Yes, yes they can.

I mean for one it supports a lot less hardware. Second it’s significantly less reliable. Third it has thing like Co-Pilot built-in. I don’t know how people aren’t criticizing it more frankly.

You really have no idea.

Drinking enough will make you overdose, it’s called alcohol poisoning and can be fatal. This isn’t really any different to other substances you can overdose on. There are some substances where a fatal overdose has never happened in fact, THC and LSD being notable examples. I don’t know about you but I consider death to be pretty show stopping for me. Obviously if your some supernatural entity or something it might not be a huge deal for you.

As for effect length: how many drugs do you think take longer than 24 hours to stop being high? There are some that have long legs don’t get me wrong, but they are the minority. Some substances such as DMT and Ketamine actually last a shorter time than alcohol, and have less after effects like a hangover. In fact a bad alcohol hangover can easily last longer than 24 hours after imbibing. Alcohol withdrawal for serious addicts lasts quite a while too, up to a couple weeks I think, and can also be fatal if not treated correctly.

All you are doing here is proving you don’t understand how drugs work nor do you have practical experience by the sounds of it. I would argue if you don’t understand how drugs work you shouldn’t be allowed to set policy on them. Uninformed opinions are dangerous.

Unfortunately some people have no idea women like this actually exist and need to be told that drug use is a part of normal suburban life. Though to be honest I am kind of against the idolisation of suburbs, they are really inefficient, but I digress. Articles like this help break down the stigma around this kind of drug. A stigma that makes little sense as well given their safety profile and effectiveness in treating some illnesses like treatment resistant depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

I don’t particularly commend the women, nor the news outlet, for coming out about this though; it is still very much technically illegal by current law. But, I also do agree that the stigma attached to drug use, even when done so responsibly, is in fact ridiculous and stupid in general. However, I don’t see a better way of achieving what that does…so I couldn’t suggest any better alternatives and I don’t support going back to a previous era in Law where drugs that factually are provably dangerous, for some reason, are not regulated. Reasonable and Sensible Regulations on dangerous Drugs are REQUIRED; it’s just that some people have a different definition of ‘Reasonable and Sensible’ which has to be ironed into a proper consensus for society.

We should start with the most dangerous drug in our society: alcohol.

Oh wait the Americans tried that and it actually made things worse. Shocking.

Drug prohibition doesn’t and has never worked. We also know neither voters nor politicians understand nor follow scientific consensus on drugs. Not popular consensus. Scientific consensus. Very different things unfortunately.

Look up any ranking of drug harms published by scientists. You might honestly be shocked. Things that people consider safe like alcohol normally end up being ranked much higher than other things commonly thought of as dangerous like nicotine or amphetamines. As much as smoking is bad there is way too much focus on it compared to alcohol and some other stuff. I know there are even some people that think of cocaine as being relatively normal and safe because of its overall popularity, yet if you actually look into it it’s not healthy at all.

You’re the one making an argument here. So you’re the one who should be doing research. Yet it seems I’ve done more research than you in this conversation.

My views are based on data from my own country. If that situation is that bad in Los Estados Unidos then leave. In my country the average lecturer salary is a bit over £40k per year which is above the average UK salary for all age groups. That again is for lecturers which are not the same as professors.

You still haven’t said what their salary actually is, just vaguely talked about hourly rates. Shouldn’t most lectures be full time employees? Are you saying most lectures aren’t full time in your country?

Edit: In the UK we actually have a dedicated visa for people with certain skills and qualifications like your academics. So if you wanted to move here you probably could: https://www.gov.uk/global-talent-researcher-academic

If this is Los Estados Unidos then it’s not surprising something is wrong. I still sincerely doubt what these guys are saying though. I suspect a lot of them either mismanaged their money badly or are just straight up lying. Nobody would work in academia in that country if things were that bad at every University.

