What part of surrealism do you not understand?
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Author: thomasfarley01
Business writer and graphic arts gadfly.
Not my best work.
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Paris Hilton (the cat)
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“It is No Measure of Health . . .”
Got to the hotel. Adjoining room. Hilton never discloses which rooms are adjoining and, as everyone knows, you can’t soundproof an adjoining room. The doors are never as thick as walls and doors act as soundboards, reflecting every kind of noise. Even normal discussion in an adjoining room is always clearly heard. I can’t stand that with my crippling sleep problems. There may be a way to make a note of this when you reserve a room but I forgot to write that in. IF you can make a note when using their system. So, a lot of fuss to get the room changed since they are nearly fully booked.
Then, getting to the new room, I notice a few very small ants. No problem, just a few, ants are everywhere. I would never complain about something like this. Except for this morning when the server handed me a coffee cup with a small ant running around on it. I showed it to the server and at this point I have to say something. I talked to the restaurant manager about this, saying that they obviously have a property wide problem and that I can’t be the first to say something. She said that they are working on the problem with a professional pest controller. Obviously, not successfully. She offered to pick up the cost of the coffee. I said that all properties have problems but since you know about it, you better check a cup before you hand it to a server. The meal was over $25, the room close to two hundred a night.
If I find more ants in this room then I will have to make a fuss to get housekeeping in which will displace me for hours. I didn’t create this problem, I am reacting to it. I don’t want to bring this news to people, I don’t want to listen to excuses, I don’t want to argue with people. But life makes you be the bad guy in response to all of the other people in life giving excuses, arguments, and attempting to buy off a complaint with a free cup of coffee. I didn’t have anything to do with any of this.
Update: And, of course, it got worse. I declined room cleaning at first because I thought I could live with the problem but there were more ants when I got back. Told the desk I was requesting and then left for a few hours so room service could get to it. They didn’t. I went back to the desk asking when room cleaning would be there so I could come back after they were done. I really, really needed to get some sleep. Desk clerk said he didn’t know their schedule but would message them. I said fine and would wait at the front for confirmation. “Oh, no, they can’t message back.” What?
After that “No” I said that this was now out of hand and that I’d need to talk to the manager. He responded by talking to someone on the phone and then handing the receiver to me. “No,” I said. “In person. How things are done.” A nice lady came back, I talked with her for a little while, said I had been a Diamond Member for years, which doesn’t seem to count anymore. Left again for a few hours, the room was just about ready. I mentioned the ants but housecleaning didn’t seem to know anything about that. What? Crazy. Anyway, the housecleaner seemed like a nice person so I gave her a $20 bill. I am a nice person.
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What Do You Do With Nothing?
This is a desperate attempt to recover a photo impossible to take again or to rehab.
These three guys were either pretty drunk or pretty high when they passed me on the Waikiki strip at about eleven at night. They were yelling and laughing at other people as they walked, sort of wobbly, down the street. Spotting my camera, they struck this pose. Walking away, they yelled, “Call that, ‘Three Black Guys in Hawaii!'”
Unfortunately, as you can see, I didn’t get the shot. This is impossible to recover blurring. See my first attempt which dives into a poster look to salvage something. Next, I went with a completely different look, maybe making fun of their impaired state. Still doesn’t work for me. Sigh.
Some other attempts.
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Strangers to History
The personal computer boom really got going in the late 1970s with the Apple II and some other pioneering machines making their way to market. It really got going in 1984 when IBM introduced their personal computer entry and with the Mac providing another approach with its mouse.
For the next fifteen or twenty years we had to suffer under the constant bleating of idiots asking why they needed a computer. Why?! Why?! Why?! Well, why do you need a brain? To learn. Do you want to learn? Why do you need the greatest learning tool ever invented on your desk? You need an explanation for that? Christ. Functionally worthless people taking up space. You do know you can turn off a computer when you don’t need it?
Well, here we are again with A/I. Gutenberg revolutionized the world with a copy machine. That’s all it was. A copy machine. Didn’t make anything new. But every historian agrees that the world was completely changed once moveable type was made practical. A/I is a creation machine. Let me repeat that.
A/I is a creation machine.
Do you get that? We are in Santa’s workshop. What do you want for Christmas? If you don’t know, let Chat make a suggestion. And don’t worry about A/I taking over the world. Anyone, like me, who has put hard hours into getting it to work, knows that it is constantly hallucinating and it has no idea how to be consistent. That’s not in its DNA and this won’t get better for a long, long time.
Early days folks. And remember what Woz said three years ago, “A/I will never wake up in the morning and say to itself, “What would I like to do today?” He added that we are not close to getting A/I to match the true intelligence of an ant’s brain. Tru dat.
A last note: too many people writing about A/I negatively are not using it or have only spent a few hours with it wildcatting ideas. The mainstream media. Corporate media. Idiots. Find some YouTube videos on people trying to get it to do some business applications. Better yet, pay $20 a month for a subscription and just get on with it.
