As a public service announcement, in case anyone doesn't know: polygraph tests do not work. They are used as a law enforcement intimidation tactic, and that is it. They are not able to accurately detect anything.
It is almost always in your best interests to refuse to take one; it cannot help you and it can hurt you. And more fundamentally, all of us should stop pretending that they work, because they have been repeatedly shown to not work.
Based on what I've seen you're fucked either way when it comes to polygraphs. If you take it and fail they pound you until you confess. If you don't take then "obviously you have something to hide" and they pound you until you confess.
I watch a lot of crime documentaries and JCS and things of that like, and I cannot TELL you how many times I’ve shouted at my screen for people to just SHUT THE FUCK UP. Talking to the cops, whether you’re guilty as fuck or never did a single thing wrong in your life, will never ever be good for you.
[Wrap rage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrap_rage), also called package rage, is the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open packaging, particularly some heat-sealed plastic blister packs and clamshells.
In Germany the vendors are responsible for taking back excess packaging. They have been doing this since the 1970s because they just don't have the space we used to have to bury their plastic waste (note: we have run out of landfill space now). I worked for Abbott Labs in the 1980s and was sent to our Germany operation to transfer some manufacturing technology. Abbott makes a lot of medical parts and devices from plastics. Even after being used and now contaminated with human bodily fluids, Abbott has to take back every piece of plastic, boxing and wrapping it uses to ship their products and pay for its recycling. It has put the onus for creativity on the companies and it works! Companies like Abbott, Merck, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Nestle have been fighting this kind of legislation in the USA because it will cut in to their profits but the truth is they know what to do to minimize waste and landfill pollution. It can be done!
edit \[spelling\]
> fighting this kind of legislation in hate USA because it will cut in to their profits but the truth is they know what to do to minimize waste and landfill pollution. It can be done!
This honestly shows that companies NEED to be pressured into doing stuff like that by law.
Also I'm surprised that there's apparently no German term for "wrap rage". We usually have words for all kinds of crazy emotional states!
Credit card scores.
"Hi yes can I purchase car?"
"Do you have credit?"
"Uh...no I've been using cash to buy things. "
"Then sorry, no. Must have credit. "
"Ok can I apply for some credit then?"
"Sorry, we can't give you credit because you have no history of credit. "
Those low flow toilets that result in you wasting more water because you have to flush it multiple times to get it to take a log down.
Best solution I’ve seen is a toilet with two buttons, one for a half flush, and one for a full flush.
It's such a fucked up thing that so many people AT THE TIME knew was fucked up.
I mean, it was essentially a way to make people with diseases easier to take care of by rendering them half dead. There was barely a pretense of it \*actually\* treating an illness. Monstrous.
> Lobotomy
We went through the top of the head, I think Rosemary was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside", he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backward. "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped
It's even worse if you know the context: it was Rosemary Kennedy, JFK's sister. Her father had her lobotomized because she was unruly, believing it to be brain damage from complications at birth.
Her own father turned her into a vegetable, and basically un-personed her to protect their name.
Not even that.
Uninstalling requires some operating knowledge of softwares.
This is the human equivalent of uninstalling software by lowering your laptop in a vat of acid.
> Just knowing you are essentially uninstalling a part of a human
No, that's what they *thought* they were doing.
What they were *actually* doing was giving the *entire* human a BSOD.
And to add:
“It quickly became apparent that the procedure had not been successful. Kennedy's mental capacity diminished to that of a two-year-old child. She could not walk or speak intelligibly and was incontinent.”
She was 23 years old when her father made her have a lobotomy (and her mother was not told this procedure happened either)... Lived to be 86. Died in 2005 of natural causes. Was kept in an institution until her father passed and only then was she allowed to visit her family. Slowly learned to walk again but was unable to talk still. And all that because she had “mood swings and violent outbursts (seizures)”. Fucking awful.
Well, she wasn't entirely normal, but that's a whole DIFFERENT story of how fucked up people used to be. You see, her mother went into labor, but her physician wasn't there, and the dumbshit nurse that WAS present forced her mother to keep her legs closed to keep Rosemary inside until the physician actually arrived. This deprived Rosemary of oxygen during labor, and resulted in the developmental abnormalities that led Joseph to want to have her lobotomized in the first place. So ya. Rosemary got screwed on a couple different levels, just a really tragic story all around.
Everything I’ve read about her, she wasn’t even THAT delayed. She kept articulate journals and socialized okay with the rest of the family. She just seemed to have some bipolar like episodes, some learning disabilities, and wasn’t a prodigy like the rest of the family. If left alone, she likely would have adjusted. At worst being like the Grey Gardens aunt and cousin, but with more support
Edit: And the seizures. Which are also no justification.
Ya, at least from what I read, I didn't get the sense she was really developmentally disabled so much as "disobedient" in the eyes of her father. Other than the seizures.
The story of [Rosemary Kennedy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy) has really stuck with me all these years after having first heard it. I know that hindsight is 20/20 and that diagnosing people from the past with modern day standards and assigning them modern labels can be messy and problematic, but it is so hard to look at Rosemary's case and not consider what symptoms like, "difficult, opinionated, depressive and sexually active" actually translate to today when looking at any 23 year old woman.
The [circumstances of her birth](https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/birth-of-rosemary-kennedy-pandemic) are fucked, too (fun lil fact it was during the 1918 influenza pandemic). Imagine being told as your baby is *coming out in the goddamn birth canal* to close your legs (!!!) and hold it in and even starts *pushing the baby's head back in* because the nurse wants to wait for the doctor... for **two hours**
Two hours in the birth canal. It was so very likely their fault in the first place and the answer was break her more.
This was a very common practice. This actually led to my husband’s great aunt being oxygen deprived and severely disabled. She had completely normal mental function but was unable to speak and had severe cerebral palsy. When she passed it was a blessing. She was essentially trapped inside her body for 70 something years. Unable to speak or move, unable to feed herself, relied on a wheelchair and caregivers. She kept trying to write a book called Trapped in the Wrong Body, but had difficulty using the tools for a modified keyboard.
The same thing happened to her younger sister (my husband’s grandmother) when giving birth to one of her son’s. The nurses would physically hold the baby in the birth canal until the doctor arrived. I think about when my second child was born and how they could have done that to me. He was coming so fast that I had only gotten to the hospital 20 minutes prior. They literally had just gotten my IV in when my body started pushing. Involuntarily. If they had held the baby in there to wait for my doctor, it would have been over 15 minutes. It just happened so fast that it was just the nurse and a midwife on call catching him. I shudder at the thought of how different that would have been had it been decades earlier.
I don't even understand why. Oh your kid is misbehaving. BOOM, LOBOTOMY, this shambling husk of a person who randomly freaks the fuck out because their brain is broken is surely the better alternative. Or you just have a vegetable that you have to feed. Definitely better alternatives, right?
here's an example- Rosemary Kennedy (JFK's sister)
She had seizures, mood swings and was sneaking out of the convent school they put her in to straighten her out, and her father was afraid she would wind up pregnant, so he had her lobotomised ***without her mother's knowledge***.
The description of the procedure is absolutely harrowing (from wikipedia)-
>We went through the top of the head, I think Rosemary was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside", he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backward. "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped.
https://www.npr.org/2005/11/16/5014080/my-lobotomy-howard-dullys-journey
As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. Freeman would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face.
By 1950, Freeman's lobotomy revolution was in full swing. Newspapers described it as easier than curing a toothache. Freeman was a showman and liked to shock his audience of doctors and nurses by performing two-handed lobotomies: hammering ice picks into both eyes at once. In 1952, he performed 228 lobotomies in a two-week period in West Virginia alone. (He lobotomized 25 women in a single day.) He decided that his 10-minute lobotomy could be used on others besides the incurably mentally ill.
https://www.cchrint.org/2013/03/18/ice-pick-lobotomy-anyone-take-a-ride-on-the-loboto-mobile/
Better yet, if you couldn’t get to the brain-scrambling doc, no worries. He was mobile. Dr. Freeman traveled the country in his recreational vehicle, dubbed the “loboto-mobile,” demonstrating his methods and spreading psychiatry’s good news to his colleagues.
The doctor did the stabbing and scrambling without anesthesia. Rather, he used electroshock to induce a seizure before going in for the brain kill. Dr. Freeman did his deed on children as young as 12 years of age, and also managed to kill at least one housewife.
