That's what I had to do to figure out source of my asthma and allergies.
Without any microbiology degree and while suffering from delibitating disease it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease while in other subreddits people post their poop for analyis.
In tune with the saying of "it can't be what mustn't be" ("Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf") a lot of medical professionals outright dispute mold-caused sicknesses. Their imaging can detect late stage fungal infections in the lungs and head of elderly people wholly consumed by the fungus, but they have no methods to detect early stage infections. And instead of realizing they're lacking appropriate analytical methods for mold detection they outright deny that it could be the cause of the problem.
Luckily the microscopy helped me to figure out which samples to send to a professional in order to pin down and remediate the cause of my sickness.
> it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease
Unfortunately, this is the only way to keep a hobby subreddit on topic. Once a subreddit becomes known as an outlet for non-hobbyists looking for one time assistance, the same requests get posted over and over again until the people who want to discuss the topic get fed up and leave.
Mold topics are particularly sensitive on Reddit because mold exposure is a huge red herring theme on TikTok and social media. People with difficult to diagnose medical conditions will often go through a phase thinking that mold exposure must explain everything and there are thousands of TikTok accounts and Facebook groups that will tell them it's the only explanation.
I understand that one cannot expect a reddit hobbyist community to compensate for a medical system that has already "failed" the patients. But if you feel your disease is progressing despite the medications the doctors give you, you will desperately try every single thing that people post on social media.
The cycle of "long covid > mold > lyme > candida > parasites" can only be broken by clever people building better, cheaper analytical methods for detection of these diseases.
Doctors really should show some humility and remember that 200 years ago it was an innovation for them to wash and disinfect their hands, and the guy who told them, Ignaz Semmelweis, was "red herring" chased into psychiatric asylum.
Wie Ghets. Hope youre condition has improved. I went through something similar 10 years ago. I eventually isolated the cause of my illness. Its a general allergy to fungus probably. It is believed that after being infected with a virus, your mastocytes encode to react to fungus. As such, vast numbers of mastocytes are constantly firing off when you encounter mold or fungus. Here's the thing that took me a while to figure out. Traces of these protiens are common in food. Effectively, any food that isn't alive or microbe free, will cause a mild to moderate reaction. Foods that didn't cause problems, where things like, fresh meat, eggs, fresh leafy green (still alive). Anything that might have been stored in bulk, or might have had microbial activity, would cause a mild reaction. The good news is that with dietary restrictions and a clean dush and mold free home, you can live a comfortable life. Also, I think it may be the case that the encoded mastocytes eventually die out after 24 months and with it, the allergy. Not sure, but eventuntually i returned to normal and no longer am sensitive. Hope you are getting better.
Viel besser! I'm happy to hear you have recovered, thanks for sharing. You're correct, the mycotoxin contamination of food products is such an important but overlooked fact. Once your body starts reacting to them your life is turned upside down.
The kicker for me was IKEA furniture. I was literally allergic to IKEA furniture, and only against specific parts of that IKEA furniture. It was only happening with the newer models of IKEA furniture bought in the past ~5 years. I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture.
In their recent sustainability reports IKEA has proudly mentioned how they are saving both costs and the planet by increasingly using recycled materials. They are quite light on the details but you can put together the stories across several of their publications and promotional videos.
Basically IKEA uses fungal waste products from industrial processes such as aspergillus from citric acid production. These fungal waste products are used as packaging material but also as a novel fungal adhesive for their "recycled wood" materials. This novel IKEA material sigificantly reduces plastic use and is cheaper - the holy cow of sustainability. It is basically old wooden furniture shredded into wood chips and then the wood chips are throw onto a big pile where they outside in the rain (even in the official IKEA video). Then they glue the wood chips back together with the novel fungal-based adhesive. Then they put a big layer of plastic around it and use it in parts of their furniture which are a bit more hidden, like the side panels of the pull-out drawers. One can recognize it by the rugged surface.
So these things are basically mold time bombs. It is wet wood chips, wrapped in plastic, and laced with fungal adhesive. The problem was so bad for IKEA that they changed the color of all components made from this from WHITE to GREY because people kept posting pictures of the slight grey mold on top of the white paint to social media.
If you go on the IKEA website and look at furniture, they list the exact material name for every single part of the furniture - except for the recycled wood parts.
