bismarck

I think this will be my last post on this forum -- have scrambled my password and e-mail to make sure I'm not tempted to come back. Really can't deal with this place anymore and will be going the way of Spex and Mickey. Good luck everyone.

Sorry.

I am so sick of this fucking bullshit virus. It's ruined everything. I don't even know who to be mad at anymore. Just tired. What a miracle it would be if plaquenil was a cure. My hunch is it won't do anything for most, but will cause prolonged QT syndrome and sudden cardiac death in a minority of those who take it, and then these deaths will be mislabeled as heart attacks instead of as a medication effect. But that's speculation. I'm not going to pretend speculation is fact. That's for politicians, political pundits and armchair warriors.

I really wish I could take you to my work and see what is actually happening without the media filters. It's not good.

Yes, literally nothing to see. Dude, no one's reading your posts anymore. If you were on Reddit, everything you wrote would be down voted off the screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6-7oYSjeb4 Go figure that Texas cases are increasing. That's what you get when you have too many Kramers and not enough Jerries and Elaines.

You know nothing about me or what privileges I have or haven't had. That's the problem with this discussion. All these assumptions. I'm not on the street begging, but you're not in an ICU with flooded lungs. Don't underestimate your own lack of perspective. I'm as sick of this shit as much as everyone else here but I am also seeing people dying. There is no easy way out. Incidentally, I do agree with you that Yang was the best of the crop. I think most reasonable people do, but again what does this have to do with anything. I don't know what you're referring to as far as the state of the health director. The thing I found most repulsive about his posts were his theories about the secret lab in china concocting a virus and his backseat commentary on complicated medical procedures.

I'm not going to go through old posts, but it seems at times that you expressed things that I perceived differently. Perhaps I am mistaken. There is community on Reddit within the smaller subreddits, but certainly you are right. It's the largest forum in the English speaking world so you have a constant flood of new ideas and it is difficult to establish accountability. But that doesn't mean you can't learn from their strategy. Another thought is to encourage the non-surgical side of the site to take market share from the more medical hair loss sites out there. Perhaps you could also collate databases of patient submitted cases, similar to how it is done with surgeon submitted cases. Also maybe giving us 5 minutes to copyedit our posts after submission before we get the "Edited by <x>" tag. Though probably that would be just for me.

Melvin, I appreciate your point and I certainly agree that you are entitled to your opinion. However, I would ask that you weigh this against your responsibility to maintain the forum as a neutral ground to encourage hair loss sufferers to visit, and (just as importantly) encourage sponsors to advertise here. If I were in the shoes of a physician considering promoting their practice and I saw the administrator of a site make posts that favored one procedure when I felt they were even, I might be discouraged to advertise there as it would be perceived as a hostile market. This is just my perspective, but I'm really trying to help you see what it might look like to an outsider. Some might perceive it as you using your admin status as a bully pulpit. Especially when many believe that the FUE vs FUT answer is not clear. Same thing with controversial topics like COVID response. Whether or not you're right, this is a highly politicized issue and really has nothing to do with the purpose of this site, which is hair restoration. As an admin, your goal should be to administer a site about hair loss. Of course you can express your opinion, but take off the admin hat. It has nothing do with hair and obscures the purpose of the site. I've run forums myself in the past, and regretted every time I got involved with something that took away from the site's true purpose. Users are free to say what they want but I would really suggest you keep your bottom line in perspective. If you have to chime in, do it with a duplicate account and don't comment on your own posts/threads. It's commonplace on reddit and sometimes necessary because status matters so much on forums. The internet is no longer a democracy. Regarding the formatting of the site, the Reddit format should be followed closely if you can. Allowing downvotes, having a window on window format, and integrating live chat are a few basic points. The quote flexibility structure and image posting are really difficult to work with if you're trying to multi quote or add images. These revisions could be stitched together in a matter of weeks by someone with decent back end experience in something like MEAN stack. If now is a time that sponsorship has dropped, you could experiment with new formats to bring back former advertisers when this goddamn pandemic has ended. It could be 2021 at this point. I am really appreciative that you have tolerated my disagreements with you as we certainly don't always see eye to eye. That is a classy move and I respect you for that. I will do my best to curtail my comments as they often can come across in text differently than in my head. My apologies if you believe I am one of the people that has contributed to what you're describing as denigration. My intent is almost always to encourage active discussion and non-groupthink.

Cosmo: If I need help with any intubations I'll send you a DM!

Cosmo: We are going to value different things. But you have a tendency to call "fake news" any information that doesn't agree with your preconceptions of the world. Despite your previously stating how much you hated big orange, like him you particularly take offense to things when they cause financial harm. This is not unreasonable, but you take it too far. -Theories that China created the virus and is sending spies around the world are xenophobic and bigoted in their intent. While everyone is angry at China right now, to deny facts that you don't agree with, and create conspiracy theories for the ones you hope are true is truly disrespectful. -You initially doubted claims that the virus would ever raise beyond 60k, then when it did, you started questioning the methods of documentation in autopsy reports. The chain of reasoning that leads to a probable cause of death by the pathologist has not changed. Nothing is ever 100%. This just you doing another 'fake news' bit. I don't deny that the economic devastation this has caused is profound. And that the deaths from that may end up being incredible. But if we didn't quarantine, these effects would hae been much worse. The media is certainly exaggerating things to hurt Trump, but this does not mean something very serious is not occurring. I'm going to end with the first comment you made in this thread: It sounds like now you should be more concerned.

Melvin, it sucks that you're hurting but I have to point out two things -A large part of the reason the forum is losing traffic is because the software is old, buggy with a clunky interface. This discourages new users, particularly younger ones. Especially as current 20-somethings start balding, the loss of traffic will be devastating. The quarantine may be a good time to consider investing in the site as far as a software upgrade. -The one thing Bill did really well was to stay non-partisan in discussions. You have a well-intentioned tendency to take sides, whether it's in threads about FUE vs FUT, threads discussing whether the Coronavirus is real or not, your support of the surgeon that did your own transplants, etc. This is not moderator behavior. If you need to do this, create a separate account and post without the admin status under your name. Otherwise it is really discouraging to users who don't agree with you.

Taking a break from taking care of COVID patients to go back through this thread and reading for some amusement. Dear lord CosmoKramer is a moron. Complete utter moron. r/agedlikecheese

Well, it provides an obvious cosmetic benefit on the back of your head. Very true. Also, even if we restrict our searches to patient submitted cases, our minds tend to focus on the extreme positive and extreme negative results unless we are very careful because those are the most interesting.

I have had extensive conversations with three of the names you have mentioned, and across the board they indicated to me exact opposite of what you stated: strip is unequivocally superior for yield. Not for me in particular, but in general. So I'm not sure where you're coming from with that statement. Perhaps they changed what they said to you because your stance on FUE is so strong and they knew your surgical history, but I was very careful to come in neutral when I spoke with them. Or perhaps their opinions changed over time--my conversations were recent. One of us has fake news on this one. Blake Bloxham and Feller certainly don't agree with you. Feller has had his problems, but I don't think Blake is coming in trying to sell one procedure over the other for personal gain. I fundamentally agree with his opinion that FUT is better for yield and repeat procedures, FUE is better for not having a scar. I don't think they will be equal for quite some time, though we will not likely know this for sure for at least a couple decades. But I really don't think it's even debatable at this point.