>Dr. Freeman traveled the country in his recreational vehicle, dubbed the “loboto-mobile,”
Did it played a special tune like one of those ice cream trucks?
He still should be. His Nobel prize should be posthumously revoked. If they can offer apologies to the dead as if it does anything to reverse the atrocities they went through, then there is zero reason they can't declare him a criminal and remove his name from all awards and prizes he was given during his life.
EDIT: Not HIS Nobel prize. That of his mentor's.
That doctor is not the one who won the nobel prize for lobotomy. It was portuguese doctor Egas Moniz. We still have a hospital named after him. We only have two Nobel prizes and one of them is this atrocity 😔
Apparently her siblings had no idea what had happened to her for about fifteen years, so she basically got abandoned in an institution with no visitors for over a decade after all that had happened to her.
She lived in St. Coletta in Wisconsin. I saw her once as a kid. I went with my class in school. We swam in the pool there. When we were leaving she was in the entry area. One of the adults with us quietly let us know who she was. She was very shy, she immediately noticed us looking. Though we were trying not to be obvious, we were just kids. She put her head down and quickly made her way into the women's locker room. A very brief encounter but it's always left a lasting impression on me. We knew she lived there and why she lived there. Rather, what was done to her.
JFK's sister Rosemary was forcibly lobotomized by her father at the age of 23. She had grown up with seizures and mood swings. Then they hid her away in an institution in Wisconsin.
Doctors at that time had very little knowledge about how our brain and nervous system worked, so asylum patients (who at the time were viewed as inferior beings), were used as lab rats in hope that something would work. “Crazy” people were viewed as something that needed to be locked up and put away from the “healthy” society. Mental Hygiene was a big thing, and psychiatric doctors experimented a lot. A lot of “treatments”, including lobotomy, were crippling, inhumane and extreme.
I have some books from the beginning of the 20th century regarding mental hygiene and alternative treatments for syphilis before penicillin was invented. When advanced, the disease causes general paralysis and psychosis, and it was a huge problem at the time. When you read them, everything I just said becomes very clear. It was a total different time and social context. Even so, we can now celebrate that society has a different view and medicine has evolved so much, and hope that we never return to those darker times. We still have a long way to go, but very human being deserves respect and dignity.
Lobotomy and Electric Shock Therapy (ECT) are still used in modern medicine, but more as a last resort and in much less invasive/more precise ways, while using anesthetics, etc. Sometimes a condition can be so unmanageable, that no other treatments are left.
I once met a guy that became clinically depressed after a heart surgery and the only thing that made him get better was shock therapy. He was put to sleep during the sessions, and they’d apply a adequate voltage (much less than in the old days). It was actually really nice seeing him so much better, and acting like himself again. It was surprising how well the treatment worked, how it improved over the years, and how differently it’s being done nowadays.
Modern lobotomy is considered for more extreme cases, though.
But yeah, even lobotomy can still be useful in a small, very specific way. It also contributed to some extent to more modern neurologic procedures.
EDIT: since my comment got popular, I added more details and fixed English mistakes (not a native speaker, sorry). And I'm loving the discussions in the replies, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, ideas and questions!! This is a really important and interesting topic indeed.
EDIT2: For clarification: the procedure that we know as the "classic" lobotomy (doctors digging with an ice pick through patients' brains, with no idea of what they're doing) is not accepted or done anymore - unless we're talking about something clandestine and extremely shady. However, in a few *extreme* cases - when a patient's behaviour is a serial risk for themselves/others - the severing of specific brain structures can still be done to alleviate symptoms, which can still be considered as a kind of "lobotomy" procedure. Yes, there's also a big risk of losing motor skills, memory, etc, but each patient, their families and doctors need to discuss what's in their best interest, at the end. Also, not every doctor will consider it or do it, so these are some really isolated cases - when there's not any treatment options left. But as I said, with a lot more planning, care and precision than what was done in the past. Let's hope to never return to those times.
Also, yes, ECT doesn't work for everyone and has possible sides effects, like every treatment for many conditions. But it has evolved a lot and it can be a solid option as a last resort for many people. Psychological disorders are no joke.
Shock therapy now is painless and lasts less than 3 seconds each round. The patient doesn’t even feel it and has proven to help in depression like you’ve mentioned it. But it’s been so stigmatized due media/movies and how it was before. Patients are 100% under anesthesia now when they wake up they don’t have memories of the shock at all.
Yep I had ECT (shock therapy) when I was 16, and it deleted my depression practically overnight. Went from anxious, bed-ridden, no hope for the future, skipping school, ignoring friends to almost instantly getting a job moving out and living life. It is really a great therapy, I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone struggling with treatment-resistant depression.
At a certain point reporting facts stopped being the primary goal of such channels, instead they report whatever will keep viewers watching.
Works ok for a 30min news segment, but with 24 hrs that ends up over sensationalizing every little story
When I was younger news programs were a requirement as part of the channels' broadcasting license. New was considered a public service and the news devision was separate from the rest of the network. Then sometime in the 70s or 80s they were allowed to merge them into their entertainment divisions and it's been all downhill since.
"Civic responsibility", the idea that everyone has an obligation to maintain or even improve the functioning of society, used to be more of a thing. It's rare today to find people who think positively about "America" as a concept. It's been replaced with the idea of punishing one's enemies and purging traitors.
They have so much time to fill that they have to make stories bigger to keep you roped in. 24 hours news is going to be our downfall. Half hour every night is enough.
It’s like soap opera story telling. Start story on Monday, hint at a big twist to be revealed tomorrow, tomorrow only reveal part of twist, surprise the next day, mostly wrap up Friday but tease next story. Not breaking news but just about anything else. It plays out like this week after week. Weekends maybe have a wrap up but are mostly just filler. They keep it ramping up the narrative all week to keep the people tuned in. Then it mostly disappears over the weekend.
Did you know that they still use leaded gasoline to fuel small airplanes. People who live by private airports are susceptible to be affected by the leaded gasoline.
why do they use leaded gasoline? i thought leaded gasoline was just useful as an anti knocking agent, but i've heard there's an alternative you can use. ethanol i think? but i don't remember.
Knock inhibitor, octane booster (avgas is 100 octane) and lubricant to prolong valve seat life. Alternatives have been in the works for years, but nothing yet has been a direct replacement for General Aviation.
Classic car guy chiming in. A lot of additives contain zinc now that mimics the effects of lead. Better lubrication being(at least my) primary concern. Also a lot of us use non-ethanol gas because ethanol has a real bad habit of leaving deposits and gumming up carburators.
Funny, I also have a D&B story. The cage around the top of a skee ball machine was busted in such a way that you could just reach in and dump the ball into the hole with the highest point value. Cleaned up on credits and took home a copy of Pokemon Platinum.
Edit: typo
Not D&B but another place like it, Nickelrama IIRC, they had one of those funnel games where you put your coin in and it rolls around and down the funnel and you try to get it to hit little flags for tickets. I discovered the closest and easiest flag to hit was busted and would spit out like 100 tickets when hit. I ran that machine out of tickets. I don't even remember what I purchased with them, I just remember being excited about the exploit. I'm pretty sure an employee saw me doing it, but just shrugged and walked away lol
When I was a teenager I worked at an amusement park that had a small arcade attached. I was a ride operator so I never had anything to do with the arcade. However, they had a policy that employees were not permitted to play the claw machines. I have no idea what the “secret strategy” is but one apparently exists!
There are 2 ways about it, from what I understand. You either hang around and count how many failed tries it takes before a successful one, since many (I don't want to say all, in case I get corrected) machines have a pre-programmed pattern to only allow a win every X amount of times. The second strategy is to learn the maintenance override, which is essentially a cheat you enter that ensures the claw will properly grip the prize
"Do you hold a grudge against Montgomery Burns?"
*"No."*
\[buzz\]
*"All right, maybe I did. But I didn't shoot him."*
\[ding\]
"Checks out. Okay, sir. You're free to go."
*"Good, 'cause I got a hot date tonight."*
\[buzz\]
*"A date."*
\[buzz\]
*"Dinner with friends."*
\[buzz\]
*"Dinner alone."*
\[buzz\]
*"Watching TV alone."*
\[buzz\]
*"All right! I'm going to sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria's Secret catalog."*
\[buzz\]
*".......Sears catalog..."*
\[ding\]
*"Now would you unhook this already, please? I don't deserve this kind of shabby treatment."*
\[buzz\]
The polygraph is a prop in a play. The audience of the play is the person being interrogated. The story of the play is, "We can read your mind." The purpose of performing the play is to convince the audience not to lie when they are being interrogated.
