The feature is called "unified inbox" - faxes appear as a PDF attachment in an email inbox somewhere.
If the government department had a unified inbox for emails/faxes accessible by workers, then there wouldn't have been any "pain" in the form of consumables by the fax machine. That was my worry.
Luckily for the author, the article says the fax number was handled by an old-school, real-life fax machine:
It was Karen. She sounded breathless. She sounded like she was standing next to a machine that was hyperventilating. In the background, I could hear a rhythmic whir-chunk, whir-chunk.
"Yes?" I answered, my voice the picture of innocent helpfulness.
"Sir, please. You have to stop the fax. It’s… it’s been printing for an hour. It’s jamming the machine. We’re out of toner."
That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender from what was assigned at birth, but it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case. Edge cases in biology get wild and sex assigned at birth can be a near arbitrary decision. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)
Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
It is quite common for babies to come out of the womb with blonde hair, only for it to darken to brown later in life. The baby isn't blonde, it just looks blonde right now.
Same with gender. Doctors observe a flavor of genitals, make a reasonable assumption, and legally assign the gender which seems appropriate.
Only in theory is it so easy to separate clerical errors from other issues.
So in practice clerical errors cause all kinds of long term havoc. Once declared dead it can be a monstrous effort to prove to various systems you are in fact alive.
One cannot ask a baby what social role they would like to have. Typically, in approximately 97-99% of cases, that aligns with the genitalia. So no, no coin flip. It's typically done by looking at genitalia. You'll be right almost always.
There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population.
Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.
> There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population.
> Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.
This is funny because that's the exact argument that transphobic opponents say about trans people themselves and the argument as to why gender fluidity or gender outside of sex doesn't exist. "Just because an extremely small number of people believe they are a different gender than their biological sex doesn't mean that gender is different from biological sex" is almost exactly the argument that transphobes use.
I think you fundamentally fail to understand what I just said. Proper unbiased random sampling allows you to create sub populations that tend to reflect the characteristics of a larger group, biased populations don’t share that relationship.
“Because some animals hibernate, all animals hibernate” is just as flawed as saying “Because only a small percentage of hibernate, no animals hibernate.” Instead the relationship is “Because some animals exist that hibernate, there exist animals that hibernate.”
I do not suggest that detransitioning can indeed extrapolate to the whole group.
I am saying that it exists, therefore at least some people regret their transition, therefore they should not be allowed to make that decision at 12, or for their parents to do so.
So-called "detransitions" represent way less than 1% of the trans population. In particular, the proportion of people regretting their transitions is much smaller than that of mothers regretting having their kids. They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of bigoted narratives.
Which is why puberty blockers are prescribed to transgender children, delaying puberty until later in life when a "good decision" can be made, usually closer to the mid to late teens.
Sadly, it's not possible to "delay puberty" until later in life without permanent consequences. Puberty cannot simply be resumed later. Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. The changes can't be reversed later as if hormones were not altered during critical phases if the person changes their mind.
It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades.
> Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases.
Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them.
> It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades
Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to.
The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window.
Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages.
Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age.
> but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know.
I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing
> You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim.
> I asked Claude...
There are no double-blind studies, RCTs, or otherwise on this topic because it's not a situation that lends itself to that type of study. Please don't try to ask AI to summarize the situation because its training set is guaranteed to have far more discussion about it from Reddit and news articles than the limited scientific research
Of the papers out there, many are either case reports or they're studies that look into the case where people go from puberty blocker therapy into gender-affirming care, not the cases where they change their mind and discontinue with hope of returning to their baseline state.
Above I was addressing the implication that puberty blockers are a safe way to press pause on puberty until much later without consequence. That's simply not true.
Those studies you found about bone density also note that they can reduce height, and along with it other growth changes that occur during those ages in conjunction with puberty. Someone who takes puberty blockers until 16-18 will have a different physical anatomy than someone who does not. You cannot resume growth in adulthood after discontinuing the medications.
So the studies you found are consistent with what I'm saying: You cannot delay puberty without also impacting the growth that happens during that phase. That's one of the main reasons why people take the puberty blockers! As someone gets older, the window for that growth does not stay open forever.
