Therapists used to be the most helpful thing in the world (or so I’ve heard), now they’re so unhelpful they have to rely on the state to get us to use them and have so many different indie-based projects and programs competing with them, like BetterTherapy (which isn’t bad tbh). The old joke is they’re paid friends but now I see they’re just paid, you could be in a genuine situation where something obliterates the quality of your life (e.g. custody battles) and they’ll be like “does lithium sound good” (which by the way, lithium is outdated by two thousand years, so if it’s recommended right away to you, run). The reason they’re not set up like lawyers where you only pay them “if you win” is because they know this would destroy them.
I fear the medical profession is also going down this path.
Government and lawsuits are totally regulating everyone to death. Doctors used to be knowledgeable and creative (and they still are) and had the freedom to prescribe whatever they thought would be the best.
Now, they can only follow conventional wisdom and the exact recommendations of the regulators. If they deviate just a little to find the perfect fit for your case, they risk themselves and their livelihoods.
It’s primarily private insurance (at least in the US) that drives that. The doctor can prescribe something and then a “doctor” who works for the insurance company can take a 10 second look at it and deny it outright in favor of a more profitable treatment.
When it comes to costs, yes, but there is also another angle.
Sometimes doctors will prescribe expensive, patented drugs when cheaper, better, out-of-patent alternatives exist.
This is not to the benefit of the insurance companies.
Rather the pharma industry and regulators act in a concentrated rap battle: the regulator covers their ass by only approving in accordance with the latest, most comprehensive studies (“evidence based practice”) and the pharma industry only bankrolls new studies on their most profitable medications.
I learn the sax, you pick up the keytar. Then we take over the stages of every major festival with dual soloing to smoke machines and neon lights until the groupies carry us off stage. Deal?
“Consultant” in IT is often enough a fancier sounding title for “rentable body”. You’re basically working as a contractor of some sort, but officially you’re a consultant.
They’ve largely subverted the occasionally useful profession of journalism. There’s a big difference between researching things your audience wants to know, and asking someone with a commercial agenda what they’d like to tell your audience.
not exactly what you're asking, but banks and insurance companies are the majority of what I call "the beaurocracy of money". they don't produce anything of value, and are basically just a sinkhole for labour.
Administration in general. There are so many jobs in (public and private) administration whose entire job is, to fill out forms or write reports, that nobody will ever read.
The same is true for countless middlemanager positions. It’s not a full-time job to manage 10 employees who are not directly working with you. No idea how this is called in other countries, but in Germany we call it Matrixorganisation, and it’s often as absurd as it sounds.
I’m in administration and part of my job is filling out forms and reports that no-one will ever need unless there’s a problem in which case they become very important indeed.
In today’s business environment we tend to forget that redundancy = resilience.
The company I work for now has very much this attitude for the last 50 years.
As a result they have 3 locations, no sops, and no accountability.
Over the last 6 months is been my job to put us back in compliance with local and federal reporting requirements and develop SOPs. The feedback from the bottom up is that it’s wonderful to have consistency, different bosses giving the same answers to questions, auditors being able to complete audits in expected and appropriate times, and in compliance with reporting regulations.
Can companies go overboard and employ people like me who do busy unnecessary work? Absolutely. But it is definitely appropriate to have a couple of administrators.
Rules and procedures are always a trade-off. However, I would argue that the vast majority of organizations have way too many of them and produces way too much busy work.
Just look at your own example - I’m 90% sure, that the different locations did have procedures and did document stuff, just not in a consistent way. So their documentation was scattered and their reports practically useless.
Huh? I can go almost anywhere in the world and wave my phone at a register and take whatever I want home. Without a bank Id have to carry a lot of everywhere.
No. No you wouldn’t. We don’t need banks to implement the concept of currency in a society and you’re myopic for not understanding that but instead pretending to be some sort of authority on the matter.
🙄 uh huh. I prefer a currency backed by something with some longevity and not petted by grifters who keep getting arrested for fraud over and over again, or hacked and cleaned out with little to no recourse.
I’m no economist, but banks are pretty useful from how I understand it. Lending out money people don’t use is like creating money out of thin air. Helps people buy houses and everything. I tried looking for the video I saw on this topic, it’s something like “how banks create money out of thin air”.
I hate capitalism as much as the next lemming but banks and insurance companies, at their base level, definitely provides a service. Banks help you spread the cost of things over time at the expense of interest, and insurance companies do something similar with risk.
Its only when they do warped shit like lend money at zero interest or force consumers to pay for insurance (thereby negating the need to be competitive) that they start to leech off the system.
I would distinguish between providing a service & creating value. the service that banks and insurance provide is useful, but only in the context of a money-centric society. they don't create anything that has a purpose deprived of context, it's only the moving around of numbers.
But we do live in a currency-based society. That’s like saying food only has value in the context of a chemical-energy based society. It’s a pointless semantic argument here.
perhaps it is, but I'm not convinced. if food, eating, whatever were an unnecessary and wasteful system then the growing of food and processing, production, etc would likewise be a waste of resources, human labour included. a lot of our work does go towards food production, supply, processing, etc - if you could switch to an alternate system that dispensed with food but didn't otherwise alter our lives, that would surely be massively preferable. it's hard to imagine because eating is such a fundamental need, but that's just a limitation of this comparison.
if we could dispense with money but otherwise have society look much the same (or better, which I think it undoubtedly would be), that would be an improvement, to me, just by virtue of freeing up the labour of all the people who work solely in the overhead of the system. to imagine how else we might function as a society, I think it's useful to identify ways in which the present system is inefficient.
You can’t mention Erowid without mentioning similar organizations like Dancesafe, MAPS and Bluelight. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I am only here today because of those sites. I am literally where I am today because of my time on Bluelight.
I wouldn’t want Lemmy to host videos, they require a lot of storage and bandwidth for a service the users pay nothing for. 60 seconds of video could equal many thousands of text posts and links. I hope Lemmy stays simple.
I would like for some instances of lemmy in future to consider adding videos prehaps to save on server costs have the videos set to 480p or 720p max this will add an entirely new layer of content to lemmy prehaps said instances and supplement there income with ads and donations
Honestly, can just be a different form of therapy. Worked with one in conjunction with a therapist through a service provided by my medical insurance.
The therapist was completely useless. The life coach had me questioning the way I thought about things, and got me to seriously reevaluate the ways I caused myself stress. All she did was ask questions, but they got me to see things differently. Helped a lot.
A dizi (chinese flute). I got two of them at home but never managed to get any good at playing.
Like most hobbies in my life, it’s something I get super excited about for a weekend and then completely drop again for half a year or so.
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