And what are your tolerance levels and experience with both substances?
As someone who rarely drinks, I notice significant (not huge, but significant) impairment of my coordination, response time, and thinking ability after just a single beer.
On the other hand, I smoke weed (actually, mostly hash oil - concentrated cannabinoids) on a daily basis and notice no impairment at all from a single hit of weed. After a whole bowl to myself (or a dab of oil) my reaction time can go down a little, and thinking can be slightly slower, but not as much as a single beer will do. It takes a lot of weed to significantly fuck with my coordination. In fact, the main driving related effect I get from weed is that it calms me down; I drive slower, less aggressively, and don't get as stressed by things like traffic and slow/bad drivers.
So any benefit you think you gain from caffeine is just you rationalizing your addiction? Does the fact that weed and LSD are not considered to be addicting drugs mean your willing to accept their may be some validity in user's anecdotes? Besides, most people who are claiming the drugs help are talking about the creative process, coming up with ideas and designs for code, not the actual coding itself. You can come up with a real creative design while tripping, look it over once your sober to find any flaws, and then implement it sober as well (or under the influence of caffeine if you prefer).
The arguments against the idea of drugs being helpful that I see used by those who have never done illegal drugs basically amounts to "I've always been told drugs are bad, so they can't be beneficial." I am comfortable enough with the understood process of "cognitive dissonance" that the opinions of people (in regard to this topic) who's only knowledge of drugs is what they were told by "authority figures" can be thrown out.
I understand all of your points, but I think you missed mine. Do you think the farmers that grow your food are more concerned with feeding your family, or earning money? Just because someone has their own selfish motives doesn't mean their actions can't be beneficial.
Regardless of motive, my point remains that those who enable the violation of unjust laws are one of the strongest forces in raising awareness and opposition to those laws.
Psychedelics and cannabis can help with the conceptual part of designing software, but they make it more difficult to write actual code and can make it more buggy. I find that a small amount of weed can help me focus for a couple of hours before it makes me groggy. Also, microdosing LSD - taking just enough to get the stimulating, creative, awareness-expanding, uplifting effects but not enough for the reality distortion and motor impairment - shows promising signs as a nootropic. I would recommend looking into LSD microdosing if you're really curious about how recreational drugs could be used beneficially for intellectual purposes.
I've never used LSD explicitly for problem solving, but all kinds of unique ideas come to me spontaneously, and there have been many times while tripping that I've viewed the world in an objected-oriented way for example thinking about each person as a separate implementation of an abstract Person class along with implementing interfaces for each role they perform in society as a way of conceptualizing the way unique people can all fit into predefined roles in society. Most of the realizations on psychedelics are hard to describe to others, but that's mostly because of how complex and nuanced (and many times, personal) the realizations are. It would be like trying to explain how some 100,000 line system you wrote works to someone; You understand it conceptually in your head, but putting it into words so a lay person can understand the inner workings is all but impossible.
It's not that recreational drugs help the actual act of writing code, but they can be greatly beneficial to the conceptual design process.
Then there's stimulants like adderall and (obviously) caffeine. And the fact that smoking weed after work can be an effective means of preventing burn out.
In the end, I think it mostly varies from person to person. What drugs they're used to, how their mind naturally works, what kind of work they do, what kind of effects the want, etc.
Caffeine and Adderall are mind-altering drugs with obvious benefits for productivity. Besides, you can use a drug like weed or LSD for creativity and designing, and then review and implement that design while sober. Also, there is unofficial research going on regarding using extremely small doses of LSD as a nootropic for it's creative, uplifting, and energizing effects, but at a dose lower than required for hallucinations and motor impairment.
If it weren't for people like Dotcom and the Pirate Bay guys, would there even be a movement for the EFF and EDRI to fight for? That's what I see as the problem with saying we should all wait for the law to be changed before engaging in activities we believe should be legal - If no one is performing the activity then who cares enough about legitimizing it to fight for it? Why spend all the effort to legalize an activity that no one seems too concerned with? Do you think prohibition would have ever ended if everyone would have stopped drinking alcohol until it was repealed?
What if the chemist who originally created Adderall intended for it to be used to just get super tweaked and strung out for days on end? What does the "intended purpose" have anything to do with responsible or ethical use?
