For a nonprofit entity that I am affiliated with, we had a very high engagement (free) Facebook presence that eroded over time as organic posts get crowded out.
So you end up boosting or wasting money on ads. In my (limited) experience, ads weren't effective for us as they were too local and the audience was limited. Boosts were effective but expensive.
The funny thing was the our highest conversion paid event advertising was the old fashioned newspaper.
I’m genuinely happy for you, that you’ve figured out, that coffee was bad for you and that you were able to overcome using it.
However I also think it’s being unkind to your fellow humans, who’s metabolism may tolerate or even benefit from coffee (or whatever other substance) to extrapolate from your experience to our entire species.
And it seems maybe we’re not the only animals enjoying stimulants [0].
I like these kind of comments. For some reason, in most discussions, We fail to address the fact that we all don’t react similarly to foods, drugs, etc.
Plenty of people choose not to consume caffeine, they just don't make an issue of it, which is as it should be. Your personal choices don't have to be a cause.
To me the post sounded like there should be scrutiny of caffeine consumption as there was scrutiny of alcohol and nicotine. And I tend to agree with that. It’s a psychoactive substance that causes physical addiction so people should know the facts.
There aren't interest groups buying ad time for scaremongering or people beating the drum for moral superiority about the evils of caffeine... no. But energy drinks have gotten a bit of a bad wrap, and four loko with the caffeine and alcohol got banned... and if you have a heart condition or anxiety your doctor is going to advise you to lay off the coffee. Isn't that enough?
Or does it have to become a social evil for it to count?
I hope this comment of mine isn’t considered too low-quality, but is it any surprise that someone whose name is “flatTheCurve” would advocate compulsion over personal responsibility? :P
(And to avoid misinterpretation here, the original intent of flattening the curve to avoid hospital overrun I was fully behind. Now that we have more data, I find the people shrieking at their fellow citizens for going to the beach or public parks and demanding that they be prohibited from doing so to be detestable)
Interestingly, you've decided to conflate two completely unrelated situations here! I can only guess at whether this is due to spending insufficient energy analyzing the situation, or simply motivated reasoning.
Either way, it's important to recognize here that drinking coffee is a personal decision with personal consequences. Social distancing during a global pandemic has some personal consequences, but the majority of effects are on society (e.g. other people). By drinking coffee, flatTheCurve does no harm to people they come into contact with. By going into public, a hypothetical citizen exposes everyone they come into contact with to increased risk of infection. With infection comes risk of hospitalization, lifelong debilitating conditions (specifically permanent lung damage and strokes), and even death.
Going out in public for non-life-sustaining reasons during a global pandemic is more similar to tying your grandmother to a chair and forcing her to play Russian roulette than it is to drinking coffee.
Just curious, where do you draw the line on this reasoning? For example, would you feel the same way during a particularly bad flu season that did not have a novel virus like we are faced with currently?
Just trying to get a read to know how to best respond. Everything we do in society carries risks, particularly of spreading infection (influenza, meningitis, staph, strep etc), and generally historically we have not taken such a hard-line stance. Was that historic stance actually mistaken, and we should have always enacted these measures, or do you believe that this sars-cov-2 outbreak is such a different beast that it’s warranted now but wasn’t warranted previously?
BTW I agree drinking coffee is different in that the risk is entirely personal. I just wonder why we don’t view exposure to pathogens by venturing out into society through the same lens.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. And again as I told the other commenter I should not have posted my comment since I should have known it would just derail the discussion, but I am hopeful that our discussion and others might actually make it retroactively “worth it” if that makes sense.
See my previous comment here, that is a good starting point for my position. Happy to answer any questions. (BTW I made a statement in that post that covid is an order of magnitude less deadly than the flu for those under 30, I no longer stand by that statement because it’s been hard to get age-stratified influenza IFR data as well as the uncertainty of covid-related mortality data. I still think the statement is true for <18 due to the varying risk distributions that I explained in that post)
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Incidentally, I should have listened to my gut and not posted in this thread originally since I fear I might be derailing this discussion. So, I’m sorry for that. But for now I don’t think deleting my comment in this thread is a good idea at this point since we might end up having a useful discussion.
I must admit, this was a much more cogent and well-reasoned argument than I expected to receive - and, in fact, the only argument more coherent than "but muh freedoms/portfolio!" that I've heard in favour of ending quarantine orders. Thank you for that - and I apologise for prejudging you.
