consonants

As an opiate addict in recovery, and having experienced caffeine withdrawal: taper, taper, taper. There is no excuse not to.

Going cold turkey is an ego-motivated action, in my opinion. It's the 'If I can endure this acute suffering and beat it, then I'm stronger for it' attitude, and gives a false sense of inflated accomplishment. The reality is that you put yourself through needless torment so you could feel better about yourself, while a rational person whose goal is to actually beat the addiction realizes that their chance of returning to the substance increases substantially with how bad the withdrawal symptoms are.

If you want to quit, do everything you can so that you don't go back to ingesting the substance in question. That means reducing the chances you'll relapse because withdrawal fucking sucks and the only thing that will fix it is either waiting or using again. Guess which one your brain will try to convince you to do (hint: its the one with the least amount of immediate suffering)?

Fun fact: decaf actually has some caffeine in it [1], and is probably the factor in how it helps the transition from a caffeine fueled lifestyle to general normalcy.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17132260

I doubt any person in power would advocate such a radical shift that could possibly alter their favorable status quo. As the Citigroup papers says, the current political and social environment almost solely serves the the interests of wealthy, and for that they are elated. They fear that a social movement that shifts the focus of the national narrative towards any kind of reduction in inequality would drastically alter the ecosystem in which they are the apex predator. To extrapolate, if it becomes politically viable to advocate a basic income for the people, then the narrative has shifted towards reducing inequality and that is a direct threat to the plutonomy they enjoy. Why risk the narrative when you can already suck on the government teat through contracting, subsidies, and political donations? Shuffling wealth around introduces too much uncertainty.

Is anyone else unable to resolve bell-labs.com? I've tried with my local connection, then SSH'd into my home machine, and tried via 3G on my phone and no luck.

Any links to a mirror or what not?

Thanks for the correction.

The wealthy would fight tooth and nail against this as it threatens their positions of power. If their needs are met, who would toil for them to earn meager amounts of money just so that they can eat and have a roof over their head? Capitalism depends on a class of people that only has one mean of survival: to under sell their labor and time to employers. Closing off of the commons and the privatization of public lands accomplished this a few centuries ago. Giving the common people a basic income rolls back the stronghold the capitalist has on society.

Check out Citigroup's leaked Plutonomy paper[1]. It's details, in disgustingly congratulatory terms, such a stronghold. It is also a literal dictionary definition of conspiracy to maintain a political, economical, and societal control of their financial position.

[1] http://mathbabe.org/2012/08/30/citigroups-plutonomy-memos/ - you will have to check some popular bittorrent sites to find the full paper.

The post you are replying to is why I take evo-psych explanations with a grain of salt, as your post is just as plausible while it doesn't try to stretch the findings in the article by reducing complex evolutionary processes to explain human society.

edit: ugh, grammar. this is what I get for posting from a phone

Mass unemployment ensures that there is always someone who will trade their labor for the lowest possible price so that they don't starve.

It's built into the system, less of a plague and more of necessary requisite for capitalism.

Super helpful comment, tptacek

Is this mature enough to run dosbox in wine compiled for OS X? I want to know how deep this rabbit hole can go.

>So freaking expensive.

It seems someone hasn't visited their local asian food market ;)

Like the other domesticated animals that once had a vital purpose in human society, there will be people who will continue to raise them simply because they view them as companions and not a commodity.

That's a noble goal, in my opinion.

The issue at hand isn't whether or not it is easy or hard to learn, it's that the rabbithole can go on forever as all language implementations will manifest inadequacies which you will have to 1) be familiar with 2) know how to work around.

It's an inherent phenomenon that DSLs will change and come and go at an incredibly fast rate. I just don't find it worthwhile to write code that is dependant on the DSL du jour and pigeonhole myself and whatever unlucky sole has to maintain the legacy code in the future. Imagine being dumped on a mountain of ColdFusion legacy code.

I just find it kind of absurd is all.

Honestly, I blame the way history is taught in America. It's neutered any sense of class solidarity, riddled with retroactive ideological lensing and the worship of personalities.

Yes, let me learn this domain specific language for a domain specific language so that I can learn another domain specific language whenever this one stops trending.

