I found that I experienced something similar on stuff as light as adderal/vyvanse/focalin or cigarettes.
As someone who has taken most of the stuff out there I agree with trabant that they help return exit 0, and think it's proportional to the euphoria the drug produces.
I don't think we need to ban them but we need to be honest with ourselves that we're sticking cattle prods in our brains, and to enjoy them for what they are :)
I may not work in healthcare, but I work in health-tech, most of my family worked at a health insurance company for most of their lives, and previous generations were tobacco farmers in KY.
We can build a city on a hill, but what's the point if we can't let loose in the way we want?
>The anti-vice authoritarians only stop here because they would be eviscerated if they tried to ban something like alcohol. But we should be careful about emboldening the moral busybodies with national victories.
Bingo. The state is dictating virtuousness for our own good.
>Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
Yes this is my argument.
>The suggestion that we should restrict healthcare based on the degree to which a person is culpable for their disease is a terrible idea, and impossible to implement.
We talked past each other here.
I did not mean that we should remove an individual's access to healthcare due to their habits.
My intent is that if we're OK with spreading out the cost of health care to every citizen, we must also be OK with the fact that some people will cost more due to their habits. If we feel the need to dictate which habits are proper in order to make the costs more lean, maybe we should reconsider spreading out the costs at all, and hold off on socializing medicine.
Socializing the cost of medicine is not a bad idea, but telling people which habits are proper in order to make the costs more lean is a dangerous idea with no limiting principle.
I must have missed the memo that Prohibition worked after we banned alcohol and weed.
This is a ridiculous overreach. The end game is for people to stop smoking altogether, and while that would be good for American health, this is so unnecessary. It is not the prerogative of our peers to maintain our health.
It is our free right to poison ourselves in the ways we desire. In ten years from now when cigarettes are fully illegal and those "darn ignorant poor people who just can't help themselves because they don't know any better" continue to swell up and die from overeating, are we, the wealthy class, going to dictate what they are allowed to eat?
I wish these were rhetorical questions but as we continue to socialize the cost of medicine we need to be very explicit that we are OK paying for others' bad decisions as part of the package. If not, we should not socialize the cost. Dictating what risky behavior is allowed is the wrong move, because there is no limiting principle.
For example, in a world where we dictate like this, how long until we ban climbing rope because it makes it too easy to climb rock faces, which leads to injury and socialized health-care costs?
This ban is a serious assault on American freedom and a return to puritan morality.
EDIT: some phrasing, may affect the comment below :(
Stadia doesn't cost anything per month to use. I can see how their horrible wording on the website and insistence on signing you up for the 10$ a month Stadia Pro can make it seem otherwise. I actually signed up and paid for a month because I thought it was necessary. I asked for a refund the next day and they refused me.
You can play it on any device (no chromecast necessary) with basically any input method. I'm a huge fan of the tech and would use it more often while traveling with a laptop if it had more than a handful of games. Or a search bar in the ux.
As usual Google does 80% of the work and gives up when it realizes the last 20% is the real hard stuff.
AOC is closer to a regular ol' populist. Note how she and Cruz were the first to join the ranks of angry people online in lambasting Robinhood before they could explain themselves in the GME debacle.
I commented to respond to this and deleted it, since I realized I was making some wrong assumptions. If you saw it, please disregard it.
I'm still not convinced the change doesn't require a hardfork, which would involve switching chains, right? I feel like the possibility of hard forks being necessary hurts bitcoin as a "gold replacement"
I think divisibility will get in the way eventually. What happens when over a period of 200 years enough keys are lost to where there are only 10 million Satoshis left in active circulation?
Surely by then people will move over to a new chain, be it a fork of bitcoin or a different one entirely with new features, and history will have to begin anew.
There are billions of ounces of gold out there, and ounces can be subdivided as small as technology will allow without any one else having to agree to a protocol change.