If I could summarize your argument, it appears to be that "a large segment of the population are at low-risk from infection, and unemployment (which quarantine often causes) and isolation have a larger negative impact on mental health"? That certainly hangs together.
The filthy European socialist in me naturally responds "Great, so have the government actually do its job and provide UBI or some other form of financial support, and permit going outside so long as safe distances are maintained, and you've solved a large chunk of the latter problems while still minimizing infections" - but I know that that's sadly unlikely.
> The filthy European socialist in me naturally responds "Great, so have the government actually do its job and provide UBI or some other form of financial support, and permit going outside so long as safe distances are maintained, and you've solved a large chunk of the latter problems while still minimizing infections" - but I know that that's sadly unlikely.
Haha, exactly that. I have issues with the ethics of the government "manufacturing" a problem and then riding in to solve it, even though I personally support UBI, so I'm against rolling it out under these conditions. But more broadly, echoing what you said, we know at least in the US that the government would completely fuck it up.
> If I could summarize your argument, it appears to be that "a large segment of the population are at low-risk from infection, and unemployment (which quarantine often causes) and isolation have a larger negative impact on mental health"? That certainly hangs together.
Exactly that. In particular I've been talking a lot about suicides and overdoses but the next thread for me to pull on is the mortality due to social isolation itself. We know that social isolation is heavily correlated with worsened outcomes for pretty much every disease, but it's probably hard to find research putting a number on it.
But anyway, I really do think the important point to decide on is basically: "Is containment feasible?". If it is, then theoretically lockdown _could_ be worth it, although I oppose it on constitutional and ethical grounds to such an extent that I would never support it for anything short of the zombie apocalypse.
If containment is not feasible, which I think in the US is a totally foregone conclusion, then nothing we're doing is decreasing covid mortality at all. So all we're doing is introducing a net new category of lockdown-related mortality , which as I've said previously is actually nnot a big overlap with the covid mortality since a huge chunk of those dying from covid aren't in the workforce or will only be in the workforce for a few more years anyway.
BTW, not sure if you've seen the Dr Erickson / Dr Massihi video floating around (the one that Youtube has just censored), but I think it's really worth watching. They absolutely butchered the statistics, making a ton of imprecise and/or outright wrong statements, yet everything else they say about immunology and social isolation is entirely valid. And it's really that whole philosophy that we need people to understand: hiding inside, preventing exposure to pathogens, these are things that decrease our ability to defeat infection.
Caffeine is incredibly benign compared to alcohol and nicotine, and so far research has shown that it may actually be a net positive in moderate amounts in terms of cardiovascular health.
If you're worried about gastrointestinal problems, you can switch to tea. Much less acidic and harsh on the stomach, and some varieties have enough l-theanine to counter the negative effects of caffeine. If you're worried about the caffeine content not being concentrated enough, you can even drink matcha, which typically has more caffeine per ml than American filtered coffee.
You can follow people. But if the people you follow "like" a political post, then you might see that. You can also tell Twitter to "Show you less" of any kind of post.
I used to think that worked, and at some point it (maybe) did. There were/are also magic strings you can mute.
I think currently your only hope is to use the "latest tweets" timeline, complete with periodically resetting your preference when Twitter decides to change it for you, which is abusive behavior on their part.
I prefer the chrono timeline and no "likes are stochastic retweets" nonsense, so that's a happy convergence for me. Who knows how long it'll last; Twitter seems to despise their users and I'm quite convinced no one in power at the company actually uses the platform.
Sorry, it's actually on the timeline. On twitter.com, look at the stars to the right of "Home" right at the top. Click that, then "See latest Tweets instead"
A twitter-like service whose only ban-able TOS violation (besides obviously illegal stuff) is to post any political content... that sounds amazing! I’d be there in a heartbeat.
The thing is, everything is political. Take LGBT people, especially trans people. Their entire right to existence is a hotly debated topic. Same for abortions. Religions. Sport events. Porn preferences. Sex work. Even such utterly mundane things as lipstick.
Take that out and you'd be left with essentially a feed of cute animals and still get fights between people arguing if dogs or cats are cuter.
That's true, but even more so than your list suggests. It's not just socio-cultural controversies that are political, but even basic elements of the economic status quo. Why do I have health insurance but not my Uber driver? Is my labor worth more than his? Is it OK that Pat Bowlen owns the Denver Broncos, or should the city of Denver own it instead (a la the Green Bay Packers)?
Got a bunch of phone numbers that wanted our service. Only 1 person was interested, but didn't sign up.