Hmm. I suppose I disagree that being able to create a simulated universe is any way evidence (one way or the other) that our universe is simulated. And I don't think a Bayesian inference can fundamentally provide meaningful evidence either. But I will keep an open mind to it.
Have you read William Gibson's Jackpot series? It starts slow but it has some plot devices that you might find interesting.
So he was basically thinking that the rate of expansion within the observable universe was greater than the speed of light? Or that expansion literally guides the light unidirectionally?
I agree but consider this about getting out: Whether you want to become a healthcare worker, an artist, a cook, or anything else that actually helps the people immediately around you, then increasingly you are going to have to operate under corporate management that somehow manages to corrupt the good left in these jobs. And that means you're going to feel less like you're helping, and then you're just working for another corporate master for even less pay.
Maybe it would ultimately be more comforting to find ways to use that extra $60,000 in the office job to support people organizing in your community, leftist groups working in other areas, etc. I don't know and I'm not going to judge you one way or another, it's just food for thought.
I hope you can find a happy and healthy balance with your work life soon.
I need to bite the bullet and get the fuck out but how the hell do you enter the biggest phase of change in your life when you follow the same patterns each and every day?
My M.O. is to throw myself right into the deep end and just deal with the consequences as they pop up. I've had a lot of good outcomes. But I've also accrued a fair amount of trauma pursuing those outcomes.
Yes, definitely. So far he manages to connect the dots in through history in an engaging way and gives enough glimpses into the real world through anecdotes that you can imagine the general vibes on the ground. The geopolitics are also explained enough to understand how the individual facts reflect the bigger picture. It is a bit dense but at the same time he keeps a pretty good pace even if it means skipping some details - it's not written like an all-encompassing academic reference. It seems to be an honest, well-edited peek behind the curtains of history for popular audiences.
I'm going to need more time to work through it. It's pretty dense with facts, as expected.
Ohler starts by very quickly recounting the tale of William Pickard and his apprehension. I don't think Ohler even mentioned that his base was in a missile silo. Maybe he comes back to Pickard later.
Then Ohler explains how his mother had Alzheimer's and his retired federal judge father wanted to treat her with LSD. His father said something like, "if this is such a useful medicine, why can't you just go buy it at the store?" This was Ohler's inspiration for the book.
After that he jumps to divided Germany after the end of WWII. He explains what the war time drug policies were and how the situation developed after the collapse of government. He tells how US personnel were impressed with the Nazi policies and worked with former Nazis in their attempts to reassert control and to export those policies to the US. He clearly calls out the policies for being racist and racially-motivated.
Naturally Anslinger's name comes up a lot and Ohler explains how he pushed UN members to enforce draconian drug laws to crush the market worldwide. Previously Anslinger had engineered a US stockpile on opium, and with production and trade cratered this stockpile became a monopoly. Anslinger used his financial interests in this monopoly to make himself the head of a global drug cartel.
The USSR refused to adopt Nazi drug policy for East Germany or for themselves. Because they continued to allow production (which threatened his plan), Anslinger fear-mongered to the UN that the USSR was planning to flood other countries with drugs. His intelligence sources did not support this conclusion.
That's about as far as I've gotten. The book only really gets started once it jumps to the end of WWII, and this section hasn't even mentioned psychedelics yet - it's still focused on speed, opiates, etc. It reads like a direct continuation of Blitzed (so far as I recall it). Of course this is all very important context before jumping into the discussion of psychedelic criminalization. It seems clear that the direction it is going is that psychedelic policies were not based on the drugs themselves, but on the corrupt policies and strategies applied to drugs that existed prior to the psychedelic era.
I think there are some exceptions to that rule, but that it is mostly true.
Where you can't get it fresh, there is often a more local alternative available - kratom, coca, betel nuts, ephedra, etc. These too have been facing similar criminalization pressures.
Here's some coverage: They're holding the meeting 30 minutes away from an oil platform that is releasing large amounts of methane lol
For the most part they've failed to get anything done, which I'm sure is a perfectly acceptable outcome for the oil companies that this conference is designed to appease.
I think methamphetamine is less neurotoxic than amphetamine at the equivalent dosage, although that's only what I heard - never looked into it to say that I know this for a fact.
I can see how that could be the case. It's prodrug action through amphetamine is always going to be lesser on a per gram basis.
Did you know that Ohler has a new book out called Tripped about psychedelics?
Yes but I didn't know we have it on TankieTube! Maybe I'll listen to it this weekend. Psychedelics are very interesting to me.
I was, yeah. I should have caught that. I have a friend that was obsessed with Inside for a while. I guess I had the same reaction to your profile as I did to first hearing his song - this is just common conversation set to upbeat music, right? (I'm a climate change doomer if you couldn't tell.) He's super catchy - I ended up singing along, too.
There's an interesting and easy read on amphetamines used in Nazi Germany titled Blitzed by Norman Ohler.
Blitzed is a great reference, it was one of the sources that opened my eyes to the bigger picture iirc
Fun fact: doctors in the US still occasionally prescribe methamphetamine for ADHD. It goes by the trademark name Desoxyn.
Because it works lol. I've never tried it but it's clear why it does: One of it's two metabolites is amphetamine itself. At best you get additional therapeutic effect from the original form and the additional isomer, at worst (since the additional metabolite is not extremely toxic) you just have a prodrug for amphetamine.
For those whom it might benefit, a prodrug is a drug which does not have the targeted action but whose metabolite is the active chemical itself - these are sometimes used to bypass drug laws but they have other purposes too.
afaik there are two primary reasons why meth is seen so much worse than amphetamines even though they are both generally legal prescriptions where either is legal:
Meth is what was common so meth was the focus of propaganda and other communications, and
The big one imo: Meth is much, much easier to synth.
And so meth is relegated to a last-resort therapy in most cases.
There may be additional factors I'm missing here that aren't described in the research that I've done. There haven't ever been too many meth users in my social circles and science can often gloss over individual experiences. I don't mean to say meth is great or even that it's not bad for most people. I don't really know. I just know that a lot of the discussion around it is severely distorted which has created some undue prejudices when it is a legitimate therapeutic compound for an illness that plagues significant numbers of the population in Western-styled developed countries where ADHD traits can be strongly discriminated against.
·7 hours ago
Ukraine says Russia fired that ICBM.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-launches-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-attack-ukraine-kyiv-says-2024-11-21/