thinkharder

From the LA Times article: "At one point the members broke into two groups, each standing around separate pianos to sing.". If you've ever watched a choir practice, this likely meant everyone facing inward toward the piano, and you can't stand too far apart because you need to hear everyone else to harmonize and adjust your volume. Singing loudly is probably only second to sneezing in terms of projecting atomized 'stuff' from the respiratory tract into the air. So there were 30 people standing in a circle spraying droplets directly at each other.

It may very well be that it's very easy to spread this virus, but I don't think this incident is a good indication of that. It seems more an indication of how poorly even well-intentioned people understood the contagiousness and what exactly social distancing meant at the time this happened (1 month ago).

I think both the multiple app store and 'apple isn't responsible for promoting your app' are both red herrings. The issue is that the search function in the app store lies to end users. To use the example in the article, if I go to the app store and search for "weigh loss tracker" I get 5 result, none of which is Happy Scale. The default sort is 'relevance', whatever that means, but i can change that to Most Popular. Still no Happy Scale. If I search for "Happy Scale" i get no result. From my perspective as an end user of the App Store, I'm being lied to. The search is not returning honest results that correspond to what I search for. This is not what the end user expects of search, they expect true organic results based on what they searched for, or at worst, a complete list with the apps Apple wants to promote at the top. In this case they are getting a curated subset of those results and not being told this is the case. Also, consider that the app store is unusable without search. There are million of apps, so is no way to browse it to find what you're looking for. If search doesn't return it, it might as well not exist in the app store.

Unless this is thoroughly explained somewhere in the dev documentation, then developers are being lied to also.

People threw a fit when Google changed the search result UI so that it became impossible to tell paid results from organic results. This is similar but worse. Google just put the paid results above the organic ones. Apple completely removes the organic results at their whim.

The author should have been promoting the app thru multiple channels and not relying on the app store search exclusively, this was an obvious mistake. This doesn't justify what Apple did though. It's their app store, and they can do what they want, but this, although legal, is pretty sleazy IMO.

I have a tendency to let frustration build up until I lose my temper. The issue is that I don't realize I'm doing it until I'm ready to explode. My last dog was so sensitive to that, that she could tell when I was starting to get angry before I would realize it. I would be sitting at my computer, struggling with something, and I'd feel her poke me in the leg with her nose, then I knew it was time to take a break. I think she could hear that i was typing 'harder' when I got angry, but it could have been any one of a lot of tiny signals. Point is, she was consistently aware of me getting angry before I was. I miss that dog...

Most MDM's install both a cert and a profile on iOS devices that allow the MDM admin to do just about anything. Any company-owned device is going to come to the user with this pre-installed, and non-removable by the user. I'd be astounded if a company the size, and with the security stance of Tesla didn't use the most intrusive MDM available.

Actually, in the US "Abandoned Vehicle" is a legal thing and depending on local laws you might very well be able to claim, and get title to a vehicle that has been abandoned on your property. And the abandonment period can be really short, 48 hrs in some states. It depends on your state's definition of "abandoned vehicle", and local laws, and it will probably require a few trips to the DMV and might require filing in small claims court, but there is a legal process for gaining ownership of a vehicle that has been left on your property.

Same for any lost property, if you find something valuable (wallet full of cash), you generally have to turn it in to the police, and there is a notification process to try to find the owner, and after a period of time (generally 3 months), if no one has claimed it, it's yours. Again, local laws are going to differ, but the general legal concept, that "A finder of property acquires no rights in mislaid property, is entitled to possession of lost property against everyone except the true owner, and is entitled to keep abandoned property."[1] is common.

There's some old saying about possession being 9/10ths of the law....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost,_mislaid,_and_abandoned_p...

The definitions of equanimity and disassociation sound really similar, but they are very different things. In Equanimity, you feel a connection to everything, with the sense of self and ego diminished or completely removed. In Disassociation, you feel disconnected from everything, floating free and completely alone. To be honest, I've never experienced equanimity, so I'm going off the descriptions I've read and had explained to me, in my own attempts at mindfulness meditation. Disassociation, I've experienced multiple times. It tends to happen when one is in an extremely stressful emotional state, and it's a big relief when it happens in that context, but it's a self-defense strategy, and not a healthy state. I suspect you could achieve it accidentally when trying for equanimity, but it isn't equanimity.

