09bjb

I've read up a bit on the research, and it sounds like a next-day or 48-hour "blues period" is par for the course after an MDMA session. They mitigate this problem by making sure that your schedule is clear of obligations the next day and warning the patient about it ahead of time.

The impact of MDMA in these trials is that it's not "a few hours of excitement": the drug often helps the patient make large, permanent breakthroughs in their trauma or self-image that wouldn't be possible without the "life preserver" of the substance. Going through the trauma and reorienting oneself to it in a new, healthy way seems much more possible (to many people anyway, certainly those with full-on diagnosable PTSD) with the help of MDMA.

Agreed. My deep dive (reading the academic papers, etc.) trying to confirm that the TSA millimeter wave scanners are harmless came up with more questions than answers. If this tech uses the same spectrum then I'm giving casinos a +1 for potential cancer risk.

Yes. There's no other way to get it legally.

"Should" (in any moral sense) and "Monsanto" don't play nicely together.

Yeah this one has been tricky. I haven't bothered to spend a ton of time on it, but I've done a deep dive or two on a user's history when it seems suspicious...and often had my suspicions amplified. Lots of pro- industry stuff and not a lot of discussion on other topics. Sometimes it's just people who work in the industry and have a huge portion of their identity influencing their view...which given that they have some expertise and lingo complicates things. But sometimes it's just a laughably one-dimensional HN account.

One note; in general, I think we tend to diminish finding when we find out that the placebo effect is partly behind them. Wrongly, in my opinion. Better reactions might be, "Wow, we take this action and our bodies/brains take care of the rest of the effect through some placebo magic? That's amazing!!"

Not sure why this is getting tons of downvotes. Warby Parker's profitability per retail square foot is one of the highest in all of retail mostly because there's such a distance between what their frames cost to make and what they sell them for. Limited choice (Trader Joe's style) and a good sense for the products their target market wants seem to be their secret sauces to pulling off crazy margins on said products.

Get and use a chemical assay kit of some kind. Trust but verify.

As in, there was a legitimate possibility in the 60s or with OWS that the movement would pick up enough momentum to really shake things up, power-structure-wise.

I don't think there's a firm consensus on the reasoning, but it's generally acknowledged that the Sch. 1 classification of the psychedelics was motivated to 1) quell their threat of cultural and political destabilization and 2) to keep hippies and blacks in check. The 60s were similar to Occupy Wall Street: there's major (valid) fear on the part of the establishment when a radically different movement picks up steam. Psychedelics were (rightly) considered a partial fuel to the new movement.

I also agree that the U.S. is much less of a monoculture now and people generally agree that others should be able to live, think, and believe whatever and however they want.

I'd highly recommend watching "Blackfish" for some insight into this sort of phenomenon with a more domestic spin (spoiler, it's about SeaWorld's acquisition of and treatment of their Orcas).

How? Is there a simple solution that would work in the U.S. as well? Most people I've heard that are reasonably informed about it here invariably end up with, "It's complicated, because it's a combination of issues spanning mental health, law enforcement, drug policy, etc..."

When I last checked Rotten Tomatoes and saw a bunch of yet-another-damn-superhero movie with 90+% scores, I wondered if this was the case. Knowing that at least eight out of ten movies Hollywood puts out are riskless, brain-dead re-hashes of the usual proven plot/style formulas...and that RottenTomatoes was rating many of these "near-perfect"...that was the last time I visited RT expecting to get some help with what movie to see in theaters.

Anyone blaming Hollywood putting out mostly garbage as the source of Hollywood's woes? Netflix and the rest of the new owners of scripted video content know that you need great stuff if you're going to expect guaranteed viewership.

Graham Hancock dedicates at least 10% of his most recent book "Fingerprints of the Gods" to exploring the recent evidence for a cataclysmic meteor impact that catalyzed the precipitous drop in global temperatures we observe 12900 years ago at the "Younger Dryas Boundary." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas#Impact_hypothesi...

He has some pretty out there theories but that section is pretty convincing.

Free lunches, pens, merchandise, cruises...all of these tactics work and have proven ROI for the drug manufacturers. They've known for years that they're worthwhile investments. It's not really the doctor's fault, it's just reality until there's stricter regulation.

I agree with all of your points. Science costs money. Somehow, however, we've made incredible scientific progress over the last 650 years with Science and Industry tightly dependent on one another (Science on Industry to conduct new research, and Industry on Science to open up new possible products and markets).

Unless we change something we'll get Industry stifling new knowledge (as in your examples) and stagnating as a result of its own actions. All that said...somehow it's worked fairly well for centuries, so I'm reluctant to accept heinous actions like these as the status quo, even if corporations can usually be counted on to act in their own short-term best interests.