What if you'd rather go for a hike after work, not get stuck in traffic, don't like having to avoid bums literally asking for beer money, don't want to worry about getting violently robbed at night, and would like to sleep with the window open without hearing traffic? Besides, if I want quality service at a business, I know I need to go to the suburbs. But maybe it's just because Milwaukee is a shit-hole.
Why do Americans constantly feel the need to push themselves to burnout? How would you like if your boss assigned you hours of work that had to be completed on your free time after already working 8 hours a day? Do people really believe that school is less effort and stress than work? Must be those rose-colored glasses.
Besides, I think a more effective change to the school year would be to take the three months of summer break, and distribute them through out the year, one month at a time. So kids would go to school for a couple months, then get a month break after every quarter, trimester, what-have-you. Then there is the crazy long 3 month break that TFA references where kids forget everything. And kids get to have more significant breaks more often so they can unwind and relax a bit more between quarters and start the next one refreshed and ready to go.
How does recreational use imply abuse? I abused adderall my last year of college and first year of full-time work for entirely non-recreational purposes and it pretty much ruined 2 years of my life. My recreational usage of psychedelics on the other hand has been entirely positive. I don't think that recreational drug use is inherently either good or bad. Drugs are tools. And like all tools, it's all depends what you do with them.
And why do people think that drug use is the result of some problem in people's lives or a vain attempt to be "cool"? Maybe people do drugs for the same reason they do anything else with their free time: simply because it's enjoyable.
"Drugs" are a hard thing to generalize. Remember, everything from caffeine and weed up to alcohol and heroin are labeled "drugs". Some are much more inherently dangerous than others, but to generalize "drugs are bad" is as naive as generalizing "food is bad" after walking through the candy aisle. And as far weed is concerned, it's far more benign than America's socially acceptable intoxicant, alcohol.
As a 24 year old software engineer who has smoked weed daily for the past 5 years and, as an individual, earns more than the average household income, I disagree with your statement. I know many other people who smoke as often as I do and are also arguably successful people for their age.
Yes, most stoners I know work near-minimum-wage jobs, but from what I've seen, this is because underachievers and unmotivated people are drawn to weed, not because weed necessarily makes you an underachiever or unmotivated. It does make you relax and more at peace with the world, which can lead to lower motivation (why exert yourself when you're already content with things?) and just wanting to chill, but it doesn't take much effort to keep yourself motivated and on track while maintaining a weed habit. In fact, smoking some weed after work is a great way to unwind, release stress, and prevent burnout.
Smoking weed doesn't make you stupid any more than drinking alcohol will make you abusive or drinking caffeine will make you a tweaker. Which is to say, it can if you let it, but it's pretty easy to avoid it with a little effort.
That said, I can certainly believe that smoking weed isn't a good thing for kids since they (in general) don't have the maturity to use responsibly nor the established lifestyle habits to prevent complacency in the face of weed's tranquility.
That's the whole point most people have been making against the gateway theory to begin with: Of course most people who shoot heroin used marijuana first, marijuana is much easier to get than heroin (and more acceptable). This study just takes it one step further and says "before most people started using even weed, they started with alcohol." I bet if they studied further, they would find that caffeine is the real "gateway drug".
Pedantically speaking, the sun causes cancer, the air around busy roads contains many times as many toxic particulates as air in the woods, and drinking well water could expose you to radioactive Radon.
Marijuana has not been shown to cause cancer, and has a much lower correlation with lung disease than cigarettes. While you are correct that there are some potential harms in smoking weed, they are no where near significant enough to demonize marijuana over. No one brings up the fact that car exhaust can cause lung damage when discussing transportation. In both cases, the harm is there in theory, but isn't significant enough to be of concern in normal circumstances.
Yes, that's what we want, every idiot who doesn't want to bother getting informed about the issues being forced to vote. We may as well pick our leaders from a fucking hat!
As long as illegal drugs remain a multi-billion dollar market, cash isn't going anywhere.
Besides, think about what cash really is. It's just the most liquid monetary vehicle available due to government decree that everyone accept it. If the government were to do away with cash there will still be other highly liquid goods for people to trade with similar efficacy as cash.
I hate the implication that people who don't have a problem with marijuana should stop using it just to prove to the world they are not addicted. Then even if someone quits for a month or two and then starts using again, people argue that starting back up is proof of addiction. I'll stop smoking marijuana to prove I'm not an addict after you prove to me you're not addicted to eating sugary foods, driving your car, watching TV, and reading Slashdot. Doing something repetitively makes it a habit. Doing something despite desperately wanting to quit makes it an addiction. I have known people who have wanted to quit marijuana for various reasons... and then they did so with no problem. That's more than I can say for cigarette smokers or regular Adderall users.