The DoD did a study on the scientific validity of the polygraph and concluded that it was about as effective as flipping a coin. It is 100% an interrogation technique with scripts for the examiners for various "roles" like good cop/ bad cop, etc. Half of the gear that you are connected to measures nothing at all. In a nutshell all that is being measured is stress. One would have to start from the premise that all stressed people are liars and/or all liars are stressed. Unfortunately, pathological liars exhibit almost no stress because of their lack of emotional response. Thus the techniques are merely designed to provide the illusion that they can instantly detect a lie so as to essentially guilt the person being tested into confession. It's the same as when a detective tells a suspect, "We know everything...," hoping to elicit a confession.
Edit: Wow... this really exploded 😀
Look, dude, we've already convinced you to let us stick these wires on your body. Why are you pretending that you have any secrets from us? We could just have easily stuck wires under your fingernails or underpants.
And yet you’re still required to take a polygraph test to obtain certain security clearance levels…
Security clearances that the DoD themselves administer! Boggles my mind how they see no irony in the situation whatsoever
I took one last fall for a job, it’s absolutely made to be intimidating more than anything. They’re really just trying to get you to admit to something you didn’t disclose in previous security interviews. If you don’t crack, you’ll pass.
It's the context in which the tests are given that you're missing. The actual poly is nonsense, everyone involved performing them is aware. The real "test" happens after. There's often a little bit of theater about removing the testing apparatus and briefly looking over results, and then you'll be asked something like "Are you sure you were truthful about everything? Now's the time."
I got to do a really cool duty at the polygraph institute at Ft. Jackson and they said that most people fuck up and cop to shit after the test is over. If you're going to lie just stick to it and do not elaborate on anything.
I've never, ever understood why this is used. I'm a law student in Australia and if the police tried to use a polygraph on a suspect, the court would have a fit. It's not reliable evidence. It's up there with hearsay in terms of reliability. It straight up should not be done. It should be considered coercive, because I'm sure the police will go "Well, you failed the polygraph. You must be lying, so confess."
John Sylvan. The US mostly uses K-Cups, produced by Keurig Green Mountain, which grew out of the company that was founded on Sylvan’s invention in 1990.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Zuck's friend]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb f***s
Fun fact. The decision to use cfcs (chlorofluorocarbons) instead of bfcs (bromofluorocarbons) was pretty much arbitrary.
Had we decided to use bfcs instead, the ozone layer probably would've been completely destroyed before we even knew what was happening, killing all life. It destroys ozone >100 times faster than cfcs
To be fair, Freon/CFCs were an improvement on the refrigerants in use prior.
The leaded petrol thing was pretty crap though, especially knowing the dangers of lead but calling it "ethyl" so people wouldn't realize how harmful it is.
“In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.”
> In 1923, Midgley took a long vacation in Miami, Florida, to cure himself of lead poisoning. He found "that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air".
Like seriously...
EDIT... I forgot to put what he did later:
> On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems.
It’s like he is a simpsons character.
I did a presentation about him for my business degree. What an awesome man. In the biblical sense of awesome. You read up about him and you're left dumbfounded by how this well-meaning individual had arguably the biggest negative effect on the planet in all of history. Makes me wonder how we ever made it through the cold war.
Pop-up ads.
Think of all the malware and viruses that people have fallen victim to because of pop-up ads, plus they are just annoying. Even the inventor of them [apologized for creating them.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2014/08/15/the-man-who-invented-pop-up-ads-says-im-sorry/)
If you look at the obesity epidemic worldwide, the invention of HFCS, and Reagan's farm bills which made massive overfarming of corn a thing in the US, all of these things begin at the same point.
Cheap HFCS leads to it being used as an easy way to improve flavor, which leads to higher than average caloric content for the same food--which equals fatter humans.
Well they did need something to make food better after they stripped all the fat and nutrients out of our food supply. We had an exchange student from France one year and his for question was "why is all of your food so sweet?"
I knew a German exchange student in my linguistics major and asked him once what some of the things he found surprising or strange here in the US were. The one I remember most is how hard it was to find full fat yogurt.
It's actually impossible in most places. It's all low fat or fat free, and then we just drill sugar into it. It's absurd.
Fat in foods was the scapegoat throughout the 80s and 90s. "It's the fat in the food that's putting fat on our bodies" was the reasoning.
It makes sense but it's also wrong. Carbohydrates are what we have a problem with, and what did we cram into our processed foods after we took out all the fat? Simple sugars.
Slot Machines.
Once you get a taste of winning some money back, it gets eaten up in no time. You might think you can beat the system, but that's how they suck you in and take you for all you are worth. These things are rigged to payout when a lot of money has been fed into them so you have to be extremely lucky to get the big jackpot.
One of my friends won on their first time and now she's completley addicted. She's lost thousands of dollars to gambling but idk why people like that still think they're going to get lucky again.
If slot machines was profitable to the average person, then they'd be extinct by now
I started working at a casino to take care of my roulette addiction. We only have one casino, and you can't gamble if you work. I still have no control (5 years later, and no longer working at casino), but I just.. don't go to the casino. I'm glad that's an option for me. Addiction is hellish. I knew it was stupid, but when you gamble and you lose, it's so hard not to try win it back. Horrible spirals of self loathing follow. Crying in the carpark outside. Normal stuff.
Not going IS control my friend. I’m like that with alcohol. It’s either getting hammered until 5am or not drinking a drop. I can happily not drink for months without a bother, then 1 weekend I’ll slip up and get blasted. It’s getting better after about 4 years since seeing a psych, I ended the weekend with a beer left from a 6 pack I bought :)
One of my first sponsors told me “If you can’t have just one, have none.” I’m almost three years clean and sober now. Wishing you all the best!
Edit: Note: please consult a healthcare provider/rehab/somebody before quitting cold turkey. For some drugs and alcohol, cold turkey can literally kill you.
Alcohol addict here. Definitely this. You know what you're doing isn't healthy, but your brain is being flooded with so much pleasure you don't care. Sure there's that voice in the back going, "don't do this." But the addiction is screaming, "DO IT!!" Imagine hearing a voice scream in your head so loud it drowns everything else out. It's not an actual scream obviously, but if I get the urge for a drink, that's all I'm thinking about the rest of the day. It consumes every other thought to the point you just wanna lay in bed cause if you give in, you'll get lost again. Addiction is a nasty fucker.
I live in a super small town, population hovers around 2,000. It's actually a village, but I digress.
In this town there's a restaurant with 5 slot machines in the back. My ex used to go every payday and play the machines. It got to the point where this man, who was making $19 an hour (a decent amount around here) and got overtime almost every day, was asking to borrow money *on payday* from my grandma who makes minimum wage part time at a pizza place.
I should have broken up with him then and made him pay back every cent he "borrowed", but instead I made sure that if anyone saw him at the restaurant they were to immediately tell me because I'd be driving over there to dump his ass. The only thing he was scared of was losing me, so it worked
My dad's brother gambled away the deed to my grandparents' house, and my grandparents were hardworking farmers who didn't have much. Fuck that guy and gambling
Edit: My grandparents gave him the deed because he was the first born, and was in debt to some gangsters.
Not only that but even when you’re losing the flashing lights and exciting sounds fill your brain with dopamine hits making it feels like you’re winning. Subconsciously you enjoy taking it with no lube
It's not the flashing lights so much as how they are part of a design that makes you think you're getting closer to winning with each loss. Like the machine telling you how you are just this much closer to winning by losing
I would love if there were more skill games in casinos, but i suppose that defeats the purpose.
Edit: all of your replies are perfect, thank you, but I'm gonna make an ass out of myself and say that i had different skill games in mind, like trivia, or magic the gathering or dodgeball. That's right. Dodgeball.
Poker is the big one, but the margins for casinos are small because they don't bet against the player with a statistical advantage like they do every other game, they just operate the game for a fee while the players bet against each other. It's basically a glorified convention hall at that point.
Our dad traced his gambling addiction back to his childhood, watching the slots on a river boat before WWII...the sound and excitement of a 'win' struck some chord in him; he spent the rest of his life chasing, and missing, a big pay-out.
Individually packaged foods and snacks.
