buffington

It's hard for you to imagine, and I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, because you're not a ten year old girl.

I've been the parent of a ten year old girl, and can say with confidence that it's within the realm of possibility that an adult could manipulate a child in ways that ultimately would make that child afraid, if not utterly terrified, to be disobedient.

You scraping and digging through the comments here imploring to know about how she was coerced suggests to me that what you're really looking for is a justification to blame the ten year old girl. "coercion implies a threat" implies that with no evidence of a threat, the girl must have played along. She must have liked it. That's the vibe you give as you dig in and keep demanding people prove there was a threat. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that vibe.

Walmart doesn't invite people of all ages to hang out in a private room together, with no supervision, no rules, no limits.

Parents tend to assume that "the internet" is regulated, somehow, whether by laws or market pressures. The thinking goes something like "Instagram is safe, right, because how could it not be? It's used by so many people, and if it could harm our kids, how would it be allowed to exist?" - right or wrong, people expect platforms to be held to some standard, and, right or wrong, put trust in the platforms to meet their expectations of safety.

The thing about Omegle was that it very much was the private room scenario I described above. I left out the part that made the room "safe" - the eject button. But persuasive people can persuade other people, especially children, to avoid that eject button, and while that only happened to some of the 74 million people using the site, it happened to people. And for those it happened to, those encounters wouldn't haven't happened without Omegle's help.

If you don't believe that, consider all those commenting here about how unique and special Omegle was for people who were good to one another. There's, thankfully, a lot of those comments.

But both things can be true, and were true when Omegle was operating. With 74 million people using it, the smallest of fractions of a percent still represent more than zero people experiencing harm that Omegle enabled.

The parents blame the platforms because the platforms enabled the harm.

You're likely getting downvoted because you've made the claim that smokers tend to be sedentary and out of shape without providing any credible data to back that claim.

What you seem to be asking is this: is it the weed, or is it the person's health. The study accounts for that, and is able to determine that there's a higher risk when people are consumers of marijuana, all other factors accounted for.

I'd recommend actually reading the article before participating in commentary about the article, if only so that you don't waste your time defending comments that you might not have made had you done so.

I re-read your question and it occurs to me that by "smokers", you may actually mean "marijuana smokers".

The study doesn't break that down. Which is a shame. There are people who do not smoke or vape marijuana, who instead ingest it (my 85 year old neighbor being one of those people). Do those people fare better than those that smoke or vape it?

Asked more simply: is it the smoking and vaping that increases people's risk of heart problems, or is it the marijuana itself?

The 2020 study that CNN cites established cohorts that included marijuana users who also smoked tobacco, marijuana users who also consumed alcohol, marijuana users who smoked tobacco and consumed alcohol, and marijuana uses who didn't smoke tobacco or consume alcohol.

There is broken down analysis in the study, and it suggests that consumers of marijuana, whether they were tobacco smokers or alcohol drinkers or not, have increased risk of heart disfunction.

All that said, I'm not defending the study, nor am I disagreeing with your sentiment.

As someone who started using medical marijuana as an "older person" (though not as old as those in the study) I always find these studies frustrating.

I'm not sure if I can ever recall a single study that described the actual dosage being consumed. I have little doubt that someone taking hits off a bong all day long is going to be more likely to experience negative complications far sooner than someone eating a 5mg edible once a night.

CNN decided to focus on smoking and inhaling, but the study they cite isn't focused on smoking or vaping. A quote from the paper:

> Cannabis use was ascertained by asking about marijuana, hashish, pot, grass, and hash oil use either smoked or ingested.

I think the point the GP was trying to make was that when you see official unemployment numbers from the US government, those numbers are derived from the number of people actively seeking unemployment benefits (which includes job training, job placement, and payments). Those numbers don't include anyone who doesn't officially apply for benefits, which would naturally exclude all sorts of people who are not employed.

When the Red One was released in 2007 it started at $17500. Arri's Alexa started closer to $65000 at the time.

What they're doing with pricing today, I have no idea, but when Red hit the scene in 2007, not only did the price get a lot of attention, but it motivated the entire industry to take 4k digital video seriously. Every major manufacturer of professional cinema cameras would soon release their own competitive cameras with similar features to the Red One.

That was such a well written, introspective, and vulnerable story. I've had several opportunities to experience similar rides with very similar endings, and know how gut wrenching failure feels. And how it's often just a failure, with nothing learned. With writing like this, though, the rest of us get to learn.

Amazon has also optimized returns (for itself) by making its sellers eat the cost of those returns, one way or another. That's not all that controversial, but when you consider what Amazon recommends people buy, it becomes obvious that they have no problem recommending garbage because they don't care if it gets returned. They won't eat that cost. They get the profit from the sale, then let everyone else work it out.

> what they recommend is in the consumers immediate best interests.

How? Amazon routinely recommends products to me that are objectively inferior compared to other products. For example, I just searched for "peak design travel tripod" and the number one result, which is also marked with "Overall Pick", is a tripod made by a company with the name of KINGJUEEQUESTER that looks like it's made out of cardboard tubes, but at least comes with a free 21 piece lens filter set and selfie stick for $18.99. And it has 3000+ 5 star reviews that are almost nearly identical. "Edward Von McTavish: The KINGJUEEQUESTER tripod arrived. It is of the most impressive quality. The Leg Lock feature fulfills my needs. I recommend for you."

