southsamurai @ southsamurai @sh.itjust.works

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12

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4,202

Joined

2 yr. ago

Clip ons, I don't always remember they're on if it's bright out, but I usually take them off

Not because it's douchey, but because it's harder to see.

I think it's just sjw. I tried uploading stuff on other instances and it worked fine, just not to sjw communities, or from this sjw account

Really weird though, I've never had it happen before

Edit: damn! It was temporary it seems

Rudeness is in the presentation, not the fact.

If you say "fuck off", that's rude.

If you say "I don't do favors for people I don't know" or "I don't take requests from strangers" those are neutral and acceptable facts.

If you say "you can ask, but it doesn't mean I'll do it" that's another neutral and acceptable way to address it if you're willing to see what the favor might be, since some favors might me acceptable.

I tend to be willing to hear the request, but only with the caveat that I will most likely not comply. Last time a stranger asked if I could "help them", my response was "I doubt I can, and I might not, but ask away". They asked, and all they wanted was a light. I no longer smoke, but I carry a lighter. So I checked the surroundings and lit his cig

Years ago, I had a patient that lived in a really shifty area, and folks would approach me on my way up to their apartment. I'd see them coming and before they could reach me, I'd tell them that if they were wanting something to not waste their time, but if they were looking for trouble, they found it.

Which was rude in other circumstances, but necessary in that place at that time.

Your response was acceptable in that time at that place. Not necessarily the friendliest way of phrasing it, but sometimes being friendly doesn't go well.

Most people don't have the brain power to actually know what's in their best interest.

At most, they can handle very simple situations.

To really make choices in own best interest, your have to think long term, at a broad scale. Unfortunately, we can't see with certainty beyond maybe a few steps from our present time and place. So we would also have to think out layers of possibility with each decision.

If you can't do that quickly, you're fucked because you'll always be reacting instead of planning. Since even the smartest people on the planet can still only handle as much planning as a chess game takes, we're all fucked.

And yes, I'm including myself as not having the brain power to properly act in my own best interest long term. Being able to see the problem doesn't mean you're immune to it.

Well, that's what I said, just with an attempt at humor

You're not asking this in good faith.

However, nobody has actually tried to simplify an answer yet.

Taxes are a form of social contract between all taxpaying members of a country.

While it is not truly voluntary, it it also only applied when a person takes part in specific aspects of the social structure. So it can be avoided, just not without eschewing the benefits that come with being part of that country.

By partaking in the aspects of life in a country that incur taxes, you are, indirectly, agreeing to pay them that may or may not be fair. It may or may not give you any feasible alternatives to life in that country, and it decidedly does not leave any pleasant options. But you can avoid taxes, without legal consequences for not paying them, by not engaging in taxable activities.

It would suck for sure.

Now, does that mean taxes aren't theft? Define theft.

If I come to up to you and say "hey jimbob, if you come over here and mow my grass, I'll give you a gallon of milk. But, you gotta give a half pint of that to Gary over there because he gets a cut of all the milk that I give to people since he makes sure the cows stay healthy", is Gary stealing?

Gary is also providing a service. Me and Gary have a mutually beneficial agreement. You do not have to mow my grass. But once the offer is extended, and accepted, trying to say that Gary stole anything from you is not going to be a believable statement.

That's what taxation is. It's an agreement between everyone involved that "Gary", the government, gets a cut of money out of various exchanges of funds. In return, ideally, Gary keeps providing services to everyone.

Again, that's in an ideal world. In reality, not every government actually provides services to the taxed. Often enough, governments make every effort possible to not provide services as expected. But that's not the same thing as taxation itself being theft, it's a given government stealing while using taxes as the method.

So, what choices do you have to avoid taxes?

Well, you'll have to live life without monetary income, since you likely live in a country that taxes that. Difficult, but not impossible. You'll have to avoid owning taxable property. Here in the US, that's usually vehicles, homes/land, and similar real property. That's not actually difficult if you live in the right places, but if you're also not making monetary income, your choices for where to live become very unpleasant if you don't have very good friends and family to rely on.

You'll also likely have to avoid buying most things, since sales taxes exist. That's the really hard one to avoid because most people take part in the social agreement and will not give you goods or services without monetary exchange. Not impossible, but it's going to be a brutal life.

So, the choices absolutely are not fair. Since you also can't go anywhere livable without dealing with taxable transactions, you can't just opt out entirely and go live in the woods away from governments. Everywhere livable is owned by a government somewhere.

But that still doesn't make taxation itself theft, only specific implementations of taxation, and that is a different thing.

There is an app that's already making use of the piefed API, so I don't doubt that some of the lemmy apps will eventually get around to it as well.

Well, you've already been told the important part, that you can't crowd source this. There's way too much detail that matters to give a good answer without a shit ton more information.

That being said, brain fog tends to be a specific term used by a relatively narrow range of neurological conditions. As it happens, I've been around a lot of people in that narrow range.

So, with the initial caveat in place still, the answer is probably not going to help.

Most of what causes brain fog isn't so much about the things that amphetamines do.

Amphetamines work by boosting dopamine and norepinephrine, basically by increasing the cycle where brain cells pull chemicals into themselves.