See this actually makes sense, but it is also entirely their own fault. You should only ever do a PhD if you’re getting paid to do it by being sponsored by a company or from a scholarship fund. That’s how I ended up doing my PhD. The kinds of people taking our loans to become a PhD probably shouldn’t be doing a PhD in the first place. It’s not like an undergraduate degree.

I am telling you that even people further down in the hierarchy make good money. Either your academics are lying to you (which wouldn’t suprise me people are fucking greedy) or something has gone very wrong in your country. If we are talking about American it’s probably both of those things.

Yes except lecturers also make bank.

The only people not making good money are the PhD students who also teach. Even then most of us I think get more money than the undergraduates.

Even I as a student get something like £19,000 a year plus £40 per hour teaching rate for any classes I teach.

Either these people are manipulating you or there is something very wrong with academia in your country. Luckily moving countries is quite easy for academics as many Universities will hire foreign staff and there are often immigration laws in place for these kinds of people.

In what world or country are professors not making enough to afford somewhere to live? In my country professors make good money despite the fact that tenure doesn’t really exist here. It’s one of the highest ranks you can have in academia above lecturer, senior lecturer, and reader.

Someone using Linux Mint would be a good guess as I don’t think they default to Google.

Then you use DuckDuckGo like I do. Not every search engine has gone to complete shit. Google was just an example. Obviously it’s not the current meta in terms of search engines.

Are you honestly telling me there aren’t people asking basic questions that could be solved with a google search? Don’t get me wrong the kind of question you are talking about does exist, but that’s now what I am discussing here.

I live in Europe, in a country that still has its problems. The truth is though it’s not just us. There are less deaths from war and less poverty throughout the world in general if you actually look at the statistics. This is despite all the bad things you see in the news. The modern news and internet make people more aware of the bad in the world, when the truth is things are actually getting better overall.

Aside from global warming the world as a whole has been steadily improving. I think you are confusing the USA with the rest of the world. Empires collapse, it happens, that doesn’t mean the whole world is on fire.

I don’t think you have interpreted that correctly. People tend to reinstall when changing versions, for example from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04. That isn’t the same as doing updates.

Honestly if you are that worried about updates breaking stuff, you might be better off using an immutable distro. These work using images and/or snapshots so it’s easy to rollback if something goes wrong. It’s also just less likely to go wrong as you aren’t upgrading individual packages as much, but rather the base system as a whole. Both Fedora and Open Suse have atomic/immutable variants with derivatives like Universal Blue providing ready to go setups for specific use cases like gaming and workstation use.

Alternatively the likes of Debian rarely break because of updates as everything is thoroughly tested before deployment. Gentoo and void are the same deal but in rolling release format so they are at least somewhat up to date while still being quite well tested.

Yeah unfortunately this is a real issue. I also think it’s an issue that experienced users don’t really want to help newbies, especially those who can’t or won’t do research by themselves. Ideally experienced users would be more helpful, but at the same time that isn’t their job. There are many who learned Linux more or less on their own so it’s understandable they don’t want to help given they didn’t use any help when it was their turn. I think now that the community is growing this might start to change a bit, as the newcomers are more likely to have had help and be willing to help others.

I sometimes try to advocate for using Linux, and I don’t mind giving friends advice from time to time. That being said I don’t want to be stuck answering stupid questions all the time that could have been solved with a google search or a YouTube video. I have my own stuff to worry about both technical and otherwise.

That’s why I think teaching new users how to access resources like man pages, gnu info pages, google, and so on is the correct approach to take. It is empowering having the skills to work through your own issues. That being said I also think it’s important for experienced people to give advice on more complex questions.

Also another serious question: why the fuck are you trying to demonize an anxiety disorder? In fact while I am here why are you trying to demonize personality disorders caused ultimately by childhood trauma?

I can understand making the argument that someone with NPD doesn’t belong in medicine for safety reasons. But anxiety disorders? Really? How is that going to impact their performance? Surely someone with anxiety is more likely to double or triple check things that others would miss.