That's what is known as 'feed corn' and is grown specifically as livestock feed. The specific strains of corn are optimized for producing maximum plant material, which is mostly stalk and leaves. A field of feed corn plants will usually be very tall, 8-15 feet. In contrast a field of sweet corn (grown for human consumption and possibly for processing into other foods), will be much shorter, since it's optimized to produce the most, largest and highest sugar content corn kernels, and any energy the plant spends to grow a tall stalk is wasted.

Feed corn is harvested with big combines that just cut down the whole plant at ground level and chop everything up. The results are piled up and left to ferment. Once fermented, you have silage.

I'd be surprised to learn anyone was harvesting sweet corn and saving the waste material to make silage. The equipment isn't designed to keep that stuff it just gets dumped back onto the field. And those strains of corn don't produce very much plant material since they're optimized for small plants and big cobs. Additionally you'd have to load all the waste material into trucks, which would significantly raise the cost of harvesting. And dumping that stuff back onto the field is a good thing, it helps keep the dirt down for the winter and decomposes into usable nutrients and fibrous material which helps reduce compacting, etc. It'd be expensive and labor intensive to try to capture the waste material from feed corn. It's easier and more economical to just plant feed corn or buy silage.

You're right about straw, though. The harvesters are specifically designed to leave the straw in row pile behind them. Then you run a baler over that and it leaves a row of straw bales in the field. Then you run a stacker over that (or a flatbed trailer and buck 'em by hand) and you have a haystack.

I had a good friend who just had open "hang out" time every day after work in his garage. There was a group of about 30 friends who might stop by any time between 5 and 8 PM, have a beer, hang out and BS. Sometimes it was just Paul and 1 or 2 others, sometimes 15 people showed up, sometimes Paul wasn't even there, but the garage was always open (if you had the code). I used to go almost every day between work and home, it's how i made about half the friends I have now. It was also where weekend plans got made and many a hunting/fishing/camping trip got planned there.

That's over now and I really miss it. Buddy had some health problems and ended up with an overwhelming opiate addiction and just stopped hanging out with anyone. Some of the friends still get together for a weekend poker game but it's not the same. It was so cool to have a place you could go hang out after work where you knew everyone was fun to be around and they liked having you around. You never know who would be there or what the conversation would be but it was always a good time.

I've tried to get the same thing going myself, but have never been successful. I'm not sure how you get that started. Once it's going, it's self-sustaining, but you have to reach a critical mass of participants and has to occur really regularly, even daily. I think maybe it takes a very specific kind of person to be the host.

Anyway, that's what the OP's campfire analogy made me think of. I really miss it...

I had a similar experience. I show up at the ER and they do their thing. Doctor says, "the symptoms indicate appendicitis, but the tests (which are mostly just poking you in the side and seeing how bad it hurts) are inconclusive. Normal procedure is to send you home and see how it goes, but I'd really feel more comfortable if we took a CT scan to be sure". At this point I'm in so much pain if he said he wanted to do a voodoo ceremony, I'd have been all in. CT scan reveals I had a weirdly shaped appendix, hidden behind a couple of folds of intestine, in a slightly different area than they are usually in. So the poking test didn't work cause they were poking around in the wrong area. If they'd sent me home I'd have come back with a burst appendix, which is potentially fatal. Ironically, just as they were wheeling me into the operating room, a woman came into the ER with an actual burst appendix so they wheeled me out and took her first.

I had a dog who started having a runny bloody nose all the time. 4 xrays, 2 nasal endooscope procedures and several thousand dollars and still can't figure out what's wrong. In desperation took him to a really good emergency/surgery vet clinic, they did a CT scan and it reveals a large tumor growing on the nasal cavity side of the soft palate. Confirmed with an endoscope going into the mouth and back up into the sinuses, couldn't see it from the front. Super frustrating because it was too late to do anything at this point.

I think using CT scans in the context of a checkup, to look for problems, is bad, because as discussed elsewhere on this thread, if you go looking for something, you'll find something. But if you already know there is a problem, they're the best tool we have for looking inside the body without cutting.