Brain fog in most circumstances is caused by damage to the brain cells in one way or another. It isn't going to be helped by a hit of dopamine and norepinephrine. Otherwise, it would respond to those chemicals when administered directly. There are some cases where brain fog is chemical in origin rather than structural or inflammatory causes. But, again, in those cases, there are better options.

Take MS as an example. The brain fog there is from demyelinization. The outer layer of some nerve cells gets attacked my the immune system. The signals no longer get carried properly, and a side effect of that is decreased responsiveness in the brain. A brain fog. It's a structural issue where cells are damaged, and there's an inflammatory response that amplifies the effect.

You can dump all the dopamine and norepinephrine you want into a brain like that and all you'll get is a jittery, stressed out person with brain fog. Wouldn't matter if you took those chemicals, or an amphetamine, it just can't patch over damaged cells. Best case, it slightly decreases the fog by having healthy cells improve function, but it isn't likely, and there's no telling if the improved activity of those cells could bypass the damaged ones and do anything useful.

If your friend is dealing with any of the usual suspects, chances are that it would be a waste of time. It's been tried, and never really does anything useful, or they would get prescribed more often

Now, I have heard that some Parkinson's patients have had a degree of improvement of the brain fog from amphetamines, but that's a dopamine based disease to an extent, so not a big surprise there.

If her doctor isn't willing to prescribe them for her, then there's essentially zero chance it would do any good because they will and do prescribe them for conditions where it can be helpful.

Tbh, I'm not surprised she had trouble finding anything. Most of the diseases where brain fog is an issue, amphetamines were tried so long ago that the journals and publications the data was in were all in print. A lot of that stuff isn't digitized, and you won't find it outside of a medical library. I think the last time I read anything about studies done with them for MS in particular was back in the nineties. And that would have been in back issues of stuff.

It sucks, but she may not ever be back to her old self. She may get better, but never quite back to before. At least, not unless some new stuff comes along. Again, using MS as an example, there's been some attempts at repairing the damage to the myelin. There's been some success with it, and it does come with a decrease in disability. Combined with a disease modifier, that can potentially reverse the problems caused, and keep them from coming back. But that's likely a decade or so away from being ready for patients to have access to. Iirc, it's still in animal testing.

Other conditions have similar attempts ongoing, so it isn't hopeless. But amphetamines have been around long enough to have been tested against pretty much every disease out there. They just aren't viable for brain fog usually

Well, death from lack of sleep is a damn rare thing. In the cases I'm aware of, there were other factors involved.

Being able to keep someone awake via flexing of muscles only, that gets dubious as hell. At some point, the victim is going to just pass out, and nothing that subtle is going to wake them back up unless there's something else going on.

Also, the guy using stimulants is more likely to die from lack of sleep plus the drugs than the woman would be just from lack of sleep.

Also, after a week , both would likely have died from dehydration before sleep could be a factor. They'd also be laying in their own urine and feces.

While I don't doubt there's people that could lay in their own filth that long, what isn't going to happen is them laying there unaffected by it.

In other words, as a piece of fiction, it's a unique idea. But it's utterly implausible, and impossible in any realistic sense.

It has definitely been a goal. How far they'll get with legislators against them, I dunno. But it's what Pinchai and the people in control wanted because they think it's part of what made Apple powerful

It ain't stupid if it works

Unless it's this

There's a person on lemmy using the name. They're a bit off their rocker tbh.

You gotta learn how to surf it as best you can.

I'm not being flip. Anxiety, depression and all the related issues, they have a certain tidal nature. There's highs and lows. The key to living with it is to ride the worst waves until things settle back down a little.

If you ignore it, you get swamped.

Doesn't really matter what methods you use to do it. Breathing, meds, exposure therapy, CBT, yoga, whatever. You practice them when things are good, so you can stand on them when things are bad and make it back to shore.

I gotta warn you though, anxiety that's induced or worsened by chemicals is a shit ton harder to negotiate. You can't rely on your normal inner perception of your self. Normally, once you're used to anxiety, you can learn to recognize when it's going to spike, and that alone gives you some empowerment. But when it's external chemicals causing things to worsen, you can't feel when it's getting better or worse in the same way unless you also get used to that chemical and how it influences your anxiety. Which, seems like a pretty bad idea to keep using something that's making anxiety worse.

WHOA!

The answer to any question like that is: I have no idea, but we'll try and find out tomorrow. And if we can't, that's okay.

The second that pig boy said that Reddit's "corpus of data" was his to sell.

The fuckstain showed that the people that were the corpus of data were irrelevant to him, and every decision they've announced since that moment has driven that message home.

The population isn't really bigger any more. It's propped up by bots and reposts so much that the actual humans get buried outside of niche subs.

Here, the chances of talking to a bot are lower, and (barring newcomers that haven't adapted to the culture yet) most of the people range from neutral to genuinely good.

A bigger population doesn't help anyway. Most people in the world are stupid, or cruel, or just assholes. The bigger a given platform gets, the more you run into those because it's a numbers game.

A smaller platform can manage to self regulate and, bluntly, drive the serious assholes away. But once things get big enough, the assholes take over because there's too many of them to drive out.

I'm not saying lemmy doesn't have assholes. I'm just saying they don't dominate the discourse, and tend to have a high turnover rate.

That's why I'm on lemmy.

I hope to fuck not.

Bob. We call him Bob

I fucking loved it!