atchoo (u/atchoo) - Readit News

atchoo commented on The unpublished preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm mindmatters.ai/2023/08/a-... · Posted by u/momirlan

dang · 2 years ago

Please don't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

atchoo · 2 years ago

Are you going to admonish the parent for contravening the flamebait and "ideological battle" guidelines? Treat the cause not the symptom!

atchoo commented on Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds msn.com/en-us/health/medi... · Posted by u/thedday

throwaway60707 · 2 years ago

You sure?

Schizophrenia is directly linked to dopamine. So is ADHD, but in the opposite way (not enough dopamine). Both were demonstrated on fMRI.

Psychosis is a physical issue in the brain (too much dopamine making the brain fire when it shouldn't) that's solved by administering dopamine antagonists (= antipsychotics).

atchoo · 2 years ago

There is little surprise that if a brain is behaving differently, that we can see differences in neurotransmitters. Like the Serotonin Hypothesis, that doesn't mean the neurotransmitters themselves are part of the physical cause and not just a consequence.

It's like trying to diagnose and treat a political crisis by observing telephone connections. We see stark changes in telephone use in a crisis. If we meddle with the telephone exchanges we might improve or harm various types of event. It's not really about the telephone calls though, we are just hacking at the messaging of an external event we are ignorant of.

A conspiracy theory induced panic might be superficially "solved" but cutting all the the phone lines. We have not identified or solved the cause though and people don't find life without telephones (dopamine) worth living so they plug them back in (quit their anti-psychotics).

atchoo commented on The unpublished preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm mindmatters.ai/2023/08/a-... · Posted by u/momirlan

systems_glitch · 2 years ago

Remember, Lenin established the tools Stalin used. The GULAG system, the string of secret police organizations starting with the Cheka, etc...

atchoo · 2 years ago

Yes?

Forced labour camps and secret police organisations were pretty ubiquitous. The Tsars had The Okhrana, forced labour camps and political repression (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had all been exiled to Siberia). The Checka and Gulag were the Bolshevik versions of the same thing. Russia had the White Terror... and then the Red Terror. It all fucking sucks but the point remains, Stalin took things to new levels of psychopathic insanity where we start hitting 10s of millions of excess deaths.

If you don't like Gulags, then bear in mind they were created at roughly the same time the US setup forced labour camps in Haiti that led to 1000s of deaths and extra-judicial killings. Not something Americans talk about much. Should Woodrow Wilson be compared to Stalin too?

atchoo commented on The unpublished preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm mindmatters.ai/2023/08/a-... · Posted by u/momirlan

XorNot · 2 years ago

Ehhh...it's not like Lenin was much better. As soon as he was in power, he pretty rapidly got to "actually we should do some purges".

The history of Russia is one of an endless parade of terrible leadership which invariably decides that a quick round of death squads will solve all the problems.

Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism if people were starving in the streets, whereas ultimately the USSR liked to pretend they fixed that while just doing it to the Ukrainians, Polish and other Baltic states.

atchoo · 2 years ago

> Ehhh...it's not like Lenin was much better.

No. Claiming this underplays how appalling Stalin was. Lenin purging Mensheviks AFAIK, meant losing party membership and maybe emigrating to continue your political project, whereas Stalin's Great Purge killed a million people. This isn't a defence of Lenin, it's just that Stalin was on a different level entirely.

> Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism

What? That's nonsense.

atchoo commented on The unpublished preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm mindmatters.ai/2023/08/a-... · Posted by u/momirlan

wrp · 2 years ago

Admiration for the USSR among English intellectuals predates WW2. So the answer to your question is in the social milieu of the 1920s-30s. Someone else will have to try a detailed explanation.

atchoo · 2 years ago

It's worth bearing in mind that the West was pretty awful too with a vast quantity of appalling crimes that our rose-tinted spectacles might like to forget because the victims were "non-people". It was Imperial Britain with it's colonies, the US with it's viciously racist segregation, Leopold II of Belgium chopping of limbs in the Congo. Not cool.

It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.

atchoo commented on The BBC on Mastodon bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-07... · Posted by u/_han

petepete · 2 years ago

While I agree the delay is a killer for topical news/comedy content, it's hard to argue the same for In Our Time. In Our Time is the only show I regularly listen to in podcast form.

atchoo · 2 years ago

For IoT the one actual pain-point is that if an episode generates online discussion then I can't participate but it's mainly a complaint about the user-hostile attempt to make the podcast feed an inferior second class citizen.

It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad really.

atchoo commented on Microbial Odor Profile of Polyester and Cotton Clothes After a Fitness Session ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... · Posted by u/Eisenstein

Eisenstein · 2 years ago

> even though they take more time to dry due to colder house temperatures.

However when it is very cold the air is much drier. Contrast that to a temperate but humid climate where everything sits at 20C - 25C w/80% - 100% humidity. Practically a microbial incubator.

atchoo · 2 years ago

That's basically the UK and I haven't experienced a problem with indoor air drying. I would give some basic guidelines though. It's the sort of things that you don't think you need to tell people until you see what they do...

- ideally machine washed with a significant spin to remove water. Air drying hand washed items that are sopping wet is a lot harder - might take 4x longer

- hang in a room with decent ventilation and some active air flow. Trying to air dry in the equivalent of a cupboard would be doomed

- hang fully spread out with decent space between the clothes. Drying time will be significantly extended if densely scrunched together with pieces touching. Buy multiple racks to get enough hanging space.

- don't put used wet gym clothes in a laundry bin to fester. If you aren't washing them immediately, hang them up to dry first and put them in the bin later

atchoo commented on The BBC on Mastodon bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-07... · Posted by u/_han

atchoo · 2 years ago

Hmm. My faith in the BBC's commitment to decentralisation and open standards has been damaged by the artificial month delay they added to their podcast feeds to try and drive traffic to their centralised Sounds app. I've been listening to the In Our Time podcast for 20 years and then they go and vandalise it as a growth hack. There is no way I am using multiple proprietary podcast apps so I end up listening to topical comedy a month out of date... which is just weird.