THC is present in all tissues of cannabis. It happens to be conveniently concentrated within the trichomes, but I have it on good authority that it is possible to get high by consuming a large enough quantity of other parts of the plant.
What the consumer is looking for is a plant that tastes great when vaporized and also gets them high. Mint, perhaps?
Market forces. Tell me which market forces are in favor of sinking $8500 to provide a service that grosses $35/month. It'll take over 20 years to pay for $8500 at $35/month. Of course, that's assuming 100% of the $35/month goes against principal. In reality, only a small fraction of that gross will be net, and the $8500 will have an interest rate slash opportunity cost. So the $8500 probably amortizes sometime closer to never.
It also doesn't solve the switching between keyboard and mouse problem. If Leap could implement human interface software that somehow seamlessly integrated a chording keyboard with their positional interface, and if Herman Miller created a workstation chair with arm supports that can suspend the user's arms weightlessly in front of them, this could offer some big advantages.
DeepFreeze is awesome. Buddy of mine once owned a cyber-cafe. He allowed administrator access on all his PCs. His customers, who were pretty much all young males between the ages of 15 and 25, (no risk from that demographic, no), were free to install whatever games or hideously infected viral crap they wished. After they were done abusing their rented PC, my buddy would simply poke the reset button, and the machine would boot back to its pristine state.
Reciprocity: There are some important distinctions to be made between the service that Amanda Palmer is offering and what OP is offering. Amanda is in the entertainment business. Her product moves people. She delivers coin of the spirit. So when she is reaching out, her fans have already been moved and uplifted by Amanda. They have a motivation to reciprocate, and being able to give money or a neti pot or a couch to sleep on allows them to fulfill that need. OP, on the other hand, is providing a tool for graphic designers. Not a lot of emotional bonding potential there. The most OP can hope for is a feeling in their users of having found a useful tool. Simple graphic tools are pretty fungible, and chances are, someone else offers a tool with similar utility. So to get the kind of engagement with users that would produce the kind of reciprocity that Amanda achieves, OP would have to somehow make their download be more than just a graphic utility. If OP cultivated a social presence in which their download was seen as part of a foundation that supports the wonderful and somewhat legendary person that OP surely is, then OP might have a shot at achieving the reciprocity that Amanda has.
Patronage: Some consumers have matured enough to view the market as a sort of garden in which their money is nourishment that determines which things grow and which things wither. These consumers will answer the call for help not so much out of reciprocity, but as a way of cultivating the good stuff in the garden. This desire to cultivate is a need that OP's graphic utility can tap into, since it is driven by a desire to make the world a better place. Unlike Amanda's main focus on reciprocity, patronage can be a more universal and consistent force for funding. The trick is finding and providing your service/product to these patrons and, ideally, triggering their desire to patronize.
I work well with http://www.rainymood.com/ on. I turn it up enough that background conversations are unintelligible. I can still tell someone is talking, just can't parse what they're saying.
That's great and all, but in my experience, small local one-jar-at-a-time-by-hand producers charge about twice as much as the grocery store does. I can't believe that all the honey in the grocery store is fake. Or that the local producer's honey is really twice as good.
Some of the fattest-paying contracts in the whole of software development are for dinosaur systems. Seriously - if you want to make twice or thrice whatever your current contract is, develop expertise in a 'dead' technology that is still being used in a high-value niche market.
You could try your hand at various programming competitions such as those offered on TopCoder or Kaggle. Some of the prizes in these competitions amount to serious dough.
Alternatively, you could try algorithmic trading. Several online brokerages offer an API, such as Interactive Brokers and TradeStation.
Also bear in mind the rising skill level that is being automated. Soon, the only people who are still employed will be those with the least automatable skillsets. By adjusting the mix of immigrants in favor of those whose talent will be supplanted last, we assure the US of having a better producer / consumer ratio for a little longer.
