TAM_cmlx

Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.

Can I live in your simple universe?

Speaking as someone who was homeless for ~5 years, I could have told Amazon exactly how this would play out. The vast majority of the homeless are drunks, addicts, mentally ill, and fantastically stupid (who think they're geniuses). What do you think is going to happen when you hire such people?

Original link was to slashdot, I think. AVG said "Could be a Trojan Horse Host" and then gave me a cheerful green bar and said, "Threat has been successfully removed."

As a possible note of interest, I had to disable AVG in order to read this article.

Two years ago this October I was homeless. I would wander around all night for fear of attacks[1] and try to sleep during the day at the university while sitting on a bench or chair. In October the winter shelters had not yet opened here, and it was so cold I feared I would freeze to death. I wandered into ER on a pretext: there was a swelling in my leg, spider bite maybe?

I overheard the intake person talking with someone: "I'm worried about that guy in #68." Why? "He thinks he's got a spider bite, but he's got blood clot written all over him."

I felt pretty good about that; it meant I'd have a place to sleep for a whole night. Then I was suddenly surrounded by 5 or 6 people.

Symptoms, sir?

Sometimes slurred speech, tingling in the extremities, can't spell anymore, confused by the way people talk so _fast_, confused by simple things, excessively paranoid, feels like there's an Ace bandage wrapped around my chest.

You're a junkie. No. You're exclusively vegetarian. No. You're diabetic. No, I've been tested for that. Well, we'll take a blood draw.

I got an ultrasound over my legs -- and they discovered a DVT. Next thing I knew, they'd slapped me in hospital for eight days. I was put on no less than eight medications, the scariest of which was Coumadin (same as Warfarin, I think?) -- scary because they made me watch a video describing it, by which I mean "You follow these instructions to the letter or you gonna die, son." At least that's what it felt like. And I had to sign all kinds of waivers, or something. Two of the residents (very young women) told me that they had had DVT's themselves... possibly as a result of being exclusively vegetarian?

The diagnosis was: Pernicious Anemia. My understanding (which is not to be trusted) is that the myelin sheathing around my nerves has been dissolving for years. Apparently the communicating tissue between the axons in my brain had been going away for quite some time.

I liked this diagnosis because: it's easily treatable; it explains my increasingly weird behavior; I'm not dead from it.

The treatment is: Take B12 every day for the rest of my life.

The highly-abbreviated coda to the story is: My Doctor told I'd had this disease for at least ten years(!); hospital got me a case manager, who got me Disability, Homed, and a Laptop. But it took 2 years or so.

TLDR: Being exclusively vegetarian can cause DVT's

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM6WrqLMJrQ