Unpopular opinion but the bots were more fun. You could immediately spot human opponents because it devolved into defensive peeking until someone pixel-perfect portals directly behind the other. When 90% of gunfights end with someone getting shot in the back it doesn’t feel like a fun flanking mechanic anymore.

Oh I’m sure, but it seemed like a different beast. American Idol was really tuned into the characters and personal drama, there was never that much meta-drama. Almost like the Super Bowl vs. World Cup

As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?

Off the top of my head: basic biology so I’m not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I’m not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.

None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.

You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.

Good god, if you went through an entire education and don’t realize how fucked of a take that is I don’t know what to say. Go try again at a different school maybe?

The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.

There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.

The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.

Forgive my American ignorance, but do people actually watch Eurovision as entertainment? I feel like I’ve only ever heard of it as an arena for politics/protest/controversy, never “hey listen to this great song that won”. Is the controversy part of the draw?

I don’t think it’s that crazy or draconian at all. You’re still free to engage in the safest way possible. You have confidence that it’s a safe location and your drug of choice isn’t cut with fentanyl. Why would there be a black market? Addicts generally don’t like buying from untrustworthy sources and passing out in alleyways.

There’s a strange pushback to accepting that humans are physical creatures that evolved for certain stimulus. Society functions by self restraint and a social contract that says, for example, my neighbor won’t go into a stimulant induced psychosis and assault me. Its not a poor reflection on his moral character, that’s just how a human reacts to the substance.

It’s kind of a childish libertarian view to demand full personal freedom at societies’ expense. Your freedom to use a drug anywhere at any time means that the rest of us have to distribute narcan at the library, regulate 45,000 liquor stores, hire more police to counter intoxicated driving, and expand EMS to handle completely preventable emergencies. All that to save you a weekly bus trip to the casino?

Changing the economic system has no impact on any of that, those are the set costs of addiction. Addiction doesn’t cease being a problem because you give up on preventing it. You’re undermining the money going to social services by avoiding simple deterrence-by-inconveince

Any safety and recovery programs are a lot easier to manage when you know exactly where your source is and who’s using. Safe injection sites already exist and have been shown to eliminate overdoses and increase access to social services without any honeypot effect or increased drug use. Adding safe and tested drug sales to the site is a pretty logical step.

Requiring transportation is a detail for implementation, you already need it to do anything in the USA. Unless you think every person has a right to get drugs delivered to their doorstep?

There’s reasonable balances between free and total access to liquor stores on every corner and locking up every bathtub moonshiner.

A good part of the reason prohibition failed was 10,000 years of societal dependence with no alternatives. Humans aren’t built for the sedentary lifestyle and structured civilization we’ve built up and we really do need something to compensate.

We now have the technology and medical knowledge to reliably treat mental and physical ailments, we don’t need ethanol as our cure-all. If I could snap my fingers and swap professional treatment and healthy recreational norms for traditional drugs I’d do it in a heartbeat.

with crystal meth the statistics say, that only a few percent (we’re talking 1-2%) get addicted.

Couldn’t find the numbers on meth specifically but I’m highly skeptical.

70% of users who try an illegal drug before age 13 develop a substance abuse disorder within the next 7 years compared to 27% of those who try an illegal drug after age 17.

25.4% of illegal drug users have a drug disorder.

I’d argue that any form of self medication is inherently unhealthy, and free access to legal substances doesn’t fix that. Some people are able to navigate it responsibly but it’s not possible for most people.

The human brain is a complex soup of chemicals and electrical impulses, altering it with a substance won’t result in an objective self assessment of the effects.

Taking your example, plenty of normal and reasonably happy people get addicted to opiods. The first experiences are on such a different scale to regular chemical pleasure your brain generates that it alters your perception of normal feelings.

If you ask someone to compare that high to normal life before or after, they’ll tell you they never experienced “true” happiness before.

