I heard a story many years ago of a tech who went to investigate a cascading failure in a row of washing machine hard drives. A single platter had failed, which damaged the head. They thought maybe it was just the pack which was faulty, so they put in a new pack, and destroyed that as well. So they thought maybe it was the drive which was failing, so they put the first failed pack in another drive, and destroyed the head on that as well. Their attempts to figure out what was wrong ended up killing three or four disk packs and as many drives.

When the tech turned up, he ran his finger around the inside of the mouth of the drive, and his finger came out covered in red dust.
"What's that?" the customer asked.
"Data," he replied.

85% of Australia's population is urban, almost all of that in the capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. And there is, normally, a lot of interstate traffic, so those urbations are well connected. When we've slipped, COVID spreads through Australian populations very well indeed.

One of the first things done was to break those connections and set up hard borders between the states, so that each state, and to some extent each city, could concentrate on cleaning itself up, without worrying about whether more cases were being brought in from outside. Once a city or a state was clean, they kept the borders closed so that they stayed clean. Melbourne got hit hard, and our reaction was to lock down hard, and long. No unnecessary travel. Strict definitions of what "necessary" is, and if visiting your dying relatives if you're not actively a carer for them is not necessary, then neither is a haircut. Curfews. 5km travel limits. Compulsory masks outside the home. And that was kept up for months, until we started seeing double doughnuts: no new local cases, no deaths. Then we relaxed, carefully, and started accepting travel. And when there were new outbreaks, which we knew there would be, we locked down again.

The difference between Australia and the US? We passed the marshmallow test.

The marshmallow test is something given to small children to measure their maturity and self-control. You put them in a room, with a marshmallow on the table. (Or a chocolate, or some other kiddy-crack treat.) And you tell them that they can't have it now, but if they don't touch it, then in five minutes they can have two. Then the experimenter leaves the room. Young children can't control themselves: they see a thing they want now, so they take it now. There is a certain level of maturity where the child realises that for putting up with a bit of temptation, they can get a bigger reward, so they wait. Sometimes they literally sit on their hands to stop themselves taking the marshmallow, but they wait. And after five minutes, they get two marshmallows.

Australia and New Zealand are enjoying our two marshmallows.

America had to keep having haircuts. And couldn't close unnecessary retail. Had to have sit-down restaurant meals instead of take-out. Couldn't put up with masks. Weren't able to lock down interstate travel, much less inter-city. You, as a society, couldn't stop yourself having the marshmallow in front of you. And now you don't get a second one.

I created nothing, I wasn't even pre-empting.

OCD obsessions and ASD executive dysfunction do look kind of similar, if you don't know anything about either. Gastroenteritis and bulemia both involve throwing up, so they're the same thing, right?

Maybe I should ask if you actually know what Impostor Syndrome is before indulging your Reading Comprehension failure any more.

It's not a strawman, it's barely even paraphrasing many of the comments on this very post.

Impostor's Syndrome is not a medical disorder indeed. Well spotted. You get a gold star. But from my point of view, it's something I've heard that other people don't have. It's really common amongst Autists and Aspies.

Obsessive-Compulsive disorder is the compulsion to enact non-functional rituals. That is not the same thing as being aware that you don't notice that you're hungry, and getting into the habit of eating a hamburger at 8:00 on Tuesdays because that's hamburger time and if you don't do that then you won't get around to eating at all.

It's almost like you haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about, but you read something on reddit once, and you'e an expert now.

"Some are just assholes", indeed. Congratulations: you're one of the trolls I was talking about.

Compare "at times" with all the time. Like, clinical depression "all the time."
Compare "like order and regimen" with being unable to function if anything changes.
Compare "put on a brave face and do things they don't want to do" (like go to a job that sucks) with "put on a brave face and go work at a job you love, with people you like, but the effort to deal with people at all exhausts you."

Here's a newsflash for you: you do not know what you're talking about. And you're part of the problem.

I know the trolls are lining up to post "Ass-burgers is fake anyway, I met an Ass-pie once, and he was fine."

So let me say this first: If you've met an Aspie and dismissed the condition because that person "seemed fine", then please consider that what you didn't see was the countless hours of practice and stress and anxiety of being able to pretend to be that way; the habitual exhaustion from the effort of doing so; the depression and abysmal self-esteem from never, never understanding the people around you or being able to tell whether people actually like you or not. The years of teasing and abuse, the subsequent years of retrospectively realising all the other things which were teasing and abuse at the time but we couldn't tell at the time. The incessant Impostor's Syndrome, which only gets worse the higher you rise -- if you can move forward in your career. Who speak nineteen languages, but get scurvy because they forget to eat. No, seriously: people whose executive dysfunction requires the scheduling of bathing and eating, or else a rigid routine, where even slight interruptions can trigger a panic attack. The meltdowns and fear and frustration and despair.

And you don't see the ones who don't "seem fine". Who weren't as fortunate as those of us who got a series of lucky breaks and have been able to work around our disabilities and take advantage of our strengths. The ones who killed themselves in despair or ended up on the streets or were institutionalised or are housebound on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.

The DSMV changes to the Autism Spectrum diagnoses have been widely stated by the people writing them to be for the purpose of excluding people from being diagnosed on the spectrum. Because when people started actually looking at how many people had an ASD, it turns out to be much more than anyone thought.