I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments. If your immune system is wrecked by covid infection and lockdown-triggered vitamin D deficiency the mold really hits hard. I do not believe that IKEA sufficiently removed residual humidity from all shipments of this material, there are too many pictures on social media that show it.
The timing really coincides with IKEA's introduction of their sustainable wood material. Too many people reported the "gray dust" that was appearing on these white pieces so IKEA simply painted them gray.
If you are located in the US and have access to a lawyer and a microbiology lab, buy some IKEA drawers and do some experiments with the material of the pull-out drawers (left and right side panels). If you can document it for a court case, it might be a big class action lawsuit.
> I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments.
I'm glad you're better, but I'm sorry to say this is not a good take. I have a couple friends who suffered from Long COVID, one of whom eventually passed away from complications. Their conditions were clearly triggered by COVID and knowing both of their styles and tastes, I don't think they had a single IKEA furniture in their houses.
Long COVID misinformation is rampant and this is not helpful.
I'm sorry for your loss. It's definitely a fringe theory and I didn't intend to minimize their suffering. But this theory is grounded in my personal experience and my personal analysis with the furniture at hand and my immune system, plus the input of dozens of medical professionals and hundreds of lab tests along the way. My disease fits all of the long covid symptoms listed on wikipedia and it is brazen of you to swing the "long covid misinformation" hammer when I share my personal story of suffering and healing from the thing that people like you call "long covid".
This constant invalidation of multi-year delibitating disease is exhausting. If you come up with a long covid biomarker feel free to reach out so we can test and then you can officially gatekeep me from being part of "long covid". But until then please don't invalidate my healing story.
What helped me was other affected people sharing their story and figuring out what helped them personally to improve and what not. What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.
I have healed from this stuff DESPITE OF medical professionals.
> the thing that people like you call "long covid"
No. See e.g. https://meassociation.org.uk/2023/05/updated-booklet-long-co.... There are many conditions with a similar spectrum of symptoms, distinguished by their suspected causes: Long COVID is specifically the name where this is caused by a COVID-19 infection. We already know that COVID-19 infections aren't the only cause, because these conditions predate SARS-CoV-2 (in humans).
If you've correctly concluded that your symptoms were caused by something other than COVID-19, then by definition you did not have long COVID. "Long COVID is actually caused by IKEA furniture fungus" is misinformation, and your experience with a similar condition doesn't give you immunity from criticism.
> What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.
I half-seriously want to propose "doctors flat-out refuse to think about your condition" as a diagnostic criterion for chronic fatigue syndrome.
It is a horrific disease and there are many who have it much worse than me. But I also nearly died from this.
> If you've correctly concluded that your symptoms were caused by something other than COVID-19, then by definition you did not have long COVID.
The symptom onset correlated both with covid infection and with covid vaccination.
> "Long COVID is actually caused by IKEA furniture fungus" is misinformation, and your experience with a similar condition doesn't give you immunity from criticism.
Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture. But in my informed opinion there is a correlation, just as with the covid vaccine, and it would make sense to do both scientific and judicial discovery of this correlation.
Due to lacking medical methods one might most likely never be able to show that long covid is caused by a certain mycotoxin plus a certain covid strain hitting the body at the same time, or a certain mycotoxin weakening the immune system enough for long covid symptoms to appear.
But IKEA is/was aware of the problem as they change color from white to gray, they actively hide facts about these materials from their product detail pages, and their own videos demonstrate that it is very likely that shipments of their product were soaked in humidity. And if you soak wood in water, wrap it in plastic paint, and then put it into a room with 30% humidity it is like a fungal growth booster no matter what the person who lives in that apartment does. The water wrapped inside plastic will create micropores in the plastic and try to diffuse outside, thereby creating perfect conditions for mold growth. This is what I think IKEA has done, and I think they tried to hide it.
As mold-based materials are growing in popularity both due to lower costs and sustainability factors, the dangers of mold-based materials that are shipped with too much internal humidity need to be researched and remediated.
PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it.
> Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture.
Can you please explain how this isn't evidence strong enough to immediately reject your "all long COVID is caused by IKEA furniture" theory?
> But IKEA is/was aware […] they actively hide facts […]
This is classic conspiratorial reasoning. You observe that group A do activity B to cover up activity C, which – if activity C causes situation D – would help cover up situation D. You then treat this as evidence that activity C causes situation D, and/or that group A is complicit in knowingly causing situation D; but this doesn't follow, no matter how much it feels like it does.
