This is what I do. Whether genetics or what, my ears get stopped to the point of deafness once or twice a year. Tried cleaning them out with just water and ended up with an ear infection. It's excruciating.
Now: Use Debrox (etc) following directions. Several applications of the liquid over a day or two. But most importantly, flush with bulb with very warm water (as hot as you can stand). Repeat, over and over. Once you start, don't stop, because you won't be able to fully dry your ear canal until you get all of the wax out. Water means infection. Make sure everything is very clean throughout the procedure.
Do it over a stopped sink or bowl, so that you can observe what's coming out.
After it's done, dry completely. I use the twisted end of a tissue, etc., to sop up most of the water. Then blow warm air into my ear for several minutes.
That seems completely different—the active ingredient in debrox is peroxide, which foams up and in theory loosens the earwax (a cerumenolytic). If you want to be cheap use diluted hydrogen peroxide.
But there seems to be mixed evidence as to whether it's any better than distilled water.
The situation is a bit more complex than that, but in any case, that's a rather weak rationale for not committing suicide.
Here is a better reason: You'll be dead quite soon in any case, so unless you're in agony, you may as well enjoy your final days here. Think of some of your favorite activities and pick one. Rinse and repeat.
Sound shallow? Maybe, but I've spent an awful lot of time contemplating the question.
Sorry if I did a poor job of conveying, but my comment was never intended to rationalize committing suicide or not committing suicide. It was to illustrate society generally doesn't respect these wishes, that these wishes often fail, and that ending up in an institution staffed by our juniors may be less of our own choice than we may think.
Within my extended family and larger social orbit, I've watched maybe 20 kids grow up. The girls are uniformly successful and seem to have significant support from family, school, and society. The boys have been struggling and have experienced limited support to a degree that I find shocking. Perhaps half will never achieve regular employment, and sadly several seem destined for addiction and early deaths.
This is just anecdote, but for me, I'm inclined to believe 20 data points I can personally observe.
I'm not sure exactly how new this is. Even decades ago, my experience of growing up male is that to a fair degree it's like being thrown off the dock. "Hope you learn to swim before you drown!" The idea that boys are privileged over girls seems like a cruel joke.
The media/bad actors online/scam artists aren't concerned about being ethical with their megaphone on full blast instilling fear and panic amongst Americans.
The fact is if I have the choice between being unethical and saving my parents from a life filled with panic and fear, I know what I'm choosing.
Those media entities were calling people out in the West as wanting to kill their grandmothers when some of those people in the West weren't following very, very strict Covid restrictions, while nowadays the same media calls people in China as heroes and freedom fighters when those people in China are doing the same thing that the anti-Covid restrictions people in the West were doing about two years ago. No-one in here cheers for blocking the likes of the BBC and the NYTimes.
First, I think it's a little bit different to compare these two. One is 3 years after COVID, with vaccines, some level of herd immunity, and better treatment options. The other was immediate when little was understood. China's position is extreme, the west never reached that level of lockdown.
But in any case, I agree. A news diet is important. My parents watch CNN, and I can tell it has negative effects. I tell them to not watch the local news every night and don't put on CNN. This isn't a political thing.
But it must be said - there are much stronger calls to violence on one side, than the other, at this point in time.
I doubt there's consensus on which "side" has stronger calls for violence. But it's not needed. We can just agree that calls to violence are virtually always wrong and deal with them uniformly without respect to ideology.
Even if true, your first part is irrelevant to the question.
As for the second part, there's a reason why we don't take on these responsibilities ourselves, for competent adults. If you _truly_ believe your parents are mentally incompetent, the right thing to do is to present this before a court, with your parents present and allowed to respond. That's how civil society works.
That's too binary for the real world. Somewhere between padded rooms and someone being left to engage in destructive behavior by themselvesbis "intervention", which is a common-enough concept exclusively applied to competent adults.
In this case, we're talking about secret sabotage of someone else's Internet access. This falls outside of the common concept of intervention. In general, if you have to act secretly, you're almost certainly in the wrong.
