I've lived in the same house for 20 years. Until the last 5 years, we NEVER had a problem with wasps. In the last 5 years it's been a real annoyance. We have to do a weekly wasp patrol and the odds are about 50-50 we find a starter nest of 5-10 "cells". We've been going through 1-2 full cans of wasp spray per summer, and I think we might have gone through 1 can in the previous 15 years.
One of my clients is a country club and I asked the maintenance guys about wasps. They told me they normally go through 3-4 cans of wasp spray a year, last summer they said it was 2 cases of wasp spray.
I wonder if there is some kind of long-term wasp population cycle.
I guess I don't understand. I'm mostly responding to the rhetoric of "enforced housing shortages" that principally blames single family homeowners for backing zoning restrictions that limit the construction of multi-family housing in traditionally single family neighborhoods. The crux of the argument is that people aren't interested in protecting quality of life, etc, they are just protecting their housing value as an investment.
To me the hole in that argument is that a house isn't a very good financial investment in terms of profit, nobody is really making much of a profit off their houses around here based on what I see for sale prices and what's actually paid to buy and own the house.
It may be true if you live in some parts of the country or even very specific neighborhoods here locally. My dad had a neighbor in Arizona who had moved from LA, two retired cops that sold their house in LA and bought a ranch in Arizona. The way my dad described it, their house sold for like 3-4x what they paid for it and in a fairly short amount of time (the cops basically retired when they hit pension minimum years).
The real value (or utility proposition) of owning a house seems to be you get a place to live for 30 years *and* a big check at the end. The big check *feels like* a profit thanks to the nominal distortion of inflation, but $revenue - $expenses, it's often a break-even perspective. The bonus is you lived someplace for 30 years and still get a bunch of money.
I think there's a whole weird world of Facebook that ordinary people who have friend lists that mostly mirror their real lives never see.
My guess is its comprised of people making low-end money pushing scams and social-media-as-a-career, various swaths of low-income populations, bored and lonely shut-ins who will friend/like anything and have zero privacy settings, and then the truly weird and crazy bottom end of the population.
Plus, it's an international system. You can participate in high weirdness outside your geography.
I've been in lots of bars, but I've never seen a bar fight, gang rape or other type of horrible thing in a bar. I think it mostly just means I don't associate with those kinds of people or go to those kinds of bars, not that they don't exist.
This artificial scarcity of housing thing gets brought up here, mostly blaming owners of single family homes for engaging in zoning restrictions so they can get rich on housing price increases.
I watch the sale prices for houses in my neighborhood and if I extrapolate those prices out 10 years when my mortgage is paid off and I sell, the price I will get for my house isn't even a profit compared to what I paid in principal, interest, taxes and insurance and maintenance costs.
It's feels like a windfall because it's a giant lump sum run up by inflation, but it's more or less break even at best. I literally would have been much better off had I rented cheap suburban apartments and put the difference in some stock index fund.
I think the complaints about artificial scarcity are kind of accident-of-history. Up until not that long ago, most people didn't *want* to live in the city. Old housing stock, bad schools, crime, high taxes. The US spent decades migrating to the suburbs. In the last 20-some years, many cities have seen a renaissance, including suburban boomers retiring and moving back into core cities.
Since so much development focus at a macroeconomic level was focused on the suburbs, the cities were underdeveloped. Now that everybody wants to live there -- young people, retirees, etc, the housing growth is lagging the demand, and the demand is driving prices way up.
Uber may be a horrible company, but the taxi system here was borderline unusable unless you were at the airport or had an hour to burn waiting for one at your house.
The convenience of Uber/Lyft is astonishing. You can actually get a ride nearly anywhere in very short order. It's hard not to believe their success isn't a function of breaking all the rules but because they actually provide a really good service compared to taxis.
But couldn't you always take a Town Car -- illegally -- for cash in NYC?
I don't count myself an expert on NYC, but early on when I started flying out there to support our small office, they told me if I had trouble finding a cab there was often a bunch of Town Cars that would do cash fares.
I didn't do it often, but 2-3 times coming out of a better restaurant there would be a few Town Cars waiting and they would take you for cash fares that didn't seem out of line for what I'd pay for a taxi.
Nixon definitely did weaponize drug policy as a tool for dealing with his enemies -- hippies, left-wing types and minorities.
