Mz

For small stuff, pick one thing and try to do it every day for three weeks. Once it is a habit, it should have momentum of its own. Rinse and repeat. (Keep a log book or you will forget and feel like nothing has changed.)

Negative thoughts can be more complicated. I will recommend you start by drinking a glass of water, having a bite to eat and/or taking a short nap. Negative thoughts can have multiple causes, but they tend to be more persistent when you are hungry, tired and thirsty.

For "bad habits," it generally works better to find a better way to meet your needs than to try to deny yourself something. For example, trying to eat healthier is generally a better approach to weight loss than restricting how much you eat.

Well, I know a lot about the subject. But it would help to know what sorts of behaviors you are looking to change.

because now it would now take 31.5 dominos.

Really minor nit: You could drop one of your nows.

Tangentially, my sons told me that when they start card tricks with an unopened pack of cards and strongly highlight that fact like it proves the cards have not been tampered with, the trick there is that card decks all start in the same order. So an unopened deck will come with a particular card order and they can know the order of the cards and can use that fact to help them with their card trick. It is part of how they fool the audience.

Your site is basically empty. Current content:

Welcome.

Hi, I'm Viktor. More to come, in the meantime you can contact me via twitter, linkedin, or via email at <my name> at <the domain this site is on>.

More links and a pgp key at Keybase.

Made with ️ in Nice.

Should say something more like:

Welcome.

Hi, I'm Viktor Vojnovski. I do (stuff you do, reasons why people would look for you online). You can also find me on twitter @vojnovski. Here is my linkedin profile. You can email me via ViktorVojnovski at <this domain name>.

I can also be found on Keybase.

Made with ️ in Nice, France.

As others have said, it really should be ViktorVojnovski.com.

Edited to reflect updated location info.

Re your update. My suggested edits don't add a lot more words. But they do replace completely empty fluff ("More to come, in the meantime ...") with actual useful info. That empty fluff is apparently also a lie if there is no intent to actually add more info.

My latest related thing, brand new. Still fleshing it out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15781531

Diet for a Small Planet also found that at the time the book was written, there were no countries incapable of feeding their people. Starvation mostly had roots in political problems, including civil war. It wasn't due to an absolute lack if food.

Sending food to starving countries often isn't a panacea. Frequently, the same political problems that caused the starvation in the first place prevent the food from getting distributed to the people who most need it. If it does get distributed, it can change the tastes of locals, who will now want to purchase a Western diet that they can't really afford. This leads to more hunger as people reject a diet of affordable local traditional foods and spend money on meat and wheat and other products beyond their means.

The first half of the book is a political piece. The second half is a vegetarian cookbook. It is one of the best books I have read.

I basically did the same thing. I developed a portable income and moved to a small town to get myself back into housing.

But most people can't just up and move wherever they want. The jobs are mostly in the expensive big cities. Even services like Task Rabbit, Amazon Flex or Uber are mostly only available in a short list of very large cities.

Meanwhile, we have torn down about 80 percent of SROs and the like and the default expectation is that young, single people should get a roommate. There is a dearth of genuinely affordable housing near jobs that would allow people to live alone and make ends meet working an entry level job. Those options mostly do not exist.

Pretending this isn't a problem because you found a solution that works for you is pretty LA LA LA not listening. Detroit has affordable housing because so many locals are in dire straits that a charity was created not that long ago to pay the water bills of people getting their water cut off: https://www.detroitwaterproject.org

So, basically, your life works because you saw opportunity amidst this debacle, not because everything is fine in the US.

There is one problem with your theory: There is a serious shortfall of affordable housing in the US. So a lot of Americans are having trouble affording even the basics.

The first industrial revolution shortened work weeks, in part to redistribute work. People worked really long hours. That was the norm. With automation, unemployment levels rose while those with jobs continued to work inhumanely long hours. Then people pushed for the 40 hour work week.

I think we can again work to lighten the burden of work for the average worker without disenfranchising large numbers of people.

I used to write about that on my old blog, but I probably won't continue to write about it. Here is at least a partial list of those writings:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html

Yes, in my experience, they are chronically infected and it is dangerous for me to be around them.

