1,411 karma · joined November 14, 2012
when it comes to social media of any type, if your grandma is using it, you don't want to be using it, since it must be for old people.
according to teenager logic, anyway.
I don't think my ISP choice is a result of free market capitalism. It seems an awful lot like collusion against the free market, against competition, locking me down to one ISP depending in which region I happen to live.
Suggesting this is somehow equivalent is way off the mark, at best it is grasping for straws.
Trump not sitting down with MSNBC to discuss immigration would be equivalent. Barring media outlets is completely unprecedented, because we have freedom of the press in the United States.
It's an actual transcript. I'm a little flabbergasted.
In fact, I'd say it's downright ominous.
FCC is in the middle of legalizing regional monopolies, DEA is busy banning Kratom in the middle of the worst opiate crisis in decades, and the White House is barring media outlets from press briefings.
it doesn't even sound like I'm talking about America, right? something is very, very wrong.
That's 80 dollars for one 80 milligram pill, which is about 6 hours worth of a high for someone crushing and snorting it. Less time well per dollar spent if they're smoking or injecting them, more if it's being taken orally.
Also, keep in mind that Oxycontin was reformulated to be resistant to crushing, meaning that suddenly a lot of addicts were up shit creek without a paddle when they couldn't snort/smoke/inject or even chew the pill they just bought.
Heroin, on the other hand, is much cheaper, more potent, and more widely available than Oxycontin could ever hope to be.
When you're that deep in the hole of addiction, you start thinking of heroin not as evil, but as a cheap, potent substitute for the prescription pills you've been throwing money away on. It's a fucked up path that too many have walked.
They are both over and under-prescribed. Pain is both over and undertreated every day in every state in the country. There are pill mills, there are stingy ER's and clinics, it goes both ways. It isn't one or the other.
On one hand, you have doctor shopping.
On the other, you have legitimate chronic pain sufferers turning to the street to make ends meet.
My grandparents bought pills from the black market at black market prices to fill the gap of under treatment. At the same time, people were paying cash-only pain management clinics for prescriptions which they were filling multiple times.
There will always be abusers, lawmakers and activists need to realize that you can't regulate or price someone out of an addiction (or a dependency.)
There is a staggering difference between addiction (which usually involves abuse) and dependency (which usually involves no abuse)
Addiction to prescription opiates leads to one of two roads. The problem road is heroin. For example:
Let's say you get addicted because you abuse the pills prescribed to you after surgery. You continue to maintain your addiction with drugs purchased from the street, then at some point you remember that heroin exists and is dirt cheap compared to the dollar per milligram you were paying for oxycodone. Suddenly, heroin doesn't seem so evil. Now you have a new perspective about heroin, mainly that it's cheaper and more potent than prescription pills.
Dependency, meanwhile, can be maintained under a doctors supervision for years. Pain can be managed with prescription opiates safely and effectively, increasing the quality of life of someone who suffers from pain every single day.
It's a multi-faceted issue with many variables, you can't really reduce it down to one sentence or another. There is no easy solution, either. You can't under-prescribe or prosecute doctors, that just hurts the people suffering the most.
I know what the solution isn't, though: banning fucking kratom. this entire thing is a complete and total structure fire, and the DEA is trying to immediately move to Schedule I a powdered leaf that stops withdrawals for addicts. For the opiate naive, taking powdered kratom leaf results in a light buzz. For an opiate addict, it's no buzz + immediate relief of withdrawal symptoms.
There is always methadone and suboxone, but these drugs are extremely long-acting. Meaning that if and when you come off of them, you will be in withdrawals for weeks or even months. For comparison, short-acting opiates like heroin withdrawals last about a week, maybe two.
Now that you know this, it might not surprise you to hear that methadone patients often switch back to shorter-acting drugs like heroin to attempt to get clean.
Ironic, isn't it?
I also wonder how often they do it, and why. You don't win any money, there is no incentive I can make out beyond bragging rights.
I mean, they aren't exactly footraces, right? It's an endurance test, IMO. Usually for charity, people usually participate for the exercise and show support for a good cause, or so I always assumed.
Winning seems totally arbitrary on one hand, but on the other hand I have to assume people do compete on some level, which makes the cheating more sensible, if you think about it in that sense.
I cheated once when I was a teenager at an online competitive game, so I'm not completely ignorant about the temptation of cheating. I'm used to people cheating at competitive online games, they're usually underskilled and looking to compensate, underage, just looking to spoil the fun, or some combination of those.
Maybe that's the intention here, to spoil the fun for those looking to compete. I suppose I'll never really know, but I can't help but ponder it whenever it comes up.
>The Moon does not exist!
>This is no lie. Until recently, I, too, believed in the traditional, establishment view of the moon. But any thinking person, untainted by the biases imposed on us by the controlled media, will have no choice but to reach the conclusion I did once faced with the facts described in this account.
Replace Moon with whatever you want.
Holocaust, Moon landing, 9/11, etc.