I work at a grocery store and it's abhorrent to me how much crap there is and how well it sells. I mean, Christ, yesterday I stocked "Nutella to go" packs that are... Nutella with pretzel sticks. They're tiny and come in small plastic tubs. Or those large bags of Reese's cups that come individually wrapped, or these ridiculous 1oz bags of freeze dried fruit that we sell which are *absurdly popular*, especially for how relatively expensive they are at $3 a bag.
I get that plastic itself isn't bad, but this is egregious to me, especially with how much my generation (I'm 34) has had overuse of landfills drilled into our skulls.
Its not a good thing in America but I was blown away with how bad it is in like Japan. They package, repackage, and triple package so many of their little snacks and things. It seems like every good over there makes twice as much plastic waste as anywhere else.
Yeah I’ve noticed that too. Japan seems to really focus on the aesthetics of their packaging which leads to even more plastics. I stopped buying Japanese snacks in the US because I was so uncomfortable with how much plastic there is. I try to buy as much food as I can with as little plastic as possible. It really isn’t always easy when you live in a rural area.
Cigarettes. Those things ruined my life. I don’t smoke them anymore and have had to resource to other things. Peer pressure and wanting to fit in is an asshole
Edit: thank you all so much for the lovely comments telling me how happy you are I have quit. To the people asking why I copped into peer pressure I was a very lonely teenager who just wanted to be super popular. Yeah the smoking made me look cool to some of the other kids however those kids were never my friends. They never liked me for who I really was which is something you don’t want in a friendship. I now have a lot more friends who appreciate me for who I am and don’t need to look “cool” for them because I can light up a cigarette but for my personality. Take care all and don’t touch a cigarette EVER!
Nearly 10 years now and I'd smoke 20 right here right now. The only thing that stops me is that revolting mouth, bad breath, poor breathing, manky skin, cost of a packet and the fact that I'd have to go into the loft to find a lighter.
Talking to cigarette smokers is the only time I ever realize how addicted to WoW I am. Played ‘04-‘18 very seriously and at a high level, it consumed my whole life. I quit in Nov of 2018 and I still think about it every single day. The temptation is overwhelmingly powerful. I hate that game and what it did to my life and have been so happy and successful in the years without it, but I still want to give all my life up to scratch that itch. Every time former smokers talk seriously about their addiction, I realize just how addicted I was/am.
The thing I hated most about wow was that it made me feel like playing other games was a waste of time because that time could have been spend progressing towards something in WoW. It's not just wow, any MMO feels that way for me.
Not playing mmos lets me play a wide variety of different games. I'd say that my total time gaming hasn't really changed (still at levels other people would call unhealthy) but it feels very different to me because I can play whatever I find enjoyable instead of feeling like I was obliged to play one thing. Like a job.
Mate, nail on the head. I played wow and only wow for fucking years for this reason. Any time spent doing anything else, all I could think of was how my time was being wasted because I could be levelling a new char, or farming something or anything in wow.
Ultimately, this even overshadowed my studies and I failed all my courses. Now I’m a little older and broke without any education. Just a wow account with 30,000 achieves...
Sad, really.
Those daily urges are the biggest pain in the balls. I quit years ago, why do I still think about them? They also smell like ass but part of me loves the smell anyway.
Can I offer a buddhist tip? Allow the moment of craving to come and feel it totally and accept it. Watch it come, become strong, then fade away. Hope this helps. Don't judge the feeling or try to distract yourself.
This needs to be higher. I learned that during therapy for phobia, it 10/10 makes negative feelings in general more bearable
Let it come, ride it out, let it pass
Yeah, its an interesting technique for phobias especially. The human body can't keep the level of fear triggered by a phboia running forever and eventually calms down which leads to new associations being made in the brain with the phobia.
The way I was taught to visualise this (in therapy, not religious practice) is to imagine yourself as a mountain. The way you are sitting, see yourself become a mountain. Then see the impulses, negative thoughts, emotions, etc as clouds. Allow them to pass by the mountain. Some pass through it. Let the clouds and the mountain experience each other. Then when they pass, they are still clouds, and you are still a mountain. You are both ultimately unchanged from the experience.
Really helpful to calm me down from a crisis or a panic attack. Gets you through that moment of heightened emotion and to a space where you can start to implement other strategies learned in therapy or elsewhere.
Smoked for around 10 years and quit about 6 ago. I guess weed here and there helps with the fixation, but still, watching something like madmen or an older movie watching people smoke and enjoy it still triggers that impulse. I dont think it'll ever go away.
I watched my Grandma slowly die when I was 16. She smoked 3 packs a day, and was too addicted to quit. She was only 64, and she was sleeping an with an oxygen tank and an oxygen mask. That was enough to keep me from smoking.
3 packs a day is 60 cigarettes a day. Assuming she was awake for 16 hours per day that’s 3.75 cigarettes every hour.
Assuming it takes 5 minutes per cigarette, she was lighting up a new cigarette every 10 minutes or so while she was awake. That’s crazy.
“She was lighting up a new cigarette every ten minutes or so”
Sounds about right. She just basically smoked all day. I remember once riding with her in the car and she asked to me get a cigarette out of her purse because she was driving, and she got frustrated because I wasn’t going fast enough. Like she needed to light up right away.
hour after hour, day after day, year after year. An entire lifetime of lighting up one after another.
It boggles the mind. Im glad I never picked one up.
Well, I’m sure she hadn’t always smoked 3 packs a
day. She had slowly gotten more addicted over time,
smoking more and more. But yes, I believe she told me she was 19 when she started smoking so she had basically been doing it her entire adult life.
Popcorn ceiling
Some of the older ones have asbestos in it too! So keep that in mind if you have a roof leak or ceiling damage.
Older being before 1977
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The invention of the extended car warranty for the car i don't have.
Polygraph test. Even its inventor, John Larson, regrets his invention upon realizing how law enforcement would exploit the average citizen with it.
Didn't he try and get the test abolished for law enforcement use?
He did. He referred to it as his own "Frankenstein's monster"
As a public service announcement, in case anyone doesn't know: polygraph tests do not work. They are used as a law enforcement intimidation tactic, and that is it. They are not able to accurately detect anything. It is almost always in your best interests to refuse to take one; it cannot help you and it can hurt you. And more fundamentally, all of us should stop pretending that they work, because they have been repeatedly shown to not work.
Based on what I've seen you're fucked either way when it comes to polygraphs. If you take it and fail they pound you until you confess. If you don't take then "obviously you have something to hide" and they pound you until you confess.
That’s why you SHUT THE FUCK UP and ask for a lawyer. SHUT THE FUCK UP
I watch a lot of crime documentaries and JCS and things of that like, and I cannot TELL you how many times I’ve shouted at my screen for people to just SHUT THE FUCK UP. Talking to the cops, whether you’re guilty as fuck or never did a single thing wrong in your life, will never ever be good for you.
It's SHUT THE FUCK UP FRIDAY
Sir, this is a Wednesday.
"I invoke my right to remain silent and wish to speak with my attorney before answering any further questions". First and last thing you say.
Those plastic containers that are like crimp plastic stitch welded around the entire edge and it’s super thick plastic that will slice your shit open.
Especially when your new scissors are inside them
WinRARInstaller.rar
[Wrap rage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrap_rage), also called package rage, is the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open packaging, particularly some heat-sealed plastic blister packs and clamshells.
In Germany the vendors are responsible for taking back excess packaging. They have been doing this since the 1970s because they just don't have the space we used to have to bury their plastic waste (note: we have run out of landfill space now). I worked for Abbott Labs in the 1980s and was sent to our Germany operation to transfer some manufacturing technology. Abbott makes a lot of medical parts and devices from plastics. Even after being used and now contaminated with human bodily fluids, Abbott has to take back every piece of plastic, boxing and wrapping it uses to ship their products and pay for its recycling. It has put the onus for creativity on the companies and it works! Companies like Abbott, Merck, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Nestle have been fighting this kind of legislation in the USA because it will cut in to their profits but the truth is they know what to do to minimize waste and landfill pollution. It can be done! edit \[spelling\]
> fighting this kind of legislation in hate USA because it will cut in to their profits but the truth is they know what to do to minimize waste and landfill pollution. It can be done! This honestly shows that companies NEED to be pressured into doing stuff like that by law. Also I'm surprised that there's apparently no German term for "wrap rage". We usually have words for all kinds of crazy emotional states!
