I hate that line, because it's untrue. It's not the homeopathy that works, but the placebo effect. It's an important difference, because homeopathy is a system with claims to causal relationships.

Now the claim in medicine is always a comparison - it works better then doing nothing, or it works better than placebo. Actually, "works better than placebo" is pretty much the medical definition of "works at all". By definition it is impossible to have less of an effect than a placebo, unless your substance is a poison.

However, real medicine doesn't even work that way, that's just a simplification. Actual real-world medicine doesn't compare against placebo, that's just for very early tests to establish if your new drug has any effect at all. In the real-world, you compare against the best currently available medicine. Your new one must have either more effect or less side-effects. Otherwise, why bother?

Homeopathy does not work. Claiming it works because of the placebo effect is like going to the beach at 5 am, drawing symbols into the sand and then claiming that the sun rose because of your magic ritual. If something has the same effect with or without your hogwash, you can remove the hogwash from the equation.

If you want it mathematically:

if
placebo + homeopathy = effect X
and
placebo = effect X
then
homeopathy = 0

Shaking, not rubbing. Pay attention!

But yes, you should be able to put a, say, $100 bill into a large bottle of water, shake it a lot, put a drop from that into another large bottle... repeat a couple times, and then hand them the final bottle as payment. According to their own theory, they are now rich beyond their wildest dreams!

It also gives Bitcoin a lot of reputation back. If you can actually trace what happens, then the resilience of the whole system is much higher than it appeared to be otherwise.

You haven't seen my tent and that of some other people I hang with. We don't go camping, we do LARP. My tent has carpets. :-)

That said yes, if you know this is your life, you'll of course do things differently. And of course if you've been born into it, then that's just how things are, you don't even notice most of it.

Still... I prefer being able to open the tap to walking two miles to get fresh water. Little things like that.

First, I'm not an expert on the subject, not even particularily interested. I've just gathered a few things here and there.

I think you dramatically underestimate the work of the hunter-gathere and overestimate the work of the modern men, mostly because you use different definitions.

You spend 8 hours a day at the office. During the week. How many of those hours do you really work, and how many of them are socializing with co-workers, Facebook, /. or goofing off? Let's be honest here, the average office worker does not spend all 8 hours working.

I don't think you're done with 2 hours of hunting or gathering, either. It depends on location and other details, but at least in Africa, early men and many still existing primitive tribes are persistence hunters, which can take all day.

You conveniently forget things like gathering water, which sometimes (again, depending on location) can take a few hours by itself.

You also conveniently forget that due to division of labor, most of the maintenance work of modern life is already included in your daily work, because with the money you earn there you go and buy stuff ready-made instead of having to make it yourself.

If you have a grand- or grand-grand-mother still alive, ask her about washing clothes before the washing machine was invented.

And you also assume that there's a strict split between work and leisure time. I'm probably not alone in saying that for most of my life, I've actually enjoyed my work, and I do it not just for the money but also because it gives me pleasure and purpose and challenge.

I simply don't think there is an easy comparison. I'm saying that all things considered, I would not want to switch places. Maybe the tribesmen wouldn't want to, either, and that's fine with me. Or maybe he would, you'll have to ask him, not me.

Don't forget that life expectancy figures in child mortality and that is high in all pre-modern cultures. Yeah, once you've made it past 5 or so, you could reasonably expect to see 40 or 50.

It's not only about hard work. It's also about famine and disease, for example. Not having to work hard is cool - until you suddenly have to just in order to not fucking die.

There's some truth to both sides, as usual.

I spend quite a bit of my time outdoors, averaging a few weeks a year, often with no electricity, gas-powered cooking and living in a tent. It is definitely beautiful in its own way and I'm always happy to go - and I'm equally happy to come back to a warm, dry home with a hot shower.

The dark ages were called that for a reason, one of them being that it was a step backwards from what civilization had already accomplished. The ancient greek lived better in many ways than the medieval europeans 1000 years later.

But even if you take the best period in pre-modern human history, I wouldn't want to switch, at least not permanently. There's still disease and pain and war, crime rates are crazy compared to today (ignore the news, they are lying, google Steven Pinker for a scholarly analysis) and let's not even get started about the ignorance and the dominance of religion over daily life. Plus you'd be very lucky indeed to visit another country once in your lifetime, as someone else posted your meals would have a fraction of the variety they have today, and so on and so forth.

One has a life expectancy of 30-odd years, the other of 70+. He has access to literature, art and music from all over the world. If he breaks his leg, he is transported to a hospital, gets a cast and will be well again in a short time instead of getting an infection and having a 50-50 chance of surviving.

We have romantic thoughts about prior times mostly because we forget all the shit about them. Your average medieval market fair doesn't include the open-latrines, your village getting burnt down in one of the constant wars, the fact that women had a reasonably high chance to die when giving birth or the simple fact that most likely everyone reeked to high heavens. Or just the fact that 90% of us would be pig farmers or something.

I know what I'd pick if given a choice. If you think different, pick a tribe, learn their language and go and live with them for a few years.

You can totally work a few hours a day to satisfy basic needs and spend the rest doing whatever you want. Of course it will probably mean not being able to buy the latest smartphone every year or going on expensive holiday trips, or very much medical care or a car - but then, the tribesmen do without those as well, right?

And of course that was a total lie, but sometimes I just can't help myself and a little comeback is nice, and he's probably still hunting around for my "aliases".

Time to close this, it's served its purposes. 62 comments to this journal entry, 20 of which are content, 42 are spam and trolling. All at -1. If there was any doubt that there's a mental illness involved here, that alone would remove it.

That's a good point. An UI system has to be familiar to the user, and what is familiar changes over time.

But that's the visual appearance angle. Other things remain, like the state having to be clearly identifyable and a control element having to appear as such.

Interesting but unfortunately not uncommon. I worked with the Gnome UI design group for a short time during the early days and basically gave up because of people with more enthusiasm than knowledge dominating the mailing list.

User interface design is a typical bikeshed problem. Everyone things it's not that difficult and he can do it and few people realize just how much effort and expertise goes into it. Heck, "Human-Computer Interaction" (Dox, Finlay, Abowd, Beale) is 800 pages.

I wish IArchitect's user interface hall of shame were still around.

Many design failures were made because people thought testing wasn't necessary because things were obvious. It's better to throw a few thousand bucks at a design test than botching a product because you didn't. That failure would be at least a hundred times as expensive.

Cheetah 3D is like 70 bucks and I've used it to create models for 3D printing.

It's not free, but if you're into 3D printing then 70 bucks is nothing as everything else involved costs you a lot more.

No he doesn't. That's what is what makes this a mental health issue. Validation is a basic human drive and he is probably desperate for others to acknowledge his existence. There's an ob-xkcd on that but I couldn't find it with a quick search.

In mentally unstable people, who rely on others for validation, this can get to the point of Existenzangst. Basically, he doesn't want to win an argument, he just really, really needs to have an argument. Because it means that others acknowledge he exists, which he isn't really certain about all by himself.

So by the effort he invests alone you can see that this really is quite important to him. It's self-destructive, but it matters. It's much like some mentally ill people who cut or hurt themselves, because the pain gives them assurance that life is real and that they exist and things.

Zontar, we should compare notes. I'll send you a mail.

But same here. I've had real-life shit that I would have instantly traded for this troll.