I started to reply to thinking there was a federal minimum speed limit but decided I should confirm what I believed and glad I did because I was wrong. In the US, states have full control over the speed limits that are set on both the state hwys and the interstate freeways within that state. That said, I'm pretty sure every freeway I've ever been on had a posted minimum 45mph speed limit, and bikes are not allowed.

Whether or not speed variances between vehicles increase accidents doesn't seem to be clear. With a quick search I found this(1) that indicates that speed variances don't play a role in causing accidents. I also found this (2), which says "that the greater the difference between a driver’s speed and the average speed of traffic—both above and below that average speed—the greater the likelihood of involvement in a crash". And I found this (3) which basically says the speed limit should be set at the 85th percentile of what everyone is driving. Kind of like how you should build sidewalks where people walk ("Don’t make any walkways this year. At the end of the year, look at where the grass is worn away. That shows where the students are walking. Then just pave those paths"), set the speed limit at the speed most people drive.

Everywhere in the US I've lived, the max speed limit laws were written like "whatever speed is safe for current conditions up to a maximum of XX Mph" So you can get a speeding ticket for going slower than the posted limit if conditions are bad. I've actually been pulled over going well under the posted max speed limit during a hard snow storm.

(1) https://www.caee.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman/public_html/TRB04... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve (3) http://onlinemanuals.txdot.gov/txdotmanuals/szn/determining_...

Exactly. A couple of years ago at my yearly eye checkup found a small hole in my retina. Pretty common with near-sighted people. The eyeball is elongated and this stretches the retina a little bit. It's also a fast track to complete blindness in that eye. You might see the hole as distortion in your vision, depending on where in your eye it is, or you may not be able to see it at all. If untreated the whole retina will detach and you are permanently blind in that eye, and there's no treatment. If I hadn't gone to that yearly checkup, there's a good chance I would have been blind in that eye before the next one.

The treatment for the hole in the retina was one of the most awesome procedures I've ever had. The doctor puts on this big headset that completely covers his face, with multiple microscope-type lenses and a visible green laser shooting out the front. Looks like the borg. He holds your eye open and using the visible laser to aim, points at the edge of the hole and activates the IR laser, blap, blap, blap (it actually makes that sound) as it stitches the edge of the hole down. It feels like you're getting poked in the eye hard each time so he has to stop after a few cause your eye freaks out and moves. Wait a few seconds till it settles down and continue. My eye felt like it had been punched hard, but that faded by the end of the day. Repair is still holding coming up on 3 years.

Go to to your annual medical checkups.

How much farmland did you drive thru as a kid vs now? I live in a small city and never get bugs on the windshield or grill. When I drive out of town and thru the surrounding farmland there are tons of them. To be fair, though, I grew up in farming country and it there used to be way more than there are now if my memory serves me. It does appear that there are fewer total insects in those areas. The farmers are getting better at controlling them, I think.

70 Calories of chocolate is about 11-12g of (70-85%) dark chocolate, or 12-13g of Milk Chocolate(1). Chocolate's LD50 is approximately 1000g/Kg(2). So basically your body weight in chocolate. It's the theobromine that kills you, same as dogs, but they're much more sensitive to it. And it strongly depends on the kind of chocolate, pure cocoa is much higher in theobromine than milk chocolate: So 5 oz of Cocoa powder ~= 8.6 oz of Baking chocolate ~= 26 oz of Semi-sweet ~= 27oz of dark chocolate ~= 59 oz of Milk Chocolate ~= 3583 oz of White chocolate.(3) (White chocolate has no cocoa powder in it, just cocoa butter.) Note that these comparisons are of just the theobromine content, not the the 'healthy' stuff in chocolate.

I have personally tested this back when my metabolism was young by eating 2 pounds of Hershey's Kisses in one evening with no ill effects. :)

I don't think we know that much about flavonols, quercetin is the most studied and most of the studies used a 1000 mg/day dose, but I don't find any info about a most effective or maximum dosage.(4)

The reason to eat chocolate is cause it tastes fucking awesome. If you're trying to eat it for your health I feel sad for you. ;-)

1.)http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-average-all-bra... 2.)http://blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience/2012/02/14/the-curiou... 3.)http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/10/pets/chocolate-cha... 4.)https://examine.com/supplements/cocoa-extract/

As someone who lives in a state with state-run liquor, this is the exact opposite of how it actually plays out. Prices are anywhere from 30-100+% more than across the border in a state without a state-run liquor policy. Because the government has a monopoly there is no competition to drive prices lower and since the government monopoly gets to keep the profit there is no incentive for them to lower prices. Furthermore, a big part of the reason that liquor is state-run where it is, with few, scattered stores that close at 7:00 PM and on Sunday and holidays, is to encourage reduced alcohol consumption. Raising prices is an effective mechanism for that too.