The thing I'm actually searching for isn't even on the first page of results. It's on page two, under "More Results" and has a title of "Peak Design Travel Tripod (Carbon Fiber)" and is priced at $599.95 (the same price you'll find on Peak Design's site).

How is it that showing me anything other than what I searched for supports me as a consumer?

Can you link to an example of a lease that requires a certain number of people be there every day? I used to have a business that needed office space, and of the several buildings we used over the course of about 10 years, not a single lease ever cared about how many people would show up every day. The closest thing to that would be related to max occupancy and parking spaces. The leases would always have to specify how many people could be in the building at most for fire code compliance, and that number determined the number of accessible and normal parking spaces.

Regarding tax breaks, I never saw any, but that was pre-pandemic. That makes more sense to me, but leases requiring minimum attendance counts seems like it could be an oft-repeated myth.

I agree braking is important, but I don't understand how it's relevant to my comment.

All the board sports, I mention, including the One Wheel, have braking.

Skateboarding: your feet or power slides are your brakes. I guess your tail too, if you don't mind it splintering away.

Snowboarding: your edges.

Surfing: not really applicable, though you can stall by putting all your weight on the tail.

One Wheel: leaning back.

In my experience, the One Wheel is as effective at stopping quickly, or even more so, than skateboarding or snowboarding.

I'm normally in the "use your common sense" camp for sure, but with One Wheels, I feel a bit different. They're very easy to ride. It takes about 5-15 minutes to learn how to ride them well enough to go very fast.

I love the thrill of going fast on stuff, but I think the One Wheel and similar devices need to be capped to a "safe" speed (where science determines "safe"). If a firmware update came out that did that today, I probably wouldn't even notice, because I don't ever let it get above 10-15mph if I can help it.

I've been an active skateboarder, snowboarder, and surfer for 25 years, and have ridden a One Wheel XR for about three years.

All are different in terms of most of the skills needed to do any of them.

The One Wheel is much more like a snowboarding in soft powder than it is like skateboarding, but even then, it's not quite the same. There's a sort of softish center pivot feeling, where on a snowboard it depends on where your edges are.

Skill wise, you don't need any to make the One Wheel do what's advertised. You do need skill to ride it confidently, but you gain those skills as you use it.

I've had one very bad fall on the One Wheel, and it was bad. It slide out while going fast down a steep slippery/sandy hill, and then nosedived, which sent me cart wheeling, then whipped my heel into the ground, shattering it into 23 pieces. I was in bed for 6 months, and didn't walk without help for 12.

I actually think my other boarding skills made the injury worse. I reacted as if the board was a skateboard, where a sideways slide is something I'm super comfortable with and do on purpose. That reaction was to lean deep, counter to the forces of the slide. The big fat gripping tire of the One Wheel bit in, then acted as a fulcrum with my body as the lever, and I just went sailing.

The advice from the GP to have One Wheel-curious people try a skateboard first is indeed good advice. It won't teach you how to ride a One Wheel, but it will teach you how hard the ground is.

Every eye doctor I've known has also said to never rub your eyes, for any reason.

Here's just a short, non-exhaustive list, as to why rubbing your eyes is a bad idea:

* it's very easy to scratch your cornea

* touching your eyes or eyelids is an easy way to introduce infections

* rubbing can increase the pressure on your eyes, which can cause damage

* rubbing to try to get something out of your eye risks more damage, as now you're rubbing a foreign body around delicate corneas and such

Eyes are also special in that has a dampened immune response. Eyes are relatively fragile as a result.

There are times when you want to rub your eyes because they itch. Doing nothing is the best approach. Your eye will work it out, or the urge will go away. Same for when something trivial is in your eye. Your tears will flush it out.

For non trivial contamination, use water. I have to assume there are exceptions, but when in doubt, water will flush it out.

I've also seen this.

I think when a company trusts its employees to get the job done, a few really good things happen. High performers (where "performance" is directly tied to revenue, or goal completion, or actual metrics and not "ass-in-chair" fluff) produce quality work quickly. Middle performers do fine. Terrible performers, if you have any, stick out - instead of having a hard conversation with them about how many hours they put in, you can have a hard conversation with them about how they need to improve.

What I think is fascinating is how frequently, when working in an environment that gives someone room to be creative, or less stressed, or even given more responsibilities, middle performers often become high level performers. I'm sure there are lots of reasons as to why, but I've seen it happen a lot. I suspect that when you trust someone to do what they're good at, they have room to get even better at it. At least that's been my experience.

I have also seen insanely pedantic levels of tracking and reporting and dogma at companies, and those are miserable places. High performers leave. Everyone else spends their time figuring out how to juice their numbers and play within the system so they look like high performers. Tracking everything builds a new, unspoken system that, when you're in it, becomes your first concern above all else, and even pits you against your coworkers.

