In 2008 Ryan Frazier sat outside a gas station in his car. Before him was a metaphorical fork in the road. His wife would surely be wondering where he was. His child was perhaps home sick, unable to attend school that week. A text on his phone asked him to pick up milk on the way home. He glanced out the window of his car and thought about his next move. When he was a boy, a local priest had molested him severely, leaving him scarred and broken as a child growing up. As an adult, he had brought legal charges against the priest. After years of battling a long, grueling legal battle, he had just learned today that the case was decided against him. The priest was free. Perhaps we would molest someone else. But at any rate, Ryan’s memories were not gone. His revenge was not had. The only legal recourse he had had failed him and the last thread of his hope was frayed and quickly coming undone. He glanced at his watch, and opened the car door. One foot in front of the other. In a daze, a fit of sadness, blinded by the devastating loss of hope, Ryan walked into the gas station and bought a gun, legally, using his name and ID. He walked back to his car, shut the door and killed himself in the parking lot. He had never owned a gun. He had never shot one. He was known as a cheerful person and a good businessman. He had lots of friends, lots of connections. But today, Ryan’s depression got the better of him. He couldn’t cope with the realization that his only hope in life had been literally, legally let off the hook. Eight years later, Ryan is still dead. Eight years later, Ryan’s family is still living.
The strongest argument for gun control is the one never told. Is it callousness? Is it misunderstanding? Is it ignorance of the facts? Is it cruelty? Or is it succumbing to a social stigma?
Depression is the unseen sickness. And it kills more people daily than we would care to admit. Depression is not the goth teenager, lacquered in black lipstick and throwing up the devil horns at a rock concert. It is Ryan Frazier. Well liked, cheerful business people. Community driven, married, happy. Well off, self made, rich, poor. It is gender agnostic, religiously unbiased, age transcendent. There is no cure. There is no cure. There is no cure. And it strikes at any time. Deadly and swift, it kills faster than any other disease. Within seconds an otherwise healthy individual can be struck down without warning. There is no numbness of the arm, no tingling in the leg, no struggling to breathe, no marks, blemishes or abcesses. Like a worm, it eats through the mind. Like a slug, it tortures your gut. You feel it. No one else does. Then it kills.
No one talks about depression. No one talks about suicide. It’s an uncomfortable topic hitting too close to home for far too many. Nearly 39,000 people kill themselves each year. 19,000 of those are with a firearm — 49%. No other suicide method has such a majority. No other method has to. If you could stop just one of those 19,000 would you?
But before you can answer that question rationally, first you must understand the mind that depression creates. Most people believe depression is feeling “sad.” This is not true. Everyone “feels sad.” Feeling sad is not a bad thing. It is not harmful. If anything it is a sign of a healthy human. We all feel sad from time to time and sometimes it is perfectly normal to feel sad for a prolonged period of time. Depression goes beyond that. Take the worst, mind numbing experience you have ever had in your life. Go there with me. You will cry. It will be hard. But go there. A brutal rape, feeling powerless as you were forced into your most vulnerable position and taken like so much meat only to be left behind like so much garbage. A horrific beating, bullied and bruised, unable to defend yourself against an attacker that only became more enthralled by your screams for help. The loss of a limb, athletic before, hopeful for your future, only to lose your most prized posesion, waking up from surgery finding it torn from your body and discarded as medical waste. A bad break up. A drunken brawl. The loss of your best friend. The death of a beloved pet. Whatever your worst experience in life is, extrapolate it over the course of your life. Imagine living it every day. Every day you wake up raped. Every day you wake up bloody and beaten. Every day you wake up in surgery. Every day you break up with your partner again and again. Multiply that feeling some tenfold until you can’t imagine it. What’s worse than daily rape? What’s worse than a daily horrific beating? What’s worse than losing your limb daily? Make it worse. Go there. That. That is the disease of depression. Would you survive? Could you? 107 people per day can’t. They live that hell. They survive until they can survive no more. Imagine begging for you life, pissing yourself out of fear, groveling, crying, clawing at the ground beneath you for any way out. Now imagine that your attacker is yourself, your own mind turned against you. You beg and beg and beg. There is no cure. There is no cure. Could you find a way out? Could you survive it? Take a moment. Breathe. Understand depression and be glad you do not live like this…
Suicide methods abound. But only a few are actually highly successful. Attempts at suicide are quite frequent, but while people can often survive overdosing, hanging, cutting, drowning and even jumping from seemingly high places, guns are unsurprisingly fairly successful. Of course they are designed to kill and if they don’t kill, they maim severely. Failed suicide attempts by use of a gun often lead to lives far worse than before…but those are rare. Guns have the highest success rate of any method used by people to kill themselves in proportion to those that try it and there is little chance for a change of heart. Suicide often comes from a place of despair with life as it is, a desire to be free, not from a desire to die. Yet when push comes to shove most survivors speak about the surreality of it all, the mechanical actions that go into the preparation and the sense of numbness that collapses during the actual attempt. Often, a suicide attempt can be a brutal way of bringing someone to appreciate life far more than those that have never been at Death’s door — much less there by their own hand. Yet with a gun, those last moments of realization and a chance to back out are often lost. A light squeeze of a trigger in a surreal moment of depression and despair is all that’s needed to fade to black. Most suicidal people are not constantly suicidal, and attempts often take place during extreme bouts of depression and hopelessness that outweighs all other feelings…a gun removes the freedom of thought from the equation and takes the possibility of epiphany out of the equation, replacing it with a cold certainty of death.