I think if you set up these kind of government-run dispensaries, you have to mandate that their purpose is ensuring product and supply chain quality (not just making fat bags of cash), and that revenue above COGS has to be restricted to what it costs to run the program and maybe a small emergency/maintenance fund. Otherwise the natural incentive that apply to any monopoly encourage them to raise prices to the max the market will bear and rent-seek. It's civically conscientious to think that the government would be advocating for the people by working to proved the lowest possible prices, but that isn't how any government-run 'vices' dispensary program I've ever seen plays out IRL.

"If they punch you in the face your options are:" "Ok so how do you de-escalate when the perp charges for you?"

In both the scenarios you present, it is far to late to draw anything. By the time the person is punching or charging you from less than 22 feet away (google the 21 foot rule) you do not have time to draw a weapon, taser or baton. Your only option at that point is direct physical altercation. If you try to draw something it's going to get knocked out of your hand during the altercation and then it's a scramble to see who picks it up. As for getting the weapon taken away from you, while it's in the holster, cops really, really ought to be using and training with level 2 or 3 retention holsters. These make it easy (if you train with it) to draw a weapon from a holster on your hip, but almost impossible to get the weapon out when it's on someone else. If a cop chooses not to use a retention holster, that's their choice, but it's trading safety for convenience.

As to the Prevention article, it seems to me that if we want to reduce the number of cops killed with guns, then the low hanging fruit is that we need to stop sending lone officers to domestic disturbance calls. This study makes it clear that DD calls are an extremely risky type of call and police should approach them extremely carefully. " they would be ambushed and they weren't prepared," Swedler says. No less-lethal weaponry is going to solve that problem.

The point I and others are trying to is that there are very few scenarios where using a taser actually makes sense. Most of the time when they get deployed it's as an alternative to deescalation, or to punish a perp for not 'complying'. They're not intended as a substitute for a firearm, they're a substitute for a baton or physically taking down a suspect, and I think the evidence at this point is pretty clear that they are not any better at being less-lethal.

But to get back to the subject of the article, the issue isn't cops using tasers (although there are issues there), the problem we're having is that Taser the company is inappropriately inserting themselves into the legal process, and using bad 'science' and the threat of lawsuits to prevent the actual real-world safety of their product from being analyzed. This is bad and wrong, I think we can all agree.

These aren't packs of feral chihuahuas we're talking about, the adult (american) grey wolf mean weight is 88 Lbs, they can weigh up to 180. Imagine an animal almost as large as you, who's very purpose for existence is to predate mammals much larger than itself. Now imagine being surrounded by 20 of them and aware of the fact they have evolved to hunt cooperatively, to take down ungulates that can weight 5-10 times what they do. You are going to maybe get 1, 2 (if god himself intervenes) shots off with your bolt action 30-06 before they swarm you and literally tear you to pieces. If you had your back to a cliff and a M134 Minigun, you might have a chance. Luckily they mostly choose not to hunt humans, but it ain't because they wouldn't be successful. They just have easier prey most of the time.

When you were thinking about fear, were you thinking about an actual threat, or an imaginary one? Was it something realistically possible, something that has caused you fear in the past, or something theoretically possible, like getting in a car accident. I tried the exercise and it took me about 30 seconds to work myself into a minor panic attack, and a couple of minutes to walk that back. I'm in the process of buying a home and didn't leave myself enough time between the offer and when I needed to deliver the earnest money check to make the bank transfers into the checking account I needed to do so the check will clear. Thinking about that creates enormous anxiety in me. Working out of it involves logically walking myself thru the steps, the possible outcomes, and what I need to do in the event of each outcome. Basically, if I deliver the check today and they deposit it same day, it won't clear until tomorrow, giving the transfers just enough time to get completed. I"m still slightly nervous about it, but it was easy to ramp that way the hell up. It was less easy, but completely possible to ramp it back down by thinking it thru.