I'm not asking for a double blind study. I'm asking for examples of someone who took puberty blockers, regretted it and stopped, and then went on to not be able to live the life they wanted to live. I'm not aware of any such stories and I'm pretty familiarly with the population of people who regret taking hormones. When I double checked with Claude it also failed to find anything accept the issue around bone density I mentioned.
There are plenty of studies that point to strong evidence that this protocol results in better mental health outcomes because for whatever potential consequence there is for delaying natural puberty, there are plenty of known irreversible impacts of allowing it to progress.
If you have other evidence, even just observational studies it would be good to share that.
And again the recommendation is to continue until 15 or 16, not until 18
It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. If the "correct" age is what we see today, then there's thousands of generations of humans who had puberty naturally occur "too late" yet we're all still here to talk about it. If the "correct" age instead is when it used to occur, then everyone should go on puberty blockers for a few years to avoid this unnatural surge of precocious puberty.
> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.
That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.
> It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years.
The change over the past couple hundred years is measured on the order of a couple years at most.
This has nothing at all to do with hormonal intervention until adult ages. Once someone reaches adulthood the window for a lot of changes has closed.
> Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes.
You're either not understanding, or trying to avoid an inconvenient point: Once blocked during critical periods, many of those changes simply cannot happen at a later date.
Puberty cannot be delayed until adulthood and then resumed as if nothing happened.
Puberty only lasts a couple of years. First menstruation usually happens between ages 9 and 18 - that's a spread longer than the duration of puberty! Look at any puberty-age high school class and you'll find one kid who has basically finished puberty, while another has barely started.
In other words: the "window" isn't as crucial as you make it seem.
I read it, but you keep moving the goalposts around so much and introducing irrelevant detours that I can't respond to everything you write, sorry.
I've been consistent about my point, but you've introduced so many other topics including the "maybe it's only for a year or two" point that this is just one big gish gallop
Your point about puberty happening earlier and earlier also contradicts your arguments about how it might only be for a year or two
I had a brain injury when I was 12 that knocked my testosterone levels way down.
In my 20s this was discovered and I went on testosterone replacement. My hands are still the same size as my mom’s. My feet didn’t get back to the size they were before the accident. I didn’t regain the height I lost. God only knows what it did to my brain.
Maybe if you’re only on them a little bit you’d be fine, but the whole concept is bad. My wife fainted when she got her first period. Why? She didn’t want to be a woman. She was a tomboy. It turns out that the flood of sex hormones during puberty can actually make you feel like a woman/man, which should surprise no one. To block that from happening and potentially effectively treating the dysphoria is madness.
Your anecdote is a bit of a tangent. Trans kids wouldn't be on blockers as long as your hormone levels were out of balance, and they generally want to avoid the changes which you bemoan the loss of.
But do you even find your life to be significantly harmed by your smallish stature? There are short people who never had brain injuries, and it's generally not such a concern that we feel the need to make them larger. Lots of them even wish they were taller.
And it's a pretty frequent straw-man to compare tomboys to kids with persistent gender dysphoria. They only seem superficially similar to people who really haven't engaged with the huge breadth of research on trans people over the past century. It also ignores the fact that there are feminine presenting trans masculine people (those born female, who medically transitioned, but still present femininely), or tomboy trans feminine people (born male, medically transitioned, still present masculinely).
But surely puberty, not just maturity, is necessary to fully understand the sexual experience and whether your feelings about yourself crystalise differently in the presence of sexual drive. Not to mention, the idea of delaying puberty seems like an invitation for unrelated and/or unforeseen downstream consequences on biological health.
It is not. Precocious sexual drive is possibly amongst the worst things there is for gaining sexual maturity. Also known as 'thinking with your dick'. CSA aside, you can do a ton of damage to your life by just going along with your sexual drive.
I am a virgin at 27 years old. What am I missing about the sexual experience? Is it somehow locked out to me? Or… can I access it intellectually, and reason about it with its ups and downs?
There's a reason the consent age does not start at puberty.
Sexual identity is an important component of gender identity. Encouraging people to make conclusions about their gender identity before they understand their sexual identity seems risky to me, especially when a child is being asked to make decisions with potentially life-altering medical consequences.
To be clear, a person does not need to have had sex to understand their sexual identity. They need to know what they find attractive and how their sexual identity relates to their own body. Even if someone feels like the opposite gender, that does not necessarily mean their sexual identity will automatically align with that.
