78 karma · joined February 8, 2019
In my opinion, not having your property taken unfairly by the police is more of a basic right everyone should enjoy, rather than a special right afforded to citizens like voting.
It seems that transit in the Bay Area serves multiple purposes.
1) Getting you from point A to point B.
2) Mobile climate-controlled shelter for homeless people.
My claim is that purpose 1 is at odds with purpose 2. I’m all for solutions to the problem of not enough shelter. I don’t think the SFMTA is the solution, or if it is, then we should accept that companies like Uber are going to take its market share for purpose 1.
1) He probably has been abused and harmed many times, perhaps in his childhood.
2) He probably expects the worst from people, and thinks that everyone is out to get him.
3) He may be suffering from schizophrenia and literally thought I was attacking him somehow (I was sitting across from him with earbuds in reading a kindle).
4) Becuase there is not enough housing to go around here, the standards are higher, in terms of having an agreeable personality/job skills/overall shit-togetherness to secure a place to live, whether by earning a salary or staying on a friend’s couch or in a homeless shelter.
5) Feedback loops mean that once you are homeless, you suffer a lot and all of the above issues probably get worse.
My personality is such that I end up caring about and loving people that I spend time around or think about a lot. But I’ve learned the hard way that even if you love someone, you need to look out for yourself when trying to help them.
There are a lot of problems with Uber, but one thing it’s not is the cheapest and most convenient climate-controlled shelter for the city’s destitute mentally ill.
Please, if you’re going to make bets, stick to those that might have a positive expected value!
The most aggregious frivolous lawsuits make big news, or at least the ones that look frivolous when portrayed from the right perspective. You hear less about the day-in, day-out work the civil justice system does in keeping people honest and holding society and the economy together. There is a reason companies from around the world sign contracts with one another stating that their disputes will be settled in US courts - because it’s the legal system they trust to make the most consistent and fair choices.
Could you elaborate on that? I feel like those labels could all describe the same people depending on their life experiences. The psychological factors that result in high-achievers in academia and industry seeking prestige are too subtle for me to understand well enough to think of any of these people as “shitbags”.
McFarland has been conclusively shown to be a con-man (eg. spammed the Fyre attendee email list selling tickets to nonexistent celebrity meet-and-greets while he was out on bail). We should take narratives that benefit him at the expense of people he lied to with a big lump of salt, given his ability to manipulate.
Group A: Drugs like benzos, alcohol, and opioids provide pleasant sensations upfront, killing your pains and anxieties, but those problems return in even worse form when the drug wears off. It’s as though your brain’s baseline for what counts as suffering had been lowered by the experience of being coddled. It’s very clear how this leads to compulsive redosing and addiction.
Group B: Psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and LSD induce unpleasant feelings as they take effect, followed by a more positive (perhaps euphoric) experience once the brain adjusts to the presence of the drug, and then less potent pleasant after-effects when the drug wears off. It seems like the brain has raised the bar for suffering - suddenly the fact that you can see things in the correct color, gravity is pointing in the right direction, and you have clarity of thought makes life feel easy. You might redose to extend the peak effects, but you aren’t going to take any more for a while once it wears off. It would be tough to get addicted to these. However, a depressed person might have trouble with the come-up, and could experience a panic attack. You’d want a very skilled therapist if you’re trying to treat depression this way.
IMO ketamine kind of straddles the line here. The onset of the dissociation can be stressful, but it’s not that hard. You don’t forget your problems, but they feel like the problems of somebody that you know closely and care a lot about, so you can try to solve them from a different perspective. You can feel that you are doing something great, which can lead to compulsive redosing, but you keep the lessons you learn when it wears off. It’s not as though your problems come back in even worse form like you get with group A. Although if you really blast yourself, the dissociation can get so strong that you don’t care about your problems at all, which gives you more of a group A experience while you are peaking. I’m not a scientist and I may be wrong about this, but I think the antidepressant effects are not caused directly by the drug or metabolites that one could become tolerant of. I think that they are a result of the brain’s recent experience of looking at life from a non-depressed perspective.
Subjectively, it’s not as good a “take the pill and forget your problems” drug as opioids, benzos, and alcohol are. It can be used in that way if you take a huge “k-hole” dose and dissociate completely, and some people do get addicted. But at common doses, certainly whatever they are going to prescribe, it’s more of a “think about your problems and figure out how to solve or accept them” drug like mushrooms and LSD.
However, I’d also consider that there is an infite array of possible risks to address, and we are likely to be biased towards looking into the ones that are related to things we are paying the most attention to.
Due to the financial success of the tech giants, and specifically the shifting of ad spend from newspapers to tech companies, it seems to me we are likely thinking about the dangers of ad tracking too much, rather than too little. The media companies have unfortunately suffered from the success of tech, so it’s not surprising they would be on guard for problems the industry might cause. And Congress, of course, will use both the carrot and the stick to get their piece of the action in the form of campaign contributions.
We have a known-known slow-motion disaster happening right in front of us, that has already seriously damaged world we live on, and is projected to do much worse. That danger is coming from an industry that has had a lot more time to form stronger influence-trading bonds with the powers that be. I feel like we’re all being distracted with a dog-and-pony show when people are walking around scared about ad tracking when the Earth is burning. Maybe if the tech companies can stay at the top of the heap for a long time spending money buying Congress, loyalties will shift enough for the government to be willing to do what’s needed to put the reigns on extractive energy interests and solve humanity’s #1 problem (it pains me to suggest that buying Congress is ever a good thing, but I’m trying to be optimistic in the face of what seems like a huge disaster).
Whether the parameters of some neural net are trained on the Facebook pictures of your baby you uploaded is entirely insignificant.
On the other hand, the psychological harm this author will do to their baby if they raise them with an attitude of fear and anxiety is likely to cause them to suffer greatly.
I’m not sure what you mean by “pushed to the fringes” - it seems this author’s isolation is self-imposed. I’m familiar with the ways depression and anxiety can isolate a person, so I’m sympathetic. But it’s often not useful to express that fight-or-flight response by trying to spread your anxieties to others. Learning to distinguish which perceived problems actually matter is important. Most of them can be dealt with inside your head, or by talking them through with someone you trust. Learning to do this has greatly improved my quality of life and my personal relationships.