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The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

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Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point in drinking any alcohol at all unless you want to achieve some level of impairment?

This comment belies a misunderstanding of how alcohol affects the body - that it merely creates a gradient from "not impaired" to "impaired". Clearly there is more to alcohol than just impairment. Alcohol is both a stimulant and a sedative. It's widely recognized as a social lubricant. All of these properties, in moderation, can be beneficial to many kinds of work.

You get sleepy after one beer. Horrible feeling. I mean it’s nice at first but not for long.

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#292
post #14

Some of the speculation in this thread [1], originally flagged as hearsay, seems to be confirmed by this article, namely his use of nitrous oxide. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25235843

The singer, Jewel who was a friend sounded an alarm in August https://people.com/music/jewel-wrote-to-tony-hsieh-before-hi... She's pretty credible.

It's actually worthwhile to listen to what Jewel had to say:

https://youtu.be/GxqeOwVl0IQ

I was captivated when she described hearing Tony describe his vision for Holocracy, I finally understood what he was aiming for.

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the grief of losing someone to the virus is any greater or less than losing someone to an overdose or suicide. A death is a death and always tragic. I'm sure the mother grieving her sons suicide is just as sad as the person grieving the death of an elderly parent. (Of course in reality people care less about addiction deaths because many still mistakenly see it as a moral failing rather than a disease).…

> most of us are likely to get this disease at some point anyway

If you live someplace like South Dakota with grossly irresponsible leaders at every level of government, this is probably true.

If you live somewhere with decisive and responsible leadership like South Korea, New Zealand, Finland (among many successful countries around the world, rich and poor), or Vermont, then probably not.

Notice that multiple effective vaccines are here. We just need to hold out through this winter, so that production can spin up enough to start getting a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated.

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#294
post #202
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things. It was flagkilled for a while and then we unkilled it but left [flagged] on. It also got a lot of upvotes, so the signals were actually mixed. I don't have any special insight, but FWIW: situations like this are inevitably messy. People want different things (e.g. the social standard about not speaking ill of the dead vs. curiosity to know the truth or share…

I've run and moderated a forum for 15+ years (not dissimilar position to your role here) and think I've developed a pretty good instinct for picking the truth from fiction in anonymous posts of that sort. I was very confident that it was close enough to the truth. That said, I don't think the average reader can "smell" the difference in the same way; they haven't approached a forum daily with a moderator's eye. I'm a…

[deleted]

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#295
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Tony Hsieh had a surprisingly large collection of half-empty liquor bottles at his desk. Not just Tony. My best friend used to work at Zappos. He used to brag to me that every employee/team gets their own mini-fridge, which is stocked with booze and liquor. He said that a common "bonding" experience for different teams in the company is to exchange different types of liquor. This was in early 2010s. He said drinkin…

Startups usually have fridge full of booze. We usually use it on fridays or during certain major milestones. Not a big deal

If you watched Valley of the Boom, the Netscape build team sections talk about the booze culture. This has persisted into SRE team culture. This is not new. I agree, no big deal.

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately it is being factored into these decisions, and has been publicly discussed for about nine months now as a consideration. What makes you think it's getting lost? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/health/coronavirus-alcoho...

Given the extreme conditions being imposed in certain states, it certainly is not being factored into these decisions uniformly by all governors. There are states that are using reason and common sense. But look at California for example. When you have Sheriffs in virtually every major county directly and publicly refusing to enforce your orders, perhaps you have gone too far [1]. [1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news…

You disagree with their conclusions and are using that as proof that they are not including this data in their decision making. That's a poor argument, weakened even further by the various announcements and resources Newsom specifically has made about impacts on mental health and newly created helplines and recommendations - which make it clear that he is well aware of this effect.

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's insane to change policy intended to protect a huge segment of our vulnerable population to placate addicts. Addiction is a terrible thing (I've lost family members to it), but I'm not going to prioritize their needs over the needs of the elderly, essential workers, medical staff and high risk individuals.

Fair enough, but it's not only addicts being adversely affected by the quarantines and lockdowns. I would go so far to say that everyone has been adversely affected by the lockdowns--it's just a question of how much and have these costs outweighed the benefits. Until recently, I'd it was pretty clear that Sweden (no lock-downs) and the US (many lockdowns of varying length and enforcment) have suffered the same per ca…

Sweden changed course on that decision a couple weeks ago now, and has stricter rules than a lot of the US (no gatherings larger than 8 people, for example).

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the grief of losing someone to the virus is any greater or less than losing someone to an overdose or suicide. A death is a death and always tragic. I'm sure the mother grieving her sons suicide is just as sad as the person grieving the death of an elderly parent. (Of course in reality people care less about addiction deaths because many still mistakenly see it as a moral failing rather than a disease).…

> most of us are likely to get this disease at some point anyway If you live someplace like South Dakota with grossly irresponsible leaders at every level of government, this is probably true. If you live somewhere with decisive and responsible leadership like South Korea, New Zealand, Finland (among many successful countries around the world, rich and poor), or Vermont, then probably not. Notice that multiple effect…

The flu also has a vaccine and yet we have never managed to eradicate it, and this is even more contagious.

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of us are likely to get this disease at some point anyway If you live someplace like South Dakota with grossly irresponsible leaders at every level of government, this is probably true. If you live somewhere with decisive and responsible leadership like South Korea, New Zealand, Finland (among many successful countries around the world, rich and poor), or Vermont, then probably not. Notice that multiple effect…

The flu also has a vaccine and yet we have never managed to eradicate it, and this is even more contagious.

It will be quite hard to “eradicate” Covid around the world, but with luck vaccines will provide lasting immunity, enough to end the pandemic, return life to more or less normal, and prevent tens of millions of deaths.

Empirically, SARS-CoV-2 mutates much more slowly than influenza viruses, and if a new strain eventually pops up that the vaccine and people’s antibodies do not work on, the current vaccines should be faster to modify than to recreate from scratch.

Re: The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There have been 1.5 million confirmed Covid deaths It'd really be halpful to frame with some kind of context. TB kills that many annually. To make matters worse, it's a curable disease, so these deaths are entirely unnecessary, but when was the last time you heard a peep about that? It's been raging for decades, and WHO is targeting 2030 as the end of it.

Speaking of necessary context - in 2019 the US saw several hundred people die of TB, vs ~250,000 of covid so far this year. For better or worse, it's been possible to control the spread of TB so that it is no longer a great threat in the west, and that is what controls the amount of American money and public interest spent on it.

But, the way this control has been achieved is that the US and many other rich countries require anyone applying to immigrate (and many people not applying to immigrate, if they are from a risky country) to be screened for TB and be treated successfully before they are allowed to enter the country (with some waivers where treatment is unlikely to be available where they are). On top of all these border controls, at least $100 million is spent specifically on TB just inside the US every year, in order to keep the number of annual cases down somewhere around 10,000. Until 2019 healthcare professionals in the USA were required to be screened for TB every year. People in America who do contract active TB disease are required to take medication daily, personally supervised by a healthcare professional, for six months - to make sure they do it correctly.

And all this is only possible because TB takes a pretty significant amount of contact to spread, and there's a detectable latent stage (sometimes lasting an entire lifetime) of infection before it becomes contagious - neither of which is true with covid.

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