I always wondered if ADHD and smoking were related.
I’m ADHD boy for sure, and my dad and his younger sister are both very much not like my aunt, who is more like me. Shes in her 80s now, and was the only smoker - literally smoked cartons a week for about as long as I remember.
I deleted my comment talking about it because it usually goes badly with the HN audience and their preconceived notions.
But I have had the hypothesis (as a layman) that growing around smokers affects the brain of a child, they self-medicate with tobacco, and the cycle continues, and it has for many generations until today when smoking is frowned upon and self-medication is no longer readily available. I don’t think smoking is the cause of all of ADHD, but we’ll eventually learn that dopamine dysfunction has a lot of different causes.
I've had similar thoughts! I grew up around a heavy smoker. My dad told me to never smoke and I never have. But I randomly tried a nicotine lozenge in my 40s and found it such a "lightbulb on" moment that I've been using pouches for a few years now and my executive functioning still feels better for it (though not as much now as in the first two years, alas).
Part of ACA was the creation of regional health cartels. If you’re in a region with shitty networks, care may be hard to get. Where I live there’s a teaching hospital with a doctor focused medical network and a big Catholic hospital chain.
In my scenario, There is a good market for cardiac, OB, and some other specialties in each network. The rest is a monopoly— the catholic network doesn’t staff neuro for example, they just have consultants.
30 years ago, you’d just call your GPs office and they would have told you to go to the ER. Instead your moms insurer paid $150 for an interaction that likely funneled you their medical networks local hospital and added low value.
Urgent care is a grift to replace a relationship with a doctor or practice with a lower paid, lower skilled NP. It’s more a sales funnel that anything.
The audience for a news headline is a layperson who may have no knowledge of or context to infer past factoids about brain regions or evolutionary biology.
There’s a balance between being informative to the audience and satisfying for pedants.
I live in New York, which is heavy handed with salt. Paints and alloys are better, but there’s basically a 250k and about 10 year lifespan for a car that lives upstate.
The frame, exhaust and suspension generally get corroded and start to fail. You see a lot of 200k Civics and Accords, but few 250k.
You really notice it when traveling to California. Last time I was in SFO with my son, he counted 78 Porsche 911s and about 100 “old” (80s or older) cars on the roads.
It’s not laziness, it’s hyper focus on compliance. CJIS is the policy maintained by the FBI that handles information security, which is derived from standards built around paper.
Adding more weirdness, the details get worked out by each state.
My guess is they encrypted whatever is criminal justice information (license plate hotlists, etc) or protected by local laws (DMV data) and left the rest to make it easier to deploy and service. Remember pictures of you or your car taken in public are not protected or in scope.
Police tech is garbage and usually driven by federal grant spending. So it’s going to be interesting to see how Flock and Axon grow the business as it turns into a service model.
The other companies are stealing people's work for headlines and sabotaging each other. Google is offering a whole bunch of Gemini APIs that do real shit, with the same terms and contracts and the existing products for most of them.
These companies respond with this, “Oh my goodness, how could this have happened” bullshit.
The stuff happens because instead of having actual controls, which require actual engineering, actual thought and deliberate action, we have “guardrails”.
Guardrails are the equivalent of telling a toddler to behave themselves.
The drive to move fast and start up style controls are a menace. I used to work for an entity with a lot of compliance requirements. Startups are always a shit show with security and controls. My guess is the AI people are worse because they’re both bad at doing it, and are likely mining their customers interactions to build their own business.
Sensitive or Customer data shouldn’t be anywhere near these companies offerings. Everything needs to be segmented and proxied at a minimum.
Once you have one of these things, the problems that sound insurmountable turn out to be not much.
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