I bought a Sceptre a few years ago but it died pretty quickly (dead pixel strip on the screen). But the replacement 44" Insignia (Best Buy) that I replaced it with has been an awesome tv.
So yes, you can just walk into the Electronics Store (Best Buy) and purchase a dumb TV.
>>Right now I have bigger problems than just depression.
Just depression?! You might want to grab a little empathy before writing off something that has been a major problem in a large chunk of the populations lives. In fact, "just depression" has caused me to try to take my life multiple times. I can hardly see a "bigger problem" out there..
There are absolutely people with bigger problems than depression. For example, I have MS, and my mental health is absolutely one of my less concerning problems. There are so many options for mental health + the treatments are much easier to access than a lot of my symptom management meds + DMT. People undergoing chemo. People with ALS. People with bipolar (who can't take a lot of first line depression treatments) or other more complex mental health issues like schizophrenia.
None of this is to downplay depression, but there are absolutely people for whom 'just depression' would be accurate. Migraines suck, but someone with cluster headaches might call them 'just migraines' and they wouldn't be wrong.
I'm not the GP; I'm a separate person who was providing potential context.
Something can be a huge problem and still be small potatoes to people having catastrophic problems, and often those of us in very, very dire circumstances are tone policed to within an inch of our lives and have to constantly consider normal people above ourselves (and make no mistake, people with MDD are closer to normal than somebody with ALS or severe cancer). We're never allowed to express anger, never allowed to talk about having it harder, have to stop and attend to the feelings of others while ours are ignored, etc.
Also, no offense, but depression can end up making people very self-centered. It's your illness that makes you think that what you're going through is more important and worse than what anyone else is going through, and it's not. (And it's not for me either: there are definitely people who have it worse than me and could say they wish their problem was 'just' MS. I just wouldn't get offended by that.)
I said it elsewhere, but it took me a month of micro dosing down to get off my 40mg/day citalopram habit, which I had been on for 15 years. And even on my own super slowed down schedule I still experienced massive side effects. Good luck to you if you ever decide to wean yourself off of it & always remember to keep backup citalopram in case you can't get your script refilled right away.
A psychiatrist definitely does not always know these things. Mine told me there should be no Citalopram withdrawals and that I should taper by cutting my dose in half over a 2 week period.
They were absolutely wrong as I have serious withdrawal reactions to Citalopram. It took me a month of micro-dosing down to safely get off a drug I was on for 15 yrs. And even then I was having constant brain & body zaps, that feel like short circuiting, for a full month after I dosed down to nothing. 6 mos later & I still can't sleep more than 6 hrs.
How did I know this was going to happen? Going cold turkey when my script ran out. I even told my psych about it numerous times but they just brushed it off.
"Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?"
As it stands right now, no. Luckily, at least for now, I'm tech savvy enough to navigate it. But the 100, mostly immigrant, elderly residents of my building will not be so lucky.
Two months ago I learned, during a water outage on a Saturday morning, that my building's new assistant manager was an AI bot from EliseAI. What was an actual emergency, it thought, was something that could be dealt with the following week. It told me that management would respond on Monday, which is completely unacceptable during an emergency water outage. I had no water for 3 days & on Monday the actual human manager waffled on why it wasn't immediately fixed & thought it was cute (he giggled & got excited) that I discovered that the assistant manager was now an AI bot.
And just yesterday, I got an unsolicited text from an unknown number that looks exactly like a phishing scam attempt, except that it was sent by the assistant manager AI bot. The text said that I had $130 in unpaid rent & had links to remedy it. WHAT?!! First, it's illegal in CA to give a tenant notice that way. Second, it looked exactly like a phishing scam attempt. I obviously didn't click the links, but I did parse them & found that they belonged to EliseAI. This also happened a month after the human manager gave out a notice about back rent that I had already asked about. He told me I had $0.00 debt on the books. So why the AI bot phishing attempt?
I perused EliseAI's privacy policy and there is no way that I will be knowingly feeding any PII into it.
I haven't tracked down the manager yet to give him a piece of my mind. But in what world is this kind of activity OK? How are non-tech savvy folks going to survive these things? Especially the large non-English speaking elderly population in my building. As far as I can see (I live in SF & am surrounded by it), we're doomed.
I'm surprised that no one has said anything about the fact that this is put out by a VPN company!
I also could not find their name on the map. It doesn't mean that it's not there, I just couldn't find them. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The only thing I find a VPN useful for is torrenting w/o your ISP knowing. In my case, I use Surfshark for torrenting so that Comcast can't send me any of those pesky letters.
Windscribe is on the map with one connected node: their DNS service Control D. I know it seems a bit hypocritical and untrustworthy since it is written by a VPN company, but Windscribe is generally regarded as trustworthy, privacy oriented, and not deceiving customers for money [0]. Companies such as Windscribe, Mullvad, IVPN, and Proton are better in almost all cases than something like Surfshark because they minimize the risk of your personal info falling into the wrong hands. Unlike those proprietary companies that will turn over your full browsing history in a heartbeat when in court, companies like Windscribe will have nothing to turn over in the first place. I use Windscribe all the time personally because even if sites profile me, I dislike the fact that they can know the city in which I love just from connecting to the site, so there are a few other benefits.
