ultrastable

this is above my pay grade techinically speaking - don't suppose you know of a guide to this sort of thing?

not to mention - it's a little convenient that the author of a book called "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" is telling us that actually, we shouldn't be worried about those products

and re: hard drugs, casual use of those that doesn't meet addiction thresholds is way more common than most people think

yeah, I don't disagree w/ the fact that the word "addiction" shouldn't be thrown around too casually, but I don't like the way they're scolding others for being insufficiently scientific while they demonstrate their own ignorance

"Nir Eyal: The vast majority of people stop playing these video games. Do you think people are still going to be playing Fortnite and Candy Crush in 10 years or so? Of course not, they'll be doing something else once they get interested in other things that they decide to pursue. So, if it's really the behavior this technology is doing to us, that shouldn't make sense. They should be addicts for life, but that's clearly not what happens."

pretty vapid. someone could have an unhealthy unrelationship w/ games w/o literally playing the same game for a decade lol. and in any case, saying "they shoudl be addicts for life" shows this guy isn't at all up to date on addiction science. most addictions resolve themselves after a period of time

agreed that the social media addiction studies are trash, but this is representative of how flawed the understanding of addiction in this discussion is:

Joel Billieux: For a lot of people, you can realize that the gaming is actually a coping that is displayed to face with social anxiety or trauma or depression.

Jason Feifer: Let's say someone comes into a clinic, their gaming usage meets a certain definition of addiction, it is having a negative consequence on their social, family, or occupational life. But a trained clinician like Joel, must be able to look underneath those symptoms and find potential other issues.

that doesn't mean something's not an addiction! substance misuse is almost always a coping method, and one that's masking other issues. I don't believe "gaming addiction" is a big problem or even necessarily real, but it's a little annoying to see these guys critiquing the scientific failures of a particular discourse then demonstrate how flawed their own understanding of addiction is

"Since Masonry's tenets are brotherly love, relief, and truth, if the Masons did run the world, it might be a better place. Many of the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution of the United States were Freemasons; the principles in that document have stood the test of over two centuries. Would a Masonic government be so bad? Look at the governments founded by anti-Masonic groups: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Iran under totalitarian religious rule. Where is the real problem in the world?"

lol, so what they're saying is the world isn't run by Masons - but it should be!

this is extremely embarrassing for YC. whether or not it's an intentional scam, anyone remotely involved w/ the tech industry should have seen how implausible the whole project was

so you're saying you wouldn't rent to someone purely because they were homeless? w/ attitudes like this it's not surprising there's so many people living on the street

I don't think we should fall into the trap of thinking it has to be one or the other. people shouldn't be kicked out onto the street & the asylums absolutely were inhumane. reestablishing them is not a decent solution, & "requires long term care" doesn't necessarily mean "needs to be locked up"

why wouldn't you rent to it?

"undocumented immigrant" isn't necessarily the same as "refugee", likewise sex vs assigned gender. if you're going to critique word choice you should know what those words mean

I don't know anything about Bluetooth security but I'm assuming adding it to a lifesaving device isn't necessarily an improvement?

You should check out Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell if you haven't yet

it's monstrous yeah. did you see the thing about McKinsey recommending that Purdue pay a rebate to pharmacies for every OD death, to assuage their concerns over dispensing large quantities of opioids? https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/mckinsey-consultants-pro...

one thing I don't think that's talked about enough re: the opioid crisis is labor injuries - imo people taking opioids in order to be able to work through injuries they've incurred on the job played a big part in it. doesn't diminish the guilt of the Sacklers et al, ofc, but it wasn't purely an overprescription problem

true, although I think it's worth pointing out that private prisons aren't as big a driver of mass incarceration in the US as a lot of people think. the privatization of services like food or health within public prisons, or replacing mail or in-person visitation w/ extortionate electronic systems, is probably much more significant.

similarly most exploitative prison labor doesn't take the form of producing goods for private companies (like the Whole Foods cheese thing) but consists of using inmates to reducing staffing & other costs inside the prison, like making them work in the kitchens or laundry

edit: immigration detention is the notable exception - about 70% of immigration detainees are held in private prisons, compared to about 10% of prison inmates

there's no neat middle ground like buprenorphine but meth & some other stimulants can be prescribed in the US, so that's better than nothing - at least helps w/ problems of contamination, dose ambiguity, health risks associated w/ smoking/injecting etc

