Haven’t tried poppies yet in large enough quantities to feel anything, but I’d assume yes. Also similar to other mild natural drugs, like Khat or Kava or Nutmeg

Not really, you gotta chew a lot or drink a lot of tea to feel anything and then it’s more like drinking a few cups of coffee

Anything can technically kill anything if you are pedantic and creative enough. But at that point every statement becomes useless. Especially when a work of fiction is concerned.

Yeah, approaching these things with stringed logic breaks them usually. Same goes for vampire reproduction for example. If they turn the people they feed on, how come the world isn’t filled with vampires by now? There should be exponential growth in the number of vampires. Or Dracula needing to sleep on sacred home soil. Does it have to be from his exact crypt? How does he know the limits? Could he dig 1000 meters down and the soil would still work? How does a new vampire find their home turf, if they don’t have a family with a crypt?

You can go on endlessly poking holes, but that just takes the fun out of it. A good level of suspense of disbelief is always needed to enjoy those stories.

Dracula cannot be killed by sunlight. At least in the Bram Stoker novel. He’s out and about during the day quite a bit. What sunlight does, is keep him from changing shapes. Same for garlic, crucifixes and holy water. He can’t stand them and they weaken him, but nothing in the text says they would be fatal. Silver isn’t even mentioned.

It all depends a lot. There are different types of fragrances, for example an eau de cologne will smell less long than an eau de parfum which will smell less long than a “real” perfume. So depending on your day and type of fragrance you might need to refresh it during the day, or not. How much you use at a time can also vary quite a bit by person and smell. People who have been using a particular fragrance for a long time tend to use more since the nose gets blind to smells pretty fast. In general I’d say less is more here. Obviously the size of the bottle makes a difference as well. Finally, a lot of fragrances will not last forever. If you keep them too long they will spoil like the food in your fridge. Usually this takes a long time though.

To give you some concrete examples, a 100ml flacon of Brioni Eclat, which is an eau de parfum, will last me about two years. I use it most days, with one or two sprays per day. A 75ml flacon of a cheap eau de cologne I liked before that lasted less than a year, because it needed more applications. The shitty Abercrombie fragrance I used as a teenager started smelling funky after about 4 years of laying in some closet.

In case you weren’t aware, this is basically the premise for a philosophical thought experiment called an Experience Machine. It was first posed by Robert Nozick in an attempt to challenge hedonism.

Here’s the wiki in case you’re interested.

I’d love for you to be right. I just see this whole thing more cynical. To me the economic arguments were always just a fig leaf so that people who weren’t open racists could hide their shameful views on migration behind it. I’m not talking about the people in Belfast trying to light houses of migrants on fire. Those assholes are out in the open racists. I’m talking about your uncle or colleague who openly has “respectable” conservative views and mostly seems alright but when he’s with his buddy’s having a pint is showing his less palatable ideas.

There is another way of looking at this. People really believed those economic arguments and voted for that. If that’s true they are dumber than a sack of rocks. Idk what is better.

The main motivation for Brexit was racism and xenophobia (hidden behind an embarrassingly thin veil of brain dead financial promises). Now that the british people see that Brexit negatively impacts their own financial situation they want to have their cake and eat it too. Back to EU benefits, while continuing the racist policies.

Some nurses at our hospital have rolled their experiences over into a book deal. Why don’t you try writing as a side job/hobby for a while and see if it would work out? I know nursing is a stressful job with little down time but if they can manage, you might be able to, too.

Why would it be better the other way around? I’m guessing here but I’m assuming the ration you’re naming has to do with men having less kids than women on average, as well as a higher mortality.

Sure, a man can get multiple women pregnant at the same time, while women can only carry one kid at a time (usually). But most men don’t do that. Most people are relatively monogamous, especially once they know they will have a child with someone. So it’s not about what would be theoretically possible, but about the actual behaviour of people.

If AI works like tech guys say it will (of which I have my doubts) it’ll basically work like another Industrial Revolution. Back then it was supposedly a similar issue: people used to weave fabric by hand, but when the spinning jenny and electric loom came around they weren’t needed anymore so they were out of a job and turned destitute. Companies started selling the products internationally in the colonies and employed differently qualified workers to handle the new machines. So the hand weavers got replaced by loom operators and knowledge workers. If you believe the Silicon Valley class, this transition will be the same.