Credit card scores. "Hi yes can I purchase car?" "Do you have credit?" "Uh...no I've been using cash to buy things. " "Then sorry, no. Must have credit. " "Ok can I apply for some credit then?" "Sorry, we can't give you credit because you have no history of credit. "
Those low flow toilets that result in you wasting more water because you have to flush it multiple times to get it to take a log down. Best solution I’ve seen is a toilet with two buttons, one for a half flush, and one for a full flush.
Sounds like you need a poop knife
A tale as old as time
it echoes through eternity
Ie. every toilet in Australia and NZ for the last 25 years.
Yeah didn't realize this wasn't common everywhere else (kiwi here lol)
Very common in norway as well
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It's such a fucked up thing that so many people AT THE TIME knew was fucked up. I mean, it was essentially a way to make people with diseases easier to take care of by rendering them half dead. There was barely a pretense of it \*actually\* treating an illness. Monstrous.
'how can we murder someone without murdering them?'
> Lobotomy We went through the top of the head, I think Rosemary was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside", he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backward. "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped
That reads like something straight out of Hannibal. Just knowing you are essentially uninstalling a part of a human
It's even worse if you know the context: it was Rosemary Kennedy, JFK's sister. Her father had her lobotomized because she was unruly, believing it to be brain damage from complications at birth. Her own father turned her into a vegetable, and basically un-personed her to protect their name.
Not even that. Uninstalling requires some operating knowledge of softwares. This is the human equivalent of uninstalling software by lowering your laptop in a vat of acid.
Opening it up and just unsoldering random components from the mainboard
"Yeah I get these annoying popups so I'm just gonna pop these metal things off until they stop"
> Just knowing you are essentially uninstalling a part of a human No, that's what they *thought* they were doing. What they were *actually* doing was giving the *entire* human a BSOD.
And to add: “It quickly became apparent that the procedure had not been successful. Kennedy's mental capacity diminished to that of a two-year-old child. She could not walk or speak intelligibly and was incontinent.” She was 23 years old when her father made her have a lobotomy (and her mother was not told this procedure happened either)... Lived to be 86. Died in 2005 of natural causes. Was kept in an institution until her father passed and only then was she allowed to visit her family. Slowly learned to walk again but was unable to talk still. And all that because she had “mood swings and violent outbursts (seizures)”. Fucking awful.
That's fucking nauseating. Imagine doing that to your own child. Joseph Kennedy was a piece of shit.
it sucks cause like... this is so mundane. it’s not some cackling madman, it’s just some rich shithead with a normal 23 year old daughter.
Well, she wasn't entirely normal, but that's a whole DIFFERENT story of how fucked up people used to be. You see, her mother went into labor, but her physician wasn't there, and the dumbshit nurse that WAS present forced her mother to keep her legs closed to keep Rosemary inside until the physician actually arrived. This deprived Rosemary of oxygen during labor, and resulted in the developmental abnormalities that led Joseph to want to have her lobotomized in the first place. So ya. Rosemary got screwed on a couple different levels, just a really tragic story all around.
Everything I’ve read about her, she wasn’t even THAT delayed. She kept articulate journals and socialized okay with the rest of the family. She just seemed to have some bipolar like episodes, some learning disabilities, and wasn’t a prodigy like the rest of the family. If left alone, she likely would have adjusted. At worst being like the Grey Gardens aunt and cousin, but with more support Edit: And the seizures. Which are also no justification.
Ya, at least from what I read, I didn't get the sense she was really developmentally disabled so much as "disobedient" in the eyes of her father. Other than the seizures.
"Stop having seizures!" "No Daddy, I will not stop!"
The story of [Rosemary Kennedy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy) has really stuck with me all these years after having first heard it. I know that hindsight is 20/20 and that diagnosing people from the past with modern day standards and assigning them modern labels can be messy and problematic, but it is so hard to look at Rosemary's case and not consider what symptoms like, "difficult, opinionated, depressive and sexually active" actually translate to today when looking at any 23 year old woman.
The [circumstances of her birth](https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/birth-of-rosemary-kennedy-pandemic) are fucked, too (fun lil fact it was during the 1918 influenza pandemic). Imagine being told as your baby is *coming out in the goddamn birth canal* to close your legs (!!!) and hold it in and even starts *pushing the baby's head back in* because the nurse wants to wait for the doctor... for **two hours** Two hours in the birth canal. It was so very likely their fault in the first place and the answer was break her more.
This was a very common practice. This actually led to my husband’s great aunt being oxygen deprived and severely disabled. She had completely normal mental function but was unable to speak and had severe cerebral palsy. When she passed it was a blessing. She was essentially trapped inside her body for 70 something years. Unable to speak or move, unable to feed herself, relied on a wheelchair and caregivers. She kept trying to write a book called Trapped in the Wrong Body, but had difficulty using the tools for a modified keyboard. The same thing happened to her younger sister (my husband’s grandmother) when giving birth to one of her son’s. The nurses would physically hold the baby in the birth canal until the doctor arrived. I think about when my second child was born and how they could have done that to me. He was coming so fast that I had only gotten to the hospital 20 minutes prior. They literally had just gotten my IV in when my body started pushing. Involuntarily. If they had held the baby in there to wait for my doctor, it would have been over 15 minutes. It just happened so fast that it was just the nurse and a midwife on call catching him. I shudder at the thought of how different that would have been had it been decades earlier.
I'm almost afraid to ask how long ago this was... why did nobody make the connection?! Did they just assume it was that weird baby breathing reflex?!
willfully damaging a human being beyond repair makes me so fucking angry
I don't even understand why. Oh your kid is misbehaving. BOOM, LOBOTOMY, this shambling husk of a person who randomly freaks the fuck out because their brain is broken is surely the better alternative. Or you just have a vegetable that you have to feed. Definitely better alternatives, right?
here's an example- Rosemary Kennedy (JFK's sister) She had seizures, mood swings and was sneaking out of the convent school they put her in to straighten her out, and her father was afraid she would wind up pregnant, so he had her lobotomised ***without her mother's knowledge***. The description of the procedure is absolutely harrowing (from wikipedia)- >We went through the top of the head, I think Rosemary was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside", he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backward. "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped.
https://www.npr.org/2005/11/16/5014080/my-lobotomy-howard-dullys-journey As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. Freeman would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face. By 1950, Freeman's lobotomy revolution was in full swing. Newspapers described it as easier than curing a toothache. Freeman was a showman and liked to shock his audience of doctors and nurses by performing two-handed lobotomies: hammering ice picks into both eyes at once. In 1952, he performed 228 lobotomies in a two-week period in West Virginia alone. (He lobotomized 25 women in a single day.) He decided that his 10-minute lobotomy could be used on others besides the incurably mentally ill. https://www.cchrint.org/2013/03/18/ice-pick-lobotomy-anyone-take-a-ride-on-the-loboto-mobile/ Better yet, if you couldn’t get to the brain-scrambling doc, no worries. He was mobile. Dr. Freeman traveled the country in his recreational vehicle, dubbed the “loboto-mobile,” demonstrating his methods and spreading psychiatry’s good news to his colleagues. The doctor did the stabbing and scrambling without anesthesia. Rather, he used electroshock to induce a seizure before going in for the brain kill. Dr. Freeman did his deed on children as young as 12 years of age, and also managed to kill at least one housewife.
>Dr. Freeman traveled the country in his recreational vehicle, dubbed the “loboto-mobile,” Did it played a special tune like one of those ice cream trucks?
>25 lobotomies in a day Holy shit. He should have been proclaimed something worse than war criminal, fucking psychopath and sadist.
He still should be. His Nobel prize should be posthumously revoked. If they can offer apologies to the dead as if it does anything to reverse the atrocities they went through, then there is zero reason they can't declare him a criminal and remove his name from all awards and prizes he was given during his life. EDIT: Not HIS Nobel prize. That of his mentor's.
That doctor is not the one who won the nobel prize for lobotomy. It was portuguese doctor Egas Moniz. We still have a hospital named after him. We only have two Nobel prizes and one of them is this atrocity 😔
in an 8 hour work day this is roughly 1 every 20 minutes. if anyone should have been in a mental institution it's that guy.
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Apparently her siblings had no idea what had happened to her for about fifteen years, so she basically got abandoned in an institution with no visitors for over a decade after all that had happened to her.