I don't know where you get the idea that someone in control of an army of amoral autonomous killing machines would have your liberty in mind.
The only thing stopping a government from using it's army to oppress its people is the fact that the army is made up of its people, and even that isn't always enough.
Next up, why do when continue to use wheels when we have jet engines? Why do so many people still use fire to heat their homes (gas furnace) when they can use electricity as a modern replacement? Why do people eat food when it would be more convenient to just get your nutrients pumped into you through an IV? I guess some people just don't want to keep up with the times...
My point is that even if there are observable problems with a system, that doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing needs to be done away with. You have to look at the bigger picture. You have to compare the costs with the benefits rather than just point out the costs and freak out. I do think that there is a thin line between helping people who are down on their luck and enabling people who just don't want to work though.
And regarding locking people up after they've committed the crime: No one who died on 9/11 came back after Osama was killed. There is something to be said for being proactive about crime rather than simply reactive.
I'm just saying there's more to the situation than just helping someone who's lost their job. Society as a whole benefits from the stability these social programs provide. And I figured that since your compassionate side appears to be lacking I would appeal to your selfish side.
If compassion isn't enough to make you support unemployment, think about it this way: The most dangerous people are those with nothing to lose.
When a man has to put a gun to your head to pay his rent I doubt you'll be lecturing him on how he could have avoided the whole situation if only he had saved.
But those billions are going to trickle down to us, remember? Giving tax money to corporations invigorates the economy, giving tax money to education traps our children in a lifetime of debt./s
This exact thing has been my biggest problem with Pandora. With all that information about what songs relate to each other, you would think they would know that going from "Brain Damage" to any song other than "Eclipse" is going to sound very off. On a related note, whenever a song from Dark Side of the Moon starts playing on Pandora, a lot of times I'll just stop it and play the whole album off my phone to hear it in all it's glory.
Slashdot Mirror
And what are your tolerance levels and experience with both substances?
As someone who rarely drinks, I notice significant (not huge, but significant) impairment of my coordination, response time, and thinking ability after just a single beer.
On the other hand, I smoke weed (actually, mostly hash oil - concentrated cannabinoids) on a daily basis and notice no impairment at all from a single hit of weed. After a whole bowl to myself (or a dab of oil) my reaction time can go down a little, and thinking can be slightly slower, but not as much as a single beer will do. It takes a lot of weed to significantly fuck with my coordination. In fact, the main driving related effect I get from weed is that it calms me down; I drive slower, less aggressively, and don't get as stressed by things like traffic and slow/bad drivers.
So any benefit you think you gain from caffeine is just you rationalizing your addiction? Does the fact that weed and LSD are not considered to be addicting drugs mean your willing to accept their may be some validity in user's anecdotes? Besides, most people who are claiming the drugs help are talking about the creative process, coming up with ideas and designs for code, not the actual coding itself. You can come up with a real creative design while tripping, look it over once your sober to find any flaws, and then implement it sober as well (or under the influence of caffeine if you prefer).
The arguments against the idea of drugs being helpful that I see used by those who have never done illegal drugs basically amounts to "I've always been told drugs are bad, so they can't be beneficial." I am comfortable enough with the understood process of "cognitive dissonance" that the opinions of people (in regard to this topic) who's only knowledge of drugs is what they were told by "authority figures" can be thrown out.
I understand all of your points, but I think you missed mine. Do you think the farmers that grow your food are more concerned with feeding your family, or earning money? Just because someone has their own selfish motives doesn't mean their actions can't be beneficial.
Regardless of motive, my point remains that those who enable the violation of unjust laws are one of the strongest forces in raising awareness and opposition to those laws.
