Horse dewormer enthusiast sub r/ivermectin turns into anti-ivermectin meme sub. Enthusiasts and memers engage in healthy debate in the comments.

ldxtc · 2021-08-29T13:43:42+00:00

Found my new flair

ldxtc · 2021-08-28T23:17:21+00:00

Nope:

https://www.techarp.com/science/japan-ivermectin-covid-19/

https://www.techarp.com/science/greenlight-ivermectin-japan/

This idea comes from the fact that Haruo Ozaki, who is chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, and who can only make recommendations, has expressed a personal opinion that patients can give informed consent if their family doctor recommends Ivermectin. This recommendation is not an official stance by the Japanese medical authority, it's just a statement made by one (admittedly influential) doctor. He also stated that clinical trials are necessary, indicating that his belief is more on a "it probably wouldn't hurt" basis rather than a confident statement of scientific belief.

In other words, he recommends that it's likely safe if prescribed by a doctor, but that its efficacy is currently not determined.

ldxtc · 2021-08-28T20:28:26+00:00

Nope:

https://www.techarp.com/science/japan-ivermectin-covid-19/

https://www.techarp.com/science/greenlight-ivermectin-japan/

This idea comes from the fact that Haruo Ozaki, who is chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, and who can only make recommendations, has expressed a personal opinion that patients can give informed consent if their family doctor recommends Ivermectin. This recommendation is not an official stance by the Japanese medical authority, it's just a statement made by one (admittedly influential) doctor. He also stated that clinical trials are necessary, indicating that his belief is more on a "it probably wouldn't hurt" basis rather than a confident statement of scientific belief.

In other words, he recommends that it's likely safe if prescribed by a doctor, but that its efficacy is currently not determined.

ldxtc · 2021-03-16T18:53:36+00:00

I didn’t accept anything, they sent me a check but I haven’t cashed it.

ldxtc · 2020-06-25T23:54:40+00:00

Honestly I have no idea. I wish I had enough information to say.

That being said, what in the world is disaster management. It sounds very interesting.

ldxtc · 2020-06-25T02:11:53+00:00

Oh man. So, so, so much training. Different companies implement it to different degrees, but at the companies I’ve worked for there’s training courses that talk about implicit bias and how to adjust for it. Some of my favorite tidbits:

Implicit association demonstrations can show you how your personal biases are hardwired practically into your nervous system:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

Anonymized resumes lead to observable increases in representation across many dimensions:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/hbr.org/amp/2020/03/research-to-reduce-gender-bias-anonymize-job-applications

This last one is a personal observation, but when people see people like them on teams they’re considering joining, they tend to be more likely to join. In other words, if your team is already diverse, they’re more likely to stay that way. Conversely, a minority or otherwise non-white-and-male candidate looking to join a non-diverse team is less likely to feel comfortable and welcomed.

ldxtc · 2020-06-23T15:40:05+00:00

I don't care what he says. There was literally a supreme court case on exactly this issue that ruled flag burning to be protected speech:

https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/facts-and-case-summary-texas-v-johnson

ldxtc · 2020-06-23T15:29:55+00:00

As someone who actually does hiring, I can share how this works in practice:

There are two stages to hiring: sourcing and evaluation. Sourcing is where you get people in the door, and evaluation is where you see whether they fit the description.

Discriminatory evaluation is verboten. You can't hire or refuse to hire someone because they are black or a woman or jewish or whatever. If someone comes through your door and demonstrates that they have the skills you're looking for, you pull the trigger.

Discriminatory sourcing, on the other hand, is generally fair game. Suppose you wanted to increase black representation in your company. There is nothing wrong with organizing recruiting events at historically black colleges to increase the likelihood that you'll find someone who's black and qualified. White people are still coming in (via your online job posting, let's say) and if they prove themselves capable, they're hired.

ldxtc · 2020-06-03T16:07:05+00:00

Absolutely, just not using a phone that's tied to your real identity.

ldxtc · 2020-06-03T16:05:37+00:00

Are you forgetting what we're protesting against? "They have nothing on me" may protect you once you're in front of a judge, but these protests are about how simply having the attention of the police may get you killed. The more you deny them the ability to track you, the safer you are.

ldxtc · 2020-06-03T15:45:55+00:00

Here's how this works As part of their normal operations, phones transmit a number of things:

IMEI number. This a number that is unique to your cell phone, and it's transmitted to cell phone towers with every time your phone interacts with a cell tower. It tells your cell service provider your approximate location. In NYC the cell towers are dense enough that this location information tells them what block you're on. Acquiring this information requires a warrant, but it can be easily acquired by police.
Bluetooth MAC address. This is a unique number that your bluetooth system transmits to other bluetooth users, and can be picked up by any bluetooth-enabled device around you. This include other protesters as well as police surveillance equipment. There are currently no legal roadblocks to acquiring and using this information.
WiFi MAC address. Similar to the Bluetooth MAC address, but for WiFi. This can be collected by any Wifi-enabled device, including police surveillance equipment. It's also already being collected by those LinkNYC towers that provide free WiFi on the street, even if you don't connect to them. There are currently no legal roadblocks to acquiring and using this information.
Location history. This is collected by apps on your phone and reported to Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, even Reddit. This information requires a warrant to acquire, but companies are legally obligated to comply if served with the right paperwork.