Culture flows from the top. So long as software quality is constrained by arbitrary sales deadlines, your problem will not go away. The only way out of this mess is for management to buy into the value of quality and to insist on it, over the screams of marketing and sales. It is also a function of your customers. In many industries, customers will be ticked off for a while if you ship their product late, but if you ship them a brick, they'll never forget. Perhaps you are 'blessed' with more forgiving customers. In which case, your best optimization for the situation will be to polish up your resume and jump ship at your earliest convenience.
In general, males are easier to hook into gaming because we're hardwired by evolution to respond to fight-or-flight, competitive, adrenaline-soaked combat. Those are really easy scenarios for developers to concoct. The rapid onset of these adrenaline rushes make these experiences much more addictive than other game reward activities. Females are more hardwired to gain reward from slower activities such as resource gathering, nurturing and social interaction. These are much slower rewards and are therefore less addictive. Since real life offers females many opportunities for obtaining these sorts of rewarding experiences, it is challenging for game designers to create games that tap into these reward systems for females in ways that exceed what they can get from ordinary life. Contrarily, although competitive sports offer the same adrenaline-soaked competitive rewards for males, there are limits to how much of this real-world reward males can get. Stamina, age, physical conditioning, injuries, and desk-bound, pasty-faced-nerditude all conspire to make the guaranteed rewards of gaming easily competitive against real-world experiences for males. This is why it is easier to hook males on gaming, and why, even if you can interest a female in gaming, she will probably prefer games that are fundamentally different from games that males prefer.
That said, you might try a pretty game that offers a lot of exploration and crafting. At the moment, I'd say your best bet might be Guild Wars 2. It is a beautiful game, with many different ways to advance. If you like, you can simply explore to gain XP. There are many activities that do not require combat. One could probably make a full game of exploring and buying resources to craft into better shields and weapons. Of course, this doesn't exactly add up to the same-game nirvana that you're probably hoping for.
I suspect that any putative IQ loss from cannabis use has more to do with how the user uses their brain. Many cannabis enthusiasts report they prefer to just "chill out" while high, and that their life on the whole is more laid-back and relaxed. The brain is somewhat similar to muscle inasmuch it becomes stronger with use, and vice-versa. For example, consider the N-back exercises that have repeatedly demonstrated a measurable increase in tested IQ for people who exercise their brains regularly using N-back software. If we imagine that that average mental load on a cannabis enthusiast's mind is reduced during this "chilling out", it is not hard to imagine that they might test lower on IQ tests after repeatedly de-exercising their mental muscle.
If, instead of flushing one trillion dollars down the war on drugs toilet, we had spent that money on research to identify safe and entertaining drugs that also motivated users to do challenging things with their minds, we might now be poised on the brink of a new age of innovation, lead by stoners. But instead we have the highest incarceration rate. What a waste.
Sadly, almost all the titles I've checked out over the past decade have been digital, from the comfort of my PC. (Audiobooks are awesome for long commutes on public transit). The past two times I went into the physical library building, I found it was largely populated by vagrants who were using the free internet terminals to view porn as they avoided the cold outside. Heck, I even took the elevator to the third floor in hopes of using a rest room less trafficked by said vagrants, and came upon one old fellow giving himself a paper-towel bath. Perhaps this is only a problem of large urban libraries.
Libraries were founded in the day when books were precious and expensive treasures. Now, there's hardly a used bookstore that doesn't have a "free" bin. People aren't reading dead-tree books as much nowadays, and those who do generally have no problem purchasing them or sharing books with friends or finding something to read at free book swaps. For expensive texts, a digital lending library makes more sense, since digital texts are searchable, and they don't have to be returned to the library when the checkout term expires.
My code is much more maintainable now. If there's a choice between a sexy, haha-see-if-you-can-figure-this-out way or a bread-n-butter way of doing it, I generally go for the bread-n-butter way now. I still indulge in a little Perl golf from time to time, but never anything bigger than a few lines of easily replaceable functionality.