My problem is that I don't think drug policy really changed all that much when this happened, the only real difference was that post 1960s there were just a LOT more ordinary white people doing drugs, mostly marijuana.
But before that, drug policy had historically been used to suppress minorities too -- Chinese, Blacks, Mexicans. Sure, Nixon made it worse but it wasn't like it was great before that. In many ways, I think what Nixon made worse was not the racist aspect of it, but the concentration of authority and creating the DEA, making anti-drugs much more of an intensive effort.
The thing I wish would happen is that all the fucking Linux scolds would just shut up and stay out of these threads, as if their "you should have switched to Linux, it's easier than my wife these days" comments add any substance.
I mean, some of us (try) to make a buck doing computer work and switching people to Linux, even if we wanted to, isn't really viable when they want/expect/need Windows.
What I don't get is that Microsoft still needs the vast army of consultants/IT people to support its products yet it continues to alienate them by making their products *harder* to customize and run cleanly.
I mean, I get it -- they make money off this and if shit like Xbox and Candy Crush or whatever paid content was easy to turn off, the adoption rate would drop right off a cliff and MS wouldn't make money at it.
MS obviously sees the not-too-distant future as one where they are irrelevant and are trying to restructure their business into some weird mix of Apple, Android and Microsoft all at the same time, with consumers locked into a monthly service that Microsoft gatekeeps and collects market intel from. I'm not sure how they get hardware makers to go along with a walled garden they don't control, but maybe that's where the experience of Android comes in.
The risk charts I've seen rank "smoking", not nicotine, because until about 5 minutes ago smoking was the principal consumption source for nicotine consumption and most of the risks were associated with actually inhaling smoke; nicotine just made it really addictive and repetitive.
I think in an alternate universe with opiates as a culturally ingrained and accepted substance, there'd be a lot less overdoses than we see in the wild now because of regulated dosing and tribal knowledge of acceptable dosing. Strangely with alcohol nobody knows how much liquor can kill them, yet people seem to die fairly frequently from alcohol over-consumption.
I'd argue alcohol has a health risk from long-term consumption that opiates don't. A long-term chronic alcohol user likely faces a host of related health issues -- cirrhosis of the liver, and a whole range of metabolic illnesses (obesity, diabetes) depending on how they consume it (beer drinkers more likely to have obesity, for example).
Addiction seems to be primary health risk with long-term opiate users; therapeutic users and some addicts which self-regulate well seem to lack significant secondary health problems tied to opiate use.
My gut instinct is that if there was an alternate universe of opiate users, they would have higher rates of addiction but actually lower rates of secondary health issues. Social problems would likely be about the same, less violence associated with opiate users vs. drinkers, but maybe more problems with amotivational behavior among opiate users.
Let's say for whatever reason, opium and alcohol switch places historically and instead of alcohol being the dominant legal drug, opium derivatives become legal.
Like alcohol, the dominant forms of opiates that remain legal are low-concentrate varieties, such as smoking opium or low-strength tinctures -- in the same way that beer and wine are popular, although like spirits, morphine or heroin also exist, but are consumed mostly diluted cocktail style. For the most part, opium is sold in regulated stores and always in well-known concentrations by a well-regulated industry.
Society has recognized for centuries the problems of opium use, but as its deeply ingrained in culture only the US ever tried to ban it during Prohibition which was a complete failure. Alcohol is seen as much worse, and society is presently engaged in a "alcohol crisis" fueled by over-prescription of therapeutic alcohol and black-market alcohol which is tainted.
Would we more or less be in the same place we are now, kind of turning a blind eye to the dangers of opium -- relying mostly on the culturally ingrained "rules" for to not overdose regularly?
It seems to me that most people ignore the large-scale problems with alcohol availability and despite cultural acceptance it's probably way more dangerous than we ever consider. Millions of people are alcoholics and millions more are borderline functional alcoholics and there are vast social problems associated with alcohol, like drunk driving, violence, domestic abuse, etc.
I think there have been attempts to quantify the risks associated with the various varieties of psychoactive substances and almost always alcohol and tobacco come out 1 or 2 with opiates further down the list maybe behind barbiturates, which society mostly has avoided as a long-term crisis or black market drug.
The latter is kind of interesting considering the popularity of Seconal and Quaaludes in the late 1960s and 1970s -- it's somewhat surprising that with the surge in illciit lab-made fentanyl and other "research chemicals" that there hasn't been a parallel surge in illicit lab-made Quaaludes or Seconal.