The statistics are clear. Suicide rates in households that own guns are higher. Suicide rates in states with high gun ownership such as Wyoming are also higher on average. Guns aren’t the most popular method of self-murder, but while drug overdoses only succeed about 3% of the time, suicide by gun succeeds over 85% of the time making it the most lethal of all methods. It doesn’t account for all suicides, nor does it account for even a majority of attempts, but it does account for a majority of the successful ones and it does so with an evil grin.
The year is 2003. Bruce Rogers is sitting in his lounge at home, drinking a scotch. He had developed a taste. He was well-off…a dentist by trade. A plush leather chair was his nightly throne and he often sat here and thought, or perhaps read, and drank himself into stupors. Tonight, in a bout of undiagnosed depression, he got up and loaded a family heirloom he kept in the home. By the end of the night he had shot himself dead. His daughter described him as having a great sense of humor. His daughter’s description didn’t bring him back to life.
I find it funny in a sickening kind of way that so many people love to parade about as champions of unborn fetuses, laughingly calling themselves “pro-life” while in the same breath supporting the death penalty. These same people support gun rights with a flaming passion, ignoring the outrageous problems that go along with them because of their weak-minded place of lugheadedness that just can’t see past the constitution in their vest pockets. We made the laws. We can change them. These aren’t the Ten Commandments, writ in stone by the finger of a wrathful god — these are manmade laws made by flawed individuals like you and I and if you weren’t so trigger happy, you might be able to see the pain they sometimes cause. You can fix it. But you don’t, America. The hypocrisy of this entire situation is laughable. The rest of the world doesn’t hate America because they think Obama is weak or the antichrist or black; they hate America because fundamental human decency is nowhere to be found. If you’re going to claim the title of “pro-life” then you must be pro all life.
Zachary Demers. 23. He was arrested on DUI charges while using a commercial license. His depression turned on and he began to fear things…losing his ability to drive, his job, his ability to find future jobs, his social life. He took his own life shortly after the arrest with his hunting rifle, unable to cope with the new reality that would become his life. There is no cure. There is no cure.
So if you could stop a single of these deaths, would you? You can. You can vote to. You, the people, make the laws. Make them now. There is never a better time than now. There is a constitutional right to bear arms, I do not deny this nor will I ever. But that right is broad and comes with certain caveats: Those that wrote this right into our nation’s laws did not have access to the kinds of weapons we now do. Sane gun control laws should not be about criminal intent. They should not be about mass shootings. They should not be about one offs. They should be about the things we can change, the things listed here in cold black and white, made colder by the taste of blued-steel. This is crushing. But does this matter? No. Gun owners are too busy worrying about the loss of their liberties to bother about the traumas they might lead to. Maybe I’m not a patriot. Maybe I’m weak. Maybe I’m missing some kind of big picture. But I know that if I could cure cancer magically by losing a leg, I’d do it. And if I could save the lives of 19,000 people every year just by giving up the right to shoot targets and gut my own dinner, I’d do that too. If your “right” is leading to the undeniable harm of a group of people, then perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate what your “right” fundamentally entails. Checking your laws, re-envisioning your nation, making a better world for all those in it — now that is the patriotic thing to do!