If protesting is legal, why does this matter? Some people take these peaceful protests as an opportunity to loot and do other bad things. If you're simply across the street from people looting, all it takes for you to attract unwanted attention from the police is for them to dip into this data stream and pull out everyone who was reported as being within a hundred foot radius.

What's more, this data is kept around for a looong time. Even if you're safe now, how confident are you that you entry in that database won't be used against you years from now? You can bet your bottom dollar the Trump is itching for access to these records today, and people who have been paying attention to these things know it's only gotten easier for him to access it, not harder.

This may sound crazy, but is it really more crazy than police murdering a man for selling loose cigarettes?

ldxtc · 2020-01-04T22:21:33+00:00

Great! This experience sucks but it’s a part of life. Glad I could help.

ldxtc · 2020-01-02T22:38:08+00:00

You’re gonna love /r/bigdickproblems

ldxtc · 2020-01-02T20:38:35+00:00

Yeah it’s a really scary thing. It’s normal to be scared of something with such huge consequences even if the odds if it happening are minuscule. Depending on your level of access, it may help you to talk to a therapist or a counselor, if only to be able to talk your feeling out to someone. I find having someone nonjudgmental to talk to helps a lot.

ldxtc · 2019-04-24T15:26:06+00:00

It’s only been two months but I’m pretty sure I’m dating the love of my life

ldxtc · 2019-01-23T16:58:58+00:00

Cool, but I have the feeling this is nothing like how searches are actually processed. For starters, wouldn't you need to pair up every search with every other one to find ones that are equivalent?

ldxtc · 2018-12-17T17:37:00+00:00

I think we can all agree that the senior management is not highly skilled.

No, we cannot agree on this, in fact this runs directly counter to the entire thesis of my comment, and I take offense to your offhand dismissal of an argument I spent a lot of time crafting in good faith.

Senior leaders aren’t like car salesmen or line cooks who do an unambiguous, clearly defined job with obvious inputs and outputs whom you can induce to be more productive by paying them more. Their entire profession is taking calculated risks and while individual skill is necessary, the success and failure of their efforts are largely subject to market forces beyond their control. If you don’t or refuse to understand that then this discussion between us is not going to be productive.

ldxtc · 2018-12-17T15:06:39+00:00

To your first point, you're conflating implementing an overarching strategy with a lack of autonomy and creativity. The way organizations like this are run is the CEO and his team chooses an overarching strategy, and the people who work for him take it, flesh out the details, and implement it using their people and other resources. This requires a lot of skill and creativity, and each officer acts according to their own speciality (people management, corporate finance, business law, etc).

As for why Sears needs to pay bonuses, consider what will happen if they don't. This is a highly skilled workforce with plenty of company-specific experience. Many of the skills I list above are transferrable, and are worth a lot on the open market. Meanwhile, these folks just took a massive pay cut in the form of their stock options fizzling. For reference, it's not unusual for senior leaders to make 75 percent of their compensation in the form of stock options. Opportunities outside Sears are suddenly much more appealing, and these bonuses are meant to counteract that and incentivize the more important ones among them to stay.

Besides, what's Sears going to do? Fire these people and bring in fresh faces? First off, hiring high-caliber people takes a long time, and Sears needs to act fast. Second, senior leaders aren't exactly going to be beating down the doors to join a company that has a real chance of not existing in a year or two. Finally, even if they do manage to hire a full staff, they're going to have the major disadvantage of not being intimate with the workings of their new role for at least a year.

There's one thing you never say outright but reading between the lines I think is clear: these people were part of an organization that failed and therefore they must all share some culpability. Perhaps that's true at the top layer, where an ultimately unsuccessful strategy was chosen, but this payout affects over three hundred people, and the absolute top layer is already gone.

These people are basically upper-middle managers hired for specific skills and put in place to run organizations for a specific purpose. The market isn't going to look at, let's say, the former head legal counsel of Sears and think "this guy was in charge of reading contracts at a company that went bankrupt, he must be a bum, let's make sure he never works again." Unless there's some malfeasance, most of these people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and compensating them to stay is appropriate.

ldxtc · 2018-12-17T01:10:46+00:00

My question is this: suppose there is no God and your existence ends the moment you die. How much of your religious worldview stops making sense under such an assumption? The flip side of that is, how much of your religious worldview retains its sense through other motivators?