> I also could not find their name on the map. It doesn't mean that it's not there, I just couldn't find them. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
They're there, in the top-right next to Mullvad, as they're also self-funded. Seemingly connected to "Control D" as it's a DNS service with focus on privacy built by them.
Also, from their "Ethics" page:
> Windscribe is entirely self funded. We don't have any VC's breathing down our necks and telling us what to do.
Thanks for pointing that out! It turns out that the latest update to qBittorrent started binding to all available adapters. I just set it to only use my VPN's adapter and all seems to be fine now. Thanks again!
Someone else had the IP assigned, then, or you're behind some sort of NAT with someone else. The ISP very likely holds a record of which device had a particular address assigned at any given time. At where I live, addresses are usually lent for pretty much forever. I have mine for 8 years, unchanged. Even my mobile carrier latches the same address for months even.
While I differ from others responding, in the fact that I do find pain relief from cannabis, this is not the place to get your information from [1].
[1] https://spinfuel.com/legal/
"Spinfuel eMagazine is a professional e-cigarette news and review website, staffed and operated by people that purchase, use, and enjoy electronic cigarettes. As such, we receive sample products for the purpose of review, though more than 50% of the products reviewed are purchased by Spinfuel. We do not receive any sort of compensation from vendors, manufacturers, or anyone else for writing reviews, commentary, or guides."
People who say it doesn’t work don’t understand chronic pain management. It’s less about stopping the pain and more about making it bearable enough to forget about it.
Some pain you can’t stop. You can address the symptoms though.
Not OP, but it happened to me. Started meditation to deal with anxiety and the introspection that came with it, ended up with me on the verge of a complete breakdown. I started off doing Sam Harris and then progressed to doing an hour or more each day. I had some moments of insight and then hit some dark night of the soul which wrecked me, I was close to admitting myself to hospital for psychological help.
What fixed me was finally reading Breath by James Nestor and how you breath has a direct impact on the parasympathetic / sympathetic nervous system. I learned to take long slow breaths into the diaphragm and too nose breath all of the time. Basically my vagus nerve was fried from burn out and being in the fight flight mode of the parasympathetic system, as opposed to the 'rest and digest' chilled nature of sympathetic nervous system.
My own view now, is that mediation should not be attempted (at least by anyone with mental issues) until the parasympathetic / sympathetic system is balanced and stress is significantly reduced. This should start with the breath.
I feel like you did the wrong sort of meditation for anxiety. Mindfulness and breathing where you see the thought come and let it go is preferred for anxiety sufferers. You should not be following your anxious thoughts.
I could see how it would affect you negatively if you tried to follow all your anxious thoughts and delve into their "meaning". The goal for some with high anxiety ought to be lessening its meaning. You should just see it as another emotion with a neutral (or even helpful at times) stance. You don't lessen anxiety by giving it MORE attention. That seems like it would train your brain to think it's way too important and you'd get stuck in an anxiety loop.
The thing is, these "No true Scotsman" justifications only come out later.
Despite significant literature on meditation psychosis, meditation is promoted as a completely safe practice and risks are almost never mentioned to new practitioners.
TBH all I'm seeing are straw man arguments from you. It sounds like you have not given any time to a truly good-faith exploration of these methods, instead leaning on vague impressions based on only the most incidental and bottom-of-the-barrel evidence.
> sounds like you have not given any time to a truly good-faith exploration of these methods
To me, this is just a variation of "never mind the science, why don't you try for yourself" argument you find in quackery. I found a disconnect between what people were reporting and actual behavior in meditators.
> only the most incidental and bottom-of-the-barrel evidence.
Are scholarly reports of psychosis bottom of the barrel or are testimonials from meditators the bottom of the barrel? Perhaps next, you want to make an argument from popularity?
You might just be completely unfamiliar with the emerging scholarly literature on the topic.
Lambert, D., N. H. van den Berg, and A. Mendrek. "Adverse effects of meditation: A review of observational, experimental and case studies." Current Psychology (2021): 1-14.
> Ah, the old "you're criticizing me, ergo you believe everything I am criticizing unconditionally" fallacy. What fun...
I don't believe that you do. I said you used a familiar argument that quacks use. I do not believe that you believe in quackery. This isn't facebook. On hacker news, I assume people are generally critically minded.
> Disengaging because of the amazing amount of bad faith in your responses.
I don't know what you mean by bad faith here. I have no need to deceive you and don't feel anyone here is trying to deceive me either. I am not refusing facts unreasonably. I do have an unpopular position based on considerable thought on the matter. I am citing literature on the topic that is not dubious. You can't ground arguments any better than that. This is not bad faith.
Taylor, Greenberry B., et al. "The adverse effects of meditation-interventions and mind–body practices: A systematic review." Mindfulness 13.8 (2022): 1839-1856.
Britton, Willoughby B., et al. "Defining and measuring meditation-related adverse effects in mindfulness-based programs." Clinical Psychological Science 9.6 (2021): 1185-1204.
Shapiro Jr, Deane H. "Adverse Effects ofMeditation: A Preliminary Investigation ofLong-Term Meditators." International Journal of Psychosomatics 39.1-4 (1992): 63.
In any case, I do also agree that further exchange with you on this topic is not productive.
So yes, you can just walk into the Electronics Store (Best Buy) and purchase a dumb TV.