't warming. Everything is OK. We can continue burning fossil fuels while having zero impact to the environment. Is there a word describing this mass wishful thinking?
That mass wishful thinking is call “climate change denial”.
We keep adding more and more evidence that climate change is happening. Even on a local scale we can all see significant changes in our local climate from year to year. The older among us can see this even more clearly if they chose. From what we know of the atmosphere there HAS to be heating from the rapid increase in CO2.
You can stick your fingers in your ears as much as you want but it won’t prevent this from happening and at an accelerating pace.
The same people who get pumped up by football games and tailgaters, war epics, and 'badassery' and doing stupid but 'brave' things like shooting fireworks out your ass, are the same people who will deny anything that's 'too scary' not to.
Or attribute it to "God's will" and then still assume he'll take care of things so they can just go on ignoring the issues.
Reminds me of the cowardly lion who could talk a big game,but was inwardly afraid of everything. Even xenophobia and racism --it's ALL rooted in fear of 'others' fear of this. Politicians know damn well the power of fear, and have used it w/ great success to stay in power and keep left/right workers divided on stuff like abortion/gun rights.
Also the solutions being pushed kind of suck for most people. We’ve had 50 years of sustainability and eco-asceticism. Denial is a perfectly fine reaction to the solutions being proposed.
A dollar a gallon tax on gasoline would be more than enough to capture the CO2 it releases.
Other energy sources are similar.
These costs are way below what happens when some oil producer throws a tantrum or starts a war. However, unlike wars, etc., such a tax would directly cut into oil company profits.
Your crazy if you think the government isn't going to just piss that money away. Its already at ~$.50 a gallon with federal and state taxes. And the oil companies will just stop producing to lower supply and inflate the price. More taxes are going to hurt the individual , companies have enough money to get around it. No, we need a revolution.
The senior architects and principle engineers at my company have started scheduling focus hours as well as office hours for people to drop in and ask questions.
They were getting stretched pretty thin by being invited to design meetings for multiple different teams, and the office hours have been a great way to combat that burden. People drop in, ask some design questions and leave. Since there are usually multiple people waiting to ask questions it keeps the discussion short and focused instead of filling up a 30-60 minute meeting just because that's what was scheduled. It also lets the architect decide to schedule a focused design session if it's needed instead of letting others fill their calendars.
As the parent of a child with ADHD that is medicated, it seems completely plausible that it could cause depression. When my kid has had too high a dosage (or accidentally takes a double dose) she's like a zombie, completely flat affect, and very little motivation. It's like it drains her life away.
Part of the problem is that it's very difficult to get the right dosage for any given day because diet, metabolism, and hormones seem to have a big impact on how effective it is. We've found it's better to go with a lower-dose extended release, and then let her self-medicate with 5mg regular tablets as needed. This works great now because she's a fairly responsible teenager (when medicated), but it was really hard when she was younger.
Extended release (XR) is very nice, since it avoids the dopamine peaks and valleys caused by individual doses. I will say, generic XR is usually pretty crappy, since it basically breaks the dose into two parts. Name brand XR is better because they construct the pill to where there is an actual extended release. Which sucks, because it's super expensive as a result.
What I do instead is two lower-dose XR pills per day. The four hits over about 8 hours seems to work pretty well for me.
Extended release on the lower end of dosage + self-medicating with caffeine as a booster has been my go-to for about 15 years now. As an adult who's been taking it since middle school I can say that, while it's had its ups and downs, overall life is better with it than the times I've had to go without due to insurance disruptions or moving and having to find a new doctor who will prescribe it.
I share this experience myself, in particular the dosage not providing a consistent effect day to day - every specialist I've spoken has told me this is weird and shouldn't be happening and yet it is so. Switching to staged release medication (Medikinet CR) has helped me too.
Unfortunately extended release Methylphenidate of any kind/brand is only partially covered by Dutch health insurance[1], and I'm certain the cost is prohibitive for people who might be less well off.
1: In essence, the government has determined that all Methylphenidate variants are equal, and so you can just take the cheapest instant release variant or else pay the difference out of your own pocket.