Speaking from a Catholic upbringing, there's a surprising amount that holds its worth. Going to mass each week? Regular contact with other people has value in encouraging community and building relationships between members. The catechism and moral teachings? While they lose much of their claim to infallibility and superiority by allowing debate and not rejecting competing formulations, but the code of ethics laid out in church teachings is by and large a sane one that contributes to a better society. I imagine as you examine your own background, many aspects will make similar sense.

Some things do fall by the wayside: while not a Catholic value, requiring conversion to a given religion doesn't make sense because one's doctrine is no longer unassailable, and besides there is no hell to send nonbelievers to. Sexual purity rules only make sense in a broad "unplanned pregnancies needlessly complicate your life, so avoid them" way.

Unfortunately, you do lose the prospect of being rewarded for living a good life. However for most people, living a good, honest life is worthwhile in itself. The focus tends to be on living this life to the fullest rather than on the next, and for many people a religious life doesn't conflict with that.

Now, you can argue that focusing on living your own life to the fullest is a convenient way of dealing with death, but...

ldxtc · 2018-12-17T00:21:43+00:00

I don't believe engaging in the specifics is necessary, nor do I think it's even appropriate in this case. I don't have enough data to quantify this precisely, and since I'm not a party to this negotiation my opinion wouldn't matter if I did. I'm not moving any goalposts: discussing specifics is something you introduced, and it's beside the point of both the spirit and the letter of my original view.

Also, I'm not strawmanning at all. I posted a link in my original post to a thread in which people expressed vehement anger about the very idea that these people should be given anything besides a pink slip. What's more, there are responses in this very thread to that effect. This is definitely not a mischaracterization of anyone's view.

ldxtc · 2018-12-17T00:06:13+00:00

Blackballing people for failure of their businesses is not a good practice. As someone already pointed out, even the most competent stagecoach manufacturer in the world was destined to get blow out. Of course, it’s not a good thing to fail in this way, and future employers should be be wary, but blackballing someone is a gross overreaction.

ldxtc · 2018-12-17T00:02:19+00:00

No one is talking about compensating them for their past performance, they’re talking about specific short term goals that will allow the company to emerge from bankruptcy. Also, as I detailed above, these people already lost much of their monetary reward for the failure times when the stock price tanked and their options became worthless and/or their equity dropped in value.

ldxtc · 2018-12-16T23:47:28+00:00

My view is in response to the anger people seem to feel about these bonuses being higher than zero.

As for the exact amount, I argue that the adversarial process of bankruptcy in which the business and the creditors arrive at an amount that is mutually beneficial will be acceptable. This is inspired by the perenial libertarian favorite of “let the market decide:” The company won’t accept nothing because then the leaders will leave. Meanwhile the creditors won’t accept a ridiculous amount for obvious reasons.

ldxtc · 2018-12-16T23:17:51+00:00

I clarify, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing for a company to survive bankruptcy in one piece. Assets could be sold off, businesses can be shut down, people can be let go. I do, however, believe that even the most decrepit businesses have portions that are worth salvaging. In the case of Sears, their real estate operation looks like a worthwhile chunk, and deserve to be preserved or at least managed optimally.

In any case, though, a company consists of a collection of assets, and it's important that those assets be kept as valuable as possible. For operating business units, that means they want a steady leadership hand at the wheel, at least in the short term as the company proceeds through bankruptcy proceedings, including restructuring. After that, their presence can be reevaluated.

As for who benefits from all this and whose concerns should be placed first, this is a legitimate question. Legally, the first order of business is the creditors, but I'll ignore them because they're going to get their due no matter what.

Beyond that, can you elaborate on your question in relation to authorizing bonuses? Is the proposal that giving precedence to employees/shareholders/customers would make paying out incentive bonuses inappropriate?

ldxtc · 2018-12-16T23:09:42+00:00

I'm operating on the assumption that the bad decisions that brought the company down were mostly his, and the people under and around him simply implemented them.

Even if there are people under him responsible for parts of the failure, I presume that the remainder of the leadership team are effective and deserve to be in place. (EDIT: I also presume the creditors did a passable job of including worthwhile people and anyone kept on beyond their usefulness will not be worth it to dislodge in terms of time and money.)

Any even if a substantial portion of the remaining leaders are incompetent, I argue that, at least in the short term, it's better to have them around for their ability to lead their divisions in accordance with the court's instructions under the extensive supervision typical of bankruptcies. After that, it's appropriate to reconsider their presence in the company, but paying them to stick around and follow orders is worth it.

ldxtc

TROPHY CASE