To encourage you, I have done a great deal of pioneering work in on-age SEO with the help of A/I, leapfrogging the existing but very expensive natural language industry to produce coherent sentences from tables of statistics. If that last sentence sounds like gibberish, well, all specific business applications sound like gibberish to those outside.
To those people who do understand that sentence, you know what I am talking about and its implications. And by the way, I created that work for my company, I sensed this project was possible and was given permission to run my idea to ground. (By-the-way, I don’t have a college degree and with my severe dyslexia with numbers I was never able to pass Algebra, getting only as far as advanced fractions in the eighth grade — so, what’s stopping you?) Going forward, you should be able to create new work within a company, with your imagination as the only limiting factor. If you want to learn . . .
So, if you want to learn, get with the program or get out of the way. Some of us want to learn and we don’t need stupid people putting down those that do. Go back to fifth grade where you can bully people with that kind of behavior. You are a moron and I am stupid if I spend time arguing with you.
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Rough Legged Hawk
Jim Boone (internal link) “I think your ID is correct, but it is atypical. Hawks are easier in flight, but always are among the most difficult to ID because of age, color morphs, and lots of variation.”
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And So it Goes
Speaker 1
You.
Speaker 1
Hello, aloha and mahalo. It is Monday, September 11, day of remembrance for all of us.
Speaker 1
My name is Thomas Farley, F-A-R-L-E-Y-I have a friend who is is dying and he has been dying for many years, but it is certainly the end of the line.
Speaker 1
It will be the end of the line very soon for him, it seems, unless there’s some miraculous intervention from beyond science.
Speaker 1
I and he’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to die, die poorly like this. I would not trade places with him. I envy him, though, in a way, with the enormous amount of resources that he’s been able to get to apply to his condition. He has a physical disease.
Speaker 1
He has a number of things wrong with them, but they are in the end, all physical.
Speaker 1
He’s had good insurance with Kaiser and I’m sure some of his own money. Similarly, I’ve had good insurance plans and money and I’m actually paid out of pocket for nearly all of my mental health treatment because compared with physical diseases, you cannot get seen by a doctor routinely enough to do any good in mental health. For a psychiatrist. Well, he has Kaiser. I think under Kaiser, probably you wouldn’t be able to see a doctor psychiatrist more than once every couple of months.
Speaker 1
Instead, you’re kicked down to therapists and technicians. So I’ve always paid out of pocket for regular psychiatric treatment.
Speaker 1
So that’s one big difference between mental health and physical health. Another is that routinely, for years now, most of the major insurance companies have provided a 24 hours nurse talk line so that you can talk to a nurse at any time of day except that. And I’ve talked to these nurses on these health lines before. They say they’ve never, ever had a psych nurse assigned to one of these 24 hours help lines. They could have a psych nurse, a telephone line in addition to the physical, the regular RNS.
Speaker 1
They could have that. These groups, Intermountain, Southwest, Kaiser, multibillion dollar corporations, they could pay for a 24 hours psych nurse telephone line so he wouldn’t wind up at the emergency room or some other place victim of suicide. But they don’t because mental health does not exist for these people. They talk about these institutions, talk about the rising rate of suicide, and isn’t that awful? But they won’t fund for it.
Speaker 1
They will not fund for it. They will instead give out some pity, some false pity and give some money to other groups, other agencies that are working on the problem, but they themselves don’t participate. And in the last few years, we’ve all seen how they want to really focus. They really want to throw everybody into two categories that of depression or anxiety. And if you’re not in that category, then good luck to you.
Speaker 1
I don’t want to dwell on my particular problem, although I’ll just say that it’s severe insomnia and nightmares and yeah, you hear about research, say, into PTSD and related, but it’s not really in my opinion. And I’ve been almost become a professional consultant on this subject since I so much want to get better. And I’ve tried everything. So I’ve become sort of an expert on what’s current, and I’ve done everything, including electroshock, or ECT as it’s politely called. Electroconvulsive therapy didn’t work for me, paid for all that out of pocket.
Speaker 1
Physical diseases, especially the physical diseases that happen to a lot of people, that Big Pharma has a market for. Those seem hopeful. As far as research getting spent, I know there’s some incurable, seemingly incurable problems like autism, and so there’s just major diseases, although autism goes to great deal of mental health fields, so it’s inherently not going to see the amount of research or funding to begin with. My friend has got all of these resources now available to him as far as end of life treatments and hospice, just like my parents had hospice and people willing to help stepping in. And there’s nothing for end of life, for mental health problems.
Speaker 1
My condition is not livable, and all I get in a response as far as end of life is that it can’t be that bad.
Speaker 1
And I sometimes say, yeah, you’re right, it’s not that bad. It’s a hell of a lot worse. You live with this, you live with this. But it’s a mental health problem that they can’t capture with a microscope or a thermometer going up or down, or blood pressure they can measure or blood they can sample. They just have to take the word of the patient, and our word doesn’t mean a damn thing.
