Really biased hit piece in the Tagesanzeiger in Switzerland today on ADHD because some sociologist got it into his head that prescribing Ritalin was tantamount to corporal punishment in schools.
That's one thing that surprises me here: the media is incredibly and almost transparently biased, which I would think is not the best thing in a fucking direct democracy.
I don't think these fuckers understand what it's like when you have ADHD and the only thing makes it possible for you to function without forgetting everything or being distracted by everything or being annoyed by everything because you can't filter anything out is the medication you often forget to take in the morning. There are two people living in my house who simply cannot function otherwise, and it's not because of some random description of symptoms.
But these people are adults. And I get really tired of folks thinking it's trendy to be diagnosed. Has anyone actually considered the idea that maybe there are a whole lot of us out here who silently got to adulthood with ADHD because our environment and coping skills made it possible to do so, and when our information-intense world has gotten even more chaotic, as has happened in the last decades, eventually those coping skills get overwhelmed?
My kid had huge struggles during the first three years of the pandemic, eventually declining to attend school because it wasn't safe, and then being more-or-less tortured by the state for that and being autistic (I'm really not understating that, though I don't want to get into it).
So as soon as it was legally viable - this school year - I put her into an online British high school. Her compulsory ed here in Switzerland is done (they literally give up on your kids at about 15 and push them into the job market)
Now, my kid is bright. REALLY bright. She skipped the first grade in France even though she didn't speak the language, did brilliantly in school there, and only started having issues when we moved to Germany... because those kids only have half day school.
(The idea behind the half days, I eventually figured out, is the teacher teaches you for half a day, and then your stay-at-home parent (who is of course your mother) will do homework with you teaching you for the other half of the day. Which is one reason that children of immigrants and single parents and non-university-educated parents have such a bloody hard time getting into uni in DE later, because they start out WAY behind and no one explains this expectation.)
Well, it seems like I have some luck again. Short-term, but it is something.
My experience in Switzerland is that if you don't have some connections to get a dedicated GP, you end up at one of these big medical practices where doctors basically do the last year of their residency and then leave, or, in a couple of bad cases I ran into at one huge practice, older EU foreign docs - and NOT the best ones - who want to make some money in CH before they retire work to settle in. (more)
The biggest silent driver of the world towards fascism is removal of the ability to get accurate facts and information.
It's not just the propaganda and deliberate misinformation - that's already in full swing.
The removal of the ability to FIND information is critical here.
The recent and very VERY obvious moves to make search engines nearly useless for actual search basically means 2-3 big corporations control our ability to find out what's going on if we don't hear about it from friends and family.
They control our ability to research things we don't know about. They control our ability to fact-check.
They control whether we find the answers to health questions. They control whether or not we see health data.
And governments control whether there is any data for us to see AT ALL (by e.g. removing funding from wastewater monitoring, not publishing data that they do have, not collecting data they should, etc.)
My ex told me that at some point after Chernobyl, it became illegal to own a Geiger counter in Germany. While I don't have verification of this, that is basically where we are right now.
It's hard to be outraged and to organise if you can't see what's actually happening.
It scares the fuck out of me, and I am NOT naturally paranoid.
@zleap Well, yes. Twitter has been a lost cause in this regard for a long time.
I find the degradation of search engines, however, much more dangerous and frightening. In the early 2000s, there were lots of different search engines, and Google was not in fact my favourite of them.
But for a long time, we've really only had Google (and Bing to a lesser extent), and Google has been declining for a long time.
It got worse when it became almost impossible to do exact string searches because they started doing things like stemming words, etc, so you couldn't find something based on the fact that a very exact phrase occurred in it. That, at least, makes technological sense (indexing is cheaper that way).
But with the excuse of "use AI for everything", we've seen a simultaneous drop in the ability to use search at all in the way most of us have for years, and I don't think it's coincidental.
It's bad when big platforms are overtaken by fascists. It's worse when the only reference to encyclopedia has been, effectively.
Universal staff shortages in almost every sector worldwide?
Geez, you'd almost think there'd been a deadly plague that had torn through the planet and killed, maimed, or incapacitated people, and caused serious emotional damage even to those who didn't get it.