This is confusing to me... I believe that neo-liberalism is fundamentally making decisions according to evidence to benefit our society regardless of tradition / religion / who said it. To me, that openness to solutions puts it opposite of many present-day conservatives who value tradition, existing power structures, historical norms, and therefore makes it a "left" ideology.
In my understanding a neo-liberal government is a fan of unblocking housing development, evidence based decision making w.r.t. pandemic responses, and police encounters. I would personally call governments in many parts of the Bay traditionally conservative as they are trying to protect what it was 50 years ago.
What does Neo-liberalism mean to you?
edits: lots of things, sorry if that confuses any responders...
As a liberal from a very loudly conservative state who moved to California, I believe that California's classist policies are racist when it comes down to brass tacks - especially its feudal age prop 13. I'm glad Ezra all but said so as well.
Just to muse, when I was younger I assumed people who were very into yoga and its aesthetics were chill people. As I've aged into my late 20s, most of the people I know who practice yoga and its aesthetics have excruciatingly stressful day jobs and horrible anxiety. They are some of the least relaxed people I know.
I now ponder if they're so loud about relaxing because they want it so badly. Anecdata for sure, but maybe there's more to it.
I wonder if progressive America's increasing focus on purity and aesthetics are similar?
After taking a look at 538's rankings of racial disparities in police encounters in Portland/Seatte/San Francisco/Washington DC[1], the contradictory support of BLM in those areas among it's constituents, progressive America's constant refusal to allow housing and absolute insistence on lockdowns in a pandemic that mostly punish non-white families, I worry I'm onto something.
I'm not convinced that your average tax paying American will benefit from this - if anything the difficulty in taxing wealth and loss of ability to print/control money granted to Americans by American guns could lead to a noticeable decrease in quality of life for them.
That being said, there is a tremendous demand from people in many countries to defend their wealth from less stable environments that seek to control their ability to freely transact/store wealth.
No idea how it ends, or even if these cryptos deliver on their potential. Any idiot can see there are many roadblocks, and I personally think that Bitcoin's price is wildly manipulated (and most likely a ponzi).
However, as someone who has 2nd hand experience with poorly run govs stripping peoples' wealth for political reasons, I'm very excited by these possibilities in spite of some of the negatives.
For the record I have no Bitcoin, but I do run a node for another crypto I find interesting.
>I am not saying that it can't be mismanaged by a state, but you do not have anything better than state fiat money.
I agree with this! At the moment I don't see many things that are better yet. I hope to see an obvious winner someday.
EDIT: For the record, I hold no Bitcoin. While it has a lot of potential value in creating Freedom To Transact, I'm not convinced the current price per unit is anything but a Pump and Dump. If Bitcoin is a Constitution of Money, it's a pretty fucked up one.
I believe the value of cryptocurrency is to neuter governments' abilities to inflate or devalue currency with the push of a button, and to improve our ability to transact freely with one another.
I absolutely agree with you that money needs limitations, such as hard rules on supply increases. A money supply that is uncontrolled in such a way that you can make more or less whenever you personally feel like it regardless of the other users' intentions won't be useful for very long.
I personally think of cryptocurrency like a constitution but for money - whereas before whoever had the biggest guns could decree How It Is Now, the guns will be powerless to what is written down. In this way, it removes power of a select few to control the supply of money for their benefit.
I don't know how this ends. Is it a net negative to the human experience? Anarchy? The select few who got into bitcoin early wielding all the power now? Taxation falling to the wayside and a deterioration of quality of life? Each of these is somewhat possible, but as someone who has 2nd hand experience of what a country can do when it has free reign to issue whole new currencies and remove old ones or devalue the existing one into oblivion, I don't really care.
As someone who has taken most of the stuff out there I agree with trabant that they help return exit 0, and think it's proportional to the euphoria the drug produces.
I don't think we need to ban them but we need to be honest with ourselves that we're sticking cattle prods in our brains, and to enjoy them for what they are :)