(Note: My son has diagnosed ADHD, non-hyperactive) There isn't a blood test, but you can do a neuropsychological evaluation which assesses cognitive functions. We had one done for my son, and it was a 2-day affair. As a non-ADHD parent, it was eye-opening to get a glimpse into how his brain worked and to start to really understand the challenges ADHD poses in a school environment.
As a first step, you might hire a coach to help you with
1. Making and keeping the necessary appointments.
2. Dealing with insurance.
3. Persuading your parents to endure the ego-threat of listening to your actual needs instead of telling you things like "stop being so hard on yourself".
Plus you can extend that period of time significantly (or even indefinitely) by doing some form of work, even if not highly paid. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
I really like the idea of "barista FIRE": make enough "fuck you money" that you can survive on a low paid job and supplement it a little with your savings, while leaving enough in reserve for retirement.
The PNC has been challenged in the past for holding on to records that legally should have been deleted.
If I put my tin foil hat on for a moment, I wonder if this "mistake" was a way of getting rid of some records that should have already been deleted.
Doing it this way, and publicly admitting it, might have been deemed safer than clandestinely deleting the records and then getting caught in a security audit later.
The UK took a wrong turn when it gave the police their own extra-judicial justice system.
The system of police cautions, warnings and fixed penalties allow the police to administer punishment with none of the due process that a court would provide.
The idea of a "police caution" is a misnomer that implies it's just harmless warning, when in fact it can affect the course of someone's life many years later.
Furthermore, people are blackmailed into accepting these cautions under the threat of going to trial and potentially receiving a more severe punishment after conviction.
Even more outrageous is the retention of records from the PREVENT programme and "non-crime hate incidents". These are people who have not even committed a crime or been arrested.
The whole system stinks, and given that most people manage to avoid interaction with the police it is sadly unlikely to get the scrutiny it deserves.
The outrageous behaviour of (some of) the police during recent lockdowns actually gives me a little hope, as it as drawn widespread attention to the way they routinely abuse their power.
The general view in the population is the police do not deal with normal people other than as victims. If you're arrested, or even questioned, you're seen as guilty. Besides if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear.
This view doesn't hold when the police get you for speeding (go find real criminals)
Many police officers are quite reasonable, but then you have Derbyshire, whose actions over covid have likely killed people (by reducing compliance with lockdown orders)
The difference with the police in covid is the public are suddenly seeing that the police are dealing with normal people, not just criminal scum who should be lucky they aren't shot.
As I understood it, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 really clamped down on DNA and fingerprint storage. Not enough, but at least it was a move in the right direction. Particularly bad was that if you were charged and found innocent, they would still keep your records for 3 years.
The general view in the population is the police do not deal with normal people other than as victims.
Unfortunately, there is an element of human nature that says, "It won't happen to me." And then maybe one day, if you're unlucky, it does happen to you. And everyone else who is similarly confident that it could never happen to them won't necessarily be there for you, because it's so far out of their experience and frame of reference that even if they're a generally decent person, they have trouble relating to the situation you're in or understanding how they might feel in your place. And so the people who are least at risk, who are often the ones who could make the most difference, don't always act as strongly or as frequently as they could to mitigate the risk to others.
Even after Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 was implemented, PNC only drives the removal records from IDENT1 (fingerprints) and National DNA database (self-explanatory), not the ASN or nominal records themselves - these are "proper to retain for statutory purpose until the person turns 100 years of age".
I remember a similar anecdote about a legendary F1 driver (possibly Michael Schumacher, but I can't remember).
During practice the drivers talk to their team over the radio about the car's setup. Most drivers would stop talking in the corners and come on the radio during the straights.
This driver would apparently just keep talking all the way around corners. Driving the car was basically automatic, leaving him free to focus on optimising the car.
I'm quite fascinated about how an idea like this gets as far as somebody founding a company when, as several people here (as well as the linked videos) have argued quite convincingly, it appears to be easily debunked.
Are the founders knowingly trying to scam investors? Are they just naive/stupid?
Or am I (and the debunkers) being too negative, and this is just the first iteration of an idea that could one day change the world?
I think the main founder is a CalTech alumnus who also has another company (Heliogen) which promised solar heat at 1 cents/kwh. Backed by Breakthrough new energy ventures.
I believe this idea and kite power ideas are crazy but they might just work.
> I think an intermediate level of mastery is when you realize that a computer is a logic machine built to serve humans and it will always listen to you if you're willing to put in the effort. You can always go a level deeper. Great engineers know all of the tools at their disposal and will bend the computer to their will if they need to.
