181–190 of 314 posts
As an aside: I hadn't bought anything off Zappos for years, and checked it out when the news hit and surprised that it still basically looks the same as I remember it maybe 10+ years ago. Certainly looks and feels like an eCommerce website from the late 2000s/early 2010s. I'm curious if this was an intentional choice or a sign the website has been on cruise control since the acquisition. It certainly makes me wonder…
I think something that gets lost in the concern about COVID is how many addicts and people struggling with mental health are being killed indirectly by these quarantines. I don't have an easy answer of course, it's a serious virus, but while for a normal person these shutdowns are depressing, for addicts these shutdowns can be indirect death sentences. I really think that needs to get factored into these decisions.
The virus itself is doing far more to damage mental health than stay-at-home orders ever will. Around the world, we’re talking about millions of grieving people who have lost parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, .... Millions more people who struggled to stay breathing and may now suffer severe long-term (or maybe permanent) symptoms. Health care workers around the world who will have PTSD from h…
If I remember right, the authors estimated the scenario as:
* Project 500K-750K excess deaths in the US until mass vaccine availability based on current public health practices (conservative/linear, ignoring exponentials involved)
* Someone dying generally has ~10 people close to them => half will experience ~depression for 1mo, 1 quarter for 2mo
* Something like 10-20% will have severe forms (major/ptsd/..)
* So something like 3 million people across all of above
That's a lot. Not quite as high as # of addicts in the US afaict, but up there. I could have easily got parts wrong, so worth going to the interview+article if you're truly interested.
They also have some articles on depression in elderly and other groups being especially impacted right now. Pretty real.
I think something that gets lost in the concern about COVID is how many addicts and people struggling with mental health are being killed indirectly by these quarantines. I don't have an easy answer of course, it's a serious virus, but while for a normal person these shutdowns are depressing, for addicts these shutdowns can be indirect death sentences. I really think that needs to get factored into these decisions.
> something that gets lost in the concern about COVID I don't know if I'd describe it as passively as "getting lost". Very visible people have been talking about it, including the outgoing President, who mentioned the mental health costs of lockdown multiple times. Leaving aside the fact that even true things that Trump says are discounted due to his lunacy, most people are too dim to understand the concept of trade-…
I think something that gets lost in the concern about COVID is how many addicts and people struggling with mental health are being killed indirectly by these quarantines. I don't have an easy answer of course, it's a serious virus, but while for a normal person these shutdowns are depressing, for addicts these shutdowns can be indirect death sentences. I really think that needs to get factored into these decisions.
...and how many new addicts and mental illnesses are being created
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This recurrent story where extremely intelligent people are battling mental health issues and cannot speak out because the stigma behind this issue is too damaging is why we need to normalize the discourse around mental health if we want to avoid this type of tragedies. Where exactly is the "stigma" of mental health in tech nowadays? We're blasted day and night to the point where apparently every other person is "b…
I mean, given the demands of modern society, I wouldn’t be surprised if every other person was honestly battling some kind of mental health issues at some point. I mean hell, it’s tough enough being sentient and dealing with mortality, throw in social issues, politics, propaganda, conspiracies, lack of health care, lack of social safety nets, caring for dependents, dating, paying bills, social media, “Instagram cultu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, just for starters, millions of people haven't died of the virus. At last count, the death toll so far is just over 1.5 million. A terrible number, to be sure, but if you claim to not be engaging in hyperbole or misstatement of facts, it would be good to back that by not making your very first statement completely non-factual.
There have been 1.5 million confirmed Covid deaths, but the total number of people who have died from Covid is far higher than that, I would guess at least 1 million more, but possibly higher. Even wealthy countries with developed healthcare/government infrastructure are missing a significant fraction of deaths (in the USA alone, we have probably missed about 100k Covid deaths from the confirmed count). In many less…
Regular old respiratory infections are a frequent indirect cause of strokes and heart attacks, but we've never claimed before that common colds cause "millions" of deaths.
It's the saddest article I have read in a while. Tony Hsieh was an amazing human being. The manner of his passing from the world does not take away from the good he did while alive.
Maybe sharing the circumstances of his death will also do some good if it encourages others with friends or loved ones who have mental illness to do something before it is too late. One of my friends has been spiraling out of control for the past few months. I have tried and tried to help them. I'm going to keep trying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If she can do that and do it in a positive way then I think an Internet forum could do it too. " You just compared an Internet forum to a grieving mother. Not the right comparison by a longshot. Allowing a publication run by professional journalists ( they follow a code of ethics) to share news is slightly better than internet forum participants to share their opinions on such a sensitive topic.
I think you have an overly favorable opinion of “journalists” (while I think WSJ is full of good ones, most publications are not). But that being said, I agree there are lots of bad ways to handle this sort of thing on public forums (see numerous Reddit failures). But there’s gotta be something better and more positive than to bury the truth. They were not sharing opinions they were sharing the facts.
And I guarantee you way more people were alerted to the truth in those well-researched and deeply reported articles than ever would have learned from a throwaway account on HN.
If the family had actively tried to halt publication of the articles or if there hadn’t been reporting into the cause of death, I would agree with you. But that isn’t what happened. Moreover, the reporting that did come out, even from the tabloid, added a lot more context and insight into the situation than what the burner account did. And even better, plenty of people were willing to put their name to their words (though you had people who were quoted anonymously too, which isn’t uncommon).
I got downvoted for calling that commenter and his comment gross - and I’ll probably get downvoted for this comment too — but the fact that unsubstantiated gossip happened to be true (which I personally didn’t so much doubt to begin with as much as it was I didn’t trust it without substantiation; my objection was how that information was shared) doesn’t change the other fact that the way it was presented was in poor form.
I’m in complete favor of being open and honest about the fact that people who we admire and respect or hold up as successful can struggle with addiction or mental illness. I think it is incredibly important to lessen the stigma around these areas.
But it is incredibly different for a mother to bravely and honestly declare that her son was an addict at his funeral then it is for a burner account to say “bro blew himself up while he was high on nitrous” (that’s a paraphrase, the original comment wasn’t as blasé but it certainly wasn’t full of either details or compassion). People are going to gossip and speculate on Internet forums, I get it. I’ve also definitely participated in it. But I don’t think it is too much to ask that as a community, HN be held to a higher standard of spreading anonymous gossip, than a place like Twitter or Reddit.
Think of all the new things you'd try to fill out days where you don't know many foods that start with that letter. And the days that are mostly fasting (e.g. Z) aren't too common.
Plenty of us are a little weird. I guess something to think about is where do you know the "little weird" is treading towards excessive danger.
I think something that gets lost in the concern about COVID is how many addicts and people struggling with mental health are being killed indirectly by these quarantines. I don't have an easy answer of course, it's a serious virus, but while for a normal person these shutdowns are depressing, for addicts these shutdowns can be indirect death sentences. I really think that needs to get factored into these decisions.
Based on the article, it doesn't sound like he was actually living in isolation. He just chose to surround himself with a crowd that enabled selfdestructive behaviors.