> distribution of child abuse photos legal

That's the problem. So long as there is a channel for distribution of images depicting child sexual exploitation, there will always be someone abusing even more children to produce more material for profit. Widening that channel is opening the figurative floodgates and possibly encouraging a 'dormant' pedophile to act on his/her urges when they normally wouldn't have.

Stopping the distribution of photos of children being raped -> less children being raped so that photos can be distributed for profit.

I'll even argue that legalizing distribution of such images will normalize the behavior in sick individuals. Remember the jailbait/gonewild reddit, and the hoards of neckbeards claiming that there is nothing wrong with looking at suggestive or actually explicitly illegal pictures of underage kids? That was a community in which that kind of disgusting behavior was normalized and encouraged. You could tell that most of them thought it was perfectly fine.

It's ludicrous to suggest that making the distribution of the pictures of children being raped legal is a serious attempt at fighting child abuse.

The 'legalize it' attitude works for the drug argument, where there really isn't a victim from one's choice to consume whatever substance they please.

There is and always will be victims when child pornography is being distributed or produced. Taking a laissez-faire approach just because ALL distribution channels can't be destroyed ignores the real and lasting repercussions the phenomenon has on children.

Edit: I'm still kind of shocked that you are advocating what amounts to a child abuse economy. It isn't the price that is the problem, it is that children are suffering BECAUSE sick individuals feel the need to look at pictures of exploited children.

The proprietary software as evil thing comes as a morality judgment, that the potential evils from such software/licensing far outway whatever positive nuance it could bring to the table. A nuanced reading of the past 75 years of copyright/patent law and judgments can come to the conclusion that such an ecosystem is detrimental to the rights and ability of end-users and developers.

Guess what the solution to the proprietary software problem is? Not using or promoting proprietary software or platforms that enable it.

You are getting upset that the Free Software Foundation has standards to be met to consider software as "free". To dismiss their agenda as existing in 'crackpot' territory is invalidating a legitimate argument to support your shaky conclusion.

Weird how you come to that conclusion. Cultural hegemony comes to mind, which is important in analysis of anthropological and sociological studies, claims the exact opposite of this: that the lower-classes emulate and internalize the mores of the ruling class.

Anecdotally, I come from a low income family and witnessed first hand the dissonant beliefs my parents held, that materialistically and socially benefited the rich at our expense, personally, and as a class.

It comes as a real surprise that it is that obvious to you. Are you from outside the United States? Perhaps that may be true in a society that has a shred of class consciousness, but certainly not here.

Doubt it. If firms could analyze and deconstruct the purchasing decisions and preferences from such 24/7 feeds, it will just allow them to more efficiently funnel money from the consumer to the top. The lower income market is intensely profitable, mostly due to the limitation of choice a disenfranchised person has.

It's disconcerting that, literally knowing everything about you, puts advertisers in a position to accurately target you in insidious ways.

Advertising is incredibly good at convincing people that they need [product] as it is. Assuming the 'rational actor' theory ever treaded water, this sinks it.

It does seem like the logical progression for Google and friends. What will be interesting is how such invasive monitoring will be pitched as innocuous. People seem to be a-okay with corporations mining their data, though.

Once whatever successor to Google Glass becomes ubiquitous, I can see this becoming a reality.

This is an advertising research agency's wet dream come true, unfortunately.

>Those things are not related. So what if you get paid less than the value you add? That doesn't mean that suddenly its not a job that you love.

For some the cognitive dissonance that comes with such alienation doesn't sit well.

>Why not? Large corporations - music producers, book publishers, movie producers, pharma companies, manufacturers, etc all run on the assumption that they will find enough people with passive income on their brains...

Forbes has vested interest in maintaining a populace that ultimately doesn't have a choice in whether they have to undersell their labor to survive, nor question their employer-employee relations. Again, this comes back to the cognitive dissonance that being forced into an unequal relationship elicits.

Implementing a negative income tax or minimum income would do wonders for the first world poor.

It's been done before with overwhelming success.

Honestly, having profit as the sole motivation for enterprise in society is strangling the developing world.

This market fetishism sounds familiar, have you been trawling through von Mises or something? I've heard the same diatribe from vocal internet libertarians and am curious as to the source of this meme.

