microcentury

My last comment was in 2013. I'll see you again in 2031. I hope you'll continue to defend the flame of HN.

I'm sure that it is, and many people seem to do it. However, it's a lot easier to see smoking as it really is and be happy to walk away from it.

Have a look at the book or seminar - the enjoyment of cigaretts is dealt with at length and forms a core pillar of the argument. If you don't want to quit though, then you don't want to quit and nothing is going to make you open the book with an open mind.

For any smokers out there reading this and thinking, 'God I will never quit if I have to spend the rest of my life resisting the urge for a cigarette', like this article says, note that it doesn't have to be that way. I quit smoking six months ago and every day without cigarettes is a blessing. I _hated_ smoking, and I wanted to stop, and for years and years I couldn't stop. And then I did, and I am free, and it is wonderful. Why the hell would I want to go back to the thing that I hated and was killing me, like this person? If you see cigarettes for what they really are, as a non-smoker sees them, how could you ever want to smoke?

These arguments come from Allnn Carr's stop smoking methodology. You can read his book or do a seminar. And for those out there who say 'it doesn't work': I read that book the first time in 2003, and probably more than ten times since. I attended the seminar three times. It was finally the online seminar that made the ideas click for me. (The breakthrough was the realisation that the response that says 'I want a cigarette' is a broken thought process that was learned, i.e. is not natural, and can be unlearned.) Now that the ideas have clicked into place for me I am absolutely certain I will never smoke again. When I hear the 'I want a cigarette' thought, I don't have a melancholy response that I can't smoke. I hated smoking! I have a happy response that I have learned how to get back to very close to the state I was in before I ever smoked at all.

Anyway, I am sure this article is well-intentioned, but I would strongly strongly suggest that if you haven't tried Allan Carr's method you give it a shot, and if you have tried it, give it another try. Smoking is a nightmare from which we all can awake.

Also calling shenanigans. The sentence 'As a graduate student at Harvard she had become familiar with the Bing search engine's advanced capabilities' reeks of marketing.

Slightly off topic: Are there no male executives left in the world? All that politically admirable use of 'she' was linguistically very jarring, and an unnecessary distraction from a fine article. Have we not pretty much agreed on 'they' as being the gender-neutral acceptable alternative to 'he'?

This is slightly off topic, but I would just _love_ to know how Musk manages his time. He has the same number of hours as the rest of us - how does he divide them between his personal research and actually getting stuff done? What percentage does he spend on marketing versus engineering, PR versus logistics, and on and on... Man I would love to have a drink with that guy. There has been no other contemporary person in any sphere of human endeavour I have been so fan-boyish about.

-> Interesting. They put a Sales/Ops guy at the helm of Motorola, which implies that (in a way, naturally) all strategic decisions will be made by Google and passed down to the subsidiary.

This absolutely does not follow. Woodside is a senior trusted Google executive.

Edit: Removed absent-minded italics tags.

Really like it! Only feedback so far is 'Create report from template' is not intuitive to me. Would something like 'Enter today's data' work better, or is there an angle here I'm missing?

Affecting hangouts also for me (Ireland)

Fair point, noted and accepted :-)

She does sound like an incredible person, but what are we supposed to do with that information? Does it mean we should not try and do anything, given there is always someone out there who has a 'better' (for very wide definitions of 'better') story? I don't write this to be snarky, and I used to think in a similar way myself, but this is not a good way to see the world.

I would bet my house this is supposed to be a joke. It just falls slightly short of the mark in a way that's hard to define, and so looks like it might possibly be serious. It comes from the same school of humour that occasionally gets Irish people arrested by Homeland Security when they're asked if they have anything dangerous in their bags, and they roll their eyes and say 'Yeah, a bomb.'