I still think it's wrong that HN needs my email address to delete accounts and comments, but yes I finally broke down and did this their way.
I'll miss the good parts of this community, but the selective moderation and toxic flag-or-downvote-truths-i-dont-like-instead-of-discuss-them parts of the community have ruined this site for me.
Other console makers make a profit on their consoles as well. Typically it's either a small margin at the beginning, or maybe they're eating it somewhat, but as time goes on the components get cheaper, production is improved, or they make revisions to reduce complexity in the circuit boards, or they release a newer smaller version of the console as well. But it's not fair to say that Sony and Microsoft lose money on their console hardware but Nintendo doesn't.
It's extremely rare that anyone gets "roid rage" or addiction. Rage is induced far more often by people not being able to vape/smoke in airports. Any kind of rage associated with steroids is usually caused by too little estrogen, which only really happens when taking anti-estrogen pills, not generally from the steroids themselves, and when this happens can be rapidly fixed by adjusting hormones with hCG, HMG, or estradiol valerate -- none of which are scheduled, hCG is cheap on the gray market, and estradiol is widely available to trans women.
Addiction is so rare that the American Medical Association, FDA, and even the DEA itself opposed scheduling anabolic steroids, because of the lack of evidence that steroid use resulted in dependence[0]. This is why it simply doesn't belong on the controlled substance schedules.
There's a lot of post-hoc justification and propaganda about it now that it's illegal. But the evidence doesn't support this propaganda. It is fairly effective at convincing a non-trivial amount of the population though.
one often discussed topic of psychedelics is "ego shedding/death" usually seen as a positive thing, which it can be. But it can certainly misalign you for life as you currently know it. So, you may end up "in a worse situation" if your life was going well, you experience "ego shedding" after which you struggle to return to "normal life". This concept is terrifying for a lot of people, and rightly so i think
That pesky middle class is always sticking up for their rights and freedoms. Just a little more price inflation and a little more wage stagnation and they’ll be owning nothing and being happy about it right according to the WEF’s plans.
I think this view is overly pessimistic. I’ve started to find statistics like the ones in this article to be more or less useless. No error bars, no distributions, no detail - maybe that trend is really just the top 2% (by pay) of the (tech) workforce being laid off. If bigtech lays off a bunch of people and those people end up working for less at startups, then perhaps this is better for everyone, especially in a high-interest-rate economy where those startups need to build real value and become durable businesses.
Private markets are still going to look for alpha in the tech sector (most relevant to readers of HN), and there is still lots of dry powder that can only be held for so long. The next 5 years could produce some really strong businesses that are currently only ideas - as long as we’re optimistic and willing to keep going
Not everyone is in tech. Most wages have been either stagnant or increased well below actual inflation. Housing, food, and energy costs are way up, far higher than the official inflation numbers imply. Middle class purchasing power is decreasing year on year and people are relying too much on credit to maintain their previous standards of living. It’s all going to come apart once people exhaust their credit.
Not sure why you’re downvoted for pointing this out. Like most recent tax proposals this would disproportionately impact the rural middle class. Farmers and truck drivers would be directly impacted and then these costs would be passed on to consumers.
Those poor enough to receive WIC and EBT payments would have this tax largely subsidized, so it won’t impact them, and the wealthy would barely notice.
I think the argument could be made that giving an addict more money means giving them more money for their self destructive addictions, which is ultimately counter productive.
On the flip side, giving them more money could reduce the likelihood they turn to crime to fund their addictions.
You could make this exact argument against income tax cuts for the rich. Drug and alcohol consumption is strongly correlated to income, so cutting the top marginal tax rate is just feeding the destructive habits of the rich.
Wouldn't a jobs program also help them while bettering society as a whole in the process and possibly teaching them a skill?
It wouldn't have to be hard labor, I'm thinking park beautification or paid internships for skilled jobs that have shortages.
Long term I see "free" money from the government just expanding the class of people that are dependent upon the government for their way of life. The old "teach a man to fish" addage.
I agree with everyone that it should be a completely unnecessary product, but I don't feel that it is excessively expensive for what it does.