Not sure if this works anymore, but worth a try. Get on the phone with the 1-800 during business hours and escalate, ask for consumer relations. Make sure you tell each person that you talk to that you’ll never be shopping at best buy again if this isn’t resolved, so they know you’re serious and will properly escalate you. 15 years ago, that would solve any problem. People who absolutely scammed Best Buy would still get replacements plus a gift card for their trouble, at least once.

Sorry this happened to you. Don’t just assume the chargeback is going to solve things without any more effort, the machines involved might fuck you over if you don’t take steps. Credit card might side with vendor if you don’t submit evidence better than theirs. Your case seems cut and dry since it wasn’t even the right address, but you might still need to get that police report filled. Like the other poster said, you’re just getting the case#, as frustrating as it is, expecting anything else would just be silly. All of these things show you are serious and not a scammer. Scammers wouldn’t try this shit because it would put them in jail the second or third time they did it without any evidence. You have evidence, but the machine is tuned to ignore it until escalation. Fucking lame, I know.

Might be worth mentioning how much money the company spent in stock buybacks, and how much the executives were compensated in previous years. It’s a shame.

My flavor of sleep disorder, I fall asleep when I’m bored. On modafinil I get through the boring activities like driving without falling asleep. Without the drug I’ve no issues staying awake for hours after regular sleep if I’m really hooked on something, like a good show, game, or project. At the end of the day once the drug starts wearing off, I’ll fall asleep watching shows if they aren’t engaging enough.

They say it promotes wakefulness, but I don’t buy it. I think they’ve misidentified some key mechanism, at least in neurodivergent brains.

When I fall asleep, I hit REM within 15 minutes, compared to the 2 hours it takes NT brains. This was per an EEG taken during my sleep study, overnight and through forced naps the next day. I swear I’ll be in REM while awake sometimes, if I’m fighting sleep, like I perceive the movement.

I’ve narcolepsy, modafinil (200mg daily) eliminates undesirable dozing for me. It doesn’t prevent sleep altogether, just the kind of falling asleep while driving I was dealing with before.

It’s weird to classify it as a stimulant, you can see them pussyfoot around it on Wikipedia. No one gets amphetamine like energy from this drug. Neurologists don’t understand the mechanisms at play, only that it’s effective at treating symptoms of narcolepsy. They’ve given it to pilots to have them fly for 48+ hours without sleep fatigue, but that’s not the same as being wired. College kids abuse it to trade sleep for study time. Plenty of countries don’t prescribe it for ADHD.

Why are you going to sleep at 10am? Why are you taking a drug that primarily treats narcolepsy, and then going to sleep? Outside of being sick, the only way I can pull that off is if I’m suffering deep depression, and use sleep as an escape from it all. I hope you’re ok, that you have a fulfilling purpose.

Yep, it’s a total shitshow with most research and popular science news. More results are coming together about various ND conditions being strictly genetic, yet there’s still a ton of people out there talking about what could trigger issues after birth, and cures. You can no more make a zebra into a horse than you can make an ND person into an NT person.

Some of the things people consider issues are unproblematic and natural within ND populations, but NT people rule the world and since they deem it weird, we have to change. I’m at least hopeful that this ND awareness spring we seem to be in, where a lot of adults are becoming aware that they are (and always have been) healthy ND adults, will give rise to some improved acceptance and eventually help shift how we treat ND children to avoid the everyday traumas that I think lead to unhealthy ND adults. I’d be even more optimistic if it weren’t for the constant denialism and pushback from everyone, including professionals, and even people gatekeeping in the ND population.

When you’re sick*, your entire body becomes inflamed, even your nervous system, and that fucks everything up. Further, if you are more sensitive and have sensory needs (almost certainly do), you’re being overwhelmed by unwanted sensations (body aches, heightened sense of smell, headaches, runny nose, coughs) and are unlikely to have the energy to stim to help regulate.

Best course is to try to minimize all the unwanted sensations and check out mentally until your immune system does its thing. AKA, get some rest.

