I was hoping for Roy Wood Jr. I was sad when he left.

Paul Atreides has entered the chat.

Walk without rhythm and we won’t attract the worm big brother.

Right, do we not remember PRISM? Edward Snowden is still living in exile in Russia.

They don’t need to tap your router when they already tap the routes.

Can we just stop putting these people with no background in health in charge of health systems? The hubris is astonishing.

I mean, what next, are we going to put a TV host in charge of the military, or a wrestling business executive in charge of education?

Right, like, who did you think you were making surveillance tools for? Because it wasn’t Mr. Rogers.

Not just suicide assistance chat bots, but suicide promotion chat bots.

sometimes it can be really disruptive and long-lasting. Why are we pretending that’s disordered?

Because if it’s “really disruptive” then a person might need support to be able to function well enough to, e.g., keep a roof over their head. Insurance companies require a label in order to pay out for that support, so there it is. If you’re grieving for 2 weeks plus 1 day, but still able to function, no one is going to arbitrarily slap a diagnosis on you.

Fwiw, “disordered” doesn’t necessarily mean abnormal in the context of mental health, it really just means causing problems (or, “really disruptive”). Indeed, it’s normal to grieve for more than 2 weeks, but our broader society is geared toward extracting profit from you, not toward making sure you can work through your emotions, so mental health professionals are often stuck with just trying to facilitate the least-bad outcomes. Also, as you said, sometimes the changes are just to appease insurers; the system is dumb, so sometimes you have to do nonsensical things in order to make it help people like it should.

As for narcolepsy/etc., yeah … As a mental health professional, I am also befuddled. I suppose a psychiatrist with appropriate training could diagnose and treat that, but normally it would be a sleep specialist.

Tl;Dr: the healthcare system itself doesn’t make sense, so we do things that don’t make sense in order to make it work for patients.

Dickbaskets have an annoying habit of getting into positions of power.

It would also have to cause terror. The people using these websites live in such an abject state of terror about their own inferiority that this probably had no measurable effect anyway.

I never understood how anyone thought touch screens were going to take over for productivity. Back when they were being hyped, it seemed plainly obvious to me that even multitouch didplays couldn’t outpace a physical keyboard and mouse for input speed.

I can’t find it with a cursory search, but I remember seeing marketing back then for a laptop that was just two touch screens with no touchpad/keyboard. Color me shocked that it didn’t become the new norm…

I remember when Doom Ultra HD 8k came on 40k floppies. Back before we even had 2k displays. It took nearly 2 days to read it all into RAM (mind you, I had a cluster of 200 computers just to have enough ram…) and ran at about 0.01 FPS on my 640x480 CRT. And you had to read about 73 more floppies every time you loaded a new map.

Ah, the good old days.

Benefits can be expensive, and they only pay you for the 40 hours because it’s a salaried rather than hourly position. They just want free labor at the expense of the employees’ sanity.

Eh, if the simulation were allowed to develop organically from the beginning, then it makes sense to me. If it has the fidelity for the subatomic particles comprising your eye then it has the fidelity for macroscopic particles getting in your eye.

I see dust in my eye as a better argument against the existence of a benevolent creator deity, personally.

Also consider a healthcare career. As a teenager, I wanted to do computer science/engineering, and sometimes I do wish I had stayed on that track. But now, as a nurse, I could get a job in any state in the US by tomorrow. I dare you to try to find a hospital that doesn’t have open nursing positions. Even when the economy goes down, people still get sick. Even if society collapses, the knowledge/skills will be useful.

And if you don’t want to change diapers or deal with blood, there are still options; I’m in psychiatry and rarely have to deal with either.