teflange

Are you saying you feel like you shouldn't wear gloves with your angle grinder? Every safety guide I've seen recommends doing so.

Been touch-typing and sitting behind a computer for most of the past 25 years (not counting sleep:)...there's no magic bullet for RSI. I've tried correct posture, wrist alignment, dvorak, stretching, ambidextrous mousing, trackballs, touchpads, etc., and I still get really bad RSI from time to time.

Best thing I've found is when I start feeling pain in a wrist or hand I change things up - switch mouse hands, go from laptop to desktop (or vice versa), use a different keyboard. If you can take a break for a couple of days (and avoid going back to the same motion that caused the problem) that can help a lot.

Thanks, I appreciate your well-considered answers and excellent AMA; keep up the good work!

You should be very, very afraid. CPS operates outside the bounds of ordinary law enforcement; you essentially have to prove yourself innocent of whatever "crimes" they wish to accuse you of.

What law enforcement group can coerce you into signing some arbitrary agreement under threat of forcibly taking your children? Where is that in the constitution? Nowhere. What group can legally enter and search your home without a warrant? None - except CPS. Which can order you to submit to drug testing, force you to attend classes, meet with them and be present at "hearings" without having charged you with an actual crime? None - except CPS.

They are financially incentivized to intrude into your life and to remove children from homes; it is how they justify their budget, their staffing, and their entire operation.

If the people you are dealing with like you okay and you don't piss them off they will likely leave you alone. If on the other hand they decide they don't like you, the degree to which they can screw up your life (up to and including selling your children to "foster parents") is almost infinite.

If I were you I'd stop smoking because it's quite likely they will order drug testing to ensure you aren't a "risk" to your child; as I posted above the person I know who had her kids stolen by CPS tested positive for cocaine; this was the reason given for the removal. Good luck.

I have often wondered at what legal framework purportedly exists to allow a government bureaucracy to appropriate citizens' children when there is little or no evidence of physical abuse or severe neglect. I personally know someone whose young children were stolen from her by government workers because she tested positive for cocaine, with no evidence or assertion of neglect or abuse. Really, recreational drug use means the government can steal your children?

Like so many government organizations initiated with an admirable motive ("protect the children"), I feel that CPS has become a power-hungry, unconstitutional, and fascist apparatus that exceeds its purview and does far more harm than good. It operates outside of the normal system of justice and places unusual and inane requirements on parents to prove themselves worthy of keeping (or winning back from the State) their own children.

Further, the State's "solution" for handling children kidnapped from their families - whether morally justified or not - is often times worse than the situation the children were in before; foster care is riddled with state-sponsored child abuse and neglect - the very things it is supposed to be preventing.

Like police forces and their drug war asset forfeiture laws, CPS has become a self-serving, child-confiscating nightmare organization that sustains itself on the backs of citizens and their children. Foster parents, case workers, judges, state psychologists...all are funded based upon the number of children they kidnap and "help", and the number of parents they trap into the never-ending revolving door of "training classes", court appearances, home visits, drug tests, etc. ad nauseum.

I'm sure you and many of your coworkers are well-meaning and caring individuals. Nevertheless you represent a vast, extra-judicial overreach by government and your apparatus should be dissolved immediately. Along with so many parasitic government organizations you have hugely outgrown your initial dubious usefulness and need to be eradicated and replaced from the ground up with some kind of organization that conforms to constitutional law and provides a net benefit to society, rather than a massive net detriment.