cowboysauce

Here's another viewpoint: just because there's no job that I I would enjoy doing doesn't mean that I don't enjoy anything. There are so many things that I enjoy doing, but no company is going to pay me 100K a year to just do whatever I want.

Furthermore, what I enjoy changes radically from month to month. Earlier this month I was enthralled by geology and thought about how awesome it would be to be a geologist. Now, something else has captured my attention and I rarely think about geology. Soon, I'll move on to something else.

So, at best, a job can keep my interest for maybe 2 to 3 months, I'm burned out within a year and I can usually manage to stay for about two years total before my productivity abruptly drops to near zero. To me a job is solely a means to obtain money and time off so that I can go do what I actually enjoy.

To me, you're just as much as an enigma. How could you possibly enjoy doing the same thing for a long period of time? What do you do when you are consumed by the euphoria that comes when you finally find something new that finally scratches that insatiable itch inside of you? The indescribable joy and obsession that makes everything that's come before seem empty and jejune by comparison?

Though I have been diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD, so that probably explains a lot of it.

>And it's sad that people associate having a sugary beverage as a 'good time with friends.' Lets enjoy poison together?! :-/

Oh boy, just wait until you learn about alcohol.

The article cites research that shows that the percentage of Americans with 10+ close friends have dropped from 33 to 13 percent since 1990. I wonder how much of that can be attributed to a change is what is considered a close friend? Just keeping in touch with other people used to be much more difficult and I wonder if the proliferation of cell phones and then smartphones has raised the bar. I wonder if friendship changed from just needing to keep in touch to having to directly support each other's emotional needs.

Personally, I can't imagine having that many close friends (and how many more non-close friends do you have?). To me it seems like it would require an almost obsessive level of effort to maintain, like to the extent that it's basically the only thing you do outside of work. Which I suppose would have been easier without the internet to distract you, but still.

If you're traveling at 0.9c then there will be significant time dilation. Since velocity is relative, both parties will see each other as severely time dilated which can lead to somebody receiving a reply to a message before they send it.

A lot of chemotherapy agents works by causing DNA damage and are therefore carcinogenic themselves.

Despite my initial comment, I'm pro-hairdryer. If it works when nothing else does, then do it. I'm even pro-hairdryer in the sense that it could be used as a stop gap until the patient learns more effective ways to manage their OCD.

I think what bothers me about is that Scott doesn't mention that there are legitimate drawbacks to the solution in the story. It's a nice "thinking outside of the box" story but to use it as an excuse to be smug and very much "I'm better than the rest of these psychiatrists who don't actually want to help you" is distasteful.

That's strange. My impression came from his article about the Chamber of Guf where he talks about pure OCD, but it sounds like he's only read about it and never actually met someone with it.

I wonder if the disconnect is in taking the story in an idealistic way vs a practical way. Like sure, if you had someone for whom that works utterly when nothing else works then yeah, do that. But I don't think that's a realistic scenario.

I've read most of Scott's blog posts and he rarely mentions OCD and when he does it tends to be "this is what I think people with OCD experience" and not "this is what my patients have told me" which leads me to believe that he is not an expert in OCD.

I have OCD and it's ruined my life in ways that are hard to articulate. Which is why I can point out two good reasons why what's being described might not be a good idea. First, giving into compulsions just legitimizes them and reinforces the patterns that are central to OCD and can ultimately make things worse. Secondly, OCD has a habit of changing how it manifests. Sure, maybe the woman is no longer bothered by the hairdryer, but what happens when it becomes changes to worrying if the oven is on? She'll be right back where she started.

I doubt that the anecdote actually happened as described. It's way too contrived, simplistic and borders on "Psychiatrists hate her! Cure your OCD with this one simple trick!". Realistically, OCD is incredibly insidious and if it were that simple to cure then nobody would have OCD. What's described is, at best, a short-term fix and half the psychiatrists likely knew that such things rarely stick.

I've had the same thing happen to me more times than I can count. I think I found the silver bullet, a way to permanently defeat my obsessive thoughts. If I'm lucky then it'll last a week before my OCD comes back in full force. But the truth is that you cannot directly fight OCD, it's like squeezing dough. When you clamp down in one spot, it just squirts out somewhere else. There's a quote that I think describes it perfectly "To hate me is to give me breath, to fight me is to give me strength". Fighting OCD or giving into its demands is just falling into its traps. You only truly win when you reach a point where you don't respond to it.