Doing something to someone "for their own good" rightly has a terrible reputation. It happens most often in traditional parent / child relationships where the parent makes a change that is in the child's best interest in a way they cannot yet see. It can also happen in other situations.
I think that there are rare situations where people will be better off if their preferences are ignored. Those situations are tricky to identify and destructive to personal relationships to act on. The best-case scenario is that someone eventually recognizes that you did something good for them - but you should make peace with a long interregnum where they consider you a villain. You would also need to be prepared to carry the weight of being wrong. Acting against the desires of someone you love because you think you know better than them is only ok if they eventually share your view of what is right. It's a situation where you are choosing for your foresight to be judged in hindsight.
Thanks for the link. I think you should seriously contemplate this. If my kids did this to me, I'd ban them from my house, at a minimum.
More abstractly, suppose your thinking is correct, and now they're "de-programmed". If you were right, you could now tell your parents what you did, and they'd thank you. Does that sound like how it would play out?
a couple of years ago, my best friend had a major pyschotic episode. among many other unfortunate incidents, she drove her car into the yard of a stranger in the middle of the night, and knocked on that person's front door.
in response, i took her car away from her. drove it to a spot she didn't know about. she was, of course, furious with me. and my actions were no doubt illegal.
despite that, it was the right thing to do. if a similar situation were to arise, i would do it again in a fraction of a second. and now that my friend is in her right mind again, she agrees that i did the right thing.
would i have reprogrammed a router, if that had been a factor in distracting her? absolutely i would, without a second thought.
My mom had a psychotic break a few years back. My whole family let it go on for weeks, with the attitude “she’s an adult” etc.
As you reference in your threat about your kids, I knew the consequences of going against her will.
However, when I was finally able to visit home I realized she has lost weight and was a danger to herself, even trying to “take a walk” at 2am on a cold winter night.
I lied to her, convinced her to get in the car and drove her to a mental facility where she received treatment and has recovered mostly.
To this day she resents me and doesn’t fully trust me.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems in my family I’m the only person willing to trash our relationship to keep her safe.
This could have been avoided if she was self reflective and open to feedback, but her ego cannot take it, she’s simply too fragile.
These are hard cases, and you have my sympathy. (Same for sibling post.) Quite possibly I'd have done the same.
This sounds very different than the case under discussion, which seems to be that an adult child decided that he didn't like the information that his competent parents were listening to, and that it was making them unhappy, so he secretly sabotaged the parents' router.
That's more-or-less the plot of the movie "The Brainwashing of My Dad". The Dad in question is interviewed in the film. He is generally aware of what happened and happy about the situation.
Is that a guaranteed result? No. But it's more likely than you might expect.
--
The problem in these scenarios turns out to be that people aren't "brainwashed" or delusional or psychotic; but that they spend enough of their attention on bullshit that the bullshit feels like their identity.
I've been at this for almost 40 years, and it's shocking to me how little urgency there is to hiring over the last 5-10 years. I have a sinecure but still interview from time to time. Compared to (say) 1990, it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive.
In principle, I'm likely someone that hiring managers are looking for, and really a pretty good deal. In practice, I'll probably just retire rather than throw my hat into the ring again. Or--since I have a vindictive sense of humor--maybe I'll spend my retirement doing "fake" interviews with prospective employers.
This. It's been a buyers market in the last decade. If employers were really struggling to hire great engineers, they wouldn't be "playing with their food" so much.
I think it's this one of the parts that really ticks someone like me off. Most interviewers know almost upfront 10 minutes into into the interview if they are going to reject you, yet they can often drag on for an hour, under the guise of knowing, your 'approach' a problem.
Hiring decisions are generally not made by only one person. The interviewee might be performing poorly on one interview, but the interviewer doesn't know how it went on the others. Shutting off the interviewee 10 minutes into a one-hour interview session would backfire pretty badly unless the interviewer is sure that those 10 minutes was enough to determine the candidate definitely isn't hire-worthy (which is different from voting to pass on the candidate). The (Bayesian) priors of that happening should be pretty low if the screening process was working as intended.