I imagine there are quite a few factors, but I think that is a good thought. Walking a great deal -- sometimes on the order of many hours a day -- has played a large role in my successful efforts to improve my health. I am convinced that moving lymph is a very big part of that.

No one is requiring you to do this. Why do you care (aka object) if some folks actually give a damn?

My father drank a lot. He quit after he left the army. I think he drank to suppress nightmares and he was able to quit -- without any kind of program, like AA -- once there was no threat of returning to a war zone.

I also have known people who were apparently drinking to treat some undiagnosed medical condition and drank less or quit drinking after the condition was properly treated.

I think it would help to assume you have some reason for drinking so much. Now you need to figure out why that is and try to solve the underlying problem.

I like the book "The truth about addiction and recovery" as a resource.

Best.

That's a very classist remark. It implies that having been poor completely nullifies the value of my opinions.

I mentioned being homeless as shorthand for "I used to go to homeless services, so when I say that most of them suck, that is firsthand testimony." I have also had a college class on homelessness and public policy, I have six years of college, yadda.

From what I understand, they are partially paralyzed. Every partially paralyzed individual I have personally met was pretty ill, basically. I have a compromised immune system. Being around paralysis victims is a big problem for me.

So, yes, I feel quite confident. Though what I know and what I can prove are very different things.

Edit: I will add that I have come to believe that breathing problems inherently impair the immune system. Oxygen is one of the things the body uses to kill stuff. If you can't breathe, you are pretty vulnerable to microscopic warfare. (Another thing I know but probably can't prove, fwiw.)

As far as I can tell, this is only an effort to create new parts, not find volunteer service people. If there are zero available parts, it is better to have parts than to not have them. No replacement parts = guaranteed death at some point. So, the way to bet here is to support the creation of replacement parts.

Helping out where their money really can make big difference.

First do no harm. We don't necessarily know what works. We have rich folks who are pro UBI and that ticks me off. I don't think it is a good solution. I think it just helps salve their guilt at helping to destroy jobs. I don't want their guilt salved. I want them to focus on redistributing work. We should view the trend towards automation as the Second Industrial Revolution, not the start of making most people charity cases dependent on a handful of "generous" rich people or some nonsense.

I was homeless for nearly 6 years. Most programs to help the homeless are completely sucky. I am against growing more homeless services. I am trying to come up with answers that shrink the problem of homelessness.

But a lot of people are not interested in shrinking the problem. Many are fine with growing it, because it serves some sick emotional need of theirs.

I recently talked to someone who wanted to 'share their vision' of taking over an entire downtown block with homeless services. I cut them off with "I have an appointment. I gotta go."

This person said they had "a heart for the homeless." Sounds more like some sick hard on for the homeless. That isn't actually caring about the welfare of other people. That's some twisted desire to make them feel good about themselves. If you care about other people, help them get off the fucking street. Come up with solutions that shrink homelessness, don't build more soup kitchens. Geez.

But solutions that shrink the problem of homelessness are hard to create. It is a hard problem to solve. In contrast, programs to "help the homeless" (like soup kitchens) are easy to dream up, but often help entrench the problem rather than resolve it.

No matter who you are, trying to find something that actually works is challenging.

Bill Gates said that automation of an efficient system magnifies the efficiency. Automation of an inefficient system magnifies the inefficiency.

I think that same paradigm applies to throwing money at problems. I would hate to guilt rich folks into throwing more money at programs that actually make the problems worse and entrench them. They can just keep stuffing it under their mattress or whatever until we have some concepts for how to actually improve things. Then someone can go try to convince rich folks to invest money in real solutions.

There are multiple articles readily found about complications of using positive pressure:

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/581344_7

http://www.mdedge.com/ecardiologynews/dsm/5224/hospital-medi...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2199002

To my mind, this is actually related:

https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/54084/Why-I-m-Not-a-Fan-...

One of the problems you run into with any lung related mechanical devices is the need for proper sterilization. From what I gather, this is much less of an issue with negative pressure ventilation.

