Em Adespoton

I have to admit; I suspect that some of the Reddit bots are calling from inside the company.

I never tossed my Reddit account when I left, so I still get notified of replies to my posts and comments; I’d say there’s a third type of bot - an “engagement bot” that takes high karma comments on old posts and replies to them in a manner that adds nothing but could trigger the original commenter to reply.

At first I thought it was actual people, but it’s always young accounts with high post volumes, all the same type of post that nobody who had actually read the original thread would have written. And the accounts seem to target high karma comments, and aren’t limited to any particular subreddit.

In the US, doctors were prescribing opioids for pain medication for decades, ignoring the addictiveness and decreased effectiveness over time.

So someone who went in for surgery or had an injury could end up hooked on their pain meds… except the meds would become less and less effective over time, requiring larger and larger doses. Until the dose passed the “legal” threshold, at which point these people switched to illegal suppliers to survive. And eventually the doses got to be so large that their bodies couldn’t handle it, and they died.

And then there’s people who got hooked on methamphetamines because they were a cheap but effective way to stay up all night and study for an exam when they were a teenager— and eventually they couldn’t function without them.

And that’s just two common examples from two drug families, ignoring things like e-cigs (person gets hooked on something they didn’t even know they were consuming), regular cigarettes, or alcohol, all of which are legal but can also be addictive and deadly.

And… that ignores the obvious: it’s possible to feel sorrow for someone’s situation without affirming their life choices.

Is this a follow-up to my observation about appointments potentially terminating well before Trump is even sworn in?

I think we landed on using negative mooches.