People believe their interests as law abiding citizens and the police's interests as law enforcers are somehow aligned, that they're on the same side or allies.
I think it's partly what gets ordinary people into such trouble with the cops. They just assume that being open and honest with the cops won't somehow lead to the cops arresting them for anything they say, since cops are mostly incentivized to arrest people. And I'm not talking about people who commit a crime and "spill the beans", but people not committing crimes stopped apparently at random who just answer their questions.
I'm mostly convinced that unless you have a serious need for police services, it's best to keep your distance.
Remember when application protocols were defined by academics in public RFCs?
For one, they started out the idea that there was no globalized central data repository -- that there would be multiple data repositories, requiring both client-server and server-client protocols. And that there would be multiple software implementations, so just define a protocol and let people implement it as they saw fit.
Now it's all designed for central monopoly data storage and a single source for software from the same people that control the data storage. Thanks, corporations.
This. My 14 year old 8th grader just started a new late start time -- 9:30. It had been 8:25, which was kind of ideal from a parental oversight perspective. He walks to school, so I was pretty much always able to monitor his progress and make sure he got up and ready for school.
9:30? He wants/expects to sleep until 8:30 and I nearly always have to leave for work at 8:00 and while it worked out OK the first couple of weeks (new school year novelty), Friday he was almost late.
I'm just lucky he only has to walk and he's 14. If he was 10, had to ride the bus and had to start at 9:30? I'd have no choice but to pay for before school care (which the elementary schools already have, some parents drop off hella early, like 7:00).
I think a confounding factor in all of this is that the general public mostly understands school start times in the context of their own experience 30-odd years before. And the basic design of the school experience seems kind of wed to the structure of the stay at home mom, the very close neighborhood school that was walking distance for anyone over 7 in 1960.
Once schools used bussing for desegregation and for facilitating school consolidation it all kind of went out the window, and now start times and distances are driven by bureaucratic goals of racial balance and efficiency.
Best thing I could think of would be paperwork the employee had to fill out documenting a medical condition that interfered with work or resulted from an on the job injury.
Ordinary medical treatment involving a doctor, I don't know how a specific store location would see this even if TRU had been the insurer of record. Some kind of statement about the employee treatments (using the bizarre, technical coding language of health insurance) may have gone to some TRU home office. It seems like when I use health insurance I get a letter from the insurer telling me what I'm not getting coverage on and then a bill from the provider.
I'm skeptical that TRU provided that good/comprehensive enough insurance for most employees to begin with. I'd bet most employees (numerically) would have been part time and paying cash, using a spouse/parent's insurance, etc, never even giving TRU a reason to get into the paper flow.
I think they would benefit more from trying MDMA on dogs.
We have a pretty good understanding about canine socialization and interaction and can better interpret ambiguous behavior on their part.
And what about trying it on chimps or other great apes? I suppose the argument there is they are SO similar to humans that the effects are probably entirely predictable.
Or is the whole point of this to actually see if octopuses specifically provide human-like responses to mind altering drugs as a means of evaluating octopus cognitive abilities?
The problem with this multi-layered, outsourced internet economy is that there's just about zero accountability for shitty service or products anymore.
I barely blame the delivery guys for not giving a shit considering how little they get paid and the crushing scheduling/travel burden imposed by Amazon.
Be grateful they're only unhappy enough with their employment to just toss packages. My guess is that the next iteration of unhappy employment involves burning those packages in a giant pile someplace, and the one after that involves rich people lined up against a wall.
I mean, if there's anything at all to the "Russians did it" in so many fields their main motivation seems to be create conflicts, not create any specific advantage.
It does seem like the one side effect of the social internet is that you can create real conflict very easily.
I would argue that it's a cultural belief derived from evolutionary biology.
Outside of a modern environment with reliable birth control, women who fucked everything got a bunch of children they couldn't support and men who who wouldn't support them because they were caring for another man's genetic offspring.
And that's if they didn't die at the end of pregnancy when they couldn't participate in gathering food or wound up being the slowest to flee from an environmental peril, like a fire, flood or a hungry bear.
None of this is to deny we're still stuck with a bunch of shitty cultural rules about sexuality that have been mooted by modern technology and economics, but my guess is most of them served some legitimate evolutionary value or some social goal that kept the tribe/clan/village from disintegrating due to disputes over parentage or lineage or even simple jealousy.