This kind of conspiratorial reasoning is extremely seductive – as I know from experience. I was never able to reason myself out of belief systems shaped like this. I'm hoping that laying this out abstractly will help bypass this – that you can look at the shape of the argument, go "yeah, that shape of argument is exceedingly questionable", then let that cognitive dissonance sit in your mind and gradually break apart the conspiratorial thinking over time – but I'm not really expecting it to help you.
I got lucky, because my conspiratorial beliefs (about big tech being evil cyberstalkers who collect and sell everyone's personal information) were never validated by others, and I began to doubt them (despite the mounting evidence), until I started to consider non-conspiratorial alternative explanations. It turns out, those have a lot more evidence to support them (as I'm sure most of HN is aware). This eventually allowed me to construct general models of the world where the "bad guys" are not necessarily omniscient, and these have served me well across a wide variety of topics.
> PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it.
Please stay away from these. They are not healthy to someone with your mindset. You already know that the medical establishment is sceptical of the existence of ME/CFS, and only grudgingly acknowledges Long COVID: you don't need to expose yourself to repeated testimony from people with grudges and a vested interest in holding your interest.
I understand the joke but high-quality furniture is expensive, and only recently IKEA went from "good value" to "horribly overpriced".
Generally IKEA's goal of sustainability is noble and their transparency is appreciated, but the way they handled this issue reminded me they are a very profit-driven company with customer service set up to deflect issues and minimize cost.
The best furniture one can have are family heirlooms from old-growth wood, but it is both expensive to place them and to move them.
Fungus in general is not well-understood at all. We didn't even realize until a few decades ago that it's pretty much the backbone of life on Earth. All of our research into it is highly specific (using fungi as chemical factories in pharmacology, for instance), but besides that, it's largely a very mysterious branch of life. In medical school, you learn about fungus as it pertains to a few common infections and some classes of drugs, but otherwise you don't hear much.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just not something they're willing to speak on professionally because it's a huge blind-spot for science.
This is really interesting. I haven't been the same since I stayed in an extremely moldy place and have wondered about fungal infections/candida infection.
What was the remediation, some kind of anti fungal course/Nystatin?
I just wanted to say: Be careful going down this rabbit hole. There is a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience on the internet regarding mold, fungus, and candida as an explanation for every vague illness. The candida forums are particularly bad at misinformation. You can find people on internet forums, Facebook, and TikTok confidently explaining how candida explains everything wrong with you and can cause any symptom, but it's not backed by reality. People can waste a lot of time arguing with doctors or trying different antifungals and supplements before realizing that their condition is not candida at all.
I feel you have good intentions and I appreciate your warnings but it's not like people go down these rabbit holes because they want to. They get pushed away and invalidated all the time by people like you who have the best intentions. Their appearance is uncomfortable, their symptom descriptions are vague and conflicting, and due to limited financial and intellectual resources they cannot express their disease in an optimal way, especially to stressed medical professional.
Doctors WANT to help people, but their diagnostic tools are still very limited and they can't/won't do home visits and see in what kind of unhealthy environment people are living in. For healthy people from a stable environment many homes of sick people smell horrible. But if you're financially tied to such a place, and never lived somewhere else you might feel that you're not well but you cannot pin it down.
The whole candida thing feels like a strawman to me. For my industry it would be a layperson coming to me with a defective computer and saying they have a trojan on their computer but in fact it is a spyware instead. I wouldn't send them home and be angry at social media to talk about trojans so much, I would help them diagnose the issue "computer problem" and then we see it is technically a spyware.
50% of population has below-average intelligence, 50% of population has below-average education, 50% of population has below-average wealth. The medical system makes it too easy to send these people back home and invalidate their symptoms just because they come with the wrong "tagline" into the meeting.
And what doctors are reporting as bad influence of social media is actually that patients know of thousands of others with similar symptoms, so they will be giving more push back against gaslighting attempts by doctors. For doctors it's easier to blame "misinformation" than to actually accept the symptoms listed by the patients and see that the medical profession is far from perfect and that the current lab methods have a lot of room for improvement.
The following advice assumes that you went to your doctor, reported the symptoms, they did a full checkup incl. CT imaging and sent you home without finding anything (e.g. the famous conversation of "congratulations you don't have cancer!" - "yeah but why do I have these symptoms then?" - "We don't know!").