@grrrr_shark Here in Seattle, WA, US, we see fewer retail workers and bus schedules reduced due to staffing shortages per the companies or agency that runs them. AND we see this in grocery stores ("We're hiring!" signs), drug stores ("We're hiring!" signs), county transit system ("We're hiring!" signs), etc.
While I'm in my unmedicated-for-today ADHD rant space:
A word for privacy researchers who mock folks who use products by Megacorps whose product is the user:
This isn't my thought, this comes from lots of conversations with lots of the disabled community, but it's certainly my experience as a disabled person with a disabled child:
Assistants and home automation products that can control everything are optional privacy-stealing annoyances for your average person. (more)
Do NOT tell the users that all they need to do is become Linux experts and install Home Assistant (which is great, but it's work...) and alternative product X and they will be better human beings.
You want to help?
Build accessibility products. Support strong privacy laws WITH disabled people in mind, because when you support marginalised people, you support EVERYONE.
Kiddo has been doing Angel work for c3auti and says it's easier helping others to do things that she finds hard to do for herself :) <3
Don't EVER let anyone convince you that autism means a lack of empathy. It's usually quite the reverse.
And if you find yourself pointing to a particular person or incident as your reason for that, ask yourself if maybe that person was taking time to process the situation, or if there was implicit communication, or if perhaps that person had other issues.
@grrrr_shark haha same to all of that. I literally laughed when these stupid farts who voted for brexit were on the news whining about the extra paperwork and reduction in income.
Like lol good, hope it ruins you
Poking around on the Internets tonight, while looking for something else, I fell into a bunch of commentary about the former almost-solo Thunderbird dev who got banned from the community and interacting with TBird developers/MLs/etc.
It is AMAZING what a bunch of people who don't know anything about the situation or person will speculate.
A little background: dude now runs his own fixed up fork of the TBird project.
All well and good. He's a talented guy and all and did a lot of the work for years alone.
But if you look at his project site, you also see (or at least saw, I haven't looked at it for years) that it's largely driven by his grudge for having been removed from the community.
I have some feelings about that, as I'll explain, but for now:
This thread I found was a ton of back and forth about whether this guy had done anything to deserve his ban, completely without reference to anything other than two emails he posted (one being his ban, and the other being his response to the council that banned him saying they needed to be dissolved) and a bunch of references to other Greats who were Once Assholes (tm) - e.g. Torvalds - and the usual argument about whether "But his work!" is a greater contribution than all of the people who quit because of them.
And I had to laugh, because there were guys who were just VEHEMENTLY defending the potential shit out of this guy, not even having used his product, because hey, communities don't have the right to tell you not to contact other people in the community!
Except they do, and there are reasons for that, and...
Well. Come along children and read my ill-advised thread...
I have never worked on TBird. I worked as the core developer/maintainer of the central component on a FOSS (allegedly) project that was supposed to integrate with myriad mail clients, including TB, but I had no interaction with the TB project except with one person. This will become important.
I have very little direct knowledge of the actual events that occurred leading to the ban - more that I experienced many things that allowed a lot of back calculation. And I experienced an AWFUL LOT of the person in question later on.
I have some very good guesses that I'd actually stake my reputation on, and if you know me, that's a thing I don't do. I am very good at and comfortable with the non-committal "I don't know".
I am not sure why I am going to tell this tale in any detail except that this thread was so absurd, and I hate that the FOSS community works like this - bros chiming in with their two cents about what must have happened when they just don't know anything.
I know something here. It's a different thing than in the thread, but it's something about the costs of "But his work!" that maybe you should know. If I can remember enough to talk about it. It's been a while.
I do not work in FOSS anymore. This guy and my former company's reaction to him are a large part of why. And I'm good with that. But this stuff continues because people don't talk, so maybe I'm just feeling up to it tonight.
More people are condemned in whatever I say about this than just this dude. I can live with that too.
No, I will not provide you with receipts. I don't owe you anything.
I am telling my story, and while I certainly have some shit somewhere and a ton of people who could corroborate this stuff, I AM NOT HERE TO DEBATE YOU ON THE INTERNETS.
I'm just here to talk about stuff that happened around me.