They wanted to price their product below market demand and limit market supply and wondered why they had problems with scalping? I mean the lack of fundamental economics is as much a problem with these artists as anything else.
200+ cities? That's a global tour for a major artist who may not hit all 50 states and will often only hit 1 city in many states.
Only smaller bands with more cult followings would realistically try to hit 200 cities in the US, and even then that's 4x per state -- how many cities are they really going to visit in Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, Kansas...?
Bottom line this is an economics problem of supply and demand, not a Ticketmaster problem. Not that Ticketmaster doesn't suck, they're just exploiting artists' marketing-driven logic and lack of economics understanding.
If the artists really cared about the fans, they would sell tickets directly to fans and travel with some kind of circus tent they could setup on whatever patch of open ground could be leased. Bypass Ticketmaster, their local monopoly contracts on venues, the whole thing.
There's no good reason I can think of that doesn't boil down to artificially generated demand and marketing perception.
But even this doesn't make sense. How does a bunch of disappointed fans who can't see the show due to shortage-driven ticket price inflation improve their fan experience?
Are there really people who want to see Taylor Swift or some other pop star mostly because tickets are hard to get? "I really wanted to see her but the tickets were easy to get, so now I don't want to go" -- I mean that doesn't even make sense.
It's not like pop stars also couldn't simply cancel dates that were less than 80% full if they played multiple nights in the same town.
The BS about venue scheduling or other logistics doesn't make much sense, either, they plan most high level concerts MONTHS in advance, including ticket sales, and can probably pretty easily coordinate tours with venue availability for consecutive nights, including booking slightly smaller venues to avoid partially full venues.
The only thing that MIGHT make sense is capitalizing on "buzz" and trying to get to as many markets as possible before the latest album loses popularity. Extended stays in some towns would slow the tour's geographic progress, but usually a hot star will do world tours that take most of a year.
I just don't get how any possibly negatives make "give all the money to scalpers and ticketmaster" a better alternative. Just play more shows and sell more tickets.
An auction style process for selling tickets makes the most sense, keeping the price very high initially and only dropping prices once demand falls below some threshold.
The real market failure here is that ticket face values are too cheap, the actual price many people are willing too pay is much higher than what the face value says. Scalping and resale markets wouldn't exist if the face value was the market equilibrium price.
What I don't understand is why *artists* let this happen and give away much of the profit to scalpers or ticketmaster.
If you're Taylor Swift and you sell out 2 shows in an hour, why not add shows until you wind up with a non-sellout? If the last show doesn't meet your touring costs, cancel it. The artist will make more money doing this. Raise supply to meet demand.
I know raising ticket prices isn't popular and people are pissed that "real fans" can't see a concert for the price they want to pay, but unless you raise prices or increase supply you will have scalping.
There's only two reasons I see why artists won't increase supply (perform more). One is they're just lazy and don't want to perform more. Touring sounds grueling generally, so maybe that's true but I'm guessing that doing 25% more shows or whatever isn't going to kill them. They can space out dates, lengthen the tour, etc, to make it less demanding. Touring isn't *that* grueling for top-tier acts with access to luxury hotels, private planes, and assistants who keep them supplied with anything they want.
The other is manufacturing demand -- the artist is only "popular" because ZOMG TICKETS ARE SOLD OUT. They intentionally limit supply to generate demand. The cynic in me thinks this is probably the case, although I question if this dynamic really works as well as they think given how much outrage there is over ticket prices, scalping, etc. All those problems go away AND the artist makes more money if they play more shows.
I'm sure there's some kind of argument against more shows based on venue availability, but given that so many tour dates are announced months in advance it sounds like they'd have no problem picking slots with facility availability.
We did one of these assessments in our group, with my normally level-headed boss making a big deal of us gaining this assessment as some kind of benefit.
I was the first to raise my hand and ask what kind of academic or scientific validation this personality test had. Of course it had none, it was snake oil being pushed by a management consultant who wanted to validate his BS with with "objective" data management could use to reinforce their own biases and petty personality conflict.
Nobody likes the guy who asks why we're wasting time and money on parlor game psychology. I suggested a Ouija board because it was as scientifically valid and a lot more fun.