"Emotions play a huge role in anxiety and really cannot be ignored or just reasoned away. They need to be experienced. They need to be felt and expressed. And once they are, logic is a useful tool, as you said, to dive into them and think more about why you are feeling that way."

You are totally right there. What i learned in CBT: you experience emotions. Period. You have no control over whether or not you feel them, and if you try to repress them they will force their way out in weird and inappropriate ways. Emotions cause physical feelings in the body. Fear gives you that pit in your stomach, the FFF reflex fires up and your body prepares to flee, fight or freeze. As you experience the physical sensations, it provokes cognitive thoughts, and the combination of feelings and thoughts will produce actions. Each of these things feed back into each other either reinforcing them or diluting them. You may take actions that produce more fear, or actions that make you feel safer. Your thoughts may reinforce your emotions or calm them down.

For me the big revelation was that there was a separation between emotions and feelings. To me they were literally the same thing. Understanding this concept has allowed me to find a tiny bit of space between experiencing the emotion and the physical sensations it provoked. That allows me (sometimes) to drive a wedge of logical thought in between them and experience the emotion, without it uncontrollably driving physical sensations that then uncontrollably drive thoughts that feed back into the emotion, creating a vicious cycle. It's true that you can't just tell yourself "stop being afraid". But there are a lot of cognitive things you can do to temper and interrupt the anxiety cycle. For me, it's not easy, takes a ton of work, but it DOES work, and it has changed the way I view life and my place in it in enormous positive ways.

That's not a question, it's a textbook example of the complex question fallacy, which is dishonest rhetorical trickery. Also useful if you just want to insult someone but pretend you're asking a question. If a person was just interested in the guys relationship with his brother, they'd ask "how come your relationship with your brother is so trash?", without the loaded accusation at the end.

It's the same category as "so, have you stopped beating your wife yet?"

No the op, but for me 50mg nortriptyline daily is the no-migraine magic. Been thru most of the other available meds and nothing worked, except zomig, which you take after onset and for me, relived the pain, but none of the other symptoms. Nortriptyline is a really old tricyic antidepressant/nerve pain med, with pretty low risk of interaction/bad reaction. Without it I have clusters of 2-6 migraines over 4-5 days every 3-6 weeks. If you don't get them regularly, you may not want to have to take something every day, but if you get them with any frequency, it's a million times worth it. I can miss up to 2 sequential doses without problem but if I miss 3 or 4 I will get a migraine every time.

Best of luck.

I think the obvious big difference between microorganisms like polio or smallpox and insects like mosquitoes is that the microorganisms aren't really part of the food chain, they don't have predator species that rely on them for a food source. Mosquitoes, on the other hand, are food for many other species, birds, bats, other insects, and completely removing them from the environment, removes that food source from those other species. It's possible that the predator species would expand their use of other food sources (possibly, outcompeting other species for those sources), or that they'd continue on in reduced numbers. Or it's possible that removing mosquitoes starts a domino effect, where former predator species go extinct (and their predators do the same or switch food sources), or enter into more intensive competition for other food sources, resulting in competing species either going extinct, finding new food sources (there's the domino effect again), or reducing population numbers.

We've done it with other animals (passenger pigeon) without the world ending, but I smell unintended consequences... Something as ubiquitous as the mosquito is hooked into the ecosystem in a lot of ways.

I think it depends a lot on your personality. My best friend and I used to be a lot alike in this way. We were both really shy, had trouble socializing, especially dating. It was a big part of why we are such good friends. A few years ago he started going out to the bars after work almost every day. It started as an attempt to maintain a relationship with a girlfriend who liked hitting the bars, but after they broke up, he discovered that he really liked it. He talks to the bartenders, he talks to the guy at the next stool. He'll wander around the bar, pick out the most interesting looking person and strike up a conversation. He has completely overcome the social anxiety. I, on the other hand, don't like the bars. It's generally too noisy, lots of distraction, and because I'm at the bar for the purpose of "meeting people" it seems more high-stakes than it really is. I've had really good luck with the kind of casual conversations you describe, the cashier at the store, the girl at the coffee shop, the guy standing on the street corner who's obviously lost.... I had a 20 min conversation with a complete stranger last Sunday I met walking my dog. "Hey, that's a beautiful dog, what breed is it?" was all it took to start. There are a million opportunities to interact with other human beings every day. What works for me is each day, picking a few very low risk opportunities to start a conversation, and really going for it. For some reason at the bar, I get shot down once and I'm done. YMMV and all that......