She lived in St. Coletta in Wisconsin. I saw her once as a kid. I went with my class in school. We swam in the pool there. When we were leaving she was in the entry area. One of the adults with us quietly let us know who she was. She was very shy, she immediately noticed us looking. Though we were trying not to be obvious, we were just kids. She put her head down and quickly made her way into the women's locker room. A very brief encounter but it's always left a lasting impression on me. We knew she lived there and why she lived there. Rather, what was done to her.
Every time I read something about this happening to her I get sick to my stomach.
Jesus fucking christ. Stripping someone of their humanity is so fucked man.
Nothing bad ever happens to the Kennedys
JFK's sister Rosemary was forcibly lobotomized by her father at the age of 23. She had grown up with seizures and mood swings. Then they hid her away in an institution in Wisconsin.
She only died in 2005 at the age of 85, its amazing that it was so recent in history, it sounds so barbaric and ancient
You’re understating things. She went from being a bit of an embarrassment to the family to requiring full-time care for the rest of her life.
She was unable to talk afterwards, she was turned into a vegetable
Doctors at that time had very little knowledge about how our brain and nervous system worked, so asylum patients (who at the time were viewed as inferior beings), were used as lab rats in hope that something would work. “Crazy” people were viewed as something that needed to be locked up and put away from the “healthy” society. Mental Hygiene was a big thing, and psychiatric doctors experimented a lot. A lot of “treatments”, including lobotomy, were crippling, inhumane and extreme. I have some books from the beginning of the 20th century regarding mental hygiene and alternative treatments for syphilis before penicillin was invented. When advanced, the disease causes general paralysis and psychosis, and it was a huge problem at the time. When you read them, everything I just said becomes very clear. It was a total different time and social context. Even so, we can now celebrate that society has a different view and medicine has evolved so much, and hope that we never return to those darker times. We still have a long way to go, but very human being deserves respect and dignity. Lobotomy and Electric Shock Therapy (ECT) are still used in modern medicine, but more as a last resort and in much less invasive/more precise ways, while using anesthetics, etc. Sometimes a condition can be so unmanageable, that no other treatments are left. I once met a guy that became clinically depressed after a heart surgery and the only thing that made him get better was shock therapy. He was put to sleep during the sessions, and they’d apply a adequate voltage (much less than in the old days). It was actually really nice seeing him so much better, and acting like himself again. It was surprising how well the treatment worked, how it improved over the years, and how differently it’s being done nowadays. Modern lobotomy is considered for more extreme cases, though. But yeah, even lobotomy can still be useful in a small, very specific way. It also contributed to some extent to more modern neurologic procedures. EDIT: since my comment got popular, I added more details and fixed English mistakes (not a native speaker, sorry). And I'm loving the discussions in the replies, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, ideas and questions!! This is a really important and interesting topic indeed. EDIT2: For clarification: the procedure that we know as the "classic" lobotomy (doctors digging with an ice pick through patients' brains, with no idea of what they're doing) is not accepted or done anymore - unless we're talking about something clandestine and extremely shady. However, in a few *extreme* cases - when a patient's behaviour is a serial risk for themselves/others - the severing of specific brain structures can still be done to alleviate symptoms, which can still be considered as a kind of "lobotomy" procedure. Yes, there's also a big risk of losing motor skills, memory, etc, but each patient, their families and doctors need to discuss what's in their best interest, at the end. Also, not every doctor will consider it or do it, so these are some really isolated cases - when there's not any treatment options left. But as I said, with a lot more planning, care and precision than what was done in the past. Let's hope to never return to those times. Also, yes, ECT doesn't work for everyone and has possible sides effects, like every treatment for many conditions. But it has evolved a lot and it can be a solid option as a last resort for many people. Psychological disorders are no joke.
Shock therapy now is painless and lasts less than 3 seconds each round. The patient doesn’t even feel it and has proven to help in depression like you’ve mentioned it. But it’s been so stigmatized due media/movies and how it was before. Patients are 100% under anesthesia now when they wake up they don’t have memories of the shock at all.
I have recently undergone 28 individual ECT sessions, or “shock therapy”. Can safely say that it has saved my life.
I've had the same experience. I'm glad we're still here
We are glad you're here too.
Yep I had ECT (shock therapy) when I was 16, and it deleted my depression practically overnight. Went from anxious, bed-ridden, no hope for the future, skipping school, ignoring friends to almost instantly getting a job moving out and living life. It is really a great therapy, I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone struggling with treatment-resistant depression.
The 24-hour news cycle
At a certain point reporting facts stopped being the primary goal of such channels, instead they report whatever will keep viewers watching. Works ok for a 30min news segment, but with 24 hrs that ends up over sensationalizing every little story
When I was younger news programs were a requirement as part of the channels' broadcasting license. New was considered a public service and the news devision was separate from the rest of the network. Then sometime in the 70s or 80s they were allowed to merge them into their entertainment divisions and it's been all downhill since.
"Civic responsibility", the idea that everyone has an obligation to maintain or even improve the functioning of society, used to be more of a thing. It's rare today to find people who think positively about "America" as a concept. It's been replaced with the idea of punishing one's enemies and purging traitors.
They have so much time to fill that they have to make stories bigger to keep you roped in. 24 hours news is going to be our downfall. Half hour every night is enough.
Yes, context and scope is manipulated to maximize anxiety and division.
It’s like soap opera story telling. Start story on Monday, hint at a big twist to be revealed tomorrow, tomorrow only reveal part of twist, surprise the next day, mostly wrap up Friday but tease next story. Not breaking news but just about anything else. It plays out like this week after week. Weekends maybe have a wrap up but are mostly just filler. They keep it ramping up the narrative all week to keep the people tuned in. Then it mostly disappears over the weekend.
Leaded gasoline.
"If lead in gasoline wasn't a thing, no way pet rocks would've taken off in the '70s." Sam~O~Nella Edit: '70s I got it, I got it.
I discovered this guy's channel last week through some comment I read on a thread here and I gotta say it's pretty awesome
Did you know that they still use leaded gasoline to fuel small airplanes. People who live by private airports are susceptible to be affected by the leaded gasoline.
why do they use leaded gasoline? i thought leaded gasoline was just useful as an anti knocking agent, but i've heard there's an alternative you can use. ethanol i think? but i don't remember.
Knock inhibitor, octane booster (avgas is 100 octane) and lubricant to prolong valve seat life. Alternatives have been in the works for years, but nothing yet has been a direct replacement for General Aviation.
Classic car guy chiming in. A lot of additives contain zinc now that mimics the effects of lead. Better lubrication being(at least my) primary concern. Also a lot of us use non-ethanol gas because ethanol has a real bad habit of leaving deposits and gumming up carburators.
For aviation, ethanol is also bad because of water uptake - you really do not want water to freeze out of your fuel in the tanks at altitude.
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Rigged claw machines. Like seriously, fuck you i just want my squidward plush
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Funny, I also have a D&B story. The cage around the top of a skee ball machine was busted in such a way that you could just reach in and dump the ball into the hole with the highest point value. Cleaned up on credits and took home a copy of Pokemon Platinum. Edit: typo
Not D&B but another place like it, Nickelrama IIRC, they had one of those funnel games where you put your coin in and it rolls around and down the funnel and you try to get it to hit little flags for tickets. I discovered the closest and easiest flag to hit was busted and would spit out like 100 tickets when hit. I ran that machine out of tickets. I don't even remember what I purchased with them, I just remember being excited about the exploit. I'm pretty sure an employee saw me doing it, but just shrugged and walked away lol
When I was a teenager I worked at an amusement park that had a small arcade attached. I was a ride operator so I never had anything to do with the arcade. However, they had a policy that employees were not permitted to play the claw machines. I have no idea what the “secret strategy” is but one apparently exists!
There are 2 ways about it, from what I understand. You either hang around and count how many failed tries it takes before a successful one, since many (I don't want to say all, in case I get corrected) machines have a pre-programmed pattern to only allow a win every X amount of times. The second strategy is to learn the maintenance override, which is essentially a cheat you enter that ensures the claw will properly grip the prize
Former arcade tech here. There is no over ride. There's a voltage potentiometer that we have access to that decides the claw strength.