I just turned 55, and have been writing software my whole career. I still enjoy it, but it's been a long time since I had that feeling like there was blue fire coming out of my fingers as I write. I find it has become pleasantly mundane. Beats the heck out of working for a living, though.
The fact that people pay money for the possibility of getting to see a show for free sure sounds like a game of chance. I hope they've cleared this with all the buzzkilling lawyers who know the laws about what is and isn't gambling.
Speaking as someone who has managed projects that had programming outsourced to India, I can assure you that there are many very good reasons why this hasn't really caught on all that well, despite decades of trying. There are many valid reasons to want out, but fear of unemployment due to excessive outsourcing isn't one.
It may be that people whose genetics predispose them to exfoliation glaucoma are also more than usually enchanted by coffee. Still, interesting observation.
It is time to get rid of the worn out notion that an employer is somehow responsible for the welfare and productivity of the workers. In reality, the employer purchases services from vendors it calls employees. In the rest of the capitalistic market, it is usually the vendors who are coming up with sales, coupons, discounts and other incentives to motivate customers. This paradigm should be extended to include service vendors who are now termed employees. If workers were required to incorporate and provide services on a 1099 basis, their relationship to their customers would become much clearer. Vendors who are motivated and productive will tend to attract more customers and better contract terms. A transparent reputation system that allows customers to rate vendors just as sellers on eBay are would help everyone to employ service vendors with confidence. Right now, hiring is like buying a pig in a poke. Customers can only glimpse at the impression a vendor creates through their resume and interview. With a public reputation to maintain, vendors would be conscientious and customers could contract vendors with confidence. We could then be rid of all the silly 'benefits' and 'holidays' and other crap that really has little place in a vendor-customer relationship.
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THC is present in all tissues of cannabis. It happens to be conveniently concentrated within the trichomes, but I have it on good authority that it is possible to get high by consuming a large enough quantity of other parts of the plant.
What the consumer is looking for is a plant that tastes great when vaporized and also gets them high. Mint, perhaps?
Market forces. Tell me which market forces are in favor of sinking $8500 to provide a service that grosses $35/month. It'll take over 20 years to pay for $8500 at $35/month. Of course, that's assuming 100% of the $35/month goes against principal. In reality, only a small fraction of that gross will be net, and the $8500 will have an interest rate slash opportunity cost. So the $8500 probably amortizes sometime closer to never.
It also doesn't solve the switching between keyboard and mouse problem. If Leap could implement human interface software that somehow seamlessly integrated a chording keyboard with their positional interface, and if Herman Miller created a workstation chair with arm supports that can suspend the user's arms weightlessly in front of them, this could offer some big advantages.
DeepFreeze is awesome. Buddy of mine once owned a cyber-cafe. He allowed administrator access on all his PCs. His customers, who were pretty much all young males between the ages of 15 and 25, (no risk from that demographic, no), were free to install whatever games or hideously infected viral crap they wished. After they were done abusing their rented PC, my buddy would simply poke the reset button, and the machine would boot back to its pristine state.
I'm a fan of Darik's Boot and Nuke. Quick and effective.
Reciprocity: There are some important distinctions to be made between the service that Amanda Palmer is offering and what OP is offering. Amanda is in the entertainment business. Her product moves people. She delivers coin of the spirit. So when she is reaching out, her fans have already been moved and uplifted by Amanda. They have a motivation to reciprocate, and being able to give money or a neti pot or a couch to sleep on allows them to fulfill that need. OP, on the other hand, is providing a tool for graphic designers. Not a lot of emotional bonding potential there. The most OP can hope for is a feeling in their users of having found a useful tool. Simple graphic tools are pretty fungible, and chances are, someone else offers a tool with similar utility. So to get the kind of engagement with users that would produce the kind of reciprocity that Amanda achieves, OP would have to somehow make their download be more than just a graphic utility. If OP cultivated a social presence in which their download was seen as part of a foundation that supports the wonderful and somewhat legendary person that OP surely is, then OP might have a shot at achieving the reciprocity that Amanda has.