People in iron lungs are people with fundamentally compromised immune systems. Exposing them to germs forced into their lungs by positive pressure while potentially damaging their lung tissues in the process strikes me as a great way to give them a deadly infection, sooner or later.

If necessary, do it cheaply. This does not have to involve 5 star hotels. It used to be a tradition to do things like backpack across Europe. Couch surfing also potentially works. I did a lot of travel by visiting friends and family in my twenties.

Discussion of logistical details on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/933619850806620167 (Potentially NSFW as this is Naomi Wu, aka @RealSexyCyborg)

I was under the weather yesterday, so barely spent any time online. I am surprised to see replies here.

The use case:

TLDR:

I am stopping the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I am definitely going to be doing something else intended to be generally useful for homeless Americans. I am debating also separately curating a list of local homeless resources, but I have reservations about putting it out there for the whole world to see as I fear that may serve as an attractive nuisance. Due to the intended target audience, it seems to me that sign ups and a network likely won't work. So I wonder if there are ways to mostly limit it to locals from my end, even if the walls are leaky and imperfect.

Longer:

While homeless, I started a blog to keep track of information for me that I needed because the state of the art was paper handouts, often filled with inaccurate information.

I went with a blog because: Papers make me sick. If you get rained on, they stop being readable. And when you are homeless, you have to carry everything you own all the time everywhere, so every piece of paper was one more thing to carry.

Most websites for homeless services are donor facing. In other words, the main thrust of the website is to tell you "We do good work. Please give us money, donate goods and/or volunteer." So even if the agency has a website, it is incredibly challenging for an actual homeless person to go online and find out what services are available locally. Thus, my site attracted organic traffic even at a time when I had abandoned it and there were zero updates and zero attempts to promote the site because it was client facing: it listed information useful to actual homeless people looking for resources.

I am not going to be updating the site further. I am leaving it up for now, but I don't want to promote it further.

The longer the site went on, the more I tried to write generally useful information rather than location specific information. However, the name of the location is in the name of the site. This causes two problems: 1) People outside of the area see it as not relevant to their needs and 2) alternately, homeless people take the existence of the site as a suggestion to move there.

I am again in an area with a fairly large homeless population. Locals here have voiced the opinion that the homeless are attracted to the area because there are services here. That may be a factor, but I think a more likely root cause is that it has relatively temperate weather for the state of Washington. January average lows are around 34 degrees. In Spokane and other parts of the state, average January lows are in the low to mid twenties.

Most homeless services, like soup kitchens, are useful for helping people survive a crisis. But they tend to do a poor job of helping people solve their problems in order to establish a stable middle class life. To be fair, the kinds of problems that lead to homelessness are not easily resolved. But this situation means that accessing homeless services comes with a danger that you just get good at being a freeloader. This can actively undermine the pursuit of self sufficiency.

When I was going to homeless services, it exposed me to germs and cigarette smoke and other health hazards, which undermined my efforts to get well enough to work and support myself. Most "practical" conversation amongst the homeless was about things like where to get another free meal or other charity, not about things like how to make money while homeless.

It can take two hours of standing in line to get a free meal. If you do that three times a day, you have spent six hours just on staying fed. That is six hours you can't job hunt or otherwise try to solve your problems.

The more talented you get at accessing homeless services, the more stuck you can become, in part because of how they are structured. They figure your time as a poor person isn't worth anything, so you should be okay with taking two hours to get a meal. Worse, many of them assume you are an alcoholic or addict, so they may subconsciously figure that the more of your time they waste, the less time you will spend getting high.

While homeless, I figured out what kinds of things were genuinely helpful to me, things that helped me survive in the here and now while also helping me move towards my goals of self sufficiency rather than helping to keep me stuck. I want to keep writing about those things.

But I have very mixed feelings about once again curating a list of local services. On the one hand, I think there is need for this information. On the other hand, I worry that broadcasting it worldwide may do more harm than good.

