If it helps anyone I take antidepressants and have had a positive experience with them. Depression can be caused by a chemical imbalance and no amount of exercise or talking about it will fix it.
One of the most frustrating things when your really low is people giving advice like do exercise to feel better - please don’t do this.
> Depression can be caused by a chemical imbalance and no amount of exercise or talking about it will fix it.
This is a debatable. As far as I understand things: 'chemical imbalance' has no tests to confirm that's actually true, That's just a story they tell to relax people.
Which is orthogonal to the point that antidepressants can work for some people.
We don't know how depression works. It very well may be many little things dressed in a trench coat.
Jim Carey had the best way to think about this:
“I believe depression is legitimate. But I also believe that if you don’t exercise, eat nutritious food, get sunlight, get enough sleep, consume positive material, surround yourself with support, then you aren’t giving yourself a fighting chance.”
I wonder what his thoughts are on post natal depression? Of course those things help but there can be factors outside of people’s control that can lead them down this path…
People talk about depression all the time.
The difference between depression and sadness is sadness is just, you know, from happen stance. Whatever happened or didn't happen for you...
... and depression is your body saying fuck you, I don't want to be this character anymore, I don't want to hold up this avatar that you've created in the world. It's too much for me.
So, a friend of mine who's a spiritual teacher has a really good take. His name is Jeff Foster, and his take on it is that they should change [how we think of] the word "depressed" as "deep rest"
deep rest - your body needs to be depressed, It needs deep rest from the character that you've been trying to play.
If you say that to a depressed person, they are going to sink deeper into despair. Most people (even those who are not depressed), are not meeting that bar.
Always remember, being true is not the same as being helpful.
Exercising can help. It's not bad advice or inappropriate to suggest it. People shouldn't suggest it as if it's a cure all and certainly shouldn't suggest you just need to buck up, but the study is showing it can really help.
Context: I'm "using" SSRIs, talk therapy, psychotherapy, strength training and endurance training -- all in parallel right now.
It can be inappropriate depending on where the person is, when I was diagnosed I could barely get out of bed. Feels a bit like telling an anorexic person to eat something.
Yes, exactly. I have exercised daily (either weight training or cardio) for nearly 20 years. I've also had anxiety and depression for that entire stretch of time.
Exercise was how I stayed mildly sane for a good majority of those years, but when I started taking medication it was like the entire world changed. I wish I had started earlier in life. It helped me to become a lot more introspective as well, being able to better examine why I was feeling the way I did.
There are some things that no amount of exercise or "healthy living" can fix, that's unfortunately just the human condition. It's nothing to be ashamed of.
> Depression can be caused by a chemical imbalance
And yet many other times, it can be caused or exacerbated by situational and psychological factors, including "being stuck at home all day".
> One of the most frustrating things when your really low is people giving advice like do exercise to feel better - please don’t do this.
Worse, antidepressants actually cause significant harm to many people who take them, often without even improving their depressive symptoms. This is very bad, and I would say significantly worse than giving general advice that might be inapplicable to some people.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution, and some people probably are legitimately just in need of more motivation to go running or biking or whatever else will get them the exercise they need.
Usual antidepressants (reuptake inhibitors) have specific chemical and clinical effects. Some forms of depression, mostly with stress, respond heavily, others, like refractory and bipolar, show no effect. It's like saying a knife cannot cut an arbitrary material. It depends. Studies of ADs must start to differentiate at least a few subtypes of depression.
I support people taking antidepressants if it helps them.
But I have to say the "chemical imbalance" theory either means no more than "depression responds to an antidepressant (sometimes)" or it is false/meaningless. Neither neurologists nor psychologists have a sufficiently detailed understanding of the workings of the brain to make such a claim.
Again, I'm glad drugs work for you. I would note that there three ways drugs can go for people; working with few problems, not working, working but with significant physical and/or psychological side-effects. Especially, taking any substance daily for the rest of one's life can stress the organs responsible for digesting/processing regardless of whether than substance is otherwise a great fix.
