Tristan O'Tierney, Square Co-Founder, Dies at Age 35 (sfchronicle.com) 160
An anonymous reader quotes the San Francisco Chronicle:
Tristan O'Tierney, a co-founder of San Francisco payments company Square, died Feb. 23 in Ocala, Fla., of causes related to addiction, his family said. He was 35...
His family is awaiting an official cause of death from officials. "I do know that it was in relation to his addiction," [his mother] Pamela Tierney said. "I know he got to the hospital, he couldn't breathe and they couldn't revive him." O'Tierney was in a three-month rehabilitation program in Ocala and had been battling addiction for three years, Tierney said. O'Tierney openly discussed his struggles with addiction on social media. "As some of you may know, I've been battling with addiction for these past few years," he wrote in September in a now-deleted Instagram post that he also shared on Twitter. "With some success. A lot of failure too though."
Bloomberg remembers him as a former engineer at Yahoo and Apple who was hired to develop Square's original mobile payment app in 2009, then stayed on until 2013.
"In addition to his parents, O'Tierney is survived by his three-old-year daughter, according to an obituary on the website for the funeral home."
His family is awaiting an official cause of death from officials. "I do know that it was in relation to his addiction," [his mother] Pamela Tierney said. "I know he got to the hospital, he couldn't breathe and they couldn't revive him." O'Tierney was in a three-month rehabilitation program in Ocala and had been battling addiction for three years, Tierney said. O'Tierney openly discussed his struggles with addiction on social media. "As some of you may know, I've been battling with addiction for these past few years," he wrote in September in a now-deleted Instagram post that he also shared on Twitter. "With some success. A lot of failure too though."
Bloomberg remembers him as a former engineer at Yahoo and Apple who was hired to develop Square's original mobile payment app in 2009, then stayed on until 2013.
"In addition to his parents, O'Tierney is survived by his three-old-year daughter, according to an obituary on the website for the funeral home."
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Don't complain here, complain to the CIA people cutting it in Mexico and importing it.
Drugs have to remain dangerous if they're going to stay illegal and highly profitable for funding black ops.
I'm sure your Congressman will be eagar to hear your complaint since you hwve a representative government.
Re: Obviously Chinese Fentanyl (Score:1)
He died of overdose not addiction. Let's not sugarcoat it.
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If you have no problem with it, you're nominated.
Not the original AC but I have to admit myself that I have very little sympathy for addicts committing suicide by lethal injection. Perhaps I would feel different if one of my loved ones was an addict but I doubt it. I have a cousin that ruined his life with alcohol and died in his mid fifties from cirrhosis. I feel bad for his sister, but not for him. Nobody held a gun to his head.
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Say what you want about the Nazi; at least he knows how to turn on the monospace font.
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Kind of like Phillip Michael Thomas. decades of sobriety, relapsed, rehab, dead.
Quite. Except for the fact that he is still alive.
Re:3 months (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that’s why we need to end the war on drugs and decriminalize their use. We spend too much energy focusing on the wrong solution and wonder why nothing seems to change.
Re: 3 months (Score:1)
Most rehabs don't do their jobs. They care about that insurance money and that's it. There is a reason only ~10% of junkies end up clean. They tell u that the first day of rehab. They say look around, this disease will kill you if you don't stop.
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> The ignorance contained in this single line is enough to kill a horse.
Except for the fact that he's right, unless you chemical detox someone, about 60% of cases will relapse or worse. Kurt Cobain, and numerous other celebrities have done rehab, relapsed, rehab, relapsed, rehab, and possibly killed themselves after 5-6 rehab trips.
It's not "ignorance" to state facts.
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"Seems like rehab isn’t doing a very good job." - The ignorance contained in this single line is enough to kill a horse.
Alcoholism was redefined as a "disease" in the late 1950s. The reason for this was so that insurance companies could justify addiction treatment as something that should be covered by insurance, which created a multi-billion dollar revenue stream for that industry.
What rehab facilities have proven to be successful at, is taking insurance money. This is fact regardless of your own personal experiences.
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The has been at the core of AA for years
AA is all about lifetime addiction. Shift you off of booze and onto coffee, donuts, and jesus. Admit that you are powerless? Fuck that. Make people powerful, not weak. And guess what? AA has about the same success rate as trying to quit on your own.