I've worked with some people who definitely seemed like "masters", and this was true of all of them. Quiet patience and an unshakeable belief that this thing is going to be fixable, even after trying multiple things that have gone nowhere. And they're almost always proved right.
It also made me realise I need to get out of this business as soon as possible, because I'm the polar opposite. After a few failed attempts my brain goes into panic mode and the problem seems insurmountable. Then I "wake up" an hour later after a bout of procrastination, no closer to a solution.
I often wonder about the chicken and egg of how people attain this state. Are they first and foremost technically brilliant, and the confidence emerges from that? Or is it more of a personality type that has allowed them to solve lots of problems and become technically brilliant along the way?
I had a similar experience early in my career. To me it was eye opening to see some masters keep investigating problems without getting emotional. I learned how not to care about the time it takes to figure things out, but to start and carry on. This way given enough time, almost all problems are solvable. The time pressure doesn't change this fact.
In case of a time pressure, I just focus on workarounds instead of analysis. Once the problem is no longer burning, it's up to the project priorities to investigate the root cause.
I also learned that panic never solved any of my problems, so when I notice that I am moving into panic mode, I stop for a minute and cool down. This is a skill that can be learned.
It’s more a type of persistence I think. More junior people often ask me something along the lines of “How do you immediately know these things?”. But the answer isn’t anything magical. Generally one of:
1. I’ve run into the same or similar problem before.
I only occasionally achieve this state but I find that it comes from high levels of comfort with the systems you're using. That's everything from the operating system to the programming language to your chosen editor/IDE.
When you have a high level of comfort with all of these things when you see a problem you can often guess *where* the bug is and that's half the battle right there.
Have you ever noticed that your friends will ask you to fix their WiFi or an app on their phone and even though you have no real expertise you can normally do it? That's a version of the same thing. You understand the general principles of the system and you're able to guess the general location of the problem and start flipping switches until it goes away.
I don't have anything to offer other than sympathy, but I just wanted to thank for this post.
I'm going through exactly the same thing as you, and asking myself the same questions. You're obviously more experienced than me, so it's actually reassuring that this happens to more senior people.
Can we not pretend that electric cars don't pollute the planet?
To be clear, I am a big fan of electric cars. But this seems to have become another one of those things that has become so polarised you're not even allowed to express healthy skepticism.
ICE vehicles have very little headroom for "environmental growth" whereas electric seems to have very high levels of headroom. Batteries from more common elements, better recycling, more renewable energy to charge them. As much as I love big trucks, there is no "zero carbon diesel".
So it isn't pretending, they really are a lot better for the planet in the mid-term and forward.
Also, the fact that EVs produce almost zero local pollution makes them incredibly compelling. So much so that I'd still be in favour of them even if they produced the same amount of CO2 overall. Just to make it clear which "team" I am on.
I'm just pointing out that the EV debate seems to have become one of those things where people pick a side and then stop accepting any nuance.
The comment I originally replied to was making the typical glib lazy assertion that ICE cars are some terrible medieval technology and EVs are all sunshine and rainbows. It's more complicated than that.
there is also the environmental cost of replacing the worldwide fleet of vehicles with EVs, and replacing fuel based infrastructure with electric infrastructure. I would love to see a study done on the environmental impact of car ownership in a place like Cuba, where they fix and reuse 70 year old cars to this day due to sanctions. They've certainly avoided all the shipping pollution that the auto industry would have imposed at least.
I think our disposible lifestyle needs to be fixed. Replacing your perfectly good thing with shiny new x% better thing is not necessarily green when you consider the costs of manufacturing that thing, shipping it to you, and disposing with your old thing.
And it's insanely expensive and thus not ever going to be remotely economically feasible. The only reason it might falsely appear to be so now is because it is heavily subsidized (way more heavily subsidized than EVs are).
Economic feasibility is a different question, but we can say the same thing about EVs in Norway - they're not currently economically feasible there without significant incentives. That doesn't mean technology can't catch up.
Is anyone pretending that electric cars don't pollute? It seems like the pollution of EVs has been widely discussed in all kinds of media. Even extremely pro EV site like Electrek or CleanTechnica writes about it all the time.
The pitch has always been that they pollute less globally (and that how much depends on the electric energy mix, but will generally decrease over time) and way less locally. EVs is also the only solution to have a viable path to net zero lifetime CO2 impact. It'll take a zero-emission grid and zero-emission mining, but we need those anyway, and EV tech will help make mining zero-emission.
With Norway's ultra-clean gird four people commuting in a 40kWh EV have, after 130k km, a smaller carbon footprint than four cyclists doing the same.
EV pollute the planet, but so does everything else - including making the food that's turned into energy spent on cycling. It's not all that clear cut.