So I think we need to look beyond a glib "this fixes it for everyone" rhetoric even if this fixes it for you (and yeah, some of my friends should at least drugs, I'll admit).
Maybe so, but I also cut m finger quite badly on NYD, I went to an urgent care centre had it looked at, x rayed and dressed and some antibiotics. The next day I had an appointment with a consultant and then went in to surgery to have it inspected to see if I had cut the nerves or tendon (thankfully I had not), had it swen up dressed, and a follow up appointment to have the dressings removed and final check. All at no cost.
The £9 is for the administration of the prescription - if th drugs are super expensive heart medication or whatever, it would still be £9 (or free).
I stand by NHS being the only great thing we have left.
I'm not even talking medication, talking about cost of therapy it's like $200 per session sometimes but yeah all depends
I had to pay $3K for an MRI in cash one time, which yeah you get what you pay for but my buddy pays $2.8K/mo in insurance for his family, like that's a big chunk of his monthly pay
Oh I want to be clear no snark towards you this is the cliche topic of healthcare in US
Regarding the topic at hand though, yeah I lift 5 days a week and do a half hour of maximum inclined walk for those days as well. Mental health but also I want to be ripped. Helps my job has a gym and I'm the only one in there in the mornings. We also walk like 2 miles at work, in circles around the parking lot, talking to co-workers 4 days a week.
My main problem is anxiety, like I wish I could walk downtown in a city and do street photography but I fear that someone will ask me for money or get robbed. The funny thing is I'm a big guy, like 6', I bench almost 300 lbs. I'm not like a stick. I have a fear of crowds too I can do shopping but sometimes in like a WalMart that's a lot of people and of course I'm terrible with women, the fear even if I have the bod. I'm just scared of eye contact and low self-esteem even having a six-fig job my self-determined value is whether a woman will say yes to me or not, it's funny. I don't have a fear of speed I can drive 160mph+ on the highway, helps to have a good car.
But for the moment I'm working towards freeing myself from debt and then being able to live a life where I'm not in fear of losing my job. I'm a privileged person, this is brought on by myself eg. dropping $1.2K a night at a strip club or $600 Venmoing a band to play song requests. I'm complaining about therapy cost lmao.
Do you think they're stupid and just don't realize that they pay for it with taxes?
You're not factoring in the most critical piece of financing - the mental burden. You don't want to be stuck figuring out how to get enough money to pay for mental health services when you need them the most. That's when your earning potential is at its lowest, and every minor obstacle to getting help gets magnified ten fold.
That may as well be a death sentence unless you're privileged enough to be able to easily pay for it with savings. Realizing that you need help, figuring out how to access it, and actually following through is hard enough as it is without any added financial burden.
> It’s a double edged sword - secrecy leads to accidental damage by fishermen & anchors, so generally you want your cables and pipes charted.
Yeah, and the other edge of the sword is on display in the Baltic Sea nowadays, where "fishermen" accidentally keep dragging their anchors for miles across the sea bottom, always somehow exactly where the communication cables are.
I have license for boat and use nautical maps. They show me a cable, but not the hierarchy of the infrastructure. I see a cable, but can’t evaluate if half of town stays without electricity or only an island with dozen houses if I damage it.
However the available maps do not stop russian ships regularly dropping anchors on European infrastructure in Baltic see. Obviously charting them does not help. Maybe they should stay secret at the end.
You can hide the position of the cables from fishermen and the public. But if someone knows where they are, it is the KGB, I mean, FSB.
We should make information about infrastructure public.
There was a power outtage in Berlin, due to to an attack aginst a 'secret' cable bridge. If the map of cables would have been public, then the public may have had a chance to realize that having no backup cable is a bad idea for critical infrastructure.