I don't see how that's inconsistent. Slice is used to describe things that are cut from a larger whole, particularly for food, while paper is manufactured as sheets.

>(brown dwarfs that very likely were red dwarfs before)

This is incorrect. Red dwarfs will end their lives as black dwarfs. However, no black dwarfs are currently expected to exist because the universe is not old enough yet. Red dwarfs, in particular, are expected to have lifespan of trillions of years.

Most people who know ASL can also communicate in English, but language skills are a spectrum and some people may know enough to get by in daily life, but may not know enough English to understand more complicated topics. It's really no different than a native Spanish speaker living in the United States. Some may only know a basic level of English while others may be equally comfortable in both languages.

This isn't even unique to the Deaf community. Something like 15 to 20 percent of the general population are considered functionally illiterate.

> Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him

I like to imagine that Finnegans Wake would result in a crash.

> It’s absolutely bonkers that two fairly different sign languages exist for the same base spoken language.

Sign languages are not based off of spoken languages. Sign languages are languages with their own grammar and vocabulary. They are not a method of encoding spoken language like writing is. The history of Nicaraguan Sign Language is a great example of this. In the 70s the government of Nicaragua set up a school for the deaf focused on teaching its students to fingerspell Spanish. Instead, the students spontaneously created their own sign language.

It’s more efficient to burn natural gas directly for heat than to use it to generate electricity which is then used for heating. Typical gas turbines are around 40% efficient, plus a few percent for transmission loses. Though apparently there are some cutting edge turbines that are 60% efficient.

ERCOT does have shutdowns agreements in place, but there’s a limit to what you can do when simultaneously facing record demand and having ~30,000 MW of capacity go offline. For comparison, on Sunday evening demand was roughly 70,000 MW.

>This seems like more of a reason to push for rolling out wireless connectivity in places of natural beauty

I cannot state how strongly I. disagree. Part of the appeal of these places is that you are completely cut off. Destroying that for something as banal as credit card payments is abhorrent to me.

I’d also much rather that the organizations that run these areas spend their money on things other than paying for and maintaining PoS systems. I’ve yet to see one that’s as reliable as a steel post that you jam cash into.

I'd explain it as being irrelevant to this particular conversation since credit/debit cards would also be affected by hyperinflation. Though you'd have the advantage of not having to push a wheelbarrow full of cash around.

>Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations?

I’ve gone camping and hiking in plenty of places that have no cellular service so cash is the only way to pay the fees.

>The fact that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real dollars is insanity and proof that its value is a speculative bubble that’s being driven by anarchist fanatics and criminals.

Or, you know, because the government says that it’s worth 100$ and lets you pay 100$ in taxes with it.

I’m skeptical that dead drops of items purchased on the dark net is common. It seems like too many competing factors that would make it impractical.

Your customers are limited to your immediate geographic area and those who are willing to search for their purchases. The use of cryptocurrency to make purchases is a pretty big barrier for most people and reducing your customer base even further seems like it would make the whole operation uneconomical.

Paradoxically, the purchases should be inconspicuous yet easy to find. The mention of using Bluetooth and WiFi to help guide your customers would help, but at some point you have people out in public (presumably they’re in public because private locations provide even more obstacles) looking for hidden objects. That in itself is pretty conspicuous, even with the greater public knowledge of things like geocaching and Pokémon go (your customers also risk being engaged by those people). Additionally, placing and maintaining your drop locations is conspicuous. All it takes is one person seeing you leaving an object for the bomb squad to get called in.

The idea that a seller could place multiple orders ahead of time and then activate them as required seems odd as well. Your customers are going to have to be okay with buying drugs that could be degraded from being exposed to environmental conditions if the drops are outside (placing them inside of buildings exposes both you and your customers to more scrutiny). Likewise, leaving them for extended periods of time makes it more likely for them to be discovered. You’re also limited by what you’ve previously placed. If a customer wants multiple items, they’ll have to go to multiple drop locations.

There’s also the time and expense of setting up all these drop locations. You don’t want them concentrated because that makes it more likely that your customers will be noticed, but spreading them out will reduce your profit.