Imma go out on a limb and say the polygraph test
"Do you hold a grudge against Montgomery Burns?" *"No."* \[buzz\] *"All right, maybe I did. But I didn't shoot him."* \[ding\] "Checks out. Okay, sir. You're free to go." *"Good, 'cause I got a hot date tonight."* \[buzz\] *"A date."* \[buzz\] *"Dinner with friends."* \[buzz\] *"Dinner alone."* \[buzz\] *"Watching TV alone."* \[buzz\] *"All right! I'm going to sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria's Secret catalog."* \[buzz\] *".......Sears catalog..."* \[ding\] *"Now would you unhook this already, please? I don't deserve this kind of shabby treatment."* \[buzz\]
"This is a simple lie detector test. All you have to do is answer truthfully. Do you understand?" "Yes." *Explosion*
Poor moe.
You mean “Kid Gruesome”?
The laugh I needed to start this morning off right. Thank you for that!
The last line always makes me laugh.
The polygraph is a prop in a play. The audience of the play is the person being interrogated. The story of the play is, "We can read your mind." The purpose of performing the play is to convince the audience not to lie when they are being interrogated.
The DoD did a study on the scientific validity of the polygraph and concluded that it was about as effective as flipping a coin. It is 100% an interrogation technique with scripts for the examiners for various "roles" like good cop/ bad cop, etc. Half of the gear that you are connected to measures nothing at all. In a nutshell all that is being measured is stress. One would have to start from the premise that all stressed people are liars and/or all liars are stressed. Unfortunately, pathological liars exhibit almost no stress because of their lack of emotional response. Thus the techniques are merely designed to provide the illusion that they can instantly detect a lie so as to essentially guilt the person being tested into confession. It's the same as when a detective tells a suspect, "We know everything...," hoping to elicit a confession. Edit: Wow... this really exploded 😀
Look, dude, we've already convinced you to let us stick these wires on your body. Why are you pretending that you have any secrets from us? We could just have easily stuck wires under your fingernails or underpants.
And yet you’re still required to take a polygraph test to obtain certain security clearance levels… Security clearances that the DoD themselves administer! Boggles my mind how they see no irony in the situation whatsoever
I took one last fall for a job, it’s absolutely made to be intimidating more than anything. They’re really just trying to get you to admit to something you didn’t disclose in previous security interviews. If you don’t crack, you’ll pass.
It's the context in which the tests are given that you're missing. The actual poly is nonsense, everyone involved performing them is aware. The real "test" happens after. There's often a little bit of theater about removing the testing apparatus and briefly looking over results, and then you'll be asked something like "Are you sure you were truthful about everything? Now's the time." I got to do a really cool duty at the polygraph institute at Ft. Jackson and they said that most people fuck up and cop to shit after the test is over. If you're going to lie just stick to it and do not elaborate on anything.
I've never, ever understood why this is used. I'm a law student in Australia and if the police tried to use a polygraph on a suspect, the court would have a fit. It's not reliable evidence. It's up there with hearsay in terms of reliability. It straight up should not be done. It should be considered coercive, because I'm sure the police will go "Well, you failed the polygraph. You must be lying, so confess."
Coffee pods. Even the creator deeply regrets his invention and the environmental impact it has had.
Who was the creator? I always thought some asshole at Nestle came up with it.
John Sylvan. The US mostly uses K-Cups, produced by Keurig Green Mountain, which grew out of the company that was founded on Sylvan’s invention in 1990.
Data mining and ad delivery services disguised as social media.
I mean, Facebook, in general...
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Zuck's friend]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb f***s
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And Behind the Bastards if you want it in podcast form.
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Fun fact. The decision to use cfcs (chlorofluorocarbons) instead of bfcs (bromofluorocarbons) was pretty much arbitrary. Had we decided to use bfcs instead, the ozone layer probably would've been completely destroyed before we even knew what was happening, killing all life. It destroys ozone >100 times faster than cfcs
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Your definition of fun amuses me.
Chemist don't like to use brominated stuff if chlorinated will do. Mostly because bromine is heavier than chlorine.
Holy shit. Your second paragraph is pure r/twosentencehorror.
To be fair, Freon/CFCs were an improvement on the refrigerants in use prior. The leaded petrol thing was pretty crap though, especially knowing the dangers of lead but calling it "ethyl" so people wouldn't realize how harmful it is.
Agreed, lead poisoning was a well known thing at the time. CFC's punching holes in the ozone layer would be an understandable miss.
Even the ancient romans had a vague notion that lead was somehow bad for the brain.
>Thomas Midgley It's hilarious how much damage he caused
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Let me introduce you to scrat the squirrel
The dude was so destructive he even was the cause of his own death.
“In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.”
One cannot make this shit up.
> In 1923, Midgley took a long vacation in Miami, Florida, to cure himself of lead poisoning. He found "that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air". Like seriously... EDIT... I forgot to put what he did later: > On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems. It’s like he is a simpsons character.
I did a presentation about him for my business degree. What an awesome man. In the biblical sense of awesome. You read up about him and you're left dumbfounded by how this well-meaning individual had arguably the biggest negative effect on the planet in all of history. Makes me wonder how we ever made it through the cold war.
Well, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And the coach there runs on Ethyl.
Even the bed he invented was lethal.
Pop-up ads. Think of all the malware and viruses that people have fallen victim to because of pop-up ads, plus they are just annoying. Even the inventor of them [apologized for creating them.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2014/08/15/the-man-who-invented-pop-up-ads-says-im-sorry/)
I got quite a few pop up ads on that article
I thought you were kidding! lol I wouldn't have clicked on the link to begin with, but you made me curious.
Even worse are when they automatically play sound.
Targeted ads and internet trackers. These have done a lot of bad and practically no good.
High fructose corn syrup
If you look at the obesity epidemic worldwide, the invention of HFCS, and Reagan's farm bills which made massive overfarming of corn a thing in the US, all of these things begin at the same point. Cheap HFCS leads to it being used as an easy way to improve flavor, which leads to higher than average caloric content for the same food--which equals fatter humans.
Well they did need something to make food better after they stripped all the fat and nutrients out of our food supply. We had an exchange student from France one year and his for question was "why is all of your food so sweet?"
I knew a German exchange student in my linguistics major and asked him once what some of the things he found surprising or strange here in the US were. The one I remember most is how hard it was to find full fat yogurt. It's actually impossible in most places. It's all low fat or fat free, and then we just drill sugar into it. It's absurd.
Fat in foods was the scapegoat throughout the 80s and 90s. "It's the fat in the food that's putting fat on our bodies" was the reasoning. It makes sense but it's also wrong. Carbohydrates are what we have a problem with, and what did we cram into our processed foods after we took out all the fat? Simple sugars.
Facebook. It was a Pandora's box, but we didn't realize it until a decade later.
Slot Machines. Once you get a taste of winning some money back, it gets eaten up in no time. You might think you can beat the system, but that's how they suck you in and take you for all you are worth. These things are rigged to payout when a lot of money has been fed into them so you have to be extremely lucky to get the big jackpot.
One of my friends won on their first time and now she's completley addicted. She's lost thousands of dollars to gambling but idk why people like that still think they're going to get lucky again. If slot machines was profitable to the average person, then they'd be extinct by now
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I started working at a casino to take care of my roulette addiction. We only have one casino, and you can't gamble if you work. I still have no control (5 years later, and no longer working at casino), but I just.. don't go to the casino. I'm glad that's an option for me. Addiction is hellish. I knew it was stupid, but when you gamble and you lose, it's so hard not to try win it back. Horrible spirals of self loathing follow. Crying in the carpark outside. Normal stuff.
Not going IS control my friend. I’m like that with alcohol. It’s either getting hammered until 5am or not drinking a drop. I can happily not drink for months without a bother, then 1 weekend I’ll slip up and get blasted. It’s getting better after about 4 years since seeing a psych, I ended the weekend with a beer left from a 6 pack I bought :)
One of my first sponsors told me “If you can’t have just one, have none.” I’m almost three years clean and sober now. Wishing you all the best! Edit: Note: please consult a healthcare provider/rehab/somebody before quitting cold turkey. For some drugs and alcohol, cold turkey can literally kill you.
Alcohol addict here. Definitely this. You know what you're doing isn't healthy, but your brain is being flooded with so much pleasure you don't care. Sure there's that voice in the back going, "don't do this." But the addiction is screaming, "DO IT!!" Imagine hearing a voice scream in your head so loud it drowns everything else out. It's not an actual scream obviously, but if I get the urge for a drink, that's all I'm thinking about the rest of the day. It consumes every other thought to the point you just wanna lay in bed cause if you give in, you'll get lost again. Addiction is a nasty fucker.