It may be true that the transgender experience is something more fundamental to the self than “mere” sex. But when the choice is between one set of trade-offs and another, such as intervention versus non-intervention, I would contend that understanding one’s sexual identity is a critical piece of information.
The obvious solution is to prescribe puberty blockers to 100% of children. After all, how can a 12-year-old decide that they are cis - they don't have the capacity for that yet. They can undergo the right puberty, whatever that may be, once their brain has matured.
That suddenly looks like a very silly argument, doesn't it?
So what about the kids who already get all of that and still say they are transgender? Should they perhaps be treated like they actually are transgender, or do you propose forced conversion therapy - like we tried in the past with gay people and left-handed people?
Puberty blockers aren't being handed out like candy. There's a rather intense psychological diagnostic process before it.
Have you considered that due to their education and research those people may know more on the subject than you do?
Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or environmental lack of acceptance or support.
Besides, despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.
After reading the above I don't believe they concluded stress of living in a non-accepting world is the primary reason.
30% think about killing themselves and 4%+ try each year is shocking. I think whatever side of the debate you are on we can agree things aren't working out for too many people who go through this process. If this was a drug or vaccine or hair shampoo it would have been pulled off the market.
Through what process? This was a study about trans and nonbinary people, not specifically about people who have “transitioned”
I would imagine the rate of depression and similar disorders in trans people is extremely high. To be so unsatisfied with one’s own body that you consider (or go through) major treatment and surgery to change something so fundamental.
> Genspect, which is also a biased source on the subject:
Organization that supports position <x> supports position <x>.
If Genspect can be discarded as being a biased source, then so can WPATH and every other org supporting gender ideology.
Given the fraught nature of the debate, Wikipedia seems like a poor source for determining the bias of players in the debate - the most passionate debaters have plenty of time to just edit Wikipedia.
Can you explain what „gender ideology” is supposed to mean?
The primary issue with Genspect is poor scientific rigour applied to their publications, as I have shown above. Pretty much „if it fits our platform, we will spread it”.
> *70%-80% of children who expressed transgender feelings, overtime, lost those feelings.
This number most likely comes from a study that classified girls as transgender based on behaviors like preference to wear their hair short of wear pants instead of dresses or skirt:
Media research points to transgender topic being spun primarily by traditional media and social media as a political wedge issue to mobilize right-leaning voters, akin to abortion rights before:
it's only a fallacy in purely logical arguments. Appeal to authority makes sense in medical, scientific, engineering, and other contexts when the arguments necessarily depend on ambiguous data and subjective conclusions.
And yet we cannot stop time, and a decision has to be made. It seems natural to involve the child in this decision.
Of course, the next best thing (if a decision can't be made now) after stopping time are puberty blockers. Which are not completely without risks, but this applies to the other two options just as well (if not more so).
You can't not make decisions, and to claim so is to frame choosing one particular option as not-a-decision.
Modes 0–2 use a custom DES variant that retains the standard 16-round Feistel network structure but differs from FIPS 46-3 in its permutation tables, S-boxes, and key rotation direction.
Why would you need a custom DES variant? Did Cadence have a cryptographer on staff? Or did they license this DES-variant? Or was a three-letter US government agency involved?
Looks like the DES-related modes were developed back before crypto code export restrictions were relaxed.
I read elsewhere that the plane was only going 24mph when it hit the truck, and I didn't understand how the collision could have been that damaging, but I wasn't taking into account how much momentum a plane would have at that speed. From the video, it seems like a plane moving on the ground acts less like a car or truck and more like a very delicate freight train when it hits something.
Maybe they were talking about the truck going 24mph, but the plane is clearly going WAY faster than that.
I'm not completely sure but it seems like the runway entry lights are red which very clearly indicates the runway is in use. They should have known better.
Planes aren't built to withstand head on collisions because in almost every case the passengers would all die anyway and to keep the weight of the plane down for fuel efficiency. Firetrucks on the other hand are super heavy due to all the water they carry.
On Nov. 6, 2024, she counted 162 children or ongoing pregnancies resulting from Normand’s sperm donations and 451 children or ongoing pregnancies resulting from Seelos’s sperm donations.
> ... the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen ...
If you take a look at the size of widescreen monitors, you can kinda guess why someone decided to move the start button/menu to the middle of the screen.