Obviously it can't be because so many people were swept under the carpet for all those years, so it must be a problem with the definition. Hey, if we change the definition of Cancer to exclude any condition of the skin, that means that all those people with melanomas must be cured, right?

A lot of what you're describing happens to a huge segment of the population at times.

I understand that most people have moments of getting a conversation stuck in their head, of stressing out in a crowd, of getting frustrated at nothing because you're tired.

There is a huge gap between that and being unable to restrain your temper because your morning routine is different. Of having to restrain your urge to flee (I mean straight up pounding heart and racing mind and flinching at all movement and being able to think of nothing other than getting from here to the exit by whatever means possible) from any average shopping center. Of having conversations running through your head that you won't have: will never have, but you can't stop rehearsing what you would say anyway, while finding yourself utterly unable to figure out what to say when someone unexpectedly surprises you with "hello".

I'm high functioning, as Aspies go. And yet a shopping center will reliably send me into a panic. I can't follow one conversation in a quiet room reliably, let alone in a noisy environment. I get completely thrown when I can't have my coffee in the morning in the proper routine, and it puts me off for the rest of the day, or longer. For some people any of this can happen if they're tired or low or having a bad day. For me this is every day. When things are going well, then the trolley moves smoothly enough on the rails. But it doesn't take much to derail completely, where most people are driving something far more all-terrain.

It's not just "occasional social awkwardness". There's much more going on that most people don't see. And it takes a lot of work to make it so that you don't see it.

If you'd RTFComment below, it expands on this quickly thrown out line, to say that what I describe above is the normal problem for accounting of Autism Numbers, and does not apply to the CDC study.

Which is to say, you're right, but neither this study nor its reporting is typical of the norm behind "ONOZ Autism Epidemic" hysteria.

"barely noticeable in everyday conversation to an untrained observer"

Whereas a trained observer may be able to spot it as they walk in the door, and it may be obvious to anyone given extended interaction (socially, professionally, family, whatever).

And in everyday conversation, people see the best behaviour, the greatest effort to pass as Like Everyone Else. They don't, as a rule, see the anxiety attacks, the stimming, the meltdowns and shutdowns, the continual gnawing fear that you're doing it all wrong and no-one will tell you, the desperate desire to go hide somewhere quiet and dark and alone, the continual rehearsing of social interactions in your head.

Just because you can't tell an Aspie when you pass one on the street, that doesn't mean they aren't suffering from it.

Trust me on this.

Which is a fair point, in this study.

All too many reports, however, don't discriminate across age clades, and just count up total Autists, if they specify at all. And they detect massive rises in Autism diagnoses since <whenever>, and you can't tell if adult diagnoses are skewing the results or not.

In this case, that they've accounted for the improvements in diagnosis rates is a positive sign... although I wonder how that "50%" number was arrived at:

However Roithmayr [president of the research and advocacy group Autism Speaks] noted that better and broader diagnosis and higher awareness accounted for only a half of the rise in autism rates, and that the most recent numbers show that there is an autism epidemic in the United States that needs to be addressed.

A lot of Autists simply don't trust Autism Speaks. Most of its money goes to advertising and research into eliminating Autism (which Autists interpret as eliminating the possibility of people like us in the future, at the expense of research into treatments for the disabling symptoms of Autism for people who exist now). There is only one Autist on any of its boards (being John Elder Robison on the Research board, where he is outnumbered fourty-nine to one), and they have produced videos where people talk about killing themselves and their Autistic child and that they only didn't because of the "normal" child at home, in front of that Autistic child. (Just because they may not be able to speak normally doesn't mean they can't understand what you're saying.) Autism Speaks tend, as far as we can see, to be advocating for the parents, not the autistic children (which isn't a problem per se, except that they misrepresent themselves as speaking for the Autists themselves, something which is overwhelmingly not true), and advocating for more resources based on a campaign of fear and loathing of the worst case scenario, and misrepresenting it as the typical case. It would be entirely in character for Autism Speaks to underplay the role of improved diagnosis and overplay the "OMFG EPIDEMIC!!1!", as this plays right into their story of Autism being this Thing which will steal your child in the night and you need to give money to Autism Speaks if you want your child back.

That's not to say it's necessarily wrong, but I do not trust that unsupported statement from that source.

This is an important point to remember.

As an example: I was diagnosed with Asperger's in 2010 at the age of 37. Do I count in the statistics of 2010, or 1973?

Kirrily "Skud" Robert is not her real name. Kirrily Robert is her real name and Skud is her nickname.

There, I corrected that for you.

Lifelines

It's console based, but it's fairly powerful for that. Once you learn the navigation keys (and there's a help window at the bottom of the screen), then you can walk up and down your family tree with ease. It reads in GEDCOM, allows you to edit those records as GEDCOM (so you have a lot -- perhaps too much -- freedom in record structure and normalisation), and it exports in GEDCOM as well, as well as a scripting language which allows for all sorts of reports and outputs. You can even tell it to keep records in UTF8.

It is a record/database manipulation program: you will need to gather your data yourself, and enter it by hand. While the actual entry process is tedious (which, to be frank, will always be the case, flashy GUI or not), it is a good opportunity to go over the data and discover incongruities and patterns.)

I happen to be on secondment.

From EngIT. :-)

That counts. If Unimelb EngIT does your desktop support, trust me; it counts.