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Shift you off of booze and onto coffee, donuts, and jesus.
While coffee and donuts are dubious, Jesus has been pretty helpful in individual's lives, although some people even screw that up so badly that we have a word for it: martyr [wikipedia.org](er, it gets screwed up and ended by others, to be precise).
Re:3 months (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like rehab isnâ(TM)t doing a very good job. You can clean a person up and prevent them from using, but unless you address the underlying issues that lead to them seeking out the drugs in the first place theyâ(TM)ll eventually wind back up in the same place. Drug use and addiction can be as much of a symptom as it is a disease.
Very true words, and personally I would question even the possibility of a 3-month only program in the first place.
Everyone has their own story and situation, and even as a person who has gone through that myself, I still have few if any generalizations to make that would be helpful.
But one rare one is as you say, you absolutely positively NEED that drive and desire to quit, no matter what the cause.
I've often been told my case is "special" even though I still don't know why.
My story isn't unique, years of medical procedures and pain management, suddenly combined with unemployment and loss of access to those resources, followed by turning to street drug forms to substitute for that sudden lack of any pain management at all.
This was nearly two decades ago now, but for a couple years I was fine with the situation.
I tried a couple times to go back to proper methods and doctors, but at that time I felt that wasn't the better option. No desire to quit, and so no success in doing so.
An especially sad event one day just ended up flipping a switch in my mind, and I was done.
I honestly wanted everything to change.
However withdraw pains can certainly make a person crave death, and at times even seek it out.
There does exist ways to deal with that one problem, specifically with opiates there are substitutions that trick the withdraw pains away and let you ween away completely.
The simple and sad truth is, in the US, such treatments can be difficult to get, are very expensive, and of course as I said only address that one aspect about quitting.
I can only conclude my case was seen as "special" because literally the withdraw agony was the one and only thing keeping me from both quitting and not killing myself.
Even then, it took almost a year and a half of treatment to ween all the way down to being just miserable, instead of in suicidal agony.
Three months just doesn't even register as a possibility to me.
Finding a doctor to provide such treatment was difficult, and it was nearly five hundred bucks a month out of pocket for that year and a half.
Someone like the co-founder of Square isn't going to have the same worry over money problems, but the vast majority of us almost literally can't afford to get such treatment.
If such programs were more available, accessible, and not demonized, I can't help but wonder what percentage of people who currently just die would still be alive.
Worse is the sheer number of people in the world that don't want that number to be above 0%
Personally I feel each and every last person that claims death is deserved is more than just partially responsible for those millions of lives lost.
Those holding such a "tough on drugs" opinion are far closer to murderers than any kind of moral pillar, even while they convince themselves they had no part to play and it is the fault of everyone else.
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Someone like the co-founder of Square isn't going to have the same worry over money problems, but
Obviously the co-founder of Square had no desire to get clean. I read an article that his family admitted he "struggled" with illegal drugs for a long time. He had plenty of money and access to health care. It wasn't about pain management. It was about recreational drug use. He took his own life just like someone playing Russian roulette takes their own life. It's hard to generate sympathy for someone who accepted the risk and died doing exactly what they wanted to do.
Personally I feel each and every last person that claims death is deserved is more than just partially responsible for those millions of lives lost.
Those holding such a "tough on drugs" opinion are far closer to murderers than any kind of moral pillar, even while they convince themselves they had no part to play and it is the fault of everyone else.
Says the addict that finally got
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"The addiction treatment industry is dangerously unregulated. John Oliver explains why many rehab programs should incorporate more evidence-based care and carefully reconsider their doctor-to-horse ratio." [youtube.com]
Twinkle (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been following Tristan ever since I used his twitter client on the original iPhone, Twinkle, which brightened my days as an early adopter. Itâ(TM)s interesting to me how much emphasis is put on his addiction and time at Square, whereas his time at Apple and as an early iPhone / iOS developer really was the affectionate and incredible context that struck me as profound. The innovation from those early days is still unparalleled and Twitter is no longer even remotely the same place we met at eleven years ago. RIP Tristan. You were one of the good ones.
Addiction to what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary mentions addiction several times, but doesn't say what to. Was he that famous that we're expected to just know?
