my understanding is that cannabis is far less damaging to the health than nicotine cigarettes. yet nicotine cigarettes stayed legal while cannabis was declared illegal. the logical conclusion is that the health concerns were not the determining factor. therefore, it was obviously about other things, such as cultural perception, commercial lobbying, political ideology.

by the way, tobacco (nicotine) was one of the first cash crops that were exported from the US to europe when america was first settled by european settlers, which gave money to america and made the migration much more attractive to many people. that’s why there is a cultural fond memory of tobacco, because it funded settling america back then (among other factors) (source: read it a while ago on wikipedia).

then there’s the strong tobacco lobbying group. turns out that there’s a lot of money to be earned with cigarettes and the lobbying group for tobacco is strong. that’s another reason why it wasn’t banned.

then there is this whole issue that a whole lot of drugs are primarily taken by marginalized groups. why? these groups already have a difficult life, drugs often help with pain relief -> higher drug usage in the black population. combine this with the “forced labor is illegal except as a punishment for crime” thing and suddenly you get a rural south that wants to find any pretense to criminalize black people. and guess what, drugs are a convenient way to do that.

yeah, well, the thing is that i’ve read many drug trip reports and what people describe there is often similar to what i experience anyways. so i see the connection there.

because cannabis was mostly consumed by groups that the political mainstream didn’t like. for example, it is still the case today that cannabis is mostly being consumed by people who lean left politically.

e.g. https://news.gallup.com/poll/405086/marijuana-views-linked-ideology-religiosity-age.aspx

• 68% of U.S. adults favor legalizing marijuana, tied for record high
• Liberal, younger, less religious are most supportive
• Only 32% of conservatives aged 65 and older are in favor

also, around 1969 when a lot of people took drugs (LSD etc) on hippie festivals (woodstock), these people overwhelmingly had anti-war, anti-capitalist, hippie views etc. so there’s a clear link between drug usage and political views.

we learned another degree of freedom

well i’ve said for years that my brain produces its own mind-altering substances, in larger amounts than other people produce it, and it does have an effect on me. i’ve always kinda seen the world very differently from other people … yeah i do think that my mind actually produces its own … how are they called? psychedelics.

damn, there really is a large number of stories about small people, now that i think about it.

• gulliver’s travels
• fairies
• smurfs

all cereals are related rather closely

lots of fungi do that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_ring

it’s because of nutrients in the ground being evenly spread out and getting consumed from a center outwards, at equal speed.

it’s not an opinion. cannabis doesn’t kill. it’s outlawed to target the black and leftist population mostly.

this has nothing to do with leftism btw. the term “left” has been captured by neoliberals to mean “we allow free migration”.

neoliberals want free migration because the ruling class wants a steady inflow of workers to do their bidding.

rule: scientists need a research budget and for that they have to convince the public that there’s interesting stuff to be found out through their research.

also btw this was not your question but just to add … i think that it’s important to reserve enough space to streets. not to build lanes, but to build cafes and seating banks and trees there. it’s a typical problem of cities that they figure out that there’s not enough space to build trees, bike lanes, etc. after the houses are built. better reserve space first.

eh, the price curve looks a bit more U-shaped. it goes down first as you go from 1 to 3 stories (because less area usage) but then it can go up again (higher construction cost per floor because higher material strains). i’m not entirely sure where the optimum is.

yeah, since as we all know, the world is actually hollow. there is nothing going on inside.

this is like the thing about prions which are proteins that make other proteins fold into a copy of themselves, thereby spreading.

they’re not alive as we understand it (they don’t have genetic code), they’re just a single big molecule copying itself all over the world.

another example, as you’ve already said, is crystals growing over time (metabolism) in aequous solutions.

Consciousness is a peculiar state, if everything is then nothing is, is that the point of the exercise.

nah i don’t think that everything is conscious but all living beings are.

tbf the machine learned it well from decades of human journalists who already applied this one trick that doctors hate.

very interesting take. so, i do think that other species are sentient, like insects and plants.

the exceptional treatment that humans claim for themselves has to do with other things, not sentience. humans fulfill an important role in nature, because we do work that nobody else could do. with human’s effort it’s possible to make life multi-planetary which would not be possible otherwise. so the plants kinda should pay us for the service that we do for them.

fair point

well, considering how many living beings there are, i would not call it “narrow”

also it aligns well with other definitions of “consciousness”, such as ensuring the wellbeing of your community, because after all, that’s what remains of an individual after the individual is gone.