I love it, absolutely fantastic.
The article mentions such a hoax would not have been possible before 1830 or so, because the technology wasn't around to spread information in such a way. They also point out that due to the presence of newsboys selling papers around New York City, nearly the entire city heard about the "lunar discoveries" around the same time, making it a shared experience.
It reminds me of the way we receive information now. When stories hit, they hit everywhere at once, but also stagger out over time.
You might see a story online first, then hear it on network or cable news later that evening.
The next day, it's in print. You might discuss it on social media, in a comment section on a website, etc. Only to find yourself discussing it again when it's on TV in the evening with those close to you.
It's a neat look at the power of mass media back when mass media was still budding on the vine, nearly 200 years ago. It only became more interesting when I began to consider the influence and power of modern mass media.
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p.s. To think that a group of clergymen had written to the falsely accredited astronomer to see if there was any way science might let them spread gospel to the lunar people, hah! I had a good laugh over that.
p.p.s. I've always loved reading about hoaxes, thanks OP for sharing this link, this is why I use aggregators! Much appreciated, I'll check out the rest of the site after I've finished this one.
p.p.p.s. I also found myself learning some new words while reading this. credulity, for example.
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Excuse the formatting, but I wanted to discuss this as well:
>Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati — students and professors, doctors in divinity and law — and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. Have you seen the accounts of Sir John Herschel's wonderful discoveries? Have you read the Sun? Have you heard the news of the man in the Moon? These were the questions that met you every where. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story.
What a neat perspective on how this affected a college campus.
It spread like a virus, infecting all those who came into contact with it, no one doubted or questioned the information, and all likely continued to spread it themselves as fact.
It had to have become a game of Telephone at some point, wouldn't you think?
As the information got further away from the "source" it seems like it would be susceptible to having details omitted, twisted, changed entirely or remembered incorrectly.
Of course not everything there was terrible, but the signal to noise ratio was unreasonable IMO, similar to how Greenlight has flooded Steam's new releases with mobile ports and other undesirable software of questionable quality and price.
I love indie games, but I think services like Greenlight have been long since abandoned by anyone who cares and have been overrun by pay-for-vote services, shovelware and pre-packaged asset packs being sold as a completed, original title.
Luckily it's being killed off, after 800 votes on Greenlight I did nothing to stem the tide of crapware flooding the platform. With over 40% of Steam's titles added in the past year alone, there is clearly a problem with lowering the barrier of entry to game development and publishing so far down that games become mix-and-match premade assets, teenager developed memegames, etc. Is it really "starting somewhere" if you're running a legal scam to make a quick buck?
I did mix up the two storefronts, Xbox Live Arcade had some awesome indie titles like Geometry Wars, etc. It was the other one that was basically a dumping ground.
>most of the time it's a student producing something with programmer graphics.
this is fine by me, but don't you think something like that should be shamefully hidden away, part of a portfolio, or better suited as a free browser game? Or even a PWYW title on Itch.io.
Surely they don't need to be on Steam of all places.
Pixel Dungeon was an excellent mobile port of an excellent mobile game, was priced fairly and is right at home on Steam. On the other hand, several mobile titles are overpriced and poorly ported. I don't think that's what Greenlight was intended to do.
Sorry for the stupid question.
There were one joke games for a dollar, just like Steam has now.
There were overpriced games, bad games, shit games. Stuff that should be shamefully hidden on a hard drive long forgotten.
I am certainly glad about the death of Greenlight, and from what I can tell all the "indie@xbox" hype leading up to the launch of the One has been unfulfilled, with those games seemingly ending up on the PS4 instead.
I suppose whoever sells the most consoles gets to have the most indie titles.
Then again, I don't own either console, so maybe "indie@xbox" is better off than I'm thinking it is.
Nintendo had indie games like Stardew Valley ported over to the Wii U, IIRC, so I expect to see similar footwork done for the Switch.
I know police as a whole are not evil. I've been let off the hook by police quite a few times, had an officer give me a ride home when I was stranded after walking several miles as a teenager, etc.
Police retaliation happens, though. Corruption exists, etc. It's not a huge stretch to imagine local police retaliating against someone who whips out a cell phone.
Even if the courts won't convict that person of a crime, police can very much exact revenge just by paying more attention to you than they might have otherwise.
Stopping you without cause, searching you without cause, detaining you without reason. There are plenty of ways I could imagine retaliating against a citizen if I was corrupted/otherwise morally compromised, empowered as a police officer, and had a grudge.
tl;dr: I'm not casting all cops as evil, I'm stupid, but not that stupid.
I'm only speculating that this court decision might not stop an officer with a grudge from retaliating against a civilian.
It's perfectly logical, and wasn't intended as a generalization against police. I'm not a cop-hater.
I have a similar story of inept police and injustice:
I have an uncle who is a real piece of work. A druggie who my great-grandparents adopted, raised and supported until they both died.