Shipping through the mail obviously poses it’s own problems, but it also has a lot of advantages. Mail generally can’t be opened without a warrant, sending and receiving mail is pretty inconspicuous and it gives the buyer more plausible deniability.

The article reads more of a “maybe this is how it could be done” than a “this is how it’s actually being done”.

> The point of national parks isn’t to preserve wilderness for the sake of preservation. The point is recreation.

The national parks service philosophy is very preservationist. They advise people to follow guidelines that are literally called “leave no trace”. Their mission statement uses the word preserve in the first sentence. Hell, part of the reason why Big Bend national park never became an international park (among many others) was because the parks service disagreed with the laxer, conservationist approach that Mexican authorities favored.

>The point is recreation. This is why they are full of artificial modifications like roads, trails, and sometimes attractions with shops and bathrooms.

Those modifications are done carefully to have as little impact on the environment and a lot of types of recreation are completed banned in national parks, hunting being the obvious one. The use of vehicles (including bicycles) is completely banned in federally designated wilderness.

What steps did whoever installed this take to make sure that this thing isn’t going to leech metals into an ephemeral watering hole used by wildlife?

Public health agencies have been encouraging people to lose weight and exercise more for decades. I doubt that COVID-19 is going to motivate people where diabetes and heart disease have failed.

I guess I must just have a high natural tolerance to psychedelics, or maybe weight matters more than people say it does.

Posts like this always make me feel like I’m doing psychedelics wrong somehow because I can never relate to them. I’ve done mushrooms 3 times, LSD once, and I’ve never felt that way. I recently did 3.5g of mushrooms and yeah, there were fractals covering most of my vision, but overall I felt pretty normal. I was definitely more relaxed, emotionally open and introspective, but it wasn’t anything particularly special. Going outside for a walk with the leaves changing wasn’t a mystical experience and having the same police car pass by me twice within a few minutes wasn’t anything unusual. I feel less anxious and depressed in the aftermath, but everyone talks about the psychedelic experience being life-changing and ineffable. And there’s a part of me that wonders why I don’t get that :/

The wikipedia article for Psilocybin has all of the above.

>Psilocybin [...] is a prodrug that is converted into [...] psilocin [...] This chemical reaction takes place under strongly acidic conditions

And for metabolism

>Psilocin is broken down by the enzyme monoamine oxidase [...] Some psilocin is not broken down by enzymes and instead forms a glucuronide [...] Psilocin is glucuronated by the glucuronosyltransferase enzymes UGT1A9 in the liver, and by UGT1A10 in the small intestine

The lemon-tek method of consuming psilocybin mushrooms isn’t related to this. Acidic conditions speed up the conversion of psilocybin into psilocin. This normally happens in your stomach, the lemon-tek method just does externally. This causes the overall experience to be shorter, but more intense. Psilocin also doesn’t appear to be metabolized by the enzymes that grapefruit inhibits.

Because it would increase the number of medications that interact with each other. E.g. you're taking medications A and B, but now A and B come with the potentiating compounds in the pills. So taking both of them could be dangerous. You to go to the hospital and they need to give you C, but it would be dangerous because of the potentiator. It would also make medication management more difficult as people have to remember if they're taking the potentiated drug or not.

I wonder how the perceptual distortions of time that some psychedelics can cause play in with this hypothesis. Psilocybin mushrooms, in particular, can make time seem to pass incredibly slowly. They do have a tendency to make things more interesting and salient than usual which would tie nicely into the presented hypothesis. Though they could also just directly cause neural fatigue as well. There could also be another mechanism at play.

That layer of Venus’ atmosphere isn’t habitable even for Earth extremeophiles. It’s true that the pressure and temperature are similar to that of the Earth, but the only water there is contained in droplets of nearly pure sulfuric acid. No known extremeophiles can survive that.

Those regions contain an unknown substance that absorb UV light. There is currently no connection to this announcement. Though one of the possible causes of those regions is that they are caused by life in Venus’ atmosphere.

The authors of the paper estimated that at least 200 times more volcanic activity than what’s present on the Earth would be required to release that much phosphine into the atmosphere. It’s almost certain that there are active volcanos on Venus, but that much activity is unlikely to have gone unnoticed.