Maybe? Not my cup of tea, but if I didn't trust my wife, and she allowed me to track her, maybe that'd solve whatever hypothetical problem we were having. Very unlikely, but I don't think the idea itself, doomed to fail or not, is a problem if both parties consent.

Which is what you do when you work for an employer that wants to track your entries/exits into their buildings. You consent to allowing systems to be put in place that serve as placeholders for when trust isn't yet or won't be established.

I worked at a company that used badge-in data to determine how many people to expect for lunch (which the company provided). Given the terribly ancient tech that system ran on, I'm certain that around 11AM every day the person responsible for producing lunch would import a CSV file into Excel and tally the list, all in plaintext.

Granted, that's probably an odd exception to the norm, but your comment reminded me of how badge-in data presented a clever solution to a problem, even if I shudder to think of how that data could have been used for harm.

If they do what sort of thing? Monitor stuff?

It all depends on the nature of the consultancy agreement. If you work for the financial industry as a consultant you can expect to allow monitoring.

I don't know of a single place that makes the law clear, but if you dig in a bit, you can find a lot of resources that describe the legal differences between contractors and employees. One thing that's evident in nearly anything you can find is that contractors basically have no protections.

The IRS doesn't care in the slightest if an employer monitors a contractor.

That is incorrect. That "key difference" is not even remotely a universal truth.

I've been a consultant and an employee many times in my career. You can take any variation of the following sentence and it'll remain true:

I've worked for a company as a [ hourly consultant | salaried employee | per project consultant ] that [ monitored my every keystroke | monitored attendance | monitored nothing ].

Every variation is possible, and I've seen every variation.

> life is hard. You have to go to work to make money

That's certainly one approach towards living life.

Another might be:

Don't accept it when your employer decides to start tracking your every move and work for a company that values outcomes more than they do asses-in-chairs. When the eventual recession comes, the odds that it'll disrupt you in any significant way will be greatly reduced because you haven't spent the last three years worried about how to present yourself as "productive", and instead have been focused on actually getting things done.

I've been in the tech industry since 1995, and I've never worked somewhere that didn't require individual security badges to gain access to the building. Both schemes exist in abundance.

Sure, unions are another solution, but let's be clear:

A union only works if you were part of the union before you were fired unjustly. Without that, "too bad" is indeed often the best you can do.

I was once in the hospital with acute pancreatitis. It was unplanned, and would have killed me had I not made it to the ER. The company I was working for at the time "let me go" because I'd gone two days without showing up to work. Given that during those two days I was unconscious and nearly dead, that would have been impossible to do.

When I spoke to a lawyer, they were very clear that the company had broken the law (FMLA protects people in situations like mine), but that fighting it would cost me a lot of money, and that there was no guarantee I'd win. I fought them anyways. I spent months fighting them, and spent thousands of dollars. The company ended up receiving a fine for less that what I paid in lawyer fees, and that's it. No payout for me, no resolution. The state felt the case was at least strong enough to justify the fine, but not strong enough to justify anything else.

So, yeah, sometimes "too bad" is about all we get.

All true, and very well said. Having a disability, temporary or otherwise, is in itself a burden most people don't have to carry. Having to worry that it could get you fired feels awful, and it's something you think about most of the time.

If you're someone who needs the protections of the ADA, you should make sure your HR team knows what accommodations you need.

I have a disability that isn't obvious, and have to routinely make sure that my leaders are aware of the accommodations I need. I've had HR actively take action on my behalf when certain middle managers didn't know, or care, to support those accommodations. In one incident, they fired a manager over their lack of support.

While I hate that I need to do it, it tends to be worth it to make sure your company knows what you need.

I'd also like to think that, should I ever get fired because HR didn't manage to intervene in a similar situation as described, the dispute would be more likely to go my way. It at least removes the ability for the company to say "we didn't know about the disability."

I use Synthesia on the iPad and it works great.

Perhaps I misunderstood your original comment. I interpreted what you said as meaning that the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up an H2O molecule had to be derived from H2O molecules.

After all, your words were:

> oxygen comes from plants and plants get it from water and the hydrogen comes from hydrocarbon fuels where the hydrogen comes from water again

Then:

> technically you can never create new water on Earth

I asked the questions in good faith, even while knowing that the origin of the individual atoms has no bearing on whether an H2O molecule is H2O or not. I wanted to give you an opportunity to perhaps share something that the rest of us didn't know.

Your response was to ask about my education and how old I was, two data points that I can confidently claim have zero relevance on how water molecules are formed.

> technically you can never create new water on Earth

This is absolutely incorrect. Water can be created on Earth and is being created constantly from various processes. One of those processes: burning any hydrocarbon based fuels (aka, fossil fuels). You can see it for yourself - run any internal combustion engine and you'll see water dripping from the exhaust pipe.

> Except water is H2O where the oxygen comes from plants and plants get it from water and the hydrogen comes from hydrocarbon fuels where the hydrogen comes from water again

I'm not a chemist, so I may be totally wrong here, but does a water molecule "care" where the source of its oxygen and hydrogen come from? If you brought oxygen from space, and hydrogen from space, couldn't you then create new water on Earth?