The issue is that the traditional weavers stayed destitute, because they weren’t equipped for the new labour market and so a lot of them were driven into poverty and radicalisation. As always capitalists don’t really care about that though

You’re right and it depends largely on the framing. In a different setting I’d probably be for such a system of trust, in an Ivy League school my cynical view of it just seems more realistic to me.

The people who are studying at Princeton get told they are supposed to be the better than the others, are under constant pressure to perform and in an overall highly competitive environment. This is not an environment that builds trust, in my experience it builds distrust between competitors.

Trust to me should ideally be fostered in a system that encourages a collaborative environment, in which the students don’t surveil each other, but work together to achieve their goal of learning.

Short answer: yes!

This is all new to me and fascinating. If someone knows more, please correct me.

The way I understand it the system relies on students swearing on their honor not to cheat and then a system of self supervision (aka snitching). There is an honor committee that consists of students who make sure no one cheats, and who investigate cases where it is suspected. Additionally there seems to be a culture of snitching on each other, should anybody break code.

I guess this presupposes a culture of immens pressure and a zero sum game where collaboration between students is unthinkable because your peers are made out to be your direct competitors… sounds toxic as hell to me.

I recently read „The death of Ivan Iljych“ by Tolstoy. He asks the same questions about life that you do. Doesn’t really pose any concrete answer of course, I’d be shocked if there was an universal one, but maybe you can find something that helps you find your own in there.

I know a guy who works for Apple. Quite high up too. He has dreamed of working there all his life and just because Tim Cook decided to crawl up trumps ass he did not change his views one bit. He gets payed incredibly well, builds products that he is excited about and gets a lot of additional benefits. From his point of view I don’t really see any reason for doubt. He does exactly what he always wanted to be doing. I assume it’ll be like that for many of the guys working there.

Mac Miller was probably the worst one… I’m a little younger than him and watching his career from early on felt like watching an older brother develop and making it big. He made the soundtrack to most of my youth.

Definitely a tragic one. RIP Danya

I think you’re onto something here, and I think it’s a feature, not a bug. The US have been at war the entire time since WW2, but they usually don’t have a draft. So they need to rely on different methods to motivate young men into becoming soldiers. An integral part of being a soldier is the use of violence to solve problems, usually to the point where you might be expected to kill. If your society sees violence and killing unacceptable you’re gonna have a hard time finding people who wanna sign up to do the killing for you. So you honor your veterans more than any other part of your population, you make movies and games about valiant soldiers fighting for the good cause and step by step you slowly manufacture a cultural climate that says killing and violence are legit means of achieving a goal, sometimes even necessary.

It‘s not one singular factor, like education or better mental health care or the group of people who own them. Sure, those are all important, but they only in part tackle the main underlying issue why people do these things. Young men (and nearly all mass shooters are young men) in american society are told that they are supposed to be achievers, they are supposed to get rich, be cool, have many friends, get a girl, get a house, get a fancy car and all the other status symbols. But most of them don’t see a way of achieving this, since it’s pretty unrealistic with how things are in capitalism. This tension between the life they want and some think deserve, and the life they actually lead is pretty tough to handle.

Most adjust their goals, or get into political activism, or hustle culture, or drugs or do whatever else to get over this perception of a stolen future. But a tiny group can’t get over it and they are angry at society for taking what they think is their rightful life from them. They usually find other people with similar resentments online, radicalise further, and at the end you have a tragedy. Guns aren’t even necessary, they just make it easier to hurt a lot of people in a short time span.

Now Switzerland isn’t socialist heaven, but there is in general a higher standard of living, better education, better mental health care and less demands for young men to become as rich as possible. There are also more strict checks when issuing guns than there are in some us states and strict rules about storage. So a 17 years old will be less likely to develop the toxic ideology needed to want to do something like a mass shooting, have a better safety net to deradicalise him and have a harder time getting the needed equipment.

This is obviously generalising a lot, so don’t take it as a universal answer, because there isn’t.