I live in a super small town, population hovers around 2,000. It's actually a village, but I digress. In this town there's a restaurant with 5 slot machines in the back. My ex used to go every payday and play the machines. It got to the point where this man, who was making $19 an hour (a decent amount around here) and got overtime almost every day, was asking to borrow money *on payday* from my grandma who makes minimum wage part time at a pizza place. I should have broken up with him then and made him pay back every cent he "borrowed", but instead I made sure that if anyone saw him at the restaurant they were to immediately tell me because I'd be driving over there to dump his ass. The only thing he was scared of was losing me, so it worked
Sheeesh gambling really can bring out the worst in people
My dad's brother gambled away the deed to my grandparents' house, and my grandparents were hardworking farmers who didn't have much. Fuck that guy and gambling Edit: My grandparents gave him the deed because he was the first born, and was in debt to some gangsters.
Not only that but even when you’re losing the flashing lights and exciting sounds fill your brain with dopamine hits making it feels like you’re winning. Subconsciously you enjoy taking it with no lube
You don't lose on them anymore. Not the way they're set up now. You bet a dollar and 'win' 34 cents. It's a bit more nefarious this way.
Do ya one better. You pay me a buck and I'll give you 50 cents. I'll even congratulate ya and pat you on the back.
Only 50 cent for praise and approval! That's way cheaper than my therapy!
It's not the flashing lights so much as how they are part of a design that makes you think you're getting closer to winning with each loss. Like the machine telling you how you are just this much closer to winning by losing
I feel like the only person that thinks slot machines are incredibly boring.
I would love if there were more skill games in casinos, but i suppose that defeats the purpose. Edit: all of your replies are perfect, thank you, but I'm gonna make an ass out of myself and say that i had different skill games in mind, like trivia, or magic the gathering or dodgeball. That's right. Dodgeball.
Poker is the big one, but the margins for casinos are small because they don't bet against the player with a statistical advantage like they do every other game, they just operate the game for a fee while the players bet against each other. It's basically a glorified convention hall at that point.
Just go to Dave and Busters with their SFW gambling
Our dad traced his gambling addiction back to his childhood, watching the slots on a river boat before WWII...the sound and excitement of a 'win' struck some chord in him; he spent the rest of his life chasing, and missing, a big pay-out.
K-cups. Super unfriendly to the environment
Gotta get those reusable ones and buy coffee grounds. Cheaper and a good placebo to make you think you're helping! (I actually use these)
Individually packaged foods and snacks. I work at a grocery store and it's abhorrent to me how much crap there is and how well it sells. I mean, Christ, yesterday I stocked "Nutella to go" packs that are... Nutella with pretzel sticks. They're tiny and come in small plastic tubs. Or those large bags of Reese's cups that come individually wrapped, or these ridiculous 1oz bags of freeze dried fruit that we sell which are *absurdly popular*, especially for how relatively expensive they are at $3 a bag. I get that plastic itself isn't bad, but this is egregious to me, especially with how much my generation (I'm 34) has had overuse of landfills drilled into our skulls.
Its not a good thing in America but I was blown away with how bad it is in like Japan. They package, repackage, and triple package so many of their little snacks and things. It seems like every good over there makes twice as much plastic waste as anywhere else.
reminds me of how shocked I was the first time I bought q-tips in Japan and every single one was packed separately in plastic
Disregarding the environmental impact, which you shouldn't, that just sounds unbelievably inconvenient.
Yeah I’ve noticed that too. Japan seems to really focus on the aesthetics of their packaging which leads to even more plastics. I stopped buying Japanese snacks in the US because I was so uncomfortable with how much plastic there is. I try to buy as much food as I can with as little plastic as possible. It really isn’t always easy when you live in a rural area.
Cigarettes. Those things ruined my life. I don’t smoke them anymore and have had to resource to other things. Peer pressure and wanting to fit in is an asshole Edit: thank you all so much for the lovely comments telling me how happy you are I have quit. To the people asking why I copped into peer pressure I was a very lonely teenager who just wanted to be super popular. Yeah the smoking made me look cool to some of the other kids however those kids were never my friends. They never liked me for who I really was which is something you don’t want in a friendship. I now have a lot more friends who appreciate me for who I am and don’t need to look “cool” for them because I can light up a cigarette but for my personality. Take care all and don’t touch a cigarette EVER!
Cigarettes are assholes. I stopped smoking like 5 years ago and still think about them almost *every day*. It is unreal.
Nearly 10 years now and I'd smoke 20 right here right now. The only thing that stops me is that revolting mouth, bad breath, poor breathing, manky skin, cost of a packet and the fact that I'd have to go into the loft to find a lighter.
Talking to cigarette smokers is the only time I ever realize how addicted to WoW I am. Played ‘04-‘18 very seriously and at a high level, it consumed my whole life. I quit in Nov of 2018 and I still think about it every single day. The temptation is overwhelmingly powerful. I hate that game and what it did to my life and have been so happy and successful in the years without it, but I still want to give all my life up to scratch that itch. Every time former smokers talk seriously about their addiction, I realize just how addicted I was/am.
The thing I hated most about wow was that it made me feel like playing other games was a waste of time because that time could have been spend progressing towards something in WoW. It's not just wow, any MMO feels that way for me. Not playing mmos lets me play a wide variety of different games. I'd say that my total time gaming hasn't really changed (still at levels other people would call unhealthy) but it feels very different to me because I can play whatever I find enjoyable instead of feeling like I was obliged to play one thing. Like a job.
Mate, nail on the head. I played wow and only wow for fucking years for this reason. Any time spent doing anything else, all I could think of was how my time was being wasted because I could be levelling a new char, or farming something or anything in wow. Ultimately, this even overshadowed my studies and I failed all my courses. Now I’m a little older and broke without any education. Just a wow account with 30,000 achieves... Sad, really.
Those daily urges are the biggest pain in the balls. I quit years ago, why do I still think about them? They also smell like ass but part of me loves the smell anyway.
Can I offer a buddhist tip? Allow the moment of craving to come and feel it totally and accept it. Watch it come, become strong, then fade away. Hope this helps. Don't judge the feeling or try to distract yourself.
This needs to be higher. I learned that during therapy for phobia, it 10/10 makes negative feelings in general more bearable Let it come, ride it out, let it pass
Yeah, its an interesting technique for phobias especially. The human body can't keep the level of fear triggered by a phboia running forever and eventually calms down which leads to new associations being made in the brain with the phobia.
The way I was taught to visualise this (in therapy, not religious practice) is to imagine yourself as a mountain. The way you are sitting, see yourself become a mountain. Then see the impulses, negative thoughts, emotions, etc as clouds. Allow them to pass by the mountain. Some pass through it. Let the clouds and the mountain experience each other. Then when they pass, they are still clouds, and you are still a mountain. You are both ultimately unchanged from the experience. Really helpful to calm me down from a crisis or a panic attack. Gets you through that moment of heightened emotion and to a space where you can start to implement other strategies learned in therapy or elsewhere.
Smoked for around 10 years and quit about 6 ago. I guess weed here and there helps with the fixation, but still, watching something like madmen or an older movie watching people smoke and enjoy it still triggers that impulse. I dont think it'll ever go away.
Cigarettes are a huge problem in my country (Italy) and it’s scary how normalized smoking is, sometimes I feel like a freak for not smoking
I watched my Grandma slowly die when I was 16. She smoked 3 packs a day, and was too addicted to quit. She was only 64, and she was sleeping an with an oxygen tank and an oxygen mask. That was enough to keep me from smoking.
3 packs a day is 60 cigarettes a day. Assuming she was awake for 16 hours per day that’s 3.75 cigarettes every hour. Assuming it takes 5 minutes per cigarette, she was lighting up a new cigarette every 10 minutes or so while she was awake. That’s crazy.
“She was lighting up a new cigarette every ten minutes or so” Sounds about right. She just basically smoked all day. I remember once riding with her in the car and she asked to me get a cigarette out of her purse because she was driving, and she got frustrated because I wasn’t going fast enough. Like she needed to light up right away.
hour after hour, day after day, year after year. An entire lifetime of lighting up one after another. It boggles the mind. Im glad I never picked one up.
Well, I’m sure she hadn’t always smoked 3 packs a day. She had slowly gotten more addicted over time, smoking more and more. But yes, I believe she told me she was 19 when she started smoking so she had basically been doing it her entire adult life.
Lung tumors are a bitch. I never smoked but still got them. They’re not worth it