As someone who shelled out for the N770/N810, I can't help but engage in a bit of schadenfreude w/r/t Nokia's decision to drop Maemo in favor of the Windows phone platform and their subsequent adoption rates.

Ah, yes, maximizing profit for the owners at the expense of laborers. This has never happened before. I'll argue that the money saved could also be used to fund further automation of the labor that is one of their largest annual expenses.

Typically when people espouse the want to "change the world" it is for the betterment of humanity; though it is interesting that you identify with the sentiment.

Government is the one institution that pays lip service to and can be influenced directly by the populace it's supposed to be accountable to. Obviously, in practice it serves the will of those already in power.

As someone who doesn't want to jump ship from the system we have now to anarchy immediately, I believe that even more corrupt power structures would take governments place without first eradicating the existing power structures and influence of the accumulation of capital has on global society.

To transition now, where the power and resources are in the hands of a slim margin of people, would usher in an era of neo-feudalism. Some would argue we are already at that point, so why destabilise the only organisation with power that exists, in theory, for the people?

The NSA has specifically stated that they have the ability to preliminarily gather data through PRISM a week before going to FISC for a warrant. What is presented to the judge as evidence is usually that very collected data.

> (which would have hurt innocent civilians - does the US even care about that anymore?)

No. This is a standard tactic the US has used to economically intimidate Latin/South America for political, but usually economic reasons. After the disaster in Haiti, the government decided to raise taxes on gas/oil exports(forget really) to help recovery, but that would affect our profit margins so we threatened them economically into submission. I believe something similar happened with raising the minimum wage by a few cents for textile workers in Haiti, but there was no way in hell we'd have that.*

Menendez represents me. Not that I'm surprised that he'd protect his monied interests over the welfare of innocents or anything.

*edit: found the source http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/06/us-haiti-wik...

No, but before the internet the realm of completely untested novel psychoactive chemicals was confined to certain circles of chemists, academics, psychiatrists, and social commentators/reformers. The first person to test 2C-* series was Shulgin, and only after systematic titration on himself did he ever think of sharing his discoveries. Today it is a little different.

Today, someone can find a lab willing to synthesize a chemical for very cheap with the intention of selling it for a huge profit online. That person then posts on a board such as bluelight or erowid, where the first introduction of its ABUSE is documented. Users of the board are attracted to the novelty of the new substance, and are encouraged by the community to follow the behavior of 'researching and sharing' by acquiring said substance, ingesting, and then relaying back to the board about the experience. They are likely some of the first people in all of history to ingest the substance. If you don't think this is inherently dangerous behavior I don't know what to tell you. I don't think it detracts from their goal of harm reduction, but that element of the community exists and I do think it warrants more scrutiny than immediately dismissing my argument.

If you want to read a well researched book on the phenomenon, pick up Drugs 2.0 by Mike Power. It's on amazon's UK site.

Definitely, if you want to see an extreme example of it take a look at Tumblr. The echo-chamber nature of the site leads to a positive feedback loop of certain illnesses. In this case I'm thinking of pro-anorexia content of that site being reblogged compulsively and the new content that spawns from such influence is ghastly and viral.

Ask any serious WoW player how the game has impacted their life. From what people have told me, the social relations in-game are such that one becomes reliant on a group and vice-versa to advance in the game. Soon those reliances become responsibilities that start to overshadow real life.

Some anime is specifically drawn and written to take advantage of the type of person that would obsessively envelope themselves into their favorite anime's branding. Do a google image search for otaku, and you will immediately see the kind of profits people peddling 50 different editions of the same figurine must be raking in.

Take a look a bluelight.ru and erowid. The former is a forum for discussion of psychoactives the latter a index of chemicals and experience reports submitted by users. Instead of the harm reduction espoused, it encourages dangerous behavior in the name of 'sharing research'; which is just ingesting what could be a chemical without much human research and just writing about it. One wouldn't be compelled to put themselves in such a position if it wasn't normalized and encouraged by a community that was warped by a pattern of addictive behavior.

Grouphug.us is another example. Reddit certainly is as well. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc all provide that supplemental 'reward' of positive human interaction without the human component. Your brain isn't stupid, when actual human interaction doesn't provide the reward you WANT, it will learn where it can get it. Psychological addiction is quite the beast.