Psychedelics and cannabis can help with the conceptual part of designing software, but they make it more difficult to write actual code and can make it more buggy. I find that a small amount of weed can help me focus for a couple of hours before it makes me groggy. Also, microdosing LSD - taking just enough to get the stimulating, creative, awareness-expanding, uplifting effects but not enough for the reality distortion and motor impairment - shows promising signs as a nootropic. I would recommend looking into LSD microdosing if you're really curious about how recreational drugs could be used beneficially for intellectual purposes. I've never used LSD explicitly for problem solving, but all kinds of unique ideas come to me spontaneously, and there have been many times while tripping that I've viewed the world in an objected-oriented way for example thinking about each person as a separate implementation of an abstract Person class along with implementing interfaces for each role they perform in society as a way of conceptualizing the way unique people can all fit into predefined roles in society. Most of the realizations on psychedelics are hard to describe to others, but that's mostly because of how complex and nuanced (and many times, personal) the realizations are. It would be like trying to explain how some 100,000 line system you wrote works to someone; You understand it conceptually in your head, but putting it into words so a lay person can understand the inner workings is all but impossible.
It's not that recreational drugs help the actual act of writing code, but they can be greatly beneficial to the conceptual design process.
Then there's stimulants like adderall and (obviously) caffeine. And the fact that smoking weed after work can be an effective means of preventing burn out.
In the end, I think it mostly varies from person to person. What drugs they're used to, how their mind naturally works, what kind of work they do, what kind of effects the want, etc.
Alcohol is neurotoxic, cannabinoids are not.
Caffeine and Adderall are mind-altering drugs with obvious benefits for productivity. Besides, you can use a drug like weed or LSD for creativity and designing, and then review and implement that design while sober. Also, there is unofficial research going on regarding using extremely small doses of LSD as a nootropic for it's creative, uplifting, and energizing effects, but at a dose lower than required for hallucinations and motor impairment.
If it weren't for people like Dotcom and the Pirate Bay guys, would there even be a movement for the EFF and EDRI to fight for? That's what I see as the problem with saying we should all wait for the law to be changed before engaging in activities we believe should be legal - If no one is performing the activity then who cares enough about legitimizing it to fight for it? Why spend all the effort to legalize an activity that no one seems too concerned with? Do you think prohibition would have ever ended if everyone would have stopped drinking alcohol until it was repealed?
What if the chemist who originally created Adderall intended for it to be used to just get super tweaked and strung out for days on end? What does the "intended purpose" have anything to do with responsible or ethical use?
What if you'd rather go for a hike after work, not get stuck in traffic, don't like having to avoid bums literally asking for beer money, don't want to worry about getting violently robbed at night, and would like to sleep with the window open without hearing traffic? Besides, if I want quality service at a business, I know I need to go to the suburbs. But maybe it's just because Milwaukee is a shit-hole.
Why do Americans constantly feel the need to push themselves to burnout? How would you like if your boss assigned you hours of work that had to be completed on your free time after already working 8 hours a day? Do people really believe that school is less effort and stress than work? Must be those rose-colored glasses.
Besides, I think a more effective change to the school year would be to take the three months of summer break, and distribute them through out the year, one month at a time. So kids would go to school for a couple months, then get a month break after every quarter, trimester, what-have-you. Then there is the crazy long 3 month break that TFA references where kids forget everything. And kids get to have more significant breaks more often so they can unwind and relax a bit more between quarters and start the next one refreshed and ready to go.
How does recreational use imply abuse? I abused adderall my last year of college and first year of full-time work for entirely non-recreational purposes and it pretty much ruined 2 years of my life. My recreational usage of psychedelics on the other hand has been entirely positive. I don't think that recreational drug use is inherently either good or bad. Drugs are tools. And like all tools, it's all depends what you do with them.
And why do people think that drug use is the result of some problem in people's lives or a vain attempt to be "cool"? Maybe people do drugs for the same reason they do anything else with their free time: simply because it's enjoyable.
"Drugs" are a hard thing to generalize. Remember, everything from caffeine and weed up to alcohol and heroin are labeled "drugs". Some are much more inherently dangerous than others, but to generalize "drugs are bad" is as naive as generalizing "food is bad" after walking through the candy aisle. And as far weed is concerned, it's far more benign than America's socially acceptable intoxicant, alcohol.
As a 24 year old software engineer who has smoked weed daily for the past 5 years and, as an individual, earns more than the average household income, I disagree with your statement. I know many other people who smoke as often as I do and are also arguably successful people for their age.
Yes, most stoners I know work near-minimum-wage jobs, but from what I've seen, this is because underachievers and unmotivated people are drawn to weed, not because weed necessarily makes you an underachiever or unmotivated. It does make you relax and more at peace with the world, which can lead to lower motivation (why exert yourself when you're already content with things?) and just wanting to chill, but it doesn't take much effort to keep yourself motivated and on track while maintaining a weed habit. In fact, smoking some weed after work is a great way to unwind, release stress, and prevent burnout.