There were backup cables. The bridge carried 5 cables, redundancy configuration would have been 3+2 afaik. But only for purposes of maintenance, not to protect against hostile action. For that, one should have taken care to not have all redundancies on the same bridge ;)
And in most environments, you cannot hide the location of those cables. Either they are visible directly, like all overhead power lines. No use in hiding those. And for the underground ones, you could try to hide them. But every backhoe operator will rightfully want a map of those anyways, so the information will come out in some way.
The only environment where hiding this kind of infrastructure would be possible is some state-does-everything soviet-like police state. Where comrade backhoe-operator wouldn't get a map, but he would get accompanied by a secret police supervisor who would tell him where to dig and where not to.
Would you feel comfortable making a decision on putting an anchor down on a cable if you knew it would only take out a few hundred houses worth of power.
I would imagine that any body that issues you a license should inform you to not anchor in proximity to cables, regardless of size / spec etc. if you put an anchor down on a charted cable, and the cable is where it should be, I think you’d be responsible for the cost of damage.
I anchor very carefully on the rocks or sandy seabed. I don’t anchor in seaweed areas and on pipes or cables. Additional attention from local newspaper is not desired.
For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible. We don’t know what this will do. We don’t really need it. No one would get this consented / permitted within their own seabed, so why do we do it in international waters.
I work in subsea cables and the companies that develop this type of tooling also work in this field, on a purely technical level it’s super cool technology and operationally very very interesting - the riser for nodule collection and how you pump / suck something from 4km down to the surface is wildly cool.
> For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible.
I honestly think this is the reason that asteroid mining should be the future for resource acquisition - not because it's cheaper or easier or anything like that, but because there's so much of it floating around out there and nobody will complain.
> we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible
This is easy to say in theory. It's harder if you have a population that wants rising material living standards. (Increasing living standards in middle-income economies is vastly more energy and material intensive than at the upper or lower ends of the scale.)
If you have a population that want rising material living standards, that's easy too. Any increase in living standards should be balanced against a concomitant decrease in population. Resource usage (meaning pollution, waste, energy production) stays steady or even goes down.
Apparently population control is anathema to most people though, so the unrelenting environmental rape continues unabated.
> Apparently population control is anathema to most people
Well yeah that too, but first and foremost when a population shrinks it leads to a demographic crisis. The government actively attempts to prevent that.
But also the issues you point to aren't inherently due to population. Most of our activities don't need to impact the environment to the extent that they currently do. We just cut corners to save money on a massive scale.
That seems to happen naturally, just with a lot of lag in the system. Declining birth rates can be seen in almost all modernised societies that have had a strong middle class.
It is actually extremely common in Europe (as I linked to in a sibling chat), with 30-40% of kids having it at any time.
With those rates, my guess is that you probably had it several times, but just thought your bum was itching for no reason (or you were one of the asymptomatic cases). I think the awareness of it has gone up, now it's common to let the kindergarten know if you suspect it in your child, and they send a message to the other parents.
To be blunt you do not get it from eating cookies in sand. You get it from ingesting pinworm eggs, you ingest them by someone touching their bum (where the worms lay eggs) and then touching something that you then touch and touch your face/mouth, or scratching your own bum in your sleep then scratching your face / mouth.
If you don’t think it’s super commen in Europe it’s generally a lack of diagnoses. Literally 1/5th
Of British kids have it at any given time (and I imagine that tracks across Europe and USA at least)
A Junior Dev is not just for Christmas, it’s for life.
But more seriously are there CEOs out there who think they can replace the people starting off in their industry with AI? Who do the think will be the senior devs in 5-10yrs?
A note to just be a bit careful passively monitoring ocean acoustics, it’s easy to fall foul of military / security forces, they don’t like anything that can fingerprint a vessel.
I worked on DAS acoustic monitoring for subsea power cables (to monitor cable health!), turns out they are basically a submarine detection system.
Reminds me of how the Navy heard the OceanGate submarine implode immediately when it lost contact en route to the Titanic, but waited several days before they admitted that because at the time noone even knew they had such a system of hydrophones in place. I wonder what else they have that we don't know about. The oceans are not just unexplored as a habitat, but also as an intelligence theater.