As someone who has had, what sounds like a very similar experience to yours, I understand and feel your pain. Folks who have never had to deal with it think it's as simple as going to the doctor. Folks who live in SV tend to forget that in the vast majority of the rest of this country, good mental health help is really hard to get. Outside of the major US cities, your typical family doctor has about the same level of understanding of mental health issues as he has about quantum physics, but he thinks he knows everything he needs to about it. And the vast majority of Mental Healthcare professionals require a referral from your PCP or they won't take you as a patient. The scenario typically goes like this: I go see my Primary Care Physician and complain about depression or some other mental health issue. He listens for a couple of minutes then wants to prescribe zoloft (or celexa or whatever). I ask about seeing a Psychiatrist and get something like "well, he's just going to have his intern ask you a bunch of questions then prescribe the same drug I would..." I ask about seeing a Psychologist, and after some pushing he grudgingly gives me a referral. The psychologist is a really bad fit with me, and isn't helping so now I've got a open-ended prescription for zoloft and no fucking help. Been thru slight variations of the same theme with 3 different primary care doctors. And no, I don't really think any of them believed I actually had a problem, but they'll give endless supplies of zoloft et al., to anyone, for any reason. And they'll happily prescribe it for you forever, without also setting you up with some form of counseling, which is specifically warned against in the drug literature.

What I finally had to do, was talk to a close friend who knows a lot of Mental Health practitioners, partly from using their services, partly from the fact this guy knows everyone in town. He was able to call a friend who is a retired Psychiatrist, who was able to help find someone who would take me without a referral, and further refer me to a good psychologist. There's also the issue that most insurance plans have pretty crappy coverage for this stuff. And since I can't get an in-network referral to an in-network doctor, I'll be paying for most of this out of pocket.

My advice, for the little it's worth, is first... Don't Give Up. It's a fucking absurd pain in the ass, but it is possible to overcome. Think about finding a doctor the same way you would about hiring an employee, that's basically what you're doing. Use your social network, do you know anyone who is in a high-risk group for depression or other mental health issues? It's likely you know someone who has struggled with this and just never said anything. Ask around. It sucks to have to reveal yourself that way, but it's really not as bad as it seems in one's imagination. You will probably be surprised how many people not only get it, but want to help. Try a doctor out, if he isn't working, fire his ass and get another. No different than hiring a contractor. It's easy to load a lot of emotion into the process, but avoid doing this and stick to business. And try not to get sucked into the psychiatry vs psychology wanking contest. They're different approaches, have different tools, and different efficacies for different issues. CBT is great for moderate depression. There's much less evidence it's helpful for ADHD. There's a whole class of medication that's quite effective for ADHD. There's much less evidence that zoloft and friends are useful long term for depression. Extrapolate that out for all the other possible mental health issue a person might have.

At any rate, you're not alone, my friend, and you're not the only one who has had to go thru this shit. It is possible... Email is in my profile, if you need someone to talk to, feel free to contact me. Best of luck.

With the exception of people who commit suicide in terminal end-of-life situations (terminal cancer, or similar), folks who are attempt or commit suicide because of depression, aren't thinking straight. The depressed brain senses, feels and interprets things differently than the same brain not depressed. So the idea is that the person isn't well, and their decision making process isn't working right. The decision to commit suicide is the result of hopelessness brought on by the brain misinterpreting the person's situation and perceiving that the only way to escape the situation is death. The person doesn't want to die, per se. They just want the pain to end. With that in mind, to allow a depressed person to commit suicide is basically failing to treat a person's health problem, and them dying as a result of it.

I'm a proponent of allowing people to make that choice when they have the wherewithal do so. Someone who is dying of a painful terminal illness, etc, end of life is no one's choice but yours. But the suicidally depressed person can't make that decision rationally. It's like making any decision under the weight of extremely strong emotion, only it's an order of magnitude more powerful than what most people will experience in their lives. The suicidal person is ill, and needs help. It's the fact that they can't find help that brings them to suicide.