I'm aware of that. but some rehabs adhere to the harm reduction model & too many don't, which is why you get people ODing because their rehab thought expecting someone to stay fully abstinent after a month or two of inpatient was a better idea than putting them on suboxone while they got long-term psychiatric help. the 12-step approach is partly responsible for the abstinence dogma, hence my mention of it

I agree w/ you in principle, but it's also worth pointing out that drug rehab in the US (and globally, but the US is the worst out of the countries I know enough about to assess) is a joke, court-mandated especially, eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/review-finds-many-wh.... putting aside the indentured servitude model, whether court-mandated or not, far too many rehabs adhere strictly to ineffective 12-step programs rather than harm reduction.

they're not necessarily worse than jail ofc, but they don't serve any useful therapeutic purpose either

not claiming the things I listed make up all or even most of threads on my subject, just that they seem to show up every time

HN relationship thread bingo card:

- pointless statistical analyses - creepy transactional views of intimacy - facile evo-psych explanations of sexual attraction - misogynist ressentiment - the plight of the incel as today's #1 social issue - mechanistic proposed solutions to loneliness which will benefit neither the men using them or the women they're used on

am I forgetting anything?

slightly bizarre to see the author explain that Cellebrite have major contracts w/ US law enforcement & ICE then go on to say "but they have bad clients too!"

& I don't like the Capitol rioters either, but I don't see how you can evince a belief in due process & the "rule of law" then criticise someone for potentially providing exculpatory evidence to a group of defendants you dislike. you can't have it both ways. and the implication that someone being an anarchist makes them more likely to want to help out fascists is odd, to say the least

"In the pamphlet The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization, published in 1936, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler wrote:

    We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.[35]"

generally speaking, that's not clear at all. are the quotation marks around antisemitism there to indicate skepticism that it even exists? and whether the antipathy is "moral" or "racial" is just pedantry, in this case - in common use "antisemitism" is used to mean hatred of Jews or those perceived to be Jewish, which I assume you know - it doesn't really matter if it's explicitly racial or not.

tbh when I mentioned the figure of the reactionary who blames history on Jews I wasn't thinking of something specifically anti-Soviet or even Russian - European or Western would have been a better way of putting it, Hitler being the cliché example

the curse of Taylorism

I agree it's awful, not to mention the fact that employees weren't informed of the Microsoft tracking software being used in the firstplace, but what's funny is that according to their analytics having yr IDE open & wiggling the mouse cursor counts as "engaged in a relevant task". whereas going on Twitter to get answers about a programming question would be counted as unproductive social media use

"Sapience time measurement is sophisticated and designed to be resilient to simple manipulatio nattempts. Merely keeping the computer on for longer or watching videos instead of working does not increase Input. Rather, it would require having the relevant work software as the active window,and giving continuous user input (via mouse, keyboard)."

doesn't sound that sophisticated to me lol. in any case their claim that their output measure (completed tasks) is "rigorous and objective" is questionable to put it mildly: "The company uses a normalized measure of output to make different jobs and roles comparable.For example, for a programmer the output measure might be programming tasks completed divided by tasks assigned, times 100. For other roles, Output might be the number of reviews (e.g., of code) completed relative to the monthly target, or the number of reports delivered relative to the target.". no mention made of the relative effort required for each programming task, or the quality of reports delivered - not to mention no assessment of whether those targets accurately measure anything that's beneficial to the company.

nothing, it's just that buprenorphine has certain advantages that it lacks: because it's a partial agonist, it causes less respiratory depression/is much harder to overdose on/you can safely titrate it faster; high receptor affinity means it largely blocks the action of other opioids (to the extent that it can be used to reverse overdose https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13054-02...), longer half-life at high doses so you can maintain smoother levels/administer it less frequently. this is more speculative but it also seems to have an antidepressant effect, & in general I think it's less harmful to cognition & mood than other opioids incl. methadone. doesn't work better than methadone for everyone but availability issues mean we're still not at the point where that decision can always be made on a purely clinical basis

yeah you're both right, I just hope supply & cost get to a point where methadone can be replaced w/ buprenorphine whenever necessary. could save a lot of lives