I wouldn’t put much hope in current medical science with this question, they still have no idea what the heck COVID does, mechanically speaking, just that it fucks shit up in a way that may lead to respiratory failure. And that’s with all the money in the world. No one is doing deep dives into how someone that’s neurodivergent feels differently bad when they are sick. Heck, they don’t really deal with anyone’s symptoms while they are sick, it’s just basic painkillers and barely better than placebo cough syrup. The only mental vital they even take is pain, which ND people either answer very low to (resulting in being told to go away), or very high to (resulting in being told you are exaggerating, drug seeking, and to go away). Maybe if they could measure the level of stimulation and figure out a safe baseline, and at what point we start becoming traumatically overstimulated, then medicated for that, I’d have a bit more faith in the system. Since they can’t even measure pain, maybe at least ask us how stimulated we feel instead of our pain levels. Anything over a 7 should be treated with something that helps us cool off. But what the fuck do I know.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I think it’s too shallow vs the actual experience. The depth at which ND people are marginalized is so far and away under presented today. Most of the established science is just wrong and resistant to the reality that ND led researchers are presenting. We need to do better at advocating for ourselves as an entire group with shared experiences and unique mental and physical health issues.

The next best analogy I’ve heard so far is NT people are Windows based software running in a Windows based world, ND people are MacOS software being forced to run on Windows (suspend your IT mind about how it wouldn’t work at all, and understand that for a lot of ND folks, it doesn’t). Get on the correct runtime environment and a lot of issues go away. That’s just really hard to do when the world is primarily built for the 85%-95% NT population, and many of the most capable in the ND population are either ignorant or in denial due to lack of acknowledgement, and stigmatization of anything that would be acknowledged.

People can not agree with what I’m saying, I’m sure it sounds absurd especially if you are NT. I doubt I would have agreed with it two years ago, but introspection after my own realizations that I’m autistic, after over 30+ years of living with this brain, I understand things quite differently now.

For lack of a more relatable analogy, I’ve been using this race based one.

Imagine you’re a black child in America in the 1960s and 1970s, but you somehow managed to remain ignorant of that fact until sometime in your teens or early adulthood. Maybe the area was really progressive, parents wanted to shield you from reality, whatever you need to imagine is fine. You end up not understanding this fact about yourself, and then you end up in the racist public. Now, imagine that the racist public never comes outright and says anything directly racist to you, but all of their other behavior is exactly like what you’d expect from racists in the 1970s. How do you come to terms with this reality? You must be doing something wrong for people to treat you this way.

Obviously not a perfect analogy, and I don’t really like to compare my issues as a ND person with the awful stuff done to black people back then, and that continues to be done today. Anyway, it’s not inaccurate, if anything, the differences between ND people and NT people are greater than any outward racial appearance, and worse, ND people aren’t really aware they are being marginalized, and NT people don’t really understand that they are marginalizing.

Same happens every time I’ve tried to use it for search. Will be radioactive for this type of thing until someone figures that out. Quite frustrating, if they spent as much time on determining the difference between when a user wants objective information with citations as they do determining if the response breaks content guidelines, we might actually have something useful. Instead, we get AI slop.

I’d like to be a person who, eg., plays with Lego for 1 hour, spends the next hour painting, then decides to go and fix his bike, then listens to music for a bit, etc.

Why? There’s no evidence for this assertion, but all successful and fulfilled neurodivergent people throughout history were absorbed in whatever had them hooked. Idealizing neurotypical lifestyles will only lead you to feeling frustrated at something you will never be able to change, disregulated, and eventually depressed.

If you’re intent on engaging in multiple different interests like this, you should try very hard to combine them. As long as you feel like you are actively moving toward something singular, you’ll be good. Disengaging while hooked is traumatic, like, to the extent that you may avoid re-engaging with it until you feel it is safe to do so.

Putting activities out of sight is a great strategy to avoid being accidentally hooked by them, but you need to figure out an organizational system that fits your space/life. If you’re combatting storage and organization for multiple hobbies, it’s going to cost a lot more in both systems and in space. I’d argue it’s more sensible to scale back, and commit to some strategy where you only buy what you need, and you sell the niche if you get bored with it. There’s no shortage of hoarders in the ND community, not because of the inclination to amass stuff, but because getting rid of stuff requires admitting some hard things to yourself. It’s easier to imagine you’ll get back into it than to admit you won’t, and that you might have gone a bit overboard on spending while you were in the middle of the journey.

There’s some theory about how we intuitively avoid or engage with things depending on real and perceived levels of effort, and real or perceived benefit. There’s another concept in autism, something about momentum. You can intentionally exploit some things to make it more or less likely you’ll engage with something. Traditional (or let’s say neurotypical) organization systems aren’t built for neurodivergent people. Best to try to find ND people you can use as a role model and hope they haven’t just adapted to NT systems. I’ve not seen him say anything about being ND, but https://youtube.com/@zackfreedman comes to mind. Just know that what you want is weird by definition, don’t let that hold you back. The population of ND people isn’t a big enough percentage to justify a market apparently.