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I've lived in the same house for 20 years. Until the last 5 years, we NEVER had a problem with wasps. In the last 5 years it's been a real annoyance. We have to do a weekly wasp patrol and the odds are about 50-50 we find a starter nest of 5-10 "cells". We've been going through 1-2 full cans of wasp spray per summer, and I think we might have gone through 1 can in the previous 15 years.
One of my clients is a country club and I asked the maintenance guys about wasps. They told me they normally go through 3-4 cans of wasp spray a year, last summer they said it was 2 cases of wasp spray.
I wonder if there is some kind of long-term wasp population cycle.
I guess I don't understand. I'm mostly responding to the rhetoric of "enforced housing shortages" that principally blames single family homeowners for backing zoning restrictions that limit the construction of multi-family housing in traditionally single family neighborhoods. The crux of the argument is that people aren't interested in protecting quality of life, etc, they are just protecting their housing value as an investment.
To me the hole in that argument is that a house isn't a very good financial investment in terms of profit, nobody is really making much of a profit off their houses around here based on what I see for sale prices and what's actually paid to buy and own the house.
It may be true if you live in some parts of the country or even very specific neighborhoods here locally. My dad had a neighbor in Arizona who had moved from LA, two retired cops that sold their house in LA and bought a ranch in Arizona. The way my dad described it, their house sold for like 3-4x what they paid for it and in a fairly short amount of time (the cops basically retired when they hit pension minimum years).
The real value (or utility proposition) of owning a house seems to be you get a place to live for 30 years *and* a big check at the end. The big check *feels like* a profit thanks to the nominal distortion of inflation, but $revenue - $expenses, it's often a break-even perspective. The bonus is you lived someplace for 30 years and still get a bunch of money.
I think there's a whole weird world of Facebook that ordinary people who have friend lists that mostly mirror their real lives never see.
My guess is its comprised of people making low-end money pushing scams and social-media-as-a-career, various swaths of low-income populations, bored and lonely shut-ins who will friend/like anything and have zero privacy settings, and then the truly weird and crazy bottom end of the population.
Plus, it's an international system. You can participate in high weirdness outside your geography.
I've been in lots of bars, but I've never seen a bar fight, gang rape or other type of horrible thing in a bar. I think it mostly just means I don't associate with those kinds of people or go to those kinds of bars, not that they don't exist.
This artificial scarcity of housing thing gets brought up here, mostly blaming owners of single family homes for engaging in zoning restrictions so they can get rich on housing price increases.
I watch the sale prices for houses in my neighborhood and if I extrapolate those prices out 10 years when my mortgage is paid off and I sell, the price I will get for my house isn't even a profit compared to what I paid in principal, interest, taxes and insurance and maintenance costs.
It's feels like a windfall because it's a giant lump sum run up by inflation, but it's more or less break even at best. I literally would have been much better off had I rented cheap suburban apartments and put the difference in some stock index fund.
I think the complaints about artificial scarcity are kind of accident-of-history. Up until not that long ago, most people didn't *want* to live in the city. Old housing stock, bad schools, crime, high taxes. The US spent decades migrating to the suburbs. In the last 20-some years, many cities have seen a renaissance, including suburban boomers retiring and moving back into core cities.
Since so much development focus at a macroeconomic level was focused on the suburbs, the cities were underdeveloped. Now that everybody wants to live there -- young people, retirees, etc, the housing growth is lagging the demand, and the demand is driving prices way up.
Uber may be a horrible company, but the taxi system here was borderline unusable unless you were at the airport or had an hour to burn waiting for one at your house.
The convenience of Uber/Lyft is astonishing. You can actually get a ride nearly anywhere in very short order. It's hard not to believe their success isn't a function of breaking all the rules but because they actually provide a really good service compared to taxis.
But couldn't you always take a Town Car -- illegally -- for cash in NYC?
I don't count myself an expert on NYC, but early on when I started flying out there to support our small office, they told me if I had trouble finding a cab there was often a bunch of Town Cars that would do cash fares.
I didn't do it often, but 2-3 times coming out of a better restaurant there would be a few Town Cars waiting and they would take you for cash fares that didn't seem out of line for what I'd pay for a taxi.
I get the same feedback for the most part when I take Uber. I ask the drivers how they like it and they all seem pretty positive about it.
Nixon definitely did weaponize drug policy as a tool for dealing with his enemies -- hippies, left-wing types and minorities.
My problem is that I don't think drug policy really changed all that much when this happened, the only real difference was that post 1960s there were just a LOT more ordinary white people doing drugs, mostly marijuana.