Smoking weed doesn't make you stupid any more than drinking alcohol will make you abusive or drinking caffeine will make you a tweaker. Which is to say, it can if you let it, but it's pretty easy to avoid it with a little effort.
That said, I can certainly believe that smoking weed isn't a good thing for kids since they (in general) don't have the maturity to use responsibly nor the established lifestyle habits to prevent complacency in the face of weed's tranquility.
You spoiled the ending! I was half way through that book! Oh well, I found the character development of Sam I Am fairly lacking anyway...
That's the whole point most people have been making against the gateway theory to begin with: Of course most people who shoot heroin used marijuana first, marijuana is much easier to get than heroin (and more acceptable). This study just takes it one step further and says "before most people started using even weed, they started with alcohol." I bet if they studied further, they would find that caffeine is the real "gateway drug".
Pedantically speaking, the sun causes cancer, the air around busy roads contains many times as many toxic particulates as air in the woods, and drinking well water could expose you to radioactive Radon.
Marijuana has not been shown to cause cancer, and has a much lower correlation with lung disease than cigarettes. While you are correct that there are some potential harms in smoking weed, they are no where near significant enough to demonize marijuana over. No one brings up the fact that car exhaust can cause lung damage when discussing transportation. In both cases, the harm is there in theory, but isn't significant enough to be of concern in normal circumstances.
Yes, that's what we want, every idiot who doesn't want to bother getting informed about the issues being forced to vote. We may as well pick our leaders from a fucking hat!
As long as illegal drugs remain a multi-billion dollar market, cash isn't going anywhere. Besides, think about what cash really is. It's just the most liquid monetary vehicle available due to government decree that everyone accept it. If the government were to do away with cash there will still be other highly liquid goods for people to trade with similar efficacy as cash.
I hate the implication that people who don't have a problem with marijuana should stop using it just to prove to the world they are not addicted. Then even if someone quits for a month or two and then starts using again, people argue that starting back up is proof of addiction. I'll stop smoking marijuana to prove I'm not an addict after you prove to me you're not addicted to eating sugary foods, driving your car, watching TV, and reading Slashdot. Doing something repetitively makes it a habit. Doing something despite desperately wanting to quit makes it an addiction. I have known people who have wanted to quit marijuana for various reasons... and then they did so with no problem. That's more than I can say for cigarette smokers or regular Adderall users.
I don't know where you get the idea that someone in control of an army of amoral autonomous killing machines would have your liberty in mind.
The only thing stopping a government from using it's army to oppress its people is the fact that the army is made up of its people, and even that isn't always enough.
Next up, why do when continue to use wheels when we have jet engines? Why do so many people still use fire to heat their homes (gas furnace) when they can use electricity as a modern replacement? Why do people eat food when it would be more convenient to just get your nutrients pumped into you through an IV? I guess some people just don't want to keep up with the times...
My point is that even if there are observable problems with a system, that doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing needs to be done away with. You have to look at the bigger picture. You have to compare the costs with the benefits rather than just point out the costs and freak out. I do think that there is a thin line between helping people who are down on their luck and enabling people who just don't want to work though.
And regarding locking people up after they've committed the crime: No one who died on 9/11 came back after Osama was killed. There is something to be said for being proactive about crime rather than simply reactive.
I'm just saying there's more to the situation than just helping someone who's lost their job. Society as a whole benefits from the stability these social programs provide. And I figured that since your compassionate side appears to be lacking I would appeal to your selfish side.
If compassion isn't enough to make you support unemployment, think about it this way: The most dangerous people are those with nothing to lose. When a man has to put a gun to your head to pay his rent I doubt you'll be lecturing him on how he could have avoided the whole situation if only he had saved.
But those billions are going to trickle down to us, remember? Giving tax money to corporations invigorates the economy, giving tax money to education traps our children in a lifetime of debt. /s
This exact thing has been my biggest problem with Pandora. With all that information about what songs relate to each other, you would think they would know that going from "Brain Damage" to any song other than "Eclipse" is going to sound very off. On a related note, whenever a song from Dark Side of the Moon starts playing on Pandora, a lot of times I'll just stop it and play the whole album off my phone to hear it in all it's glory.