So from my personal experience your biggest priority should be to reduce exposure, e.g. mask up with an FFP3 mask that properly keeps the mold spores out. If your disease is really exaberated by mold then simply wearing the FFP3 for several hours will reduce your allergic respiratory symptoms so much that you feel it. Of course move places if you can, but be aware that the new place also very likely has some sort of mold, and the mycotoxins are spread out all throughout your stuff.
Trust your instincts, especially your nose to find indoor mold sources - unless you simply can't smell for several years like me. If you leave the house for some hours and come back then you have a short time frame of some minutes where you can literally smell the location of a mold source in your house before the nose swells up again. Youtube has many videos that explain how to find mold. Generally learn about diffusion in wall construction materials and figure out where organic material is used in your house. If organic material is next to something that limits diffusion (plastic, foam, metal, concrete, cement, paint) it is a possible point of water condensation and mold growth. Maybe there is a very obvious high-intensity source of mold like backside of a picture frame on the outside wall or moldy dust in an uncleaned ventilation system. But mold can also be invisible inside the wall, floor, ceilings, wallpaper or furniture. In any case buy or DIY a hepa filter for your home.
Then assess your immune system and support it as good as possible. This means go to a doctor and do all possible traditional bloodwork (Vitamin D, the B Vitamins, iron, minerals) and figure out what kind of supplements your immune system needs but does not get at the moment. Take these supplements and do monthly blood panels to track your progress and check if your symptoms improve. Once my vitamin D deficiency was resolved it was a big jump in life quality.
Do genetic testing to see if you have genetic metabolism issues such as MTHFR, and adapt supplementation of methylfolate / methyl-B12 accordingly. If you're curious you can use promethease to do deep dive into your genetic predispositions, but be aware that the symptoms they list are correlations and not causations.
Stop smoking, alcohol, sodas, fast food. Try to eat more healthy and drink enough water and eat an apple a day (Vitamin C!). If you have trouble quitting smoking/alcohol you need to recognize those as self-medication for underlying issues which should be medicated by a psychiatrist instead.
Please be aware that if your immune system is suppressed, the moment it "starts up" again will feel like your symptoms are getting worse. Suddenly there will be a pain in the sinus, or a light fever, or a weird tingling in some part of your body. Get familiar with the Herxheimer effect which is accepted by medical professionals for bacteria die-off symptoms where people get more sick after antibiotics because the bacteria release toxins when they die. Many argue that the same Herxheimer affect also applies to mold die-off or when the mycotoxins stored in your body are re-released into your bloodstream. Medicine lacks methods to validate any of these claims.
Try not to accept any treament that reduces your immune system (e.g. cortisone or monoclonal antibodies). You want to strengthen up your immune system, and not supress it. You really need to learn to listen to your body and notice when your nose starts tingling or allergic symptoms are starting to hit. Do not do any polyp removal surgery or FESS before blood panels show that your immune system has all needed supplements and your genetic metabolism defects are adequately addressed with things like methyl B12 shots etc. For all the traditional vitamin/mineral lab tests you should be at the upper end of the green range and not just barely on the start of the green range.
The one medication that helped me all along the way was desloratadine - an OTC anti-allergic medication. Coincidentially recent medical studies also showed that desloratadine is highly effective against covid by blocking ACE2 receptor. For me it deswelled my whole respiratory system the same way that monoclonal antibodies did, without killing my eosinophils along the way.
Do not take any anti-fungal medicine, they have significant side effects (some of them are classified as chemotherapy medications - you do not have cancer). If antifungals are adviced there will be a team of well-educated doctors that make you aware of the need because they found a fungal growth.
Do not take EDTA or NAC before your immune system is recovered. They re-release things into your bloodstream your body is not able to cope with and it can really harm your body and mental health.
Do not eat any clay or charcoal or buy salt baths before your immune system is recovered. It is a waste of time. Fix immune system first and track the improvements.
Really listen to your body. Eat healthy and drink plenty of water. Maybe check lead levels of your water supply just to be sure. Read labels of food and get an understanding of how much food is rotting with mold in the factories before it is mushed together and sold to us. If you have skin rashes then sulfur soap bars are a magic trick.
Go to communities such as r/moldtoxicity and read their stories and experiences, especially about finding and remediating the mold sources. Stay away from supposed wonder medications before you fix your immune system and the bloodwork shows that your immune system is fixed.