Re:Addiction to what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was wondering the same thing, he's not much of a cautionary tale if we have no idea what to beware of...
Cigarettes? Pachinko parlors? Mainlining sea-urchins?
It was his final fantasy (Score:1)
Oh wait, let me guess: Video games. The Square founder broke the rule of successful drug dealers not using their product and became addicted to Square's Final Fantasy games.
(Different Square.)
Covered (Score:3)
What addiction would be related to breathing suppression
Hey man, I did say sea-urchins.
Also have you HEARD a heavy smoker trying to breathe?
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Well obviously to some kind of an opiate derivative if he stopped breathing.
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Anything fatal causes you to stop breathing.
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Or addicted to spuds.
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Or a system addict. Never can get enough.
Mmmm, Doris.
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Does it matter?
The CDC knows: synthetic opioids (Score:5, Informative)
U.S. drug overdose deaths continue to rise; increase fueled by synthetic opioids [cdc.gov]
CDC’s analysis, based on 2015-2016 data from 31 states and Washington, D.C., showed:
* Across demographic categories, the largest increase in opioid overdose death rates was in males between the ages of 25-44.
* Overall drug overdose death rates increased by 21.5 percent.
** The overdose death rate from synthetic opioids (other than methadone) more than doubled, likely driven by illicitly manufactured fentanyl (IMF).
** The prescription opioid-related overdose death rate increased by 10.6 percent.
** The heroin-related overdose death rate increased by 19.5 percent.
** The cocaine-related overdose death rate increased by 52.4 percent.
** The psychostimulant-related overdose death rate increased by 33.3 percent.
* Fourteen states had significant increases in death rates involving psychostimulants; the highest death rates occurred primarily in the Midwest and Western regions.
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Well the CDC should know, after all it's about half their fault. As synthetic opioids were starting to become common, they pushed guidelines,
No they didn't because the CDC doesn't deal with medical guidelines. I get the feeling you don't know what the CDC is or what it does.
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https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/prescribing/guideline.html
Yo, dawg! (Score:2)
Perhaps he was addicted to addiction itself?
O'Tierney's Cage (Score:4, Informative)
It might be useful to understand why and how O'Tierney felt disconnected.
background for those who learned from egg-brain propaganda:
https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg [youtu.be]
They (kurzgesagt) retracted it (Score:5, Informative)
Basically the video does not live up to their standard, takes only one source, is disputed etc...etc... Frankly "addiction as a sole psychological explanation" is kookery of the highest grade, and match scientology stuff.
Did you watch the video `? (Score:2)
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What would that cure be? Some mindrape pill which magically erases nihilistic hedonism from addicts?
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Amend your claim to exclude coffee or I KEEL you.
There are a lot of things rightly called drugs that don't do what you discribe. Not all drugs are tombstone drugs.
Psychedelics do make you gullible and subject to tribe pressure, like a middle schooler. Someone on acid will believe _anything_ told them by someone they trust, if they keep it up, they internalize it and become part of the tribe (e.g. a noodle dancing, bullshit spewing deadhead). Tripping around the manipulative is dangerous, ask the CIA or
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I need you to run rStabInEye.exe and install some custom hardware.
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I've heard of Squarespace (although I don't know how to capitalise it) because I listen to podcasts. I assume it has nothing to do with that.
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Japanese: Square KK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
American: Square Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
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if you've ever paid for something with your debit card and an ipad with a weird looking thingy plugged into the headphone jack; you've been squared.
Which is it? (Score:2)
His name was O'Tierney, but his mother's name was just Tierney?
Never heard of that before.
Otherwise a loss of another good person...
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The O' signifies "descendant of" in Irish.
So O'Tierney is literally "descendant of Tierney"
In the same way as "Mac" or "Mc" means "Son of".
Anecdotes (Score:2, Insightful)
Across from my house there is a private drug rehab center. The owner is a former addict himself, inherited some money, and started this as a way to plow back into the community. He claims his center has a roughly 50% success rate versus state-run centers' 10% (lot of variables, this is just supposed to be a ball-park indication). State=non-USA.
A friend's son is a heroin addict and has been in and out of rehab for years (including the above). The stuff basically alters brain structures so that the addict cra
what addiction (Score:1)