“[W]ithin the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power [...]
[I]n proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
>What do you think happened with the Golf 3 engine design? They made the camshaft structurally weaker, so the engine will blow up more easily.
Wow, talk about an oversimplification. The Mk3 moved from an 8-valve to a 16-valve engine; yes, this adds more valvetrain failure modes but also brings myriad other benefits, increased power, better fuel economy, reduced emissions…
The idea that a carmaker would purposely engineer flaws into core engine components in order to drive future sales doesn’t make much sense.
> The idea that a carmaker would purposely engineer flaws into core engine components in order to drive future sales doesn’t make much sense.
There is a legend that Mercedes 190D was built like a tank and this caused customers to not buy the next iteration. Mercedes solved this, making cars a bit unreliable.
>The idea that a carmaker would purposely engineer flaws into core engine components in order to drive future sales doesn’t make much sense.
You need to realize modern business revolves not around one-and-done, but around recurring revenue streams. To the "business minded" the only thing that doesn't make sense is leaving money on the table.
Selling people grenading engines is not a great way to build recurring revenue streams. And building performant, efficient, and reliable engines is hard enough without intentional sabotage
Nevertheless, as long as everyone else optimizes to the same metrics (minimized Bill of Materials, and building for assembly, not service), it may not be great, but it undeniably works.
Shift+Win/Option+-. And holding - gives you en/em dash on iOS and Android. Personally I love using em dashes so this whole AI thing is a real disaster for me.
I don’t want to discount your experience, but attributing a lifetime of symptoms to 5 doses of SSRIs (when you were already exhibiting an unstable mental state) seems extreme.
We know SSRI's really do cause permanent sexual dysfunctional in a small minority of people, small enough that this side effect doesn't come up in traditional FDA tests.
If a side effect is extremely rare it would be impossible or at least impractical to prove in a population.
Grandparent could be right or wrong about how the drug affected them, maybe their brain suffered from other issues and the timing of the medications was purelycoincidental, but if they are correct, your dismissive response is exactly what we'd expect given when they are saying sounds unusual/ improbable.
> If a side effect is extremely rare it would be impossible or at least impractical to prove in a population.
This is also true for a non-existent side effect. I’m not trying to tell GP he is wrong, just that from a reader’s perspective, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
This isn't a good fit for the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Grandparent's report is hard to verify, not extraordinary.
These drugs are approved based on statistical safety profiles in limited trial populations, not on a scientific consensus that absolutely nobody on Earth will ever experience a unique adverse reaction.
Also, I never said that you, the reader, had an obligation to change your worldview based on Grandparent's report.
Millions of people take SSRIs on a daily basis without these dramatic symptoms. Millions more tried them (for much longer periods than 5 days) and then desisted from treatment without major lifelong mental alterations. So yes, I would say GP’s experience is ‘extraordinary’, i.e., outside of the ordinary expectation
How did you determine that "Millions more tried them... and then desisted from treatment without major lifelong mental alterations"?
Someone literally just told you this happened to them, and your reaction was "I don't believe you," followed by a confident statistic you apparently invented.
Do you think if one person in a million took a drug and had their emotional system altered, a siren would go off? That the TV would be interrupted by an all-seeing oracle declaring a medical anomaly?
If a rare side effect occurs, it looks exactly like this: scattered individuals complaining on the internet.
You're misapplying the Carl Sagan popularized aphorism "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and apparently think the meaning of an aphorism can be determined by looking up one of the keywords in the dictionary, rather than, say, the Wikipedia article on the aphorism itself.
> How did you determine that "Millions more tried them... and then desisted from treatment without major lifelong mental alterations"?
We have lots of public data on SSRI usage (20+ million in the US alone each year) and discontinuation rates. The drugs themselves are decades old and have been through countless trials and studies, and of course there are databases like FAERS that track reports of adverse drug reactions.
Is your assertion that this is false? That in fact the typical SSRI patient is mentally/emotionally crippled by the drug? Doctors and public health agencies are hiding a public health catastrophe to sell genericized pills that cost tens of dollars a month?
Of course severe side effects can and do happen. Doesn’t mean every bad thing that happens to a person who happened to take SSRIs for a few days should be taken as a big cautionary tale.
I asked you how you determined "Millions more tried them... and then desisted from treatment without major lifelong mental alterations"?"
I took that to mean you were confident 0 out of several million people had lifelong alterations.
Any other interpretation of what you meant would suggest you are not responding to anything I wrote and simply writing non sequitors.
It seems to me you said something indefensible (0 out of 1 million people had permanent damage, there is no possibility you have data to show this) and are now trying to change the subject to something less insane (the typical patient has no permanent harm?)
Since PSSD wasn't recognized until 2019 I know you are full of hot air in suggesting if these drugs caused unusual problems we'd know about it by now:
Disclaimer: no affiliation, and in early development
DCFlight is a new Flutter framework from solo (!) dev Tahiru Agbanwa (https://x.com/squirelBoy360) that uses a React Native-like virtual DOM and Yoga layout engine to replace Flutter's widget tree, rendering UI from native widgets without the use of platform views.
It provides a set of primitive components, a plugin architecture using method channels to write your own native components, and an escape hatch to use traditional Flutter widgets within the DCFlight architecture.
This is an odd perspective to me. I'm an atheist because I don't find the truth claims of theistic religions convincing. Whether or not the centralized structure of modern religion is problematic is tangential to that
Centralized religious authority has prevented religions from evolving or being replaced by new ones. They haven't gracefully let go of their beliefs about the universe we now know are false.
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