Finally, mold growth is seasonal and highly dependent on humidity. Every time after it has rained it is really bad. If your symptoms spike in wet season don't get fooled to think you are "healed" just because summer arrives. Mold can also grow outdoors. If you are allergic to indoor mold a hike in the woods can very well put you into the emergency room because your respiratory system simply swells shut. You might live next to some wetlands and the wind blows mold spores in your direction. These are all factors to consider.
Good luck!
PS: If after all this your eosinophils are still high your doctors should triple check you for parasitic infection.
Can you add an email to your profile, so I can reach out to learn more? I'm really into air quality and been trying to improve conditions in my apartment. You mentioned that
> Generally learn about diffusion in wall construction materials and figure out where organic material is used in your house. If organic material is next to something that limits diffusion (plastic, foam, metal, concrete, cement, paint) it is a possible point of water condensation and mold growth.
which is super interesting — I've found a couple of electrical sockets in my apartment which have a very strange smell, similar to soil/mold (I've confirmed that with other people, just to reduce the chance that I'm crazy). I'm still trying to investigate/fix the issue, and it seems that you know more about that, would love to learn from you.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, very interesting!
Thanks for your kind words. I've added mail to profile, feel free to reach out.
If you are into air quality monitoring you might like homeassistant either with DIY sensors based on esphome (quite easy if you like very basic tinkering with low voltage) or with some off-the-shelf IOT products. If you just want to have a reliable CO2 sensor I can recommend the aranet4, but unfortunately those are quite expensive.
I had some electrical sockets which were super corroded from the humdity, so that the copper wire turned black even though the plastic wrap of the cable was still on it. The humidity must have moved up the cable for ~10cm. The mold damage that I found a year later was at the same wall, but I didn't mentally connect these two things at the time.
Re AIQ, I've actually built a couple of devices myself (using different sensors, plantower being the most popular one, but I've played with sensiron and others as well) but I've mostly focused on the PM monitoring.
The sockets that have strange "smell" are actually on the (inside) wall that is the building boundary (i.e. not a wall with a neighbour — these sockets don't "smell"). Still, it's a bit shocking to me that this could happen. Do you know how the humidity "got" onto your wall? How were you able to find out? I'm pretty early in my mini "investigation".
Yes, it might've been lost in translation but my socket also was located on the inside of an exterior wall of the building. So one side was room other side was outside. If all your problematic outlets are located like this, then it might be a condensation/insulation problem.
Obviously you should rule out a leaking pipe, especially if someone created a slow leak by putting a nail into a wastewater pipe, and also rule out a damage to the outside of the wall where rain could come in.
Maybe you can find out if there was a change to the exterior walls after the house was originally built, for example someone insulating the building by putting foam mats on the exterior walls during the most recent "renovation", or putting insulation wallpaper on the inside of the exterior walls. When houses are originally built, normally experts ensure with calculations that no condensation problems will happen within exterior walls.
But after many decades people think they are clever by putting additional insulation on the exterior walls in order to save some money, or to simply change the style of the building. In worst case, additional insulation will move the dew point towards the inside of the wall, and then condensation of warm+humid indoor air will happen within your exterior wall. If it is a wooden building like it's common in the US this can create a mold problem. But it can also be a problem for stone buildings like we have here in Germany, if a wallpaper of wallpaint is used that prevents humidity that is trapped within the stone wall from evaporating.
Once you know what materials were used for your exterior wall, you can use a very nice calculator [1] that will show you if the wall has a condensation problem or not. For this you need thickness and material for every single layer of the outside wall.
The airborne mycotoxin I was exposed to is a scientifically proven carcinogen and class A indoor toxin, confirmed by an official lab. It was direct cause of my eosinophilia/asthma/sinusitis. It is the biggest gaslighting ever because two people share a place and both have emergency hospital visits and nearly die but from totally different diseases in different areas of the body.
All the communities suggest you throw away everything once you leave a mold-infested place, but most can't afford that. Many keep their furniture and regret it.
I truly wish this experience upon the denialists so they can use it to gather the evidence they need. A proper cancer would've been easier because there is at least a support network and hospitals have a damn handbook for it.
I’ve done that - moved out of a mold infested house into a brand new house and kept some but not all belongings. Can you elaborate on risks? What do I need to watch out for?
Mold can stick to some of the furniture even if it's not a large, visible spot. When mold developed on the wall behind your large wardrobe there's a good chance that the wooden back of the dressed caught a bit of it. You move to a new place and carry the spores with you. At worst the new place also has a humidity problem and the spores you brought accelerate the mold development process.