What’s most frustrating to me about the issue is, every ND person I’ve had the pleasure of meeting is so open to sharing, if society was structured for ND people, you’d never feel like anything is wasted. You’d try out that thing without spending a dime, and if you did get deep into it, have somewhere you could feel safe in giving the stuff away for better use. Instead, the world is run by neurotypicals, and everyone has ulterior motives. A man can dream. If you live in a big city you might have a co-op, or hacker space, or even a public library with resources you can use.

I’m certainly rambling a lot here, I’d apologize if this was the NT world.

Another option, stop putting yourself down for engaging with “unwanted distractions”. Unless it’s something that’s going to ruin your life, try embracing it fully. If you didn’t want to do it, you wouldn’t do it. My wife has this fight with herself sometimes as we’re cleaning house, starting one task and ending up in the middle of multiple different cleaning activities. I do the exact same thing, the only difference is I love myself for it. I will eventually get to a clean house, and as long as I don’t keep stopping to self loathe, it will be cleaner, faster compared to an NT person. I know, because I’ve cleaned NT people’s houses and they are always blown away. I’ve got a model that is pretty close to monotropism that I think explains all these things, just cba to post about it yet.

Try reframing how you think of these things slightly. Watch https://monotropism.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Monotropism-animation.mp4 and just believe your brain works like that for argument sake. I know it’s tough, especially because the act of telling you to do anything most likely will lead you to not wanting to do it, a frustrating trait of this brain.

Stop worrying about how normal people do things and try better to understand how your brain does things. Reframe how you see the problem as something where you’re trying to get fixed to be normal, and accept that’s not possible. Psychology’s best therapies offer drugs that help you put on a facade of normal, or worse, crank your apathy up to where you just don’t give a shit any more.

Have you ever done anything that you were so into, that you skipped meals, bathroom breaks, and other biological needs? Like, to the point of deep hunger, dehydration, nearly peeing yourself? “Normal” brains never do that, or even moderate versions of that. Like, there’s a category of self improvement literature that sells the idea of a flow state, because most people want that state of mind and will never obtain it. It’s simply something people observed successful people with monotropic brains doing, and made up into a new pop-psych thing to sell.

Spend time actively, consciously noticing what hooks you. Aggressively give up on those things that don’t. You may habitually spend time doing things that you don’t actually like, but you are unconsciously forcing yourself to keep doing. Step out of your comfort zone and try a new thing, activity, genre, media, person, sexuality, etc. Most people spend their whole life being forced into a mold, and that mold is almost certainly not compatible with the needs of a neurodivergent brain.

Structure is NOT a requirement, and for me, personally, isn’t compatible with anything that makes me happy. Still, my entire upbringing continuously shoved structure down my throat. School constantly reinforced that I needed to organize my binder, write in a planner, and multiple times I remember being assigned projects like setting an itinerary for a vacation. I hated it, felt unnatural, stressful, and I never managed to adopt the habits they were forcing on me, yet still managed to be a successful person. I could have self-loathed about it, but instead I managed to kick the bs and move on. When I eventually got married and started going on vacations, my wife (who has an ADHD diagnosis, though wasn’t diagnosed until after this story) planned a very structured itinerary for a 2 week vacation in the UK. The trip was stressful to plan, and our daily activities were on a tight schedule, leaving no room to linger where we wanted. While we had a good time, we both look back at random moments off the itinerary as the best ones, and have high regret for being forced to stay longer in some places, and not long enough in others. This same thing happened again on another vacation, we simply weren’t self aware enough to avoid it, or were too concerned about following a script of how to do a vacation. Finally, on our third vacation, we approached it very differently. The only preplanned/prebooked moment was what city we were arriving in and the one night stay there, the rest of the two weeks were vague possibilities at best. It was our best vacation, and it’s not even close, zero regrets, and that’s including a medical disaster. Sorry for the long story, but I feel like it was worth telling you.

I don’t fully subscribe to monotropism, even wholly rejected it prior to some of my own realizations. Like, it isn’t the final and complete explanation, but it’s a much better starting point than everything else out there.