There are real, observable, permanent changes to brain structure from drug use. I don’t think that type of change should be taken lightly with personal experimentation. It should have the same scrutiny and medical guardrails that we give other permanent body choices.

For anyone interested, some reading on heroin’s impact on the brain

Deal 🤝

I’m of the opinion that unless it’s regulated in some way, people will be systemically/individually exploited. An addict can’t be trusted to keep doses safe, be sure they’re using in a safe place, or properly prioritize their personal wellness.

Just recognize it’s something that’s going to happen and take reasonable efforts to set limits without glamourizing it. Controlling ease of access is a simple way to do that (look at the bump in gambling problems since the 2018 SCOTUS ruling). You don’t have to kick in the doors of everyone with a personal grow or basement home brewing setup.

If these substances could be handled universally with education and social mores, total abstinence would have already worked. No amount of taboo can make crippling addiction sexy.

I don’t care about health benefits/dangers of any vice as much as I hate how ingrained vices are in our daily lives. I’m sick of beer ads, I hate online sports betting sponsoring every event (and rapidly turning a lot of friends into gamblers), my recently weed-legal state is already flooded with local ads and shitty shops.

I dream of a utopia where no vices are sold in a store or advertised. If you want to indulge you go to the equivalent of a Native American casino on steroids. It’s a massive temple to hedonism, zoning for it is very restricted. You can do any drug you want there, everything carefully dosed and tested. There’s complimentary trip-sitters and emergency services on call.

Things that aren’t an immediate threat to yourself/others (mushrooms, lsd, mj, low abv drinks, etc…) can be sold for private personal consumption off-prem with a reasonable limit per person. You can’t partake in public and can be asked for proof of purchase during transit.

There’s no perverse vice tax that leeches money from addicts who can’t afford it, the government’s best financial interest is to keep people clean and spending money elsewhere. If you need something to routinely “take the edge off” you get easy access to medical services (mental/physical/otherwise) and a prescription from a real doctor.

Any time I hear arguments for full legalization of anything in the USA I just have nightmares of inane Budweiser-style weed/cocaine/heroin commercials.

I might be alone on this but the freezing point of water is almost irrelevant in daily life. Any precipitation from 30°F (-1°C) to 35°F (1.5°C) results in some mix of snow/slush. Less than that and it’s snow/ice.

However if you live somewhere where they use salt as a de-icer, knowing the freezing point of saltwater (0°F, -17.7°C) is very, very important.

https://brainasap.com/adrenaline-addiction-rock-climbers-thrill-seeking-behavior/

I’m all for letting people have the hobbies they want, but adrenaline junkies are literally wired differently. Kind of weird that they get put on a pedestal for being the “right” kind of neurodivergent.

I’m starting to think you’ve never been to college

“I’m too poor to not give money to a regressive university”

Bama has over 40k students enrolled and less than 200 bothered to even protest this shitbag giving a commencement speech. There wasn’t even a movement to skip attending the event at all.

I know college students at minor schools, I know people who work in admissions at major universities, I know grad students who are single parents. I know people who handle scholarships and grant funding.

Yeah college is an expensive bureaucracy and not having money makes it harder. But trust me when I say that anyone scraping by at a flagship university has a way out. This isn’t cold hearted bootstraps, the university system is probably the most supportive career institution in America (if you’re a student).

There are a plethora of ways to show you give a shit and resources to help you do it. The people still at Bama don’t give a shit.

They’re college students. They already moved to live in Tuscaloosa, have temp/seasonal jobs and all of their possessions fit in 2-3 suitcases. Millions of students accomplish this every year for much weaker reasons. Stop acting like it’s uprooting a family of 4.

The options are how you spend your money. Improving tree density can have more benefits for the same budget spend. If that’s the case, keep my tram gray and let me hear more birds.

Like I said, there are 13 other institutions that are also in state where you can get the same aid. And that doesn’t even matter for the 67% from out of state, they could save money on the switch.

You have a pretty limited view of higher ed if you think there’s no way to attend a university that doesn’t have these problems.