For sure, but also I don't want "Joe's Discount Basement Insulin" to be on the market. I do think we should allow imports of medicines from some places in the world as long as they meet a verifiable safety standard.
This is great news. Honestly, I hope to see more nationalization of widely used services (or whatever the equivalent word for nationalization is at state or municipal levels.)
Municipal broadband, power, roads, schools, post, housing, and healthcare? It's long overdue, and with an appropriate amount of funding has been shown to be effective at controlling costs and delivering moderately good quality in most cases.
A lot of things get so warped by profit motive. And there are places I want a profit motive, but insulin (and healthcare generally) isn't one.
Walmart needs to either earn a profit or use the item as a loss leader to earn a profit elsewhere. A government can provide services without expecting them to be profitable. (See: roads, licensing, schools, transit, etc.)
There's no reason California couldn't say, "If you need insulin, and you live in California, it's available for free." Assuming that's what the taxpayers want.
"All these safety regulations slow down the free market! Anyone should be able to make and sell insulin! If it's poisonous, people just won't buy that!"
You should understand that your definition is out of date, but I'll respond:
> If somebody has coping strategies that effectively mask their autism (in the early childhood/developmental stage specifically), they DO NOT HAVE autism
The DSM V diagnoses autism much more broadly -- https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html -- and it's very plausible that a child might not be identified. (For example, my parents were drunkards, I was not assessed as a child.) A child might also learn that they are punished for some behaviors such as stimming, and learn not to do it publicly, but still engage in that behavior privately.
Autism diagnoses only require that person needs 'support', and explicitly calls out that symptoms may be masked by coping strategies.
> How SPECIFICALLY are these additional people getting diagnosed?
Psychologists and psychiatrists usually start with a series of screening questions, followed by several in person discussions sessions where they probe into both your own self perceptions and the perceptions of others.
There is a 2018 paper that specifically identifies camoflauging traits and a screener that can be used to help identify adults (and others) who have built systems to survive in the world. It's called the CAT-Q. See the paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-018-3792-6
> Is there special training diagnosticians get to unveil the secret masked signs of autism?
Yes. Typically a psych degree (doctorate) with an emphasis on ASD, but sometimes masters level mental health professionals working in concert with an MD.
> What are these scientific advances I've heard vaguely cited for the rise in autism diagnosis over the years?
Well, see the 2018 paper I linked above. If it would be helpful, there are many other papers from 2000 onward that specifically address everything from repetitive behaviors to social isolation to meltdowns, etc. Mostly, we've improved our screening processes, which means we've got better, more accurate criteria.
> Why is it even possible for a diagnostic criteria that hasn't changed to result in dramatically different diagnostic rates over time, doesn't that prove the diagnostic process is fundamentally unreliable and thus fundamentally scientifically invalid?
The DSM criteria have changed between DSM 4 and DSM 5, in 2013. The DSM used to separate Autism and Aspergers as categorically different, but they've removed the Asperger's category and adjusted the criteria for a diagnosis.
It's also important to remember that science is never stable. The point of science is to revise over time our criteria. The point is to evaluate what new information we have.
And observed rates have risen, from about 1% to about 2% over the past decade, which you've correctly identified, but you would expect that because screenings have improved, diagnosticians have evolved, and we've put more emphasis on testing people.
That's not a huge number of people, and it's fairly reasonable to assume that as we've developed the science, we're catching people who previously would have been missed by less accurate tests.
It could also be that whatever causes autism is also happening more. There's a whole lot of factors, but no, that doesn't mean the science is bad it just means we haven't answered all the questions we have yet.
> The fundamental cause of the rise of Autism is that both schools and parents both financially benefit from a child being labelled as "Autistic"
That's a pretty conspiratorial claim for an increase in diagnoses that can adequately be explained by "we're better at testing for it now."
> It's driven by parents and schools looking for money, money is the dynamo driving this, autistics are rainmakers.
This is likewise a conspiratorial claim. Can you provide evidence of this? Because "I've seen it" is at best anecdotal, and runs counter to the prevailing idea that being labelled as autistic by the medical community can deny you agency in academic, medical, and social contexts.
Science has improved, yes. We've discovered there are many people who are able to produce a set of coping strategies that effectively mask their autism.
This is what science does -- we continuously challenge what we know and change our definitions when we learn. The people who are experiencing diagnosis with autism and ADHD today will seem totally different than the diagnoses 50 years from now.