Anything that sat around a mold infested area is something you should look at closely, at least to proactively give it a thorough scrub and dry in a well ventilated area before bringing in the house.
An air filer with a real HEPA filter will help catch airborne spores but if you already have mold growth anywhere in the room you need to take care of that before blowing air all around.
I wouldn't worry if you have no symptoms. I'd advise to regularly monitor biomarkers of your immune system (monthly/quarterly bloodwork with vitamin D etc), take approriate supplements which take into account any genetic metabolism defects (MTHFR), and listen to your body, especially the magic tingling of your nose and any symptoms of seasonal allergy.
Generally a DIY HEPA filter and a CO2 monitor should be enough to keep good air in a home which does not have water damage. If you have ventilation then remember to swap your filters.
So this might not be the answer you were looking for, but from my digging into this ozone treatments can supposedly kill the mold spores but they are still able to somehow harm you when you breath them in. Mold is one of those things that is supposedly so bad to have around, even when dead in the furniture, can continue to harm you.
We have mold in my family's basement downstairs too and I run the ozone generator a lot to freshen the air. But unfortunately parents would never throw out the things.
If you have too much water in the basement a very easy fix that might work for you is to remove anything that blocks drainage on the outside of your house. E.g. there should be a strip of 1m all around your house where there is only earth or light crushed stones, but no tiles or plastic. I have seen two houses where there were tiles in the garden right up to the house wall, and the cellar was wet. Once the garden tiles outside directly next to the house wall were removed, the humidity from the cellar wall was able to evaporate to the outside air and the cellar got dry again.
It might be a very easy fix before you start buying expensive solutions. Maybe you have old pictures of the house before there were problems and you notice there was actually a strip of garden all around the house instead of concrete or tiles.
Be very cautious with ozone generators. Mold might or might not damage you but ozone will definitely damage you even at very low levels that you don't notice.
You are fixating on one tiny point which isn't really that important within OP's ... errm "opus".
Why not critique the entire work?
Anyway:
I borrow 100 from someone. I am now in debt and they are in credit - to balance, both are 100.
However, they require a return on investment - usury: 10 for 100 (or a 10% margin - call it what you like).
When I take out my loan, I am in debt for 110 and they are in credit for 100 with a promise of 10 later. So we have some accounts - my one account is 110 in debit (I borrowed 100 and promised to pay 10 on top) and they have two accounts - one for the principal (100) and another for the 10 interest. To me, in this case, the principal and interest are part of the same account but to the lender they are separated out because the interest is probably taxable as income.
However, it might be the case that I can set off my debt or the interest on my debt against some tax. In that case I will maintain two accounts - the principal and the interest.
All those interests will also end up in additional accounts related to probably banking.
I've probably pissed off a few accountants with my choice of terms but in the end I do understand how fiat money works.
What gets on my tits is assertions such as "People who don't understand ..." with no working.
Yeah CPA here. On the day you take out the loan you're not in debt 110, you are in debt 100; you would accrue interest expense over the term of the loan. What if the lender called the loan day 2 for some reason? You wouldn't pay 110, probably just 100 plus one day of interest. Goes back to fundamental definitions of financial statement elements. Liabilities are present obligations.
Anyways, recognizing the interest over time would debit an expense account and credit some liability account... Could be the same account as the loan or could be an interest payable account, doesn't really matter in the context of the example.
Also you would not be "in debit"; the liability is on the credit side of your balance sheet.
You failed to check the terms of my loan and assumed it was on an interest basis. I literally told you I borrowed 100 and promised to pay 110. I also failed to note a term and you also assumed there was one. I do mention interest later on so that's a fair assumption, if misguided.
I might be guilty of abusing an industry term or two 8)
You said interest. It's right there. In practice all loans have interest. No matter what you call it, it's interest as the word is understood in finance.
What gets on my tits more is people who are pretty bright in one field (hacking) thinking that entitles them to just brute force their way through reasoning about some other field (finance) that in their arrogance they think is simpler.
... and yet somehow I have muddled along running an IT company for 25 years (I'm the MD) and I have a fair idea about finances, including surviving some rather unpleasant financial environments that have rocked up over those years.
One month in 25 years, my partners and I didn't pay ourselves. That's as close as we have got to having issues. We keep six months payroll, corp. tax and VAT in readies. The property mortgage is nearly paid off.