Since all locations in the US seem to do an equally poor job of putting out client facing websites for serving the poor, it seems to me that simply creating a site with good client facing information potentially creates an attractive nuisance. If you are homeless and trying to find what you need locally is a constant uphill battle, but you can go online and find a curated list of resources in some other city, even if it is quite far away, it may be vastly easier to just hop a bus or hitchhike to that city than to keep knocking on doors and getting paper handouts locally and trying to painstakingly piece together information and solutions.

So, I am wondering if making it hard to find a list of resources if you are outside the region would be a means to get information into the hands of locals without potentially attracting freeloaders from far flung corners of the US.

I am 52 years old. I have read a lot of stuff over the years on a wide variety of subjects, from research into women's issues to social psychology to negotiation books. I also did a bunch of therapy in my teens and twenties to sort out my own issues.

I wish I had a short list of reading recommendations for you to sum this stuff up in a nutshell. I don't. I blog about what I think about such things because I am still trying to sort it all out myself and I don't know of anyone or anything that yet has it all figured out.

I imagine you would find it weird if you mentioned it in passing while commenting on a different topic and there was some pile on of people insisting you owed them more information about every face painting incident in your entire life because face painting is illegal in your country and also something done a lot by (insert salacious group description).

And even if you are totes cool with that, why do care so very much that I am not? Why do feel so compelled to insist that I owe people answers to personal questions merely because they asked?

Is that really a precedent you want to set? If so, I would like to know your net worth and the log in credentials for your bank account. Please and thank you.

It is intrusive because people are asking for additional details about me. It isn't relevant because it really has nothing to do with the process of managing drug withdrawal.

It might help to make this about feminism, if she is into that sort of thing.

I am a woman. I was a homemaker for a lot of years. Getting a public life has been a difficult experience. In spite of spending most of my life around the military and being fairly savvy about information security, I still did incredibly dumb stuff for the longest time.

I have only recently concluded that this is at least partly rooted in how women get socialized differently from men. Women are expected to give other people access to us in a way men are not. We are actively groomed in many ways to be professional victims. I see her behavior as rooted in that type of socialization. She doesn't like being targeted, yet can't imagine doing anything to protect herself.

Maybe reading up on some of the current buzz words (if you don't already know them), like emotional labor, and rolling your eyes at how she is letting companies take advantage of her, just like rape culture trains girls to let men take advantage of them will be a hook that opens up productive discussion.

(Try to tread lightly. Custom fit to your situation. Other provisos likely apply.)

Best.

If you have left a lot of personal information on Facebook, it is kind of the nature of the beast. They require your real name. They ask lots of personal details upon sign up. The profile grills you about your entire life, from where you were born to where you went to school to where you live and work.

HN does none of that. So, to me, it seems like a really different situation.

I have, but I don't know much about it, so I am unclear what relevance that has to the discussion. My hand wavy understanding is that a) people sometimes use it to try to break addiction and b) this sometimes goes very bad places. (Correct me if I am wrong.)

My understanding is that marijuana does not have a big downside, so it strikes me as a better thing to pursue here.

No, they aren't being helpful, and neither are you. It is lurid interest, at best. I don't owe anyone additional details about it. It isn't relevant to the discussion and I am being down voted for not wanting to answer what are essentially intrusive personal questions. Plus you called me a troll in your other comment, which only emphasizes that your intent here is not positive and not respectful. I am feeling very much like this entire thing has a malicious element to it. None of the comments here are any kind of good faith engagement of my main point.

You don't need to contact support. The "let us know" link goes to the deletion confirmation page.

It is stupidly worded, perhaps intentionally so to discourage deletions, but I just did this recently.

People who are genuinely making a good faith effort to be helpful don't promptly call people trolls (or bots or other names). Name-calling is never evidence of genuine desire to do a person a good turn.

My allergies are not really all that pertinent to the point I am making other than to emphasize that I have no plans to consume marijuana myself, so my position has no ulterior motive wrt me wanting access to marijuana personally. So I have to wonder why on earth that is getting questioned. I have concluded no good will come of me cooperating with answering intrusive personal questions that aren't really even pertinent to the discussion.