You cannot hold on to one, old definition for something like autism (or any other non-neurotypical behavior) and expect it to remain the definition, unchanging.
Welcome to being a senior dev. Your job is teaching, coaching, and developing others. Because the better and faster you do so, the better and faster the team will be at achieving your visions. You have the opportunity to set the direction for many engineers and build things bigger than you yourself can build alone, AND the people who will one day be able to help you do that.
Teaching is an investment (and is, imo, super rewarding). Think about where your team will be in one year if you spend the time now to level up everyone.
Let me tell you about the Luddites. People hear "Luddites" and think "Anti-Technology, backwards mentality! Closed Minded!"
No.
The Luddites were highly trained, technical workers who had built careers around being loom operators. They worked in the factories for a decent wage, and earned the factory owners a tidy profit.
New auto-looms were invented, and the Luddites were like, "This is great! Our highly trained staff can increase our production! We'll get paid more, the factory owner will earn more, it's a win-win!"
Except the factory owners said, "LOL. No, you are all fired, we're going to hire bargain labor and hold 100% of the profit. Get bent."
So the Luddites, who wanted to use the looms and increase the well being of all were turned out. And the factory owners extracted as much from the workers as possible.
The Luddites then decided, "Fuck it, let's burn these looms." and they went around and smashed up a bunch of them.
When I see AI tools being developed, I think, "Wow, an auto-editor. An auto-script-writer. An auto-matte painter." Surely the studios will want to use these tools to raise the efficiency of their highly trained staff and split the profits with them, right? No... of course not. The writing is on the wall already -- the studios are going to fire their highly trained staff, lean on technology, and try to maximize the profit to the studio at the expense of the people who work there.
We're setting ourselves up for a neo-Luddite moment where people get angry enough to start doing industrial sabotage, imo. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems so short-sighted to just turn out all the people who wrote code, drew art, edited scripts, composed music, etc.
(Maybe it's a good time to consider collective bargaining and/or unionization, if your job is likely to go the way of a Luddite's job in the future?)
Have you seen cops? Cops know one thing -- doing violence. They are already terrible at handling folks with mental health needs, folks who aren't neurotypical, folks from other countries or cultures... I don't want them anywhere near kids.
Discord is not a "chat app". That's a pretty narrow view on how it is both used and vended. It's a communications app, at a minimum, and people use it for audio, video, chat, events, and a bunch of other stuff that may require hardware acceleration.
Trains can't cover long distances? Surely that's a typo -- trains can cover incredible distances...
And they can change routes within their network. So yes, there's some cost to get train stations and tracks built, but afterwards they can visit anywhere within the network and carry a whole lot more than airships.
WotC licenses some of their content using the Open Gaming License. It ostensibly covers both the rules* of D&D as well as key elements of the setting -- particular monsters, characters, place names, spells, etc.
That license has allowed products and content creators to build on top of a shared platform -- using and reprinting portions of D&D's content to build their own worlds, stories, systems, etc. Note: not everything D&D publishes is covered by the OGL, just a set of core items they call the SRD -- Systems Reference Document.
WotC/Hasbro leaked that they were working on OGL 1.1 which had a bunch of ambiguous (and many argued harmful) language that required creators to do things like license their content back to WotC, pay fees to license content, control what and what was not appropriate to build on top of OGL, etc.
The OGL 1.1 was met with huge community backlash, and wotc has been fumbling for some time to figure out the next steps. It looks like they are taking those steps now.
* Aside, it's not clear that the rules of D&D are even something that can be licensed in this way, as game mechanics are not protected the same way as copyrightable characters are.
When you don't spend the time and money on preventative care as a society, you end up spending much, much more on emergency care. I feel like this has been quantitatively demonstrated again and again, but it's somehow still a political football.
People are saying 'ventilate'. Makes sense. I've got a resin printer in a large room with a crossbreeze, but I'd like to put in some more forced ventilation. Is there a quick thing I can buy that's got a small hood, inline fan, and waste vent? Or do I need to cobble something together myself out of flexible tubing?
Is a portable hepa filter sufficient? I don't even know what to look for.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the normal levels of inhibitions and reading social cues aren't present in many stalking cases. There is a belief that if they are just persistent enough, their target will see their attempts as affection and fall head over heals for them.
Fundamentally, I believe we need to do more for people like this. Safety nets and mental health and, if needed, in patient care. Would this have happened if the person had access to excellent therapy, medication, and support? Maybe, maybe not, but I would like to think that it would happen a whole lot less.