Speaker 1
And I feel for people with mental health problems that are not as articulate or verbal as I am, that can’t express themselves or they express the hell they’re going through. They really have. That just I can’t imagine the misery funding needs to be addressed for my friend. There’s all sorts of patient advocates available for him. He’s actually had genetic engineering things done for him at Stanford Hospital.
Speaker 1
There’s been housing available for family and relatives nearby, just on and on and on. And I am glad that he’s had that care. It’s extended his life for many, many years. It’s just there is no equivalent in mental health for this. And it just devalue you.
Speaker 1
It devalues a person over and over and over again. You’re not worth it. And if you want something done, you got to pay for it yourself, because we can’t see it, so we don’t think it’s a problem. I’ll give you a simple example of how much I often have needed a patient advocate to deal with people just on the phone, for example. One of the things that really induces my nightmares is being a mean person and having to argue endlessly.
Speaker 1
And if anybody’s dealt with any customer support, any healthcare organization over the last many years, you’ll know that it is impossible sometimes to get across what you’re trying to say to a person that keeps falling back on a script will not transfer you to a supervisor about the websites and email addresses that they hand out that don’t work, telephone numbers they never call to make sure that they actually work. It just goes on and on. Well, that all forces me to get service, forces me to be a mean person with these people. And I don’t want to be a mean person. It’s toxic.
Speaker 1
It’s toxic to everybody, but especially in my condition. And I can’t tell them that that just engendering more and more nightmares. And it would be great if I had a patient advocate that would be able to speak for me and would be able to sit for hours and hours on a phone trying to get something arranged and it’s just not possible, not even with paying for it out of pocket. These people don’t exist. And it is very frustrating every step of the way you’re told that your condition doesn’t mean anything and it is indescribable as I try to make myself, as I try to make other people comfortable with me.
Speaker 1
You can’t mention, for example, that you have violent nightmares anymore. They’ll call the cops on you.
Speaker 1
People today are so scared by corporate media that they associate mental health with violence when in fact the mental health are far more likely to be victims of crimes than actually committing the crime. But corporate media doesn’t want to hear that. And it is the more and more I try to make other people comfortable around me, the less credibility I have, the more well spoken I am, the less people think there’s anything wrong. If I keep up appearances, then just what’s the problem? And I’ll try to say, well, how many times do you have to watch your mother or your best friend get chainsawed to death?
Speaker 1
Well, it’s not real. No, it actually feels real. And shock after shock and this has been going on since 1988 with me and it just breaks you down. I probably have less than 4 hours of sleep every night and tell you this is how these professionals, they just want a measurement. How many hours of sleep are you getting?
Speaker 1
And their limited thinking is insane. Well, four or 5 hours, it doesn’t matter. It’s the quality of sleep. It’s all broken up. I’m pacing around at 233 30 in the morning, waking up every other half hour.
Speaker 1
It’s the quality of sleep. But they can’t measure that. They have to rely on your word. And your word doesn’t count. Your word doesn’t mean a damn thing.
Speaker 1
Well, we’re sorry for you, but there’s no at this point I’ve tried literally everything, including, like I said, ECT. And that program when it first came out, using the Apple Watch, which is a dedicated Apple Watch and a dedicated iPhone that goes with it called nightwear. I’ve written a multi part review on YouTube about it that also failed.
Speaker 1
But in the end in the end, my friend has a ton of services he’s going to have measured, respectful, end of life experience, I guess you would call it. But no, I’m going to have to take care of things myself. And it’s tragic, but it’s consistent with the disregard that mental health gets in this country. I’m not sure it’s that much better anywhere else, and I don’t have any suggestions other than fund, but it’s all about money, and so I just don’t especially Intermountain. They’re an incredibly toxic group, incredibly damaging to mental health people.
Speaker 1
And you can read on my website, Thomasfarleyblot.com, what they did to me, how they treated me. I think a real fundamental problem in healthcare is how the line personnel, or the people responding to their Twitter and social accounts have no idea what duty of care means. We are patients first and then customers. This is not a typical industry where you have a customer. No, we’re patients first.
Speaker 1
When you extend the duty of care, if you have to explain what duty of care means to somebody picking up the phone, they need some real training or they need some days in the hospital tending to patients. Once you accept the duty of care, again, it’s just not my dad was a brilliant physician, brilliant doctor, and his colleagues were all well mannered, neat, professional, all of them caring. And they accepted the responsibility for a patient once they took them on. And once a system takes them on, like Inner Mountain or Kaiser or what have you, that duty of care is extended. That umbrella applies to everybody under their name.
Speaker 1
Well, that’s enough for now. I wish I could give you some hope, but there really isn’t any. Not at least for people with my condition. And I think that they would actually prefer a lot of us just to die off so they don’t have to deal with them. I think that’s what’s going on with a lot of the homeless, with mental health problems.
Speaker 1
It’s just get these people off the books and we can go back to treating people for just anxiety and depression and everybody else is on their own.
Speaker 1
But if you know more about the subject, let me know. But there’s no dignity in this, not for people with mental health.
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Some Sights
