DrBob
@DrBob@lemmy.ca
Recovering academic now in public safety. You’ll find me kibitzing on brains (my academic expertise) to critical infrastructure and resilience (current worklife). Also hockey, games, music just because.
- Comment on This is what those who experienced 9/11 look like today 5 hours ago:
I sheltered Americans who couldn’t go home. Don’t make me regret it.
- Comment on This would go great with some CFCs 3 days ago:
The Midge!
- Comment on This is a horror film 6 days ago:
That’s $30 down the drain.
- Comment on Us Merry-go-round. 1 week ago:
No we’re not. You’re not entitled to our attention.
You can do whatever you want. I think the message is clear that there is limited support for AI here. So if you choose that as your “medium” it may meet with limited traction.
- Comment on Us Merry-go-round. 1 week ago:
should i give up the ideA b cause i can’t create it without AI?
Yes.
- Comment on Extra Milky 1 week ago:
Why go through the expense?
- Comment on Two full raccoons y'all 1 week ago:
- Comment on Extra Milky 1 week ago:
I think they just add water to bring down the fat content. All the other nutrients fall in proportion.
- Comment on The Vancouver Police 3 weeks ago:
Remember that time we legalized cannabis and it had literally zero impact on society? Let’s do that with the rest of them too.
- Comment on Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything 3 weeks ago:
Podcasts, music, film, paintings, novels…Linux distributions, ice cream flavor sales…literally everything.
- Comment on Can't wait. 3 weeks ago:
No. It’s from when the West was Nebraska and the Dakotas.
- Comment on Can't wait. 3 weeks ago:
Don’t look up “let”.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world | 6 comments
- Comment on culture 3 weeks ago:
Yes and probably not. And hell no for the third question you didn’t ask.
- Comment on culture 3 weeks ago:
It’s not poop. And it’s not leaving his pooper.
- Comment on culture 3 weeks ago:
I was one of the unlucky 10,000 the last time this was posted. Let someone else have their day ruined.
- Comment on Housing prices 4 weeks ago:
Average can mean so many things. A lot of people want it to be synonymous with mean as a measure of central tendency, but there’s a reason data people use mean. It avoids folk definitions meaning typical or expected. In those senses it can also be synonymous with modal values or an area around the median etc. It’s not a precise word.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
What are your iron levels in your blood work? Have they looked O2 sats?
- Comment on So true 5 weeks ago:
That’s actually so
cleverstupid - Comment on This shit's stupid as hell 5 weeks ago:
God at that price please tell me the screw mechanism works to adjust it.
- Comment on Has their ever been a movie or documentary that shows a person running for an office at the very beginning, the show the middle (and if they get bribed) then to the election night? 1 month ago:
We just call that a donation. And it goes through a PAC and it’s legal. The supreme Court has removed all the guard rails so unlimited donations and direct coordination with a PAC is now possible.
- Comment on What's the difference between ignorance and stupidity? 1 month ago:
Ignorance is not knowing. Stupidity is not applying what you know. Think of the friends meme…
- Comment on Has their ever been a movie or documentary that shows a person running for an office at the very beginning, the show the middle (and if they get bribed) then to the election night? 1 month ago:
What good is bribing a candidate? And by bribe do you mean blackmail?
- Comment on How bad were the asylums that Reagan closed in his tenure? Were they really that bad? Did no one take a look at the staff and bed side manner? Or was it really like Born On The Fourth of July? 1 month ago:
There is a lot of nuance that gets lost in the discussion of asylums, particularly if you know about them primarily from fictional sources. Historically they were actually a great improvement over the model that existed up to the late 1800s. That model threw the mentally ill into a general prisoner population which included debtors, criminals, and anyone else deemed appropriate. There wasn’t a keen understanding of mental illness or how it differed from cognitive dysfunction or how either of them differed from bad morals. It didn’t matter because there wasn’t really any treatment anyways.
There were attempts to separate out those who couldn’t care for themselves from those who wouldn’t. Bethlehem Hospital is an example of this and that did not work out particularly well. It gave us the word bedlam in english which means loud confusion. It was a popular tourist attraction as well with the well-to-do paying fees to watch the capers of the mentally ill while they suffered. So prison or a sideshow.
Against this backdrop the asylum model was pretty humane. By the early 20th century medicine was getting a hand in mental illness, and there was general agreement that we shouldn’t make their lives miserable for our own amusement. At its best, an asylum would be in a rural location with an associated farm. Residents would work if they were able tending animals or gardens, or maintaining the buildings or working in the kitchen. The produce would provide some income and partially supply the kitchens. What developed then was a self contained community with some residential staff.
One of the best documents for this model is Erving Goffman’s Asylums published in 1961. It examines the asylum model in great detail. It is worth mentioning that there was anti-psychiatry movement at that time that continued build steam through the 1970s. Goffman writes with an eye towards that movement that often portrays the staff as being the beneficiaries of the institution. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest shows this in a setting reminiscent of bedlam like torture. Inherent Vice portrays it in a humorous fashion with psychiatrists dining on linen table cloths and eating gourmet meals prepared by patients. Both are fictionalized exaggerations, but it’s true of any institution that lacks strong oversight that they will be highly variable depending on the specific adminstration and culture at a locale. This is true of prisons as well.
So that was kind of the situation in 1980 when Reagan came into office closed them all down. The mentally ill now live on the streets. I worked in this area for many years. It’s funny to me how a modern best practice would have a stable community setting with residential staff and meaningful work for people according to their capacity. Sound familiar?
- Comment on How Come Latin Didn't Spread in the Middle East as Much as it did in Europe? 1 month ago:
That’s me lurking until I have something to contribute.
- Comment on How Come Latin Didn't Spread in the Middle East as Much as it did in Europe? 1 month ago:
Any of us can ask AI and throw slop into a conversation. If you don’t have anything substantive to add maybe read and learn.
- Comment on Can anyone confirm? 1 month ago:
Who cares about Dallas, Houston or Atlanta - do people actually go those places when they don’t have to? I mean travel there by choice rather than necessity.
- Comment on modern humour 1 month ago:
Fourth.
- Comment on How did Voldemort actually die? 1 month ago:
I was a full grown adult when these books came out. I had to hate read them because of nieces and nephews etc and I have always known that they sucked and that Rowling was a lazy, shitty writer. It used to be an unpopular opinion. It’s nice to see the world caught up.
- Comment on When the first Black Hole was discovered in 1971 what did the scientist actually think it was at first? How come now it seems that it destroys everything it ingests? Why is it not a funnel of sorts? 1 month ago:
You misunderstand what a theory vs a fact is. If a fact is a lego brick,a theory is a what you build.
A theory collects facts and builds a cohesive narrative to explain why they are. Most importantly there will be gaps, so a theory makes predictions about facts that we don’t have yet. When a new finding fits expectations, then the theory is supported. When a new finding is unexpected or doesn’t fit, it’s time to reclaim the bricks and build a new structure.
So black holes were predicted and fit the theory very well. It increased our confidence that the theory was moving in the right direction.