Yeah absolutely. Without an explanation of what the units are it's worse than useless. "Here's a diagram of an arbitrary metric I invented. Scary, isn't it?"

I'm no climate science denier but stuff like this just adds fuel to the fire. You might say we're just supposed to take it on faith ;)

"Hacker News is fake. It's all fake. I asked to shut it down. Wonderful!" /s

It's not a semantic argument. It's important to make it plain, before having a reasoned discussion, that there are legal drugs that people use every day but wrongly categorizes as "not drugs." Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine being the main culprits. Food, exercise, and social media also cause experience-shifting changes in neurotransmitters (the drugs that are always mediating your experience). It's important to get this straight before lumping things that are illegal into a poorly-conceived category.

I think this is what everyone is missing. If we're treating college strictly as a financial ROI calculation (which, partly, it is) it's obviously getting dicier by the year. This is exacerbated by Colleges and Universities treating every major from Economics to Cultural Studies as if they held roughly equal career prospects (they obviously don't).

Yes, it is a luxury to have the time to take a step back and consider your own society from a wider lens than "how can I beter secure my financial future this week." But without experiences like College, gap years, travel, and other "frivolities," you'll most likely end up as yet another short-sighted member of upper class who's spent a majority of their lifetime's creative power accumulating and hoarding wealth. Many don't have the bandwidth for both personal security and a strong social conscience, and I don't blame them for it...but I sure wish there were more with that ability.

Money is a very powerful tool and 18 is usually not old enough to be done with the formative experiences that will determine what you do with that power.

I don't see a problem with this. Habits are self-reinforcing, good or bad. If you can interrupt a bad habit once, or start a good habit once, you give yourself more momentum for the next go-round. You have X probability of successfully doing it the first time, and you may or may not do what you set out to. But whether you do affects the probability that you'll do it the next time. And I'd be wary of anyone that claims that they never, ever, have any say in the matter when it comes to doing something once, even if it's hard.

I do agree with you in that by this same logic, you have a better chance of arriving at great self-control if you start with decent self-control.

Yeah I'm not losing any sleep over the obvious subjective difference between crap headphones and medium- to high-end ones. If the metric du jour isn't picking up any difference then, sorry brother, probably not a good metric.

"New study shows no difference in speed of blue vs. red light!" We always ascribe waaay to much importance to what we can measure easily.

So, this work was done in C. elegans, a worm, on one class of drug used on colorectal cancer. So, obviously there's still a long ways to go, but there's enough noise in the gut bacteria space at this point to know that they're very important in a variety of ways to our health.

Yeah...I'm all for this approach, except for the part that assumes you're going to buy a book that you're not going to read immediately. Totally viable and possibly useful...if you have 10x more money than you need.

I also appreciated all the oblique suggestions that our appreciation of what we don't know, and how we should temper our certitude, should INCREASE with greater knowledge. Way too many PhD types out there stomping on people with their expansive knowledge when they should know better than most the degree to which they're in the dark.

There are two guaranteed downsides to annuities: 1) they generally fall into the "insurance" category, and as we know insurance companies can get in trouble and even go under, and 2) there is a 0% chance that your annuity will outlive you. If you had $1M and withdrew roughly 4% for the rest of your life, there's a decent chance it would be worth MORE than a $1M when all is said and done. The annuity takes advantage of that fact.

Like other forms of insurance, they're probably going to make money on you. Unlike health/car insurance, this type isn't legally required or usually a good idea.

Didn't know we'd already been screwed for so long :)

Sorry, not constructive at all...I just had to.

You're probably remembering "Food, Inc."

I know. And that landlady that had enough money leftover to take a yearly vacation and attend real estate meetups for professional development! "Monster" may be too generous.

If anyone here thinks you can take investment and usury out of any economy, I'd highly recommend David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5000 Years". Totally viable, assuming we all go back to hunting and gathering.

One way or another, the poor need to be able to afford the basic necessities in life, housing included. Making anything that vaguely sounds like "rent-seeking" illegal is not going to fix it. How will anyone retire if dividends are illegal? Do we go back to a communist system, where you're required to work for government (benevolent, of course) for a fixed number of years? Where will the money come from to invest in a trailer that's "squalid"?

I tried researching this a while back and opted for the molestation (at least one qualified for that term). I recently went back to zapping out of cumulative annoyance. Any good resources that review the radiation type and dose?

I disagree that it can bring a person too far away from their physical reality. On the contrary, it can bring to into such acute awareness of all of your senses in the present moment that those around you feel painfully distracted, or even creeped out by your expansive attention.

Not that this a state I attain very frequently :P