Patronage: Some consumers have matured enough to view the market as a sort of garden in which their money is nourishment that determines which things grow and which things wither. These consumers will answer the call for help not so much out of reciprocity, but as a way of cultivating the good stuff in the garden. This desire to cultivate is a need that OP's graphic utility can tap into, since it is driven by a desire to make the world a better place. Unlike Amanda's main focus on reciprocity, patronage can be a more universal and consistent force for funding. The trick is finding and providing your service/product to these patrons and, ideally, triggering their desire to patronize.
I work well with http://www.rainymood.com/ on. I turn it up enough that background conversations are unintelligible. I can still tell someone is talking, just can't parse what they're saying.
That's great and all, but in my experience, small local one-jar-at-a-time-by-hand producers charge about twice as much as the grocery store does. I can't believe that all the honey in the grocery store is fake. Or that the local producer's honey is really twice as good.
Some of the fattest-paying contracts in the whole of software development are for dinosaur systems. Seriously - if you want to make twice or thrice whatever your current contract is, develop expertise in a 'dead' technology that is still being used in a high-value niche market.
You could try your hand at various programming competitions such as those offered on TopCoder or Kaggle. Some of the prizes in these competitions amount to serious dough.
Alternatively, you could try algorithmic trading. Several online brokerages offer an API, such as Interactive Brokers and TradeStation.
Also bear in mind the rising skill level that is being automated. Soon, the only people who are still employed will be those with the least automatable skillsets. By adjusting the mix of immigrants in favor of those whose talent will be supplanted last, we assure the US of having a better producer / consumer ratio for a little longer.
Look at all that garbage...tsk...tsk...
sub read_file { return map{my ($value, $key) = split "="; ($value => $key)} split '\n', do {local(*ARGV, $/) = [shift]; }; }
I enjoyed lunch with Larry at OSCON in 2009. I asked when Perl 6 would be done, and he assured me it would be ready by Christmas.
Culture flows from the top. So long as software quality is constrained by arbitrary sales deadlines, your problem will not go away. The only way out of this mess is for management to buy into the value of quality and to insist on it, over the screams of marketing and sales. It is also a function of your customers. In many industries, customers will be ticked off for a while if you ship their product late, but if you ship them a brick, they'll never forget. Perhaps you are 'blessed' with more forgiving customers. In which case, your best optimization for the situation will be to polish up your resume and jump ship at your earliest convenience.
In general, males are easier to hook into gaming because we're hardwired by evolution to respond to fight-or-flight, competitive, adrenaline-soaked combat. Those are really easy scenarios for developers to concoct. The rapid onset of these adrenaline rushes make these experiences much more addictive than other game reward activities. Females are more hardwired to gain reward from slower activities such as resource gathering, nurturing and social interaction. These are much slower rewards and are therefore less addictive. Since real life offers females many opportunities for obtaining these sorts of rewarding experiences, it is challenging for game designers to create games that tap into these reward systems for females in ways that exceed what they can get from ordinary life. Contrarily, although competitive sports offer the same adrenaline-soaked competitive rewards for males, there are limits to how much of this real-world reward males can get. Stamina, age, physical conditioning, injuries, and desk-bound, pasty-faced-nerditude all conspire to make the guaranteed rewards of gaming easily competitive against real-world experiences for males. This is why it is easier to hook males on gaming, and why, even if you can interest a female in gaming, she will probably prefer games that are fundamentally different from games that males prefer.
That said, you might try a pretty game that offers a lot of exploration and crafting. At the moment, I'd say your best bet might be Guild Wars 2. It is a beautiful game, with many different ways to advance. If you like, you can simply explore to gain XP. There are many activities that do not require combat. One could probably make a full game of exploring and buying resources to craft into better shields and weapons. Of course, this doesn't exactly add up to the same-game nirvana that you're probably hoping for.
