>A perfect storm of prescription opioids, government prohibition, and cheap/plentiful Chinese and Mexican fentanyl.
I think it's actually the fact that the war on opioids has translated into a war on prescription pain drugs, in general.
So, when you're a chronic pain sufferer and have gone without and you get ahold of something - anything - to remediate the pain, you're far more likely to take a little extra just to get the pain to STFU for a while so you can do things like sleep through the night for the first time in seemingly forever.
I've heard tales of American veterans (through the VA) being referred to things like yoga to manage their chronic pain, when it's entirely due to neurological damage and things like yoga will do fuck-all to help with that.
Is it any wonder then that people might be more liable to OD when they obtain something to try to manage the pain that otherwise never ceases?
I'd say it is a fundamental issue in American society (the war on opioids translating into no pain management medications whatsoever) with callous indifference - rather than anything else.
I think it is also the lack of sick leave for many Americans so they take a quick pill to recover. Sometimes your body can recover by itself if only given time and physical therapy.
I had some excruciating peroneal tendonitis that made it hard for me to walk on rough surfaces. Foot doctor said the best treatment was a walking cast, rest and daily exercise. Fortunately my employer allows me to work from home as needed so I could give my foot a rest for a few weeks. But not everyone has access to that. Imagine if you are a server at a restaurant on your foot all day.
I used self guided physical therapy to improve a chronic nerve pain issue. I'm glad I had very moderate pain and a moderate accompanying physical issue, and I wouldn't want it to be the only option in a more severe situation, but it's not useless either.
>I think the reason why most devs still prefer plain-text resources over anything else is...
I think you missed a vital reason and that is portability and sharability. No one needs to install anything special to read or edit a text file.
It's the digital equivalent of paper and pen when you think about it and that makes it a popular platform for everyone to be able to consume it.
Plus, back when we were all old and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the text file was the lightest/smallest way to transfer data (read: ideas) between computers.
The practice/behaviour saturated the industry so much that many readmes of today are still on text files.
Maybe there's a correlation to the real world, where we're definitely more apt to consume mediums that don't have superfluous data points than the words/ideas that they're meant to convey? Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass?
Either way, plain-text resources are the easiest to create, share, and consume because there's almost a universality in the standard for text files (except the EOL and CRLF but that's more of an inconvenience than anything).
This is what I meant by standardization but I used a wrong term. I completely agree with you. At the basis, there will always need to be plain text, which should result in a wide variety of viewers and editors becoming available. In order for interactive visualizations to succeed among software devs, they can't be a SaaS, they need to become a part of the plumbing.
>Punishment is a deterrent and has been proven so for millennia.
A proven deterrent? Do you have any facts to back-up your posit? The crime and recidivism rates would seem to indicate the contrary; especially, in the states.
Essentially, we should - in theory - have no crime by now (given it's been over a millennium) as all rates should've diminished to zero, yeah?
At best, punishment as a deterrent is keeping the for-profit prison-industrial complex in business and that's about the extent of any benefit[s] (if it can even be called that) it might be providing to society.
This is absurd. Something can work in some cases for some people and yet not in all cases. It's not a matter of always working or never working.
There's a line of thought I keep seeing in this thread:
a purpose of imprisonment is deterrence by punishment. people still commit crimes. therefore deterrence by punishment doesn't work. therefore prisons should be replaced with free-range daycare for adults.
You don't have to like the idea of restricting someone's freedom. But would you rather that a violent offender be in prison and unable to cause further harm? I would.
It's not an either-or kind of thing, where we can either put people in a hell-on-earth where they're traumatized or we can let them go free. It's possible to acknowledge that a person has done something terrible while also treating them with some basic human dignity. Lots of professions agree that you get from people what you expect, and when you expect people to act with dignity many of them do.
Prison doesn't have to be a place where punishment is meted out upon some imperfect soul for an eternity. It can just as easily be a place where the inmates are expected to make an effort to understand why they are there and how they can move on from that chapter of their life. And we can still lock up the unrepentant for a very long time.
Many of the Christians that I've talked to use the phrase "hate the sin, love the sinner." Maybe it's time we took that to heart and allow our prison population the dignity of being treated like human beings?
What reclassification? And how would you account for the fact that every other type of crime also increased? Assault, robbery, threats, gun homicides, detonated hand grenades?