As far as scrolling, it’s a tough thing. If you are feeling fulfilled when doing it, stop kicking yourself for it, and instead look to optimize the activity. For example, cut out content that you know you don’t enjoy. If instead it’s just something you’re doing to pass the time, with no real enjoyment, you should probably figure out a strategy to cut it back or out entirely. When brains like ours are bored, the compulsion to fix it is very strong, and will likely drive you quickly to something you will actually find fulfilling if you let it. If you’re really lucky, an activity you find fulfilling will be neurotypically amicable, and maybe even profitable, but you should not expect that. Don’t try to have multiple things at once, it’s not that you can’t, it’s that you will likely be happier sticking to one thing you enjoy until you don’t anymore, and then throwing yourself into the next thing. And try not to kick yourself too hard if/when that happens, sticking with something you don’t want to, or putting yourself down for it is antithetical to loving yourself. With this brain, it’s not about the destination, it’s the journey, and as soon as you do get to the destination you will find an emptiness that can only be filled by starting a new journey.

Happy to chat more deeply about this stuff, feels like there’s always more to say. Not sure how well it works with lemmy, but if you check my comments I recently wrote a response to someone in an ADHD community asking about watching movies that feels very similar to this question.

Yeah, and King George III had all sorts of shit written down that people in governing roles agreed to. People under tyranny were pretty upset and tried diplomacy back then as well. Violence is what eventually solved it, and the people that went through that wanted to make sure violence was always an option, hence the 2nd amendment. Anyone, Republican or Democrat, that says otherwise is just wrong.

Same folks will be like, x issued more orders than any other president, but also excitedly talking about record revenue, turnout, etc. As if the stuff they agree with grows in a vacuum away from the stuff they disagree with.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s still competitive for a lot of markets, and if it’s not it’s because cable has been lowering prices to become competitive. Everyone I know 15 years ago was paying $300 once you added up TV, Internet, and cell phone bills. Accounting for inflation, that’s $450 today. I heard my grandma was being ripped for $350 a couple of years ago, and she just wanted a single channel. Hard to find anyone under an age that even has TV service, and those that do just want it for sports. At the original price of YT TV it was cheap enough to say why not, at the current price, even if it’s cheaper than cable, it’s now twice as much as I’d ever want to pay for it.

Fuck LG, not like they made good BR players. I’ve sworn to avoid buying their shit since they discontinued support for a BR player within a year of release, which back then meant you wouldn’t be able to watch any BR movie released after a certain date due to new DRM or whatever. They just up and decided to not release new firmware for units still under warranty.

I’ve never had trouble staying engaged with something I actually like and want to do. I will fall asleep if I don’t have my narcolepsy meds and I’m trying to do something I’m not truly interested in, yet can binge watch something I’m truly hooked on, into the wee hours, even without the meds.

My advice, start paying more attention to the things you are interested in and stop trying to be interested in things once you realize it. There’s no such thing as superiority of any entertainment or hobby over another, yet so many people shit all over themselves because they get it in their head that their interests are somehow wrong. Not liking something that everyone else does is fine, liking something no one else does is fine. Strive to be you, if you can’t focus on any movies you’re probably not watching movies you’re interested in. Maybe you aren’t interested in any movies at all, plenty of people just don’t get poems, paintings, music, literature, beer, wine, shoe culture, car culture…

Neurotypicals have the ability to be at peace with being bored, so much so that it’s called a disorder when someone can’t sit still and suck it up when the shit being served is just not interesting (to them). You literally have to smoke weed to attain that same level of apathy.

That’s a nice analogy. If the world was sane and just, those in power would quickly get their shit in order now that they’ve been reminded what the 2nd amendment was actually meant for. Doesn’t matter if it’s king, president, or CEO, people in power over Americans are meant to respect the threat of violence.

Hate the right and the NRA skewing it for stupid individual self defense reasons just as much as the Democrats trying to claim it has something to do with militias.

That’s great, probably better for life happiness to just not look very closely, and ignore research like this. I doubt anyone is getting sick, even if it is certainly spraying stuff around.

Also, how is their research any worse than the one sponsored by Dyson, who is trying to sell overpriced hand dryers.

Anyone who has ever seen one of these more than a few weeks old knows how disgusting they get because cleaning crews were never trained to clean them. I’m assuming that isn’t considered in Dyson’s version of the research at all. There’s one in a bathroom in my area that is covered in mold.

Are you comparing raw dollars or percentage of property tax? Accounting for inflation and the increase of your property value? What about the whole situation where Texas collects the taxes but only disburses up to some amount to schools. Probably easier to just look at the ISD financials. Just need to remove all expenses for non education activities, like sports and administration. I wonder if the ISD funding also gets used to pay for ISD specific police. Just asking questions, without actually doing the work, betting teachers have lost way more than 30% in 5 years. Texas government is actively trying to prove that public education doesn’t work so they can justify privatization, and bring back legal segregation plus religious schooling funded by taxes.