When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere, and also in awe at how clean the city was. Never did the two thoughts cross each other in her head
> When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere
The first part I kind of get, humans get used to stuff they get, and get frustrated when it disappears without them really understanding why, it's kind of understandable.
But why would she be outraged about recycling bins being more readily available? Are the recycling bins like really ugly/disgusting, or why would they upset someone? Sounds like being upset about there being too many libraries or something.
> Sounds like being upset about there being too many libraries or something.
You joke but people who complain about public recycling bins would also likely be the ones to complain about public libraries too. I've encountered many people who think libraries exist to poison the minds of the youth and somehow make homelessness a problem and we should shut them all down to alleviate the homeless issues in our communities and ensure higher community standards in education (mostly, go read the bible at church, that's all you need).
When I was in school 15 years ago, BGP was described to me as a sketchy game of telephone.
“Oh yeah you want to route to a 129.37.x.x address? I know a guy who knows a guy. Said he’s the owner of the whole 129./ block. In fact, he’s my personal friend. I mean friend’s friend… Why don’t I just take those pesky packets off your hands and we walk away”
How could they? The alternative starts to look like every router maintains complete "internet state"...which turns out isn't possible. Awareness is complex and expensive. And there are endless variables and "whys" to consider
I think you overestimate the number of people that can work from home. For society to function the majority of us have to actually go to a physical place and do something real with our hands and our time.
So did you take them and have a bad time? Because they definitely work for me and I doubt a placebo could have such a large effect on the 48 hour stomach pains I used to get alongside my frequent panic attacks.
I find it funny that people complain about emotional blunting when that is the entire purpose of the drug. I would prefer not to live on the razors edge ever again. I’ve had chronic anxiety and depression ever since I was a child, though.
For some people the emotional blunting is desirable, especially as you said, if the problem is chronic anxiety. But for many other people, their depression is defined by a lack of positive affect and anhedonia, meaning that emotional blunting is literally making things worse.
Depression is highly heterogenous, and I am glad the medication helped you.
SSRIs have much more clinical evidence of efficacy for addressing anxiety disorders vs a placebo than depression. The effect size is ~0.7 vs 0.2 in meta studies.
Totally agree, they really shouldn't be called antidepressants at all. Important to add tho that for many with depression they have comorbid anxiety and often the anxiety is harder to tolerate than depression, so removal of anxiety symptoms can be hugely beneficial.
Also, IME they are dosed completely wrong. So many people seem to be on very low doses, which has no improvement on placebo in the studies I've read.
Whereas, higher doses are _hugely_ better than placebo, especially for anxiety.
What's worse is a lot/most studies on SSRIs in general often don't adjust for dose. Which seems like an enormous oversight to me.
> I find it funny that people complain about emotional blunting when that is the entire purpose of the drug.
The ideal would be to blunt the negatives but not the positives. The effect of some of the older antidepressants can be to blunt both, across the board.
Some of the newer atypical antidepressants can address depression without making everything flat.
You’re making the mistake of thinking there’s a top down process. That’s not what’s happening. It goes like this: “if I close my public restroom then all of the people asking for a public restroom will have to go across the street and they will not bother me anymore“
The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision
There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.
Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to
Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.
Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.
Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity.
It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.
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