The reason we use "deterrent" instead of "prevention" is that we understand that punishment cannot prevent all the crime. Some people will not be deterred by a threat of punishment.
If you entertain such a possibility then it is easy to see that the system with ideal deterrence (i.e. it detters everyone who could possibly be deterred) will also have 100% recidivism as the only people who get punished are the ones who cannot be deterred and will keep committing crimes no matter what.
> The reason we use "deterrent" instead of "prevention" is that we understand that punishment cannot prevent all the crime.
No, the reason is because of the four main theories of criminal punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation (also known as reformation), and incapacitation—that is, all but retribution—are all forms of prevention, and so “prevention” lacks specificity.
> If you entertain such a possibility then it is easy to see that the system with ideal deterrence (i.e. it detters everyone who could possibly be deterred) will also have 100% recidivism as the only people who get punished are the ones who cannot be deterred and will keep committing crimes no matter what.
This assumes that the system not only has ideal deterrence, but entirely lacks both rehabilitation and incapacitation.
"Deterrence in relation to criminal offending is the idea or theory that the threat of punishment will deter people from committing crime and reduce the probability and/or level of offending in society." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)
So, punishment as a deterrent is currently a theory.
I want to reply to wickedsickeune below, "Gravity is also a theory," but I think the thread's hit max-depth.
The word "theory" in the context of Deterrence_(penology) is not the same as the word "theory" in "theory of Gravity." The _Theory_ of Gravity refers to a model or explanation that follows from observed facts.
Deterrence, according to the Wikipedia page, doesn't fit that definition of the word.
> Despite numerous studies using a variety of data sources, sanctions, crime types, statistical methods and theoretical approaches, there remains little agreement in the scientific literature about whether, how, under what circumstances, to what extent, for which crimes, at what cost, for which individuals and, perhaps most importantly, in which direction do various aspects of contemporary criminal sanctions affect subsequent criminal behavior.
(Off-topic) It's sometimes (always?) possible to reply despite the missing "reply" button. Click the timestamp of the post to see it on its own page. That page seems to have a reply button even when the thread does not.
> Yes, because the word "theory" was used erroneously. Saying that its currently a hypothesis would have been better.
No, it was used correctly; “theory” has definitions other than those in the context of empirical science and the use of “hypothesis” would have been at least as wrong as the scientific sense of “theory”.
Gravity is also a theory. The word "theory" scientifically, does not mean "idea". It means a rigorously tested and researched collection of co-related ideas that reinforce each other. Do not use it to dismiss something's value.
> So, punishment as a deterrent is currently a theory.
The use of “theory” in that sentence is not in the scientific sense; it is a philosophical rather than a predictive model. (There are predictive models of deterrence, some of which might be theories, or perhaps hypotheses, in the scientific sense, but that's not what the quote is discussing.)
No. Unauthorized access or disclosure can happen when someone with legitimate access to the system gets access to more data than they should see. For example, a patient logs on to the system to view their own record and sees records for other patients. Logs would show this, and this would have to be disclosed.
Deliberate penetration of the system, or purposeful exfiltration of the data, are very different occurences.
What I find funny about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is that he is married to Kyra Sedgwick, who is the half-sister of jazz guitarist Mike Stern. Mike Stern played with Miles Davis and Miles Davis is basically the Paul Erdos or Kevin Bacon of jazz.
I've heard that Kevin Bacon isn't actually the Kevin Bacon of the Kevin Bacon game; some researchers a few years back crunched the numbers and determined that the most-connected actor was actually Rod Steiger (having starred in a wide range of highbrow and lowbrow movies over a very long career).
Maybe somebody else has since overtaken Steiger, though. Maybe even Kevin Bacon himself!
Edit to add: ha, I see there's a calculation at The Oracle of Bacon: http://oracleofbacon.org/center_list.php Not sure how frequently this is updated, but the top few names definitely sound plausible.
If you find it funny that Kevin Bacon is within 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon of someone else, you're kind of misunderstanding the idea of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Challenge: Find the link between Kevin Bacon and President Tyler
On a podcast I listened to recently, Kevin Bacon said he didn't really like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon because he felt it was fun of him at his expense.
>Modern IRC servers tend to support TLS on port 6697 and SASL for authentication.