Pretty sure a fair number of people knew the US Navy and others had hydrophones in place, they've always been coy about it though.
For interest:
* it's one reason we know so much about ocean tempretures and tangentially have great data on climate change being real, and
* they had some cool R&D vessels:
FLIP was originally built to support research into the fine-scale phase and amplitude fluctuations in undersea sound waves caused by thermal gradients and sloping ocean bottoms. This acoustic research was conducted as a portion of the Navy's SUBROC program.
That was not the first time such data was used to from and a wreck. They have released locations for things like downed airliners for years, decades. Everyone knows about SOSUS. The classified bits are its locations and exact capabilities.
I remember at the time it felt a little bit suspicious to me. Only after everyone already knew it had imploded, the navy came out to say their hyper advanced detection system for enemy submarines had of course also detected it.
I live near a sub listening station. Schools tour the base. Their hydrophones are built on site in long oil filled tubes. They can hang these from the listening barges or lay them on the bottom. Hydrophone arrays can be paired with anchors attached to a sound triggered buoy. The buoy sinks with the anchor and will be released when it gets the right signal. With this setup the Navy can lay down semi-permanent arrays without a surface buoy.
the systems are pretty public, for instance the UK tender for Atlantic Net is easy to read. And the russians have Bastion which we known well about as well.
Good advice but there's a bit of a difference between a device (or even several) you can knock together yourself and throw out of the side of a (surface) boat vs access to a whole undersea cable which (I have just learned) is what you need for DAS. Plus, if you can do it yourself with virtually no resources, it's a safe bet that any potential adversaries are already doing something many orders of magnitude greater.
Supposedly new submarines are so quiet that they can't be detected anyway. I'm sure there's a large element of exaggerating abilities here, but there's definitely an element of truth: in 2009, two submarines carrying nuclear weapons (not just nuclear powered) collided, presumably because they couldn't detect each other. If a nuclear submarine cannot detect another nuclear submarine right next to it then it's unlikely your $5 hydrophone will detect one at a distance.
Of course, none of this means that the military will be rational enough not to be annoyed with you.
Very cool and very powerful technology, it'll be interesting to see how fiber sensing progresses, especially with how much undersea fiber already exists. For subsea power cables, is there a parallel fiber dedicated just for DAS monitoring? Do these get bundled in with data fiber runs as well? I've been curious how well DAS can work over actively lit / in-service fiber.
On the cables I worked on they would use a separate fibre, but power cables tended to overspec the number of fibers massively so was never an issue. Some even have two bundles of fibers.
A supplier played whale song they recorded from cables, and said they repackage and sell the same product to defense contractors.
Even biulding the equipment. There are rules about hydrophones at certain certain frequencies. Just putting the plans online might runafoul of export rules. Beware of stringing multiple hydrophones as this article suggests. Put too many on a system and you are into possible beamforming territory ... the tech used for geolocating noises underwater. The USN gets kinda twitchy about such things.
I used to be a submariner and now work in an unrelated acoustic space (acoustic analysis of the electric grid), but I'd love to learn more about the DAS world — my email is in my profile.
1GW at 500kV three-phase AC is 1154 amps; 1 billion divided by 500,000 divided by sqrt(3).
You could handle that with one set of 1272kcmil aluminum conductors, or two sets of 300kcmil conductors, based off of this wire submittal: https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf
The voltage drop will be higher than HVDC, but AC transformers are probably an order of magnitude cheaper than HVDC switchgear. That’s the main issue with HVDC, interrupting HVDC current is very difficult since there’s no zero point like with an AC sine wave. High voltage AC breakers use SF-6 to extinguish the arc at the zero point, which happens 120 times per second at 60 hz (100 times per second for 50 hz)
One of the most frustrating things when your really low is people giving advice like do exercise to feel better - please don’t do this.
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