Pot doesn't make people stupid, people make people stupid. Is there a pot equivalent of an AK47?
Why, yes. Yes there is.
I suspect that any putative IQ loss from cannabis use has more to do with how the user uses their brain. Many cannabis enthusiasts report they prefer to just "chill out" while high, and that their life on the whole is more laid-back and relaxed. The brain is somewhat similar to muscle inasmuch it becomes stronger with use, and vice-versa. For example, consider the N-back exercises that have repeatedly demonstrated a measurable increase in tested IQ for people who exercise their brains regularly using N-back software. If we imagine that that average mental load on a cannabis enthusiast's mind is reduced during this "chilling out", it is not hard to imagine that they might test lower on IQ tests after repeatedly de-exercising their mental muscle.
If, instead of flushing one trillion dollars down the war on drugs toilet, we had spent that money on research to identify safe and entertaining drugs that also motivated users to do challenging things with their minds, we might now be poised on the brink of a new age of innovation, lead by stoners. But instead we have the highest incarceration rate. What a waste.
Sadly, almost all the titles I've checked out over the past decade have been digital, from the comfort of my PC. (Audiobooks are awesome for long commutes on public transit). The past two times I went into the physical library building, I found it was largely populated by vagrants who were using the free internet terminals to view porn as they avoided the cold outside. Heck, I even took the elevator to the third floor in hopes of using a rest room less trafficked by said vagrants, and came upon one old fellow giving himself a paper-towel bath. Perhaps this is only a problem of large urban libraries.
Libraries were founded in the day when books were precious and expensive treasures. Now, there's hardly a used bookstore that doesn't have a "free" bin. People aren't reading dead-tree books as much nowadays, and those who do generally have no problem purchasing them or sharing books with friends or finding something to read at free book swaps. For expensive texts, a digital lending library makes more sense, since digital texts are searchable, and they don't have to be returned to the library when the checkout term expires.
Rack and pinion steering, no doubt.
My code is much more maintainable now. If there's a choice between a sexy, haha-see-if-you-can-figure-this-out way or a bread-n-butter way of doing it, I generally go for the bread-n-butter way now. I still indulge in a little Perl golf from time to time, but never anything bigger than a few lines of easily replaceable functionality.
I just turned 55, and have been writing software my whole career. I still enjoy it, but it's been a long time since I had that feeling like there was blue fire coming out of my fingers as I write. I find it has become pleasantly mundane. Beats the heck out of working for a living, though.
The fact that people pay money for the possibility of getting to see a show for free sure sounds like a game of chance. I hope they've cleared this with all the buzzkilling lawyers who know the laws about what is and isn't gambling.
Speaking as someone who has managed projects that had programming outsourced to India, I can assure you that there are many very good reasons why this hasn't really caught on all that well, despite decades of trying. There are many valid reasons to want out, but fear of unemployment due to excessive outsourcing isn't one.
It may be that people whose genetics predispose them to exfoliation glaucoma are also more than usually enchanted by coffee. Still, interesting observation.
It is time to get rid of the worn out notion that an employer is somehow responsible for the welfare and productivity of the workers. In reality, the employer purchases services from vendors it calls employees. In the rest of the capitalistic market, it is usually the vendors who are coming up with sales, coupons, discounts and other incentives to motivate customers. This paradigm should be extended to include service vendors who are now termed employees. If workers were required to incorporate and provide services on a 1099 basis, their relationship to their customers would become much clearer. Vendors who are motivated and productive will tend to attract more customers and better contract terms. A transparent reputation system that allows customers to rate vendors just as sellers on eBay are would help everyone to employ service vendors with confidence. Right now, hiring is like buying a pig in a poke. Customers can only glimpse at the impression a vendor creates through their resume and interview. With a public reputation to maintain, vendors would be conscientious and customers could contract vendors with confidence. We could then be rid of all the silly 'benefits' and 'holidays' and other crap that really has little place in a vendor-customer relationship.