I’ll be honest, I’ve been on adderall (with occasional periods off the drug) for almost 20 years now, and I’ve never experienced anything remotely approaching mania or severe depression (as distinguished from rare bouts of sadness). And I’ve not always been the most careful taker of the medication, frequently alternating between taking too much or lowering my dose.
I’m not saying it’s not possible to have those side effects, I just haven’t experienced them.
Everyone is certainly different; I know people on Adderall (or Vyvanse, which is similar) that have great outcomes, but Adderall gives me manic episodes, raises my resting heart rate by 20bpm, prevents me from sleeping, and causes mild hallucinations. I took it exactly once. Vyvanse had the same side-effects, but much milder and it lasted longer. I ended up on Focalin, which works and the only side effect is mild interference with my sleep.
> The bipolar-level manic highs and depression/lows are very real.
I've had to be very careful about NOT using those terms when talking to doctors and psychiatrists. As a layperson that description seems to fit, but it causes huge red flags for medical professionals and they freak out, resulting unnecessary tests and evaluations for my kid.
The key term for the "manic" phase after the meds wear off is "Rebound Effect". Also when the dose is too high the generally accepted term is "zombie mode" or "zombie-like". Calling it an "overdose" will really cause people to freak the fuck out.
There's big differences between drugs in the same family. Personally speaking Methylphenidate is much less intense and easier to fit into my normal life than the Lisdexamfetamine (which are probably closer to phentermine)
That’s not true. For example, a lot of Benadryl will make you hallucinate, but that doesn’t mean a normal dose will make you hallucinate a small amount.
Getting horribly fall down drunk as a teenager caused me to shit my pants once. But I didn’t so much as fart when I got tipsy on vacation recently.
I would absolutely be willing to bet that a small dose of Benadryl won't make someone hallucinate "a small amount".
Put it another way if makes you feel better -- a little bit of D3 via direct sunlight and D3 rich foods will improve your mood and health outcomes in a variety of ways. An excessive amount of D3 will give you kidney stones and harm your bones.
This is mostly just scaremongering, but even if I had a noticeable drop in intelligence from taking medication over multiple years, gaining the ability to actually schedule appointments in a calendar, to do focused research on topics that I'm interested in, and to build productive habits like eating regularly, exercising daily, and daily practicing skills I wanted to improve at -- would more than offset the downside.
It's one thing to be worried about subtle effects from medication, but I already know what the long term health and brain effects are from constant insomnia and regularly forgetting to eat. Neither of those are good for brain function.
So yeah, seems like a pretty reasonable risk to take, particularly given the fact that I have a psychiatrist, therapist, and multiple friends and family monitoring me.
Let me flip the question back to you. Would you notice if D3 or iron or protein intake was subtly harming you over the course of multiple years? Is that something that terrifies you?
Still wondering if you have the same concerns about the long-term effects of iron intake as you do about medications, or if you're somewhat selective about which long-term effects of chemicals in the body terrify you.
But yes, I do think the benefits for my mental health very clearly outweigh the theoretical risks you posit. So even if I agreed with what you're saying (which I don't), a subtle hammer tap to the soul is still very clearly and obviously better than the sledgehammer to the soul that is sleep deprivation (something that I concretely know would impact my brain function as I age and that I concretely know makes me less of myself). If that causes you to raise your eyebrows, then I'm not sure what to say other than that you're bad at risk analysis.
According to a coworker that had worked at IBM for a couple decades it was a great place to work until sometime in the mid 2000s. It was like they suddenly noticed how shitty Oracle was and decided that was the business model they needed to follow. Labeling older employees as "dinobabies" is a perfect example.
I visited IBM Austin a few times circa 2009-2011 to collaborate with an IBM employee on a project. Huge campus, absolutely completely dead at all times. I would come in through the main entrance, go past the security guard, and see nobody at all until I arrived in the lab space. The lab itself was a large workspace with all sorts of desks and project space, but the only employee in there was the guy I had come to see. Absolutely bizarre and an incredibly depressing place to be.