But before that, drug policy had historically been used to suppress minorities too -- Chinese, Blacks, Mexicans. Sure, Nixon made it worse but it wasn't like it was great before that. In many ways, I think what Nixon made worse was not the racist aspect of it, but the concentration of authority and creating the DEA, making anti-drugs much more of an intensive effort.
The thing I wish would happen is that all the fucking Linux scolds would just shut up and stay out of these threads, as if their "you should have switched to Linux, it's easier than my wife these days" comments add any substance.
I mean, some of us (try) to make a buck doing computer work and switching people to Linux, even if we wanted to, isn't really viable when they want/expect/need Windows.
What I don't get is that Microsoft still needs the vast army of consultants/IT people to support its products yet it continues to alienate them by making their products *harder* to customize and run cleanly.
I mean, I get it -- they make money off this and if shit like Xbox and Candy Crush or whatever paid content was easy to turn off, the adoption rate would drop right off a cliff and MS wouldn't make money at it.
MS obviously sees the not-too-distant future as one where they are irrelevant and are trying to restructure their business into some weird mix of Apple, Android and Microsoft all at the same time, with consumers locked into a monthly service that Microsoft gatekeeps and collects market intel from. I'm not sure how they get hardware makers to go along with a walled garden they don't control, but maybe that's where the experience of Android comes in.
The risk charts I've seen rank "smoking", not nicotine, because until about 5 minutes ago smoking was the principal consumption source for nicotine consumption and most of the risks were associated with actually inhaling smoke; nicotine just made it really addictive and repetitive.
I think in an alternate universe with opiates as a culturally ingrained and accepted substance, there'd be a lot less overdoses than we see in the wild now because of regulated dosing and tribal knowledge of acceptable dosing. Strangely with alcohol nobody knows how much liquor can kill them, yet people seem to die fairly frequently from alcohol over-consumption.
I'd argue alcohol has a health risk from long-term consumption that opiates don't. A long-term chronic alcohol user likely faces a host of related health issues -- cirrhosis of the liver, and a whole range of metabolic illnesses (obesity, diabetes) depending on how they consume it (beer drinkers more likely to have obesity, for example).
Addiction seems to be primary health risk with long-term opiate users; therapeutic users and some addicts which self-regulate well seem to lack significant secondary health problems tied to opiate use.
My gut instinct is that if there was an alternate universe of opiate users, they would have higher rates of addiction but actually lower rates of secondary health issues. Social problems would likely be about the same, less violence associated with opiate users vs. drinkers, but maybe more problems with amotivational behavior among opiate users.
Let's say for whatever reason, opium and alcohol switch places historically and instead of alcohol being the dominant legal drug, opium derivatives become legal.
Like alcohol, the dominant forms of opiates that remain legal are low-concentrate varieties, such as smoking opium or low-strength tinctures -- in the same way that beer and wine are popular, although like spirits, morphine or heroin also exist, but are consumed mostly diluted cocktail style. For the most part, opium is sold in regulated stores and always in well-known concentrations by a well-regulated industry.
Society has recognized for centuries the problems of opium use, but as its deeply ingrained in culture only the US ever tried to ban it during Prohibition which was a complete failure. Alcohol is seen as much worse, and society is presently engaged in a "alcohol crisis" fueled by over-prescription of therapeutic alcohol and black-market alcohol which is tainted.
Would we more or less be in the same place we are now, kind of turning a blind eye to the dangers of opium -- relying mostly on the culturally ingrained "rules" for to not overdose regularly?
It seems to me that most people ignore the large-scale problems with alcohol availability and despite cultural acceptance it's probably way more dangerous than we ever consider. Millions of people are alcoholics and millions more are borderline functional alcoholics and there are vast social problems associated with alcohol, like drunk driving, violence, domestic abuse, etc.
I think there have been attempts to quantify the risks associated with the various varieties of psychoactive substances and almost always alcohol and tobacco come out 1 or 2 with opiates further down the list maybe behind barbiturates, which society mostly has avoided as a long-term crisis or black market drug.
The latter is kind of interesting considering the popularity of Seconal and Quaaludes in the late 1960s and 1970s -- it's somewhat surprising that with the surge in illciit lab-made fentanyl and other "research chemicals" that there hasn't been a parallel surge in illicit lab-made Quaaludes or Seconal.