I think I'd been working at said FOSS project full-time for about a year when this tale starts.
It was a bizarre place to work to begin with, the conspiracy-theory-immersed "architect's" baby, a project intended to be split into a corporate branch to make money off of the apps it sold, a non-profit to own the core code pieces to prevent them from being sold to adversaries that could make them closed source (given that it was a privacy-enhancing tech project, this was a legit concern, though I will tell you that I also don't think it was unrelated to said architect's assertion that Signal was absolutely a CIA project. Anyway...), and some kind of community-driven group as a third pillar never got off the ground.
The commercial part was overseen by the board of the corp, and the non-profit part had its own council, whose job, as far as I can tell, was to do whatever the architect told them to do.
This also is part of the story, though it's a part I laugh at now. It was less great when there were human resources issues, let me tell you.
Since I have ADHD, it's after midnight, and I probably definitely shouldn't be telling this story in the first place because I am mostly happy to let that section of my life die, let me give one other piece of context so that my part in this (up to and including having ever taken the job to begin with) makes some sense to you later:
I got this job when I had been looking for a way to move to Munich (where I had a research job) with my kid and husband, but after failing to find an apartment for months (and being miserable in said research job for a whole lot of reasons much less dramatic than this story), my now-ex informed me of a FOSS privacy project that had openings, and my previous privacy research experience and development skills might be a good fit.
Here's why I do not buy the "ADHD meds are addictive for people with ADHD" bullshit:
You know how ADHD folks keep saying "Look, if it's that addictive, why do I forget it all the time?"
I think this morning a finer point on this hit me, after many days without it and taking it a little late for work today:
If I do not take my ADHD meds, I don't notice. At least, not until it is way too late. Because this is our default mode as ADHD folk. This is who and how we are.
I do notice when I have taken them. Many times, I feel them kick in - not like a jolt of some drug, but suddenly, I realise I can focus and express myself clearly when 10 minutes earlier I was struggling.
Ok, I need some advice.
My daughter won't allow pictures to be taken of her - and this is her right.
However, it turns out that while it IS a privacy issue for her, it isn't about the pictures per se, it's that she doesn't want pictures taken with a phone. Good old normal non-networked digital cameras would be fine, she just doesn't want Google or Apple consuming her likeness.
Any recommendations for affordable decent digital cameras? I haven't owned one in almost a decade...
EDIT: She has found some family friends and all is OK now ❤️
So Kiddo's dad apparently packed his entourage off to a hotel tonight in Berlin because he wants to catch an early train.
Made no efforts to see if my kid would need help packing/striking her tent, so guess who has been on the phone with kiddo all night hand-holding/explaining via video call/etc?
She did great, but she was panicked as Hell and is now stressed about not catching shuttles/trains today instead of having gotten sleep.
So... I had a kind-of iffy psychiatrist when the pandemic first began. Not because he wasn't a good psychiatrist - he was. We had really factual, detailed, research-driven discussions about ADHD when I got my diagnosis, which was exactly the right kind of discussion to have with this particular patient. Though I think it was more he enjoyed having a patient he could have that discussion with.
(He was iffy when he tried to play psychologist in an area he was very not-versed-in)
@grrrr_shark Just wait and see, I think. And remember that you know you better than he does, no matter how good he might be at persuading you otherwise. He's still commenting from the sidelines while you actually play.
@grrrr_shark I'm on Fosstodon but people regularly splain the fundamentals of free software at me. I suspect sometimes we aren't good at phrasing conversational elaboration/justification of a position? Or do some folk just never get off their soap box?
@helgztech there are a lot of mainly (but not only) dudebros who just think they know better than everyone, especially but not limited to marginalised folks.
And they have a tendency to explain, to a post author, unsolicited, things that the author would have had to understand to write the post in the first place.
It's a soap box thing, definitely, and it is exhausting.
Oh crap. I'm cleaning the house due to our imminent departure and have removed pants (tm) (American version - am still wearing British pants, though they are not actually British, and... gaaaaaah I blame you, @GrumpyGirdle !!!).
But ordered dinner tonight so I could keep working, and while child was supposed to answer door, I realised I have to because I ordered beer with dinner. So I have to wear pants again. :(