After several years of existence, crowdfunding is still a relatively new industry. As such, it’s rife with opportunists and scammers trying to find ways to take your money.
In my opinion, this is one of those opportunistic events and I’m going to show you how they’re trying to do it.
This is where it all starts, on the Kickstarter platform, which is considered by many to be trustworthy because of safeguards allegedly in place to watch out for the interests of potential backers of campaigns.
It’s a campaign for a technological marvel called VoiceMojo, a device that when put into production will make all of our lives better.
This wonder product is only in prototype form, however. It’s not not in production yet so any claims made for it are at best conjecture and speculation, right?
Amazingly, they have two testimonials to how effective it is, by some people who have allegedly used what should be that prototype: an Italian journalist and a Mexico City secretary.
We can find Matthias Scappi on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthias-scappi-5b74b6135/ where he used the same identifying photograph. His profile there mentions nothing about being a journalist. This makes me skeptical of Karina being a secretary as well.
It’s pretty obvious that the couple in the video is the same couple we see in the individual headshots. Something doesn’t add up when you put it all together.
The proposed product — VoiceMojo — is nothing particularly special. It appears to be a Bluetooth microphone that is then paired to a smartphone app that also is under development.
If all the work would be done by the smartphone, can someone please explain the need for a separate device like the VoiceMojo?
Tech marketing. travel. conscious living. transforming fear to faith and trying to trust in the process. Unraveling me one day at a time..
OK, so this is a topic I am really passionate about and this may go into a rant at some points but LISTEN UP, my male friends…
And, well, this could include females too, for sure, but I think nonetheless, it has to do with masculine energy which of course both genders posses. But, I do see this more amongst my male friends and men I have dated.
You want a sex goddess, do you? You want hot, sexy, intimate interactions. To be turned on. You want it like the movies? You want to feel sensational. Desires to be fulfilled. Release some tension? Have playful fun? Be touched? Admired? Pleasured? (*in or outside of the bedroom)
Maybe it’s with your spouse, maybe it’s with your partner, maybe it’s with a girl you’re casually dating or even, a total stranger you just met on Bumble…
NEWSFLASH, LADIES WANT THIS TOO. We want to feel sexy, hot, desirable, expansive, invigorated. We want to express our inner, seductive, sensual, maybe edgy, Goddess. What an empowering, confident place to be! Talk about standing in your power (which I talk a lot about in my posts), aimiright!?
Are you making her feel comfortable, accepted, engaged? Safe… safe is a big one. Safe to be herself, safe to be vulnerable, safe to let down her guard, show an intimate side of herself? I am going to say, no. Otherwise you’d probably be getting more a** (whoops, but true- #sorrynotsorry).
ARE YOU FRIGGIN’ NICE? Really. You think that if you’re kind, she will “want more”. If you respect her, treat her with grace and genuine compassion, she will “get attached”. So you don’t text back, wait to answer, you don’t ask too many deep questions, and keep it surface. You think this makes it easier, less complicated, more fun? Naww. You don’t take her out for dinner or tell her how banging she looks in her outfit.
Well then good luck getting that dirty pic, a girl to express her fantasies or bust out that bada** lingerie for you. Being kind, open and respectful is only going to make her feel confident and connected and therefore, comfortable and empowered to be that freaky sex Goddess you want her to be!
You need to activate that part of her by creating that space. That safe, yet expansive, welcoming space where she can open up. A space where she feels seen, felt, heard. That doesn’t have to mean commitment, and it could eventually, but the two are mutually exclusive. It’s just being self-aware, connected, and aware of what the other person needs to be the best expression of themselves. It’s adopting a conscious approach to dating/intimacy. Acting from a place of love, not fear.
In my experience, I have said things, shared things and opened up more to someone I have known for a month, versus someone I dated for over a year because that beautiful space was created. It is such a cool feeling to be able to do that- share what I like, don’t like, what I desire and what I am truly thinking in the moment (sexy or not!). I can do that because I know/feel that I am respected and valued, regardless. And when I feel respected and valued, I open up. I feel expansive. I feel empowered. I express. I am free to be my truest me.
So men, looking for that bottom lip biting, lustful, flirty, arousing connection? I invite you to activate it by creating that space for her. Make her feel seen, felt, heard, respected… empower her to be that sensual sex Goddess you crave.