People believe their interests as law abiding citizens and the police's interests as law enforcers are somehow aligned, that they're on the same side or allies.
I think it's partly what gets ordinary people into such trouble with the cops. They just assume that being open and honest with the cops won't somehow lead to the cops arresting them for anything they say, since cops are mostly incentivized to arrest people. And I'm not talking about people who commit a crime and "spill the beans", but people not committing crimes stopped apparently at random who just answer their questions.
I'm mostly convinced that unless you have a serious need for police services, it's best to keep your distance.
Remember when application protocols were defined by academics in public RFCs?
For one, they started out the idea that there was no globalized central data repository -- that there would be multiple data repositories, requiring both client-server and server-client protocols. And that there would be multiple software implementations, so just define a protocol and let people implement it as they saw fit.
Now it's all designed for central monopoly data storage and a single source for software from the same people that control the data storage. Thanks, corporations.
This. My 14 year old 8th grader just started a new late start time -- 9:30. It had been 8:25, which was kind of ideal from a parental oversight perspective. He walks to school, so I was pretty much always able to monitor his progress and make sure he got up and ready for school.
9:30? He wants/expects to sleep until 8:30 and I nearly always have to leave for work at 8:00 and while it worked out OK the first couple of weeks (new school year novelty), Friday he was almost late.
I'm just lucky he only has to walk and he's 14. If he was 10, had to ride the bus and had to start at 9:30? I'd have no choice but to pay for before school care (which the elementary schools already have, some parents drop off hella early, like 7:00).
I think a confounding factor in all of this is that the general public mostly understands school start times in the context of their own experience 30-odd years before. And the basic design of the school experience seems kind of wed to the structure of the stay at home mom, the very close neighborhood school that was walking distance for anyone over 7 in 1960.
Once schools used bussing for desegregation and for facilitating school consolidation it all kind of went out the window, and now start times and distances are driven by bureaucratic goals of racial balance and efficiency.
I thought this was puzzling, too.
Best thing I could think of would be paperwork the employee had to fill out documenting a medical condition that interfered with work or resulted from an on the job injury.
Ordinary medical treatment involving a doctor, I don't know how a specific store location would see this even if TRU had been the insurer of record. Some kind of statement about the employee treatments (using the bizarre, technical coding language of health insurance) may have gone to some TRU home office. It seems like when I use health insurance I get a letter from the insurer telling me what I'm not getting coverage on and then a bill from the provider.
I'm skeptical that TRU provided that good/comprehensive enough insurance for most employees to begin with. I'd bet most employees (numerically) would have been part time and paying cash, using a spouse/parent's insurance, etc, never even giving TRU a reason to get into the paper flow.
Everything being sold for currency just happens to be mostly about money.
Those circus tents can be heated with forced air heaters. They set them up here in Minnesota, and we're as cold as most of populated Canada.
I think they would benefit more from trying MDMA on dogs.
We have a pretty good understanding about canine socialization and interaction and can better interpret ambiguous behavior on their part.
And what about trying it on chimps or other great apes? I suppose the argument there is they are SO similar to humans that the effects are probably entirely predictable.
Or is the whole point of this to actually see if octopuses specifically provide human-like responses to mind altering drugs as a means of evaluating octopus cognitive abilities?
The problem with this multi-layered, outsourced internet economy is that there's just about zero accountability for shitty service or products anymore.
I barely blame the delivery guys for not giving a shit considering how little they get paid and the crushing scheduling/travel burden imposed by Amazon.
Be grateful they're only unhappy enough with their employment to just toss packages. My guess is that the next iteration of unhappy employment involves burning those packages in a giant pile someplace, and the one after that involves rich people lined up against a wall.
I think it's just to create chaos.
I mean, if there's anything at all to the "Russians did it" in so many fields their main motivation seems to be create conflicts, not create any specific advantage.
It does seem like the one side effect of the social internet is that you can create real conflict very easily.
I would argue that it's a cultural belief derived from evolutionary biology.
Outside of a modern environment with reliable birth control, women who fucked everything got a bunch of children they couldn't support and men who who wouldn't support them because they were caring for another man's genetic offspring.
And that's if they didn't die at the end of pregnancy when they couldn't participate in gathering food or wound up being the slowest to flee from an environmental peril, like a fire, flood or a hungry bear.