I'm no hacker and I treat finances as a means to an end - no more and no less.
It bothers me that finance people think they’re smarter than everyone when all their jargon bullshit boils down to SQL statements any senior DB person would understand.
Totally. Tech people don't have jargon that boils down to something simpler, nope. No "artificial intelligence" or "machine learning" or "back propagation" or "neural networks" or "big data" or "scaling up" or (one could continue for days....)
SQL seniors can understand anything in finance. Senior finance people would be baffled from chapter 1 of anything serious in CS. That’s the difference between general purpose programming and a math DSL.
Which part? You can’t find any mainstream finance concept that can’t be expressed in SQL, or it’s laughable that finance people don’t understand computing? Which part is laughable, would love to know.
You can't have taken a class on finance and/or accounting and passed it. This is 101 material, literally. Read the CPAs take.
And, in my initial comment i explicitly point out the error - the interest amount should not be there. People don't tend to show the working for zero * x = zero. This misunderstanding of a very fundamental piece makes any material on this topic by this author not worth reading. It might render everything they write not worth reading because they also don't know where their circle of competence stops.
I see the reasoning for accountants keeping future liabilities off of the balance sheet. I do this myself in multiple contexts.
Still, when making decisions about whether to take out or grant a loan (personal or business) I need to consider future "value" and cash flows. To someone running a business this is probably more important than the balance sheet. So I think the interest recording criticism is valid but relatively minor in the context of the whole article.
It's not keeping future liabilities off balance sheet. It's marking them at their current value. Same thing for assets. Nobody wants to see a balance sheet where 30 year government bonds are written down at the sum of all interest payments to be received plus the principal. If you did that, you'd have balance sheets jumping all around the place as companies just managed cash on a day to day basis.
The vast majority of the article is trash. It's wrong in many situations. The only reason the accounting issue was brought up is it's early, and so incredibly stupid that it renders the rest of the thing untrustworthy. The rest is bad. If you don't think so, you don't know the subject and are learning from bad sources.
Blimey! After I engaged reader mode, all was revealed 8)
The "spider" and the wandering particles are funky but everything else in gthe presentation conspires to exclude granddad (who has rather shite eyesight these days). On the bright side, you didn't go for a dark theme. I'm happy to sort out my very minor accessibility "problems" but it might be nice to cater for all, as much as you can.
I love how you have considered so many ways to ensure that it will degrade gracefully, as far as is possible for certain glyph handling capabilities.
Good skills ... how on earth does this work? I pasted your glyph quite a lot and found that backspace changes it into the other flag:
EDIT: Oh dear, HN strips out funky glyphs so this post looks a bit odd.
I have noticed that the young 'uns are quietly rebelling against the way things are. This is another example.
OP is considering going off social grid as they understand it ... OK, dumping doom-scrolling and sitting in a cafe alone and being obviously alone and then looking around and noticing things.
That sort of "interaction" used to be normal. Having a billion people within ear shot was not normal until about 15 years ago.
I’m in River Forest and the deer are a pain to deal with. They eat your plants, they’re not afraid of people (because they get hand feed) and they get hit by cars.
They’re lacking their natural predators — and the logical solution of introducing them is ruled out because the local forest preserves aren’t large enough to support wolf packs.
Maybe the coyotes will figure out how to take them down.
You need to shoot the people who are feeding them - that's the logical solution to the problem you posed 8) Their natural predators are now cars because that is how things are now.
An environment is whatever it is at a point in time. You have described how things are around you and that is the current normal. You may not like it or even understand it but that is how it is.
You have to decide whether deer should live within your domain or not. At the moment it sounds like they are a negative factor for you. When you have run out of deer, will you start on the coyotes? When you have run out of creatures with backbones, will you start on arthropodia or amphibians?
Not really. The deer that thrive in suburban areas learn to watch for traffic. Even where deer vs car collisions are common, deer multiply well beyond what car traffic takes out. Really, hunting is the only way to thin the numbers.
Deer eat grass, they can thrive almost anywhere in North America just fine with or without people feeding them.
In suburbs they probably need to capture and slaughter some number of them to keep the numbers reasonable.
Deer can eat grass, but it's not their preferred food, and they can't thrive on it. They eat forbs, shoots, browse (twigs, buds, etc.) and mast like acorns (they are set up to deal with the large amounts of tannin in acorns).