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BBC Bitesize has been online since 1998. It was the BBC’s first digital-first product and has been represented on the web by many different applications over those years.
The Knowledge & Learning Beta was one of our first projects on the BBC’s (then rather new) Forge platform. As it evolved into Bitesize, and as more and more features were added, we accumulated a lot of Technical Debt.
We found that our ability to estimate how long a piece of work would take became increasingly difficult and the number of bugs we were generating was continually increasing.
There’s no doubt an abundance of Technical Debt in the applications you work on. As we build new products and add features we make decisions that we know will require our future selves to do extra work and deal with the ramifications of those decisions.
There’s also numerous external factors that will introduce Technical Debt into your product without you introducing them directly.
Technical Debt reduces the agility of a team. It restricts their ability to make the right decision and forces further short term thinking.
The Engineers were always keen to ensure that anything we developed was implemented ‘the right way’, and that we took adequate time to refactor code that didn’t meet best practise.
Our Project Managers saw the effect Technical Debt was having on their delivery estimates and felt like Technical Debt was a massive time sink.
Product Managers were hesitant to devote time to dealing with Technical Debt, instead preferring to focus only delivering features to users.
Too often Technical Debt is seen as a negative part of building a product — the positive effects of accruing that debt is often forgotten.
On BBC Bitesize our objective is to bring relevant learning material to our audience and prepare them for school and exams. We deliberately accrue Technical Debt to get new content or new features in front of our audience quickly.
Building a perfect system is not only time consuming it’s impossible to get it perfect first time. Not only that, the risk involved is engineering the perfect product before putting it in front of your audience is massive.
If a feature fails to hit the mark or doesn’t work well in real world testing, it’s much easier to write off a couple of weeks work than 6 months of engineering effort.
Despite the accrual of Technical Debt not always being bad, we know it can hinder future product development.
On Bitesize we use a number of techniques to try and tackle it at the right time and accumulate it in the right way.
When implementing a new feature we look at the quickest way to get that feature in front of a small proportion of our audience to quickly learn how it’s used. Sometimes that means accruing debt by hard coding a datasource or implementing a mobile only UI.
Once that feature is unleashed we can look at the usage patterns and understand how the feature should evolve. Scaling these features to new sections of the audience means dealing with that accumulated Technical Debt.
We then swap out the hardcoded data for the correct service call, implementing appropriate caching behaviour to ensure that it can handle increased traffic, or add the responsive version to improve the experience on other devices.
This means that we achieve those goals of putting new features in front of our audience and deal with Technical Debt as part of the process.
When enhancing a feature the first thing we do is assess if there is any Technical Debt in the same area that needs to be addressed.
We’ll then make sure that the refactor happens or the improvement is made before starting the new feature work. We do this before estimating how long a piece of work might take and factor it into how we work.
This allows us to focus on dealing with Technical Debt that will actually make a difference rather than refactoring areas that are working fine and not affecting our work.
Feature work is our bread and butter but often issues arise which aren’t necessarily caused by how we chose to implement something.
In these cases we make sure to understand and communicate the effect these have on our applications. Typically we’ll add them into our backlog and address them immediately to avoid them adding up and causing huge disruption later.
When working on our applications we try to follow the Boy Scout rule. In essence it means that when we see wee problems while working on features we tidy them up there and then.
We don’t make big deal of it — it’s just seen as part and parcel of development. There’s one caveat though if there’s any risk that it might have a knock on for the application then it needs to be flagged to the rest of the team — especially our testers.
Often Technical Debt can be accrued not necessarily by moving too fast, but by not thinking through how something should be implemented.
Just because we want to deliver quickly doesn’t require us to write poorly thought through code. If you’re busy, keep things simple and talk to fellow engineers about the solution.
We find paired programming and peer reviewing strategy before writing any code helps enormously with this.
Depending on your situation and workplace some of these strategies might work or you might find they just don’t apply.
On Bitesize we found the best place to start was talking through the issues as a team. We used this guided conversation question set to help us understand the issues and build a strategy that works with our applications and processes.
Diflusap eye drop is used in the treatment of allergic disorders, severe allergic reaction and eye disorders.
Difluprednate belongs to the class of drugs known as corticosteroids. It acts by stopping the release of certain natural substances in body that are responsible for pain and swelling..