None of this is to deny we're still stuck with a bunch of shitty cultural rules about sexuality that have been mooted by modern technology and economics, but my guess is most of them served some legitimate evolutionary value or some social goal that kept the tribe/clan/village from disintegrating due to disputes over parentage or lineage or even simple jealousy.
They wanted to price their product below market demand and limit market supply and wondered why they had problems with scalping? I mean the lack of fundamental economics is as much a problem with these artists as anything else.
200+ cities? That's a global tour for a major artist who may not hit all 50 states and will often only hit 1 city in many states.
Only smaller bands with more cult followings would realistically try to hit 200 cities in the US, and even then that's 4x per state -- how many cities are they really going to visit in Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, Kansas...?
Bottom line this is an economics problem of supply and demand, not a Ticketmaster problem. Not that Ticketmaster doesn't suck, they're just exploiting artists' marketing-driven logic and lack of economics understanding.
If the artists really cared about the fans, they would sell tickets directly to fans and travel with some kind of circus tent they could setup on whatever patch of open ground could be leased. Bypass Ticketmaster, their local monopoly contracts on venues, the whole thing.
There's no good reason I can think of that doesn't boil down to artificially generated demand and marketing perception.
But even this doesn't make sense. How does a bunch of disappointed fans who can't see the show due to shortage-driven ticket price inflation improve their fan experience?
Are there really people who want to see Taylor Swift or some other pop star mostly because tickets are hard to get? "I really wanted to see her but the tickets were easy to get, so now I don't want to go" -- I mean that doesn't even make sense.
It's not like pop stars also couldn't simply cancel dates that were less than 80% full if they played multiple nights in the same town.
The BS about venue scheduling or other logistics doesn't make much sense, either, they plan most high level concerts MONTHS in advance, including ticket sales, and can probably pretty easily coordinate tours with venue availability for consecutive nights, including booking slightly smaller venues to avoid partially full venues.
The only thing that MIGHT make sense is capitalizing on "buzz" and trying to get to as many markets as possible before the latest album loses popularity. Extended stays in some towns would slow the tour's geographic progress, but usually a hot star will do world tours that take most of a year.
I just don't get how any possibly negatives make "give all the money to scalpers and ticketmaster" a better alternative. Just play more shows and sell more tickets.
An auction style process for selling tickets makes the most sense, keeping the price very high initially and only dropping prices once demand falls below some threshold.
The real market failure here is that ticket face values are too cheap, the actual price many people are willing too pay is much higher than what the face value says. Scalping and resale markets wouldn't exist if the face value was the market equilibrium price.
What I don't understand is why *artists* let this happen and give away much of the profit to scalpers or ticketmaster.
If you're Taylor Swift and you sell out 2 shows in an hour, why not add shows until you wind up with a non-sellout? If the last show doesn't meet your touring costs, cancel it. The artist will make more money doing this. Raise supply to meet demand.
I know raising ticket prices isn't popular and people are pissed that "real fans" can't see a concert for the price they want to pay, but unless you raise prices or increase supply you will have scalping.
There's only two reasons I see why artists won't increase supply (perform more). One is they're just lazy and don't want to perform more. Touring sounds grueling generally, so maybe that's true but I'm guessing that doing 25% more shows or whatever isn't going to kill them. They can space out dates, lengthen the tour, etc, to make it less demanding. Touring isn't *that* grueling for top-tier acts with access to luxury hotels, private planes, and assistants who keep them supplied with anything they want.
The other is manufacturing demand -- the artist is only "popular" because ZOMG TICKETS ARE SOLD OUT. They intentionally limit supply to generate demand. The cynic in me thinks this is probably the case, although I question if this dynamic really works as well as they think given how much outrage there is over ticket prices, scalping, etc. All those problems go away AND the artist makes more money if they play more shows.
I'm sure there's some kind of argument against more shows based on venue availability, but given that so many tour dates are announced months in advance it sounds like they'd have no problem picking slots with facility availability.
We did one of these assessments in our group, with my normally level-headed boss making a big deal of us gaining this assessment as some kind of benefit.
I was the first to raise my hand and ask what kind of academic or scientific validation this personality test had. Of course it had none, it was snake oil being pushed by a management consultant who wanted to validate his BS with with "objective" data management could use to reinforce their own biases and petty personality conflict.
Nobody likes the guy who asks why we're wasting time and money on parlor game psychology. I suggested a Ouija board because it was as scientifically valid and a lot more fun.