I know Samsung and Dell have ginmorous 49 inch monitors. Start menu that pops up from the lower left corner of the monitor would be a bad UX - the user might not even notice that a menu had popped up if that lower left corner of the monitor is out of their peripheral vision.
Moving the Start menu to the middle of the screen does go against years of muscle memory... moving your mouse/trackpad to the lower left, using the monitor border as a stop-zone though.
I guess they didn't want to make it an option/toggle hidden in some dialog box somewhere...
You used to be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen. IMO the more sensible move for widescreen monitors is to move it to the side so it takes up less screen real estate. Windows 11 removed the ability to move the taskbar like that; it's stuck on the bottom (unless you seek out 3rd party software solutions).
Also it should be noted that (at least as recently as September, haven't used 11 since) you could move the start button back to the left side.
Which is absolutely a good thing, but my point is that they removed a feature when it had only become more relevant with time. They get no credit for the change to move the start button to the middle, which is admittedly defensible if the goal was to accommodate widescreen displays, when they removed the ability to move the taskbar entirely, which had been in windows for 25+ years, and also had that benefit.
It's inconceivable they ever removed it. Why would they do that? It's been a feature for a long time and a lot of people use it.
If you're going to introduce a new thing, you have to make sure it justifies replacing the old thing. The new windows 11 taskbar was essentially a straight downgrade.
I have a 48" 4k non-curved monitor, running stock KDE with the launcher in the corner and UI scale set to 100%. Not only is the experience just fine, I simply cannot see having the launcher in the middle being useful. It would lead to a beak in left-right organizational thinking for where window and pinned tasks live as my active applications change and I have to hunt for their new screen position. Alt-tab breaks down after a certain number of windows, as does the exploding "overview". Having a consistent order and positioning for multitasking is both faster and less cognitive load.
The wikipedia entry lists a reference explaining the history of mollyguard, along with a pic of Ed and little Molly, but an HN comment has the relevant text excerpt. see https://hackertimes.com/item?id=26633835
Samsung learned about molly guards the hard way - recall of millions of products after accidental fires from people/pets activating the front-panel dials.
Luckily, there’s an easy solution recently devised that can prevent this safety hazard in homes across America, Samsung said. Customers concerned about unintentional activations can request free knob locks and covers that Samsung confirmed made it much harder to accidentally turn on the stove.
During the meeting, the CPSC shared data showing that across 338 incidents between January 1, 2018, and May 30, 2024, stoves from “ten specific manufacturers” were involved in fires causing 31 injuries and two deaths. Additionally, the CPSC had recorded “two other fatal incidents where a range was accidentally turned on when a knob was bumped, but the manufacturer is unknown.”
...Companies said the CPSC data would help them “fully understand the issues” and “make sure that reasonable and foreseeable circumstances would be addressed” without impacting compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
After mentioning this article to relatives, one said they had nixed buying one product because of the front dials. Then we heard from a relative in another city who bought a house due to a newborn baby - one of the additional purchases was a oven/stove/range with front panel dials.
That's wild. In Europe, we generally only have front-facing dials, but either they have a built-in push to recess function, or they require some force to turn from their off position, and for the most part heat and mode are also two separate knobs where you'd need to turn both to engage.
Gas stoves in particular, or at least all the ones I've used, have push-to-turn on the knobs so you can't start the gas flow by bumping them, and that includes non-auto-ignite ones where the push isn't used to trigger the igniter.
Do HP and Boeing recruit from the same candidate pools/train using the same employee manuals???
I was going to say that the Hewlett and Packard families should ask that the company stop using their family names, but a quick glance at the company website and I only see "HP" used.
Hewlett-Packard split into two companies some years back: HP Inc. which handles the consumer PC and printer business; and Hewlett Packard Enterprise which handles all their server and enterprise stuff, and consulting.
I don’t age. I level up.
I’m 86 today! Nothing like some playful action on a sunny day to make you feel young. I’m grateful for another year, good health and the chance to keep doing what I love. Thank you all for being the best fans in the world. Your support through the years has meant more to me than you’ll ever know.
God Bless,
Chuck Norris
If the government department had a unified inbox for emails/faxes accessible by workers, then there wouldn't have been any "pain" in the form of consumables by the fax machine. That was my worry.
Luckily for the author, the article says the fax number was handled by an old-school, real-life fax machine:
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