One night he was at my great-grandparents house, harrassing them for money and threatening them. My poor great-grandfather, a 71 year old man at the time, called 911. The operator heard my uncle scream something about killing my grand-grandmother. I guess he was coming off of drugs.
By the time the local sheriff's office responded to the call, my uncle Tim was long gone. The only male present was my 71 year old great-grandfather, so the two deputies incompetently assumed he was the perpetrator.
They didn't even let him put on shoes.
They manhandled my poor grandfather. They took him to jail and he slept on the floor of a cell. He was extremely injured, my mother was furious and encouraged him to press charges. But he was a stubborn old man who spent most of his life as a fire-and-brimstone pastor of a church, in other words he was too polite to take them to court.
The pictures of his injuries are burned into my brain. Massive scrapes, his thin skin peeled back. Bruises all over his face and body. The idea of him sleeping on the floor of a cell...absolutely sickening.
He died a few years later, stomach cancer. He was a great man. I miss him.
p.s. I also have a story of that same department doing me great justice, so keep in mind that it was the two assholes who responded, not the entire sheriff's office that was to blame.
Some of those deputies were good people who saved my ass a few times, let me off the hook a few times, etc. I will say that I'm glad to have moved, though.
Sure, it won't hold up in court if they take you to jail, but it could possibly make your life hell for 24 hours at the very least.
You could lose your job being detained, for example. IIRC they can hold you that long with no justification or reason required, but I'm not a laywer so take that with a grain of salt.
Or weeks, if they really wanted to fuck with you. Just leaving a patrol car around your house for awhile is pretty unsettling.
Maybe I'm overthinking this. I certainly don't want to get on the wrong side of my local PD. I don't even want them to know my name, much less stop me every time they see me or otherwise retaliate against me because I whipped out a cell phone.
It's almost like a chilling effect, if I have that concept right. I might be mixing that up with another term. Thinking of police retaliation makes me not want to record the police at all, out of fear of retaliation.
Corporate surveillance, with the intention of advertising to me no doubt, or selling what they can learn about me to advertisers.
I also assume any text messaging over Facebook Messenger can be used against me in a court of law. I don't imagine it's encrypted whatsoever.
It's been back and forth since the start of the drug war.
Sure, people walk it over occasionally. They have submersibles, tunnels dug waiting to be completed North Korean style, functional tunnels, etc. I'd bet they have drones, or are R&Ding drone smuggling.
Cars and trucks coming through the border, decoy cars and trucks meant to be discovered so that something bigger gets through. Trap doors in sedans, faked shipments in trucks, shipping containers in ports with falsified information hidden among the masses of imports.
These guys are not going to pack up shop and sell bars of soap because of a wall. Where there is a will, there is a way.
If you were joking, I'm sorry for assuming otherwise. Poe's Law, I suppose.
My point is that the demand is incredibly high. Drugs that are worth very little along that corridor are worth much, much more on the streets of the US.
People will continue to risk life and limb, as well as take life and limb, as long as the War on Drugs continues. The potential profit is too great.
No mediocre substitute holds up to real butter, cow farts and ethics be damned.
This is coming from someone who thought Country Crock was real butter until I was a teenager, because that's what my mother always bought.
I can't even put it in macaroni and cheese these days, let alone on my toast.
Even the expensive stuff like "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" is nearly repulsive compared to real butter IMO.
I wonder what might have become of him had he become a chemist. Nothing remarkable, maybe. Might have been even more mundane than the reality of spycraft.
You hear this same thing about food stamps in the US, to the point that Republican lawmakers start calling for big-government style drug testing (at the taxpayers expense) of welfare recipients.
Wasteful spending and big government bullshit coming from one hand, while the mouth can't stop talking about cutting back on both.
I'll never switch again.
I prefer noscript to scriptsafe, I refuse to browse without a whitelister. I like the fact that the mobile version supports the extensions I see as vital.
Chrome has one thing going for it, market share. which is why I keep Chromium installed for when I can't log into citibank to pay a bill, etc.
Also, when I was a teenager without my own computer, my mother used to think Firefox was a virus. She'd tell me "uninstall that mozzarella foxfire virus IMMEDIATELY!"
that always makes me laugh.
I guess Mozzarella Foxfire hasn't burnt enough of their goodwill to scare me off for good the way Google has.
oh, maybe we can use one of those automated lawyers! Do they support 'government sold you out' suits yet or is that a couple years off still?
The flagging feature is not a "hide" button. Try the "hide" feature to make posts disappear.
the brain needs sleep, we aren't sure why, but stimulant psychosis does a pretty good job of proving that you start to break down after depriving yourself of sleep. paranoia, hallucinations, etc are all very common with this kind of stimulant abuse where you're keeping your body awake for days at a time.
generally speaking, if you use stimulants (or "wakefulness promoting agents" like modafinil) regularly you should be dosing first thing in the morning after feeding yourself, not re-dosing, eating what you can when you can and sleeping each night as much as possible.