The OC's point was by default, meaning/inferring clear-text is still the modus operandi for generally getting onto IRC services.
>Many applications still aren't encrypted by default, like IRC.
SSL and SASL aren't, precisely, user-friendly implementations with some clients (e.g.: IRSSI[0] - but if you're using IRSSI, you don't want a user-friendly GUI to begin with, so...).
SASL has less to do with the actual encryption mechanism and more to do with the authentication mechanism (think NTLM)[1].
If IRC services dropped clear-text, today, that would go a lot further to standardising (e.g.: making default) encryption but, back to the OC's original point, it is not the default today.
This is mostly irrelevant; users using Web IRC gateways, services like IRCCloud or clients like HexChat[1] do not have to configure the server unless it isn’t already present in the list. If they do, they already will have to manually configure either TLS or plaintext. There is no “default.”
I mention SASL because it is relevant to security posture, especially if the user wasn’t connecting via TLS. Although of course the server could allow PLAINTEXT in practice there’s no point in supporting that because IRC already had native plaintext server authentication.
>I take notes every week on every employee I manage to track specific instances of positive and negative things they’re doing. This is really helpful for tracking behaviors in one-on-one reviews.
This seems to be on the micromanaging level of things. If you have to operate at this level, you're trying to "control" the all of the elements of the team dynamics, instead of letting the dynamics work for you.
A team is a team because it operates together. It isn't just about the manager-employee relationship.
>Give specific expectations and behaviors that you want the employee to execute. Don’t be vague or use words like, “better” or “more”. Be specific by saying, “You need to complete all stories within 25% of your estimates this month.”
This seems a bit metric-driven and metrics with a distribution of disproportionate work is going to drive bad culture and bad habits. The low-hanging fruit will drive metrics high for one individual and, if they're gaming the system, it will be obvious; but if it's all down to metrics, they're getting the job done, right?
I don't look at taking detailed feedback notes as micro-managing, but rather as a way to make sure employees get valuable, specific feedback.
As an example, if my boss said, "hey, you're not really doing that great," but didn't offer specific examples of how I underperformed, I'd be frustrated and not likely to improve. If she said, "Last week at the product meeting, I noticed you were staring off into space and then had to have a question repeated. Are you okay?" I'd be a lot more apt to open up a conversation about things that are bugging me.
I guess I take notes so that my feedback can be specific and not general, not so I can tell employees exactly how to do their jobs.
The worst is the reality that people could (and would) use it for libelous purposes; such as vindictive exes (no matter the sex), or people with stability problems, or the like.
Nah, it’s not that you “don’t disagree” - it’s just that many of those crypto-anarchist ideas get destroyed when meeting the actually real life.
In this case the easiness of writing fake reviews is what makes it unusable. That’s actually the same reason why decentralised social networks aren’t yet a commodity.
This problem is very well known and is an incredibly popular reason why those ideas don’t work in the first place.
If it's authed all the way down to your SSN, it means that government owns the identities used in the system.
What exactly do you need a blockchain for in such a scenario? Ah right - the unchangeability.
Well, then it means that in all scenarios with the stolen identities we would need to provide for a mechanism to delete the reviews, based on the government-provided data on distrusted SSNs.
In a scenario where we don't allow the reviews to be post-deleted, we are rampantly increasing the value of stealing an identity, which means that the motivation for that goes up a lot.
Now, it means that the only entity that is actually responsible for the correctness of the data in our database is the government.
Now, why do you need a blockchain for that if you could simply have a database backed by the government in the first place?
I think it's actually the fact that the war on opioids has translated into a war on prescription pain drugs, in general.
So, when you're a chronic pain sufferer and have gone without and you get ahold of something - anything - to remediate the pain, you're far more likely to take a little extra just to get the pain to STFU for a while so you can do things like sleep through the night for the first time in seemingly forever.
I've heard tales of American veterans (through the VA) being referred to things like yoga to manage their chronic pain, when it's entirely due to neurological damage and things like yoga will do fuck-all to help with that.
Is it any wonder then that people might be more liable to OD when they obtain something to try to manage the pain that otherwise never ceases?
I'd say it is a fundamental issue in American society (the war on opioids translating into no pain management medications whatsoever) with callous indifference - rather than anything else.