"Although low quality forages such as mature grasses provide adequate nutrition to animals such as elk and cattle, the quicker digestive process of whitetails requires more readily digestible forages to fulfill their energy and protein requirements. On severely overpopulated and depleted ranges, white-tailed deer have starved to death with their stomachs full of low quality forages."
Point taken. Of course, again there is no shortage of shrubbery in suburban environments. And the last point is just what always happens when a species that evolved as prey is no longer hunted.
Well there was a lynx spotted in north Oak Park in the last couple-three years so there’s another potential predator, but yep, they definitely need predation. I’ve seen some sizable herds north of North Avenue in the forest preserve there (along with lots of bread put out by people who wanted to feed the deer). They’re a lot bolder there than south of North.
Look up to my post—the village proposed shooting the deer and residents decided that they’d rather have nuisance deer than see Bambi shot in their neighborhood. (There’s also the safety questions around shooting deer in residential neighborhoods to deal with as well.)
"Man dog walk. Boy biscuit eat. Girl throw ball." are held up as examples of incorrect english, which is largely fair.
However, none of those examples are actually ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that those examples translated word for word into any language would also be understandable.
You're cheating with your world knowledge to guide the parsing.
eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.
Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."
Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.
Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.
But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.
Language cannot be decoupled from what it is trying to work with. It is a tool! We can manipulate the air in such a way with our mouths that ears can hear.
I don't think there is anything wrong with allowing a small amount of "world knowledge" to guide language parsing - the world caused language to "be" not the other way around.
Anyway whenever, outside of smoking crack, did a girl get eaten by a biscuit? Never, so that phase is unambiguous.
Object before subject: I'll grant you that - its a probable sign of madness or a green puppet.
I think we can agree that they are awful examples!
The problem is, that when you try to reduce an example of "bad" english to the bare bones (for clarity), you often end up with quite legitimate language.
Even in Latin the occasional transgression is sort of allowed: "Alea iacta est" - that is of course "idium". I studied Latin via "Civis Romanus", "mental" and "idiot" (Mentor and Idium).
An englander would of course say something far more erudite, than a course roman general, such as: "Fucking 'ave it, you twats".
I remember when "Warty 40" was invented and largely supplanted Warhammer itself. I remember Citadel Miniatures and (A)D&D 1st editions, not to mention Traveler, Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Car Wars and many more. I was pretty decent at painting (quickly and accurately) and several kiddies used to pay me to get their latest regiment of space marines into action with the right colours. I went to a posh school and some of the kids had a lot more disposable income than me. I also had a lot more free time than I do now.
Nowadays I own a 3D printer (Prusa 4S+ with nobs on upgraded from a 3) and an IT company.
16 year old me would have committed ... a minor crime ... for the printer but given that IT was a Commodore 64, I'm not sure how I would have driven the thing.
However a 16 y/o me today with a 3D printer probably would be printing armies out of filament. I used to make plastic models too and saved up for several months to buy a double action air brush. My printer can churn out a small scale tank that rivals a Tamiya effort from back in the day. Some finishing is required but not much.
I might have a go at some Warhammer models and see how it goes, just for old time's sake ...
Pretty much the same age, generation and story. I also remember Traveller and Car Wars, and when 40K was first released as Rogue Trader (and when GW said that they were keeping plastic mini prices comparable to lead minis because the injection moulding equipment was really expensive, but once they'd paid that off they'd be reducing the price of plastic minis dramatically. hahahhahahhahhahah).
I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you remember the first generation of plastic gobbos and dwarves in the Warhammer (not 40K) beginner box released back in the early 90's, where they obviously had two-part moulds and there were no underhangs anywhere on the models, then my FDM versions were more shit than those.
The author is spot-on about the hobby, and about the business model, and about 3D printing's place in it.
But have a go, it's a fun challenge for a 3D printer enthusiast :)
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I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you just care about the print layers, use a filament that is solvable in acetone, and use it to smoothen the surface. Of course, if you absolutely need the resolution, you likely must use a resin printer.
That beast must surely require an orangutan to play it properly! Six manuals and the rest means that you don't exactly play it, more like you dance on it. Whacking out something complicated, written by Bach, on that thing is going to raise a serious sweat and I hope no one has ever tried to play "The flight of the bumblebee" without getting into peak physical condition first.
I've just installed it and tested it on a link from a HN topic which worked exactly as advertised.
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