I used to work at IBM in the UK in the mid 2000s and this was fairly accurate at the UK offices too.
We'd joke that IBM stood for I'm By Myself as people would work from home 90% of the time - many would be mysteriously uncontactable/AFK during that time due to "unforseen circumstances" (theat seemed to happen all the time) ... it was very hard to get hold of people when they were WFH.
No regrets - it was a great start for me, but I am glad I left.
I co-oped at IBM Austin from 1986-1987, there were some pretty vacant spots then, too. One time a fellow co-op and I followed some full times around to explore and got stuck getting snacks in a break room because our keycards didn't unlock the door to the rest of the floor (kind of a fire issue there in hindsight) and we had to wait 10 minutes for someone to let us out.
This is because IBM had huge layoffs in the early 90s but kept the buildings. One upside is that everyone even co-ops got their own office. It was just as bureaucratic and political back then.
I knew researchers at IBM Almaden. They would avoid going in or duck out when the bean counters were around. The idea was to not draw attention to one's self and one's project for fear of being cut.
At the time, IBM also had a very strong focus on either hiring from east Asia or outsourcing / rerouting work to such.
That's when they went all-in on professional services as their primary go-to-market, chasing high buzzword quotient stuff that was meant to capture services revenue and lock into proprietary software. Remember WebSphere?
> Baseline demographic, lifestyle, and dietary data from the UK Biobank were used
This data is from the UK where coffee is still significantly less popular than tea. Would be interesting to see the mortality risk of coffee vs tea drinkers though.
I always wait for my coffee or tea to cool down a bit before drinking it for this very reason. Doesn't make it any less enjoyable, I don't understand how people develop a tolerance to scalding hot and won't even finish anything less. Such a weird cultural preference.
Even better on a hot day is iced coffee! Something about letting it end up at room temperature for a while alters the taste but if it just goes straight on ice it's kinda sweet on its own.
> I don't understand how people develop a tolerance to scalding hot
It's the same as with repeatedly touching hot things with your hands: The nerves deaden and eventually very hot stuff doesn't feel as hot anymore. For your mouth, this is not so handy I feel. I occasionally make mistakes that burn me quite badly, but I can't really tell when it's happening because my memory of a bad burn feels way worse than the reality currently does.
Edit: Actually it's not so handy on your hands either.
Isnt the British method of preparing tea and coffee to load it up with milk and cream immediately? Makes it so you can drink quickly and don’t have to wait for it to cool off.
(Source: am American and have watched one or two YouTube videos of how to prepare tea the British way)
>Isnt the British method of preparing tea and coffee to load it up with milk and cream immediately?
I feel like the potential health risks of doing this every day might be worse than the health risks of cancer caused by exposure to hot liquids, even if it's something as small as a bit of increased weight gain. (Especially since you can just wait for it to cool down a bit.)
The study found natural sweeteners also had a decrease in mortality (but artificial sweeteners did not - but probably because people choosing those already have health risks).
I get the sense after living in a country which produces incredible coffee for a while that it's about quality.
Like they're just covering up the bad taste.
You have to pay like 20$ a bag to get something that isn't bitter in North America. Here if you want bad coffee at a low price I guess you can buy instant?
I don't think green tea drinkers are putting many additives in there.
> you can break the trip up into "daytime travel", stay in a city like Chicago for a few days, and then "overnight" to the next city
My limited experience with Amtrak in the West or Midwest is that it's impossible to reliably plan like this. Amtrak is renting access to rails owned by freight carriers and constantly gets delayed or blocked by freight trains with higher priority.
Their "schedule" is an absolute best-case scenario that never actually happens. The trains usually arrive somewhere between 2-8 hours after the scheduled time, and occasionally it just doesn't show until the next day. They have an app that's supposed to give the "accurate" arrival time is often wildly off as well.
Chicago is the exception here, though. It's the core hub of the entire system, and there are no trains that pass through Chicago. A Chicago train will nearly always leave on-time, unless there are equipment issues.
Data-journalism is actually a thing, and bigger organizations like the New York Times have done some pretty impressive work building tools and training programs for their reporters.
It would bother me forever.