Making the wrong call would entail the interviewee potentially feeling offended, which could be an issue if the ultimate decision was to make an offer to them -- they might reject the offer due to this experience alone. Not to mention it would be pretty awkward to work with a new colleague where you walked out on him as an interviewer. (In general you really don't want colleagues to know that you voted to pass on them)
In general if a candidate thinks they're getting nowhere they can suggest to stop the interview. Nobody can stop you from cutting it short and leave if those 50 minutes are important to you.
(Also, FWIW I don't think saving a hypothetical 50 minutes of interview time is what the GP was specifically referring to...)
I think reasonable people will give allowance to the hiring loop taking a day or two to synchronize on their earnest opinion of a candidate. I'm not bothered by that at all.
More disturbing are the cases where the hiring organization knows in advance that they _will not_ hire a candidate. IMO, it's unethical to waste someone's time on that.
In my personal experience, I had a FAANG drag me along for six months, passing screen after screen, only to be put off at the end for a "flaw" that was obvious from day one on my resume. I'll accept your judgement, but don't waste 50 hours of my time discovering something you could have learned in 60s by reading my resume.
Hirers complain about not being able to find candidates. This is one huge reason why.
I've been thinking about charging $1000, up front, for a day's interview. Sounds like an arrogant, asshole move. But still, what would be better?
This is pretty relatable. Not sure I'd say "unworthy", as that's hard to measure. Instead, I'd just say that consciousness seems to lead directly and inevitably to misery. And following Qohelet from thousands of years ago, those who are no longer conscious, or never were, are the best off.
We'll all be dead quite soon. In the meantime, I enjoy going out into nature a bit (waterfalls are great), and more reliably, having a pet. I think this is the best that this world has to offer. Godspeed.
Aside, perhaps amusing: A while ago, I used Tumblr as a modest blog of my tech adventures. Put a link to that on my LinkedIn page.
A year or two passed, and while applying for jobs, it occurred to me to check that link. Without telling me, Tumblr had given my URL away to someone who enjoyed posting naked pictures of herself. Lesson learned.
(In truth, given the quality of most tech resumes, I'd be quite happy to click on one and be shown that.)
Tumblr occasionally deletes blogs that don't have active owners. You should have gotten a series of increasingly urgent emails, but I'm sure deliverability is inconsistent.
I believed that for years. It just sounds like the sort of oafish, lame humor I'd expect from him.
But finally, I looked more deeply into it. My impression from that dive is that he was not specifically mocking this reporter's disability. Rather, it's more of a theatrical way of saying "Duh!", which he has used on many prior occasions, and even occasionally when referring to himself. (And of course, "duh" comes from a meaning of mocking people with low IQs or other similar disabilities. You could argue that it's wrong, but it's not particularly unusual in American discourse.)
It's somewhat open to interpretation, but I think a reasonable person could come down either way.
Really, either speculation is equally valid (or should I say, invalid) without:
(1) An understanding of the facts of how successful the EU has been at diversifying away from Russian gas and whether NS2's natural demise was all but an inevitability.
(2) How much the repairs will cost.
If the repair costs are low, it's probably Russia, because of the propaganda value.
If NS2's demise was highly likely, again probably Russia because they're leveraging a sunk cost to their benefit which is just smart.
But so many people are making confident assumptions about (1) and (2) in this thread. If you don't know the answer to those questions, stop forming strong opinions!
Now: Use Debrox (etc) following directions. Several applications of the liquid over a day or two. But most importantly, flush with bulb with very warm water (as hot as you can stand). Repeat, over and over. Once you start, don't stop, because you won't be able to fully dry your ear canal until you get all of the wax out. Water means infection. Make sure everything is very clean throughout the procedure.
Do it over a stopped sink or bowl, so that you can observe what's coming out.
After it's done, dry completely. I use the twisted end of a tissue, etc., to sop up most of the water. Then blow warm air into my ear for several minutes.
No problems since I learned this approach.